This Mental Trick FORCES You To Get Your Sh*t Together

We've all been there. Hitting snooze on the ambitious alarm we set the night before. Ordering that bag of processed crap that's guaranteed to make you feel bad. Wasting those precious hours of evening freedom choosing immediate rewards over the things you know you should be doing. The stress building as you realize you're not living up to your potential and you think, I've got to get my ---- together. Listen, we both know you're capable of more than this. There's a version of you that doesn't waste time, that doesn't miss a day, that does what's required, and thus escapes the path of mediocrity and unlocks the life you truly want. Where you can do what you want, when you want, where you want. The life of freedom. Up until 2020, I was on the default path. I spent my days working my cashier job, attending community college, and wasting any free time I had on pointless distractions. Realizing the path I was on, I decided I needed to do something drastic. So I dropped out of college, moved across the state to pursue my dreams of becoming a creator, and it finally felt like I was making progress in life. Then around a year into my journey, things started falling apart. Every day, I'm sleeping in, putting off work, and choosing to watch YouTube instead, and spending my evenings playing Call of Duty Mobile. I felt lost. There was honestly this quiet feeling of shame within me that kept trying to whisper into my head, you're doing something wrong, but I just kept pushing it away and distracting myself. Until one fateful day, I'm having a especially frustrating match of Call of Duty, someone kills me, and I throw my phone across the room. And in that moment, I was transported back to seeing myself five years ago, playing video games all day, giving in to bad habits, and throwing my stuff around like a toddler. I had regressed back to my old self, the very patterns I worked so hard to escape. From that day forward, I was hellbent on never falling that low again. But it was a constant uphill battle, because I began to realize that watching motivational videos all day and relying on willpower to resist the self-destructive behaviors weren't the answer. So I began researching all kinds of self-help books, I'm reading studies, learning how the brain works, until finally, I came across something that changed my life. Fast forward to today, I've been working 12 hours a day, waking up at 5, hitting my workouts, and the craziest part about all this is, it doesn't even feel hard. So in this video, I'm going to break down not only how I got my life back together, but beyond that, made it better than ever before. First, I need two things from you. One, to commit to watching the rest of this video. And two, to accept the current situation you're in. Because if you're currently stuck in a cycle of self-deprecation, or coping and blaming your current situation on someone else, things aren't going to change. As Carl Jung said, We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. The first thing I realized was the reason it felt so hard, like no matter how much conscious willpower I put into it, every day was still just as hard, was because I was relying on the conscious when this issue was subconscious. So the mind is like an iceberg. What is above the surface that you can actually see and experience is the conscious mind. This is your current visual field, it's the things you're hearing, it's the things you're thinking, it's the things you're feeling. Whereas everything going on behind the scenes, that you can't look at directly, is the subconscious. And what I learned is that the subconscious is around 95% of our mind. Meaning it's 95% of our thoughts. Meaning it's 95% of our actions. And if our life is just the sum of all the actions we have done up until that point, then the subconscious was responsible for 95% of my life. So clearly it was important, and clearly something was wrong. So imagine if you were a little snail, and you really, really want to head north. But unfortunately, you are on a massive pirate ship that is sailing south. Meaning that no matter how hard you work to go north, at the end of the day, you're moving south. And this is exactly how the relationship between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind works. If you want to go somewhere, you have to get the subconscious mind on board, or it's going to continue pushing in the opposite direction. That's why I felt so much friction when I was trying to change. But okay, how do we turn the ship around? Well, obviously the ship is not conscious. It's not a person you can't talk to it or reason with or anything. It's just made to go in the direction that it's directed towards. So who's steering the boat? Well, that would be your identity. Your identity is the image your mind and your subconscious mind holds about yourself. It is what you truly believe you are deep down. So if you're struggling with bad habits, part of your identity. If you're struggling with insecurity, part of your identity. If you can't get in the gym to save your life, part of your identity. And what our egos try to convince us is, oh, you are those best days. These are those highs. But the reality is your true identity is the baseline you allow yourself to fall to. And you're always going to fall to this baseline. It makes sense to relapse on bad habits and self-sabotage when you're in emotionally triggering states or something's going wrong in your life. But what interested me on my journey is that when I had really good days and I was building a lot of momentum and everything was going good, I would still find a way to fall back into a rut. And that's because my subconscious was directing me back to the baseline. Meaning the only answer is to raise your baseline, which means we need to raise your identity. This is also the reason why relying on willpower doesn't work long term. Sure, it works and you can definitely grow that capacity. You can grow that part of the brain as Andrew Huberman's discussed. But at the end of the day, it is a limited resource and you will run out of it. If you want to shift your identity and raise that baseline, you are going to have to use some of your conscious energy, first off, to find your whys. Because here's the thing, when you ask someone, oh, why do you want to achieve these things? Why do you want to become better? They're going to spit off all these different reasons. Well, I want to make this much money a month and I really like this car and I want to go visit the beach and I want to have these hot girls like me. But the reality is they don't really want that. If they really wanted those things, they would be making effort to get them. They want to want those things. And if you want to want something, it means that you don't actually want it. For the longest time in my life, I wanted to want to quit pornography, but I didn't quit pornography. So you need to take all these alleged desires you have and do some Socratic reasoning, get to the source, and just keep asking why. I want to make $500,000 a year. Why? Well, because then I could buy the supercar that I really want, a Ferrari. Okay, why do you want to buy the Ferrari? Well, because when I'm driving it, people are going to look at me and girls are going to look at me and smile. Okay, why do you want people to look at you and smile? Well, because I'm actually pretty insecure and it'll validate my ego temporarily. So clearly that core desire isn't actually a good thing. It would be infinitely better if we have a reason, like I want to make a lot of money because I want to retire my mother because seeing her work past 60 or 70 will be extremely painful for me. I want to get fit in the gym because when I have children, I want to be able to pick them up and I don't want them to see a fat father and become fat themselves. Here's the truth, and I see this in so many people where they feel like they have goals, they have ambitions, they're working in a direction. But if you were to ask them to, hey, write down your goals, write a little paragraph on this piece of paper, they wouldn't be able to. And the truth is, if you can't write out your goals vividly, descriptively, you're going to eternally struggle to get there because your mind doesn't have a clear picture to orient itself towards. It's like if you were playing soccer and it was really windy and it was this goalpost that was just blowing around because it wasn't properly weighted. And early on, your reasons can just be to avoid pain. It can be that the current situation you're in sucks so bad that you have to get out of it. But the thing is, you have to make sure that it's actually painful enough. You have to look long-term in the future where if things don't change, if you don't get out of this ******* rut, where are you going to be? You're going to be on your deathbed regretting your entire life. You have to think about how bad that's going to suck and generate so much pain that it'll propel you to take action and change and work to raise your identity. Because if you only take it on a day-to-day basis and you never think into the future, it's so easy to blind yourself with random distractions and video games and junk food and porn. And once you have your true desires, your true whys, a vision for the future, you need to create your higher self. So the more and more you gain clarity on the desires you have in life, what you really want out of this life, what you want to achieve, you'll begin to see a version of yourself in those desires. And it's important to note that that version of yourself is not the current version of yourself because if that was the case, you would already have these things. No, they are the version of yourself required to achieve all of these desires you have. For me, my higher self was someone much more disciplined. He woke up the same time every day. He never fell into bad habits like video games. He was extremely confident and charismatic and people were just drawn to him. And he had immense amounts of focus and creativity that allowed him to achieve great things in his endeavors. And when you create this vision of yourself, you need to think about it pretty much all the time. Because something that's interesting about our mind is that it can't tell the difference between real and imagined. That's why visualization actually works. I know it's kind of a woo-woo manifestation thing that a lot of people talk about and they think of it as like the universe gives you stuff. No, we're merely sending something into our subconscious that the subconscious thinks it's real. Therefore, it starts to rewire itself and work to reinforce that belief that this version of yourself is reality. And when you have that clear vision, what you can then do is notice the gap. And the gap is the difference in traits, habits, mindsets, actions, anything that's different between you and the higher self. But here's the thing. You already have the higher self within you. You have all of the propensity, all of the tools within you required to create this version of yourself. But there's a problem. There can't be two selves. So in order for you to shift into the higher version of yourself, the current version of yourself must die. And the weapon that you will use in order to kill the current self is that of justification. And justifications are you doing the actions that are in line with your higher self to communicate to your subconscious mind that, hey, I'm the higher self. But it's not that easy because the current self, like anyone, does not want to die. So he is going to pull out his own weapon, which is resistance. And resistance comes in many forms because it is quite literally anything else besides the one thing you know you should be doing, the true justification that you're your higher self. So sure, it'll be things like scrolling on the phone, sex, video games, drugs, junk food. But because your current self is equipped with your own intellect, your own smartness, your own mind, it knows exactly what to say to you to get you to do things. It can convince you that other things are also positive and good and productive to keep you from doing the actual actions you should be taking. For example, there was a phase in my life where what I really needed to do was work more. I needed to work more on content, spend more time filming and writing and recording and all that. But my current self convinced me that, yeah, but in order to do that, you need to do this 15-step morning routine to get you truly productive and in the zone. And what it was really trying to do is cut out time in the day that should have been doing those actions. But the thing about resistance is that it always shows its face when you're doing something that's worth doing, when it's the hard work on that thing that could actually change your life, when it's pushing yourself in the gym to actually get the body you want, when it's going out of the way to talk to people because you want to work on your social skills and make more friends or get a girlfriend, or even when you're in a moment that requires you to be courageous. And the first thing you can do to help decrease resistance would be to put up bumpers. For example, when you go out to a bowling alley, people are bowling and if they miss, it falls into the gutter and they lose. But if there's a kid, they'll put up bumpers. So no matter what, the ball is heading in the right direction to the pins. Bumpers will be things like removing all the junk food from your home. It also may be removing people from your life because unfortunately, people, when they have a certain perception of you, they want to keep you in the bubble. And when you're trying to change and move out of that, that makes them uncomfortable and they'll subconsciously try to pull you back where you were. But they're my friends, or that's my girlfriend, or that's my mom, or that's my boss. Do you want to reach your true potential or not? Yes or no. Do what's required. Or what is relatable for the majority of us, putting some barriers between you and this ******* square. I have read so many self-improvement books. I've been working on this for years. I've really increased my discipline and my focus to levels I wasn't even expecting to get to. And yet I'm still fully aware that this little rectangle designed by billionaire nerds to addict me can hijack my brain in a second. Therefore, sometimes I just put it out of arm's reach. I also have an app that blocks the apps that would be distracting for certain periods of time. But that alone isn't enough to fully combat resistance. Because think about it. Is your current brain trying to work against you? Your current self is stronger and smarter than just a couple bumpers you put up. And the closer you get to killing your current self, the more and more it's going to work to throw resistance at you. Therefore, the only way to combat this pain is with pain. You have to respond to resistance by doubling down on the very thing your current self is trying to prevent you from doing. And or something adjacent to it that is more painful than the thing you were going to do. And this works in two different ways. First, because it forcibly lowers and creates a valley of your dopamine levels, which because dopamine has a seesaw balance to it, will cause it to sling back up. Meaning the work you are going to do no longer seems that hard. You're actually motivated to do it. So basically, you do something that sucks more than the thing you were going to do. So the thing you were going to do sucks less. But secondly, probably more important than that is that it trains your brain to stop feeding you resistance. So if you're on the treadmill and you're running for a mile and resistance is trying to get you to quit early, run for two miles. If you're finally starting that book and resistance is trying to get you to get on the phone, read an extra chapter. And understand that doing the things isn't actually that bad. Mental resistance is always more painful than the actual things itself. And obviously, this would be super unsustainable in the long term if resistance just kept coming and coming and coming like this. But the reality is, it will eventually subside. And a lot of these things that you have to push yourself to do become the new baseline. Because the current self will die and you'll become that higher version of yourself. That's not to say that you will never encounter resistance. Again, resistance is just part of this. If you are truly into self-improvement and you want to keep leveling up yourself, keep going to a new higher self and a new higher self, there's always going to be resistance. But you get better and better at combating it. But to ensure that you don't fall back down into ruts in general, you need to maintain clarity. Clarity on your why and clarity on where you're heading. Because what happens is, you start making progress, you're getting momentum, and you just really zoom in on your life on a day-to-day basis. And while that's okay, you need to zoom in and focus on things and be present in the current moment. Eventually, if you don't take the time to zoom out and think about why you're doing all of this, you're going to lose clarity. And what happens is, then your reasons and your motivations and all of that start to dwindle away and your baseline can start to lower. And while that may all seem like a lot, the reality is, this is the best news we can hear. Because if our struggles are self-inflicted, then the solutions are self-generated. Meaning that we have the power, the autonomy, the authority to take full control over our lives and gain the freedom we desire. Whether it's mental freedom, time freedom, location freedom, financial freedom, it is all at the cusp of becoming that higher self. If you would like my full subconscious reprogramming protocol that I use to eradicate bad habits, insecurity, distractibility, and emotional struggles that I was facing, check out Mental Mastery in the description. It is my full protocol for all of that. But what happens often is, we're taking action and things aren't working. Things aren't changing. We're not making progress or we're unsure of what exactly we should be working on. I was in the exact same phase. So click the video on the screen right now to understand how I fixed it and learn how to lock in on a single goal and execute it to perfection.