The most significant changes in my life happened when I grew enough balls to stop giving a shit what people thought of me. Here are some of the those times and the bigger lessons I learned.
Sobriety
This is at the top of my list because it's easily the single most important change in my life. As much as I talk about discipline and the power of being decisive, I took my sweet time putting down the bottle. The main reason is because I didn’t want to be perceived as a boring guy with no social life.
I actually realized that I had a harmful relationship with alcohol 3 years prior to getting sober, but I made the stupid mistake of talking to my friends about whether or not I was an alcoholic. They may have meant well by me, but they were my drinking partners and weren’t about to be hypocritical and ruin the fun.
Eventually, I stopped worrying about looking cool and started to focus on becoming a person of substance. There were many issues that contributed to my alcoholism, but perhaps the most serious one was being worried about my image. I cared more about what other people think who don’t have to live my life,than about what I thought of myself.
Writing About My Life
When I started writing about my life, I made the deliberate decision to never exaggerate, understate, or misrepresent it--for better or worse. I’m not world famous. I’m not even nationally famous. But I do have all of the “receipts” for what I’ve said and talked about.
It wouldn’t take much digging for people to know that I’m speaking the truth about my alcoholism, where I grew up, how I technically didn’t graduate high school, my relationship with my family, or how I’ve worked on overcoming all of that.
Once I realized that I'm blessed to be in the position to offer real advice on what a life change looks like and the work it takes to overcome the odds, I realized that it would be a terrible disservice to the world to not talk about it. I don’t care about how certain things make me look or seem--all that matters is that I’m able to show people what is possible.
Forgiveness and Arguing
Forgiveness is so important to me that my third full-production book is about forgiveness. There are MANY reasons why people have trouble forgiving, but a big one is because we're afraid of appearing weak. Some of this self-preservation. Some of this is pride. But much of this good ol’ fashioned vanity.
Once I felt the feeling of forgiveness over the feeling of being right, choosing to forgive became easy. I don’t really care if people think my argument is the best one (though I personally care about presenting a rationally, well thought out argument). I care more about my internal feelings than external validation.
Selling and Marketing
The problem many people face with selling and marketing anything--themselves or another product--is that they’re fundamentally worried about being rejected. They view this rejection as a rejection of self rather than of their offer. As a result, they don’t try to offer the world anything in the first place.
I have struggled with this problem more than most people would guess. Ultimately, not caring about rejection is how i made such significant strides in my income. This change in income snowballed into what allowed me to make money to change my life
Online Dating
I met my girlfriend via online dating. The same one that’s been around some 6 odd years at this point. While everyone today is doing online dating--so much so that there is now a vocal counter-movement to it--it was not a big thing when we met.
That’s not to say a decent amount of people weren’t doing it, but to put this in perspective, I never had a Tinder account. That’s not because I was ever against online dating. It’s only because I’ve been dating my girlfriend for so long.
When everyone else is worried about how a certain action is going to be perceived, be bold and you can take whatever you please.
The rest is up to you.
