How To Actually Change Your Life

I got a DM the other day from this kid and he was asking me, not really asking me, but declaring that he felt lost. He had no direction in life. He's 20 years old. He sees me. I seem to have a clear path of where I'm headed and he doesn't know what to do. And it really got me thinking about a lot of things. Let me be clear when I was 20 years old, I had no idea what the **** I was doing either, but it really got me thinking about a lot of avenues of, I've heard that a lot. You know, I've had a lot of conversations with people at events or DMS or whatever it may be of people saying things like this and it's not a rare occurrence. And I feel like every generation has had their fair share of challenges in the past. I feel like it was a little bit more physical, obvious ones like war, poverty, disease, crazy ----, which I know still exists in the world currently. But by and large, I feel like America as a whole, on average, the younger generation, the problem isn't finding comfort in hard times, but in avoiding too much comfort and too much pleasure. And I feel like the odds are heavily stacked against younger generation because I mean, first of all, there's billions and billions and billions of dollars of research going into how to make a phone, social media, anything highly, highly addictive. And we're given that, giving kids those that like eight years old, they have them in school, bring them around everywhere in their pocket. Social media is creating these like crazy role models of like do drugs, party, look cool, chase after girls, do all this ----. And it's like absolutely absurd in my opinion. And I think the ability to abstain from doing the easy pleasurable thing that's right in front of you and picture a life that you can dream of asking yourself if a better version of yourself exists, what that version of yourself is, picturing the plan to get there and actually starting and executing on that plan, I think is such a rare thing right now and so hard for people to stop and even think about given how much constant distraction there is in their life. And that's what made me want to ask this kid, I was like, do you believe a better version of yourself exists? And I'll get into that. But I really, this really got me thinking a lot about role models, like the idea of a role model and thinking about how when I was young, I had everything so wrong and I didn't really have a role model in my life helping me. Don't get me wrong. My dad was incredible, but he wasn't really like in my face on my case, in my job, knowing what I was doing. He was from a different generation. He wasn't close to my age or hadn't recently gone through anything I was going through. And I full transparency was just a dumb kid. I thought it was cool to party, to not try in school, to do drugs, to chase after girls, to do all these things. My friends literally thought it was cool to like, and it's funny cause my brain is still kind of wired to be like, yeah, it's fun. You know, of course it is. And people probably listen to probably feel the same way. But to like think of going out and drinking and chasing after girls with no like connection or value for who the person is to not value your education when you're sitting there doing it, to be wasting my time was an education of which I didn't even know where it was leading me. Cause I didn't think about what I wanted my future to be. I was just following the path that was put in front of me to have all these things in front of me that I didn't have someone look at me and being like, do you want to be like a better man? Do you want to be a man period? Cause what I was doing was what boys do, you know, like playing video games and chasing after girl thinking it's cool to do all these things rather than building meaningful relationships, working on my, making myself a better, well-rounded, more educated man to be prepared for taking care of a family and being the man that a woman that I respect would want to even be with. You know, I didn't have anyone kind of in my face being like, what the **** do you want to do with your life? Who do you want to be with your life? Asking me if I wanted to be exceptional, you know, if you ask the average kid, do you want to be exceptional? Do you want to do something great with your life? The answer is usually yes, but their actions very rarely aligned with it. And I feel like I didn't have anyone and you don't need someone. The responsibility lies within yourself ultimately always. But I do believe that like a role model could be a huge asset for pushing yourself to ask these hard questions and being like, if you want to be exceptional, what you're doing right now is average or even below average. And if you want to continue to be average or below average your whole life and continue doing this, but you need to make a serious change and start doing hard ---- and letting go of the easy ----, the comfortable, pleasurable ----, abstain from that to make a better version of yourself. I didn't have someone really asking me that. And it's kind of a, it's kind of scary now that like social media, because we don't have role models in our real life. So many people, I believe, and now social media is such a vast array of like, who do we look up to? The one with the most followers, you're young, you get on social media. If at that time the realm you fall into is people who are promoting gambling, sex, drugs, and I'm, it sounds like trite to even say those words, but people are literally like smoking weed, promoting gambling and talking about how to get girls, how to sleep with girls casually on social media. And I really think as a whole, all those things hurt men more than they benefit them. It doesn't make you cool. It just kind of takes away from values, genuine, real values in life. So essentially try not to ramble too much. This kid asked me that question the many times I've been asked, it really got me just thinking about wanting to share that when I was young, I had no idea what the **** I was doing and I didn't have a role model and falling into the wrong role model can get yourself into a bad position. But someone being able to ask you, what do you want with your life? Do you believe a better version of yourself exists and take responsibility to take that in action? And the reason that question to ask yourself is, do you believe a better version of yourself exists is because if you say yes, you are admitting that you have faith. You have faith that a better version of yourself exists. And the only way to move forward in life is by starting and just taking action. There's no book or a 12 step program or perfect way that it's going to organizing. And this sounds super trite to say, I know everyone knows that, but people still don't do it. Awareness doesn't mean anything. Action is all that matters. But what you need for action, sometimes people are waiting for action. Well, you need faith. And if you believe a better version of yourself exists, then you already have faith. So as a young man, speaking to most young men, you need to have faith, a better version of yourself exists. You need to take responsibility for your own life into your own hands. Most likely you're not going to have a role model following you, telling you what to do, asking you these hard questions, pushing in the right direction. You need to be the one to do that. So where the **** do you start? Easiest thing to do, look in your life, see the things that are easy, that everybody is doing. What's, what in your life is like calls towards you that you can just feel as advice when you're checking your phone all the time, playing video games, eating shitty food, doing all things. What calls to you that makes you want to do that everyone else has also called to and avoid those things. And just by avoiding those things, you are already going to be ahead of everyone else who's stuck into those things. And then being able to sit down and clearly define the values that are important to you can start with like an ideal person that you want to be defining those values. Actually think about that strictly. Like if you say you're going to do something, do it. Be a man of your word. You're not going to succumb to the easy pleasures. You're going to value delayed gratification over easy gratification. You're going to be respect every single person that you meet. You're not going to lie. You're not going to bullshit. You're going to work hard. If you're going to do something, you're going to do it with intention rather than a half assing it and just be like, Oh, at least showing up to half the job. Like you need to declare how you want to show up into the world and then stick to those things and just start taking action. And the first bit of action, sometimes it's just removing the pleasures, starting to do some hardship. And that's also why I really love the gym because the gym requires discipline. Choosing what you put in your mouth versus what you don't put in your mouth requires discipline. Going to the gym when you're tired and working hard requires discipline. And when you show your mind what your body can do by doing hard things and the progress that comes from that, it gives you a bit of momentum where you can start to see and think about things more clearly and start applying that same discipline to other areas of your life. None of it might make sense in the beginning, but I truly believe if you're at least trying to define your values, if you get them wrong, they'll evolve. If you create a path for yourself and you go the wrong way, you will still learn and then you can create a new path from what you've learned from there. But if you're just sitting down absorbing comfort constantly and not taking action, you're going to go absolutely nowhere. So realize that you already have faith in yourself. Take responsibility for your own life because no one's going to take it for you to find who you want to become, the values that are going to get you there and just start by doing something. That's all I got to say. And then the rest will come. I promise you, if you guys actually put the right effort into it and you're not spending your time absorbing bullshit, the rest will come. With all that being said, IAC is starting to dial me in this car and I'm ******* hot as ---- out and I'm sitting outside my gym ranting before going to work out. So it's shoulders and arms. It's beautiful Saturday. I may have some French toast after this workout. So if you bared with me through this rant, let's go work out. All right, so I don't know how long I just ranted in the car. So let me jump into this workout. I'm still doing really high volume giant sets, built a bunch of strengths doing a ---- ton of volume. This is why programming is so important. I really think that the biggest cheat code of training is having proper periodization to not plateau where you can hit different stimuluses so that the body can, the muscle can keep getting different stimuluses, continue to grow, not hit plateaus. I said, I wasn't going to rant and here I go. So shoulders and arms today, I got a giant set to start with a bunch of, Oh wow, this is going to be a lot. Damn shoulder giant set, tricep giant set, bicep giant set. Wish me luck. All right. I have no idea if you can hear me cause the fans are loud. I don't give a ****. It's hot as hell. That was the first giant set for shoulders. All those exercises were back to back to back. No rest. Just as soon as you can get into it, you go. I took like a little bit of rest between the last two, um, prone lateral raises just because they were the same movement. I gave myself like five, 10 seconds and then blasted into it. Moving on to triceps. Now this split currently I have a chest and tricep day, a back and bicep day and a shoulders and arms day. So I'm getting a good amount of volume in my arms trying to not have these skinny arms. I feel like genetically the first muscle I lose is my arms, which sucks being retired. Cause like it's all you really need are calves and arms, but it is what it is. At least I have some calves sometimes. So moving on to tricep, same thing for 2%. Got my favorite tricep exercise in here. Well close to the decline dumbbell skull crusher, the decline cable easy bar skull crusher mouthful. Probably one of my favorite tricep exercises of all time. Dumbbell is a close, close call. Very similar movement. So I'm going to jump into this starting with the dip machine right behind me and I'll take you guys through it. All right. So wrapped up the tricep portion, just by the way, I'm doing three rounds of all of these giant sets. So four times three is 12 times three is 36. Not good at math, but 36 working sets in this workout. And obviously given that they're super sets, they're not at full intensity of which I were to take 60 to 90 seconds in between. So the capacity is less of course, but still the **** ton of volume into the arms right now. And this isn't something to do all the time. There's an intention that this is part of the program for like two weeks. This is blasting in high carbs in my diet the next couple of weeks and then back to regular programming. So with that being said, going to jump into biceps. I don't have a proper preacher curl flat bench. So I'm going to try and not hit my arms here, lock it in and get the rest of my arms pumped. Still a skinny bitch, but that's okay. Just wrapped up this quite high volume workout was a success. This was like a, this is a pure Saturday workout. If you love volume, you love lifting weights and you want to get in 36 sets of arms. This is a beautiful way to do it on a Saturday because there's no other time where you have enough time to do this kind of bullshit. And if you're lucky enough that your gym is actually slow enough to do that many giant sets, then God bless. That's probably the biggest restraint when it comes to public gyms. But that's why when we were doing a lot of the programs in standard, we had to a few of the programs have some pretty extensive supersets in them, but we minimize them as much as possible. Understanding that most people aren't in a rather empty gym. So all that being said, I've been here for way too long. Bradley's nap is about to wrap up and it's Saturday. So it's family time. So I'm going to head home, get some food in me, fuel up on carbs because I need those to shuttle into my biceps. So I'm not a skinny bitch anymore. That's it. What are you making? Making you some sourdough French toast with turkey bacon. There you go. My love. All right. So post-workout French toast, Courtney's famous French toast. We haven't started a tradition yet because Bradley's not old enough. But hopefully one day our kids are old enough where they can just eat whatever dad wants on a Sunday morning. This can be what we do. So a couple of pieces of sourdough French toast, sourdough is a goat, turkey bacon, and then whatever that stuff is, coconut whip stuff. So probably not a lot of protein in here, but that's all right because I'll head with a shake for breakfast. So we're balancing it out and it tastes delicious. So going straight to the arms today and make that workout worth it.