if you're asking this question about whether or not you should make a big life change I have some advice for you and this could be around a relationship moving to another city taking on another job the thing that's going to hold you back from making clear decisions is that you're stuck in habit and routine you're familiar with it that you're less likely to try something new it's the very thing that holds us back from seeing and seizing New Opportunities so this could be like for example I'm talking to dgo here about whether or not he
should move from Miami or to Los Angeles or some other place in the world and he has some Roots there and it's important to have a center of who you are in terms of your your family your neighborhood your upbringing but it shouldn't be at the cost of you taking on New Opportunities I want to refer to something that my friend norin moroka said which is comfort is a slow death that often times the opportunity that is before us is shrouded in what looks like challenges and problems and pain points and headache but that's exactly
where the reward is because if you can make a lot of money and seize New Opportunities without taking any risk well then everybody would do it and that thing wouldn't be very valuable at all so let's get into some specifics here dgo is 38 years old so that means he's not a young man he doesn't have the same flexibility that he did when he was 19 or 22 years old so it seems almost like we're damned the older that we get the more set in routine that we are the less likely we are to make
the necessary steps and changes to our lives that will benefit us the most and you have to think about this like what what is really holding you back so for him specifically he's thinking about the clients he's already built up the routine he knows where to go and get Freelancers to help him he knows production companies and he's he's kind of set up but here's what we do we say if you can map your life out in the next 5 to 10 years on the trajectory that you're on right now and the way that we
can do that is we can look at the last three years of buildings opportunities profile jobs Awards anything that that matters to you and see is it trending upward downward or is it flat across the board so if you say if I live in this town for another 5 years working with the kinds of clients I have access to what does that do for my life my career and for my financial well-being and if it's like skyrocketing don't change anything that would be the craziest thing to do to say like you know everything's working really
well right now and I'm going to do something totally different some people do do that and have tremendous reward because of that but they're like super adventurous and have big Ideas they have world-conquering ideas and for them it doesn't matter where they are what they're doing they feel in the heart they know what to do so just think about that for a second drgo if you are looking at the next 5 years based on the the trajectory that you're on right now does it look like where you want to be and if it is you
shouldn't move and if it's not or it's not moving as fast as you would like then we can explore the other option is what is there to gain so much of human nature is about where we want to protect something like we're more afraid of losing what we have than the potential gain of something we don't have and so sometimes that's a cognitive bias we're skewed it's a loss aversion bias once we have something we don't want to give it up you have to kind of think about what's in it for you like what happens
when you move so first we we live in the world of possibilities we say if you move or if you take on a job or if you leave a current relationship and get a different relationship what is the potential let's look at the positive sides what do you gain so let's take moving to La I can imagine lots of things well number one the things you have to gain or access to a whole different kind of clientele imagine all the clients that you have today and then just exit because people that come to La are
very ambitious and driven and they're more often than not worldclass in what they do because there's a lot of money here so that money attracts the very best people and so those people can potentially be new clients so if you're working with like um let's just pick something relatively boring and sa like a dentist and you're doing marketing for them do you think there are better higher profile dentists that are trying to be at the highest part of their game the highest level and if the answer is yes then is that true with other Industries
with real estate or Tech or Finance or whatever it else you kind of just look at the different Industries in which you can work in are the players here or are they somewhere else and that's how you start to make those decisions because if you built it before there's a high probability that you can build it again there's a lot of unknowns but it's not like you're starting from zero you're building on that that basis the second thing to think about is a lot of lot of the work can be done remotely these days so
unless you're there physically and you have to be there physically this is true like assembly work like on a plant and you're building a car it's very hard to do that work remotely but if you're doing creative work if you're doing uh work that requires your brain then you don't need to be there physically then none of that will impact your business or it might impact some of it maybe 20% but what you have to gain is like 60% then I would make that trade I've had to make lots of decisions like this while I
was in school I was studying graphics design packaging with the intention of creating entertainment marketing CD ROM music packaging back then there were no DVD packaging but you get the idea key art and then I saw this new emerging thing with 3D 2D animation and it just was just at the right time right place I decided I want to do motion design so in my life I've been rewarded by making big decisions and moving moving fast when opportunity is there versus overthinking something and then the opportunity is gone I mean how many times in your
life and you thought man I had that idea and then 3 years later you see someone else executing on that idea or I believed in that company and now they're like worth $10 billion I could have gotten on the ground floor for 10 grand and be super rich today when most people think of opportunity they look to the past to inform them because it's much easier as Steve Job said to connect the dots looking backwards so they'll say like Oh Real Estate Realtors are doing really well or Finance people in finance are doing really well
so they they emulate that now here's the problem I I got this Theory right um the the closest star I think to our solar system is Alpha centuri and it's it's thousands of light years away or hundreds of light years away meaning if you travel at the speed of light it would take hundreds or thousands of years for that signal to get here so when we look up to the night sky we can see um Sparkle of the star and the constellation system but we don't know if those stars are still even around because the
information is about a thousand years old so I think opportunities like that they send the signals out and they Echo through time and eventually you see it but the thing is once you see what's working you have to imagine that a lot of people have seen it it's not like only I look up in the sky and I can see the star everybody can see it so they go running into where the gold was not where it is and this takes me to this Wayne Gretzky quote which is quite famous which is he doesn't skate
to where the puck is he skates to where the puck is going to be so in order for you to seize opportunity you have to see a pattern a trend before everyone sees it because that's who reaps the rewards case in point I saw this interesting movement in design called Motion Graphics and I moved there and I was only a handful of people my classmates and companies that could do the kind of work we're doing at the time in which we were doing it later on people saw the reward the excitement the financial gain the
high-profile jobs then they rushed in and now it's filled with people doing motion design and so those opportunities aren't there anymore so make sure you're looking forward and not backwards do you have to take a leap of faith that's where all of it happen happening in terms of the opportunities you're not chasing the trend you're predicting the trend you're going to where the puck is so you say intelligence is pattern recognition right pattern matching so if we see a b c d we can make a safe assumption the next letter is going to be e
so you see what I'm saying it's like there are ways for you to spot patterns and then you say okay based on my experience intelligence and intuition my my intelligence working kind of on my subconscious level I can make a prediction as to what the next thing might be and if that thing is what I'm interested in that gives me a competitive Advantage because I don't want to just move to something because that's where it's trending I want to move to something because it excites me and it seems like the data supports that this is
going to become a thing I'm making YouTube videos in 2014 when people like me weren't making YouTube videos it was full of amateurs and creators now there's a whole bunch of professional people making YouTube content because they realize as a distribution platform YouTube is super powerful and now it's not flooded but there's a lot of people that are professional making videos and building a social media following so I had a head start on that I had a couple of year Head Start and that's what I'm talking about let's imagine that your two hands are filled
with the current opportunities and your life and the habits that you have right now and they're here and then I say hey come come into this room and you walk into the room and in the room are full of gold bars and you're like okay what do I do I'm like well that's up to you now so you have to let go of something so you can get something else but you can't let let go of these things that you're currently holding so the window of opportunity closes and then the time runs out and the
door closes and therefore you have nothing new you have just what you came in the room with which which is what you're holding on to so we have to practice a form of Detachment to say like this is cool but I'm not so in love with this thing ever so that I can't see the next best thing and and that's something that you have to keep your eye on a lot of people say like let's go ahead and do that thing that you learned in junior high or high school where you make a pros and
cons list things for and things against and then you go and analyze it but the problem is the human mind is wired such away that it skews us to like reinforce what we already believe a form of confirmation bias So when you say the pros of doing something new you only list a few things and the cons of doing something new will be really deep so you get stuck in that kind of analytical State analysis or paralysis by analysis and I think use your imagination your creativity your passion a little bit of data that you've
been able to gather through either reading research or life experience and you have to make an educated guess you have to go where you think the Puck's going to be that requires some degree of risk but in that risk is the reward are you better off staying where you are in any one of those circles if you predicted out 5 or 10 years and if you are that's where you need to be things are blowing up like for example personally speaking I'm getting more speaking opportunities at higher profile engagements where people are meeting me where
I want to be so if I were to switch careers or stop my career right now I would feel like I'm on the ascent towards an apex that I have yet to meet but once I hit the Apex and I go towards the downside I'm going to change and you you'll know it because I'll move and I've done this multiple times before when we're in the motion design space we could see that the size of the opportunity is getting smaller the frequency of the opportunity is getting smaller and yet the competition continues to grow those
are three pretty strong indicators that this is going to come to an end at least for us so at that point I'm looking for the exit door I'm looking for the next opportunity and that's when we get into brand strategy brand design working client direct and that buys us a couple of years of time we could have stayed in that space cuz that that is going to continue to grow and become bigger but something else caught my attention creating content teaching in Mass using social platforms trying to revolutionize the way that we learn and share
information that for me seemed like that's a good thing I can put everything into that wagon and take that for the next 20 30 years [Music]
