Resistance

Paving The Path

“New attitude, who could you be to solve this problem?” Scott Thorpe (how to think like Einstein)

A New Path

Whenever we want to create a significant life change, an opposition quickly arises. The forces around us go for the path of least resistance and try to block the move. Above all, the brain in his interest to conserve energy is trying to produce enough propaganda so we will shut up and stay in place.

So how do we construct a new path?

Background: after a year of traveling, my engine is still running, and I’m sure I want to continue my traveling journey.

This conclusion has some obvious consequences I’ll have to face soon:

• Leaving Israel and being away from family and friends for long periods of time.
• Reducing my belongings to the bare minimum, and say goodbye to the comforts of having a permanent apartment/car/job.
• Finding volunteering jobs, applying for visas in other countries and at some point earning money abroad.

The practicality of spending a few years “on the road” is the biggest challenge I faced in my life so far. Contemplating this shift is demanding a deeper understanding of my motivation.

“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius” Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile)

Becoming a “nomad” means creating a unique mindset that can potentially endure the changes and grow from the process. I believe the difficulty of living a mobile life for a few years, will trigger some much-needed mutations in me. Only the most challenging environment will create the most evolved warrior.

Necessity breeds competency.

Solo traveling reconnects you the basics: how to survive in changing scenarios, creativity is a necessity, improvisation a must. An “antifragile” mindset emerges from the chaos of change. You face it all the time, and you might as well learn how to harness its power.

Shutting The Noise

Living nomadically will be the platform or the “oven” in which I’ll be cooking a different version of myself, a stronger version. My goal is simple but extremely difficult: become a creator of content that can offer value to others.

As I’m in the process of opening a podcast and a YouTube channel, I’m facing resistance from all directions. In this post, I want to address the psychology of change and give a “shout out” to anyone who’s in a similar situation.

So let’s tackle the heart of any change: RESISTANCE.

Resistance is a certainty in life, the antagonist of creativity. People are often recruited by their fears to be part of the endless propaganda against creative changes. We have it in us, and then people reaffirm it to us so we say: “I find it in myself, and now in another, so it must be true.”

Resistance is a social inheritance we transfer to each other like an infectious disease. We fear things, we have doubts, and then we feel the twisted need to deliver it to others. In the sea of voices, our voice often gets forgotten and drowned in the mass of resistance noise from the opposition.

The worst happens when we start to assimilate the noise from the outside and confuse it to be our own. Then the process is complete, and the self-sabotage begins. We tend to sabotage ourselves more than the “world is against us”.

The world doesn’t give a fuck. Nobody gives a fuck what you do with your life. Even if your entire family believes you should do X and you want to do Y, don’t think for a second that anyone on this planet cares more than you about the quality of your life.

We’re the directors of our subjective movie. We care, the rest can “have an opinion”, but rarely does anyone really tries to understand the depths of what composes our happiness. We outsource our life’s script to an external director, and then we wonder why the final cut of the movie is shit. No one should draw in our map. NO ONE. It’s our script, our narrative. It’s us who have everything to lose if we follow someone else’s script. We cannot inherit someone else’s blueprint and expect it to work for us.

No copy/paste in life… different person, different outcome.

“Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.” Albert Einstein

The reality of figuring it out on your own is terrifying, but it’s what has to be done. To do so, we need to develop a good noise detector and keep it on 24/7. Any propaganda from the opposition is noise that is here to distract from the only thing that matters: how do I become who I want to become?

People are great at providing us with all the reasons why we can fail, embarrass ourselves, and risk financial hardship and distress. My thoughts on this are: if you’re not ready to fail, embarrass yourself, and face a ton of difficulty, don’t even start.

“Most problems remain unsolved because of a lack of action rather than a lack of options.” Scott Thorpe (how to think like Einstein)

The key to dealing with resistance is ACTION, massive action. When you put enough action in the world consistently, the noise becomes like an annoying mosquito that lost the capacity to sting you.

We live in a world that pushes us from the second we are born in a particular direction. Making the ultimate jujitsu move and escaping this push means having to make decisions without the power of the push.

To me, this is a liberating thought. I never enjoyed the push and always valued the pull. The pull towards what we want and desire. We grow where we feel good, not comfortable, but good. The “job” is to find where we feel good and put all our attention into exploring those places.

Capitalizing on the pull, a power source that comes from within, is the best bet we can make.

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If you’re resisting this post: here is a cool picture that you can print on a T shirt… I’m sure some of my family members will be your first clients :)