Episode Transcript

What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys, welcome back to five minute rants.

So guys, today I actually want to talk about obstacles. I want to talk about problems, and I want to talk about really having a mindset shift towards what we would say are negative things, because immediately when people hear problems, it’s like, Oh no, I don’t want to deal with problems. I don’t need more problems in my life. And I think it is very important to actually see problems correctly.

There is good friction and there’s bad friction in life, right? There are good problems, are bad problems. And what I mean by that is this, I get to decide how I look at it. I get to decide how I see problems in my life. I get to decide whether these things are happening for me, or whether these things are happening to me. I get to see the other end of things and to see the outcome, like of how I overcome whatever obstacle it is or whatever situation is, I get to see that, and then I get to choose to either be thankful for that or to avoid it. And here’s what I mean by that.

I want you to think about how a jet engine works. Let me explain this to you. So a jet engine has turbines, and they start their big fan blades. And the fan blades chop up the air, first a big chunks, and then they work their way down to super, super small chunks. Right? The fan blades decrease. So if you picture a plane, and you see the engine on the side of the plane, it goes from large to a small exit point. Well, when the air is super compressed because of friction, because of pressure, because of problems that are chopping it up, and it’s mixed with the jet fuel, then it becomes energy and thrust to make the airplane fly. Most things that you excel at in life are things that have been hard for you. Most things that you’re good at in life are things that you have overcome and you’ve walked through to grow and to change, and all of this is simply me saying, without problems, you are not really going to grow.

Without friction in your life, without uncomfortable situations or decisions or actions you have to take. You’re not going to change. Right? Think about how athletes in the NFL or the NBA or whatever sport you want to pick, football, right, soccer, whatever it is, those athletes go into self induced problems, self induced friction on the daily basis to train and become better. How do they become better? They go through friction, painful experiences, training. You listen to Kobe Bryant talk about how how he trained, or messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, like you think about that, and then they’re actually seeking out the friction to become better. They’re seeking out the problems.

And a lot of us end up not ever really progressing in life, because we avoid problems when we just want to be comfortable. That’s actually the most dangerous thing, because it’s a problem in disguise the comfort, because later on down life, when you just only plan for comfort, have only sought comfort the short term thinking. Look up studies on short term thinking, read about it, see the detrimental causes and harms behind it, right? You’ll figure out real quick that comfort is a really bad problem to have, and most of us don’t even recognize it as a problem, and then, as a result, we have missed out on many opportunities in life that have presented themselves before us to go to the place that we’ve really wanted to accomplish our dreams.

Most of us miss out on our dreams because we’re not seeking out the problems. See, in order to get to your dream, in order to accomplish what you want, there’s problems along the way. There are problems along the way. There’s friction along the way. And if you’re not in the mindset to face that, and you’re not in the mindset to walk through that, you’re not going to get where you want to get in life, right? Everything is not just like school. It’s not just a multiple choice answer. There’s a lot of thinking required. There’s going to be a lot of failure.

Everything you’ve done in your life has required a lot of failure for you to be successful. If you’re really good at math, think about how many times you got a math equation wrong, right? There’s a lot of failure on that journey to be really good at math. Think about driving. Really, you’ve made great decisions all the time, and that’s why you’re such a great driver. No, normally there’s failure along the way, and when you become good, it’s because you saw the failure and then chose to learn from it along the way.

And so the reason behind all of what I’m saying is this, if you are trying to accomplish a goal, you’re trying to accomplish your dream or vision, there’s going to be problems. And in order to speed up that process, I would encourage you to seek them out. It’s called required difficulty. Sought out difficulty like you want the difficulty in your life to increase your capacity to move forward, and it takes practice working through friction to actually become better.

And so all that being said is friction is not a bad thing. It’s not negative. It’s really a positive thing. You just get to decide how you see it. Anyways, guys, I’m out of time. I’ll catch you later. Peace.