 This is the reason why your life isn't getting better. Now you've probably seen the scene from The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the red pill or the blue pill. Basically, you can stay in The Matrix or you can wake up to another version of reality. But they were wrong because in reality in life you have three decisions. Now that third decision is the decision to either run towards something you love, run away from something that you hate or unfortunately the third which is the most dangerous which is stay the exact same and freeze. Now this video is going to focus on that third one because it is the insidious path that many of us end up taking without realizing we're making a decision. What's up guys, it's Alex Hine, author of Master of the Day, let's get in it. So in reality, you have three decisions in life when it comes to any macro major decision. You can run away from it, like run away from an abusive person you're dating. You can run towards it, like you can pursue someone that you are fancying or you're in love with or chase that job you want or try to write the book that you wanna write or you can do option three which is what so many of us do which is absolutely nothing. Now the freeze response is the most dangerous because in your mind you don't think you're actually making a decision at all but in reality you are. You're making a decision to resign yourself to fate and whatever your boss thinks is going to go. Whatever the macroeconomic climate is is going to influence you. Whatever your significant other wants to do is what's going to happen whether they're healthy or whether they're toxic. So the freeze response, aka not deciding is the most dangerous response you can have in your life because it is a decision and it's the decision to, I'm just gonna stick my head in the sand, hope that nothing changes and then everything will be fine. A perfect example I like to give is for example when I was in my early 20s and feeling very lost in life. I thought that, well, maybe if I just don't address my financial life it'll all work out in the end. I'm gonna go to school and I'm gonna take on this debt from my undergrad and I'm not gonna worry about the loans until I just get to my whatever, 30s. And what happened was, I got to my 30s and my indecision, remember, freeze, not deciding eventually caught up with me because now not only did I have undergraduate loans now that I've done a doctorate I also have doctoral medical loans which were the two combined. And once I was seeing that and I entered panic mode then I actually formed a plan to actually do something about that. And in the same way what happens is for so many people a reason that we have life regrets is that we say when I'm 40 or when I'm 50 I'll have written a book. And yet the problem is we went through our 20s and then we go through our 30s and then we're like, oh crap, I'm 39. And I said next year was gonna be the year that I actually write the book that I've always wanted to write. And now we wake up on the eve of our 40th birthday we haven't even written down the title of our book and we're still delusional enough to think that one day I'm gonna wake up and it's just going to be written. I would say all of this just to reiterate the fact that not doing anything is the most dangerous action that you can take in your life. It is better to decide for or against something but to make a decision than it is to stay the same. Now the second thing to think about from a macro point of view is that the pain of discipline is not as painful as the pain of regret. Now this is a quote from the author Jim Rohn and I absolutely love it for a few reasons. You know, I've put together a free seven day self growth challenge and one of the videos we talk about it's the link right below this video is this exact concept because while anyone can begin changing their life over a course of seven days it's the whole point of this little free video series I've put together while anyone can do that the question is many of us will put things off until they are so painful that now we are forced to change. Most of us will wait to the eve of our 40th birthday to write the book because now we're feeling like a loser because we didn't do anything in our lives now we're 40 or for so many of us that are just too busy coasting you know, gained 10, 20 pounds maybe started smoking a little bit of weed at night because it just helps you unwind doing nothing on the weekends just because it's a little bit easier and it's a little more restful we need to be broken up with by the woman we love in order to actually take action and do something different in our lives that is unfortunately more true than it is not true for most of us. Now an example I like to give is in my doctoral program which is a full time medical program I mean it was 50 or 60 hours a week I was one of the only people to work 20 hours per week do you think working 70 or 80 hours a week is fun? Nothing about it is fun it's the ultimate sacrifice of working 12 hours a day basically every single day Sunday was a half day of work only working six hours and it did that for four years and it was one of the hardest things I've ever done and one of the most damaging to my health ultimately but now years later when I'm back to normal and I'm feeling well I can look back on that sacrifice of being in class or studying nine to six and then having to work six to 10 and then working every single Friday, Saturday and Sunday when I would much rather just relax on the couch go work in a cafe or just sleep in I can now look back after those four years and I have one fifth of the student debt I would have had that my colleagues now medical professionals also have and many of them will never pay off that debt until the day that they die and I made that extreme sacrifice because I knew that it would be four of the hardest but most fulfilling years for a lifetime of being debt free and that was a sacrifice that I was willing to consciously make so for you it may mean making a similar sacrifice the sacrifice to come home and work on your business for two or three hours every night so that in two or three years you're not going home and complaining to your spouse that you hate your job so much and you're not having collateral damage of being unhappy and going home to drink two glasses of wine or you've gained 20 pounds because you're always eating out because you're unhappy the pain of discipline is less than the pain of regret now the last thing I want to leave you with is that change in life comes from changing the little things not from having these massive, massive, massive goals because your day is ultimately a reflection of rituals and your life is a reflection of your days, right? I wrote this whole bloody book to explain that ultimately the way you change your life for example, you go from being a smoker to a non-smoker or someone who's 20 or 30 pounds overweight to someone who's in shape or someone who's consistently negative and pretty depressed for mental reasons not physiological reasons to someone who's relatively upbeat or at least neutral is by changing the little things regarding the way you live day to day it's when you wake up, you decide that you know what? This is not my most happy phase of life I don't like where I live I can't afford to do anything I can't afford a vacation I don't like my job I have no friends or I have negative friends my family doesn't support me and yet you can decide that you know one of the rituals I'm gonna do to help my mental state is I'm gonna listen to an audio book a self-improvement book every morning just for 30 or 40 minutes and it's going to be positive and instructional and it's going to help me get focused on how to start my morning off right and then in the morning I'm gonna start making better decisions for breakfast and in the evening after my nine to five I'm gonna work out because I know as soon as I walk in that door and sit on the couch nothing gets done the rest of the day those little decisions are what turn a clinically depressed person barring certain medications and barring if it's a really really deep physiological issue to someone who's now neutral or even positive and a little bit optimistic about the future and in a year they're now 10 pounds lighter they're happy they're motivated and they're actually working towards their goals every day for the first time in their life the way you change your life is from the little things and while you may have those big macro goals those big rocks those rocks have to ultimately come down to a tiny ritual you do every single day to feel better now these big rocks is something that I talk about a lot my best year goal-setting program this is something where we talk about how do you actually turn a big rock into a daily ritual a master the day daily ritual if I had to pick my life and turn it into a day what does that look like? so we discuss how do you figure out what those big rocks are that will change your life and what are those daily rituals that are going to do that now I've just launched something brand new which is called the monks courtyard which is a collection of about half a dozen courses I have on how to basically design your dream life going forward so you guys can check it out we have a time limited special because this is a brand new thing that we haven't offered before but check it out down there below because like I said the best year goal-setting program talks about everything we've talked about in this video but in general the main thing that I want to leave you with here is that don't freeze and procrastinate on designing your best life because while it's yes it's hard to fight yes it's easy to flee it is even harder to make a decision when the tendency is to want to stay the same because it feels safe it feels secure but it isn't because one day you're going to wake up and realize the price of an action was actually very very high so before you guys go I actually talk about this in a related video on designing your dream life right here