Over 6 years ago, in 2018, I was 30 years old, and my life was a trainwreck. So, I put some goals together and started on a 5 year plan to fix my life. You can read more about the details of that in a previous blog post, “Making a 5 Year Plan Totally Changed My Life“.
I didn’t focus on communicating what I was doing or building an online presence about it. I was just too busy. I just kept my head down and stayed focused.
When I did attempt to share what I was doing, I was all over the place. I’d write blogs but they were too autobiographical and wordy. Most of the time I would end up using them to explore ideas and just think out loud. So I never ended up trying to promote them, they’ve just floated here with no audience.
Today I’m thinking of all that as the previous era of my life. That’s done, I’m here now. Happy, comfortable, stable and ready to keep building. This time I want to communicate my progress more clearly and organize myself enough to share useful lessons I learn along the way. This blog post is the beginning of that.
In this post I’m going to share some insights I’ve made recently and how I’m starting the next era of my life in 2025.
Holding Myself Back
I’ve had a bit of a struggle transitioning into this new phase. To be honest, my 5-year plan only really took 3 years to accomplish. Yet, I ended up stretching it out for 6 years (2018-2024). Everything in my life changed so fast and frankly, I was shell shocked. It took time for me to adjust to this new life and I’m still not certain I’ve fully there yet mentally.
That struggle, shell shock, and adjustment required me to break down some serious subconscious mental blocks that were holding me back in big ways. Here’s an example.
One of my main goals in 2018 was to get my bachelor’s degree. I could have finished it in 2022 relatively easily. Yet, it’s now 2024 and I’m just barely about to graduate. What happened? Why did I stretch this out so long?
Well, I was lucky enough to get a great tech job earning $55k/year right when I started my degree program. That was a lot of money for me. At least 2x more than I’d ever made in my life. So I dug in to it and put all my effort toward doing my best at that job. And it paid off in big ways. The next year I was promoted to earning $65k/year, so I kept it up. My salary has continued to increase at least 10% every year until this year. As a result I reached one of my other goals: ‘Get a tech job earning $100k+/year’.
The problem is, that was all an easy excuse to rationalize why I hadn’t graduated yet. “Well, I’m just doing so well with work and earning enough money… so I just don’t have time to concentrate on college.” Sounds reasonable, right? Nah. In retrospect, it was bullshit. I should have finished my degree a long time ago and all the work stuff is just an excuse.
I could use a similar excuse for any of the other 3 goals from my ‘5-Year Plan’. The absolute truth is: I flaked on it. A little bit at a time, for a long period of time – I slacked off on finishing my degree.
But why?
It took a lot of introspection and self-honesty… but I made a very vivid realization. It’s obvious to me now, but it wasn’t at the time.
Just look at this situation the opposite way. Any time I had the opportunity to focus on other things – side hustles, hobbies, or other pursuits that would move my life forward faster… well I just didn’t have much time for that stuff. I had to work on my college assignments!
See? I kept myself locked into this paradox where I didn’t have time to finish my college degree because of my career efforts… AND I didn’t have time to get too wrapped up in any other tasks or ideas because I should put more time into finishing college.
This was the perfect self-sabotage routine that made me appear busy and productive, feel busy and productive, and yet hold me back from actually being busy and productive.
The longer I dragged my feet with my college work, the longer I could just sit in this phase of my life. It’s been a fantastic phase. I’ve enjoyed my job, working from home, all my bills are paid, my girlfriend and daughter provide a magnificent home-life, I can skateboard as much as I want, I’m well fed and I’m healthy. I can just live comfortably with very little pressure and enjoy a nice stable life. I can sit back day-dream about all the opportunities and future plans that are right around the corner without having to take any of them seriously.
I entrapped myself into my own Construct and Matrix.
Escaping The Comfort Trap
I can imagine a lot of other people deal with this same sort of thing. Maybe not exactly like my situation, but similar. Life is good, you have everything you need… so why disrupt that comfort?
The truth is, you don’t have to. Not today. You’re fine. If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re earning plenty of money, advanced into your career, with a stable home life, and fun things to do in your free time – you’re great! Enjoy it. Life is good.
And that’s the whole problem… you’re comfortable today, and you’ll probably be just as comfortable well into the future. We all operate on a hedonic treadmill, both at an individual level and collectively as a species. As conditions change, positively or negatively – we all tend to revert back to a base level of satisfaction.
Good things happen in your life, and you’ll feel better for a while but eventually revert to feeling the same. So why bother? You know what they say – Money Can’t Buy Happiness! Same as when bad things happen. Sure, you’ll be mad, angry, sad, or depressed… but you’ll revert back to feeling the same eventually.
Yet, society and the economy will keep progressing every day in small ways, with or without you. All that progression really builds up over time. Especially with AI and other technologies changing the way the world works. Five years from now, everything will be more expensive and most things about your skills and your lifestyle will be worth less. Ten years from now, even more so. Fifteen years? Everything will be different.
Inflation chips away at the money you’ve saved if it isn’t invested. Most of your possessions get worn out and used, superseded by newer products. Your job skills get weaker all the time the less you train them as the industry you work in advances and changes in ways you aren’t aware of.
Now I hope you’re seeing the trap. Comfort and ease of lifestyle are really bad indicators of how well things are going for you. One day you’ll wake up and realize things have gotten pretty uncomfortable. What happened? Well, 10 or 15 years went by and everything’s changed… but you’ve been doing the same stuff, enjoying the comfort. Stuck in the trap.
By the time you feel it… it’s already too late for minor changes and small efforts. You might be so behind that it’s gonna take some serious hustle to get back to that original level of comfort you started enjoying back when you started coasting.
Granted, everyone’s lifestyle, career, and habits are different, so it’s unfair to assume my logic is 100% accurate for everyone with all of life’s situations…
But this is the line of reasoning that I’m using to inspire myself to keep progressing and escape the comfort trap before I’m too stuck in it to escape.
Escaping the “Busy Work” Trap
I can’t even begin to list the number of concepts, ideas, and plans I’ve had for making projects, starting side hustles, and creating things over the last 5 or 6 years. No, really. I started to try listing them out but quickly realized that it would take me multiple days’ worth of work to find them all in my notes and put them here.
Yet, of all those concepts, ideas, and plans… I’ve released, posted, or otherwise got to some first version of none of them. And it’s not like I just slacked off and nonchalantly had a bunch of ideas but didn’t do anything to start them. I started them. I started all of them. I put hours and hours into most of them. Learning about them, researching them, finding the best ways to do them, starting to set them up, spending time working on them, and trying to get everything ready for each of them.
So what gives? Well, I talked about that paradox I was holding myself back with – like I couldn’t commit fully to working on any side projects because I made the excuse that I had to work on college assignments. That contributed to it… but there’s something else. Something that seems common with many other people that I know.
It’s the “busy work” trap. It’s SO easy to procrastinate with “preparation” tasks – learning about the thing, researching it, finding out better ways to get started, listening to how other people did it, and dumping tons of time into setting things up. Getting everything ready. Lining everything up. It feels productive. It feels like work. It is work…
…but what does it accomplish?
Spending some time and effort in learning or researching an idea, or planning it out is helpful. Don’t get me wrong. However, if all your time is spent doing it. Day in and day out, for weeks and weeks at a time… you’re only giving yourself more and more chances to give up on it. If you’re unsure about the project, then you’ll probably only end up finding downsides to it. The more you look, the more you’ll see, and you may get increasingly dissuaded to continuing.
Spending some time and effort in lining everything up, getting the proper licenses, making the accounts, and setting up the tools are really important to do. But just like the researching step… the longer it goes on the more reasons you may find to just give it up. If you spend too much time getting everything ready and lining up all the ducks… you’re practicing the wrong skills. Often they’re complicated skills, lots to figure out, so many details, so much to get prepared in order to get it perfect.
Do you know why it’s so complicated? You’re front-loading yourself with all the busy work that should generally be spread out over a much longer period of time. You’re building a grand, brilliant, amazing, intricate structure for something that doesn’t even exist yet.
Do you know what’s way less complicated? Just making the thing.
Just starting, figuring it out as you go, and completing the first attempt at it as soon as humanly possible.
Yes, it’s going to suck. Yeah, you may not know what you’re doing. You’ll screw it up. It won’t be perfect. It won’t be a masterpiece. It won’t earn you any money. It’ll be a flop… an abomination.. and a travesty to the industry. That’s a fact.
That’s ok. Here’s the thing… there’s no guarantee that any amount of research, learning, preparation, setup, or busy work would have ever changed that fact.
Every first attempt at anything that anyone has ever done is a “failure”
It won’t be awesome, it won’t be impressive, it won’t make you look like a legendary savant genius… but that’s ok! You aren’t! Grow up! 😃
I know. I’m sorry. It might be ego-crushing and insulting… but masterpieces, perfect works of art, and awe-inspiring accomplishments are made only after countless failures, retries, tweaks, and adjustments.
The real work on anything only actually begins after that first attempt. Success is an iterative process. You make the thing, observe what’s terrible about it, then figure out how to make the next attempt better… while you’re creating the next attempt. Then repeat.
You can’t take a shortcut past this. Researching more won’t help much, preparing and planning more probably won’t help that much. In virtually all pursuits I’m aware of you will always learn 100x faster and more accurately by going straight to the creation process.
You must embrace how bad you are at something before you get good at it. You must experience the flaws, shortcomings, and roadblocks involved with directly going through the entire process of creation to actually understand them. While you experience those things your mind will naturally begin to build the insights and skills that’ll be needed to overcome them.
Compare the outcomes of spending 2 months:
- Doing preparation work only to find that an idea won’t work and giving up on it
- Actively creating the thing, over and over, as many times in as many different ways as you can – figuring it out as you go.
In case #1, you never gave yourself the chance to succeed. You cut yourself off before you could figure it out. You took other people’s word for it, or your inexperienced assessment of it… and ended up wasting all that time on nothing.
In case #2, you gave yourself the chance to see the process firsthand. You may see and experience all the reasons why it’s not a perfect idea or you weren’t completely ready for it… but you did your best with what you had, and you made something. Then you made it again. And again.
In jumping straight in and creating your idea as soon as you can, as often as you can, it’s completely possible that you notice something no one else did. You notice things that no amount of research or preparation could have shown. Insights like those are what can lead you to success that wasn’t possible for anyone else.
These are the first steps to the line of thinking I’ve seen proven to work, time and time again… to escape the “busy work” trap.
The New Era
All I can do now is take the lessons I’ve learned from the last era and bring them to this next stage. Here are the biggest ones:
- Simplify life, reset habits, and live everyday in service of the future self.
- Make a short list of big goals to use as a compass for yourself.
- During downtime, always look for a deeper, more difficult truth in one’s thinking and situation.
- Talk very little about ideas or plans, only talk about actions after having done them.
- Connect more with people and things in the physical world than concepts and distractions elsewhere.
- Prioritize a set of scheduled milestones every single day, don’t let an hour go by accident.
As I start this new era in my life, I’m realizing that there is no finish line. Just more lessons to learn and more ways to grow. It’s not about perfection, it’s about progress. I’m incredibly grateful for the comfortable life I’ve worked hard to attain but I see that it’s not a destination. It’s a launchpad.
I hope that if there’s one thing to take away from this post, it’s that the path to growth isn’t always clear. That’s okay. Whether you’re struggling to find a way to start growing again, you’re trying but not making much progress, or you’re doubtful about the process entirely… the important thing is to just keep moving forward. In whichever way you truly desire.
The world is changing faster than ever, but it always has and always will – and so can we. At its core, this next era of my life will be all about embracing the pain of growth to let it shape my life for the better. If you want the same for yourself let me know, I’d love to hear about it. Comment below or email me: will@wforbes.net
Thanks for reading.
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