I want to tell you about a book I am reading called The Mountain Is You, which is all about self-sabotage. I think a lot of us struggle with this, and I personally have struggled a lot with self-sabotage, where I screw myself over, where I get exactly what I want and then I destroy it. A perfect example is when I built a crypto channel with 47,000 subscribers and then deleted it.
What I was reading about recently really hit me today. The author talks about making changes, and how a lot of us try to make little changes. The problem is that most of us actually attempt big wholesale changes instead. We say things like, I am going to stop drinking, stop doing drugs, stop having sex, stop eating all this stuff, stop gambling, and I am going to move and go back to school, all at once. What then happens is you run into this pain of the unknown, the pain of the unfamiliar.
The Strange Pain of Getting What You Want
The craziest thing I have noticed is that when I get what I want, it is often very uncomfortable. For example, the first time I got with a stunningly beautiful, perfect-ten looking girl, I had set up my whole life around that. To me at the time, that was hitting the highest level. Money, power, all that stuff did not matter. I believed that if you could just have sex with the hottest girl, then you had reached perfect happiness. I did hit quite a peak of euphoria the night it happened, and I was still feeling pretty good the next day, which was Thursday. But then on Friday, I went into the depths of depression and misery like I had never seen before.
Now I had gotten exactly what I wanted. This girl really liked me, everything was working out, I was getting what I wanted, and I still was not happy. Now what? That was the feeling: now I am really hopeless, because there is nothing else in the world I could delude myself into thinking would make me happy. In The Mountain Is You, the author talks about exactly this experience of getting what you want. Our brains and our bodies tend to be programmed to keep us where we are. Because they are programmed to keep us where we are, if we suddenly get to where we want to be, it will often be miserable.
I can say the same thing about blowing up on Facebook gaming. I achieved my dream in 2020 and 2021 of being a famous streamer. Thousands of people watching concurrently, sometimes hundreds of thousands of views, sometimes close to a million views on my live streams. I could literally just play a retro game and boom, the audience was there. I could play Call of Duty Warzone solos, get really good at the game, and make money doing it. And it was uncomfortable. It was stressful. I kept thinking, why does this suck so much? This is the destination I aimed for, and I am here, but it is not as good as I thought.
What really hit me in the book is that you should expect a period of discomfort when you arrive, even in a situation that is objectively better. Back when I was chasing that relationship, I did not know that when you really get what you want, it will often bring you into a place where now life does not make sense. It is all depressing, it is all wrong, and internally it feels like everything sucks. It is so shocking the first time that happens. Graduating college was the same way. This was a thing I had looked forward to for so long, and I thought I would really have my life together. Instead, one of the darker times in my life was right after I graduated college. It was that same feeling: now what?
Small Changes That Actually Stick
The solution appears to be either to consciously know and expect that experience, or to make little adjustments so you get yourself there slowly, or both. This is something I had never heard before. The author talks about how, if you want to make your life better, you just make small changes, stick with them, and then put those changes together. That is how you do it. And that is what I have done over the last 11 years that I have been sober.
Now, getting sober was a drastic change at first, and the first three months were hard. That is what is so crazy about stopping a bad habit, whether it is alcoholism, drugs, gambling, womanizing, shopping, over- or under-eating, or whatever you want to call your bad habit. The crazy thing is that objectively, from everybody else's point of view, your life looks like it is getting better. With getting sober, I got more energy. My God, I had so much energy. I could hardly sleep at night. I could go all day, hardly sleep at all, and then keep going the next day, because I was not depressing my body with alcohol anymore. I had all this energy and I dumped it into my business.
But it was uncomfortable, because I was used to having hangovers, I was used to feeling like garbage several days a week. You would think you clear that out and everything should be awesome. Instead, you clear that out and now you are in unfamiliar territory that feels strange, where you feel lost, where you do not know what to expect anymore, where you do not know how you are going to behave. And then you are irritable and anxious. This is why so many of us struggle to change our habits.
For me, getting sober was something I could not just taper off and drink a little bit less. That did not work for me. But thankfully, for a lot of other things, I have been able to make a little positive change. Say no to ice cream. Stop eating before you are bloated. Go to bed just a little bit earlier, 10 minutes earlier. Go for a one-mile run, because you do not need to run a marathon like my wife did. Or just go lift weights for 20 minutes at the gym. Little changes.
I recently started running because I love that my body can run, and I never want my body to lose the ability to run a mile in under 10 minutes. So the logical thing to do is to run a mile. At first I started running a mile every single day, no matter what. Even if I played tennis, did yoga, and walked the dog, I still ran my mile, because it is just 10 minutes and I figured I should be able to do it every day. But that got to be too much, and I realized that running a mile is a tool. If you play tennis for two hours and do a power yoga session, maybe you do not need to run a mile that day. But on a day like today, when all I did was lift weights for 20 minutes, that is a day to run one mile. And for your physical fitness, this is not medical advice, but in my experience if you sit around all day, just taking a 10-minute walk is a big improvement.
You Have to Be Able to Handle the Life You Want
What I have noticed since I got sober is that a lot of little improvements will get you to a destination that, if you suddenly arrived there, you would not be able to handle. Some of you, if you suddenly jumped into my life, would struggle with it. I am sober, my body is the healthiest it has ever been, I am very active, I am full of energy, I have a fantastic wife most of the time, I have kids that I love, I have work that I love most of the time, and I am popular and friendly. And yet some of you, if you jumped straight into this life, would hate it and find it horrifying. Even if you think this is exactly what you want, the trick is that you have to give up what you have to get something new.
For me, I have had a lot of resistance around popularity. When I get to a certain level of it, it starts to feel uncomfortable. I had a really cool experience today. I was walking home from the gym and a meeting when a guy pulled up in a car, rolled his window down, and said, Jerry Banfield, I have been watching you for 10 years. It was awesome. I asked him, you mean back when I was doing zombies? And he said, yeah, you were doing zombies and then you got into crypto. He said he had not seen me lately because he used to watch on Facebook. That is really cool. But when I first started experiencing that, it made me uncomfortable. I felt like I could not go anywhere and just be a regular person. It was really uncomfortable to go to a conference where a bunch of people recognized me, and that kept happening repeatedly. It is so weird to get what you want and then not like it, and I have experienced that so many times.
So I am glad I am reading this book. I do want to make videos that reach the maximum potential audience they are going to reach. If that means I need to get used to being more famous, then I need to get used to it. The same goes for money. A lot of us are not comfortable having more money, and I have noticed I have sabotaged having more money a bunch of times. Believe it or not, there is this survival instinct, this adrenaline mindset you get when you do not have enough money, and once you have money, that is gone.
For example, I am going to drop my car insurance down to only what is legally required by law. I am dropping comprehensive and all of that, because I have enough money in the bank to just buy a brand new car, and my wife does too, and I have crypto. I have enough money where anything that goes wrong, I can just pay to fix it. There is no stress. I do not have a job I have to show up to every day, and I can film videos. When I go to the store and go shopping, I do not even look at the prices most of the time. I do not even care what it costs. The beautiful girl at Crunch Fitness who was signing me up today told me it was only a dollar, and I told her I did not really care. I have enough money where I do not care if it is 10, 20, or 50 dollars. That is a small enough amount that it does not matter. Whether it is 10 dollars a month or 20 or 30 or 40, it is not an amount I am going to notice.
That is a surprising thing. You would think that state would be purely desirable, but it is actually a different, scary mindset to acclimate to. I am telling you all of this just as much so that I can remember it myself, because I want to stop sabotaging. I intend to go forward and get more and more comfortable, and to consciously acclimate to having the things I love and the things I want in my life, so that I do not get them and then trash them again. If you want to follow more of this journey, you can find it on my Life playlist.