The Shift That Happens When You Finally Say “Who Cares?”

In this episode of The Fuck It Shift, Adam Ross talks about the moment life begins to change: when you stop caring about opinions that don’t serve you.

After losing his companies and going through a divorce, Adam found himself carrying the weight of other people’s judgments and constantly trying to fix how others saw him. He shares how that mindset kept him stuck—and how the real shift happened when he finally stopped trying to control things he couldn’t change.

The conversation explores rebuilding after rock bottom, protecting your mind from negativity, tightening your circle, and why learning to filter out other people’s opinions is often the first step toward real growth.

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IG: @adamross_online
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LinkedIn: Adam Ross

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Fuck It Shift Podcast. I'm Adam. And as always, I'm joined by Jay, the producer is going to kick it off with a question.

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Okay, so we talk a lot on here about needing to change things for things to change. But when you were at your lowest, was there ever a situation that needed to shift? But it would only shift when you stopped trying to fix it. The idea of accepting things that are out of your control.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

And I want to make sure that I still have up my hand in a lot of the day-to-day operations of my companies, and I don't need to, but it's hard for me to let go. And during change, it is really, really hard to let some things go or accept some things that you just cannot change or you cannot fix. I could not fix the fact that my marriage was over. I could not fix the fact that the companies were closed. I couldn't fix the way the people felt about me from those two events. It wasn't until I said, who gives a fuck? And let it go that I was able to actually take steps out of the darkness. But man, I carried that stuff around. Like I would run into people and want, want to have a conversation that didn't involve what happened to me, what happened to my companies, where am I now? Wow, you really fucked your life up. Like I already know all these things. Why are we having that? Why is that the conversation piece? And I get in my crappy car and drive away and be like, oh, that's why I don't hang out with anybody. That's why I don't want to do this. That's why I don't want to have those old circles anymore. That's why, you know, you lost your name. You did what you did. You have to live with it. And then I thought to myself, also, why do I care? What about someone else's opinion matters? What about someone else's opinion? Can you change? Should you be busting your ass to work on you or to change somebody's opinion of you? It's a really tough lesson and a really easy thing for me to say in a podcast, but hey, I've been through it. I had to do it. And I am amazed at the amount of people still in my life, people I'm very close to, who say, Do you know what's who fucking cares? I tell teach my kids, so-and-so said this about me. Is it true? They always are shocked and say, No, I'm not stupid. I'm not, then who cares? When you take someone else's opinion of you, when you take someone out what someone said about you, you show low emotional intelligence and you make what they think about you a lot stronger by giving a shit. And I had to really accept that I can't change how someone feels about me, but I can change how I feel about me. And if you get anything out of the stuff we talk about on this show, if you're even listening, it is don't let other people take you off track, fill your head full of negative shit. Your own head's doing that anyway. So what do you need to double down on that voice for? If it isn't true about you, and even if it is true, but it's no longer who you are, then who cares? And I had to learn that. I had to change that in my life. I really, to be honest with you, didn't give a shit even what my family thought. I had to just care about what I thought. And that's isolation. It's lonely. But guess what? If you really buy into that, new people, new seeds, new growth start start gravitating towards you because it's what you're putting out. So that question's real simple. You have to not care what people think about you. You have to believe and care what you think about you and buy into that 100%.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

When you say you had to change, I'm assuming that didn't just happen with a snap of the fingers and you said, okay, now I'm changed. What does that process look like of change and and how long did it take? And what does that kind of be?

SPEAKER_01 4:22

It took me four years. So it's not overnight. I'm trying to speed it up for you right now by telling you that it's okay and I get where you're at. And I went through it. And this whole purpose of this podcast is to try and help people speed up a little bit through the growth and healing. Because if you're not, here's the two traps. One, you don't pay attention to it. You go through a divorce or a job loss or a failure in life, and you're like, meh, you know what? I'm gonna be with this person now, and everything's cool. Nothing's really impacting me, perfectly okay. It catches up to you because you haven't taken the time to detox, to take, you know, personal inventory and slow down. Um, you haven't had time to rebuild, and you're still probably carrying around a lot of things you don't want to. So that process is not overnight. But the very first step you need to do, practice is forgiveness. And I'll tell you, the thing that really like really took off for me is that I started listening and diving in 100% to positivity. If it wasn't positive, I wasn't consuming it. If it didn't have a if it wasn't positive in my life, it didn't exist. If you're gonna be negative, you're out. If you're gonna talk shit, you're out. If this isn't something good, now today it's it's like on steroids the amount of stuff you can feed your brain. Yes? Sure. Are you paying attention to it? Like I had to get militant about what I was going to read, what I was gonna watch, what I was gonna allow in my head, and who I was gonna spend time with. And if you didn't check the boxes, we weren't having conversations. It just didn't matter to me. If I wasn't laughing and having a good time, you weren't in my circle. If I wasn't encouraging you and you encouraging me, you weren't in my circle. The circle didn't need to be big when you're doing this because you need to protect it at all costs. There is way too many people in this world who will deliberately throw you off so that you never get any better than them. It's shitty. But when you're going through rock bottom and rebuilding, those people gravitate towards you. They love sucking every little bit of positivity they can out of you so you never level up past them. It's a trap. You have to stay vigilant and protect your brain.

SPEAKER_00 6:49

What does I'll say, throwing someone out of your circle look like? How does that um process happen? What do you would you tell them you're out? Do you not talk to them again? What did it look like for you and how to kind of eliminate those friendships or relationships?

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Well, I would encourage you to do it a lot better than I did it because I probably just stopped talking to you. I probably just started being busy, not answering you, not showing up, not going to where you asked me to go. Um, I kind of have a reputation that's impossible to get me to go do anything or do go be with a group of people. And if I do show up, it's either a big favor or I really, really want to go. It's not the greatest thing, not the greatest way to live your life. I should learn to be a little more gracious with my time and those around me. But I think that comes from how tight I had to make the circle and how I had to choose me to be able to get here today to rebuild. And I did that for my kids. It was me and them. And that's all I focused on until my family grew and I got remarried and I had more kids. Now it's a bigger, a bigger battle. Um, but when you are struggling and you are trying to get rid of those negative people in your life, you can have the adult conversation and let them know that right now it's they're not working for you, and these are the reasons why, but you're not gonna do that. You're too chicken shit to do that. Everybody's too chicken shit to do that. World will probably be a lot cleaner place if we just said, hey, listen, man, you're not for me. So instead, I did the less mature thing, and I just stopped talking to you and removed those people from my life and stopped being available. And sometimes you'll learn that no matter how much you give somebody, no matter how much how much you're there for them, they'll still circle back and say things like, Yeah, well, you know, Adam never really did X, Y, and Z. That should have been that's you know, that's the final straw, so to speak, for you should be like, hey man, this person's just not really for me. They got to be on Team Adam, or I can't be on your team. And I think when you say, How do you get them out? you just kind of make choices that you're not available for them anymore. And that's the easiest way. If it's a family member or a loved one, a wife, a husband, a child, an older, it gets really messy. And I would encourage you to just learn to hang out and not receive the information that's being sent to you. Is selfish a bad word? No, I don't think so. I think you can be selfish and still be very giving and loving and be a very generous, connected person. When I talk about, when I think about the word selfishness, it's not sharing toys, it's not sharing a meal, sharing a drink, sharing time. It is, I just refuse to buy into your bullshit. The world's full of bullshit, and I don't have time for it. And I don't understand. I'm amazed when I hear people say to me, yeah, but my parents, like 15 years ago, it's bullshit. Who cares? It's not 15 years ago, number one. Number two, they're not making choices in your life today. So why are you even listening to them? You have your own life, live it. That's to me being selfish. That's saying, okay, you know what? You don't align with me. I can still love you, but it's gonna be from a really big distance. And the stuff that you send down the pipe, I'm not putting inside my head. You and I talk about this all the time. The shit that you let inside shapes your perception and your reality. If you really could just think about that, you are letting, you are letting someone else shape your thoughts, your feelings, and your directions and what you believe in something or what you deem to be correct or true by all the crap you feed into your head, rather than standing up and saying, wait a minute, I'm gonna be a little bit selfish with my gate. I'm gonna, I'm gonna shut down my gate. Be selfish in that. You want to be a selfish prick? Don't let a bunch of stuff in your head and actually have this really weird moment with yourself where you can have conversations self to self, being like, hey, Jay said a bunch of negative shit at lunch at the while we were on lunch at work. None of that shit's true, and I'm not buying into any of it. Don't hold on to any of that. Do you know you really actually have to tell your brain that? Because if you don't, it lingers inside your head and it actually becomes part of your entire makeup because it starts to become reality. If someone every day told you that where you work sucks and what you do sucks, guess what? It wouldn't take long for you to also believe that what you do sucks and you don't want to work here anymore. But you did it to yourself. You can then blame whoever said it every day at lunch, but you could also say, why don't you cut the shit? I'm not interested in talking about that. Let's talk about something else. And you have to guard your mind with such an iron fist. And we don't. We just don't. We just let whatever's coming in. Like if this podcast doesn't align for you, don't fucking listen to it. What are you doing? You want to listen to it and argue with it in the car? It's a waste of your time, man. If it doesn't align, delete it. I'm okay with that. But nothing is gonna shift until you say fuck it. And that's it for this episode.