I Know What to Do, but I Don't Do It
I know what to do, but I don't do it. Why? If you've ever related to this or had this struggle, I think you'll really appreciate this. I'm recording it live on Twitch on my 4,993rd day on YouTube, January 29, 2025. Here's my example for today: I know exactly what I need to do with my music. All I need to do is make a sick dance set. That's it. Make an incredible Ableton Live dance set. So do you know what I've done? I've known this for quite a while, and I haven't done it.
Can you relate to doing this in your own life? Often there are things you need to do that will advance your life. You know what they are, and then you don't do them. Why? Why don't you do them? What I've noticed is that there are a lot of reasons, and I'll try to recall them from my own history in the hope that it helps you.
Doing It Plunges You Into the Unknown
If you know you need to do something to change your financial situation, such as quit a job, get a new job, or learn a new skill, often you won't do it. One of the weirdest reasons is that if you actually do what you know you need to do, it'll plunge you into the unknown, and you'll have to change your identity.
For example, I knew I needed to get sober for a long time. But if I get sober, then I don't know what my life is going to be like anymore. I knew it would be better, but it still felt like plunging into the unknown. I'd have to give up my identity as this person who drinks. And then I don't know who I am anymore.
If you're single and you know you want a girlfriend, you know you should go to the gym and work out, you know you should get on online dating, often you'll know you should do these things and you won't do them. Because if you actually do them, you'll get what you want, and then you'll have to change your identity. In my experience, some of the worst times in my life have come right after I had my whole identity pinned on one thing and then I got what I wanted. I had my identity pinned on being this frustrated single guy, and then I get with a beautiful woman, and all of a sudden I'm not a guy who struggles to get with girls anymore. I'm a guy who gets women I'm really attracted to fall in love with me. So who am I now? This identity of the frustrated single guy is gone, and yet somehow it's still there. Now my life is confusing and doesn't make any sense.
It's the same with my music. If I actually get an incredible dance set built, which I'm close to, then everything changes. What's frustrating is that you'll be so close, and then you'll quit, or something will come up.
The Short-Term Pain of Change
I have a friend who is at the highest weight she's ever been. She knows what she needs to do. She needs to change her eating. She needs to get back to the gym. But she doesn't do it. Why not? From my point of view, it's because you don't want to get rid of this identity. You don't want to let go of this experience. There's a part of you that wants to keep struggling with the weight and keep eating the way you've been eating, because you don't want to have to go through the short-term pain and uncertainty of change.
Take getting sober. Getting sober is so obviously an awesome thing, and it made my life so much better. So any rational person would ask, why wouldn't you just immediately do that? Why would anyone struggle and be miserable with alcoholism when you could get sober and have a much better life? Well, in the short term, it's so much harder to get sober. In the short term, I had to stop what I was doing and go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, read the book, and face all these painful things I'd been through. In the short term with my dance music, if I focus on just working on my set in Ableton Live, I can't make any songs yet. I have to watch tutorials. I don't know what to do. I have to try things and have them not work. In the short term, it's harder to do it.
But in the long term, I'm so glad I got sober in 2014. I'm so glad I basically stopped my life and put the work into going through the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and getting a sponsor. For so long I avoided that. I knew I should stop drinking, and I didn't.
When What You Tried Before Didn't Work
Here's another big reason I know what to do but don't do it: in the past, I knew what to do, I did it, and it didn't work. A lot of times you have bad ideas. You have ideas that won't work. You have ideas that are simply wrong. And when you do the things you think you should do, you sometimes get proven wrong, and that leads to some serious confusion.
For example, when I was building my business, I knew I needed to quit playing video games. So I quit playing video games. Then I knew I should set up an online course platform and teach courses to make money. And then it blew up in my face and didn't work. After a year, I'd borrowed all this money and it had all gone wrong. I realized I could have just kept playing video games, spent less money, and come out way ahead. I could have done what I really wanted to do, but I screwed it all up. The thing I thought I should do turned out to be wrong.
What I'm grateful for now is that I consistently act. If something feels to me like I know what to do, I just do it. Because if it's wrong, then I'll drop that as the thing to do, and then I'll face the confusion and uncertainty of figuring out a new way, learning, and advancing. To me, the worst thing is being stuck in that place of thinking you really want to do something, or you'd love to do it, but you can't do it now, so you keep putting it off.
Changing Behavior and Asking for Help
For so many years I was in that place. With my weight, I knew I needed to eat differently, but I didn't know how to eat differently. One of the hard things is that if you want to change your life, you often need to change your behavior. And to change your behavior, you need to ask for help. You need to read some new books. You need to change what you're doing. If you want to eat healthy, you need to stop going to the restaurants where everybody there is overweight.
I remember sitting in a fast food restaurant one night, struggling with my weight, looking around, and everybody in there was heavier than me. The thought came: if you eat here, you'll be like them. You're eating here today, so you're like them. Today, I'm in great shape, and I love my weight. I'm really happy about it. That means I don't get to go eat at fast food restaurants the vast majority of the time. Occasionally, maybe once a month, I'll go somewhere with the family. I can go out to dinner somewhere. But the vast majority of my eating, I don't get to do that.
Being accountable to other people really helps too, because what we often need is other people to help us do the thing when it's really hard. When I needed to get sober, I needed a lot of people to show me how to do it. A lot of times we keep this idea of "I know what to do, I just don't do it" out there as a kind of safety net. It's like, well, if I ever really need to get sober, I'll just go to AA. But then you don't actually do it. So everyone around you wonders, I guess you don't really want to get sober. You really need a support system, and you need encouragement.
A lot of times you realize that what you think you need to do isn't right, and what you actually need is a mentor who has been there and done what you want to do. For things like getting sober or losing weight, I've been there and I've done that. What worked for me, I can tell you very quickly. Number one, eat a whole plant-based diet. To do that, you'll probably need to read the book How Not to Die, and then read the whole book How Not to Diet. Then you make that your new way of eating. Another thing that helped me was not eating at night, minimizing going out to eat, and living an active, exercise-filled lifestyle. In my experience, it really is that simple. So why do so many people know that and not do it? And why do other people know they should go on some crappy diet, yet never even do the action they already know is wrong?
Be Okay With Doing It Badly at First
Sometimes you have to be okay with not doing it perfectly. A lot of us don't want to do something we know we're going to screw up, something we're not going to be good at. When you first go to Alcoholics Anonymous, you're a mess. You need help. When I first make music, it's a mess. It's hard to listen to. But you have to have that idea anyway. When I first played Call of Duty Warzone, I was horrible at it, but I had the audacious idea that I could be a professional gamer one day. Less than a year later, I was on my way to making $100,000 a year playing video games. You can follow more of these reflections on my Life playlist.
So today, I'm going to do what I know I need to do.