7 Simple Ideas That Changed How I See The World

What’s up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. Here are seven simple ideas that have changed how I see the world. Just seven simple little ideas that you can chew on. Maybe one of these will hit you right in the fields today. It’ll get you right where you’re at and give you something to noodle on. These have given me a lot of clarity over the years, a lot of confidence as well. And maybe the most important is perspective. Perspective, I think, is a superpower that only comes with time and reflection.

So let these, these ideas percolate and give them some time for reflection. I recommend these as journaling prompts. I think they can be really powerful in that way. Number one is this. The cost of inaction is almost always greater than the cost of wrong action generally in life. Like we hem and haw, especially around big decisions. Like, what if I do this wrong? What if I take the wrong path? And we spend so much time worrying about that, and then eventually, we take this fear that bubbles up of being wrong, and we allow that to dictate the decision we make, and we avoid taking action at all for fear of making the wrong decision. And in any given situation, they’re not.

Making a decision is a form of a decision. And so what I have found is, because we can’t really quantify a lot of the times, like, what was the cost of inaction? We tend to undervalue it. But the reality is, you don’t know what your inaction was costing you. You don’t know where you could be in life right now if you hadn’t procrastinated on all these things, if you hadn’t punted on all these decisions, if you hadn’t put them off for fear of making the wrong decision, you don’t know where you could be. But in my experience in life, that things never really play out as horribly as we think they will, and they tend to never go as badly as we think they will, either. That in our minds, we amplify and say, this wrong action can bankrupt me, it can ruin me. And so we avoid it, when the reality is that it’s unlikely that it’s going to end in that scenario, but the potential upside was maybe limitless. And so we cost ourselves this potential unlimited upside at the expense of this imaginary worst case scenario that was unlikely to ever take place in the first place.
And so, in my experience, the cost of not taking action is greater than the cost of wrong action, because once you take the wrong action, that gives you information that you can then use moving forward. Into the next thing. And so you have to be comfortable if you want to be successful in life, failing your way forward. And this leads us to the second idea, which is that failure is the most information rich data set in the world and that you should seek it out and use it whenever you can. See, the truth is, we all know failure is an integral part of success and that we’re never going to get to success without having achieved some level of failure. But a lot of times, we hedge on the failures we’re willing to take, and we lean towards the failures that we’re okay with, and we avoid the failures that we’re not. Whereas those failures that we’re avoiding, they sometimes are the things that we need to fail forward. And what I mean by this is, it’s one thing to fail in private.
A lot of people are okay failing in private, but failing in public, in the eyes of the people around you in your life, that is a whole different thing. And a lot of people will resist this because they fear the judgment of their friends and the family more than they fear the failure. And so if you’re one of those people who’s like, I’m okay failing, ask yourself, are you okay failing in public? And are you okay failing in public for a really, really long period of time where everybody in your life thinks you’re an idiot and a fool and that you’re making really bad decisions? Are you willing to make those failures? Because that failure is probably the one that you need to be making if you really want to move meaningfully towards your greatness. But that failure set is so information rich. You will learn so much about yourself, about what you value, about what you’re capable of, about what other people think you’re capable of. Like all these things, failure tells us so much more about the way the world works than success. When something just works, you don’t know why it necessarily worked, and you’re not necessarily compelled to go digging deeper to find why it worked. You just kind of accept, oh, I did the thing and it worked.
Awesome. Let’s just keep doing that. But failure requires you then, to pivot, to adjust, to make changes if you want to ultimately succeed. And so if you fail once and succeed the second time, you know more than the person who succeeded just the one time, because you know at least one other thing that won’t work. So you have more information at your disposal, and that might not serve you right now in this moment, but it will serve you down the road as you collect more and more failure data points and this is why I like the idea of creating a failure log each week, which is just reviewing each, at the end of each week, what we’re the things that you tried, that you thought were going to work, that didn’t, that you failed on, and writing that down in an objective way that you can reflect on actively, I find to be much more valuable than just failing blindly, which a lot of us do. And the problem with this is then we change the narrative retroactively in our minds about what we were thinking at the point of failure. And we tend to cast it in a light that makes us look a little bit better, like, oh, I thought this was likely to happen when in reality you didn’t have a clue that that’s what was going to happen. You’re creating a revisionist history.
So that’s number two. Number three is the universe doesn’t care how you feel. It cares what you do. And this, again, ties back to the idea of inaction versus wrong action. The universe doesn’t care what you think is going to happen and why you didn’t take the action or why you did take the action. At the end of the day, the action is the thing the universe responds to. That is the thing that elicits change in the world. So if you want to change something, if you want to improve your life, you want to improve your business, whatever it is, you must take action.
It doesn’t matter if you feel that you are not ready, doesn’t matter if you feel like an imposter. It doesn’t matter if you feel anxiety or stress or not worthy. Those things don’t matter. At the end of the day, you either do the actions that will lead to the result or you don’t. It doesn’t matter to the universe why you took the action or not. So unworthy, terrible people can still accomplish things that you might look at and be like, I don’t understand. Why do they get that? They’re a terrible human. Yeah, they can be terrible and still get the result if they take the action.
Because, again, the universe doesn’t care how you feel, doesn’t care what you want, doesn’t care what you think. It only cares what you do, what you do. So less planning, more doing, okay? Number four on the list of small, simple ideas that have had a really big effect on my life is this. Discipline doesn’t matter if you love what you do, but it’s the only thing that matters if you don’t. Now, this is important because in the beginning of your journey, you’re probably going to have to do a lot of things that you don’t want to do. This is my story, at least, like, all the things that I needed to put into place, the systems, the processes, the routines for controlling my mind, focusing in a meaningful direction and actually doing the work, doing the things that the universe would respond to. In the beginning, those weren’t things that I wanted to do, and so I needed to first cultivate discipline. That was the most important skill that I’ve ever had to master.
Without that, nothing else would have been possible. These days, I don’t really need all that much more discipline because I have a life that I can focus on the things that I love doing. I’ve created this ecosystem where I get to focus on the things that I love. And when you have that, then you don’t need the discipline, but understand that you need the discipline most likely to get to that place. Now, the other thing I want to mention about this is that a lot of times people will look from the outside at somebody else and say, oh, they’re so disciplined. Look at them. A really good example of this is, like, Instagram fitness influencers. They like to talk about discipline all the time, right? Oh, you got to be disciplined.
Get in the gym and eat healthy and all these things. And I don’t actually think that they’re disciplined. I think that they have found a thing that they’ve been positively rewarded for, that they are motivated to do the thing and that they like doing it to some degree. And so it’s not a matter of discipline for them to get into the gym and eat healthy. They’re being rewarded. They enjoy it. And this was confirmed for me because I made this into a post the other day and shared it on Instagram. And then my budy Adam, who is a ultramarathoner and is like a national level top american athlete, he reached back out and he’s like, this is exactly right.
He’s like, it requires more discipline for me to take rest days than it does for me to go to the gym. So when we look at people that are maybe doing the things that we want to do, and we’re like, if only I could be more disciplined like them, it might not be discipline that’s motivating them. That’s an important distinction. But they probably did have discipline at some point to get them to that point, I don’t know, but not anymore. So something to think about. I think it’s an interesting dichotomy with discipline and motivation. All right, number five is never take advice or criticism from somebody you wouldn’t trade places with. It’s really obvious that you shouldn’t take financial advice from somebody who’s broke, shouldn’t take weight or fitness advice from somebody who’s overweight.
You shouldn’t take relationship advice from somebody who’s never maintained a meaningful relationship. Right. That makes a lot of sense. You should also not take criticism from those people. And this is a tricky one. I was thinking about it the other day because I occasionally get a lot of hate in the comments and trolls. They are attracted to the type of content that we put out, and that’s okay. Doesn’t really bother me because the reason it doesn’t bother me is this quote from Rick and Morty, which is that your booze mean nothing to me because I’ve seen what makes you cheer.
So if somebody’s criticizing you and you wouldn’t trade places with them, their criticism means nothing because they’ve made life choices that you fundamentally wouldn’t have made. And so they value things that you fundamentally do not value, and so why would you ever value their criticism? So this is just another way of saying, let the haters hate. Don’t let it stop you. Keep doing you. All right. Number six on our list is that you could accomplish literally anything in this life if you just did one thing. One thing that is become the type of person who does what they say. That’s it.
If you just become the type of person who shows up and does what they say, then you will accomplish anything that you put your mind to. It’s a really small, little mental tweak, but I found it very, very helpful. When I think about my internal values and what I need to embody to continue moving towards my goals. It’s simply be the person who does what they say. If you can do that, you can do anything. Number seven, the risk of mediocrity is greater than the risk of failure. The risk of mediocrity is greater than the risk of failure. And I was thinking about this the other day because of the Michelangelo quote.
This is one of my favorite quotes of all time. It’s so good. He says, the greatest danger is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it’s too low and we reach it. Man, think about that. How many people out there in the world right now have set their goals so low and they hit it and they don’t even realize it. They don’t even realize that they set their goals too low, that they’re living a life of mediocrity that they could have achieved so much more, that their life could have been so much more than what it is. They settled for good at the expense of great. Think about that.

It gives me chills because I know I could be that person. My natural tendency is to slipslide into mediocrity and. But keeping this in mind that it’s a conscious decision every single day to keep moving forward and setting the goals high and keep striving and trying to achieve those. That’s what you got to do to stay on the path because that path is hard. But the truth is that regardless of which paths you choose, all paths are hard. Some are just hard in the moment, some are just hard in the long run. So you choose your hard now. That’s it.

That’s all. Seven eye ideas. Hopefully one of these resonates with you, brings you a little bit of value. As always, I appreciate you being here and we’ll catch you in the next episode.