0:00:00 - 0:00:22 Wanted to share some practical tips on how to avoid or reverse overwhelm, anxiety, depression, things that people struggle with today. Things are tough, arguably tougher than they've been at least in recent history. And I for one believe that they're gonna get a little worse at least. And so it's a good 0:00:22 - 0:00:45 time. It's always a good time to develop these sorts of tools. And so if you're, if you're in that boat, I hope that what I'm about to say helps you out. These are thoughts that I've expressed in longer form in a book that's coming out called Joy on purpose. I hope that's out in June 2024. So if I had 0:00:45 - 0:01:08 to pull out just one thing, just one thing that you could do to radically reverse radically mitigate the this um these situations where you just feel completely overwhelmed. You don't know what to do. You have no idea how to do it. It's just your mess or you just, you feel really nervous about the future 0:01:07 - 0:01:30 , you feel very insecure, insecure, about the present, whatever it might be here is my, my tip for you. One thing I'm gonna start out with the story. One thing I picked up on as first a student and then a teacher in computer science, which is a field that, you know, AAA relatively large number of people 0:01:30 - 0:01:54 struggle with. It's difficult. One thing I noticed was that as soon as you get confused, as soon as you start thinking that you can't do what you're up against. Something flips in you and psychologists call this fight or flight, but something flips in your, in your brain and you stop thinking clearly 0:01:53 - 0:02:17 . And so all this self doubt ends up turning into self fulfilling prophecy because you're, you're stripping away your own ability to use your rational portion of your brain to actually think about the actions you might take to solve the problems or at least attack the problems in front of you and it's 0:02:17 - 0:02:36 this downward spiral. So the more you, you, you think these self defeating thoughts, the more you feel bad, the more you feel bad, the more you think these self defeating thoughts and you just get more and more overwhelmed and there's no end in sight now, having been through a lot of these cycles personally 0:02:35 - 0:03:00 and having seen a lot more of them in various capacities, what I've learned is that there is a way out of this, but you have to transcend to a higher level of self management and, and that might sound fancy, but I promise you, it sounds fancier than it is. So here's the nuts and bolts. Are you ready 0:03:00 - 0:03:35 for it? Start thinking of all of these interchanges in life as attempts to prevent you from using your rational capacity. And I'm going to give you a tool to help you do that. Here's the tool at any moment. Any moment, you have a whole bunch of options, options on how you can act. Now, clouding that 0:03:35 - 0:03:58 obscuring that perspective is a flood of feelings of actions from other people of inactions from other people of situations that maybe are partially within your control, but at least a little outside of your control. Some things that seem completely out of your control, just cosmic circumstance kind 0:03:58 - 0:04:28 of things. It doesn't matter through all of that. There is a thread of things that are 100% your choice. Now at any time, you should be able to make a list. And I mean, literally whether it's on your phone or paper, you should be able to write out. What are my options? What actions do I have that I could 0:04:28 - 0:04:52 take as simple as that sounds, you might be shocked if you're not in the habit of doing it. Just how completely this can change how you feel. You feel powerless. Well, guess what if you have actions you can take by definition, you still have power. Can you completely control all of these things that 0:04:52 - 0:05:18 bother you? No, but that's not what we're talking about. The question is, are there things you can do to make things better. Yes. The question is, how effectively can you enumerate those and choose the best one? And it turns out that, that it's really easy. So when you get completely flooded, overwhelmed 0:05:17 - 0:05:37 , whatever you're in way over your head, we all, we all have a tendency where we wanna reach out, we wanna reach out to someone and get some help. Now, there might be a barrier to that because of pride or whatever. But, you know, at least we wish there was someone we could talk to. You know, one of the 0:05:37 - 0:00:00 problems with that approach is that we're conflating, we're, we're treating as one, these things that are actually separate, one of them. So when we ask, what should I do? I don't know what to do. What should I do? That's actually the wrong question. It's not specific enough in the way it's phrased. 0:00:00 - 0:06:20 You're almost guaranteed to, to do less than the best available to you. So how do you tease it apart? What, what can you break this into? One of these things is a list of the choices that are before you. And then the question there is which of these available options is the best. The question of what 0:06:19 - 0:06:42 is best is actually really easy to answer. You can teach a four year old how to do this. Well, it doesn't mean they're gonna choose to, but they'll understand how to, it's easy. You could write a simple program to do it for you? What is the maximum long term net benefit that you expect? Now that was 0:06:42 - 0:07:10 a mouthful. I'm gonna say it again. You look down the page of all of your options and you say which one is most likely to produce the best long term effect? That is a question that almost anyone can answer if they have the right information. Where do you get the information from? Well, if you're particularly 0:07:09 - 0:07:32 wise, you can generate that list yourself. Very few people are particularly wise. So this is how to target the help you seek from others. Now, I say others, you don't have to have a face to face conversation with someone. There's this thing called the internet and you can look up all kinds of information 0:07:32 - 0:07:56 on it for free. You can find out what did other people do who were in my situation and how did it go? You can also creatively generate new options. Looking at that information, you can get an accurate sense of what you can expect out of each of these choices because it's going to seem to be probabilistic 0:07:54 - 0:08:11 . You know, if you, if you did something like I'm gonna start my own business, I don't know what problem you would be solving with that. There are a lot of possibilities. Well, maybe you'll succeed and maybe you'll fail, but that can be its own chain of calculations that are gonna be highly specific 0:08:11 - 0:08:33 to you or you can find a, a living mentor who you can just ask questions of and get advice from and what you'll find by and large. There are a lot of people out there who charge money for that. What you'll find is most of the people who charge money for it are not worth the money that they charge. And 0:08:33 - 0:08:55 the best ones typically will give you advice for free. Why? Because they have adopted a set of values in life that are non monetary. They operate in a way where they're most interested in seeing other people benefit from the things that they've had to struggle for through. But that's, that's been my 0:08:55 - 0:09:16 experience. Hey, half the time they'll take you out to lunch to give you free advice. So, uh that's pretty amazing. And there are people like that out there anyway. So you find someone that you trust or you find information that is, I don't wanna say certifiable but you know, credible information and 0:09:15 - 0:09:36 you go down the list and you say, what are my options? And you can enumerate options from this research for each of those options. You say, what's the cost? What's the benefit? What's the likelihood of each? And as you walk through this, what you're going to find is the following. In most cases, amongst 0:09:36 - 0:09:56 a set of options, you're gonna have one, maybe two that are exceptionally better than the rest. And when I, when I say exceptionally better what I mean is if you sum up the net benefit of the rest of them, the net long term expected benefit, you probably have one choice that's greater than the sum of 0:09:56 - 0:10:16 the rest. And there are reasons for that, that I don't want to get into here and now. But what you'll find is there is a clear best choice now is that best choice going to be something that you click your heels and giddy excitement about. Probably not. In fact, it will probably be the opposite of that 0:10:16 - 0:10:35 , which is part of the value of this exercise in the first place. You see human nature, we do a lot of things automatically and they're not very good. One of the things we'll do is that we will automatically just sort of pigeonhole ourselves into a path that's easy, even if it's abundantly obvious that 0:10:35 - 0:10:56 it's not gonna work long term and we'll do all sorts of mental gymnastics to try to, to stay in that without feeling guilty. And we avoid the people and places that would make it really obvious that it's not the best thing we could do. We're shy as people we really are. And so you need to overcome that 0:10:55 - 0:11:20 human nature and you can do it through making this list. So there's a ton more about um prioritization, making choices, enumerating choices, all these things in this book, Joy on purpose. Um And I highly recommend you read it, but I wanted to make this video and it's short compared to the volume of information 0:11:20 - 0:11:41 behind it. But I'm telling you this will change your life. So many people have abundantly obvious next steps to take in their life on a path towards improvement where everything is better, long term and they can't see it or they're too overwhelmed to even think about it because they're in this emotionally 0:11:40 - 0:12:06 driven state of being flooded. You have to cut through that and the knife that helps you is switching from, I'm a victim. I feel so bad woe is me. I wish someone would rescue me from the current situation into. I am an agent with independent choice. What actions can I take? And which is the best on the 0:12:06 - 0:12:28 list and one pitfall you have to avoid that. I didn't pay enough attention to so far is avoid this trap of. But I really want a thing that's off the list. Too bad. You have your list of options. Those are your only options. Your power is to choose the best one. You can't manufacture one. That's not in 0:12:28 - 0:12:53 the realm of possibilities, right? But on the other side of that, you gotta stop neglecting the fact that certain possibilities exist on this list. You just don't like them, but they are the obviously best choice to make. So if you're in a situation where let's say you can't find the job that you want 0:12:52 - 0:13:13 . All right, which jobs can you find beware of invisible constraints. That's when you keep options off your list, even though they exist. Put it down, write down the cost, write down the benefit. Now, if the net benefit is negative or lower than anything else, great. But you've scratched it off using 0:13:13 - 0:13:35 reason and not emotions, you have reasons why it's not the best and the reason isn't because, oh, I don't like that idea. Tough. Is it the best or is it not? Right. So, there you go. There's my 15 minutes less, way less. We're way under 15 to change your life. All right. You do this in a couple of big 0:13:35 - 0:13:38 things and your life will be phenomenally better.