How to Not Suck at Life

0:00Welcome to the Essentials Code podcast. Do you suck? Do you feel like you suck sometimes? Do you wish you didn't suck as much? Today, I'm not going to talk about how not to suck it. I'm Danny Mbui-Randy. What's up, Danny? Yeah, Danny. Have you ever sucked it late? Well, I mean, the clear answers to this question are clearly grind, have more Facebook friends and Instagram followers, and clearly buy Lisa better car than your neighbor. I mean, those are the obvious answers to this one. But we're going to scratch below the surface. You really want to be a winner and do everything right. Yeah, so each have a few tips for you. Hopefully, this will help. I'm going to start. My first one is, own it, own your own life, take responsibility. I think one of the worst things we do to ourselves, and in terms of sucking it late, is, and this is happening to me too, and the past, is when we start to blame everything else around us and never take any responsibility for ourselves.

1:01And a lot of times, it's just because we're like a freighter, whatever, but we're not living our own life, then we're kind of just existing and blaming everybody else for our existence. Yeah, it's interesting as you bring that up, because the whole self-esteem movement, instead of actually helping with people's self-image, what it did was just create a bunch of narcissists who think there's everything is wrong with everyone else, and they have no introspection whatsoever. So yeah, actually finding your own responsibility in it is quite helpful. Yeah, it created a society totally tearing death people. Right? Yeah, that's it. Yeah. So my first one for Hannah of the Second Life is put down your damn phone. Simple as can be, but it's really not. And everybody's like, but I can't. I need to be available in my old boss 24-7, and in case my wife texts me, she needs to know immediately what I'm doing, where I am, I always need to be available for much of it. And it's like, put you on your damn phone. You're not that important.

2:02Like I remember when I was learning how to scoop a dive a long time ago. There, like the number one thing is there's no real emergencies. Like if you run out of air underwater, struggling isn't going to help you. And then I worked in emergency rooms for 10 years as an emergency vet, and guess what? It's not going to help to be like, oh, emergencies. And really there's no real emergencies because stuff that you can help, you help, and stuff that you can't, it's going to die anyways. So like people need to get over themselves. We're all going to die anyways. And put down damn phone. As a matter of fact, one thing that I found very interesting because it bugged me for a while having a smartphone because I was like, oh, this thing's annoying, but I really need GPS. Like I really need Google Maps. I think Google Maps on the phone is so helpful. Like my number one reason for having one. So I heard about this thing to turn your smartphone into a dumb phone. And it actually is pretty cool because I didn't really use my phone too much before, but now I definitely don't use it. So what you do is you turn your phone to grayscale

3:05because having your phone in black and white makes it a lot less addictive than in color. You take off all social media, you take off your web browser, and then you turn off all notifications. And I have always, that's the first thing I've always done whenever I get a new phone is I turn all my notifications off. There's a lot of times when you transfer your stuff, they'll read, come on or whatever the hell. So I just turn them all, I have everything off. I can't believe how often at the gym, like in the middle of a workout class and somebody's watch beeps, and then they're standing there looking at their phone for five minutes while the whole class goes on totally oblivious to the whole world that they're in a freaking exercise plan. They can't put it down for a half an hour. Yeah, it is funny though. And I think your examples are good though, because really, if doctors, if emergency room vets, if EMT's thought of everything as an emergency, they would be terrible at their jobs. They would be running around like chickens

4:05with their heads cut off, you know, panic, stress. I mean, you would wear out super fast, right? So like it's a good example, and a good way to think of it, how, you know, get some perspective, how much of an emergency is this really, how important is it, just things do happen that are important, but they're rare, but they're not all the time. They're not all refue. Yeah, they're refue. And when they happen, you'll usually find out about it. You know, it's not like, it's gonna be like lots of people we try to contact you, it won't be like one person or something, you know? Yeah, I think that's a good one, I like that. My next one is, face your fears, don't let me yourself. This is a hard one, I think we all struggle with this, but like, we didn't have to sit on this recently. I think, you know, you have to just like, to own your life, you also have to face those things that you're afraid of, and you know, try and live your best life. And I think, you know, for a lot of us, it holds us back and we hold ourselves back, or like the number one reason we're not doing what we wanna do, then the life's like, wanna live and we make concessions that we don't really wanna make. So, face that stuff and start living how you wanna.

5:09Yeah, really, it's like the only person holding us back is ourselves. Nobody else is doing it. It's crazy. And it's crazy. Oh, it's the world, it's them, it's, that's yourself. It's hate that person. It's hate that person. Fears are terrible, like they, but it's cool getting older because when you do face fears, you can look back and be like, holy crap, I was scared of that for so long, and it turned out to be nothing. Yeah. You just, I think too, for getting older, I think you just stop caring as much too. Like, you know, all those things that used to be seen, like so important, I think, well, maybe not for some people, they just start to seem so much less important. You're like, how did I never bother you? Yeah. Why did I care about that? Yeah. So my next one, how not to suck at life, is sleep more. Now, okay, so like, here's an interesting thing. So most sleep experts nowadays say, you know, the ideal amount of sleep for a person is seven to eight hours a night. And it turns out that before electricity,

6:10which was like 150 years ago, the average person slept 11 hours a night. Well, cause what we're gonna do is dark. Yeah, but it's like, and like cost fuel, it costs money, you know, it wasn't so easy to turn it on. Yeah. But it's like, if that doesn't tell you that we're meant to sleep a lot more than we're sleeping right now, I don't know what does. And honestly, like, there's so many things that sleep does for you. They say that like, if you don't sleep enough, you're more likely to eat way too much food the next day. You're more likely to be cranky. Your whole performance goes down. But like, just try it on for a week. Like sleep an extra couple hours a day. And this is something that I've been doing where I intentionally go to sleep cause like I used to have a set bedtime. And I would get into bed then, and then I would read a book and it would be like an hour later, maybe even more before I would go to sleep. So now I just added an extra hour plus to that time. And it seems super early to be getting into bed. But now I'm getting a little bit extra sleep

7:11and I feel so much better in the morning. Yeah, I get up early too, so I really don't care. I go to bed kind of early. I don't really, doesn't bother me. Yeah. Unless like, you know, vacation or something, that's different. You know, if you're just regular routine, it's good to get the extra hours though. It does help a lot. And most people are probably dragon. My last one is keep learning. Don't stop. I think this is also one of the biggest things we do that's like a detriment to ourselves if we stop. We stop being curious about new things, stop exploring new things, stop trying new things, because you know, every new thing you learn, it's new perspectives, new skill sets, new things you can leverage. And it just makes you better person. Yeah, no girl. Yeah, that's a brilliant one. So like learning is very, very important. And lots of people think like, oh, I'll just get the job that pays well and then I'll be done. And that's it. But like, okay, there's this guy, you might have heard of him. His name is Henry Ford. He invented a very popular automobile brand. He said, if money is your hope for independence,

8:15you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability. That's good. That's good. Yeah, right? I've read that the other day and I was like, yeah, like stop chasing money. All you need is knowledge, experience and ability, which basically just comes down to learning and then just messing up until you get it right. Basically, and he did. Did you ever hear that project he did in South America with rubber? Were he tried to make a little pound for a rubber plantation? Well, because he had other people controlled rubber and he wanted rubber for his tire. So he tried to make a rubber plantation but made this little Midwestern town down in the middle of the jungle. There's a total failure. He invested tons of money into it. It was really interesting. He's checking out. Yeah, dude, he was actually Edison was someone who supported, like Ford wasn't sure if automobiles were going to work. He almost gave up on building a gasoline automobile. Really?

9:15Yeah, and then he met Edison and he's like, that's brilliant. A car with its own power plant. That's genius. And then he went and he did it. But like sometimes it's helpful to have some support and conversely, sometimes it's helpful to support people if they have good ideas. Yes, true. So my last one, how not to suck at life is be compassionate with yourself. And this is something that I got from the Tao to Chang. Because I forget exactly what they were. At the end of the Tao to Chang, it was saying there's three things for life. There's simplicity, oh, simplicity, patience and compassion. Those are the three things that you need to learn. And so he goes on to talk about like simplicity, don't have whatever more than you need. Patience, yeah, wait for it. We all know what it is. Yeah. Then he goes on to expound, have compassion with yourself so that you can extend that to the world. And I think that's a key because so often we're like,

10:17force fed, yeah, you need to be compassionate with other people. Be compassionate with people with disabilities, be compassionate with people who listen to you, be compassionate with minorities, be compassionate with this and that and all these other stuff. But it's like actually it starts with being compassionate with yourself because if you are compassionate with yourself that'll naturally extend to everyone else. That's a really good one too, because if you can't be with yourself, you can't be really good with anybody else. Yeah, you're gonna have that same level of anger, frustrations, gonna bubble up whether you like it or not. You're right, it'll just be like pretending. And I think that's true about everything. If you can't do it first with you, you can't do it with anybody else. So it's like, yeah, that's a great one. I think that's a good one to end on. So there you have it. How not to suck at life, hopefully this was helpful. Check us out on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Please like, share, subscribe, leave a review. It's very helpful. We also have a little link survey in the show notes. And I think it's available online that you can check out. Please do if you have time. We'll be back later as we go full length episodes until then, though, later, Annie.

11:18Later, Danny.