Why do I keep rehashing this point? It’s for me. The way I talk to you on this platform is the way I talk to myself. It’s the same old story played out over and over again across time. I forget and I remember, I remember then I forget.
Everything you want, everything you have, it came about from pouring your time and effort into that thing. There’s really no excuses at the end of the day. It’s so hard for people to wrap their head around this. It’s so scary to admit it’s always ME.
If you want peace, you focus on cultivating peace. If you want money, you focus on money and how to stop pissing it away. If you want to master a skill, you simply spend time learning the skill.
Even if you learn badly, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter one bit. Because while you’re learning you’ll even learn how to learn. And you might be slower on the uptake than other people. Who gives a shit? You have your weaknesses and they have theirs, what else are you going to do?
Complaining and whinging is just a useless waste of time and doesn’t even make you feel better. You release the gas valve but the canister is just going to fill up again and in record time. You’re spinning your wheels for no reason.
But it’s fine, even THAT is a learning experience. One day you’ll learn that you’re spending your time on nonsense and you’ll get your act together, whether in this life or the next one.
Sometimes I have the urge to write and I just have no idea what I’m going to write down. I’ll start typing away and it will be ass, some pretentious crap or some gooey nonsense that I feel completely disconnected from. But it’s fine. You just wipe the document and start again on another one. Soon enough you’ll figure out the point you wanted to get at. Or you won’t. But you’ll try again tomorrow, and the commitment to that simple repetitive act is all you need to ensure that you’ll never run out of things to say.
I would ask why we complicate this, but I already KNOW WHY, as do you. Because life is way more interesting when it is hard. If you could just snap your fingers and be the star football player billionaire, you would get bored as shit very, very quickly. You’re not built for that. You are built to struggle and thrive on hard mode.
Just don’t forget that you’re playing a game. An endless game, which means you don’t even have to win. You can just play without stressing about outcomes. It’s like enjoying a horror movie. No matter how terrifying or stressful it gets you know it’s just a movie, it is there to be watched.
Anything that you want to do with your life, keep the very simple idea in your mind that taking one single step towards that thing is in and of itself enough. You will get there, or you won’t, but you will be so much further than if you just sit back and complain. Dreaming won’t work, manifesting is mostly bullshit, but commitment to the task is the stuff that makes legends.
And I daresay it will be enjoyable. You don’t get to wait to enjoy life, that’s not how it works. Life is happening right now, man, and this is it. I know so many people who come up to me saying their life is so hard, this is so bad, this is so tough, I’m never happy anymore, I have no joy, meanwhile I see them laugh, I see them smile, I see the way their eyes light up when they talk about their kids, or their pet, their new car. Joy is everywhere and in abundance but our mind just hyper fixates on the things that aren’t right.
You can’t be waiting on life to start. It’s already started, my friend. The clock is ticking, the needle is on the record.
And there’s the sauce. Nothing will ever be right, but you’re only going to get more of what you fixate on. Not because you manifest it, but because whatever you’re looking for you can easily find. If you want to find things to be pissed off about go right ahead, you’ll find entire treasure troves of annoying shit to get riled up about. I am particularly skilful at this when I’m driving, trust me.
But when I sit here and write, I’m humbly reminded that there’s nothing to it but to do it, and all my problems are gone when I’m locked into what I’m doing. Where are your problems? Are they in the room with us right now? The problem is just a story you keep telling yourself about the things you have to deal with that you don’t want to. Aversion. Things irritate you, they prickle you, you’d rather that they didn’t exist.
I get it, it’s human, but it’s the one thing that’s going to keep you trapped in misery for a long, long time.
Now, you can go ahead and try to rewrite the narratives in your brain about the problem, try to give it a fresh new PR spin, pretend you love it, read some Ryan Holiday and hit a stoic pose, heave a great big sigh and say ‘the obstacle is the way’. It might even work. But you could also just go ahead and start solving what problems you can solve.
Bed messy? Go pull the covers over it. Washing to do? Just throw the dirty clothes in the machine. Start learning the skill of fixing problems. Become a solution finder, a fixer upper. Every little tiny bit you do will make you feel better. It might make you feel so infinitesimally better that you won’t even notice it, but do it enough and you’ll start to sense the shifting tide.
Just be careful, cause you’ll never run out of problems. You’ll just get damn good at solving them. You might get so good that they might not even seem like problems any more. They might just feel like another part of life, another path that every man and woman must walk.
And the stuff you can’t fix? Let it go. It’s not going to change? Change your self. What other choice do you have? This is not rocket science. This is not some divine intellectual revelation. This is just straight fax. If you can’t do a damn thing about it you’re wasting your time giving it even a single second of your attention.
But if you CAN change it? Even in the smallest capacity? Go ahead and get to work. Set a timer for 2 minutes if you have to. That isn’t rocket science either. 2 minutes is a hell of a lot more than 0.
Anything you do is more than zero. (Thank you for coming to my math lecture.)
There’s something you could do about any one of your issues right now that would take the smallest commitment. I am not saying anything you haven’t heard before or thought for yourself. Start with the simplest, smallest, easiest thing you can fix and fix it. Fix it badly. Fix it SHIT. Just do it.
There you go, you will never need another blog post, youtube video, lecture, podcast or ted talk again. That alone will get you there.
Simple.
Not always easy.
But always simple.
Nathan's Writing 