If you’re feeling behind in life, watch this.

has this ever happened to you you're on your phone and you start scrolling and you're on like let's say instagram or something and you come across a young person a very young very talented very successful let's say musician and you're like oh cool a person who's done more in their 18 years than i'll ever do in my lifetime let's look at all their pictures and read all the comments and just flood my brain with this you know the feeling where you're just like damn i'm gonna have a great day after looking at all this social

media so you click on one of the pictures and you notice that there are like all these top comments from all these bluetick accounts so you click through to their profile because you know screw mental health only to learn that they're more successful more talented and younger than you and according to you in that moment they also have zero signs of struggle [ __ ] tonight we meet a 16 year old who's got more in common with venture capitalists than guidance counselors and algebra youtube celebrity at just 11 years old the most influential teenagers put

out by time magazine already locked down enough seed money that he dropped out of high school she was just 19 when recording 19. at the age of 15 she developed a boutique skin care business mendez only turned 21 in 2019. self-made millionaires born in 2004 jack bloomfield is 17 years old after two depressing hours of scrolling you put your phone down and you look around your apartment at your very regular life instead of seeing millions of fans you see a broken fan actually yeah [ __ ] i gotta get that fixed you see the bill

that you haven't paid and the fridge that's still leaking and the shelves i've got to fix the car region i've got to pay and the deadlines that just keep looming over me and you might feel something energizing you know you might feel like oh one day this will all be better i'll get my mansion i'll get mine but it's more likely that you'll just feel like you're behind in life after a few hours on the devil apps i tend to feel like everyone everywhere is getting ahead just killing it and leaving me behind and if

i can just work perfectly for the next three years with zero panic attacks i could get there too right it is exhausting but there's some good news it's a trick crazy you've probably heard of dunbar's number the theory that we can only maintain 150 meaningful relationships at any one time the actual number itself is in contention and obviously social media throws a spanner in the works but one thing that most researchers can agree on is that the number is finite now this is quite important so couple this with the fact that we are biologically hard-wired

to compare ourselves to other people if you think back in ancient times and you're watching somebody's crops grow better than yours you'll be like damn i should know what they're doing that way i will be more fed thanks neighbor so combine these two facts and we can produce a third concept comparison slots we have a finite amount of slots in our brain that we can put people in against who we can compare ourselves to whoever's filling these slots will change as we focus on different things if we put all our attention on the one percent

on the one percent as we scroll through all these successful young people yeah of course we are going to feel behind in life because our frame of reference is a bunch of ultra rich successful talented teenagers and you know i'm 30 and i've only just started taking my life seriously so whoops so looking at this concept it's easy to think that the solution would be oh well i'll just stare at a bunch of people who suck and fill my comparison slots with people who are doing worse than me so i'll constantly feel better right i

just look at johnny who sold his foot for kid rock tickets unfortunately though this is more or less the same habit and it's only going to lead us to inevitable ugly feelings again a slightly more stable solution would be to fill those comparison slots with people who inspire you and people who did blow up later in life you know people like colonel sanders who made kfc in his 60s you've seen those memes you know the ones that are like jk rowling didn't write her first harry potter book until she was 412. so that means you

don't have to try at all yeah i think this is an okay solution but i think underneath it all it still reinforces two ideas one that you have to blow up and two that it is in some way dependent on your age when we put pressure on these two variables success and age i think that's exactly when we start to feel behind in life because i think that's actually what the definition of feeling behind in life is not having enough success by a certain age so i think it's therefore important to break these two concepts

down and that's what we're going to do with the next part of the video starting with success what is it man my sister is a counselor so when she asks me how i'm going i usually give her a pretty honest answer and the other day she did ask me how i'm going and i said i feel good but i feel like people won't love me unless i'm successful i don't know gotta be honest and she said how about you rephrase that as an i statement and i'm all like what do you mean because i'm the

dumber one of the two of us and she goes how about you say i won't love me if i'm not successful and that's when it starts to kind of hurt and unpack a few things her theory is that for a lot of people who do feel behind in life or for a lot of people who are chasing success in a traditional sense we have this sense that we have to achieve things in order to be worthy of other people's love but really we also have to achieve things in order to be worthy of our own

love and because we lack that self-love we attribute that lack to the first thing that we can see and control which is success therefore get really successful so you can love yourself cool and if you're not you will feel that shitty feeling that makes sense as a theory i subscribe to it but it does beg the question what's the solution do i just love myself and let my drive for success die this feels really good in theory and just really awful in practice personally i think the solution comes in redefining success and redefining it in

a way that ultimately leads to self-love this way you can have your cake and eat it too which is a really weird expression for me success is having incredible relationships with people and making meaningful work with that definition in place it's time to discuss the second variable timings something that i've only realized recently is that young success looks really cool on the surface and any deeper than that it looks like pure agony i'm going to tell you two stories about two people whom i've been a fan of at various points in my life the first

one i was only a fan for a very fleeting moment and the second one i assume i'll be a fan of for a very very long time the first person is lil xan i'm embarrassed that i was a fan actually something about his attitude just appealed to me i don't know what it was but if you don't know he was a rapper called diego lianos who blew up in 2018 with an album called total zanaki he would have been 20 21 years old and he was in that wave of face tattooed leaned up rappers that

was just so popular for six months so this kid gets flown around the world collaborates with all sorts of people and people are even getting like face tattoo replicas of lil xan he gets to this height where it's just so hard to ignore him and he is basically a meme and ultra famous but lil xan was just lil he was a kid and sadly he didn't navigate fame and success too well in one interview he was asked about what he thought about tupac and he said the boring music people were ready to hate him he

went from superstar to punchline and between the hate the drugs and the pressure his mental health declined i want to show y'all what mental illness really [ __ ] looks like i just did this to my car scratched it heated up i just bought it i just bought this [ __ ] car [ __ ] door want to know why i'm doing that because a mental [ __ ] illness i'm owned i'm a [ __ ] slave i'm a slave to my management i'm a slave to everybody i don't get control of my bank account

i don't get control of [ __ ] i can't even drive that [ __ ] car it's honestly heartbreaking to see all that potential and promise turn into something so painful now he's 24 stuck with the same face tattoos and focusing more on narcotics than music so can we call lil xan successful i mean what good is money and fame if you feel like [ __ ] and what about his future what can we say for what's gonna happen next to little zam does he have to live his life feeling like he peaked i hope

not but probably but the biggest question above all of this is was his work at the very least [Music] meaningful you tell me now let's compare that story of blowing up at 21 to the story of brene brown who did a ted talk in her 40s and blew up after that now she's in her 50s and at the peak of her career and she's having a lot of longevity with it and the reason that she's so relatable is because she is literally relatable she spent most of her life living like all of us living all

normal like man she's going to have a long career full of meaningful work and i think that her work actually resonates more with people because she blew up late in short the timings of when you make something is irrelevant sure you can catch a trend train but you'll just go up and come down what really matters is whether or not the work is meaningful so instead of focusing on an arbitrary deadline like i need to make blank by here otherwise blank it makes a lot more sense to just focus on making something incredible i always

like to leave these things with a little bit of homework something that you can journal on the first question you can journal on is how do you define success the second question is how could deferred success serve me in the long run and the third question is how is feeling behind in life the best thing that has ever happened to me ultimately social media is not on your side and while we love success stories we connect so much more through failures being relatable is the thing that creates meaningful work resonating with other people that's the

whole goal here and all these shitty things that you're wrestling with make you so much more valuable as a human as somebody who can give empathy and as an artist or as somebody who creates something it's all on your side i know it might not seem like it in certain moments particularly when we're scrolling in the phone and we see all that stuff that like yells at us but it's the struggle that unites us the struggle that creates the most meaningful work and the struggle that creates the most meaningful relationships and i think all that

meaning and overcoming all those struggles are the things that create self-love so full circle anyway i'm gonna get off my soar box now and i'm gonna leave you with this final tweet from wesley snipes hang on is your name wesley snipes that is insane it's insane that the actor wesley snipes has that name if you saw a picture of him and a picture of me and you were asked who should be named wesley snipes you'd pick the pale englishman every time every time liz not that wesley snipes this wesley snipes don't let the internet rush

you no one is posting their failures [Music] thank you so much for watching i hope you feel a little bit better and i hope you can start to reframe your brain good luck with the journaling subscribe if you're new i make videos like this every week if this is the first one you've seen let me know what you liked in the comments and let me know what other topics you want to see me cover alrighty have a gorgeous day catch