My 5 Rules for Life
The Amplified Impact Podcast
April 28th, 2023
Today I’ll be sharing my personal struggles with ADHD and finding motivation, and the valuable lessons I’ve learned along the way.
We’ll explore the power of progress over perfection and the significance of creating more than consuming.
I’ll also reveal my personal rules for a fulfilling life and how the ability to think critically is key to success in both personal and professional spheres.
Let’s not forget… life is a constant battle, and acknowledging ongoing challenges is essential in pursuing purpose-filled and meaningful activities.
It’s important to make the right choices, even if they’re not easy.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Value progress over perfection and enjoy the process of making progress towards a goal rather than solely focusing on attaining the goal itself.” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Hey, what is up, all of you beautiful people? Welcome back to the podcast. I’m really excited to have you guys here as it is 40 degrees and beautiful in Minneapolis. We are oh, I can feel it.
We’re on the tail end of winter. Means the sun’s going to be coming out. That means this pasty white fella is going to be slightly less pasty moving forward. Probably not true. I don’t absorb vitamin D. I don’t absorb sun. I turn red, and then I go back to pink, and then I go back to translucent. So skin tone not my most endearing quality, I would say, but the weather is good, and I’m feeling good as a result.
I was out for a beautiful walk just a little bit ago. It was nice and refreshing, and it’s great to see the sun and feel energized again. So I’m feeling good, and I’m excited to have you guys here. And honestly, that feeling good is slightly new. For the last couple of weeks, I have been in kind of a low energy, low motivation state where I just haven’t had this drive to go and perform and to chase my greatness. Like, for whatever reason, we go through these seasons in life or these periods where motivation is easier to find. Discipline is easier to find than it is at other points. And over the years, I’ve struggled with this because on the one hand, my brand, my persona, which you see of me, the podcast or on the YouTube channel or just out there in general in the world of social media, it’s all just very manicured to project a particular image.
And I try very hard to pull back the veil a little bit and show you guys the struggles that even people that you look up to, perhaps as being successful or having figured it out, we don’t. Right? I wrote an article on discipline. We did a recent seven part section of the podcast on discipline, and that’s still something that I struggle with. And it was interesting as I was wrestling with this reality that is you never really have it figured out. It’s just that the battles that you fight, the monsters you have to wage war against, they just get bigger, they get stronger, and they get harder to defeat. But you never get to this place where there are no more monsters. Right? That’s just not the game of life. And I think that is an important thing to be aware of because if you’re not aware of it, then you can really be set up for failure as you progress through life thinking like I just need to get to this money goal or to this career goal or to this relationship goal or this fitness goal, whatever the goal is.
And the truth is that when we’re chasing this idea of being the best, the best has this connotation of being the peak and there’s nothing above it, right? It’s a destination. Once you get there it’s finite and you’re done. When in reality, the thing that we talk about here all the time is that the goal isn’t to be the best, the goal is to be better. And better has no finish line. And that is a very helpful frame of reference, because if you expect it to suddenly be easy, then you can become very disenchanted. You can become very frustrated and disappointed with yourself when you feel like, hey, I don’t understand. I just fought this battle of discipline, of focus, of willpower, of business, money, relationship, whatever it was, and I got to this level. Why does it still feel so damn hard? And the truth is it’s always going to feel hard but your capacity to lift ever heavier weights just increases.
And so I wanted to share that because the last couple of months I’ve been really struggling with this personally and I’ve shared it a couple of times on the podcast and just recently in the last couple of days I felt that the tide finally turn. It’s a very interesting thing I can feel when I’m coming in and out of seasons now of my life and part of it is my ADHD and this draw towards being like hyper focused and obsessed on things and then kind of like this feast famine period. But now I’m becoming more aware of it as I get older and I don’t resist or struggle so much against those low motivation times. I kind of just ride that wave, use it as the rest in recovery, try to be gracious with myself and then ride it back into the next season which will inevitably come. And all that to say is one of the things that I try to do when I’m feeling this low motivation, low state of energy is I lean on Motivational Talks videos. I go to people who are very inspirational stories or just inspirational communicators. And I use that cheap dopamine or that inspiration dopamine to help get me moving again. And I don’t do it all the time, sometimes it’s just completely unnecessary.
But when I’m in those really low states I find it very helpful. And recently I’ve been listening to a podcast that I found really really good and very inspirational. It’s not a podcast I would listen to all the time, but when I’m in these low states and I’m like oh, I just need that little kick in the butt to get going again. I find it very helpful because the reason I don’t like this stuff all the time is because it gets very close to hustle porn and I really don’t like hustle porn. And the idea that if you’re in not rising and grinding every single morning and chasing after your greatness like from the moment that you wake up to the moment you close your eyes if you’re not going to bed exhausted every night that you’re wasting your existence, I don’t like that. I don’t think it’s a healthy way to move. I do believe that you only get this one life and so you should move with urgency and you should make the most of it. But you’re also putting a ton of pressure on yourself and in a way that I don’t know if it is healthy and sustainable for most people.
Some people that’s exactly what they need. Other people I think the approach needs to be a little bit more not balanced per se but maybe that is the word, maybe it is just the goal is to be a little bit more balanced. Anyways, all that to say, I’ve been listening to this podcast and one of the topics that they were covering this morning that I found really interesting was their five rules for life. I just like this idea of having rules for life or guiding principles or values and I love thinking on this topic. One of the things when I’m talking to somebody who’s maybe like a little bit younger and starting off on their entrepreneurial journey or their personal development journey and saying how do I get to that place where I have the skills, the network, the relationships to be moving towards my greatness? One of the first things I always say is that you need to learn how to think very clearly. Your ability to think clearly will predicate your results. And so most people have never been taught how to think well or critically and how to evaluate the quality of a decision, which is a real shame because it really is the quality of your decisions that will dictate the quality of your life. And so the first thing I tell them is you need to become better at making decisions.
And one of the ways that you can do that I find is through the act of writing, or journaling in particular because I think there’s a unique connection between the brain, the hand and the written word. For me writing is thinking made physical, made manifest. And there’s something about that process of wrestling your words through the pen tip onto paper that is very powerful for helping people triangulate their thoughts. Now all that’s to say, one of the very first things then when I share that with people like hey, just start journaling, one of the things people always ask is like what do I journal about? I don’t know. In the beginning, just start writing. It doesn’t matter what you start writing about. Just start writing words. And then as you progress, what I’d like to do is take inspiration from other concepts and then write about those.
Like, what do you think about, let’s say, what’s happening with the Silicon Valley Bank or with rising interest rates or the war in Ukraine or what do you think about the idea of hustle porn? Right? Just take a concept and then just write a little essay on it. Not an essay like you were taught in school, but just start writing on it and word vomiting, and you’ll learn a lot through that process. Anyways, I was listening to this podcast and they had their five rules for life, and I thought, hey, that’s a really cool thing to write about, to journal about. It’s a good prompt. It’s a good thing to think about. Like, if I had to formulate some rules for life, what would my B? And so I came up with these five rules for life that have served me well. And some of these I’ve talked about so many times on previous podcasts that they probably won’t be warranting going deeper into at this point. But these are I don’t know if these this is a definitive list.
I spent maybe 2030 minutes thinking hard about this, and I tried to create a structure to these. And so rule number one is progress over perfection. And one of the things that I find is the most fulfilling states of being for a human is not the actual attainment of a goal. Because if you’ve ever attained anything, you’ve won the prize, you got the gold medal, you got the big paycheck, you know, like the actual event is very anticlimactic in a lot of ways. It’ll leave you feeling kind of empty and like, what was the point? What did I work so hard for? Really? The fulfilling part is what comes before that. It’s the progress that you feel yourself making towards the goal and knowing that that’s going to be one of the most fulfilling parts of the process, then it makes it easier to get started saying the goal is progress, not perfection. But for a lot of people, they get so hung up thinking that they have to take the right, perfect first step. And if it’s not, then everything else is going to be doomed behind it.
And so they can’t even take action until they guarantee that that first step is going to be perfect. But the problem is we do not really learn before we start doing everything. Before that is just information, but it’s not experience, it’s not wisdom that’s born through actual experiences yet. And so by doing the thing, by starting to take action and making progress, that’s where you start to iterate and you improve at the thing. Because there is no perfection without first having, like, well, first there is no perfection, period. But you’re definitely not going to get to perfection without having some kind of first 2nd 3rd draft from which to work. And so, keeping this in mind, the goal is progress, not perfection. I find that to be a very good role for life.
Number two is consistency over intensity. And this is a really hard one for me to adhere to because with my ADHD, the way that it manifests itself is I get very hyper focused and obsessed on things. And when I do, I go into these really intense periods of obsession and diving really deep into the rabbit hole and that’s served me really well to build mastery and get good at things really quickly. But I also then burn out and it’s not sustainable. And I think a lot of people find themselves in this where they are just so overwhelmed with motivation in the beginning of a project that they make a ton of great progress and then things start to slow down, the motivation starts to wane. There’s no discipline to replace that and so they can’t maintain that intensity that they started with. And in my experience, if you can just be consistent with your actions and show up on a long enough time frame, success in whatever you’re trying to be successful in is inevitable. So the variable in that equation that matters the most is just consistency much more than the intensity.
And the way I like to think about this is that you are far better off doing 100 push ups every single day for the rest of your life than just doing 10,000 push ups today and then calling it good, right? It’s the consistency in showing up of that action that’s going to pay dividends. So consistency over intensity. Number three creation over consumption. For me, the times when I feel the most proud of myself and I feel the most in touch with the universe is when I am creating something or having just created something. Whether that’s like a video like this or writing an article or writing a YouTube script or whatever, the act of creation is so damn fulfilling to me. And I think it is for a lot of people, if not all people. So the problem is creating is really difficult and I find myself experiencing a ton of resistance, internal resistance and procrastination slowing me down from even taking the first step towards a project, right? Like the staring at the blank page or knowing in the back of my mind that I want to write 2000 words today. But actually sitting down and starting is so hard.
Once I’m in it, it’s very easy to continue. But starting it is so damn hard. And it’s so much easier just to consume. It’s easier to go read somebody else’s article, do some research or watch a video and do some research or entertainment or just kind of relax for a bit and clear your mind we have all sorts of excuses. But at the end of the day, the world that we live in is designed for you to consume. It is designed for Netflix. It is designed for Amazon next day delivery. It is designed for YouTube or Social Instagram or TikTok’s.
Instant gratification for you just to sit and consume and consume and consume and consume. And it’s getting ever easier to do this. It’s harder and harder to create. And so the ratio between consumption and creation for most people is so lopsided in favor of consumption, and they’re just lost. They don’t feel like they have purpose or meaning in their life. And it’s because they don’t have it. It’s because you cannot consume your way to fulfillment. There’s no thing that you can consume, no food that you can taste.
There is no product you can buy that will make you feel fulfilled. The only thing that can make you feel fulfilled are the things that you create so meaningful relationships or things that you brought into existence that only you could have brought, whether that’s a book or a child or whatever, right? The act of creation is the goal, not consumption. Rule number four for life that served me very well is always pursuing purpose over pleasure. And so a lot of the things in life that are easiest to do are the things that come with immediate gratification, instant gratification. Things that feel really good in the moment. The sugar rush, the dopamine rush of just playing a video game or watching a movie, right? These are pleasurable activities, but again, they do not lead necessarily to a life filled with purpose and meaning. The things that are purpose filled and meaning filled are things that are typically fairly difficult to do. And that’s a unique, interesting struggle that we as humans have to wrestle with, which is one of my favorite quotes is from Jersey, Gregory.
It’s this idea that easy choices lead to a hard life, and hard choices lead to an easy life. So if you take the easy route, the instant gratification now, then it’s coming at the expense of that really great life that you could have had down the road. And I see people just stacking all of these in the moment, instant gratifications, thinking that is going to create a life of gratification. And in reality, it doesn’t do that at all. It’s the complete opposite. And so when given the opportunity, when given the option, always pursue activities that are filled with purpose, not just pleasure. And rule number five, and this is going back to the quote that I just gave you from Jersey, hard choices over a hard life. So in the moment, when you’re faced with choices, typically it’s the easy choices that lead to a hard life.
Because easy choices are like eating that cake or not doing that workout, or not making that phone call to tell your loved one that you love them. It’s not making that call to the client. It’s not doing the thing that you know you should do because in the moment, it’s very easy to not do it. And you might be rewarded in the moment for not doing it. But if you don’t do those things over a long enough time span, then over 2030, 40 years, because you ate the cake, now you’re overweight because you didn’t do the workout, now you have no energy because you didn’t make the phone call to your loved ones. Nobody ever answers your calls and you feel alone because you didn’t make the call to the client. Now you have no money and you’re living from paycheck to paycheck, right? So these easy instant gratification, like the easy choices in the moment lead to a life filled with difficulty, in a lot of cases, regret. But when we can prioritize making the hard choice in the moment.
If we eat healthy, then later on down the line we are fit and energized and we can attack life and play with the grandkids and go do the things and go on the adventures. Even when we’re like 60, 70, 80 years old, we can maximize this return on life. We can live in alignment with this vision that we have of our greatest self because we’re willing to face the hard choices in the moment rather than choosing the easy choices. And so hard choices over a hard life, it’s your choice. You can choose the hard choice now or you can choose the hard life later. It’s at the end of the day, all comes down to you and the decision that you make in this moment. So those are five rules for life that have served me well. I’m sure I could come up with some more.
Maybe these aren’t even the most important ones, but they’re ones that have served me pretty well and I hope they serve you well too. They serve you as well. I would love it to hear from you guys what might be some of your rules for life. Like, take this opportunity as a journaling prompt. Go write for a little bit and say, what are your five rules for life? And then share them with me. Come over to YouTube. The YouTube channel for this podcast is Amplified impact. Otherwise, you can come find me on my primary YouTube channel, which is just Anthony Vasino.
I would love to hear from you guys if you could drop a comment, drop a, like, drop a subscribe, do all those cool things that help the podcast grow and expand, helps the algorithm give it a little bit extra love, and hopefully share this with other entrepreneurs or high achievers or people just in pursuit of their own greatness. Help this message reach them and maybe it has an opportunity to impact their life in a positive way. So I’m so thankful for you guys. Thank you for being here. I’ll see you tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend. Hey, guys. I love, love, love that you’re listening to the podcast.
I truly hope it’s bringing you just a ton of value. But if you ever wanted to check out the video version of these podcasts, then you should head over to YouTube. They’re going to have more effects, more visual stuff like that, and that can help the message sometimes just hit a little bit different and reinforce the lesson in a better way. So you can check that out. It’s completely free. Go over to YouTube, search for Anthony Vasino, it’ll pop up. And if that’s not what you’re into, then cool. Just enjoy the show and let’s get to it.
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