Top 5 Life Lessons | Ep.26

I vent a real-world running encounter that captures why predictability and shared rules matter, then I unpack five life lessons I’ve learned after turning 35. The thread running through all of it is humility, because it frees us from reputation obsession, excuses, and fear while pushing us towards health, action, and purpose.
• A runner’s perspective on cars “being nice” and disrupting safe pacing
• Accepting that being misunderstood is inevitable
• Focusing on character over reputation and controlling the controllables
• Using conflict and self-honesty to make real adjustments
• Health as the best practical investment for mental health and longevity
• Receiving compliments as accepting someone’s affection
• Saying “thank you” without deflecting or performing false modesty
• Starting now by dropping ego, perfectionism, and excuse making
• Doing the bad version first so you can build the good version
• Following Christ as a life direction rooted in truth, goodness, and beauty
• Humility as the habit that unshackles you from people’s opinions

Christ is King, Jesus loves you, and He's coming back soon

Transcript

Welcome And A Running Grievance

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to episode 26 of the Ministry of Mad podcast. Now, before we get into this, I have to share something with you guys because I'm mad. I'm really mad, and I'm not sure how to alleviate the madness that I have. And so I need to, I'm going to go through some life lessons. Now, these are very important life lessons, the most important life lessons that I could think of, and I'll and I'll explain why soon. But this needs to be spoken about, and it's it's maybe it's an honorable mention of a life lesson, perhaps you could look at it that way. But okay, let me just say this. I saw recently a guy speaking about, you know, let's say you're you're gonna cross the road, but there's a car coming, and so you pretend that you aren't gonna cross the road because you don't want the car to stop and wait for you. Like you just want traffic to flow and then you you'll just walk. Like you don't wanna you just want everything to go smoothly, right? You don't want someone to stop or whatever. Which I I do that a lot. Like I actually I do that all the time. So it's a relatable thing. But there's this thing that happens when I run, and it might be one of the most infuriating things, like biggest grievances I have in my day-to-day life. So I'll give you the example or like the situation of what happened. I'll explain that to you, and then you'll you'll know my fury. You'll you'll be able to relate it to my fury. So where I live, I go for a run in the same direction, like whenever I go to go for a run. So on this particular day, it's night time anyway. I walk, I start to run out of my driveway and I turn left. Now, at about 30 meters time, about 30 meters away, there is a street that you can either turn left down or you can just cross the road. Now, as I've run out of the driveway, a car has come up and started driving right beside me. And they slowed right down. They slowed down heaps to the point that I am going just as fast as this car is, and I'm going slow. Now, my my initial thought is that they might have been slowing down in case they were gonna hit me, even though I'm nowhere near the road. I understood that they wanted to turn left at that street that's 30 meters away. And so what I did was I I purposely ran slowly, really slowly, because I'm like, well, this car's got 30 meters, they can get there in two seconds. It's gonna take me 15 seconds maybe to get there. So I'm just gonna go real slow, they're gonna turn, and I'm gonna be able to cross because I'm not gonna be turning left at that street, I'm running across, and I don't want to run in front of a car. Now, what they decided to do was go at my pace for the 30 meters. So I have assumed at that moment, okay, you're giving way to me because you're waiting for me for 30 meters. So I expect you're gonna be waiting for me when I get to this road. And they decided that they weren't they didn't want to wait for me at that point, which makes them the bad guy. Okay, because I, in my mind, this is how it works I'm crossing that street. I gave you the option to go ahead when I decided I was going to run slowly, and you decided that you were gonna go just as slow, even though you're in a car and you could have beat me there by 10 seconds easy. And so when I when I got to the street, this is what these were the options. The only options were I'm crossing the street at my pace, or you're hitting me with your car, and we're good we're just gonna have to deal with with whatever happens there. Now they got they got mad. They got mad that I ran out into the street, but I stand firm that it's their own fault. You made your decision. Why wait for me for however long, all the way up until the point that waiting needs to happen? You waited for me when you didn't need to wait, could have gone, and then at the point that you do need to wait, you get angry that I didn't then wait for you. How how do you suppose it's gonna work? I don't have time, I don't have the patience, I don't have the grace for people that think in the way that this person thinks. So, an honorable mention of a life lesson. Runners just want you to go. I planned, I could see you, I know how fast I'm going, and I know how fast you can go. So just go. Just go. It happens all the time where cars or they want to be lenient to runners and they slow down and they stuff up the whole trajectory of the run. If I'm gonna cross the street, I know where cars are are, I can see where cars are, and I'm planning the pace of my run with the pace of the car. But you ruin it when you change the pace of the car. And that is the issue that I have. Okay, don't you change your pace? You obey the law, and I'll obey the law, and we'll all get along together. If we all know the road rules, we'll all get along together. Okay, right. Oh, that you know what? That feels really good. That feels really good to get that off my chest. Oh, I've been carrying that around, and um that's really therapeutic to get that off my chest. So I thank you guys for listening to that. I really appreciate it, I really appreciate it.

Turning 35 And The Lesson List

SPEAKER_00 6:24

So now let's get down to the brass tacks, let's get down to the real business. We got some um, we got some life lessons. Now I just turned 35 the other day, and I made a small post on my Instagram account giving my top five lessons learned over my 35 years. And so what I want to do today is extrapolate on those lessons because there's a lot to be said. There's a lot to be said, a lot to be heard, a lot to be confessed. Now, I came to the conclusion of these top five mostly through mistakes that have made and things that I perhaps wished I might have known earlier, or at least had an understanding of these things, or a little bit of a grasp on these things. Because if I did, I think it would have saved me a lot of mental stress and turmoil, might have saved me some time, might have added years to my life. So I just want to I want to offer what I can offer over my 35 years of life. Now, these are in no particular order except the last one. The last one is the number one, is the numero uno, uh, but the first four are in no particular

Being Misunderstood And Building Character

SPEAKER_00 7:40

order. So I'm gonna get I'm gonna kick it off with uh the idea of being misunderstood. Now, I I believe it was perhaps Jay Jay Shetty, I think his name is. He was asked a question of what do you I can't remember the question, but it was something along the lines of what do you think is overrated, or or you know, what's something that people care about more than they should? And he said, being misunderstood. And I could really relate to that because when you when you go through life, being misunderstood is almost an inevitable thing. Like you are going to be misunderstood. And when you really unpack that, you can see why. Because the likelihood that you're going to be able to express yourself with a hundred percent accuracy, a hundred percent correctly every time, is going to be quite rare. And the likelihood that people are going to be able to understand you 100% of the time and 100% in the way that you mean it is also going to be rare. You have all of the information. You've got all the background information in your own head, and no one else has that. So you know you, as far as you know what you mean, what you intend, you know, let's let's say you want to express a thought, and the words that you use or the sentences that you use to convey this thought or this idea, to you, you feel like this should be enough information for that person to receive the message that I that I want to give them. Now, if they are taken back and if they don't understand you correctly and they think that that's an awful thing, and if you don't have a good relationship with that person, they might not often oftentimes they're probably not going to dig a little deeper and say, okay, that makes you sound bad. Like what you just said there makes you sound bad. If they don't do that, they're just gonna believe that you are bad. So they're not like not everyone is gonna ask these clarification questions and say that like they might just take you as they've interpreted it and you you've just said something, uh, or they've seen you do something and they don't have the full context of the situation. Uh someone might have, you know, not had a full story, said heard things about you that were half truths, made up their mind in their head. And so when they listen to you talk, they're listening through a filter that's like a it's a dirty filter. Like they've already got this perception of you or this image of you, and you have no way of knowing that for one, but you also don't really have a way of correcting that necessarily. So I remember I told a story once. I was having dinner with a group of people, and there was a particular um person that I was talking to quite a bit that I thought we got along really well. And after the night, so much so that I was like, wow, that person's really nice. I'd I'd known them for a little while. I was like, man, they were they were really friendly. They asked, you know, good questions. I thought we had good conversation, blah, blah, blah. And then they unfollowed me off social media like immediately after that night. And so I was like, I was taken back and like, oh, okay. Come to find out, one of the stories that I'd told they didn't like. They didn't like the story. And uh, I know the story that I told, and I know the perception that they had uh came across that I was really arrogant. And that's a shame because arrogance is not really a big issue that I had. Like my issue is that of more of insecurity, like thinking not so good of myself, like not thinking well of my, like thinking highly of myself has just not been a big trait of mine. You know, maybe when I was 20 years old and I was drunk, I probably was cocky. But as an adult that doesn't drink, that uh those sorts of thoughts and perceptions of myself don't don't come to me. And what does come is insecurity and thinking lowly. So I know the information. I know that the story that I told wasn't something that, like, I know in my head, there's no like way that this could be arrogant because I know how I feel about myself. And I think it's a lot healthier. Like, I don't think that I'm an awful person or you know, I'm not not as anywhere near as insecure as I used to be, but far from cocky or arrogant in any in any way, at least for my how I feel. I mean, but then this is the thing. You can't you you you can't control how someone receives what you said. So like obviously, like I didn't I didn't have good relationship with this person, at least not enough for them to be like to to say that's an arrogant thing to say. And if if they had have said that, I would have easily been able to correct and say, Yeah, definitely not. Like that is uh that is not um what I mean. So there was there was clearly a misunderstanding because it was more just the subject matter rather than anyway. You basically you you just have to accept the fact that it's going to happen, that you are going to be to be misunderstood. And this is the reason that you should focus less on your reputation, although your reputation is important. It's not like you should forget about it at all, but focus less on reputation and more on character. So reputation should flow downstream from your character. You're not gonna be able to control what people think about you, but you can absolutely control who you are and what you do. So it you're you're far better off to control the controllables and the things that you are not in control of. It's gonna be a painful process trying to manage those things because it's just an impossible task. You they're they're literally out of your control. You're not gonna be able to do anything about it. So control what you can control, and everything should flow downstream from that. This this really only works though if you are brutally honest with yourself with yourself. You have to have like extreme self-accountability because there's obviously the scenario that everyone thinks you're an awful person. And if everyone thinks you're an awful person, you might just be an awful person and you might not be working on yourself like you think that you are. So humility is really a huge key in moving forward with character building. The reason that I believe that person misunderstood me was probably well within their rights to not think favorably of me, let's say. I so what I take from that is that the subject matter, in hindsight, now that I know, it probably shouldn't have been a subject spoken about publicly or been publicly shared. And so I've made an adjustment. And so that I just don't bring up this particular subject matter, especially with people that I'm not super close with that don't know who I am as a person. So I've made the adjustment. Like so I had to come to terms with the fact that's like, oh, okay, like I I maybe I overshared. Like maybe that's something that I had to reconcile with and and have humility and accept a hard truth about it and just be like, okay, but maybe I did overshare. And that and that was wrong of me to do. And so from that, it has allowed me to adjust myself. And so the humility part of it is the character trait. So you work on the humility that allows for the adjustments. So I won't make that mistake again in the future, thereby assisting in a better reputation for myself, hopefully. Uh, in an ideal world. But um, but that's fine. Like part little the like these little bits of conflict that happen is a good thing. Like it's not like that'll help you to build the character. So Leonard Ravenhood has a quote that says, you don't develop character by reading books, you develop it by conflict. So it's in those moments of conflict that you are able to learn and that you're able to make readjustments. As long as you're honest with yourself, brutally honest with yourself, that you can make that adjustment. Okay, that was the first one.

Health Is Wealth For Body And Mind

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Number two, health. Health is wealth. Now, this is this is it it is a little bit of an obvious one, but I just want to dig a little bit deeper into why it's so like crucially important, so important that I think it's in a it's in a top five list of life lessons that I've learned and that I think should be adopted by everyone. And your life would dramatically improve if you adopted these things. And so, like I compare it to when I was young. I was a very active, sporty, athletic kid growing up. I grew up a bit and I let go of my diet. I stopped exercising, I started drinking, I started smoking. Uh, from that, not only did my physical health plummet, my mental health plummeted as well. And so I got things like started dealing with depression and anxiety and really poor emotional regulation. Uh, I had self-esteem issues, I had breathing issues, I had skin issues, I had brain fog, I had, you know, I was getting sick all the time. The like the list goes on. And so I at the time was alive, but I had no life in the sense that there was nothing really good about life. Like there were these momentary pleasures of eating something delicious or playing video games. That was the only joy that I was really getting in life, maybe drinking and smoking with friends, but it's so vapid and empty. And the costs that you pay, the tax you pay for living a lifestyle like that, is immeasurably worse. Like it does not stack up. You can't it it yeah, it's uh it's death. It is you're you're a living, well, a walking dead man, essentially. So the way that I see it now is that if you're going to be here, if you're gonna be on Earth, why not be here in the best possible way that you can be here? Because you're already here. You're living that you're in it. You're living the life already. You are here. If you're listening to this, you're here. And so if you're gonna be here, why would you be here in a less than version of what you could potentially be and how you could be experiencing the life that you have? So, like, there's no real point in surviving if you're not thriving. Like, I don't want to get to the last 20 to 30 years of my life be just like being conscious and not being able to do anything. Like, I'm not gonna I don't want to hit 70 and then you know, for 10 to 20 years, 30 years, however long, I just I'm not really doing anything. I'm immobile, I don't think well, I can't remember things. Like, I don't want to have that type of life. Like if if you're 70 and you everything starts to deteriorate, you can live to 100, God willing. Like you don't, you don't just want to be an empty shell of a person. Like you, at what point, like how much would your life be able to deteriorate before it's literally just better to not be here anymore and finish it up? Like, I'd rather live to 80, but like thrive the whole way through. So than have yeah, the last 20 years just be like awful years. But more than that, I also want my current years to be the best that they could potentially be as well. Like right now, I want to have the best memory. Right now, I want to have the best comprehension skills and understanding, and I want to be able to live the fullness that life has. I don't want to be prohibited by a health issue or by not being able to breathe properly or being insecure because I don't look the way that I feel like I could. And it's not, it's not to put all your like obviously you don't want to be, I'm not talking about looks maxing or anything like that. It's just like looking a particular way is the byproduct of being healthy. If health is the goal, you are just going to look a particular way, and it's kind of it's just a byproduct of being healthy. But I don't want dementia, I don't want arthritis. However good I could be, I want to be, I suppose. That's maybe the best way to say it. Um, and I genuinely believe that it is investing in your health is probably the best investment you can make outside of following Christ. Uh, just being a healthy person. So now that I can I can say I don't have issues with depression or anxiety, or you know, I have way better emotional regulation than I used to have. I've got a better memory, I can concentrate for way longer periods of time, I'm more functional, uh, just as a human being in general. Like there's so many payoffs from just making this one lifestyle, lifestyle change, just eating better and exercising regularly. And that's really all you need to do. It's not like you have to be, you know, a CrossFit freak or a high rox athlete or whatever the workout of the day is. Like you just have to just be active and mobile and not eat junk food all the time. So that was the next

Accepting Compliments And Gifts Graciously

SPEAKER_00 21:47

one. Now, number three is it's kind of it's very specific, but like it's not as broad as just like looking after your health, but it's powerful. For the people that need to hear it. So this is all about accepting love that people want to give you. So I've had so many conversations with people where they find that they don't accept compliments. They're like, oh yeah, I just don't accept compliments well, or I find that I reject them or I dismiss them or I don't believe them. And it seems to be more common than uh people would have realized. I know that that was my experience, but I didn't know that that was a universal experience, or at least an experience for a lot of different people. And I remember once, this is actually really funny, I had a birthday dinner booked with my family years ago. And I before it, I was hanging out with a group of friends, and I I said to them, All right, I gotta go, I got a dinner, birthday dinner with my family. And one of my friends just says, Oh, sweet, can I come? And I was like, I was like, um, you want to come to my like it's just my me and my immediate family. Like, you wanna come? He's like, Yeah. I'm like, well, you you can. Like, we're not like it's not like a night out. Like, I like this group of friends is like we were drinking buddies, so like we'd go out drinking and whatever, partying. He's like, Yeah, no, I want to come to dinner. And I was like, I was like, sure, man, like, yeah, like why not? Like, no one else in the group was uh like made the same offer, so it just ended up being me and him driving to my my family dinner for my birthday. So that was kind of funny, but on the way there, I had a concern. I was like, Oh, they're gonna give me presents there, and I don't know what to do. And you know, do I unwrap them there? Like it's gonna be weird. Like people are you just I don't know, for whatever reason I was stressing, and I was like, Oh, they're gonna give me presents, what do I do? And I'll never forget what he said. It was the simplest thing ever, but I've never forgotten it. He said, What do you mean? You just accept them lovingly, and I was like, Oh yeah, right, yeah, that's that's the appropriate thing to do. If someone gives you a gift, you accept it lovingly. And I tell you what, it it changed my it's it sounds silly to like I don't know what it was, but it just it changed my perception on receiving anything from people that are giving it to you out of love. And so I I I apply that to when someone is giving you a compliment. When someone is giving you a compliment, they're offering you something. It isn't always easy for someone to just give you a compliment. Like for some people, they have to work up the courage to give someone a compliment, or um, even if they don't have to work up the courage, it is it's that they understand it to be a nice thing. It's it's they're offering you something out of love and affection. And that's really what they want to do. Like the offering of a compliment is that they want to give you something nice and affectionate. And when you don't accept the compliment, you're rejecting the person's affection, but you're also rejecting something nice that that person has created for you as well. So imagine this: imagine someone bakes you a cake and they go through a lot of effort to bake the cake, and you might not have even asked for the cake, but it means more to the person who made it for you that you accept it lovingly than the opposite, which is, oh, you know, I don't actually like cake. Um, you can just throw that in the trash. They're gonna be like, well, oh, okay, well, you don't you don't like the thing that I wanted to give you. Like, I wanted to give this to you because I care about you. And you know, it's it's so it I it can be hard. I know it can be hard to accept compliments, but it's not always about you. And I think that's one thing that I have learned is that it's a reciprocal thing. Someone gives you a compliment and you accept it, and you there's been an exchange where that person's happy that you accepted it. And then if you truly do accept it and really understand that some people do really like you, like there are people that really do care about you and and they want to give you something to celebrate that. Like some people want to celebrate that with you. Children will give gifts to adults that they like, like they they'll just offer you something because they're like, I appreciate you. Have this, have this thing. Animals will give gifts, like you know, birds they'll grab things and they'll drop it off at you like it. They even do it to people. Like a bird will grab some shiny things and leave it at your front doorstep if you're someone that feeds them and you know, you hear stories like that. So gift giving is just like a powerful thing, and I think rejecting that is robbing those per those people that you probably care about as well from expressing themselves fully. And so taking it in a humble str stride and and putting your pride aside, putting your own issues aside, and just accept it lovingly and just say, you know what? Thank you. Thank you for saying that. I appreciate that. You know, you don't need to become arrogant and you don't need to glorify yourself because someone gives you a compliment. But you also don't need to be like, oh no, no, no, no, you know, don't just listen to them. Just listen to what they're saying and then just take accept the compliment and then you know, appreciate it and listen to it. Because, you know, what they're saying is oftentimes it's whether it's truthful or not, the sentiment is that they want to give you something nice. And so thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Um, so that might sound weird to people that don't have that issue, but for those that do, I hope that that helps. Now,

Start Now And Drop Perfectionism

SPEAKER_00 27:44

number four, I believe it's quattro in another language, and this is just about starting now. So whatever it is, whatever you're putting off, just start it now. And this is again, like it's it might be common, you know, there's all the memes about the Shia LaBeouf, like just do it, you know, all that stuff. It's you know, that that never seems to go away. But delay, it'll literally ruin your life. Like the thing that people need to understand is that it's just it's never too late. It's never too late to start whatever it is thing that you you've been putting off. And as like people seem to always want to put these imaginary time limits on things that we do in life. Like, I don't know why people do it. Anyone in their 30s seems to have this idea of, oh it's done now, life's over, just because they're not 20 anymore. You like a lot of my friends are like, oh yeah, it's it's we're all old as now. It's like, what are you talking about? Like, I just turned 35 and I feel better than I did when I was 25, mostly because I was really unhealthy at 25, but it's that's kind of besides the point. You could potentially feel better at 35, as I do, than you do at 25 if your lifestyle is a little bit different. And so, like, I look at like people that that and they go, Oh, it's too late for me now. It's like, you dude, you're not 90. Like, what are you talking about? You're 30 or 40, dude. Like Caleb in the Bible. So Joshua and Caleb went killed like 32 kings in open field war. Like that is where they went to war and they killed like all these people in in um in the book of Joshua. And there's this part where Caleb is 85 years old, and he says to God, he's like, I'm I'm still wanting ready to fight. Like, I feel as if I'm still 40. Like when you very first commissioned me out to go, he was 40 when he was first commissioned by Moses to go. He goes, I'm 85, but I feel as vigorous as I was when I was 40. I want to keep going at 85, dude. And he and he's he's comparing it to 40. So there's people that aren't even 40, and they're like, Yeah, life's over. It was like, dude, Caleb's saying that was a prime part of my life. Like that was prime. Like, I don't know where these imaginary limits come from. Okay, yeah, you're not 21 with the fastest reflexes, and yeah, you might have let yourself go. But bring it back then. If you've let yourself go, pick it back up. Pick yourself back up. The issue is, I think, with a lot of people, you have to be okay with being bad at something. When you're a kid, you don't really care that much about stuffing up. It's kind of a given. You stuff up, you learn from your mistakes, you're really bad when you start it, but you get better because you don't have an ego. But people nowadays will be like, oh, well, I don't want to start something because I'm gonna look bad before I start. When it's like, yeah, obviously, because you can't expect to be great at it when you've just started it. Just drop the ego. Like again, have some humility. Like, humility seems to be a key through all of these lessons, dude. Honestly. Like, I I feel like there's there's three main reasons why people don't want to do something. Maybe four, probably four. Let's go with four reasons why people won't do something. First one being laziness, like just simply you want to do something, you're too lazy to actually figure out how to do it, or to just not do the pleasure-seeking things, like people just they finish work and then all they want to do is watch Netflix and sit down on the couch, and it's like, okay, like if that's the life that you want to live, and you know, you've got the right to do that. But just be honest with the fact that it's just it's the reason that you're not doing anything else is just because you're lazy. The the second thing would probably be maybe disbelief in your capabilities and just not believing you're you can actually do anything else. So that is just more of a naive look at things because like no one's gonna be good at something to begin with. Like you kind of have to learn by doing it, and so maybe that's an insecurity thing, but um, yeah, that's something that you just have to understand that that's not just you, but that's probably everyone. The next thing would might be afraid of what people think, so cringe. A lot of people don't do anything because they think it's gonna be cringe. Uh and that kind of feeds into the next thing, which is perfectionism. So because people don't want to be cringe, they want to be, they want to have everything perfect before they start. Not realizing that you're never going to be able to be perfect at something before you've even started to do the thing that you're trying to be perfect at. Like you have to actually start doing the thing before you we can be good at the thing. And so, like, to me, perfectionism is like peak excuse making. James Isaac Vance says it best. He says, What is strength? It is the absence of excuse making. And like, well, everything I've said is an excuse to some degree. Like, whether it like laziness is an excuse, I guess. Um, disbelief in capability is an excuse, perfectionism. Oh, it's gonna be cringe, like it's all just excuse making, and it is just weakness. Like at the end of the day, that's all that really is. Like, obviously, laziness is the highest form of weakness for both. That's like both being physically and mentally weak. But it is it is definitely a weak characteristic, and I think perfectionism gives people a good excuse to justify their weakness, and like, yeah, like you know, uh, if if it was only for this, then I would like I remember there was a guy who was talking to me, he's like he wants to know he's like, I really want to learn Japanese. I'm like, oh okay, why don't you get like Duolingo or something? No, no, no, I can't get the apps because um because I like to learn the etymology of the words, and um, that's you know big interest for me. Okay, well, like going to a tutor then. Nah, well, like I don't want to go to a tutor because again, like, you know, I don't think they they even know the etymology of the words. And it's like, okay, so what what how do you find this out? Well, yeah, I don't think you can. It's like, well, then shut up. Don't tell me that you want to learn Japanese, just to tell me all the excuses as to why you're not going to learn Japanese. Like, I don't I don't want to hear it, dude. Like, what do you want me to say? Like, oh man, whoa, unlucky, dude. Like, like, what what do you want me to say to that? Like, you you I feel like you're just trying to justify the fact that you want to do something and you want me to confirm and acknowledge the fact, like, yeah, there's really no option for you then. Because if that's what you want from me, I'm not I'm not the guy. Like, I'm not gonna tell you that. Like, you're not gonna hear it from me. You what you're gonna hear from me is that you're lazy. That's what you will you will hear that, you know, and that you're just making excuses and I don't care about your excuse. Either do it or or shut up about it. That's kind of that those are the options that I I've got for you. Just figure out a way to do it. Everything is figure outerable. Now, there's a quote for you. It's a it's a proverb, it's an ancient Hebrew proverb. Everything is figure outerable. Okay. Um but ultimately, if you if you uh it it is an impossible task to try to be perfect and have everything perfect before you start. It's an impossible task that will prevent you from ever taking action. And to be honest, this is the underground man. This is what Fyodor Dostoevsky writes about in the underground man or in uh in Notes from Underground. It's basically about a guy who he he's he's not even lazy. He's he's presents himself as being so intelligent that he's able to identify all of the things that could potentially go wrong. So this is a thing, right? Like the more intelligent you are, yeah, you probably are going to be able to identify more potential risk. And so you're gonna want to account for those potential risks. But the issue is that there's so many of them that you get this paralysis by analysis, and then you never end up doing anything at all. So Dostoevsky writes the book to basically say, you can't live like this. Like, look at this guy. You know, the underground man is an awful guy that you don't want to be able to relate to. You're meant to read something like that and go, geez, I don't want to be anything like that. Because the underground man, he speaks of people like he speaks of people that are successful only because they're they're dumb. He goes, Oh, that they're so dumb that they they wouldn't have realized the risks. And so they just like brutishly just went ahead with it. But they're the successful ones, and it's the underground man that just lives in in this corner and doesn't do anything with his life and he ends up becoming extremely bitter. And so you just don't want to do that, you don't want to be like that. Like you need to just do it badly, man. Just do it and do it and be okay with it being bad. I used to love writing songs, and I remember I used to write songs all the time, but I could never finish a song. I wrote so many half songs until one day I got so sick of it, I was just like, okay, I'm just gonna write a bad song, I'm just gonna write a full song, but uh it's going to be bad. Like I I I said that to myself before writing the song, and then I wrote a bad song and I did it. I wrote a bad song because of that I learned how to write a song, and then I was able to build off of that and then make it better, then make better songs, and now I have a song on Spotify that I'm actually really proud of. But the good product is the product of a bad product. So it took the bad product in order for me to get the good product. So first you start, then you improve, and that's that's how it should go. But the issue is you can't improve on something that you haven't even started yet. So start now and just be okay with doing it badly. That is the best advice for it. When I wanted to go to the gym in the mornings, I went and I I spent a long time accepting the fact that I was gonna be doing bad workouts because I was gonna be tired. I was getting up an hour and a half, nearly two hours earlier than I'd ever gotten up in in my life, like on a regular basis. And I just said to myself, okay, well, here's here's the the fact of the matter is I'm just going to have to have bad workouts for a little while. And I'm going to probably be tired at work for a little while. And I was. And so yeah, I just I just agreed with the fact or just accepted the fact that there was going to be some struggle. And I did struggle. All up until I didn't. And I got what I wanted. So you just have to start it, be okay with doing it badly, and just improving on it from there. But don't waste time, don't delay, and don't make excuses, or just be really honest with yourself that that is what you're doing. Even if you're a perfectionist, you're also a professional excuse maker. Just call a spade a spade.

Following Jesus For Truth And Purpose

SPEAKER_00 39:10

Now onto the creme de la creme, the creme of the crop, the 10 out of 10, the best of the best. Number five. Last but not least, in fact, the most is the number one. None of the others were ranked. This is ranked number one, and that is following Christ Jesus. Okay? So I speak about this a lot because it because of how drastically it changed my life. And I just want that for everyone. Like I just want it for everyone, man. It's just so good. Like people, you just don't understand how good it is. Because it is the thing: following Jesus isn't just an expression of being a believer in God. In a God that exists. That's not what I mean when I say follow Jesus. It's Jesus, I've explained in previous podcasts, Jesus is the Logos, which is in in some sense, reason. He like everything makes sense in re in Christ. Following Jesus means that you're you're living your life in the direction of everything that Jesus says and stands for. That's what I mean by following Jesus. So it's uh it's almost like uh a life philosophy. It's at its bare minimum, it's a life philosophy. At its maximum, it's a life philosophy included with objective truth, objective goodness, and objective beauty and life in abundance because of those things. So you might look at it like this God is that which is the truest, the goodest, and the beautifulest. So I say objective truth, objective good, and objective beauty because we all have a sense of those things. We we have a sense in which something is true or false, and we know that it is objective because you can say, Well, you know, unless we're all losing our minds, but that's the other thing. We can be sure that we're not losing our minds with God. Without God, we have there's no real rational sense to believe that what we're perceiving is exactly as we are perceiving it. You can't really trust that that is the case, because it's potentially it could be potentially anything. So we can say this there's objective truth, because if you say there's no objective truth, that would need to be objectively true. And so and then so it's it defeats itself, it's a paradox. Like if someone says there's no objective truth, and you go, Well, is that objectively true? Because if it is objectively true, then it's also objectively false. So it it there has to be objective truth, for one. Uh in terms of goodness, there being the fact that we have a sense, I've I've spoken did a whole podcast on what is good, but the fact that we have a sense of goodness and something is well, okay. Let's say this there's different types of good, right? There's morally good, and then there is just like good work, let's say. If you build a house, you can build a good house, you can build a bad house. Um, or there could be a scale of good. You can tie your shoe and it'd be a really good knot and it'd be a not so good knot, like, or it could be a less good knot. And so there's a scale in which something could be good or bad. And then it could be let's say a good thing might be to be generous. You could be generous and give one dollar, or you could be generous and give a million dollars. There's a scale of of those maybe morally good things as well. And so, uh, and then when it comes to beauty, let's use the rose, for example. A blossoming rose could be a beautiful thing, and then a dying, decrepit rose could be a less beautiful thing or an ugly thing. And there's always people that go, oh, well, there's beauty in the death as well. And it's like, yada yada yada yada. That's not what I mean. What I mean by is like is life and death, essentially. That that is the core of uh beauty by definition, and I don't mean beauty in a sense of physical attraction, I mean beauty in the sense of of life. Like the the more life-giving thing, the more beautiful the thing is, and uh and death is ugly in its in its sense. Like death shouldn't be a beautiful thing, even if you can see some beauty in it, as far as like some romanticism in you know, a beautiful death. And you know, people have you know, there's literature for that sort of stuff, but that's neither here nor there. What I what I mean is God then, looking at Christ and looking at God, God is. That which is the highest of all of those things. So God is good in essence. Right? He's truth in essence, he's beauty in essence. He's not truthful, he is truth. He's he's not he is beautiful, but he's not just beautiful, he's beauty. He's not just good. Maybe that's a better way. He's not just truthful, he's truth. He's not just goodness, he's good. Uh or good, you know, he's not just good, he's goodness. Um and so that's a a way to begin to understand what God offers, and and living in him is like it gives you that kind of reference point and direction of true things in life. So I think that's kind of the best way to attribute it to it. We we attribute the highest possible idea of goodness, truth, and beauty to God. And through that, you get the fullness of life, you get direction because God doesn't God doesn't create things arbitrarily, which means that he didn't create you arbitrarily, and that you have a specific purpose that you were created for that only you can do. So direction and purpose is kind of imbued in the Christian life. There's a quote from C.S. Lewis, he says, I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. And I think that's a beautiful way to look at it because everything makes sense with God. You get those those truths, those objective uh morals, ethics, objective beauty, all these things is true with that. The question, why is there something rather than nothing makes sense with God? Is that because there could be nothing. Like we could, like no one could exist, nothing at all could exist. The fact that something exists begs a question is is there a reason or is there an explanation? If there's an explanation for existence, the explanation itself would paradoxically be included in the explanation as being a thing that uh it's gonna be hard to make sense of what I just said then, but um I feel like everything makes sense when God exists, when there's direction, when there's reason, when there's purpose. And it's a beautiful thing, man, because it's for everyone. Everyone. No one is too far gone, no one is too too late. It is a beautiful, life-giving thing, and I wish it upon all of my closest friends and my worst enemies. I truly think that that the world would benefit and prosper by giving their lives to God and understanding that love is not selfish, it is sacrificial, it is putting others first, and uh, and I think Jesus represented that the best on the cross when he gave his life for all. So, with that being said, those are my top five life lessons that I think, to be honest, I didn't realize until I started talking about these, but a lot of these come down to humility. Like, if you can if you could really grasp humility powerfully and strongly, like it is a superpower, it is a superpower to not care about what people think about you. Like you're free from it, you you are unshackled, you're free. You can just live, man. You can just live, man. Just live. And so I hope that you, if you aren't living, I hope that you start to live. And um, and I pray humility over you and over your life in Jesus' name.

Humility As The Thread And Farewell

SPEAKER_00 48:11

So once again, Christ is King, Jesus loves you, and he's coming back soon, and uh and praise be to him. So thanks for listening. I love you.