If you could just figure out how to get your shit together, you can make a lot of amazing things happen in your life. You know this.
That gap between who you are right now and who you know you could be, bothers you because it seems pretty straightforward, but you just can’t do it.
You want to get out of this rut and genuinely feel like you have your shit together. So how do you do it?
Face The Truth
You already know how to get your shit together. The key to getting started with the process is knowing that you already know.
One of the hardest things to do is simply stop lying to yourself. You’re not lost. You just don’t want to find yourself. You’re not aimless. There are plenty of places you’d aim if you weren’t so tied to your current identity.
If you want to make a sincere change in your life you have to have a brutally honest self-assessment. It’s as simple as comparing yourself right now to the person you know you could be. Be brutally honest about that mismatch
I used to think I was a smart kid who was going places. But when I looked at my life, I was headed nowhere fast. Plenty of potential, but no results, and the results are all that matter. The results were abysmal, and I had to admit that to myself instead of trying to cope by saying things would get better eventually.
This goes for you, too. Understand that things won’t magically get better eventually.
Combine that brutally honest self-assessment with a sense of urgency. You don’t have as much time as you think.
With that sense of urgency in mind, focus on the three-step process you need to follow to get your shit together and start legitimately moving toward your dreams.
Step 1: Stop Digging
Regardless of where you are right now, just focus on not making things worse. Don’t fall into what I like to call ‘death spirals.’ Death spirals are these actions you take because you’re already so much in the hole you figure a few extra inches won’t hurt.
You’re out of shape so you binge eat telling yourself that you’ll start your workouts tomorrow. Before you quit alcohol, you go on one last bender. It’s the equivalent of putting one last coin into the slot machine after you’ve lost all your money at the casino. You know you’re not gonna hit the jackpot, but you get some sort of release with the last-ditch effort of pulling that lever.
As the Last Psychiatrist explains, this allows you to ‘play-act catharsis.’ You tell yourself that one last hurrah with your shitty life will give you the motivation to make things better, but it does the opposite; it further reinforces the fact that you’re not serious about changing your life at all.
If you’re serious about changing your life, you have to stop the bleeding as soon as possible. Cut it off the moment you’re really ready to change and don’t have a ‘final shitty habits’ ceremony.
Step 2: Master the Smallest Domain
After you eliminate the things you know you definitely shouldn’t be doing, start to think about the things you know you should be doing and start wherever you need to start to build momentum in your life.
You have to articulate the person you want to be and reverse engineer backward. That’s a big topic in and of itself, so read this guide for further guidance.
First, simply be willing to go to the drawing board as many times as necessary. You just have to hit a hot streak once to start making major long-term changes.
Second, if you keep trying to get your shit together and you keep failing, you have to lower your criteria for what success looks like. I don’t know how far gone you are, but the further gone you are, the lower your criteria have to be.
If you’re quite far gone, Maybe you start by cleaning your room. Maybe you’re not that far gone. On a day-to-day basis, you have the normal things handled, but you want to level up. What do you do?
You find the tiniest challenge you can overcome and master on the path to becoming a higher version of yourself. It has to be slightly outside of where you currently are. Some people are so far gone they have to start by cleaning their rooms. For you, it might be another basic but important habit you could start to build.
If you want to get in shape, wake up and do 10 pushups. Instead of trying to have some crazy morning routine, stop hitting snooze or wake up 30 minutes earlier than usual. If you want to get smarter, read for ten minutes a day. If you want to work on your social skills, start making eye contact with people and saying a simple ‘Hi.’ Do you get where I’m coming from? Unless you’re humble enough to start at the origin point you really need to start from, you’ll never change.
Step 3: Go On Your Real Adventure
It’s interesting to see what happens in your life after you get some basic self-improvement methods going.
You create that ‘I’m going places’ energy, and the universe seems to respond in kind. When I was working on getting my shit together, I chose habits like reading and exercise to build the foundation. After that, I just started to carry myself differently, and people noticed.
I got offered a managerial position and a job I applied to be a ‘clerk’ at. While working at said job, I can’t tell you how many people told me there was just something about me.
A friend of mine reached out to me and asked me to start writing for a site he owned. I’d always wanted to write, and the universe delivered my dream to my door once I was actually ready to receive it.
You cover the basics to create the energy that you’re ready to receive amazing opportunities in your life. How are you supposed to be able to handle a lot when you can’t even handle a little bit of responsibility?
So make little steady strides and watch all the opportunities come your way. There will come a time when you’ll come across something that seems really compelling to work on — a project, a business idea, or some particular path you feel you need to follow.
Once you come across that opportunity, dive in and work on it without questioning too much where it’ll go right away.
Trust that focusing on getting your shit together, in general, will lead to an opportunity. Once that opportunity comes or you have an idea that hits you, you have to run with it like you’ve never run with anything before.