Warning: This essay is gonna motivate the sh*t out of you.
Let’s get into it.
I get angry when people piss their life away by procrastinating.
I don’t get angry at THEM. I get angry at my former self. I wasted 10 years of my life living in fear for no reason. I had extreme anxiety because I knew I had potential, but I did nothing about it.
I just drowned in information and told myself, “next year’s the year.” It never was. To lose 10 years of my life was painful.
Even more painful is that those 10 years were between my 20s and 30s. They’re the best years of our lives when we have the most energy.
And I ruined those years because of my behavior driven by inaction. I try not to get emotional when I think about it. But it hurts so bad. I’m a grown man but when I think about that lost decade I get teary-eyed (not supposed to admit that on Substack, especially in the Andrew Tate-style world of “be a man, you little b*tch”).
But that’s how I feel, and nothing is going to change that.
All of this inaction landed me with what I described back then as deep mental illness. This consisted of two parts: 1) Anxiety 2) Depression.
My anxiety got so bad my hands shook and I vomited daily. Before every meeting at work I’d get diarrhoea and run to the bathroom non-stop. My colleagues must have thought I was “Sh*t Break” aka Finch from the movie American Pie.
People at work thought I was weird. I felt like a loser.
At the start I thought the anxiety was some illness I got at birth. I now know the bitter truth: I became severely anxious because I didn’t take action towards the life I wanted to live. I just stayed trapped, drowning in fear.
I was an adult who’d been dropped in the middle of the Indian Ocean and refused to swim to shore. I just stayed frozen like a starfish which is the fastest way to drown.
This isn’t going where you’d expect it to.
Anxiety looks like a big problem to be avoided at all costs
I labelled anxiety as bad.
I saw a therapist. They suggested strong drugs to make it go away. Every time I would start a new goal and experience overwhelm, I’d see it as a red flag and stop. Frozen.
Or if life threw me some curveballs and became hard, I’d label it “burnout” and take a load off by drinking alcohol and stuffing my face with fast food. All of that led to severe acne that became a visual sign of whether life was going good or bad.
Question that changed my life: What if anxiety is the antidote, not the problem?
Anxiety is a god trying to send you a message from above
Mainstream society acts as if anxiety is a curse.
I used to think that way too. But an experience changed my mind. While trying to heal from mental illness I came up with a strange idea. I decided to write down all of my fears in an Apple Note called “Fear List.”
Every week I challenged myself to face one fear. The first fear I tackled was flying. I never left my hometown of Melbourne because I was petrified of being on planes. So I booked a 60 minute flight to Sydney to see if it was true.
My fear of flying turned out to be false. I felt fine in the air.
Once I had this tiny breakthrough I started to ask myself “What other fears are F-alse E-vidence A-ppearing R-eal?” Within a few weeks I burned through my fear list.
Everything I feared turned out to be a false nightmare. I was jumping at shadows and calling them Osama Bin Laden with an AK-47.
Anxiety wasn’t trying to murder my dreams. It was trying to send me a message and I was either too stubborn or too dumb to listen.
I started paying attention to my anxiety master.
The weird truth about what anxiety is trying to tell us
Anxiety is trying to tell you something isn’t right.
It’s trying to tell you that you have a vision for your life and you’re not reaching it. And the only way to change that outcome is by taking a different set of actions.
Suddenly, anxiety doesn’t look like a member of the Ku Klux Klan anymore. It looks like an angel from your favorite type of religious heaven.
Anxiety is actually an extremely logical feeling.
Author James Clear says:
“Stress and worry tend to be higher before you act. Without action, all you can do is worry. Once you begin, fear shrinks as you start to influence the outcome.”
Neuroscientists call this the action bias. Your brain calms down when it has evidence that you’re doing something about a problem. Action signals safety. Avoidance signals threat. That’s why the moment you start, fear shrinks.
Now anxiety starts to make more sense.
Without any tangible data points or experiences to reference, your mind just goes off into La La Land dreaming about all sorts of fantasies that aren’t real. And your mind tells you the whole world is watching and if you fail the embarrassment will ruin your life, when in reality, nobody gives a sh*t.
Flow states are found in the most bizarre place
Let’s go even deeper on anxiety. Let’s nerd the hell out.
There are two parts of the reality you live in. One is the known and the other is the unknown. When you spend too much time in the known it starts to feel like boredom. When you spend too much time in the unknown it looks like anxiety.
Between those two realities is a hidden dimension known as a flow state.
Flow is where work doesn’t feel like work & 8 hours on a task feels like 30 minutes. Flow is that feeling when you write for hours and forget to eat. When a designer loses track of time sketching. When a coder looks up and it’s 2 AM and they’ve built a new app.
Flow is hailed by scientists and elite performers as the zone of genius.
When you allow equal parts of the known and unknown world into your life, you end up in flow. But to get there you must embrace some level of anxiety caused by the unknown.
Philosopher Dan Koe calls the space between the known and the unknown “the edge.” He says…
Life is telling you to live at your edge, that’s where enjoyment is found.
This is the reality I now find myself living in each day. I wake up and experience an 8-12 hour flow state that leads to pure bliss. It’s hard to describe the feeling, and when I share it in public, people either laugh at me and call me crazy or send hate messages.
The opportunity you may have been missing is to harness some level of anxiety to access flow states, so you can live the life you want to live.
All this sounds good in theory, so why does no one f*cking do it?
There are 3 parts.
Part 1 - Certainty
Author Mark Manson nails it. “Most people wait until they are certain before they act. But you will never be certain of anything until you act.”
The need for certainty holds most people back. University and the education system taught them that every goal in life has a 12 step process that is simple and can be easily replicated. Real life isn’t that simple.
The world is chaotic. Nothing is certain anymore. And technology is plunging us deeper and deeper into the unknown as its effects accelerate.
If you’re looking for certainty, you’re living in the most uncertain time in history – and it’s only going to get more uncertain.
Part 2 - Preparation Versus Doing
A lot of prep work looks and feels like taking action. It’s not.
A programmer named Loopy explains the difference.
“Things that aren’t doing the thing:
- Preparing to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
- Scheduling time to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
- Making a to-do list for the thing isn’t doing the thing.
- Telling people you’re going to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
- Messaging friends who may or may not be doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.
- Writing a banger tweet about how you’re going to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
- Hating on yourself for not doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.
- Hating on other people who have done the thing isn’t doing the thing.
- Hating on the obstacles in the way of doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Fantasizing about all of the adoration you’ll receive once you do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
- Reading about how to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
- Reading about how other people did the thing isn’t doing the thing.
- Reading this essay isn’t doing the thing.The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.”
Make sure you’re doing the thing, not doing pretend work that isn’t doing the thing.
Part 3 - Dopamine
The information age has had negative consequences.
When we overconsume information it gives our brains dopamine. We can also get dopamine from taking action. The problem is most people are drowning in information and mistaking it for progress or learning. So they binge courses and download digital products that they often never open.
I call this phenomenon infotainment. It’s more popular than Netflix. And I made millions of dollars from it until recently. Then I saw infotainment for what it was and shut down my 7-figure-a-year digital product business.
What’s weird is you can consume information… but you can also just take action which produces information, too. Both are required. Most only do the first part.
A generation who wants the good life but does the opposite to try and achieve it
What’s known as the “good life” is a universal truth at this point in human evolution.
Enough money not to worry about money
Able to use your creativity & imagination
Work that doesn’t feel like work
Plenty of free time
Free speech
Good health
Despite this obvious vision society does the opposite of what it takes to achieve it.
People know they must work hard yet they refuse to work weekends.
People know they must get access to opportunities yet they refuse to write online.
People know they must sell something yet they won’t talk to strangers.
People know they must tap into their ambition yet they watch too much Netflix.
People know they must have high energy to succeed yet they drink alcohol.
Our results equal our level of execution. Wishful thinking, hope, and luck don’t produce results – they create fantasises that starve us of our potential.
The cliche truth is this (I sound like a $2 philosopher. It is what it is. The truth is uns*xy):
Take action daily. Embrace doing hard things. Lean into anxiety and overwhelm. Work hard. Help others.
The paradox of anxiety that’ll piss the internet off
Let’s bring all of this together.
Too much anxiety feels terrible and it’s a huge red flag that you need to take more action toward the life you want to live. But living with no anxiety is even worse because without it, you’ll never access flow states that enable you to hit your goals.
I’m sorry if this isn’t what you want to hear. I realize it probably goes against what every workplace productivity expert and psychologist has ever said. So be it.
***Does a mic drop***
If you don’t understand the paradox of anxiety, you’ll be told lies in your head and go in circles for years (or even a decade like me). If you do understand anxiety, you’ll live a life most people can’t even comprehend and likely get called lucky.
Choose wisely.
Would you rather live calm but stuck, or anxious but free? Let me know in the comments below (I’ll read every reply).
