


63. Why Trying to Fix Everything is Breaking You
May 24
7 min read
What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - "Why Trying to Fix Everything is Breaking You."
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by good advice? Like somehow, you're behind. If you're not waking up at four 30, journaling, meditating, cold plunging, eating liver, and starting a business by lunch, the truth is that nothing ever happens more than one step at a time, and you don't have to do everything. So, I was being a creeper the other day and I chose to listen in on a conversation that two guys at the gym were having.
And what caught my attention was when one of these guys started complaining about his girlfriend. I. So apparently this guy's girlfriend was getting really worked up over feeling like she couldn't keep up with all the advice she was hearing on the Huberman Lab show. I too have had a fairly consistent relationship with the self-help category for a long time now, and I can totally relate.
You read these books, and you hear these stories, and you feel like your mind has been opened to a greater understanding of what it takes to live your best life. Yet, you still can't quite bring yourself to do everything. Throughout most of my life, it seems like every time I read a new book that tells me how I need to be living, I feel almost compelled to do it.
When you start following someone or reading a book that seems to have all the answers, some of you, like me, may feel a whole lot of pressure to do everything you just read about. If it is better, why wouldn't you do it? The more you read though, the more you begin to realize that there are a lot of ways to skin a cat.
And I honestly don't know why we use that metaphor because it's kind of gross, but whatever. There's no one way to win at life. Honestly, if you read enough of these books, they all begin to sound kind of like the same, even though they may advocate different approaches. Now, of course, I can't sum up the entirety of every self-help book ever written, but I can say this, you don't have to do everything all at once.
In fact, sometimes the smaller the step the better. If you keep trying to take steps that you're going to fail at. You're going to lose that spark and that momentum is going to tank. But if you can make that step small enough, you can keep that forward momentum and over time you will develop the skills to take bigger steps.
The human mind does not change everything about itself. In one instance, we're naturally burdened with the limitation of only being able to focus on one thing at a time. So why fight that even when you see someone that's been living their worst life suddenly turn things around in an incredible way? It was usually one thing in particular at the core of what was making them live their worst lives.
All the changes happen one step at a time. Maybe you can manage two or three, but if you try to change everything. You're going to drive yourself crazy. So, a caveat here, it's not my intention to make this show religious, but a really great example of this concept comes from the story of Saul in the Bible.
So, Saul was one of the most adamant prosecutors of early Christians. It was like his mission in life to squash them out, but while he was traveling on the road to Damascus, sometime after the crucifixion of Christ, he sees a light and hears the voice of Christ. Who asks Saul why he's persecuting him. In this moment, Saul clearly is converted and asks Jesus what he would have him do, after which he's directed to go somewhere for further direction.
In this story, only one thing really changes in Saul, which is whose team he's fighting for. He ends up changing his name to Paul and becoming the greatest Christian missionary of all time, and from that point forward, he throws himself at danger, willingly over and over, and has massive success, but also ends up being murdered for it as well.
I even read before that from a secular analysis of this guy; they think that he may have actually been a sociopath. Because of his total lack of fear or maybe psychopath. I don't know which one's which. But nothing really changed in this guy other than which team he fought for, and it made all the difference.
So, what's relevant here in my mind is that big changes in outcome are affected by single, often, small changes in behavior, big changes in how we operate in the world, and how we approach our life come from lots of small changes. Changing everything about yourself all at once isn't generally sustainable.
Since really, we can only focus on one thing at a time, it's really too much for us to worry about doing more than that. Sometimes we get crushed under all of the weight of the shoulds and shouldn't I have a love-hate relationship with rules? I'm not the kind of person that does well with them. I find them confining.
And if there are too many, it causes me to feel stress, and yet as much as I hate them, I feel compelled to follow them. I know people that operate pretty well within those clear parameters though. But for a lot of us taking on one more thing that we have to start remembering, it's just like adding more weight to our load.
Don't get caught in this trap of guilt. You need to push yourself to grow. But the second you give in and say, I'm just not good enough to meet my expectations of myself, this is the moment you let your guilt rule over you. Your expectations of yourself should be at least as good as the day before, and maybe just a little better, but don't expect to become a virtuoso after just a few days of practice.
So, I own this small company. And we're doing pretty well, but I can tell you a million things we could be doing better. But if I took all of the advice I have ever heard from any business influencer, I would have accomplished nothing. The reality of life is we only have so many resources to work with, and the game you need to play is how to use those resources most efficiently so that you have more resources to draw on later.
The simplest form of a business is when you get someone to give you money for something they need. That can boil down to nothing more than a conversation with a person, or it can be as complex as negotiating a contract with a billion-dollar corporation that has its own marketing teams, suppliers, production teams, attorneys, and stock valuations.
You cannot become a billion-dollar business overnight most of the time. And if for chance that happens, there will be a lot of invested work prior to seeing that jump. Don't let the guilt monster take you over. You have too much to do to worry about that. Life is a sequence of cause and effect. Certain decisions will cause certain effects on your life.
The guilt is just a distraction. Part of the problem is the people we choose to compare ourselves to. If you're real about where you stand in life, you will compare yourself to comparable people. But if, for example, a girl wants to kick reality to the curb, she can compare herself to supermodels instead of the other women that are around her.
A lot of us like to place these heavy burdens on our shoulders, and I don't know if it is a kind of self-punishment for ourselves, or maybe we just confuse pain for progress. But if it isn't something we can sustain long-term, then it's doomed to cause us to fall back into that guilt trap. No one gives an infant a spoon and a fork and tells them that they can't make a mess and need to eat like everyone else.
We need to take the steps that we are capable of making first. It's important to know where we are trying to get to. Even if that goal is a moonshot, that is not really a problem because even a lofty goal can be broken down into as many small steps as necessary. So set your goals and make your plans but be real about which steps you're gonna start with.
When the first step has become second nature, it's time to take the next. A consequence of being alive is that every so often you're going to have things happen to you that have the potential to break you. You may go through deep bouts of depression and despondency, but even in those situations. Most of the time, you'll have the capacity to take a tiny step in the right direction.
And sometimes that's all we can do. But that's a win. When you put one foot in front of the other enough times, there's hardly a place in the world that you cannot get to. This is Skipping Stones. You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com.
And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at info@skippingstonessr.com. New episodes will be released weekly. Every Monday.