How to Change Your Life in the Next 12 Months (Without Extreme Discipline)
The change you seek is found in a highly unlikely place
There’s nothing worse than living a lie.
I lived a lie from the age of 16 to 26. I worked in various businesses with my brother which challenged my will to live.
Every day was hell. I felt trapped. I put so much time into these stupid businesses. And they paid me well. That money got me a fast car, any clothes I wanted & unlimited money to spend on synthesizers & microphones (my obsession at the time).
Money was unlimited. I couldn’t spend it fast enough.
It was one hell of a drug.
But it made me an a-hole. I treated people like crap. If I couldn’t get into the VIP room at the nightclub, I just bribed the security guard. If I wanted to attract bikini babe models, I just threw money at them.
One day in 2011, I woke up and realized I was living a lie. I can’t tell you what made this revelation happen. What I can say is I just knew.
I knew I didn’t want to live like this anymore.
The part I’m not supposed to tell you is I was scared. As soon as I decided to quit everything, I felt terrible.
I vomited non-stop. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
Those bad feelings, bizarrely, became the ingredients needed to change my life. The mistake people make is they think change is supposed to be a Cinderella story because that’s what Hollywood hero movies tell them.
But it’s not.
Big change happens when you let your life f*cking fall apart, knowing you’ll find a way to rebuild it better.
The good ol’ days are the best days
What’s strange about changing your life is most people want to skip to the good part of the story.
I felt like that too. I told myself “I just want this phase of life to be over.” But now I’m a 37 year old grandpa, I look back on this moment in time and kind of miss it.
I want to go back to the dark times. I crave it. Having nothing is such a freeing feeling. I now know that the best days are the good ol’ days.
I wish I had taken more photos of the hard times. I wish I had more ways to remember the things I did to get out of a dark place.
See, the best feeling in the world is hitting rock bottom, then making an enormous comeback that nobody expects.
The change we seek is found in a highly unlikely place
When I meet people from my high school they don’t recognize me.
They say I don’t think, talk, or act the same. While my physical body remains the same since birth, my identity is different. I’m not the same person.
In 2013, I spent what little money I had to go to a Tony Robbins event. As soon as I paid the money I felt instant regret. When I arrived at the live event on day one it started with dancing.
We had to do these stupid dance moves to these even stupider songs. Within 30 minutes, I wanted to leave. I hated it because I can’t dance and am uncomfortable hugging strangers and telling them my darkest thoughts.
When Tony finally came out on stage, it didn’t get much better. He asked us to do the same stupid dance moves and I felt like I was at a kid’s Wiggles concert.
I told the guy standing next to me that I was going to leave as they had a generous refund policy. He convinced me to stay.
“Just stick around for day one at least, then make your mind up.”
Over the next few hours Tony completely rewired my brain. By the time it was 5 PM I expected the day to be over. I got a shock.
The event just kept going.
It got to 10 PM and we were still going. It came time to walk on fire. I’m terrified of fire and being burnt, so I originally planned to duck to the bathroom for this part. But the warm up exercise we did with Tony was so powerful that I was in a trance.
I walked on fire for the first time in my life and felt nothing. My skin was all burned up but I felt zero pain. I felt unstoppable. After 12 AM we went back inside for closing comments and left the event at about 1 AM.
The first day went for 12 hours straight and I didn’t eat a single thing because I didn’t want to leave the event. I didn’t feel hungry because the rewiring of my brain was so intense.
I credit this experience for my, now, limitless mindset.
There’s no freaking problem that scares me and there’s nothing I can’t face. The internet is an infinite money-printing machine without borders or limits on our imagination or creativity.
I tell you all this to say, the change you must seek is found in the stupidest of places. If you keep looking in familiar places, you’ll keep missing out on the big transformation that’ll change your life.
Making simple things complicated
That’s what we do.
We know we need to change. We know we’re living a lie or at least living below our potential. But we don’t change. We stay the same. Why?
In our heads, we make change too complicated. We think we need all the answers at the start of the process. We’re afraid. Staying the same feels easier, especially when you’re 20 years old.
Change isn’t complicated though. It’s actually quite simple.
If your life right now sucks then you need to blow it up with a nuclear bomb. We don’t need subtle changes over the next 5 years that’ll waste more time. We need big change. We need things to break.
Examples:
Move countries
Quit the painful job
Dump the toxic lover
Let the business go bankrupt
Leave behind the friendship group
The reason we don’t change our lives is because we sell ourselves on the bullsh*t lie that small changes will get us there. The problem is the data from those small changes doesn’t provide enough wisdom or insight, so we stay lost.
We know what we must do to change our life but we don’t do it.
Voicing your opinion is a step toward freedom
Most people never speak up.
They think big thoughts or argue with their enemies in their heads, but they never speak the words out loud
What changed my life was when I started sharing my thoughts online.Simply speaking the unspeakable helped me think clearly about what I wanted. It also helped me attract the right people into my life that I now call friends. One friend is Dan Koe. I didn’t meet him in real life. No.
The words I wrote online attracted him to my writing. That then became the basis for our eventual connection.
If you can’t speak freely online and feel you’ll be penalized, are you really free?
Most of this is self-imposed. The solution is to hit post, then walk away from the computer and not check it for 24 hours.
Say yes when you feel unprepared
Literally think about a time in life when you won’t be busy.
The answer is never. There’s never a right time and there’s always more preparation that could be done. My life changed when I made big decisions that my identity and beliefs hadn’t caught up with.
Quitting a business
Ditching a long-term girlfriend
Ghosting my best friend forever
Starting a new career in banking
Giving up my music career and ditching my record contract
I had to grow into the consequences of saying yes to new opportunities, and dealing with the fall out of saying “no, I won’t do this anymore.”
If I waited to feel prepared, I’d still be waiting and living a sh*tty life full of drugs, alcohol, fake fame, status-seeking, and talking down to people.
Fire, aim, ready.
Lifestyle design matters more than goals
People set big goals like it’s the holy grail. They spend their entire lives climbing a ladder that’s leaning against the wrong wall.
You can have a big business and have zero free time.
You can be rich but never feel like you have enough money.
You can have the perfect family but feel like your big dreams have been put on ice for a few decades.
What worked for me is designing a life instead of setting goals. Years ago I wrote out what my ideal day looked like in extreme detail.
The time I’d wake up. How many hours I’d work. Where I’d work from. What books I’d read. How much time I’d spend watching movies.
After all these years, I can say that I have achieved the optimal lifestyle I wanted back then. Bizarrely, many of the goals I’ve set, though, are still incomplete. But what drives the most meaning and fulfillment is knowing I’m living on my terms.
Goals are often nothing more than distractions designed as bragging rights, and shiny objects that, once you get them, make you feel nothing.
Real freedom is making lifestyle design a reality.
Conclusion
You don’t need 5 years to change your life.
Shorten the timeframe. Make it happen in the next 12 months. It doesn’t take discipline or a Navy seal's morning routine. It just takes you to be unreasonable enough to want a better life.
It requires you to make the big, uncomfortable decisions and stop trying to be a fortune teller who can predict the future.
I dare you to do the unthinkable. Change.
Tell me which of these points resonated the most and why in the comments.
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