How do we make time for Steem, live streaming, or for trying anything new that we are excited about? What I've noticed in sharing so many new things that I get excited about is that most of us, our main limitation, the main thing that stops us from getting what we want from experiencing all these amazing things in life, is our commitment to what we are already doing even when something better comes along.
Secrets to Making Time for What We Love without Being Overwhelmed?
While in our minds trying something new is sexy, bold, and exciting, when we actually try to do it we are suprised to see how afraid we are and often after perhaps an initial attempt, we regress to going what we used to even when we know that will not leave us feeling happy. For a better result, we require a leap of faith into the unknown. Now, what most of us are hoping to get, for example, more money, a more comfortable living situation, a bigger contribution to the world, more peace of mind, many of these things we are hoping to get require a leap of faith into the unknown.
I know this was really hard for me when it came to sobriety. I drank for something like eleven years in my life and I enjoyed it a lot of the time.
At the same time, it caused a lot of destruction and misery in my life and I could see that I was never going to live a happy, peaceful, consistent life of things full of what I wanted as long as I drank. In fact, I was just going to drink myself worse and worse eventually to death, and yet despite all of that negative reinforcement, despite seeing how good people's lives were sober, it was really scary to take a leap of faith into the unknown.
In seeing death was my alternative, I was motivated four years ago and I still go to Alcoholics Anonymous every day. There I could see exactly what people's lives looked like who weren't drinking which looked a lot better than mine. I had clear proof of how great it was for some of the people. I had clear proof of seeing how miserable what I did was. I had clear proof that I couldn't just have one drink or two drinks without wanting and craving more, and yet it was still hard not to go to the liquor store because the hard part was taking that leap of faith into the unknown.
I realized I was terrified of what would my life look like if I stayed sober. What would my life look like if I actually learned how to live a good life without using some kind of substance, alcohol or anything else, or behaviors, to modify it, to deal with my feelings?
What would my life look like if I actually became a better person?
What would I be if I started taking suggestions by other people and started trying to improve myself?
My life today is unimaginable from how it was four years ago when I first went to AA. Well, I went to AA a lot earlier, but long story short, I went four years ago and I've stayed sober since then.
My life is unimaginably different today from not drinking to all these other behaviors like now I eat whole plant foods and eat vegan mostly.
That was unimaginable four years ago. It was unimaginable that I would be able to have a happy life on a daily basis, that a fight with my wife wouldn't have to leave me utterly miserable, that I might not even have to fight with my wife at all.
It was unimaginable that I could be a good father, that I wouldn't have to get mad and scream and run around the house, that I could have bad things happen and not lose my mind over it.
My life is unimaginably good today and I couldn't picture living this good before.
I couldn't picture having hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments. I couldn't imagine how that would happen because four years ago I had $100,000 almost in credit card debt and still when you count the student loans it was over $100,000.
My finances were predictably and very easily realistically bad. What's hard for a lot of us is to take that leap of faith. It is like dying, you just jump into something and you have no idea what it will look like afterward.
I think that scares a lot of us to just keeping things how they are, even when how things are is not giving us what we want. It encourages us to stay at a job even when we don't like it just because we don't want to take the leap of faith into the unknown of not having a job.
How many of us want to have our own businesses like I do. I don't have a boss. I have lots of people I'm accountable to, but I don't per se have one boss. I have my own schedule. I have that fantasy that they used to pitch when I’d go to these MLM seminars about, "You don't have to wake up to an alarm. You can do whatever you want."
I have that today.
That's my life!
I wake up when my daughter wakes up.
I forgot how to set an alarm on my phone. I literally forgot how to even do it. It had been so long. It'd been months since I'd even used the alarm on my phone. I have what is a fantasy life by all means. I'm concerned sometimes that I died because this feels like heaven.
My life is ridiculously good.
In order to get here I had to give up, take a leap of faith into the unknown and try some new things that had the potential to work better than what I was doing. That's what was tough about getting sober. It wasn't as much not drinking as finding the same ways to deal with stuff sober that alcohol was effective for.
You see, when I used to get upset I could take a few drinks and feel better a lot of times. How do I do that sober?
I didn't know back then.
Now, I do.
I pray. I meditate. I talk.
I call people on the phone. I read books. I try to help someone else.
Now, I do know.
But then it seemed scary, to die, to give up my idea of who I was and become someone new.
Live streaming especially, is one of those massive opportunities today along with joining Steem, and yet how many of us are actually going to do that?
How many of us are actually going to quit doing some of these things that don't produce much in return for us?
How many of us are actually going to say, "Okay, I'm going to stop posting on this blog on my website that no one reads that all I do is spend money on. I'm going to sign up on Steem and start posting there."
That's a big leap of faith.
About a million of us have taken it already, but relative to the entire world, it's a pretty small amount.
How many of us are going to say, "I'm going to stop spending an hour or two on Facebook where I never earn any money doing that and I often get upset. I'm going to try something new."
How many of us look around at bloggers, vloggers, live streamers and we think, "I could do that. I could do that. I want to do that. I'd love to do that. I'd love to go around like Jerry does and just film stuff he does for a few hours every day and that's all I have to do."
I don't have to go into a job. I have an amazing life, but it took a big leap of faith. It took stopping doing the things I was doing before and taking suggestions from other people. It took finding new ways to do things and it still does every day.
A lot of us are not comfortable making that transition. I was serving clients four years ago as my main business. In order to do what I'm doing today, I gave up serving clients.
Now imagine that, almost the only way I was making money I stopped doing it, right when my business was already close to bankruptcy. I borrowed $50,000 so that I'd have enough money to just do what I wanted to every single day, and that was teaching video courses.
I'm not sure exactly how much, but I made around a million dollars teaching video courses. It didn't look very likely when I started. All I knew was that I would love to do that, and that I had to drop my clients. I had to stop taking clients and drop the ones I had if I was going to do that. That's what's really hard with something new.
In other words, right when it looked like I was about to go out of business, I dropped all of the clients I had, borrowed $50,000 more before my credit tanked, and started doing what I loved every day. I gave up all my other ways to make money and relied completely on the guidance of my heart combined with the data I saw from others already doing it. How many of us are willing to take a leap of faith like that? The only reason I did it was because I figured if I was going to go out of business, I at least was going to give back everything I could on the way out in the worst case scenario and leave a legacy of video courses online to show for it.
I see people watching video courses alongside me who are interested in learning these new things and just don't do them. I've started learning music from zero.
That's the same thing there, I stopped playing video games after playing video games compulsively since I was six years old.
About a year and a half ago I stopped playing video games because I wanted to see what my life would look like if I didn't play video games.
When we have things we do like video games that take up so much of time and energy, we don't have time to replace it with anything better.
I play music today.
I've got a whole music set up in here.
I love my music set up. It's fun. It's wide open.
I'm not stuck to playing a certain game or a certain level.
I can do whatever I want. I get to create and I love it.
The first thing I did, I took the leap of faith and I asked what would my life look like if I stopped playing video games?
I didn't realize that I would start playing music until I asked that question.
"What would my life look like without video games?"
Then, very soon after that, I realized I'd have time to play music. It takes a lot of honesty sometimes to admit how our choices limit us, to look around and say, “My choice to do this job all day eliminates all the other things I'd like to do.”
I have a family member who wants to do more with their business and who has got a good income available, who just won't quit their job even though they don't like it.
I understand it's scary to just quit your job, to quit whatever you are doing that's making money. You don't know how you will make money to replace it. You have got to take that leap of faith first, and then you find out what will happen.
What I know is that just being willing to do the things I love, having the courage to just drop things that aren't fully satisfying for me.
Serving clients was miserable for me. I did not enjoy serving clients. I did enjoy making money from serving clients. I had some clients pay really well. Sometimes I could make a thousand dollars in a day working for a client, make hundreds of dollars an hour doing calls consulting with clients.
I didn't enjoy doing it because I'm sitting there showing some client’s shirt that I don't even like. I'm showing some client’s product that I don't even believe in, and I couldn't stand doing that lots of days.
After I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, and then was staying sober, I couldn't stand the pain of serving clients anymore. I couldn't just have a few drinks at the end of the day and forget about it. It disgusted me that I was helping people promote things I didn't like, that was hypocritical.
I committed, I said, "I'm going to create things I love and I don't care if I don't have any money. I don't care if I go broke or bankrupt doing it. I'm going to create things I love. I'm going to help people learn what I know."
"I'm going to help people. I don't care what money I get out of it. I'm going to do what I love every day. I don't care if it costs me some comforts in life. I'm going to give the most I can and ask for the least in return."
Ridiculously, I've made more money than ever since I could have ever dreamed of serving clients. But it didn't happen right away.
In fact it took about nine months to get rolling and it took years to cover the difference between what I would have made continuing to serve clients.
It took months of questioning, "This doesn't seem like a very good idea. Stop serving clients? We were making $10,000 a month and now you're making a thousand a month selling video courses. This doesn't look like a good idea."
I am grateful today I've learned that one of the most important things I can do is give up things I don't enjoy doing, give those things up, and then that makes space for me to do what I love.
I hope this is helpful for you, especially if there is something you have been saying for years, "I'd love to do that. I want to do that. If I had a million dollars I'd do that," to realize that you don't need a million dollars to do what you love to do.
In fact, most of the time you need very little money. You may find if you just quit doing other stuff and take a leap of faith on how things like money are going to come in, that you have already got enough money to do what you want to do. You might need to borrow a little bit of money or you might need to move out of your big house into a smaller one as my wife and I did.
We moved out of our big house into a smaller one, out of our three-bedroom, two bath with a pool, we moved into a two-bedroom, one bath and saved a ton of money doing that, and made money selling our house. We did that. We took that leap of faith.
Now, I hope this helps today because I had to hear a lot of other people's testimony about the same thing before I was willing to take a leap of faith and say, first, "What would my life look like if I stopped drinking?" second, "What would my life look like without handling my body's needs on my own?" and then "What would my life look like if I stopped playing video games? What would my life look like if I stopped eating meat and almost any animal products? What would my life look like if I mostly ate fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts and beans?"
It's amazing how good my life is today.
I hope this inspires you to start asking those questions:
"What would my life look like if I started doing what I loved every day?"
"What would my life look like if I stopped this bad habit or if I quit this job that prevents me from doing the things I would love to do every day?"
If you want to look at a lot of the evil in the world, we could say it comes from good people showing up to jobs that there is no passion for, good people going to work trying to make money doing something they don't care about.
That to me is one of the greatest sources of evil in the world, good people going to work not following their passion and dreams, just showing up for a paycheck, and then doing work that ultimately doesn't add any value to the world or in fact makes things more difficult for us.
Think about all the stuff you don't like.
Bill collectors. Someone goes to work and does that for their job because they want to eat and have a place to live.
If you don't like taxes, someone goes to work and collects taxes. Odds are that someone is a person you would consider "good" with a family they want to provide for. The job at the IRS is a very effective way to guarantee income for their family and if their work happens to put people in prison, oh well.
Speaking of prison, I worked as a correction officer. I took a small amount of money at a job I hated where I literally made sure people were held without their freedom because that was the best way I knew of at 22 years old to make enough money to eat and have my own place to live. I am sure the nazi prison guards were thinking about the same thing.
Hate War? Good people join armies to provide for their families and often agree to kill others just to bring home a paycheck and support the idea of a nation that really does not even exist outside of our minds and our symbols. My mother served twenty years in the US Army because that was the best way she knew of to provide an income for me.
Most everything we hate is possible because good people do things as a means to an end and without love as I did with nearly every job I had before. When we refuse to do work we find no joy in, armies, prisons, taxes, and everything we complain about will start to fade away as it has in my life.
I appreciate you giving me this chance to share my experience with you, which I hope is useful for you today because I want a world filled with your passion, with the things you love. That's the world I want.
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj
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