162: Action Is the Best Stress Reliever I Know

Taking action is the best stress reliever I know of. Sometimes I wake up with a feeling like time isn't just ticking away, it's slamming away. Like the arms of a giant clock; every second the giant arm slams into place with a thunderous sound. The main thing that usually worries me is running out of time before accomplishing my goals. On these mornings, I take action quickly. As soon as action is being taken—real action—I start feeling the stress lift away. Get a workout in, start knocking off tasks from your list, chip away at the things that are plaguing your mind. It's not always the things outside of our control that cause the most stress. It's often the tasks we're avoiding.

I heard this quote in a Jim Rohn audiobook this morning and it hit me pretty hard: "An ounce of discipline weighs less than a ton of regret." On one hand, I write a list of tasks to accomplish and I knock them out. I do this seven days a week. But there's still a part of me that knows I'm leaving things on the table. I'm not a "hustle culture" kind of dude, but I have a lot I want to get done in the short time I have on this planet. An ounce of discipline can simply mean chipping away at your goals. You don't have to grind yourself into the ground; in a lot of cases, that's unproductive. The question is: how do you use discipline to make real progress? Focus on what you put into the hours rather than how many hours you put in. What tasks move the needle the most? That's where the ounce of discipline should go.

I've seen a lot of weird supernatural shit since I was a little kid. This is a departure from the normal stuff we talk about here, but I wanted to document it and figured some people might like hearing these stories.

I have a little ritual in the morning. After I walk my dog while carrying a kettlebell, I make a cup of coffee and read while drinking it. A lot of times, my dog interrupts the reading session. She's still hyped up from the walk and gets excited when I sit down. She'll jump on my lap and get pets. Sometimes I just want to get my reading done, but I have to remind myself that one day I'll miss her interrupting the reading. Nothing is permanent in this life. It's hard to remember that we won't always have everything and everyone we love. Don't waste the moments. One day you'll miss them.

In the War of Art by Steven Pressfield, he talks about how we feel the strongest resistance when the task is the most meaningful to our soul's evolution. This shows up as different things like procrastination, fear, doubt, and excuses. This can be both a blessing and a curse. The curse is it's so hard to make ourselves do the things we want to do when resistance is so strong. The blessing is the resistance can help identify the things you should be focused on. There are many ways to overcome, but that doesn't make it easy. One thing he talks about is shifting your mindset from amateur to professional. An amateur will stack all kinds of reasons to not do the tasks. A professional gets it done no matter what. This is one of my favorite quotes from the book: "How many pages have I produced? I don't care. Are they any good? I don't even think about it. All that matters is I've put in my time and hit it with all I've got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance." Professionals get the work done regardless of how strong the resistance is. — Bus

We all can find ourselves in a rut from time to time, lacking motivation and having difficulty getting things done. When this happens to me, I try to remember the best way to find motivation is to make progress. While motivation might pop up from time to time, that isn't reliable. The most reliable way to find motivation is to create it with action. If you feel like you can't get yourself to move forward, just write a list of a few things that will move you forward. A little bit of progress and checking the tasks off the list will not only create motivation over time, it'll compound. A little bit every day turns into a lot over a week, month, or year.

I saw a quote today that felt like it would be helpful for people. It said, "don't take criticism from someone you wouldn't ask for advice". In recent years, criticism doesn't really bother me, but when I first got serious about posting content around 2019, it did tend to bother me. Before posting a video, I would wonder how it would be received and often second guess it. If I had this quote back then, I feel like things would have been easier. Most of the negative comments are either from anonymous accounts, so those don't matter at all. The ones that you can see are never people I would take advice from. I would imagine you will find the same. If criticism is holding you back on anything you want to do, be sure to ask the question: Would I take advice from this person? Then act accordingly.

I saw this video the other day. It was a race car driver saying "I'm just gonna put my foot on the floor and I'm not lifting until I see god or the checkered flag". It got me thinking about this kind of all in mentality that can be really difficult to achieve. How do we get this kind of mindset when the shit we need to do is the last thing we want to do? I'm still trying to crack that code—one thing that might help is to shift our thinking to focus on the payoff of the action rather than the effort. This was something a guy named Scott Adams talked about. The reason a lot of us don't go all in on things is we get trapped into thinking about everything it will take. The actions aren't fun. The work is hard. If we focus on the payoff, it might push through the procrastination.

A couple months ago, I woke up with this crazy feeling and thought 'I'm running out of time!'. I must have had some crazy dream or something. The thoughts were about running out of time to accomplish my goals and things of that nature. At 51 years old, I'm pretty fit and healthy for my age, but you never know how much time you have left regardless of your age. Then I saw a video that changed my perspective. It was an 80 year old man hitting a heavy bag. This dude had super clean strikes for someone at any age. The caption said something like, "if I stopped training at 50, I would have missed out on 30 years of staying fit". Nothing wrong with staying urgent and aggressive about getting your shit done, but we may have more time than we think!

Lately I've been paying closer attention to what gives me energy and what drains it. The biggest thief? My phone. In this episode, I break down how scrolling kills momentum, what I've been doing to snap out of it, and a simple trick to get back on track fast.