All right, guys. Today, I want to talk about joy. I’m a big believer that men are, that they might have joy. Yesterday, on my personal Facebook page–I shared it to the MLM Renegade page so you can take a look–I did a Facebook Live. I talked about the thief of joy, which is comparison. I got pretty real on there. I want to share a little bit with you guys because, honestly, I think, it’s a real problem for a lot of us.
Just to take you back a little bit. Right before Thanksgiving I got laid off from my day job. I love coming to you guys each week, but I still got to pay the bills at home. With a wife and four kids, it’s imperative to happen. And right after I got back from an event with Steven Larsen, the day after I got a sat in a meeting, or virtually anyway, with my boss at the time and he said, “I’ve got to let you go.” He said that I had been one of the highest paid people since August and that they were out of money. If anybody’s ever lost a job at the holidays, you know how much it’s sucks. Losing a job at the holidays, it’s pretty much the worse time because nobody’s hiring. Nobody wants to think about hiring until New Year’s, at least. Most of the time it takes until mid-January, at the earliest, before people get off their keisters and start to look at applications and other things. The holiday hangover is very, very real.
And so this was a rough three months. Like I’ve told you guys before, I work in sales and, thankfully, I’ve had the privilege to be fairly successful in my sales career. Because of that, I’ve never really worried too much about not getting not getting another job because sales skills are pretty transferable. That’s a good thing. I’ve been to the finish line now three different times with three different companies and didn’t get the job three different times, and that can really mess with your psyche, frankly. It’s problematic. You to start to, well, one, you get really humble, and two, you start to think about what you’re doing wrong and maybe question some life decisions and if I am, of course, no different.
The thief of joy in all of this is comparison. If I was thinking about those three other people who got the job when I didn’t, that’s a great way to, one, drive yourself insane, but two, it’s a great way to get really depressed really quick. Why would you want to do that? Like I said, men are, that they might have joy; that’s like part of our purpose in life. In my life, Joy is brought by my family, by my kids, by doing things as a family and with my kids. Those are the things that make me happy and make life worth living. It was a really trying time for me and continues to be.
I guess I likened it to social media. I do a lot of work with social media. I do a lot of sales via social media, and ultimately, social media can be one of those joy thieves. Most often, we compare our lowest point. Me without a job for three months, we compare that lowest point to somebody else’s highest point or there best looking. The classic example is a girl looks at herself in the mirror or a guy looks at himself in the mirror and then compares himself to an Instagram model whose six-pack abs and everything else, like that is not real. It may be real for them, but don’t compare yourself. If you’re doing that, you’re setting yourself up for ultimate failure and really setting yourself up to be in a really bad spot emotionally, spiritually, physically, all of the above. Don’t let somebody else dictate your happiness.
A friend asked me, he saw the first half of the video, but his Internet connection was slow or something. He said, “Well, what’s in the back half of it?” I’m like, well, essentially it was, “If life kicks you in the face, you punch it in the mouth,” and that’s an interesting idea, but that’s what I’m doing. I’m coming out swinging like, “Yeah, you know what it’s been? It’s been three months.”
Today, I had another job interview. It went pretty well. In fact, since it’s been 24 hours since I made that video, and I have had five different people reach out to me about my skills and about openings that they had, like five people in 24 hours. It’s like, well, gosh, maybe I should have gone live on Facebook two months ago. What it taught me overall is, one, people are very empathetic. People want to help other people and that warms my heart, frankly. Two, if you don’t compare yourself against others, ultimately, you can have a whole lot more happiness in your life.
One of the important things to do is to figure out… There’s a prayer that they use in AA talking about: Grant me the grant me the ability to accept the things I cannot change and to change the things that I can. We cannot change many things about our circumstances, about what’s happening in our lives. We don’t have that power. That’s not bestowed on us. If we take that power and hand our happiness to somebody else who really doesn’t care about it, like that person on Instagram, what are we setting ourselves up for? We’re sitting ourselves up for ultimate abject terror and abject destruction.
Fear and faith cannot live in the same space. Let me say that again. Fear and faith cannot coexist. They cannot live in the same space. You either have faith that something is going to happen–I have faith that I’m going to get a job–or you have fear of something or of some outcome. Here’s the problem with fear. 90% of the time, whatever you’re fearing, never happens. Or you don’t have control over it, so why would you lend it space? Give it free rent inside your head. The other 10% of the time is something you could do about it. Most of the time, it never comes to fruition.
I heard FEAR explained as an acronym. The positive side of it was Forget Everything And Rise, which I really like. The other one was False Expectations Appearing Real, which is so true, because so often, we get things spun up in our head. If we’re going to go out on a date with a girl or a guy and then they don’t call us back, we start thinking and visualizing all the stupid things that could have happened. When my kids don’t show up before curfew, suddenly, I start freaking out. Oh no, did they get in a car accident? Is there something wrong? My wife does answer a telephone call for a little while, it’s like, oh, what’s, what’s happening? What’s going on? When her battery died, or she was at work and handling a patient and just simply couldn’t pick up the telephone.
All of those things are real. The fears that our mind can concoct are absolutely insane, and we shouldn’t lower ourselves and allow ourselves to partake in the insanity. When you have faith, it is in absence of fear. There can be things out there that you’re concerned about, but when you have faith that things are going to go your way, guess what? They go your way. Thoughts are things and in there it probably isn’t another thought that I could instill in everybody more than thoughts are things. When we think about something, when we give it headspace, those things happen. Why not give headspace, give thought, to things that we want to happen?
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately and work on visualization and meditation and really trying to focus in my thoughts on those desires that I have. I emphasize and I tell everybody that they should be doing this, too. Spend time visualizing what it’s going to look like when you hit success, and not just visualizing it but feeling it. Feel those emotions, because guess what? They happen. When we visualize and we think of the worst thing that could happen and we get the anxiety that comes with that, it’s a whole lot more likely to happen. That’s why crap follows crap, and good follows good.
People who always seem to get lucky don’t really get lucky. They create their own luck. You can create your own luck too. You just need to be more focused on the things that are going to make you happy and the things that you want to accomplish in life than the things that other people are doing and that make you mad. The quickest way for me to lose my mindset, and frankly lose my mind, is to get on social media, especially Twitter and sometimes Facebook, and look at anything political. I don’t care what your political leanings are, left, center, alien, extraterrestrial, whatever. If you go on social media and look for people who are trying to troll and trying to argue like, I do not get it. Like I read it. I’m like, oh, I want to, I want to say, oh, they’re wrong, they’re wrong. Guess what? I’m wrong. By even trying to get involved, I have to shut the thing off because when I do that, when I shut it off, it cannot steal my joy.
Don’t compare yourself to anybody else. Compare yourself to where you were yesterday and the week before. Grow each and every day, and when you do, you will have success. When you have success, you can be a better person each and every day. Remember, an atomic habit is going to help you grow. If you increase your mental capacity, your value. If you increase what you are doing by 1% each day, by the end of the year, you are going to be 37 times further along than when you started the year, 37 times further along. That is an enormous amount of growth that we can do incrementally day in and day out. Don’t let your joy get stolen. Spend the time that you need to find happiness.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Guys, tune in next week. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care.