Balance is a Trap
Imagine yourself in a children’s playground.
Right in the middle of that playground, there’s a seesaw (teeter-totter).
You’re standing in the middle, right at the balance point, facing towards the end where a person would normally sit. Your feet are in front and behind you.You have both arms spread out to keep your balance.
As you shift your weight towards your back foot, the front end lifts up. This is how life is when you’re making progress. The balance is tipped upwards towards success, and everything’s looking good!
Lean back too much, and the seesaw hits the ground. But, if you lean into it, you can keep it tilted upwards.
Tip the balance too far, or the wind blows, and things start wobbling a bit.
Now you’re afraid of falling. Work too hard, lean too far, and you could lose your balance and fail at any minute, or burn out.
You tell yourself you MUST slow down or take a break.
In order to maintain balance, you MUST back off. NOW!
So, you take a half-step toward the center, maintain the balance, and your fear subsides.
Everything’s all back to normal.
The balance is restored.
Right in the middle.
Safe.
Welcome to the average way of life, maintaining a balance.
This is your captain speaking, we’re maintaining a safe, easy cruising balance of NET ZERO.
Every time you start getting somewhere, you back off and cancel it out, all over again.
Balance consistently produces NET ZEROS… … it’s a fucking trap, and you know it.
In case you hadn’t noticed yet, balance is bullshit.
So, how do you get out of it?
First, it’s important to understand the game we’re all playing, isn’t even fair to begin with.
The Game is Rigged Against Progress
In life, it’s important to know that making any progress at all is hard, even from the very beginning.
As you first stepped onto the seesaw at the low end, it was already an uphill struggle to get into the middle.
Just to have the opportunity to maintain balance, you had to work hard to get there. Not only that, but it’s also hard work to maintain it! So don’t be so hard on yourself, if that’s where you’re at in life right now.
To make things worse, the game is also rigged against us making progress.
Backwards is MUCH EASIER than Forwards
You work hard, and you start to make some real progress for a while. Hell, you even begin to feel great about yourself. But then you make one little mistake, and you’re right back where you started, or worse.
- You save money and build up an emergency fund. Just when you start to feel secure, it gets wiped out by a car repair, dentist’s bill, or an unexpected financial disaster, and you’re left with nothing, all over again
- You’ve been dieting and exercising daily for 6 long months, losing weight, looking good, and start to feel really awesome! Then, you take a weekend break, relax, party, drink a little too much, and eat the wrong foods. In just a few days, you’re right back where you started
- After 8 months of working your ass off in your sales job, you take it easy for a couple weeks. The next month, your left with a paycheck so small, you wipe out all your reserve cash. So, it’s back to square one for you
Isn’t it weird how that works? Not really.
When it comes to success… ….going backwards is always a lot easier and faster, than making progress, or moving forwards, ever was.
Life going downhill is so much easier, than an uphill climb. But the best views… …the ones worth seeing, are at the top of the mountains.
The point is, when it comes to making progress, the game’s rigged against you.
Know the Rules, Win the Game
You lose 10 pounds in 3 months; it takes 1 week to gain it back again.
Saving a $5,000.00 emergency fund can take 6 months, only to be wiped out in one day, one emergency, one bad month, or by one dishonest person.
And?
So what?
Those are the rules of the game we ALL play.
Always has been, always will be.
Life’s not fair. It never was.
It’s rigged against progress.
Harder to win, than it is to lose.
But knowing the rules of the game, is half the battle.
And we all begin with exactly the same thing.
Nothing.
We’re All Born with Nothing
We’re born with nothing, then step up into the game.
And yes, we’re all playing exactly the same game.
Sure, some people have it harder than others. I myself had a harder start than many. Others had it even much harder than I did.
There are also people out there that seem to have everything handed to them. But don’t be fooled into imagining they have it easy. Sure, they got a foot up into the game, and some start off right in the middle.
But, balancing and maintaining, is just as hard for everyone. Sometimes it even seems like the more you have to lose, the faster you can lose it all, by slipping downhill again.
When you start adding responsibilities, the more you have, the harder things get.
Responsibilities Add More Weight in Front of You
Thinking back to the seesaw, imagine all of your responsibilities were weight being added in front of you, tipping your life downhill.
When you add a responsibility, whether it’s financial, a time commitment, get married, have a child, etc., it’s like grabbing a boulder, or a sandbag, and putting it on the end in front of you.
Your rent / mortgage, bills, car payments, debts, etc. Each one is just more weight in front of you, pushing the balance downhill.
The more responsibility you have, the more money you need even just to stay balanced.
This makes it even harder to tip the balance in your favor again, and easier to fall if you DO slip up.
If you do have kids (like me), you’ll probably understand this a little better than people that don’t.
I love my kids, more than anything. But they ARE definitely sitting in front of me on the seesaw, happily bouncing away. It IS my job to keep them weighted upwards at ALL TIMES. I accept that responsibility with honor, but that doesn’t make it any easier to do.
Add some credit card debt, a couple cars, a mortgage, etc. Now you’ve got yourself a whole school yard full of kids sitting right in front of you, laughing, BOUNCING TOGETHER!
It can be SO HARD SOMETIMES even just to maintain a balance in life.
And THAT my friend… …is where we begin to understand the rules of engagement.
Add to that the internal struggles (that we all face in different ways), and the whole thing begins to make even more sense.
If you didn’t understand there’s an internal fight going on already, allow me to introduce you to the two fighters…
The True You vs The Real You
The true you, and the real you, are fighting it out constantly.
- The true you is the hard-working, forward progress making, good side of you.
- The real you is the one that takes you on those weekends away, nights out, shopping sprees to relax, or just a few evenings off, to watch TV and eat crap. The fun side of you.
They’re the players in this game, and you must get them working together, to succeed.
When the two of you are fighting, only half of you is working towards success. Can you begin to see what makes succeeding and getting out of a balance is so hard now?
Half of you is working for something, and the other half of you is tearing it down quicker than you can build it.
If you have issues with your own internal struggle, want to learn more about how it affects your success, and how to win that battle every time, I go into much more detail about it here, in this blog post.
You Never Want Your Life to be Balanced
A balanced life is a net zero.
I’ve been there. Trust me. I understand just like you do, that it’s total bullshit. It sucks balls.
You NEVER want life to be balanced.
At all times, you need to tip the balance of life in your favor and keep it there.
As mentioned earlier, the game is also rigged. So, keeping everything tipped in your favor is much harder than maintaining a balance, which is already super hard to begin with.
But those are the rules of the game.
Give Up, and Start Racing Downhill
Some people, the moment they figure out the rules are stacked against them, they decide to give up. They strike out, go for the easy way, take shortcuts and allow themselves too much slack.
Their lives are set to continue downhill forever, and they’re okay with that.
My father is an example of this. He’s a career alcoholic, and a lifetime smoker. He retired with almost nothing, because he always spent everything he earned. And at 67 years old, with the damage he has done to his body he has lung disease and is already suffering from dementia.
This is the easy way. The downhill race.
My dad’s winning that one. Hard.
Tipping the Balance to Succeed
Average people work hard as fuck their whole lives, only to maintain a balance, getting nowhere, struggling.
This is the way almost everyone you know (maybe even you), are doing it right now.
Or… ….you can tip the balance in your favor, and start winning, today.
The most awesome thing about this, is the tiny amount of change it takes to completely change the direction of your life, forever.
If you’re balanced, at a net zero, and stuck in a balanced economy, you’re much closer to success, than you think.
Would you believe me if I told you that all you need is a 2% improvement to permanently change the direction of your life, forever?
Yet it’s 100% true.
If you commit to making just 2 degrees of change in your life, you’ll barely even notice the changes you’ve made.
Yet they’ll end up so life changing, the entire destination of your life will be completely transformed.
2 degrees of change put you on the path to success, instantly.
2 Degrees of Change
If a plane headed for London, UK, took off from Los Angeles, California, and changed its course by 2 degrees south on take-off, it would no longer land in the same country.
This 2 degree shift, means the plan could land in the South of France, Spain, or Portugal.
These are totally different countries, with different languages, warmer climates, different money, and a whole different culture.
That’s the difference altering the course of your life by just 2 degrees can have.
Tip your life balance in your favor, by just 2 degrees, and change your life’s destination completely, forever.
It only takes a few, very simple, easy changes. You’ll hardly even notice you’re living any differently, and not only that, but it also compounds over time, and gets easier an easier, as you go.
Let me show you some simple changes you need to make, and how to easily implement them, to change your life course by 2 degrees, today.
Check out my blog post on the 2 degrees of change, to get moving on it right now.
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