- So I've played a lot of video games in my day,
whether I'm playing Fallout or The Sims or RuneScape,
just to clarify, I don't still play RuneScape.
I've noticed there's a commonality
to pretty much every game
and that's this idea that when you upgrade your character,
your traits and your skills,
you get to unlock new abilities, new opportunities,
travel to new parts of the map and wield better stuff.
You know, in RuneScape, if you wanna wear rune armor,
you gotta grind it out, fight like a billion goblins
or guards and grind your defense level to level 40.
In the Sims, if you wanna make any money whatsoever,
you gotta pick a skill, max it out,
and then you can start making money.
And in Fallout, New Vegas,
if you try to make it to New Vegas before you upgrade
your character and your stats and your perks and stuff,
you're gonna get completely manhandled by a flying bug.
Even though this is kind of a shower thought,
it really got me thinking about how life kind of works
in the exact same way.
By upgrading your skills, developing your talents,
acquiring positive personality traits,
it really opens up a lot of new opportunities in life.
You get to travel to new parts of the map
and you start making more money
and you get to wield better stuff.
And although this is pretty obvious,
I feel like we as human beings forget about this a lot.
We focus a ton on outcomes.
We wanna pay off our student loans,
or we wanna get a girlfriend, or we wanna move out
of our crappy apartment into a nicer part of town.
We get very caught up in all the good things we want to have
happen to us, completely ignoring the fact
that some sort of personal transformation
likely needs to happen in order for these things
to actually happen,
or at least have a higher likelihood of happening.
We're always tempted to look outside of ourselves
for the solutions to our problems, but we forget that
often our situation is just a symptom of our character,
the character we're playing as.
Our ever-growing debt is often just a symptom
of our bad spending habits and our inability as a person
to delay gratification.
Our lack of friends might be a symptom
of our lack of confidence and low self-esteem,
but we don't like to realize that.
We don't like to admit that maybe we're the ones
that need working on.
Imagine going to the doctor one day,
because you wake up, your whole body's in pain.
Maybe you have a history of, I don't know, a bone disease
or something in your family,
and you're really concerned and scared.
So you go to the doctor looking for answers
and the doctor's like, "Hmm, pain, right?
"Here, have some painkillers."
You consider him a pretty crappy doctor
because he's not actually trying to investigate
what the root cause of the issue is.
He's just treating the symptom,
but that's exactly how we often treat ourselves
and our own problems.
It's like standing at the shore,
trying to push the waves away and prevent them
from hitting the shore with your hands,
it's just so futile.
You might stop a couple of them,
but the waves are just gonna keep on coming.
All of this to say one simple idea, that's really helped me
trend my life in an upward direction is to focus
on internal improvement rather than external improvement.
Instead of shopping for a sexy new wardrobe,
that'll make me feel more confident and give me a little
bit of swagger in my step, I stop myself and I think,
what's something I can work on internally that will help me
achieve the exact same goal?
You know, how can I feel confident without having
to buy something or get something?
Usually that means getting off my butt
and developing more discipline at the gym,
having a great workout, starting to eat better.
These are things that'll help me feel
a sense of accomplishment and make me feel proud
of who I am, which will make me feel a lot more confident
than a new shirt ever could.
Or if I'm feeling like my videos aren't cinematic enough
and I'm really tempted to pull the trigger
on a really expensive cinema camera on B&H,
I stop myself and think about what's something I can work on
internally that will help me achieve that cinema look?
Well, the answer's pretty obvious.
Maybe I should learn how to light things better,
frame things better, work on my composition.
Upgrading my skills as a filmmaker
will do a lot more to improve myself as a filmmaker,
than buying a new camera.
Usually the best answers to our problems
lie within ourselves and they're really unexciting
and they're not as stimulating as buying something
or getting something, but they're the actual way
to solve the problem.
And the nice thing about focusing on internal improvement
rather than external improvement is that you develop
a sort of resiliency to the chaos of life,
because truth is anything that you get or attain
or any external upgrade you can make,
can be taken away from you in the blink of an eye,
whether that's a pandemic sweeping the nation and you end up
losing a job that you worked really hard to get,
or maybe the economy crashes and you lose all the
investments that you made
and if you spent all your time putting your eggs
in the external basket, and it all goes away overnight,
then you're left with pretty much nothing.
But if you spent your time investing in yourself internally,
then if you lose all the things you've worked on externally,
you've developed the character to bounce back from chaos.
You've developed skills that makes you valuable
to your community and your family and yourself.
You can make something out of nothing
and you can be somebody who naturally creates good outcomes,
rather than somebody who's just focusing on changing
the outcomes themselves without developing the necessary
character needed to actually reliably produce them.
So to wrap this whole thing up, just remember
this relationship between building your character
and upgrading your life.
If you focus on upgrading your character,
then the outcomes have a natural tendency
to take care of themselves.
One of the best ways you can invest in yourself
is to constantly be learning new things
and developing your skills,
which is why today's video sponsor, Skillshare,
is such a perfect sponsor for today's video.
As many of you know, I'm constantly trying to develop
my filmmaking and cinematography skill
and thankfully there are a ton of classes for me
on Skillshare, including DIY Cinematography by Ryan Booth,
which I'm really enjoying so far.
For those of you who don't know,
Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands
of classes, covering dozens of topics,
everything from filmmaking to productivity,
to how to manage your inbox pretty much any skill
you wanna work on, there's probably a class for it
on Skillshare and one of the things I love about
Skillshare is that it empowers you to accomplish real growth
because all of their classes are designed for real life.
They're extremely practical.
So you can absorb what you're learning on Skillshare
and really apply it to your real life pursuits.
It's also extremely affordable,
especially when you compare it to real life classes
and workshops, which can run you hundreds
and hundreds of dollars every single week,
but if you join Skillshare's annual membership,
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So it's kind of a no brainer.
Skillshare is also doing this cool thing where the first 500
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get two months of Skillshare premium, absolutely free.
So make sure you hit that up, explore your creativity
and as usual, have a great time.
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(soothing music)
Now, that monitor turned off.
I have been posting there more often, but other than that,
that's all for today.
Thanks so much for watching
and we'll catch you in the next video.
(gentle music)
- Ah, Steven. - Oh, thank God you showed up.
You would not believe the symptoms
I'm going through right now, man.
- Yeah, a lot of people who come in here are pretty sick.
You got me thinking though,
what would happen if everyone was sick?
If everyone's sick, then no one's sick, technically, right?
- Yeah. - Yes, it says here
that you've been experiencing some issues.
- I just woke up this morning, terrible, dry cough.
My whole body's just in pain.
I'm checking off every single symptom of that virus
that's going around.
Pretty scared about that.
So I don't know if you need to just swab me.
- Have you seen any other doctors about this?
- No. - Very well, very well.
- So do you think I have it? - I don't know.
So you said you were experiencing a cough, right?
Well, you're in luck.
I have just the thing for that,
I have HALLS cherry and HALLS mint, this is HALLS mint.
- You're not a very good doctor, no, not really.