You Know How to Change. That's Why You Haven't | Ep. 131

You know exactly what to do. You have the reels, the podcasts, the frameworks, the morning routines. And you're still in the same place you were six months ago.

In this solo episode, I break down the knowing-doing gap, why the information age isn't accelerating your growth but widening the distance between who you are and who you want to be, and the three things that actually move someone from permanently motivated to genuinely transformed. I also share a line from Sapiens that will reframe every anxious, overwhelmed feeling you've had this year in about thirty seconds.

We go deep on why committing to one voice beats consuming a thousand, why your relationship with yourself is the relationship that determines every other one, why gratitude isn't a feeling you wait for but the specific practice that breaks your attachment to outcomes, and why the question you're asking yourself right now might be the only real thing standing between you and the life you want. If you've ever felt like you know the answers but can't seem to live them, this one is for you.

⏱️ Chapters: 

0:00 — The Gap Nobody Talks About (Introduction) 

1:30 — Why More Information Is Making Things Worse 

2:32 — I Was Stuck Too (The $3K/Month Turning Point) 

3:00 — Commitment: The Decision That Changes Everything 

5:13 — The Real Reason You Don't Know What You Want 

6:00 — Half-Ass Time: Your Broken Relationship With Yourself 

8:07 — Gratitude Isn't a Feeling. It's a Practice. 

10:16 — The Arrival Fallacy (Stop Chasing the Ball and Chain) 

11:00 — Your Brain Was Built for 250 People (The Sapiens Insight) 

13:08 — Ask Better Questions. Get a Better Life. 

14:45 — Two Coaching Spots Open

🔗 Work with Jack: 

► 1:1 Coaching: jackcwagoner@gmail.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What is the difference between transformation and motivation? And what do we need to do in today's society to move from a culture of motivation towards a culture of transformation, a culture of inspiration, a culture where people take action and change their lives rather than spending their days wondering why they're not doing the thing they know they need to do to get the result that they want. What do I mean by that? In today's world, people aren't confused on how to get the thing that they want. If you have a goal, you've most likely scrolled on at least a few dozen Instagram reels this week alone telling you how you can get to that goal. The thing is, a lot of these reels, a lot of this information that you're consuming, they're telling you different things. You're learning from different people with semi-different results. Maybe you want to listen to this person, and then this person convinces you to listen to them. Who are you supposed to listen to? This huge influx of information on how to do the thing that you want leaves you thinking that you know exactly how to do it, but it leaves you paralyzed with no action and no results to show for it. You change zero bit. The only difference is that you're more frustrated because this influx of information has increased what I call the knowing-doing gap, the difference between what you know how to do and what you've done, what you've taken action on in your life. People say that ignorance is bliss, and it's for this reason, because people that are ignorant don't know how to change, they don't know that there are better possibilities. But when you're aware of the fact that there are different ways that you could be living, your life could be better. When you're aware of how you could make your life better, and you're still living in the same old reality that you know you could change to be better, that is frustration. And that frustration is a terrible feeling to live with. I can I can really relate. For a long time, I sat there scrolling Instagram reels, watching YouTube videos on how to make money online through all of these different sources. I thought maybe I'll try dropshipping, maybe I'll try SMMA, maybe I'll try whatever the next fad or trend was. Eventually, when I was 16, I decided I was going to try YouTube automation. At 17, I invested in a course, and in the course of that year I ended up making around three grand a month for a few months. And this was the first time that I'd actually taken action and listened to a single person. Which leads me to the first thing that differentiates transformation from motivation. The first thing is commitment. It's a decision to listen to one person who's already got the thing that you want. Not a thousand people that might, but one person that's going to lead you. So you don't need to find the perfect mentor, but finding a mentor is so important. No matter what you do, if you listen to exactly what someone in the shoes that you want to be in says to you, you're probably going to get the result that you want. So many of us focus on perfection in the areas that perfection doesn't even matter. We just need to start. Yet we're paralyzing ourselves with all of this information at our disposal, which leads me to another point. So many of us are convinced that we know what we want by looking at what we see on social media, but many of us have no idea what we really want. See, we spend our days comparing our gag reel to everybody else's highlight reel. What I mean by that is we see every single moment in our lives. We see the lows. We see the moments where we're on the toilet. We see the moments where we're lying in bed and maybe we don't want to get up in the morning, but do you see others' lows? Do you see others' gag reels? No, you see their best moments. And you're going over all of these people comparing your life to them. You're comparing your gag reel to everybody else's highlight reel. And what this leads you to do is think that you want their life. You want their life. How crazy is that? You are lucky enough to have your own life, this one perfect life that you've been given. Yet you want the other person's because you don't get to see their pain. You don't get to see their lows. You see all the perfectly curated moments that they post online. And what this leads us to do is again be paralyzed because we see so many options on the internet of things that we think we'd like to do. We see people making money or saying they're making money in all sorts of ways, having freedom to travel in all sorts of ways. And we never get clear on what we truly want because we think other people know better than us, because they have more success. That is so wrong. That is so backwards. None of us, not even me, not even the greats, the none of none of us these days are spending enough time with ourselves. We need more time with ourselves to understand what we really want. Think about the best relationships in your life. What do you do that makes them so strong? I bet that when you're together with that person, you give your full attention to them. You feel present with them. I bet that you make time to be with that person. So, two things there. You're making time to be with them, and when you have the time, you're being present with them. Now ask yourself, do you do either of these things consistently with yourself? You're gonna say, Jack, I spend my entire day with me. Do you? What are you doing in that time? What do you do when you have a moment of boredom? Most likely, if you're like most people, you pull out your phone and you start to scroll. See, that's half-assed time. What would you do if someone that you thought was your best friend or your mom or your girlfriend or your boyfriend pulled out their phone every time they got a moment alone with you? Your relationship would probably get a little bit worse, wouldn't it? That's what's happening with you, to yourself. On top of that, you're not having time alone to yourself. You're always doing something. You always have the next task to accomplish. You need to carve out time to be with yourself and be present with yourself. And the reason that this relates to motivation over transformation is that you can never fully transform into the person you want to be if you don't know who that person is. If you've never taken the time to sit down and ask yourself, what do I truly want? You're never going to figure it out and you're never going to get it. You can't get something that you don't know unless by sheer luck. And we don't want to live our lives by sheer luck. We want a repeatable formula that gets us the feelings and the things that we want and desire in our lives. And in order to do that, we have to carve out time to be with ourselves, be with ourselves fully and presently. In my life, the way I do this is every morning I have 10 minutes of just meditation. And now this has looked really different over the years. When I first started, I got into guided meditation so I could develop some skills required to have better solo meditations. Now it's been over three and a half years, so I do it mostly solo. I still do guided sometimes on cloudy, foggy days, but the most important thing is that I just spend this time alone with myself. I feel so much clearer afterward. The third thing that I want to talk about is you're only ever going to be motivated if you're attaching everything to that goal. It sounds counterintuitive, but I do something every single day that aligns with the theme and the name of this podcast, and it's gratitude. Now, my gratitude doesn't look like most gratitude gurus on the internet. I don't write down five things, six things, three things, whatever, every day. I just do something simple. And it compounds over time. I'm a big fan of the compound effect by Darren Hardy because when we do small actions consistently, we get big results. And the thing I do on a daily basis is when I wake up, I look around and I say, I'm so grateful to be alive today. And maybe I say a few other things. I'm so grateful that today I got to wake up back home in the US, that I get to be with my family, that I get to do things with the amazing people that I love. And over time, this compounds. It starts my day off through a grateful lens. And before I go to bed every night, I say, I'm so grateful that I have the opportunity to live today. I'm so grateful for the people I spent my day with. I'm so grateful for myself, for the way I showed up in these situations today. By doing this, by showing active conscious appreciation for the beautiful things in my life, I showed my body, my subconscious, that I didn't need something else in order to feel this way. I recognized that I have all of the necessary ingredients to happiness and fulfillment in my life right now in the present moment. And by doing that, I allow myself to maybe take some action that transforms my life because I'm no longer in chains by this attachment to a result, to an achievement. You see, most of us live our lives attached to the idea that once we achieve something, we'll feel a different way. But this is being trapped. This is like being in a dungeon. It's like walking with a ball in a chain. Because we're never gonna get away from it, no matter what we achieve. It's called the arrival fallacy, the if then. No, that's not the way I live, and the way that I live with gratitude allows me to see and feel real change in my life when I do achieve something. When I do work towards something, when I hear certain information. See, the through line of this entire podcast episode so far is that we have so much information coming at us and we don't know what to believe. And we have to be clear with ourselves what we believe and what we value and what we want. And we have to not attach ourselves to everything that we're getting coming toward us, and we have to focus on one area and one person to listen to. As human beings, it's normal to feel paralyzed by an overwhelm of information. In the book Sapiens, I learned that humans only had communities of about 250 people. Now, I bet that you're interacting with over 250 people per day. It's normal that you feel overwhelmed, that you feel anxious, but it you can't submit to that. You can't. You can't use that as an excuse because we're all going through the same thing. One thing that separates people is what questions you're asking yourself and what excuses you're making. We have a natural tendency to want to fit in, to want to be seen by others, and to want to be appreciated for the least amount of effort possible. So naturally, we like to make excuses. And we like to make excuses for why we haven't done the thing that we know will get us the better life. It's like what we talked about at the beginning of this episode. We all have the information to do the thing that we want to do, but most of us haven't done it. That's what separates us. It's the doing itself. And most of those people that haven't done it, they'll tell you why. They have clear, thought-out arguments for why they can't do the thing that they want to do. Costs too much money. I can't do it, I'm too old now. I'm too young. It's too far away. Whatever the argument is, it's all arbitrary. It's not real, it's made up. And humans like to use these arguments as definite because once you really attach to a belief, it becomes truth. Beliefs have no truth to them until you attach yourself and decide that it's true. And these beliefs and excuses become true to people. So, in order to make the change and be one of the people that actually changes your life and achieves this fulfillment and transformation over motivation, you need to promise me that you're gonna ask the question, how do I do this? Not why is this hard for me. You're gonna ask the question, why can I do this? Not why can't I? See, when we ask, we receive. Ask and you shall receive is one of the oldest sayings in the book, and it's true. When you ask for something, you find a way to get it. One of my favorite moments on the internet is when Tony Robbins has Theo Vaughn close his eyes, or look around the room, look for all the brown things, close his eyes, and then he asks, What's red? And he's like, Well, what? He can't think of anything because he was looking for the brown, and he even admitted to saying some of the maroon things are brown because your mind shifts things to match the image of what it wants to conjure. So if you're thinking to yourself, why can't I do this? You're gonna find reasons for why you can't do it. But if you find reasons and ask yourself why you can, you'll find reasons for why you can. And then your life will transform, and then you'll be committed to the transformation, not the small feeling that just some five-second, fifteen-second reel will leave you with that gets worse over time. I mean, imagine, we've been living in this era of social media and motivation for d about a decade now. What's it gonna look like in five? How are you gonna bear the idea of living with the exact knowledge of how you can achieve your dreams for five years and not going for it? I mean I meant fifty years, by the way. Alright. This was an incredible solo episode. I'm so glad to have the opportunity to do this for you. Thank you for staying to the end. I want to say one last thing, which is that I'm back in the US now and I'm taking on two more coaching clients. So if you resonate with the ideas that I put out there, if you think that I might be able to help transform your life toward more fulfillment, like I have done with multiple other people in the past, then please send me an email to jackcwagoner.com, it's in the description, or go to my website, jackwagoner.co, fill out the form, and we can see uh if we could work together, we could have a nice chat. Alright. I'm so grateful for you for your commitment to yourself, to to be here right now, to absorb this information and to want to change your life, and you can do it. Trust me, you can. There are people way way dumber than you, way less motivated than you that have done it, so you can too. Amazing. I'm so grateful for you. I'll see you next week. Stay grateful, stay hungry. This has been the Grateful Podcast.