It’s been awhile since i’ve written something more philosophical and so today I’m writing about something that I think about a fair bit these days.
Each day I wake up knowing I have an absolute ton of stuff to do.
There will be a plethora of problems with the Reviv business… some small, some larger.
And everything is more or less sitting on me at the end of the day. I don’t really have a cofounder I can just dish stuff off to though I do have a terrific team of freelancers.
Even on the weekends I know i’m going to have to work 6-8 hours each day just to not fall behind.
Sometimes I wake up thinking… “hmmm I wish I could just stay in today”…. but I don’t. I pick my ass up and go to battle. For an average of 12 - 14 hours each workday.
I finish the day knowing that I still have a ton of stuff that I did not have time to get to.
Years ago when my health was worse this would have felt like a noose.
But these days it feels like nothing of the sort.
It sorta feels like i’m playing a video game. LOL
And today I want to explain this a bit more as I think it’s something to very much look forward to.
Stress feels like a noose when your biomechanics are worsening
I still remember just how difficult it was for me to do my job in early 2014.
I was living in Vietnam and a TMJ dentist had filed my back teeth down quite a bit. My health was worsening and my stress was out of control.
I had a pretty tough and smart boss who I’d only just started working for. And he was putting me to the test to see if he should just send me packing.
There was also a ton of work to do but my focus just seemed to be unable to come anywhere near to keeping up with it.
I’d work late every single night but my productivity would be horrible. I’d sometimes sit in front of a spreadsheet and my mind would go blank trying to remember what the task even was.
Meanwhile i just felt this constant stress in my body that was impossible to get rid of.
Even on the weekends it was impossible to relax. I just felt the dreaded stress of the workweek coming and so i’d need to drink lots of alcohol and go to frequent massages to try and cope with it.
But it just felt like a noose that was tightening further and further.
So eventually I gave up and I asked to be demoted two levels and switch job functions. I’d essentially put myself slightly above entry-level at the company despite being 37 years old and having worked ~15 years.
I felt like a failure. But despite this… even this new job with far less responsibility was stressful as hell for me.
Small tasks felt like giant ones inside my head.
My productivity was still horrible.
I kept thinking to myself… “What the hell happened to me?”
This limits how much you can achieve in life
When you think about what I’ve described above and it’s ramifications, you realize how much this can limit what you achieve in life.
If you work in a company it will limit your upward mobility and perhaps even get you fired.
If you work for yourself it can easily destroy your ability to make your company successful.
In that state I was in back in 2014 I would have had zero chance of doing what I am now doing with Reviv. If I was luckly I’d be able to do perhaps 20% of what I am currently handling.
Now play that scenario out over years, then even decades, and account for the compounding that occurs.
And you start to see how this determines who becomes ‘successful’ in life and who doesn’t.
It dictates your monetary success, your pride in yourself, your relationships with others, and much more.
When your biomechanics are improving the stress feels more like a video game
These days I continually surprise myself by just how much shit I am doing each day.
I am going non-stop between tasks all day long with a short 15-minute break for lunch and perhaps 45-minutes to eat dinner and hang out with my family in the evening before they go to bed (and I continue working).
I am doing that day in and day out for well over a year at age 48. With pretty much ZERO days off.
But I do not feel stress. Pretty much at all.
Rather it feels a lot like a video game that you’re totally entrenched in.
And with each level you pass, the game gets more interesting. Because the stakes get higher.
So it becomes like a drug…. you just wanna keep playing this game more because your body feels great and you have the energy and motivation to handle it.
Sure stressful events occur… but you kind of deal with them the same way you’d deal with challenges in a video game. It just becomes an intellectual challenge that you need to problem solve for to continue moving forward.
And you start to realize how really successful entrepreneurs that went from nothing to $billions did it. They kept rising to the occasion because their biomechanics allowed them to.
It felt like a video game to them… till one day it didn’t. And their biomechanics were backsliding.
Then it just started feeling like stress and that is probably when they sought their retirement from the ‘game’.
Closing thoughts
People love to ask me about aesthetics or how much my bite has changed. Thinking that these are the things I have been passionate about.
But they aren’t.
Sure my face has changed, my bite has changed, my body has changed, etc.
But in all honesty I don’t really care that much. It’s not something I even track very much.
Rather I am all about how i’m improving at this ‘game’ of life.
I love what this process does for my ability to play this game and win at it. That is the drug that I feed off of each and everyday.
And honestly it is far more rewarding to me than the other stuff.
Not because of the money…. but rather because I had to watch people beat me for so many years. As I frustratingly wrestled against my own collapsing biomechanics.
And now i’m coming back… and i’m coming hard and fast baby!!!!!!!!
How long did it take before your stress became more like a game that you could handle?