[Music] in the storm [Music] any door [Music] i will never stop loving you [Music] one of the biggest things i've struggled with all my life is being disciplined now whether that's being a student at university doing assignments or preparing for an exam or whether that's a passion project like learning a hobby or running this youtube channel and i've always been a very enthusiastic person who's passionate and when i feel motivated or when i'm in the mood i can be incredibly productive and get a lot of things done especially when it's the last minute and an
assignment is you the next day but at the same time i'm also the sort of person who can go from that high of being very productive one day to doing absolutely nothing the next and i've always been incredibly inconsistent when it comes to discipline and i think one of the biggest contributing factors to this inconsistency is i really do struggle with perfectionism and it's not something that i have personally admitted to in the past but anyone who has worked with me or has observed me working in some capacity knows that i am in fact a
perfectionist and i think i've always justified that by saying things like you know i take a great deal of pride in creating work with love and care and doing it to the best of my ability and not just getting work done and so whether that was spending what some people might have thought of as unnecessary time to make the slides in my presentation look as good as they could be or adding that extra level of polish to a persuasive writing task i had at school all the way to spending an extra two to three days
making an assignment at university look good even though there was no apparent reason to put in the effort as i said i value doing that the additional time and care and love and effort that goes into that final level of polish is something i greatly appreciate and every single time when i haven't done that when i haven't made things perfect or i haven't made them as good as they could be i tend to lose sleep over it and regret it and i know it's a weird way of thinking but that's just how i am but
i think one of the negative results of this that i've seen in my life is you know sometimes i'm working on an essay presentation a youtube video and i have such high expectations of myself that sometimes i get incredibly overwhelmed to the point where i don't even think the thing that i'm writing down or the video that i'm making is good enough and it is incredibly crippling to the point where i don't even do anything and as a student at university i have used this as an excuse to procrastinate from doing my assignments for weeks
at a time and it's usually that deadline imminently approaching in the last minute that gets me to get the work done but you know what's even sadder than that sometimes in life there are things that you want to do that you're passionate about um like developing skill developing a hobby contributing in a group meeting or you know making youtube videos and these things don't have a deadline and the thing is sometimes when there is no deadline it's really easy to get in the state of thinking that because i have so much time i'm just going
to wait for the perfect moment to come around when i've got the perfect set of ideas where i feel perfectly confident where everyone tells me my ideas are perfect and then i'll start and the thing i've realized over the past year and a bit is that moment never comes and you know i've had people come up to me and tell me this um that the idea of perfectionism is holding me back and that i should adopt a bit of discipline but i've always ignored the advice that i've been given because this is who i am
and if i start doing something whether that be planning out a youtube video or writing a script and i don't feel like it and i don't feel truly inspired in the moment i am not being my authentic self and this idea of authenticity of being someone who only does things to the level of perfect who only works when he truly feels passionate is something that i have used to hide behind for all my life and it's very true for the way i've treated my youtube channel in the past i started this channel three years ago
and i just posted whenever i felt like it when i felt inspired when i felt like i had the perfect idea when i felt motivated and that led to a very sporadic pattern of me posting on youtube and sometimes i'd even go seven months without making a single video and what was happening in those seven months was sometimes i'd have a hundred ideas written down on a page and i'd go through each one of those ideas and i would find three to four excuses as to why i couldn't do them you know from not thinking
this was the perfect idea to not feeling creative and confident in the moment to feeling like an impostor and wondering what people would think about me to i don't have the time to do this because of my lack of discipline all the way to the fear of you know sitting down recording a video which is still which is still not a natural thing for me and then uploading it on the internet for anyone to see there's something about putting myself out there that to this day still terrifies me and maybe it's just me but you
know as great as perfectionism has been for me and i enjoy making things perfect i think i began to see how crippling it was in all my work and and in my attempt to you know become a little less of a perfectionist i i came across an incredible analogy um that a guy by the name of seth godin gives in one of his books called the practice subtitled shipping creative work something very relevant to what i do and maybe one day i'll make a video on the lessons i've learnt from this book but um i
think in the book or in a talk he was giving about the book he had this brilliant analogy that completely changed the way i approach doing creative work and it goes like this so imagine you're going down a path one day and while you're along your walk you see a toddler drowning in a pond what do you do in that moment do you ask yourself i don't know if i'm the most qualified swimmer i haven't sworn at the olympics or i don't feel like it you don't say dumb things like that you just saved the
kid because in that moment you were there and you had the opportunity to make a contribution by saving the kids life and if you don't save the toddler's life the toddler dies and quite literally the world is a lesser place for it and seth godin talks about how the same thing applies in our creative work that in everything that we do we have an opportunity to make a contribution to show up with the intent to serve someone else to help someone else in everything that we do and i remember hearing that after seven months of
not posting on youtube and feeling incredibly convicted because when i look at who i am the skills that i have with what has been given to me the experience i've had as a student in university the lessons that i have learned along the way i realize that i have an opportunity to show up and serve at least someone at least someone's day could be better at least someone's experience at university could be better if i showed up and made a contribution and if i let my selfishness my imposter syndrome my perfectionism my fear of failure
my complete lack of discipline procrastination self-pity get in the way of me making a contribution that if i use those things as an excuse for not doing anything then quite literally the world is a lesser place for at least one individual or a small group of people and i'm responsible for that and so there's a reason for me to get my life together a bit more to be a little bit more disciplined you know to show up with the intent to serve someone else and to put the work in even before i feel like it
because i don't need to give into my feelings because i can choose to be that kind of person i can choose to be the kind of person who makes a contribution and so out of that realization that i do have an opportunity and a responsibility to help someone else along with some of the other realizations i got out of this book you know i decided to post once a week that another video is coming out next tuesday regardless of what happens and so now i don't need to have an internal monologue with myself as to
whether or not i make another video because the decisions already been made and said now i can focus on how can i serve one person i think it was out of this that i began to appreciate the value of discipline that i don't need to wait for those feelings of motivation to come along that i don't need to listen to that voice in my head telling me i'm an imposter that i don't need to spend time waiting for the perfect idea to come then i can just get to work i can just have the discipline
or all the practice as seth godin likes to call it of showing up to the work that i do with the intent to serve because i have a responsibility to do so and that's the thing about discipline or the practice that you don't need to wait for your feelings to come along you can make a decision and decide the person you want to be and the change you want to make and as i've always said about the things i say on this channel this doesn't just apply to starting a youtube channel or doing creative work
that in everything that we do we can approach it with the same mindset and if you're a student out there and you've always struggled to find a reason to put in the work have you ever considered why we go to university for many years to gain all this knowledge have you ever wondered why people ask you to get your life in order to be more disciplined to organize and manage your time better it's because you have something to contribute to those around you from small interactions with your friends your peers your family all the way
to your career as a doctor teacher businessman etc and if you just procrastinate be a perfectionist wait for the perfect opportunity or ideas or feelings of motivation to come along nothing happens nothing gets done you don't become the person you want to be and not only do you miss out but the people around you and the world and so that's why we learn so that with the knowledge that we gain we can use it to help other people that's why we improve ourselves that's why we study like that's why we learn to communicate better so
that we can connect with someone else as uncomfortable as that might seem you know so that we can be the sort of person that people can look to to fix a problem now we can be the sort of person that people can give responsibility to the sort of person who makes a contribution and i know i've said this on my channel before but i genuinely believe it that there are two ways you can do every job the first way is to just do your job the second way is to show up with the intent to
serve and to see every interaction you have with someone else as an opportunity to make a contribution to make them laugh to make them smile to change their day to educate them to inspire them to save their life to get them from here to where they need to go and so whether you are serving a cup of coffee to a customer in that moment you have an opportunity to make that person's day better or maybe you realize that there are a group of people who are in desperate need of a solution maybe it's some students
who need to be tutored maybe it's elderly people who can't get access to medication because they can't travel to the pharmacy you know and then you start a business because you want to serve those people because you want to get them from here to where they need to go or maybe you're a senior cardiologist in a hospital who provides life-saving surgery or maybe you're just the nurse who takes care of the patient after the surgery and interacts with their loved ones in each of these scenarios you have the opportunity to change things for the better
and so that's why you should get your life together and be more disciplined you know to change things to make a difference and and that's the whole point of taking responsibility of picking yourself of owning your learning so that you can make a contribution and serve others in everything you do [Music] oh [Music]
