Rejoining Society

🔥 Go to my blog for the latest and greatest articles: https://www.stuartoden.com

No more poor-me bullshit sob stories. No more complaining about my life. No more wishing things were different.

Today is the day… blah blah blah.

No but seriously, I really am going to get my shit together. So far I’m even off to a good start.

But we’ll get to that in a second.

Since today was January 2nd, the gym was fucking packed. All these New Year’s Resolutioners coming in thinking that THIS is the year for them!

Yeah right. They’ll be gone in two weeks.

While I was stretching, this Persian lady came up to me and said hi. Her name is Azita. We chat sometimes on the stretching mats.

Naturally the conversation moved to New Year’s Resolutions. She asked me if I had any. I said no.

She took this opportunity to tell me hers, “I want to lose 10 pounds. In six months.”

Now, I’m not sure if you know anything about fitness, but 10 pounds in six months is a pretty shitty goal. It’s like saying you want to learn how to ride a bike in six months.

She didn’t look too fat. I mean, she looks like a typical late 40s early 50s woman who‘s had a few kids. Kind of chubby, but not obese.

I told her, in a nice way of course, that I thought her resolution was garbage.

“You could lose 10 lbs in two weeks. Just eat salad for every meal.”

Immediately she started to make some excuse. “No no, I can’t do that.”

“You WON’T do that,” I corrected with a grin.

She didn’t seem to mind that I was giving her shit.

As we were having this conversation, I imagined myself taking my own advice. I try to do that when I’m dropping knowledge on people.

As I hear the words coming out of my mouth, I try to think about how I could apply it to my own life.

“The way you’re phrasing the goal is setting yourself up for failure,” I told her. “If you just say, ‘I want to lose 10 lbs,’ then your brain is thinking that once you lose those ten pounds, then the work is over.”

The implication was that she would just get fat again.

Once again, she started to argue with me.

“No no,” she said. “I think even ten pounds is too much. I want to lose FIVE pounds.”

I rolled my eyes. She obviously wasn’t getting the point.

I decided to try another tactic.

“Instead of telling yourself that you want to lose 10 pounds, or five pounds or whatever, you need to convince yourself that you want to become a different type of person. Like if you open up a magazine, see a girl whose body you want and say to yourself, ‘I want that kind of body.’”

She opened her mouth and started giving gooooooooood reasons right away.

In her thick Persian accent: “You have to understand, when you get older, your body changes. You can’t lose weight anymore!”

Bullshit, I thought to myself. I should introduce you to Maeve.

“Do you have kids?” I asked.

She did.

“Imagine that one of your kids — and I’m just making shit up here — let’s say that he gets caught cheating on a test. You can say to him, ‘don’t cheat on tests.’ Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. But you’re just talking about the action of cheating. But if you tell him things like, ‘Be a good person,’ ‘be an honorable person who does the right thing,’ then it’s more likely he’ll get the point.’”

I’m pretty sure that was the lightbulb moment for her.

“Ohhh…” she said. “I think we’re talking about the same thing. I just didn’t phrase it correctly.”

We chatted a bit more and then I headed off to my yoga class.

For some reason I always find myself in deep conversations. I’m great at giving advice. I just wish I had someone who could get through to me like I get through to other people.

It was weird having that conversation with her. Like I said before, every time I give someone advice I imagine that I’m talking to myself.

I don’t need much motivation with regards to fitness. I would even say that’s the one area of my life where I am doing pretty fucking good.

Still, I’d always try and think of ways to transfer the way I think about fitness over to the way I think about making money. But I’ve run into one major roadblock.

The reason I like being in shape is because I prefer to think of myself as an attractive person. Having visible muscles is important to me.

Call me shallow or whatever, but I see myself as an attractive person. If I don’t work out, then I won’t be attractive and I’ll experience unbearable emotional pain.

Pretty shallow sure, but it’s the truth.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that I spend several hours a week in the gym and have for most of my life.

I reap the rewards of all that exercise: positive attention from women, good self-image (physically at least), I never get sick, I can eat McDonalds without feeling guilty, etc.

I’m sure there are people out there to which the idea of spending 7–10 hours a week in the gym sounds like pure torture. I love it.

But I’m also sure that many of those same people are totally fine with sitting in an office for 50 hours a week in exchange for a big fat paycheck.

I would rather kill myself.

Still, my point is that if I were able to transfer the way I think about fitness over to the way I think about money, then my life would be much better.

The problem that I’ve run into is that spending time in the gym is enjoyable, whereas “working” is not.

For instance, when I go to the gym I get to say hi to my gym friends. There are beautiful women walking around, many of them showing off their hard work in skintight clothing.

The act of working out is pleasurable as well. Whether it’s the rush of endorphins after a set, hitting a new personal record on the bench (which I haven’t done in ages), or taking a nice steam afterwards: going to the gym is fun.

But work?

Yeah, sitting in an office for what feels like infinity hours per week. Having downtime where there’s nothing to do, making stupid office small talk with my out-of-shape coworkers. How can you even compare the two?

I realized that in order for me to enjoy work, I need to actually fucking enjoy it. Every time I read one of these stupid articles/self-help books where they say shit like:

“You need to spend 12 hours a day on your business in order to succeed.”

“Be obsessed or be average.”

“You need to live an unbalanced life if you want to be successful.”

It’s like, are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, so you have a lot of money at the end of the month. But so fucking what? You have to sacrifice your humanity in order to get there. What’s the point of that?

Seriously, I read this shit EVERYWHERE. I can’t believe all of these self-help morons get away with writing that shit.

Anywayyyyyy… the point of this drawn out story is that I need to find something that I love doing. I need to find some sort of job, or business, that gives me the same amount of pleasure (an apparently naughty word in the current incarnation of the self-help world) that I derive from going to the gym.

More on that later.

As I made my way over to the yoga studio, I felt my brain working a bit harder than usual.

Today is Monday, which means Andres is teaching the 10:15 class. His classes are always an incredible workout, very challenging. Even by the 10:15 standards which is generally considered an advanced class.

I don’t know his entire life story, but I know enough about him to envy his lifestyle. I don’t say that about many people.

I remember one time in class he made a comment like, “I’ve been teaching yoga for 20 years…”

He looks like he’s my age.

I ran into him later and asked him how old he was. When he told me he was 43, I couldn’t believe it.

“Damn man! How do you look so young?”

He laughed. “Just lots of yoga and surfing, I guess.”

When he said that, I had a lightbulb moment of my own.

THIS guy has it figured out, I thought. I wish I could be like him.

This was a few months ago, but ever since then I think of that every time I see him. All he does is teach yoga, surf, and occasionally do a yoga retreat. Like I said, I don’t know all the details of his personal life or how much money he has in his bank account, but I assume he does pretty well. Even for a yoga instructor.

I would love to have that kind of life for myself.

Unfortunately, that’s still a few years off for me. Besides, I don’t know if I’d actually enjoy teaching yoga professionally. I do want to take an instructor’s course eventually, but it’s not the end goal.

The class was incredible as usual. Afterwards, I wanted to ask him more about his professional life but chickened out.

The combination of these experiences did, however, generated enough energy in my mind to cause me to think about my own professional life.

After a quick trip to Trader Joe’s, I came home and started making mind maps. Ever since listening to, “The Achievement Habit,” by Bernard Roth, I’ve gotten a bit more optimistic about my future.

It’s an incredible book that I’m in the process of summarizing (currently at 10k words. Oops!).

Anyway, one of the many tools he recommends is making mind maps. For those who don’t know, a mind map is where you write a word on a piece of paper, circle it, then write another related word nearby. Then you circle that word and connect the two words with a line.

You’ve definitely seen it before. Just a bitch to explain.

So I got home, started boiling some eggs, and got to work on my mind maps.

My first one was: How to have a satisfying professional life.

I worked on that for a little bit, but something still felt off. I didn’t feel like I was really getting to the heart of the matter.

As a quick side note, another thing Roth recommends in his book is to identify the REAL problem. In other words, if you have a problem you’re unable to solve, chances are that you aren’t thinking of the correct problem.

The example he gives is of someone who wants to find a spouse but is unable to.

The exercise goes as follows: ask yourself, if you solved this problem, what would it do for you? Then you write down all of the answers until you find one that really resonates with you.

In the spouse example, some of the answers could be: I wouldn’t be lonely, my parents would stop bugging me, so I could have more sex, etc.

Then once you’ve found an answer that resonates with you, you turn it into a question.

Let’s say that you really just want to have more sex. Then the problem you need to solve becomes how to have more sex, not how to find a spouse.

Get it?

Great. So in my case, as I was doing this I realized that my problem isn’t that I need to find a satisfying professional life.

The REAL problem is that I need to spend more time doing things that I enjoy.

So I made a mind map of “all the things I enjoy” in the center and got to work. I wrote down things like traveling, yoga, being around beautiful women, drugs, transformative experiences, etc.

Then I started thinking, “Okay, now how can I figure out a way to combine all of these things into something that I can get paid for?”

Then I had it: documentaries.

You probably thinking, “Documentaries? What are you insane?”

Hear me out though.

Remember that documentary about the guy who ate McDonalds every day for 30 days and ended up getting super fat and depressed? Well now that guy has a fucking TV show where he does some random shit for 30 days at a time.

SuperSize Me.

My idea is essentially a combination of SuperSize Me and what Tim Ferris does.

Interview experts, train, and learn as fast as you can. Granted, the way I see this unfolding is that I wouldn’t limit myself to 30 days. Sometimes more (training Kung Fu on a mountain in China) and sometimes less (learning how to pick locks or do magic).

I’ve actually had this idea before, but everyone that I told it to shot me down. Fucking assholes.

This was kind of the idea that I had when I vlogged for 30 days. I was still under the impression that just because my life was interesting at one point, that it would be interesting no matter what.

I was wrong.

I had a similar idea not too long ago where I would go around to different small business owners and offer them a “free commercial” in exchange for lessons in whatever they taught.

For example, I would go to a surf shop and receive free surf lessons. In exchange for that, we’d film the lessons and turn the footage into a commercial that he could use for his business.

Naturally, he’d want to share it on social media and use it as an advertisement. The cool part about that is that I’d be leveraging his customer base to promote my own “show.”

Obviously I never did anything with this idea.

Anyway, this idea is a bit more balls to the wall. In other words, I’m not going after a few surf lessons at the local surf shop. I want to find a surf expert on some tropical island, spend a month with him and surf for 8 hours a day. Film the whole thing and boom: instant documentary.

Since I love writing about my daily experiences, I can use this as an opportunity to make money from my journaling as well.

“I spent 30 days surfing with Surf Champion Steven McSurfy in Australia. This is what happened.”

Perfect clickbait title.

It’s not an overnight thing, obviously. The footage would still need to be edited and all that, which can get expensive.

But I don’t give a shit. What was that quote? I think it was Steve Jobs. I can’t find it but paraphrased, it says something like:

“If you have a dream, go for it. If you succeed, then you get to get paid to do what you love for the rest of your life. If you fail, then you just spent your whole life doing what you love anyway.”

So fucking true.

The real question is where does this leave me now? My first thought is that nobody in their right mind would actually give me the money to do this, so I’ll have to fund it myself.

I suppose I don’t know for sure though. Wouldn’t hurt to try.

Worst comes to worst, I can just go work in Australia for a few months and save up. I mean, I kind of want to do that anyway. Living in LA is.. I don’t know, I don’t think it’s for me.

Actually, that’s not true. I do like certain things about living here. I’m from here, after all. This will always be home.

That doesn’t mean that I want to live here full time. It also doesn’t mean that I want to choose between a [boring] life of office work and the excitement of being on the road all the time.

I want both. And if there’s one thing I’m going to choose to believe about all of that self-help drivel its that you should never listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do something. Just do what the fuck you want.

They do say that, right?

On the other hand, maybe I’ll just get my real estate license and call it a day. Fuck it.