My "Self-Help" Phase

Many of us wake up one day and just think... man I could do a ton better. You start searching motivational videos and all sorts of stuff... and of course you end up with the flood of scammers online trying to get you to buy a course to get rich by selling a course telling people how to get rich (ironic right?).

Dig a little deeper, and you end up with all the different ways you can make a million bucks; influencer and digital marketing, random side hustles, trading, and of course the dreaded drop shipping business.

After that you end up in what I call the "self help sphere" - where your main intake in Gary Vaynerchuck, Tony Robbins, and all that revolve in that circle. They show you what it takes to get there, and... well it's a little defeating, because you just watched 6 weeks of people telling you that you can get there fast. Then you look at the time you have, your skillset, and all you need to learn... and dang. It makes no sense.

You take a step back, and you're just like - "I don't want to make a million bucks, I don't want to be world's next successful business guy, I don't care to live some extravagant lifestyle... I literally just want to make some more money and quit my garbage job." So you end up in a period where you're reading books that want to help heal you, get your head and heart straight, etc.

And so the adventure begins. Let me save you some time and give you what great things I learned, and what to stay away from.

I honestly understand this. A lot of doing your own thing, building a life, etc. does revolve around you having the mindset to do so. If you keep telling yourself you can't do it, then of course, you're never going to do it.

But what if you do have the mindset? You believe you can learn and do it? Now we're talking. A millionaire coming up!

Yeah... not really. I think people tend to lean into extremes. It's either really easy with some hard work, or it's extremely difficult and you get in what you get out. Let's be real; it's neither. It's the in between. It's a combination of passion, hard work, some time, some learning, and of course, any good motivational guy will tell you... failure. Problem is they often downplay the failure. 99/100 businesses that will be born in the next like month, will fail, often fast, and if not fast, a slow, bloody, and painful kind of slow. Ultimately, it's about figuring it out. That's really it. You should expect to be solving problems ALL the time. That's how you win.

It's not all doom and gloom though.

One thing that self-help does often do is teach you about your own mind. Which we'll hit that later. What it doesn't do well is simply tell you that you need to be in a "think and grow rich" mindset. It isn't about getting rich. It's about living successful... which hello!

What these books and people often do is define success by money, fame, attention, brands, businesses, and that's not really what success looks like. The other way all this media tends to portray success is through... beauty. Beautiful partners, nature, that type of stuff. The other way it tends to spin success is wisdom. If you are wise and do the right things, you are successful. Another way they define success is by habits and rituals - which often are the framework they use as well. Finally, they tend to use "freedom" as a definition.

What all of the self help space tends to neglect is simplicity and fulfillment. When I was just turning 18, I grew up in quite a large suburb where I would often call it "the place where dreams go to die." It was a city basically compromised of lower class to middle lower class citizens, with some higher classes here and there. As I got older, I found that it wasn't dead dreams... it was simplicity. Many folks were happy working their 9-5, shoving 8 people in a 1200 square foot house, and having a 12 pack of beer on the weekend with their friends and favorite sport. They were successful... by their own means.

Now "success" means something different to each person. What I can tell you, is everything I listed two paragraphs up aren't it. Success for some is just having a family. For some it's the white picket fence house. For others, it's sharing love and passion. Sometimes that could look like a million dollar business... sometimes it can look like a 9-5 with low wage and nice weekends with friends.

Point being in the end - you have to define what success looks like; not by material things, but rather by what fills your heart. The more you fill your heart, the more it will overflow with light to others. That's success. Everything else is secondary.

Look, you'll have floods of people telling you this is ain't true. I guarantee you though, it IS true. The "have your money make money for you" or drop shipping gurus, and all these guys tell you about it being passive is a giant load of salesman hype. It's always work. You can never truly disconnect from something that is making you money.

Let's suppose there IS a way to have "passive" income (still skeptical), it's still going to require a LOT of upfront work, maybe even years of upfront work. You have to learn about what you're doing, build it, dump money into it, etc. - it's not just sign up, follow a set of instructions, and boom it's passive. If it were truly that easy, we'd have a lot more rich people.

I'll give you some examples. Trading for example - you have to understand before you can do it. You have to understand the trades, how to make them, when is the good times, and even then, you still have to put in a few good hours every day. Drop shipping requires a ton of upfront work, unless you pay someone to do it for you, and even then you still have market it and maintain it. Affiliate marketing is an active job no matter what people tell you. The most passive thing I can think of sync licensing, but you have to know how to make music first, and it doesn't last forever; eventually they stop showing ads, new songs come out, new movies and entertainment come out.

There is an upside to this though. Even though it isn't passive income, it is however income you can control. When you're working a 9-5, you are most likely salary. If you put in 80 hours, you get paid the same as if you worked 30. If you are hourly, you are still under the umbrella of limitation. With these types of systems that people pitch as passive, you can legit get good at them, and what you put in is what you get out. Let's suppose you have a decent drop shipping site. It's making you a solid 60k a year for a couple of years. You decide... well I want to double that. Guess what? You have a formula now. You've seen what it can do. You can do it again. Maybe your second venture wasn't as successful, but your two stores now are making 90k combined. Well, maybe you can improve the stores, sell different products, or hit a new market you hadn't hit before. 6 months later after adding a some new products and vibes to the stores, you're now on track for 130k this year.

Not passive, but if you need money, you aren't at the will of a corporate overlord that will expect you to work 3 jobs for a 10% raise maybe in 2 years.

Let's step out of being successful, making money, and owning businesses for a minute. The other side of self-help revolves around getting your head straight. It focuses on personal health and well being, which is certainly a great thing. However, a lot of people just use this to make money. The podcasts, the books, the planners, the social media content... a lot of folks out there do it for the cash, and it leads to a lot of poor advice.

Without naming him, there is a guy who basically yells at you saying "you're not making it unless you're making 50k a year." There's some folks that label their book something along the of success habits. Several folks take the approach of belittling you. Some of these people just are so disconnected from reality that their advice is just outright ridiculous.

Not all are bad though. There's just one key thing you must remember while you're ingesting and learning here - there is no "one key" to getting yourself straight. There's likely not one book that's going to change your life permanently. There's no one person that's going to have all the answers. You're going to find a lot of stupid things, things that are good yet don't work for you, and things that just don't apply to your life at all.

You need to take a different approach instead; know that you may ready 17 books, all 250 pages or more that are filled to the brim with advice... and you might pull just one thing from it to help you out. You may watch someone's content and take in 40 hours of what they have to say, and only get 2 real things that applied to you. What it boils down to is what you need. We all grew up different, have different struggles, and are at different points in life.

To end this section, I will say that I have a collection of books, I've watched and purchased more media than I care to admit, and I was in this particular self-help phase for a 6-8 months. So I've realistically spent probably 300+ hours watching content, spent countless dollars on books and courses, and here's ultimately what I got out of all that -

• Understanding the deeper layers of pain and hurt is important
• Anxiety is just fear - it's not a trait or personality. Live for today, not the future.
• Planning and goals are only part of the game, but they aren't actually that important
• Habits help shape you, but you need to be good at time management to get to the life you want.
• Treating your body well will make your mind better

There is one more point I want to make, but it's the next section!

Yes, there are successful people who just use people to make money. Who don't give two craps about what they sell or how they do it. There are people in affiliate marketing that know their products are garbage, but they do it anyway.

Just a personal rant here, so feel free to skip this paragraph if you don't want to hear my opinion. Why would you dedicate your livelihood and life to something that you know you hate, doesn't help anyone, or that you're making money in ways that are immoral or unethical? I know, Corporate America is basically built on this principle, but we as people don't need to be. Look, I am pretty intelligent, but I can't morally bring myself to take advantage of people's naivety and money for the sake of making money. I don't want to make money that way. I don't understand how so many people are that disconnected from their soul or just humanity.

At this point in time, people tend to see through the BS, and despite what anyone may tell you, there's a good chunk of people that know when you make an ad on tik tok, that you are just trying to sell a product... and you do it poorly. Let's say you are successful, it won't last because you're missing that crucial piece that makes something last - you and your passion. This is why a lot of self-help books focus on you, building a brand, or helping you discover yourself.

It seems very backwards to many people... but it's not "make money by doing the right things." Rather, it's doing something your passionate about, sharing it, and then being able to help your audience out with products, merch, solutions, etc. - whatever it is you're doing. It starts with passion, and it's the passion that makes it last.

Whether you realize it or not, my self-help phase helped me learn that passion, excitement, and authenticity are the groundwork and foundation for what you do in the real world for money. For each individual this looks different. A couple of ways it can look different -

• Maybe you're passionate about your family. You can't wait to get home and spend time with them. Work and hobbies are all secondary. This gives you the ability to cruise through a work day, even if you don't make a lot, go home to your family and be happy. Your life is made.
• Maybe you're passionate about a specific subject, maybe even what some would consider a niche; like cyber goth. You love the music, you love the self-made outfits, you love to dance. Every moment you can muster you're doing something around that - sharing it, being happy in it, and all that jazz.
• Maybe there's a skill that just lights you up, like let's say technology. You just absolutely love technology, so you spend not just your work day, but also your spare time playing and discovering technology. You will likely build a career out of this, and that's awesome.
• Maybe you are really good with people, and you want to help solve their problems, so you get into sales. You get to do something you love, which is really talk to and discover people, their lives, and have a great time, while also being able to sell them something that will help their lives.
• Maybe you're passionate about business. You love working with numbers, doing market research, and improving efficiency. You love watching everything come up and it just fills up your empty soul watching what you built grow.

If you have no passion, you end up missing key things, or you end with a temporary source of health and wealth. I know because I've lived in some of those ways. Make money. Do it what it takes. However, we were never meant to live that way. If you hate what you do, eventually it's going to take a toll on you - sometimes in more ways than one.

Take your passions and lean into them. Do them for free. Share them. Be the authentic you and be in the world. After you have that foundation, you'll find ways to make money, and it'll feel right.

While self-help ultimately wants to preach about life changing stuff, what I often found is that I don't pull anything "life changing" from any of the content, but I rather end up finding a lot of tips that help improve my life, or get me closer to living a better life.

Here's a good example; I went for a few weeks reading about focus and different ways you can clear your head out. Now, while I ultimately learned I have ADHD, there were plenty of things I found to help improve my dealing with it. I found that smell and sound are important. Specific smells too, like cinnamon can help shift your mind and focus. Sound is important too, as sometimes having background music or videos can actually improve what you're working on. I also discovered several supplements, like Lion's mane, omega 3 oils, ashwagandha, and L-theanine that can help improve blood flow, brain function, and give you a much cleaner head.

Okay, so here's something that will likely help you, but didn't help me much (prior mentioned ADHD works against me here). It did teach me a lesson though; time management is one of the most important things you can focus on. What is that thing? Scheduling and planning. Goal setting at it's absolute highest level. So many of the self-help realm revolves around this, and everyone's got a product to help sell it.

Side rant: If you have ADHD, the idea of making an organized planner for a completely disorganized brain sounds good on paper, but it shows me that you never have dealt with it before. It's antithetic to how people with this type of brain operate. "ADHD Planner" is just about the most ironic title I could think of.

Anyway, back to the original point; goal setting and having a plan to get there is important. Learning to manage your time everyday is equally, if not more important. There are a lot of awesome books, planners, mindset journals, and stuff out there. I am sure you'll find value in them. However, if you're like me, that's really difficult. Your goals may change every couple of weeks. What I like to do is have "end states" instead. It's the same concept, but it's different. Anyway, that's not what this article is about. Just know that self-help did actually teach me a lot about that.

Batching work with energy is another great tip I learned from self-help. Sometimes starting your day with the most difficult thing is going to defeat you. If you do that repeatedly, you'll always be defeated. Sometimes, all the repetitive actions and nonsense you deal with everyday drains you. Other times, you are tired as all get out and you just find it really hard to operate, and the opposite happens too, where you feel like you could take on the world.

Your mind is your greatest tool. Our of everything self-help did and didn't do for me, this was the lesson I took away from it the most. We all have some form of hurt, trauma, fear, anxiety, or depression (non-clinical, I recognize there's a difference) living within us, we can't really escape it, but we really never learn to deal with it. We tend to adapt to it, and that's just honestly the wrong thing to do.

We get wrapped up in these things and end up making them our identity. Well my friend, I am here to tell you that you don't actually need to identify with anything of this world. If you're a Christian, your identity is in Christ. If you're of a different religion it's there. If you're an atheist, then you should have no identities. Identities only limit us. "I am just an anxious person" - thus you believe part of who you are is anxiety. It's not. Anxiety is a feeling... it is not YOU.

With that being said, self-help I think it's often misleading, but I can't honestly think of a better genre name. If you decide you want to make a change in your life, feel free to dig into it. Just keep these few things in your mind to avoid the same mistakes I did -

• Success is what you make it. Are you happy and fulfilled? Yes? That's success.
• Self-help won't make you a millionaire. It may set the groundwork for you to become one if you truly follow all the advice, but it's still you that gets there.
• Everyone's experience is different. There is no "logic" to the human mind.
• Healing is so underrated, identities are limiting, and you should deal with those before you deal with anything else.
• Know that you will intake a ton of media, and you won't get out everything you put in.
• Passion drives just about everything.

Don't be fooled. Enjoy life.