I invite you today, the next time you're sad, to say thank you for this sadness right now. What is this teaching me? How can this help me? I've been feeling sad a lot this week, and I don't usually feel very sad — I'm usually very upbeat and happy, more world-domination mindset than feeling powerless. But I've been sad the last week, maybe five days, and the root of the sadness has been in my dating.
Where my sadness came from
I've gone out with so many women and gotten absolutely no return on investment. I mean, not one single relationship from it, hardly even any second dates — despite spending tens of thousands of dollars on matchmaking, on Hinge and Roses and Bumble, and taking women out to dinner and coffee and lunch, and just absolutely nothing. It has been shockingly disappointing. And I've been facing sadness, like: man, how can so many women treat me in a way that feels so bad, that feels like it's just been one humiliation after another?
Don't fight sadness — get curious
A lot of us, what we try and do is fight the sadness, argue with it, debate it, make the other person wrong, and try to do things to compensate for the sadness. And that's the exact wrong approach. What I've done this week is I've said: what do I need to learn from this? There's clearly something I'm missing, because what I find is that if my life is operating with maximum effectiveness, where I'm really loving and living an open-hearted life, I generally will not be sad. I generally will not be down or depressed.
Sadness is a call to action
Sadness, therefore, ends up being a call to action. Sadness is a warning sign that I'm operating out of alignment. Now, sure, some sadness may happen — but even that, to me, like when somebody passes, that's not the same kind of sadness. Often I feel grief when somebody passes, which is a reflection of how much I've loved them. I do feel sad when they pass. But also that sadness is a call to action to find more people to love. I get out there, and I notice that my sadness will tend to disappear once I apply the call to action. My sadness is saying: hey, look, Jerry, there's something you could learn and change in your life. When you learn it and change it, you will feel better again.
So I don't spend much time sad now, because when I'm sad, I say thank you — what are you trying to tell me? And sure, sometimes I start off by saying, "F you, I'm tired of this." I don't usually have days where I'm sad, but I've had days of just moping this week. And then I had a breakthrough yesterday.
What you can do with sadness, if you will avoid numbing it: do not numb it. Do not distract yourself from it. Focus on it, feel it, and say — what are you here to tell me? How am I willing to change? What should I change? Sometimes there will be all these negative narratives. My mind's been like, "Oh, give up on dating, dating is not worth your time, it's never going to happen." No — that's not helpful. Where's the helpful call to action?
You have to be able to think clearly
You really need your mind cleared for this, because if you're drinking, if you're using drugs, if you're into addicted behaviors, it'll block you from seeing things like this. I'm able to see things like this today because I'm not in the middle of drinking, I'm not in the middle of doing drugs, I'm not in the middle of doing things that are screwing up my ability to think clearly. So it is critically important that if you want to be able to process sadness like this, don't do things like drinking or drugs, because it will screw up your ability to think clearly. Once you can think clearly, the calls to action will become pretty obvious.
The call to action: stop trying to date
With me, the call to action was: Jerry, you need to stop trying to date. So many people have said, just be yourself, surrender, stop putting all this effort into dating, focus on building your YouTube channel. Your thinking should be obsessed every day, all day, with what's the next YouTube video. Don't even worry about the last one — what's the next one? Can you make 12 YouTube videos a day, Jerry?
The main times I've been sad are when my dating has distracted me from building my YouTube. My sadness this week showed me that my attention is not going in the place where it's most valued. When I make YouTube videos like this, I've gotten millions of impressions, hundreds of thousands of views, thousands of subscribers, thousands of dollars already, in just the first three months of starting six brand new YouTube channels. My attention on YouTube is clearly very much appreciated. Although I'd had an audience before — I deleted everything, and they came back pretty quick — I'm literally getting viewers on dating channels and gaming channels from scratch. The time I'm putting into YouTube is setting up making money and being a provider. My sadness showed me: Jerry, you need all of your attention on your YouTube channel right now.
Getting my money right
I've leveraged my credit, and I can continue to leverage my credit without making much money for the next six weeks to months if I need to. However, if I don't have my YouTube producing like $10,000 a month — even just $5,000 a month would be enough, but if I don't ideally get to like $10,000 a month within the next six months — I'm looking at having to move out of the house I'm in, and my entire quality of life drops, potentially severely. I might have to move in on somebody's couch or sell my YouTube equipment. I may have to give up on my dreams. Dating doesn't mean anything compared to that.
My kids are the most important people in my life. The house I live in now costs $2,700 a month in rent, and it's an amazing house the kids love, in a great neighborhood where I can have them overnight three or four nights a week. They love it. My ex is very happy with the arrangement. My mother comes over consistently. I am very happy with it. And my sadness showed me: Jerry, you need to stop screwing around dating right now. You need to get your money right, right now. That's what really matters. It doesn't matter if you find somebody to date in the next six months — you'll be just fine without a woman to date. But if you don't get your money right in the next six months, you will potentially be uncomfortable, and your kids may lose out on time with you. So stop focusing on dating.
I'm not giving up on dating forever
That's not to say I need to give up forever on dating. I'm not going to give up forever on dating. But right now, my mind should not be putting time and energy into dating. If you want to follow all of that, I go into it in much more detail over on my Dating playlist.
When you change, the sadness lifts
It was my sadness — just feeling like I needed to cry, crying, feeling like everything sucks, like nothing in my life even makes sense, like the world's totally an unfair, awful place. It was days of that. But my sadness broke, and the key breaking factor was seeing what I need to change. And what's beautiful is, when I make a change, I sometimes will have weeks, sometimes even months, where I barely have any sadness. Because when I'm operating at maximum effectiveness, almost any of the things you would think would make me sad don't. I just continue to flow and go through the flow of life. I accept the things that might make me sad. But when I'm out of alignment with my own self and how I'm contributing to life, the sadness is there to show me the difference: here's where you want to be.
I want to give you millions of dollars of value
Where I want to be is making $10,000 a month on YouTube — and I want to be doing that by giving you huge amounts of value in your life. There are things I could do to just trade my time for money; I could easily make $100,000-plus a year doing some marketing or tech job. But I want to give you millions of dollars of value every month on YouTube, and in return I'll take back a fraction of what I give.
Some of you have fought with sadness your entire life. In this one video, I may be able to help you change your outlook on sadness and dramatically change how you approach your emotions from here. That's priceless — it's something you might spend $10,000-plus working with a therapist on. If I can give you this idea directly in a video, or turned into a blog post, that's the kind of value I want to give. But I can't give out millions of dollars of value while I'm obsessed with wondering if a woman's going to text me back, or when I'm going to have my next date, or while I'm taking four hours to drive to Orlando to meet a woman for a date who doesn't even like me as soon as I meet her. I don't have time to be spending hours on Hinge, not getting a single match, sending roses, then matching with people who waste my time. I literally had one woman on Hinge where I could have made five or ten videos like this in the amount of time I spent messaging her — and I ended up unmatching her, because she just asked me personal questions and then criticized me over my answers. That's where I was sad: I was sad to see the opportunity I missed. I could have been creating huge value for you here, but instead I was fooling around with somebody I'm unlikely to ever meet in person and have no way to contact again.
Stop fighting sadness, start getting curious
So I hope this is a breakthrough for you: stop fighting sadness and start getting curious. What's really happening inside me? Where does my sadness indicate a call to action to change? Try some affirmations — "I'm willing to change" — and you may see it. If you want to build a life you don't have to escape from, a life you're proud of, the basis for that is relationships and dating (even if dating right now just means stop trying for a while and get your money right), being happy with enough money, and being at the forefront of technology, crypto, and AI. If you want a mentor who's been there and done that — through divorce, through losing weight, through getting sober, through making millions of dollars online and burning it down and building it back up again — I'm here at jerrybanfield.com every day. And if you want the whole journey, money and mindset and the comeback, that's what I document on my Life playlist.