Tell me one thing,
one thing in your life that is great,
that came as a result of being comfortable.
Most of us aren't defeated in one decisive battle.
We are defeated one tiny seemingly
insignificant surrender out of time
that chips away at who we should really be.
It isn't that you'd wake up one day, decide,
that's it, I'm going to be weak.
No.
It is a slow, incremental process.
It chips away at our will.
It chips away at our discipline.
Move out of your comfort zone.
It's the courage to move into your zone
of discomfort where you feel awkward
and clumsy, and sometimes alone.
The comfort zone is one of the greatest enemies
of human potential and of your potential.
The people that are really successful,
they're not looking for comfort.
They're looking for excitement.
They're looking for potential.
Give up this old idea.
I just want to be comfortable.
Quit lying to yourself.
You know, you seek more than comfort.
So, understand that when you're trying to avoid the pain,
when you're trying to avoid the struggle,
when you're trying to avoid the hard things in life.
You are actively choosing to be average.
Start putting some pressure on.
Put some pressure on yourself.
Get out here and get a about it.
Once you figure out that you're in a race
amongst billions of people that live in
this world, you're in a race by yourself.
You have a purpose,
and it's your purpose,
not everybody's purpose.
It is your purpose and only your purpose,
and it's your race.
That means you are persistently bigger
than your excuses.
You are persistently bigger
than feeling lazy,
and you are persistently beating
the feelings that typically stop you.
Stop coming up with excuses.
Don't give yourself permission
to continue to live a small life.
You can't fit a big dream into a small life.
Give yourself permission to go for it,
to test yourself, to challenge yourself, to live full.
When the sun comes up,
you've got all the books,
you've got all the tapes,
you've got all the access.
Now it's time to hunt.
And what separates you from everybody else
is that when it's time to hunt,
you are ready to hunt.
What I've come to appreciate
when you'reworking on changing your life,
changing some bad habit,
getting out of addictive situations or relationships,
or working to build a dream
or making a difference in our society.
It's hard.
There are gonna be all kinds of challenges
that we all must face.
You cannot live in this world
without a challenge.
You cannot live in this world
without a struggle.
Greatness is right on the other side of pain.
So what are you running from it for?
You say you wanna be succesful,
then push through it.
Stop making excuses and go get it.
The lack of self-discipline is the major cause of failure,
frustration, underachievement and unhappiness in life.
It causes us to make excuses and sell ourselves short.
Perhaps the two biggest enemies of success,
happiness and personal fulfillment are first the path of least resistance,
and second, the expediency factor.
The path of least resistance is what causes people to take the easy way in almost every situation.
They seek shortcuts to everything.
They arrive at work at the last minute and leave at the first opportunity.
They look, for get rich, quick schemes and easy money.
Over time, they develop the habit of always seeking an easier,
faster way to get the things they want
rather than doing what is hard but necessary to achieve real success.
The expedience factor, which is an extension of the law of least resistance,
is even worse when leading people to failure and underachievement.
This principle says people invariably seek the fastest and easiest way to get
the things they want right now
with little or no concern for the long-term consequences of their behavior.
In other words, most people do what is expedient, what is fun and easy,
rather than what is necessary for success.
Every day and every minute of every day,
there is a battle going on inside of you between doing what is right, hard and necessary.
Like the angel on one shoulder or doing what is fun, easy,
and of little or no value,
like the devil on your other shoulder every minute of every day.
You must fight and win this battle with the expediency factor
and resist the pull of the path of least resistance
if you truly desire to become everything you are capable of becoming.
And then when you see people take on more responsibility
and decide that they're going to aim up and
сonfront their suffering honestly, and forthrightly that their lives get better
and the lives of people around them get better too.
And so it's, that's very strange as well, because it also means that the pathway to
less suffering
is through suffering.
Right.
And that's kind of,
that would be hopeful if the world was constituted that way.
It's like, well, there's suffering.
How do you make it worse?
Run away.
How do you make it better?
Confront it.
Yeah, but it's suffering.
It's like, yeah, but it's there.
There it is.
It's right there.
It's a precondition for existence or something like that,
and it's like you have something important to do as well.
And you confront it, and that's the pathway to transcending it.
We need to figure out, like now today, what,
what is, you know, the best way to live your life?
What is the, you know, there, there's gotta be ways
you can be putting forward the most positive energy.
I mean, we know objectively what's causing pollution.
We know objectively what's causing birth defects and you know,
and we're taking in too much chemicals and not enough vitamins.
We know objectively all this stuff.
We know how to organize our world and yet we don't do it.
We know how to organize our health and yet very few people do it.
We know all these things, the right path to like
being like a happy, healthy person
is to do all the sh*t that we already know you're supposed to do.
Take care of your body, take care of your health,
take care of your mind, your stress, meditate, be kind to people.
We all know that.
I mean, you ask anybody, they know how to get by and to be
the most evolved version of you that you can be.
I mean, it's not like a, a magical checklist.
If you talk to people about it, you've
said, okay, here, you, you got a person, you wanna improve them.
What are the things that you're gonna do to 'em?
Okay, well, if I was a life coach, the first thing I would say
is this guy's gotta get on a diet that makes him healthy.
I don't mean a diet just to lose weight.
I mean just healthy foods in your body.
Many, many vegetables.
Start working out your body and get a
better sense of like how this machine feels.
When it's moving, it's flowing better, there's less tension in it.
Your mind feels like relaxed and
you enjoy every single moment of the day better.
Step one.
Everybody knows that step, right?
What's step two?
Be cool to people.
Be nice to as many people as you can.
Smile at as many people as you can.
Have them smile back at you, tip well.
When you go to restaurants, just do the most you can.
Be as nice as you can and just still manage to not have people walk all over you.
Just get through this life as nice as you can.
The average human is capable of unbelievable improvement.
That's, that's the thing.
That's my superpower.
I don't think I am special.
I just realized in looking at the science
that humans actually are capable of this incredible amount of change.
It is the strategy that our species took to be able to
pass knowledge on through culture rather than having to have everything be instincts.
And in having that layer where we can drink in the culture
and read books and learn from other people.
And you know, even now we're all learning from
things that people thought thousands of years ago.
And wrote down like it's insane.
It travels through to you and all of that wisdom stored in culture
so that as your parents are teaching you things, they're actually encapsulating
a ton of the wisdom that is endured, whether it's
endured from religion or books or whatever, like you're bathed.
In a culture that is giving you all of this incredible information.
And so recognizing how powerful and potent that is
is incredibly meaningful.
But you have to understand that you have to allow yourself to believe
that you can learn from that culture in the same way that everybody else can,
and that's what you're designed to do.
Now, for me, that completely
gave me the confidence, and I put confidence in air quotes because it's not like
I believe something specific about myself.
I just believed that the human animal is capable of this extraordinary change,
and so now I just needed to point myself in that direction.
Now, once this is the key,
once I realized that I could
get better at anything,
it dawned on me that how I spend my time is a spiritual consideration.
And I didn't wanna die with potential that I failed to turn into skillsets.
That to me, that speaks to me.
How much of my potential can I actually turn into skillset
and get good at this stuff and push and grow and improve?
Like that to me is just this incredibly intoxicating loop.
So for me, the discipline, the confidence,
all of that comes from recognizing human, the human animal.
Nothing special about me.
The human animal is capable of extraordinary change.
I'm gonna have to put time and energy into doing it,
but I'm capable of getting this change.
Therefore, I can do anything I set my mind to.
Therefore, it really matters what I choose to spend my time on.
Therefore, I wanna put structure and discipline in my life
so that I can move forward on things that excite me, that matter to me,
because I really can't have this big, crazy dream that I'm thinking of.
So my discipline is really born of my desire to have that thing
coupled with my belief that I can actually get there.
Desire and belief
get those two things right and the discipline will take care of itself.