You’ll Never Succeed If You Think Like This

All right, so I got wrapped into a little bit of Twitter drama a week or so ago. My buddy Nick Huber, he has a massive following on Twitter that he’s assembled over the years as a result of, I would say, creating very, not incendiary content, but content that’s designed to bait engagement. And he’s very, very good at it. His posts regularly get millions and millions of views from people getting very, very up in arms and animated. And I know that’s his stick, but I like to engage with it every now and then because it’s fun. Well, he made a post the other day about drinking alcohol and how he had given up drinking alcohol about six weeks ago. For six weeks, he’d given it up. And everybody in the current ecosystem, you hear guys like me talk about this all the time.

They kind of poo poo on alcohol and say, hey, there’s really no circumstance where you should be drinking alcohol. It’s bad for you. It’s gonna compromise your sleep, and it adds nothing to your life. It’s poison, all that stuff. Right? And I’ve talked about this in previous episodes where I haven’t drank anything in over a year. A lot of that’s personal preference. It’s not me being on any kind of moral grandstand and saying drinking is, you know, evil or anything like that. It’s just I hate how it makes me feel.

I get nothing out of it. Doesn’t make me enjoy social events anymore. It makes me sleep really poorly. It’s empty calories, so it helps me, it puts more weight on, like, I don’t get any enjoyment of it. So I stopped drinking. And I think that if you’re not where you want to be in life, physically, mentally, emotionally, and if you’re drinking regularly, I think that’s probably the easiest thing to take out of your life, and you will notice some improvements. And so I talk about that from easy, low hanging fruit way of improving your life. But Nick, he was taking a contrary approach and saying, I went off of alcohol for six weeks.

I didn’t notice any benefits. All I noticed, actually were negatives because I stopped hanging out with my friends so much. I had less joy when I was hanging out with my friends. I had less laughter, less interesting conversations, ended up leaving social events sooner, or I ended up going to fewer social events. And so I actually noticed that when I stopped drinking, my life got worse. And I had this long reply about how we don’t need to get into the details of that. If you want to go check out what I had to say, go to x.com and you can see the whole conversation there. But what I wanted to share here is had nothing actually to do with the drinking.

It’s actually has to do with the beginning of his, his post, which was that he stopped drinking for six weeks, didn’t notice any benefits, and so he went back. And my take is that going to the gym for six weeks isn’t going to change your life. Eating healthy for six weeks, it’s not going to change your life. Waking up at 05:00 a.m. for six weeks, it’s not going to change your life. All great things take time. And by expecting it to be quicker, you only make it take longer. Six weeks to give up drinking just isn’t enough time to be able to see the benefits really start to manifest, both physically, emotionally, psychologically, in your sleep.

Like it’s just not enough time. And so often. And it’s so interesting because Nick is a great entrepreneur who understands the concept that you need to give yourself long time horizons to be able to do anything great in life. And that all the good things in life, they tend to be the result of delayed gratification that take years. And so the longer the time horizon we can approach our goals, the more likely we are to achieve them. So the things in life that tend to be the most rewarding, most fulfilling, they’re hard things that have to be played out over a long time frame. And we know that the things that give us immediate gratification, the sugary foods, the not working out, watching tv, you know, binging on social media, drinking alcohol, all these things, they give us the immediate dopamine rush. And that’s what makes them so addictive, that’s what makes it so easy to fall into those traps, is because the things in our life that are good for us, that are helping us move towards our greatness, it takes so long to see the benefits of those decisions manifest.

And I’ll tell you what, there is nothing in my life that I have ever seen have a dramatic effect in within a six week period. Nothing. Nothing that was, like, truly meaningful and impactful. You have to stick with it. And I would say if you’re not willing to try and give something six months to a year of consistent effort, you’re not committed to actually seeing whether or not that thing can improve your life. And I know this is easy to say, it’s harder to live out in real time. But I want you to think about this. How do we expand the time horizons we give ourselves when we are pursuing the things that we believe are good for us and will move us in the right direction.

And I don’t care who you are, you can’t make the argument to me that not drinking in the long term is probably better for you psychologically and physiologically than drinking. There’s enough studies on this to be able to say that definitively. I’m not saying you need to go give that up. Like, if it brings you joy and it gives you a different experience of life, then awesome, go do that thing. But make sure that you give it a fair crack. And the same with going to the gym, same with eating healthy. Same with building your business. Waking up at 05:00 a.m.

whatever the new habit is that you’re trying to introduce into your life, give yourself longer than six weeks. It’s just not enough. So I hope this brings you guys a little bit of value, a little bit of inspiration, a little bit of motivation. If you’re currently trying to, you know, get one of those good, positive habits to stick, and you’re like, I’m just not seeing the benefits of it yet. Stick with it, please. Give it more time. Expand your time horizons. Because the man with a singular focus who is committed to showing up consistently to do the work on a long enough timeframe, very hard to beat that person.

So go be that person, and I’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.