5 Hard Pills to Swallow if You Want To Get Unstuck In Life
The Amplified Impact Podcast
December 16th, 2023
Today, I’m diving into some real talk…five truths we often ignore that can hold us back big time.
Number one: Smart people aren’t always making millions. It’s about action and creativity, not just smarts.
Life’s way too short, which leads to pill number two. All you have is this moment. So why wait?
Fear is a compass pointing toward growth. Embrace it, chase those dragons.
Pill four: Cheap dopamine costs more than you think. It steals your present for a fleeting thrill.
Finally, don’t sell your dreams for a paycheck. Nobody will work harder for your dreams than you.
We often know what’s holding us back. The real question? Are we ready to face these hard truths? I hope so.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Life is short. Use it.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the pod. I think so often in life, we, we know exactly what we should be doing to. If we’re not on the right track, if we’re not moving in the direction of our greatness, we usually know why that is. Like, you’re maybe listening to this podcast, not so much that you can get some in some grand insight into some aspect of your psychology that you never thought of before. And it’s probably not that I’m going to share with you some new tip or trick or hack that is going to revolutionize and change your life that you’ve never heard of. Most of what we talk about here is just reciting things we already know, lessons we’ve already learned, but we just have to keep relearning. And that’s really all life is, is like a constant cycle of relearning the same core lessons over and over and over and over again. And so it’s very rarely that we don’t know what to do to get out of our way, to get on the path towards our goals.
Anthony Vicino:
We know, it’s just that we’re not doing them. And I thought today it would be behoove us. Behoove, because that’s a fun word to spend a little bit of time talking about. Five things in particular that I think we get stuck on that can really hold us back sometimes. And so this is just reminders about five hard pills to swallow. And they’re uncomfortable truths, they’re frustrating truths at times, they’re brutal truths at others, and they are just a function of reality. And so if you want to move forward, if you want to get out of your own way, get on the path towards your greatness, keep trucking along, keep these five things in mind. Number one, people dumber than you are making millions of dollars.
Anthony Vicino:
And that can be really frustrating. It can be really disorienting, too, because if you’re like those people, like myself, I came up through school and the education system kind of indoctrinated with a very particular way of thinking about money, which is that I equated intelligence or grades and the ability to follow directions and do a task. I equated those things with making money because that’s what you get rewarded for when you’re in school, like the ability to sit still, follow the directions, fill out the answers on the test, get the good score. And so intelligence, or this, what we call convergent thinking, the type of thinking where there is just one singular answer and we just have to follow the formula and we arrive at that destination. That type of thinking actually isn’t the type of thinking that is rewarded in the real world. And so if you’re operating from that paradigm that intelligence equals money, and that the ability to follow a task and complete it is equated with money, you’re going to be very disappointed when you get into the real world and you realize, like, money doesn’t flow to the smartest people, doesn’t flow to the people who are most able to follow directions and execute a task. It just flows to the people who are the most action oriented and the most creative. And something that I’ve noticed over the years is that just dumb people tend to be more action oriented than smart people, mainly because smart people sit around overthinking things and they get hung up on the fact that they don’t know everything or they have enough information to realize, like, the ods are so stacked against them that they might as well not even try.
Anthony Vicino:
And so smart people very often just talk themselves out of ever even trying, whereas the dumb person, they don’t know any better, they don’t overthink things, they just try the thing, and they have an action towards our bias towards action. And more often than not, they find success. Because the reality of the situation is this, that it doesn’t matter how smart you are and how well you calculate the ods. Yes, you might be right that the ods of succeeding and building that successful business are like one in a million. However, sitting on the sidelines and not taking action makes it so that your ods of success are zero. I don’t know about you, but one in a million sounds a whole lot better than zero. And I think that’s the Takeaway here, is just, you need to be willing to look stupid if you want to be successful, because I find a direct correlation between people who are willing to take risks and look stupid in public and the people who find the most success in life. So that’s a hard pill to swallow.
Anthony Vicino:
You probably need to dumb down a little bit. You’re probably too smart for your own good and holding yourself back here. So, number two. Number two is life is way too short. Way, way too short. In fact, in a very real way, all you have is this moment right now. I think about this a lot, actually. How the past is just a memory and the future is nothing more than a hope.
Anthony Vicino:
All that really exists is a sequence of nows. That’s it. And how we use this now determines everything. And so I take this thought and I just try and anchor myself into reality, that I need to stop thinking and trading my todays for a someday that may never come. So if there’s something that you want to do, there’s something that you’d like to achieve, now is the time to take those actions. There is no tomorrow. And I think, just generally operating under the presumption that there is no tomorrow is a much better way of moving through life, because, one, it breeds an appreciation for the moment, and two, it creates a little bit of urgency. We got to take action, guys.
Anthony Vicino:
We’re running out of nows, so life is short. Use it. Step three. Step three. The third pill is that fear is a compass pointing in the direction of growth. A good rule of thumb that has served me very well in life is to always follow your fear, because in the best case scenario, you’re going to learn things about yourself that you never could have imagined. In the worst case scenario, in the modern world at least, is that you’re probably not going to die chasing your fears. Worst case scenario is you’re going to have some really interesting stories to tell.
Anthony Vicino:
And so there is no time like the present to go out and fight a dragon. I think about this a lot. I’ve been thinking about this concept of, like, if we get to choose of whether we’re the hero or the villain in our story, the hero, the victim of our story, then if we choose to be the hero, then it’s not enough just to have a to do list. We need to have something so much more epic and challenging, and we need to have our dragon list, which is like, what are the dragons that I’m going to fight today? I think that’s such an interesting way, but I’m still too ladling with that. I’ll share more as I kind of break that down in the future. But the fourth pill, it’s hard to swallow, is that cheap dopamine is the most expensive dopamine of all. It’s costing you something that you can’t even see. The Sugary Foods, the video games, the porn, the whatever, the scrolling of social media.
Anthony Vicino:
It’s cheap dopamine. It’s rewarding you for something that you haven’t earned, and it feels good, and it doesn’t seem like it costs you anything, but it does. It costs you perhaps the most important thing, which is your Future. If we take this and compare it to contrast it with number two on this list, if all we have is now, actually what cheap dopamine is costing you is now, it’s costing you the opportunity to live in the present. So think about that next time that you’re about to indulge in some cheap dopamine. Red pill number five is don’t sell your dreams. Most people are selling their dreams, to be honest. Most people are working harder for a paycheck than they work for their own dreams.
Anthony Vicino:
They’ll spend 8 hours a day at work, they’ll come Home and then they’ll pursue the cheap dopamine. So they’ll put in 8 hours a day working for somebody else, building somebody else’s Dream, but they won’t put that same amount of time and energy into their own dreams. And there’s all sorts of reasons for this. Life gets in the way. We have kids, we have Family, we have things, we have other Hobies or like, whatever. The truth is, nobody Else is going to work harder for your Dream than you. So it’s up to you to figure out how to do that. And in the beginning, when you don’t have the financial means to just be able to say screw this and leave the w two and go pursue your dreams and full time dive into it, that can be hard.
Anthony Vicino:
I get it. The only way is to make the time. It’s the only solution. So those are five hard pills to swallow. But if you can swallow them, your life is going to be better. And like we started this with is that we often know what we need to do, we know what the medication is, we know what the pill is. Now the question is, are you going to take the medicine? Are you going to take the hard pills and start implementing them? I hope you do. I hope you do.
Anthony Vicino:
And I think because the fact that you are here listening to this podcast right now, that tells me you are the kind of person who does just that. So thank you for being here. I appreciate you as always. I will catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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