Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name’s Doug Cunnington. And today I’m going to talk about why having it too easy can actually hold you back. I was inspired to do this episode when I was listening to Chris Williamson from the Modern Wisdom Podcast interview Ryan Holiday. And I’ve had kind of a Not a love hate, but a disinterested in an interested relationship with Ryan Holiday.
I remember hearing some of his earlier interviews on the Tim Ferriss podcast and found them really interesting and inspiring. And then I think I had my fill of all the stoic philosophy and just references and quotes and quotes and quotes. And I mean, it’s all great and people have actually. told me that they think I have a lot of stoic ways about me, which I took as a, I take everything as a compliment, but I certainly took that as a compliment.
Uh, that said, so I, I listened to this episode. I’m only halfway through it currently at the time that I’m recording this, but it’s a good one. We’ll link up to it. You’ll know if you like either Chris or Ryan right away and side note, which maybe I’ll save for another solo episode, the style of the interview that Chris Williamson has been doing recently.
I’m like, I don’t know if I like this. He reads a statement from the person typically, or he’s put together a list of statements and says, you, you wrote this once. Tell me about what that means. So he isn’t really asking any questions. He’s just like reading a statement and then saying, what do you think about that?
And I’m like, you’re just kind of regurgitating what they wrote in their book, and I don’t know if I liked that or not. Anyway, let’s talk about it. We often think that we want everything to go smoothly, to be relatively easy and just run exactly how we want it to go.
We want all the lights to be green and everything to fall into place, but. The weird thing is if that happens, or maybe you have too many advantages in your life, it can lead to some deficiencies and I’ll, I’ll lay it out. Just super specifically as well, right now, it seems like it would be really good to have super rich parents and have a trust fund so that you don’t have to work, but if you don’t struggle, if you’re not pushed to do it.
To, you know, your limits, if you’re not put in a place where you have. to struggle, then you’re probably not going to be as developed in certain areas. And the thing is, you will be challenged. Things are not going to go as planned. And if you don’t build up the skill to deal with adversity, then you’re going to be Extremely stressed out and you’re going to have potentially sort of a quitter’s attitude when you do start struggling and everyone will eventually hit, you know, some struggles.
So a couple of things here, and I’ll, I’ll talk about myself, uh, just to illustrate it. And it’s of course my favorite topic. It’s called the Doug show, right? So I’m, I’m a little anxious by nature and I think I realized this in roughly like high school or college or so. And. Specifically, it was around plans.
So I would like try to make plans. And if they didn’t work out, I was rigid. I would get stressed out and be generally inflexible. I would also get grouchy and kind of net lash out, but. It was negative. It would be a negative experience for other people to be around me because I was like, Hey, I’m not going to be flexible.
We said we were going to do these plans. Like we got to do that. And it’s something I was still working on, but since I did figure it out in college, I built routines and some maybe like coping mechanisms and essentially the realization is that I felt like I needed to be in control. And the other realization is that things are not going to go how you think.
Expecting things to go a certain way is a recipe for misery and disappointment. And it’s not just like I’m feeling anxious, just living life. It’s about creating those situations where things don’t go the way you Need to go perfectly. And if they don’t, it’s stressful. And then I would spiral out of control.
And again, I can’t emphasize it enough. If things have to go perfectly, they’re not going to go perfectly. That’s the thing. Like it’s not going to go perfectly, even if it’s a pretty simple thing. For example, another, another one that just hit me is like, if you’re heading to the grocery store, we all have to go shopping, you had to the grocery store and you’re like, it takes 10 minutes to drive there.
A lot of times we say, Hey, it takes 10 minutes to drive there. But that is under perfect conditions where there’s not much traffic. You hit the traffic lights just right. And there’s nothing unusual going on, but that is almost never the case. It’s like. Never the case. It typically will take you 15 minutes or 20 minutes to drive to the store because there’s going to be a little traffic, the traffic lights are going to be out of sync and a train’s going to pull in front of you or whatever.
Like there’s always some external factor that is a very easy one. There’s not even that many things that can go wrong. But when you add complexity, when we think about the business sense, right, when we think about starting a new side hustle, whatever it is, it could be dropshipping, it could be a new content site, it could be a YouTube channel, it could be a combo of the things.
And you might think, here’s the plan, we’re going to run the plan, it’s going to turn out just like, I think, the sad. News I have to bring to you is it’s not going to turn out how you think there’s going to be so many external factors. In fact, we can look at the last year here in the content site, SEO, affiliate marketing world, where experts, people that have been doing niche sites and content sites for a decade plus were going along, doing what they have been doing, things that they have been successful in.
They. Were hit by Google with updates, whether it was HCU, whether it was the March update, it was just outside of their control with external factors that they literally like, they couldn’t do anything about. Again, this is a complicated situation and business is complicated, but if you just apply it to like something simple, like driving to the store, even that is outside of your control.
This whole sort of cycle of creating tension just for temporary relief is what Oliver Berkman who wrote 4, 000 weeks Calls productivity debt and basically you start the day at a negative balance and The best that you could do is get back to zero and it’s a horrible place to be because basically you’re just trying to catch up and it’s it’s really hard.
It’s really hard to catch back up and I’ll reference one other uh thing from a recent solo episode. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep folks. It’s uh hard to do. There could be, you know, stress factors, there could be some genetic factors, there could be your situation in your household where maybe you have young kids or something like that, and you just can’t sleep enough.
And sometimes, like, you could have Very few external factors, but you still have to figure out like, is the temperature that I’m sleeping is my like nighttime routine helping me? Because the thing is, if you’re well rested, you can deal with a lot more. You’re a lot smarter too. And it’s only been in the last few years where I’ve really gotten my sleep under control.
Like I said, kids could be a factor. Now I don’t have kids, but I know a lot of y’all do. And having kids sort of illustrates the lack of control that you have. There are external factors happening all the time. Kids could get sick, right? They go to school, they pick up one of those bugs, they bring it back home and then they get you and the whole family sick.
Your plans are out the window and you have to figure out what’s priority and what you can let slide. And you just have to let go and say, yeah, yeah. We have to deal with what we have right here. And again, I don’t have kids, but I know the people that do have kids, you know, exactly what I’m talking about because you have to deal with it.
Uh, I assume on a multiple times per day basis.
So there’s some perfect balance where, you know, you have enough plans to have flexibility and open space so that you are able to adapt when you need to. And that’s, that’s the name of the game, really just like being able to adapt, knowing things are outside of your control for the most part, and it’s just how you deal with it, which.
That is the Stoic sort of philosophy in a nutshell. It’s been a little while since I’ve read any of those texts or anything like that, but that’s the general idea. Every now and then, even though I just said all that stuff and I think about it a lot, I find myself rushing to do something. Maybe in my normal day, I start getting stressed out and then I realize that I’m the one, I’m a self employed, I’m the one that made up the timing.
And the schedule and the expectations. So if I take my head out of my ass, then I could change the scope and do something different and say, I don’t need to do that today. I could do it tomorrow, or I don’t need to do it at all, or I can make it a much shorter, easier thing to do.
Eventually I came to the realization that the rewards of success shouldn’t necessarily be about doing nothing. Although I. I do enjoy relaxing and not doing too much, but I find contentment and enjoyment and I feel like it’s enough to go through the struggle and not have everything go as planned and being able to adapt.
The other part is if you expect things to not go as you plan, then it’s much easier to deal with. The external factors that are going to fuck up your day, right? Except they won’t fuck up your day because you were expecting things to go a little bit differently and you have to adapt. And I’m going to sort of butcher the quote.
It’s been said so many times, but like the point of planning is to go through the process of planning. It’s not so you could follow the plan exactly because it’s not going to turn out how you expect when you’re creating a plan, whatever it might be, You have incomplete information. You’re trying to predict the future, but you really just need to go through the process and that helps a lot.
And I’m going to tie it all together here. I’ll give you six tips that are just straight forward and we’ll go through those really quickly. The grander point here is this. The struggle. makes you a little bit more robust. So when things don’t go as you plan, you’re going to be able to deal with it. I’ll give one more example and I have seen it in my In my schooling and in my career, but basically the super high achievers that didn’t have to try too hard specifically, like in school, they get to a point where they are challenged and they don’t know how to deal with it because they never had to try that hard.
Everything was pretty easy. So as soon as they hit the work world or they hit a situation where they were They do struggle. They do not know how to deal with it. Same sort of situation with potentially athletes, although I’m not an athlete myself, but if you just, you just cruise, you win constantly, and there’s no real competition around you locally, and then you get to a stage where it is much harder and you were struggling, you don’t know what to do.
So let’s get to these six tips now.
Embrace the challenges instead of seeking the easy life. So a balanced amount of struggle is essential for growth. It gets you sort of on the edge of like what you’re comfortable with. Number two, personal anxiety often stems from a need to control and expecting things to go perfectly. Number three, managing anxiety involves understanding and breaking the cycle of creating stress for temporary relief.
Number four, the concept of productivity debt highlights starting the day at a negative balance and striving just to break even. Number five, if you’re not a parent, you can imagine being a parent. You can imagine the importance of letting go of control and enjoying the present moment. Number six, success should bring contentment and enoughness, not just temporary relief from stress. And all this together, you know, we’re talking about a couple things with stress and anxiety.
And if You think you need some professional help, you know, therapy is great. I haven’t gone to a therapist myself, but I hear it’s fantastic from everyone that I talk to. And actually there’s a, now that I’m thinking about it, there’s a few folks in my life, uh, some friends of mine that are therapists and you know, they go to therapy too.
So I think it’s a great thing. And if you do need some, uh, You know, someone to chat with. There’s a plenty of sources out there in the world. So thanks for checking out this episode. If you have any thoughts, shoot me an email, feedback at Doug dot show, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.