oh all right nothing broke we're good i read over 369 self-improvement books and they all pretty much say the same three things i'll give you the three lessons in this video big idea number one on the first day of class a photography professor divided his students into two groups the left side of the class was the quantity group they would be graded at the end of the semester on how many photos they took 90 would be an a 80 would be a b 70 would be a c you get the rest the right side of
the class was the quality group they were going to be graded on one singular photo it had to be near perfect because that was the only image they were grading off of where you put in your money the quantity or the quality group the results shocked them see almost all the standout best photos that you'd want to look at didn't come from the quality group they came from the quantity group because instead of all the pressure of i'm graded on one photo they spent their time in the dark room getting angles composition on lightroom which
gave them more skills and produced better results it's easy to get bogged down and waiting for things to be perfect before you take action to improve yourself before you start the business before you enter the relationship see i just gotta prepare a little bit more and then i'll finally be ready this study sums up perfectly the big idea of stop waiting in this case stop waiting for things to be perfect as volunteer says the best is the enemy of good and i'm all for having high standards but what you'll hear time and time and time
again is that your ability to reach your standards actually comes through action not just waiting and prepping on the sideline when i started on youtube had i worried about making the perfect video and seeing everything right and perfect execution i wouldn't have posted half the videos i did sub point a is stop waiting for the perfect moment to get started and just go for it sub point b on this main truth in the books phil stutz who wrote the book the tools which would take me 30 minutes to find for you he's a therapist who
works in hollywood with some a-list clients a trend he notices is that people are waiting for what he calls exoneration now that's a term that gets used if you commit a crime and then you're proven innocent the burden has been lifted off of you and you're finally free in the context of life it goes much deeper people want to be exonerated from life's struggles clark when's the moment where i read enough and i'm finally enlightened when can i read enough business books and then i finally know the perfect path to make a million dollars human
nature in fact that belief is even embedded in our society most people work jobs for 40 years that they're just okay with in the hopes of being exonerated one day they can sit back on the beach i'm retired baby i no longer have to work and now i can live the good life look at me retirement get educated for 20 years work for 40 so you can finally start enjoying the last 20. see the narrative on a much more macro level most of the books say that life's struggles don't go away and that actually the
resistance of the struggle creates the struggle more if you read any books on stoicism there's actually a word for this it's called eudaimonia where they didn't believe in the word of happiness that just wasn't something they used happiness what do you mean they thought that eudaimonia meant fulfillment and that comes through hard work sweat equity struggling and working for things happiness comes from solving your problems not avoiding them martin p seligman is one of martin seligman is one of my heroes in the positive psychology space one of the pioneers a trailblazer i gotta tell you
about his famous study with dogs in 1967 he did a research study three groups of dogs each of them the exact same experiment group one could push the lever and escape groups two and three got a little dark group number two of these dogs would receive shocks and if they pushed the lever they could escape however group number three same exact shocks pushing the lever did nothing they couldn't escape the shocks and before you think wtf clark this puppy shocking is your hero it was the 60s times are wild here's where this gets interesting part
two of this study same dog same shock same lever group three even though they had the same setup they could push the lever escape and end the shocks hey did you hear you can escape because of their conditioning from that first experiment where they pushed it and nothing happened they didn't even try since they previously had learned that nothing they did mattered they quite literally rolled over and took it the term from the study is coined learned helplessness meaning that we get conditioned into believing that nothing we do will matter now we're not dogs but
you can apply this to human behavior as well a smoker who repeatedly tries to quit smoking and fails ah what's the point i'm just gonna quit again an entrepreneur an artist who tries to take themselves full time and make a living beaten down and discouraged eventually they quit or relationship after relationship heartbreak after heartbreak that doesn't work out and all you're left with are the memories and the pain and maybe the dog if you're lucky the more life shocks you with the easier we fall into category number three what's the point why bother psychologists say
that if you want to become instantly depressed operate from learned helplessness because nothing you do matters anyway right there's a lack of control a lack of hope so what's the opposite of learned helplessness instead of a lack of hope no point whatsoever big idea number two you develop self-reliance and that's literally what self-improvement is so no wonder all the books are saying this relying on yourself and proving yourself getting up from those shocks with tenacity with grit and taking your power back some try to illustrate the power of self-reliance through instagram quotes and platitudes and
motivational speeches i'm more of a fan of success stories people who say the shocks i'm gonna get up and do something about it i just so happen to no one let's give them a call what is that monster number seven uh it's a it's yeah probably remember that one time you uh dragged me out to meet post malone because i was too nervous you should have tackled them i should have tackled it eric is in the band with me i've known him for six years we've played shows in germany together 30 000 people gone all
around the world it's the coolest thing we do he's got a really inspiring story about like what happens when you decide to just stop settling and reinvent yourself what was kind of like the low point of it stuff on the road you know you can do whatever you want i was doing a ton of drugs basically trying to top every night every night no care in the world the worst credit score you know just living horribly i think a lot of people didn't didn't trust me didn't trust what i was going to do i should
say even close friends to where sometimes i just didn't get invited places and they would tell me i made uh you know sorry but we just couldn't we didn't know what you were gonna do that sucks where are you now like briefly describe your life for how much better it's gotten since you made the decision to give up drinking or to really change everything in your life i would have a lot of people say man if you would just quit drinking you could be doing all these amazing things you know me and my lady were
passing by a liquor store i was so tempted just to tell her to pull in that was the moment when i really knew i was like okay i'm not doing this anymore i just quit cold turkey but i did go about 95 blind for a couple days again i was advised pretty harshly not to do that i had three dollars in my pocket and i took that three dollars and i put it in a jar i literally have that three dollars in that jar in my truck right now i've never been broke since then now
you have a house that's under your name you you're in the bands you're crushing it there you have your another band you have a healthy relationship you got your health back you have a lot of what people when they think of like oh man if i could turn my life around if i could have a good life it looked like this like you got a lot of those things i got addicted to doing better you know and i don't know if it's healthy to hold other people to this standard but i think it's very healthy
to hold yourself to it you know how you do anything is how you do everything you're the type of person that you're walking in from your mailbox and you have trash on the ground and you're able to go through that mindset of i'll get it later or someone else will pick that up i think it's very telling about your all your behavior in your life well it's almost swapping addictions it takes the same amount of energy but when you re-channel and refocus that energy towards something that's constructive not destructive it's not like it takes more
work you actually find yourself left with more energy it takes less energy now i have friends that i've only met in this mode so they have no idea and they're just like man you know your work ethic is so it's so crazy what's your advice to someone who wants to reinvent themselves here would be my direct advice don't don't live on the fence in any way shape or form if you're living on the fence a you're miserable b you're making everyone else miserable because you're dragging them through your story me hearing something very similar to
this was so inspiring because i felt like once i just started doing it just like picking up that piece of trash as you walk by you know just like once you start doing it it starts to become habit be prepared to to realize that most of your mindset is wrong i have been humbled and have continually humbled on a daily basis at how much i don't know tell you i've never been happier in my life my relationship of 12 years has never been better and i and i've been saying that for years now it's nice
to be trusted it's nice to be counted on people don't look back when they ask me to do something they know it's going to be done we only get to do this once i say charging the final point is a little different in my early 20s i thought self-improvement was about achievement now in my 30s i realize a lot of that's ego based it doesn't necessarily make you feel different when you get more things when you go deeper a lot of the self-improvement is good but it's half of it the other half is self-healing these
are two different things so one of the trends i picked up in several books more eastern ones this is the power of forgiveness forgiveness has two folds the first is forgiving of others growing up my dad and i didn't have the closest relationship part of me wanted to resent him from it so one day i realized even though i didn't have the best relationship with someone for 20 years do i want that affecting the next 40 years the answer was no people change people grow people evolve people are all on their own journey flash forward
now we have a great relationship it's never been stronger in order to have that relationship you have to forgive and move on from what happened in the past forgiveness is a huge trend that any book worth its weight in gold will tell you how to do believe it's the buddha has a quote something along the lines of holding on to bitterness and resentment is like drinking rat poison and hoping that the other person dies i realize that holding on to bitterness around other people or what they should or shouldn't have done they wronged me maybe
you have an x and you still have some resentment there it doesn't hurt them at all it hurts you finding ways to shed this off and let go has so much more of a freedom to it but forgiveness has another side as well probably a bigger one that affects you more day-to-day and that is forgiving yourself let me explain this to you in a more visual way looks a little messy but it'll have to do this is reused from another video i was too lazy to draw this up again if you just rank ordered all
the given emotions you could feel on the human spectrum it'd be pretty intuitive where they land you'd have things at the very bottom the worst feelings in the world are shame fear guilt other people have things i don't envy anger then you'd start to move up into pride fear eventually coming into courage and willingness finally some of the good ones are love peace freedom aliveness joy when people talk about raising your vibe this is what they mean going from lower emotions into higher ones where am i going with this and how does this tie into
forgiveness where does resentment anger fear hate fall into in this category right here i find that a lot of times people who need to forgive themselves are holding on to a lot of the stories and self-judgments about what they did or didn't do in their past and so by doing that that's bringing you in a state that's literally lowering your vibe my point is that making peace with yourself in some way actually raises your vibe there's a saying what you resist persists so the areas and the places you don't want to go deep down within
yourself are probably the places you're going to get the most growth from psychologists will say that most people this is uncomfortable because now you're actually telling me to work i thought these books were just feel good all fluff i don't actually want to work and do some introspection yeah just give me the next tactic or productivity advice and they wonder why they're saying the same thing and hearing the same message over and over and feeling stuck that's a sign you need to do some of this and so forgiveness is a two-way street it's forgiveness of
others and it's also forgiveness of yourself to the degree you're able to let go is the degree you're able to let in the things you actually want and any self-improvement book that's worth its weight in gold will also emphasize the self-healing that is involved in the process if you'd like some help on the self-improvement and self-healing aspect that's what our whole metamorphic program focuses on it's a 10 week deep dive we spend about half the time focused on self improvement creating that 2.0 you but you better believe we focus and dive deep into the self
healing and self forgiveness part and i know all this can be overwhelming i know all these books and tactics and tools can sound familiar but if you felt that like education has really just been entertainment if you're brutally honest i'd invite you to apply down below have a conversation with one of our coaches they're cool people it's a low pressure conversation to see if we can actually help you a question i get is which books would i recommend so what i'll do now is link up this video where i'm going over the five books i'd
recommend you read this year click that video and i'll see you there
