The quality of your decisions determine the quality of your life, but there's one single overarching decision that determines all other decisions.
Now for myself, I made this single decision or this meta decision when I was quite young.
I can't remember exactly when it was, but I feel like it had been on my mind since I was maybe 10 or 12 years old.
It's like right when I became slightly conscious.
You know that point when you're young and you kind of like wake up.
That's like when your memories start.
And it was a bit after that.
It was this distinct point where I just knew that the default path in life was not for me.
I started to despise it with all of my being.
So the single most important decision that I made was to not work on something that I hate while yelling at the TV about sports and politics.
I didn't want to have all of my time sucked up by work.
I didn't want all of my energy drained by tasks that I didn't enjoy.
And I didn't want my money going to bills that I didn't even choose to take on or didn't even know existed.
So now we need to talk about the fact that you're hurling down the wrong path.
Because when you're born, you're put on the default path.
You can think of yourself as a freight train just going down the tracks that other people laid for you.
And by the time that you're 20 years old you've just accumulated so much momentum and this momentum are these survival patterns that have been conditioned into your mind it's the programming that influences your decisions but the thing is is that this is a very rudimentary operating system you've been given for how to go about life so on this default path you're pretty much told to go to school get a job and retire at 65 and everyone that's influencing this path or telling you to go down it is just your parents your teachers, your peers, everyone who was conditioned in the same way by their own
parents, and they're passing down their mind to you.
But the thing is, is that you'll never reach your potential until you reject this path and take a big and bold decision to shift the train tracks that you're heading down.
That is the decision of all decisions.
That's the single decision that will change your life is to reject the default path.
In other words, it's to answer the call to adventure, right?
The hero's journey.
Or it's to finally begin writing the first chapter of your own book.
Or it's to just leave the tutorial phase of the video game of life and to start level one.
We'll actually talk about that in another video that will be titled 20 to 30 years old is the tutorial phase.
Don't fuck it up. But the outcome of your life is determined by 10 to 12 bold bold decisions.
You can think of it as a dozen train track shifts.
And if you don't make those shifts, you get stuck with a dull life, very repetitive and mechanical.
And you don't just get stuck with a dull life.
You stall out completely.
That is the biggest trap of modern life.
So imagine being in a job that you hate.
Not everyone is in a job that they hate, but that's just a big problem that a lot of people face.
Now, you can make the bold decision to never put up up with that again, shifting the trajectory of your life, or you can remain indecisive and wake up two years later without a single change in your life.
In fact, it probably would have gotten so much worse during that time because you stayed the same, and there's no such thing as staying the same.
You either get better through effort and intention, or you get worse by doing nothing.
Your health gets worse, your mind declines, your finances obviously don't go anywhere, your life just gets worse now the problem with indecisiveness is that by not making a decision you let others make decisions for you because this is life you have to do something you have to move in some kind of direction every single day you're already moving in some kind of direction every single day but most people aren't in control of that trajectory because they are on the default path, the trajectory was set for them.
Now let's call this the idle state.
It's when your brain is on and functional, but it's not processing anything meaningful.
You're doing something, but you're not really doing anything, and you hate it.
But you don't hate it enough to change it yet.
Now one of the most important things you can realize is that you silently value mediocrity because your decisions reveal your values, and as much as you'd like to think that you have these high and noble values that you're such a good person, I would encourage you to take a deep look at your actions to determine if you're delusional or not.
If you go out every weekend, you value social status.
If you order takeout every night and watch Netflix, then you value you comfort, and if you work a job, you value security.
Your values signal what is important to you, and the good life or living a meaningful life stems from the concentration of force toward the right values.
It's completely fine if you value social status or comfort or security, but where is most of your energy going?
Toward what values?
What resources, your mental energy, are you spending toward a better life because most people are pouring their time energy and money down the drain like clockwork every six months they just repeat the same life over and over that's the average life is to repeat one good part of your 20s every six months for the rest of your life same bar same friends same people same lifestyle same job same everything the currencies time attention energy money disappear the moment they appear so they can't even be used toward anything related to a better life.
When these people look back a year from now, if they even choose to look back, which they probably won't, even though they feel tired and near burnout, that's not a meaningful tired or burnout.
You didn't earn anything.
You look back and realize that you didn't achieve anything meaningful.
It wasn't worth the time, energy, attention, or money, but you don't have any to spend toward a better life.
So if you want to to change the trajectory of your life, you have to get disgusted with this fact, the fact that you silently value mediocrity.
You need to become brutally aware that almost everything you do in your day -to -day life is going to waste.
That feels terrible.
You need to feel that pain in your bones, and you need to hold that negative and positive potential in your mind, where you are now and where you want to be.
And as long as you hold those in your mind, and you think about them and you reflect and you pay attention to your actions, the positive will prevail.
Now in order to make this more tangible, I want you to sit with this question.
I want you to think about this question every day for the next seven days.
Where will my life end up if I keep making the same decisions?
And chances are if you actually think about this question, the answers aren't going to be pretty.
Now to make this even more tangible, I want you to pull out a piece of paper.
Actually do do it. Don't ignore this just because you're trying to waste time watching a video of some internet wise guy who's spouting a bunch of nonsense.
Then I want you to write out every single action that you took today and every other routined or repetitive action you will take throughout the week.
Now to take this even further and remember that our goal with this with answering that question and writing down the repetitive actions that we take is to get that image of what what we don't want, extremely clear in our head so we have something to move away from.
So to take it any further, we're going to go to a public space.
Just do this in your free time whenever you're running errands or going to the grocery store, wherever it is a grocery store is the perfect place.
There just has to be an abundance of ordinary people or average people.
Now when you do this, just watch, just observe them, try to make connections.
And while I'm sure that these people are kind people, answer the question, question do you want to be like them?
Do you want that dead look in your eyes?
Do you want that slow and tired walk?
And as much as you'd like to convince yourself that you don't want to end up like that, that's the life that you're heading towards if you remain indecisive.
If you don't make that single most important decision to reject the default path.
And now I know I may sound like an asshole for saying all of this like oh go look at the average people and realize that you don't want to be like them.
But you have to understand where we're at at this point in history.
The obesity rates in America alone are through the freaking roof.
This wasn't a thing 30 to 50 years ago.
We just live in this distracted time.
There's so much information.
There's so much convenience.
There's so many options that we're not wired for that.
We just get distracted and we turn into these blobs of people that can't function correctly.
What I'm saying should be overwhelmingly overwhelmingly positive in that you can take control of your life and you don't have to end up like that.
Now it may take seven days.
It may take a month.
It may take 365 days.
But if you observe the average person long enough and you are completely honest with yourself on what you want in your future, you won't have any other option but to radically change the values that influence your decision making.
It'll become automatic.
It'll happen over time.
Your brain will rewire itself.
Now the last and final point is that a life without mistakes is death.
Because wrong decisions are better than no decision at all.
But the bad thing here is that there are just so many decisions you have to make.
Should you work on your career or work on spirituality?
Should you learn to code or learn to market?
Should you find your purpose or find a partner?
Should you do the carnivore diet or the sugar diet?
We're in this weird point in history, three, as I said, that there are so many options to change your life, to have a better life, to the point where you choose none of the above and stall out.
You enter the idle state.
Remember, we went over that, this little bottomless pit of a brain guy.
Now the reality is, the good reality is here, that it doesn't matter what you choose as long as you choose something, as long as you're You're not indecisive as long as you make a decision, as long as you choose to do one thing, even if the outcome is catastrophic or bad.
Why? Because a life without mistakes is death.
You can think of mistakes as this compass.
When you make one mistake and you register out as a mistake, okay, I'm not going to do that again.
Now you're heading in a better direction.
You do that again and again and again and again, and you're on this incredible life trajectory just from making making mistakes, from failing.
So being decisive isn't about making the perfect decision.
It's about making a decision and then another decision and then another decision and not becoming indecisive or getting let down because of failure.
It's just about continuing to do.
Like, isn't that the most incredible thing you could ever imagine?
It's like, oh my god, I just have to do things.
I just have to fail and I'll succeed.
Well, of course, there's nuance to that it's largely true now in my own life there is a series of decisions that i have made that most people would have considered stupid or crazy or just not worth making so almost five years ago i was sleeping on this rollout mattress in the guest room because i didn't want to spend the money to move out of my ex's place we were still living together i was cheap and i was overly frugal and i didn't make a decision i just stayed in the same place and a bit later i was working on on my side business throughout all of this.
And one day I just decided to say, fuck it.
And I moved to Mexico with a friend that I met on Twitter.
The thing about this is that two weeks in, I realized that this is one of the biggest mistakes that I made in my life.
Paradise sucked. I needed a home base because my business was starting to gain traction and I needed good Wi -Fi for calls.
And I just couldn't grow the business well with all of the distractions in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
ago so i made another decision one decision that led to a mistake which led to a better decision so i called my friend or my editor who was back in arizona at the time and i asked him if he wanted to get an apartment together but this wasn't just any apartment right we were both like broke college kids before this we'd never really lived in a place where we weren't trying to split rent and pay the lowest amount possible so this place was like two to three times anything that i've ever ever paid for before in my life.
It was nice. It wasn't like a crazy high rise.
It was just like a nice apartment in a nice location.
And for someone who didn't have a great relationship with money, that was out of my budget and out of my comfort zone.
But the thing is that I was confident that I was the type of person who now had a business that in order to make that business work, I needed some kind of pressure.
So me moving into this apartment was kind of like a commitment to myself myself to make my business so successful that I felt comfortable living in that place that cost a lot of money.
And looking back, those 12 months of living in that apartment were the most I've ever grown in my life.
I was the leanest I'd ever been, the most healthy, the most financially stable, the most calm, and the most alive.
Like Devin and I, the editor, we always kind of think back to that, to that era as like our golden era.
We always compare where we lived to where we're going to live because there were just so many good things about living there.
We were close to a gym, go on long walks.
It was just a nice apartment.
I don't know. It just it just felt right.
And maybe the apartment wasn't that great.
Maybe it was just the 12 months of this growth period that we look back on and we're like, those were the good times.
So by that point, I had just realized the vast power of making mistakes or taking calculated risks because the result of doing that was was figuring out what I don't want in life.
Any crazy idea I had was no longer crazy.
I wanted to go after it.
Making mistakes became the catalyst for achieving anything good in my life.
If you want to move to a different country, it's a big risk.
But if you're a decisive person, it doesn't matter if it was a mistake when you get there because you can just decide to move back.
And if you can't move back in an instant, then you can decide to go and make more money or do whatever it takes to move back.
Being decisive and having agency are in such similar realms. If you don't know how to make more money in order to get what you want, then you just can't see that potential and you're too tied to your current way of life.
You don't know that you can go and start a business and learn new skills and educate yourself and get to a point where you could afford that.
You're not even thinking about that because you just think that the decision can't be made so when you're decisive it changes your perception of what's possible now when that apartment lease ended we ended up moving to texas with dakota robertson and jk molina who you guys may know they were on twitter they're on social media in general but after six months we had to leave because dakota's uh canadian visa wouldn't allow him to stay there anymore so that's when the mistakes really started to come into play where we moved back to Arizona leased a more expensive place just me and Devin and then
after some time I decided it might be time to for me to like get my own place to buy my first house or condo so I started looking for them and I ended up buying one and about two months after moving into that place I just deeply regretted it I didn't like the location I didn't want to be there anymore I just spent 1 .1 million dollars even though I didn't spend that much there's the down payment you know the condo cost that much and the other thing is I just didn't want to be pinned down so early in life like I wasn't ready to make that decision I wasn't in the place where I was as financially
stable as I wanted to be I didn't have other areas of my life set up so about two to three months later I put the condo back on the market I moved into another apartment and what's funny is that's where I met my fiance so that giant mistake led to one of the greatest decisions of my life and thankfully i only thankfully i only lost like a hundred thousand dollars from the house but that was that was more than worth it to me because the pain outweighed that and now of course a hundred thousand dollars would cripple most people but just think relatively here and all of that is only the beginning
of my mistakes i'm actually going through a three million dollar mistake right now and there will be a video on that later but the more i think about it i just realize that that was the cost of clarity.
Big mistakes are the cost for big clarity, and that clarity can make it all back in a fraction of the time.
The more bold decisions you make, the more mistakes you make, leading to more experience, ensuring that each decision makes less impactful mistakes over time, honing you in on success like a ballistic missile.
A life without mistakes is death.
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