The Best Things Take Time

A recent passion of mine, and the reason I started this blog, is to help other people who might be in a phase of life that I can relate to by offering my pov. For the past couple of years, I have been on this philosophic, self-improvement journey which has helped me shift my focus on the most important thing in life, my well-being. It sounds cliché when you call it your well-being, but that it is the best way to put it. Your well-being encompasses everything about you like your thoughts, your habits, your health, and even your wallet, but it also directly influences all things outside of yourself like your relationships, your job, and your environment. There are so many things to talk about in regards to well-being practices, but I think the most important one is getting away from instant gratification and focusing on delayed gratification.

These dopamine producing machines that we cant stand to be two feet apart from have drastically impacted people’s view on life. We have gotten so used to having an outlet for whenever we are bored and to seeing the top 0.1% of people get rich at 25 that we have lost sight of how things work for the other 99.9% of people. And of course, it makes sense when you think about it. If all you look at all day is people your age that are hotter than you, richer than you, and having more fun than you, of course you’ll feel discouraged and get down on yourself. Yet we continue to scroll to the next video and because his camera quality is a little worse, we feel we relate to him, but wait, “he made $200k drop shipping last year”, so then we feel behind and the cycle continues. Maybe we even try to dropship or day trade and when we aren’t as successful as those influencers we see every day, we give up and restart the loop. This is because our dopamine system is in shambles. Dopamine is your reward system, it drives you to do things that give you that reward, that dopamine hit. Every scroll, every like, and every notification is a dopamine hit. Now compound this over 5-10 years and you start to see how f*cked your motivation to do things that don’t produce those instant hits can be. The true magic, however, comes from the things that don’t give you those instant hits, those delayed gratification activities. Was Mark Cuban rich in his 20’s like these influencers? He wasn’t, and now he is one of the richest people in the world. Was Warren Buffet? Nope. Jeff Bezos? Nope. You get the point. On average, people reach their first million at age 37. And here we are letting the stress of not having it now deter us from continuing to build habits and take actions that set us up for our future. These guys, and most every successful person you see day-to-day wasn’t sitting around in their 20’s watching and dreaming about what they want or what other people have. They were out doing things that took effort and that didn’t provide instant rewards but rather taking actions that provided greater awards than imaginable later on.

You know the things that you should be doing, the habits you should be implementing into your daily life to reach your goals, and yet you still decide to not do them. The longer you put off something like learning a skill, going to work out, eating right – whatever the habit for your dream self is – the less likely you are to do it and the more likely it is affect your well-being and cause stress in your life. It is very hard to break out of the habits you have already built that have messed your dopamine system up, but I promise the pain is worth it. A quote that has been my saving grace through my own journey of rewiring my brain and dopamine system is this one from Jim Rohn, an entrepreneur and mentor to Tony Robins, “We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.”