so I've played a lot of video games in my day whether I'm playing Fallout or The Sims or runescape just to clarify I don't still play runescape I've noticed there's a commonality to pretty much every game and that's this idea that when you upgrade your character your traits and your skills you get to unlock new abilities new opportunities travel to new parts of the map and wield better stuff you know in runescape if you want to wear rune armor you got to grind it out fight like a billion goblins or guards and grind your defense
level to level 40 in the sims if you want to make any money whatsoever you got to pick a skill max it out and then you can start making money and in Fallout New Vegas if you try to make it to New Vegas before you upgrade your character and your stats and your perks and stuff you're gonna get completely manhandled by a flying bug even though this is kind of a shower thought it really got me thinking about how life kind of works in the exact same way by upgrading your skills developing your talents acquiring
positive personality traits it really opens up a lot of new opportunities in life you get to travel to new parts of the map when you start making more money and you get to wield better stuff and although this is pretty obvious I feel like we as human beings forget about this a lot we focus a ton on outcomes we want to pay off our student loans or we want to get a girlfriend or we want to move out of our crappy apartment into a nicer part of town we get very caught up in all the
good things we want to have happen to us completely ignoring the fact that some sort of personal transformation likely needs to happen in order for these things to actually happen or at least have a higher likelihood of happening we're always tempted to look outside of ourselves for the solutions to our problems but we forget that often our situation is just a symptom of our character the character we're playing as our ever-growing debt is often just a symptom of our bad spending habits and our inability as a person to delay gratification our lack of friends might
be a symptom of our lack of confidence and low self-esteem but we don't like to realize that we don't like to admit that maybe we're the ones that need working on and been going to the doctor one day because you wake up your whole body's in pain maybe you have a history of I don't know a bone disease or something in your family and you're really concerned and scared so you go to the doctor looking for answers and the doctors like hmmm pain right here have some painkillers you consider him a pretty crappy doctor because
he's not actually trying to investigate what the root cause of the issue is he's just treating the symptom but that's exactly how we often treat ourselves and our own problems it's like standing at the shore trying to push the waves away and prevent them from hitting the shore with your hands it's just so futile you might stop a couple of them but the waves they're just gonna keep on coming all of this to say one simple idea that's really helped me trend my life in an upward direction is to focus on internal improvement rather than
external improvement instead of shopping for a sexy new wardrobe that'll make me feel more confident and give me a little bit of swagger in my step I stop myself and I think what's something I can work on internally that will help me achieve the exact same goal you know how can I feel confident without having to buy something or get something usually that means getting off my butt and developing more discipline at the gym having a great workout starting to eat better these are things that will help me feel a sense of accomplishment and make
me feel proud of Who I am which will make me feel a lot more confident than a new shirt ever could or if I'm feeling like my videos aren't cinematic enough and I'm really tempted to pull the trigger on a really expensive cinema camera on B&H I stop myself and think about what's something I can work on internally that will help me achieve that cinema look well the answer is pretty obvious maybe I should learn how to light things better frame things better work on my composition upgrading my skills as a filmmaker will do a
lot more to improve myself as a filmmaker than buying a new camera usually the best answers to our problems lie within ourselves and they're really unexcited and they're not as stimulating as buying something or getting something but they're the actual way to solve the problem and the nice thing about focusing on internal improvement right than external improvement is that you develop a sort of resiliency to the chaos of life because truth is anything that you get or attain or any external upgrade you can make can be taken away from you in the blink of an
eye whether that's a pandemic sweeping the nation and you end up losing a job that you worked really hard to get or maybe the economy crashes and you lose all the investments that you made and if you spent all your time putting your eggs in the external basket and it all goes away overnight then you're left with pretty much nothing but if you spent your time investing in yourself internally then if you lose all the things you've worked on externally you've developed the character to bounce back from chaos you develop skills that makes you valuable
to your community and your family and yourself you can make something out of nothing and you can be somebody who naturally creates good outcomes rather than somebody who's just focusing on changing the outcomes themselves without developing the necessary character needed to actually reliably produce them so to wrap this whole thing up just remember this relationship between building your character and upgrading your life if you focus on upgrading your character then the outcomes have a natural tendency to take care of themselves one of the best ways you can invest in yourself is to constantly be learning
new things and developing your skills which is why today's video sponsor skill share is such a perfect sponsor for today's video as many of you know I'm constantly trying to develop my filmmaking and cinematography skill and thankfully there are a ton of classes for me on Skillshare including DIY cinematography by Ryan booth which I'm really enjoying so far for those of you who don't know skill share is an online learning community with thousands of classes covering dozens of topics everything from filmmaking to productivity to how to manage your inbox pretty much any skill you want
to work on there's probably a class for it on Skillshare and one of the things I love about skill share is that it empowers you to accomplish real growth because all of their classes are designed for real life they're extremely practical so you can absorb what you're learning on Skillshare and really apply it to your real-life pursuits it's also extremely affordable especially when you compare it to real life classes and workshops which can run you hundreds and hundreds of dollars every single week but if you join skill shares annual membership it comes in at less
than $10 a month so it's kind of a no-brainer skill share is also doing this cool thing where the first 500 of you that click the link below get two months of skill share premium absolutely free so make sure you hit that up explore your creativity and as usual have a great time if you like this video make sure to hit like because when you hit like the algorithm blesses me and it shoves my bald head into people's home pages potentially helping them out which also helps me out so it's a win-win for everybody if
you're lurking here consider subscribing and hitting that Bell icon so that you don't miss future uploads other than that hit me up on Instagram or Twitter if you want to just follow me around or check out the second channel I'm going to be posting there more often [Music] don't that monitor turned off I have been posting there more often but other than that that's all for today thanks so much for watching and we'll catch you the next video [Music] Stephen whoa thank God you showed up you would not believe the symptoms I'm going through right
now man yeah a lot of people who come in here are pretty sick mm-hmm you got me thinking though what would happen if everyone was sick if everyone's sick then no one's sick technically right yeah yes it says here that you've been experiencing some issues I just woke up this morning terrible dry cough my whole body's just in pain I'm checking off every single symptom of that virus that's going around hmm pretty scared about that so I don't know if you need to just swab me have you seen any other doctors about this No very
well very well so do you think I haven't I don't know so you said you're experiencing a cough right well you're in luck I have just the thing for that I have halls cherry and halls mint mint this is Hall's mint you're not a very good doctor no not really
