just a small language warning on this one actually a pretty big language warning on this one you know [ __ ] it the biggest language warning I have ever had on this channel the word [ __ ] and self-help are best friends at this point [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] F Fu [ __ ] and self-help has been on my mind lately cuz truth be told things have been
[ __ ] Fu [ __ ] fu fu [ __ ] [ __ ] huge thanks to shop of life for sponsoring this video more on them later about 2 months ago I set myself and 11,000 other people a challenge the alphabet superet make 26 things over 26 weeks all around topics that start with a different letter of the alphabet I chose to make documentaries a was for aliens B Brands C Cults D Doom e emojis and F is for [ __ ] as in I set out to make 26 documentaries in 26 weeks while
also moving house overseas with toddler and two dogs while changing both of my head meds and being in paperwork hell and also having a Cron's flare and they're all solvable small problems but they all came at once and uh damn man for a hot minute I thought my life was [ __ ] [ __ ] how to unfuck your life disclaimer this is just what works for me not an expert just some do with the YouTube channel but I have tried to articulate this and distill it into lessons as well as I can now say
[ __ ] let's start with a definition what is a [ __ ] and an unfucked life a [ __ ] life a imagine that you are buried in [ __ ] like literal [ __ ] that is one big pile of [ __ ] and you are there and you just want to breathe and you're like but all of the [ __ ] that just keeps dumping on you it renders you unable to deal with the current [ __ ] it's perpetual [ __ ] so if that's a [ __ ] life let's extend
this metaphor to describe an unfucked life an unfucked life involves us dealing with that [ __ ] and theoretically using that [ __ ] I don't know as maybe some fertilizer to grow some herbs in a garden and stuff you go from surviving to thriving and yes that crime is one more self-help Tru to illustrate this I want to take you through three ways that the world responds or that we respond when things are [ __ ] you're going to need to unfuck this the first way is invalidation you know when you're like ah my
problems don't matter because somebody somewhere else is getting bowled by a bear they would love to have my problems the problem here is rationally it is true the person who is being mulled by a bear is having a way worse day than me who is not being molded by a bear but just like you could drown in 7 ft or 20 ft of water we're trying to shift our Focus From the amount of water to the that we're drowning the second response to things being [ __ ] is resent I've been in and out of
seeing doctors and stuff for health reasons lately and one of the things that you might hear is well this is just your body's way of telling you that you need some rest and in my head I was just like easy for you to say you don't have deadlines renting a child and for a moment yeah I indulge in that self-righteousness yeah [ __ ] this guy but just as invalidation doesn't make things better neither does resent and the third way that we talk about life being [ __ ] that I would say is a bit
[ __ ] is when we talk about about it fatalistically Oliver burkman in his absolutely brilliant book 4,000 wigs he goes into this in a little bit more detail he talks about the idea of clearing the decks being floored like we're all sisifus but instead of a boulder we're just ticking items off a never- ending to-do list and philosophically this has a lot of Merit but in reality I've never found life to be that simple some months life gives you 40 Boulders in these moments I need something a little bit more practical than just imagining
cispus happy sometimes clearing the de is genuinely a really good strategy my experience when life is [ __ ] a massive amount of [Music] [Music] of mental junk out and I know that I've talked about this so much on my channel I need to brain dump man the reason is when things are up here they feel infinite and scary but when things are on the page they do feel finite and it makes it really easy to differentiate between which thoughts are helpful and which thoughts aren't because you can see them and you're like ah that
right there is a pretty gnarly cognitive distortion but when it was up here it felt like reality so the Mind dump literally looks like a stream of Consciousness I tried type because as faster and it'll just be like and once I've gotten to a point where I'm either feeling lighter or I've hit a juncture I write out every single obligation that I might have or might be somehow involved in everything that I need to do I call this the obligation dump that's what I did like 3 weeks ago and I was like oh why didn't
I do this earlier the analogy that I like it's definitely a sign of the times but is to see my head as a computer it's job is to process information not store them and the less files that are stored on the computer the better this thing will process we need Clarity you know what I'm saying obligations I find are some of the most obtrusive thoughts you know you're enjoying your entire life and then suddenly get hit by every single responsibility that you have to do that you've forgotten about temporarily that feeling so now I have
a stream of Consciousness I've got every obligation that I need to do here is where I get a little bit embarrassing all right I'm going to do it I made this decision this morning I'm going to let you in on my cringe just do it Campell just do it and this is kind of like the first time that I've really done this I wrote myself an aggressive pep talk you had best unfuck yourself or I will unscrew your head and shut down your neck and this is what I wrote I'm actually going to read it
out and freak it let's double down on the corniness let's go black and white and let's go cheesy inspirational music your life is a mess right now cleaning this mess will suck it's going to be hard but you're doing it because it will get better afterwards but before you fast forward to comfort remember that things will get worse before they get better but they will get better faster than you think luck is not a factor hope is not a strategy fear is not an option yeah that's what I did tell myself I was up and
then the final part of this Shrek rule is to make the possibility of the unfucked life the better life the thing that you're striving for feel very freaking real in my head I've been calling it possibility pairing all it is is me listening to stories about people who were in my position who got out in order to make it feel possible real stories you know usually things like podcast interviews audio books that sort of stuff but the more that I hear that things are possible the more the possibility of me getting unfucked feels real accompanying
my growth with somebody else's all right that entire thing was step one holy smokes step two mosquitoes emergencies bottlenecks so you know how in step one we wrote out every single obligation what we're going to do now is assign tags to those obligations mosquitoes emergencies bottlenecks mosquitoes are things that I knew that I could do within less than 15 minutes they were things that were just annoying but for some reason I put them off that's category one the second category was emergencies important things that needed to happen today some of these were really obvious but
to un cover the rest I use this question what on this list if it's not done would make everything else harder and then the final tag that I applied to this list was bottlenecks bottleneck is any task that inhibits a whole bunch of other tasks from being done here I flip the question what on this list if I did do would make everything else easier the whole point of this is to show you where your attention needs to be so now we know what needs our attention and how much attention it requires it's time for
step three push the smallest Domino first this for me was the biggest change in how I unfucked this particular [ __ ] period of my life in this particular period and in other more severe periods I felt like I was so useless and so incapable of doing anything large that I just needed to get my confidence up and that is where the mosquitoes come in I started with the smallest and most doable task on my list it was to write back to a message where I knew exactly what I had to say in that message
this took 2 minutes plus the 2 weeks of thinking about it but the first Domin I got pushed so mosquito mosquito mosquito mosquito this whole thing I kind of dedicated like 90 minutes to doing all of these tiny tasks and lo and behold I had less tasks to do afterwards I know that blew my mind in a way that is so embarrassing I don't know how I got to 32 without realizing that to conceptualize tasks as when they're done there's one less thing to do shouldn't have blown my mind but it did man anyway 90
minutes later I've got like 10 tasks that I no longer have to do 10 tasks that have been annoying me and then I see this one and I was like that is the mother of all mosquitoes that is where momentum is but before we get to that let's talk about a bunch of tiny tasks I don't have to do yeah we're talking about Shopify the sponsor of this video and if you're creative if business-minded if you can see the holidays in the Horizon and you're like I would love to sell my art or I don't
know maybe Pottery or whatever it is if the idea of having your own shop gets you excited then this is a message for you now elephant in the room are these just more tasks to dump on no that's actually why I wanted Shopify to sponsor this one because when I switched to Shopify they got rid of so many tasks so Shopify e-commerce platform Powers millions of entrepreneurs including me my shop on Shopify is truth.com this is where I sell like shirts prints more shirts Hees of stuff but I didn't always sell on Shopify I used
to have a different platform and it required a lot more work from me but switching not only increased my sales but the amount of plugins and resources meant that things that I was previously doing manually were now automatic and I was like oh oh that's nice if you are thinking about it and it is something that you want to try well Shopify through this channel they've got this special link dude yeah shopfly you can click that the link is in the description setting up a shop you don't need to know any code or anything it's
like a less than a day thing and it can make a bunch of money if it's for you it's for you if it's not it's not but in any case I use them and I love that they support this channel so shop.com tless if you're curious step four the loadbearing mosquito as I started building momentum I noticed that there was one thing that was on my list that was technically a mosquito it didn't take to too long to do but this particular task had been on every weekly to-do list that I had made since February
anth po the YouTuber he came to Sydney earlier this year back when I was living in Sydney amazing guy great filmmaker we met up we got on like a house on fire real lovely dude man when his trip was over I dropped him at the airport and when he was getting out I didn't realize and neither did he but he left his camera and his tripod in my bag if I was a better person here's what I would have done I would have found the nearest post office and sent it but I'm not this is
a confession I [ __ ] up I just kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off and he was so lovely about it and he'd be like hey just checking on that camera and so I tried to send it but then Customs returned it and I was just like well can't be done I'll have to fly to the states and hand deliver it myself but what might just be a task that I'm putting off for him it's his entire camera like this is about him not me you know what I mean
and the guilt it was weighing but for whatever reason I don't know this is like my worst trait as a human I just didn't do it until this [ __ ] month yes I did it initially I felt like tremendous shame and guilt and antho if you're watching I am so so so sorry you're an amazing guy but then I felt the switch I'd found the low bearing mosquito I could feel it within myself that I had created tangible evidence that I was not a [ __ ] up that I could unfuck things and that
is where the momentum began finally from mosquitoes to emergencies to bottlenecks I felt like I built myself up to deal with some of the emergencies from there the momentum built up until I could start dealing with bottlenecks and I was like oh was pretty cool it's obviously still a work in progress but labeling the tasks and then doing the Domino thing it's really helped me a lot step six from bottlenecks to breathing so you know earlier the uh metaphor how could we forget the one where we were all buried in [ __ ] and how
the dream The Hope was that we would unbury ourselves and then start using some of that [ __ ] as fertilizer to grow a garden that's what this step is about making actual change for this I examined three things goals and plans habits and routines reframing so goals and plans I've still got the same goals but my plan has changed a little bit for example the alphabet superet I have changed the timeline just a little bit nothing too much but uh I have made it slightly easier on myself just I don't know go with a
flow then there are habits and routines for a lot of my life I was very resistant to routines I don't know why I just was I just thought that they were the devil and if I got myself in any sort of consistency my life would lose all joy but what's life if you don't change right now I really like routine and one of the things that has reinforced how much I like routine is the lack of it and just like we have loadbearing mosquitoes we have loadbearing routines getting the most impact out of the least
change and mine aren't exactly exciting but they work waking up at the same time and exercise two things that weren't so easy while I was moving and then finally there's reframing particularly around a big weakness of mine admin the pep talk the one where I told myself that things were going to get hard before they get easier I realized that that was most helpful when I was fighting bureaucracy if I say to myself this is annoying I don't want to do this I wish somebody else could do it I put it off but instead lately
I've switched my Approach and I've started saying hey man you're really bad at this you're going to have to work a lot harder than other people do just to understand what this paperwork means and that sucks and maybe this is where all of the burkman's acceptance comes back in and has a bit of Merit because by accepting how much this is going to suck it sort of stops sucking I'm like yeah I just got to rise to the occasion a little bit more and the more that I've been doing that actually for the first time
ever the better I have become at that I forgot somewhere along the line that doing that was a skill so that's a snapshot of stability all right final time I'll mention being buried in [ __ ] but when the [ __ ] starts to look like fertilizer and when Sprouts start to grow what this is less metaphorically is us taking whatever insights we've learned about this particular time that we've got unfucked and sharing it with other people it's me reconnecting with the reason that I started this channel to try articulate whatever growth I'm going through
in a way that makes sense to somebody else but it's also made me think a lot about stability because when you do try articulate whatever insights that you have gleamed when you do try to position them in a way that could help somebody else and when you do decentralize yourself from those lessons I found that this process not only reinforces the lessons for me but it makes me feel pretty good you know so I guess what I'm saying is I am just one guy who's gotten out of one rut once again but you who watching
this you're also one person and you've also gotten out of ruts before if you have any insights on how to unfuck your life drop them in the comments and I really don't that to like get comments or anything I say that because there'll be somebody who was watching this video who's like almost almost almost and then they'll want to scroll down and then they'll find the one that helps cuz I don't know when things get tough we can always use another tool in the toolkit tools toolkits that is my final self-help book tribee for this
video all right that's the video and that is also F in the alphabet super set subscribe if you are new check out the podcast check out my book it's about mental Clarity a Ginsburg called it the most important and accessible mental book in a generation if your life is [ __ ] good luck UNF [ __ ] I guess uh have a beautiful week and catch you
