Chasing Your Dream Through Setbacks: A Course on Keeping Discipline

1. Class Intro and My Setback: Hey, everyone, welcome to chasing your dreams through setbacks. A course on keeping discipline. My name is Max Anderson. I'm a filmmaker from Alaska, currently living in Los Angeles. I'm pursuing my dream of becoming a professional feature film editor, so this course could have easily been just a course on discipline. But I took it one step further, and I'm going to cover first how to become disciplined and then how to maintain your discipline when life throws you curveballs. Now everybody experiences setbacks in life, but we cannot allow them to stop us from pursuing our dreams. We have to push against those setbacks and crush them. Here's my most recent setback that I've been working on overcoming. A couple of months ago, I was working on a test video for a potential new client. If they like the video that I provided, they would hire me to make more for them. So all of the footage was shot and it was about 90% edited. I was biking home from work on the day that I was going to finish editing. It was a normal route that I had taken hundreds of times, but on that day As I was biking, my foot slipped off the pedal. I lost control and I went down hard. I went down like this guy. The fall severely sprained my left shoulder. I was in extreme pain after the crash. I couldn't move my shoulder. It was all throbbing. Just who had hurt so bad I could have easily stopped my video project right there. I could have said, Well, I'm injured. I can't edit. I guess I'm gonna lose that potential client. But I didn't let that happen. Instead, the following morning, I set up a makeshift desk next to my couch. It was just an ironing board that I propped up so that I could put my computer next to it. So I wasn't actually able to get to my computer. So I asked my girlfriend to grab the cords and bring it over to my makeshift desk. Once everything was set up next to my couch, I put an ice pack on and started editing, editing. That last 10% of the video with just one arm took about as long as it took to edit the 1st 90% of the video with both arms. I was in extreme pain. I was moving super slowly and editing took forever. But finally, after half of a day of editing, I finished the video, delivered it to the client and waited. They love the video. They loved it so much that they hired me again and again to make more and more videos for them. And since delivering that first test project, I've made weekly videos with that company for the past couple of months. Even when my arm was in a sling, I continued to pump out videos. This highlights the importance of chasing your dreams even when you experience setbacks. And I couldn't have done what I did without a solid foundation in discipline. So in the next handful of videos, we'll talk about how you can become disciplined and then maintain your discipline, even when setbacks before you before we continue. Please write in the comments. What dream it is that you're chasing? Are you writing a new book or you're starting a new business? Are you trying to get healthier? What do you getting after? I want to know. Once you've done that, hop on to the next video 2. Discipline and Time: What do you think of when you think about discipline? Do you think of the military? Or do you think of very strict teachers who would always try to keep the kids in line? For me, discipline is not about militaristic uniformity. It's not about a lack of creativity. It's a system of managing time so that you maximize each and every hour of your day. It's a tool to help you constantly pursue your goals, no matter what life throws at you. If you have a structure in which you block out time for personal goals and you always stick to that structure than being disciplined will allow you to achieve your goals more quickly . Suppose you're a writer and you're right on Lee. When inspiration strikes, Does inspiration strike you every single day? Does it strike you every week? What about every month? Every writer knows that he or she cannot write on Lee. When inspiration strikes, a professional writer is going to write every single day. No matter of here, she is feeling inspired or not. It's the constant grind in the constant struggle that allows creativity to flow and ideas to come. That's why you need to block out time every single day for tasks which will move you towards your goals. So, like I said earlier, the foundation of discipline is how you manage your time. Luckily, my mother taught me that being early is on time. If she had an appointment at 1 p.m. she would show up no later than 12 45. If she were to show about 1 p.m. She would consider that late, and that's unacceptable. I have also adopted that mindset. I do everything in my power to make sure that I'm on time. Most of the time I'm not perfect. So yes, sometimes I will show up late to things. But most of the time I'd say 99.5% of the time I'm on time. I hate being late to things because if you're late, two things, it shows that you're unprepared and you don't have your stuff together. You know what it's like when you're at a meeting and you're sitting at a table with five or six others and you're waiting on that one person who's always late. And then here she walks in. They're all fluster like Oh man, I'm sorry. Traffic was bad. I drop my candy bar into a gutter and I had to reach and grab it and took forever. That person just looks unprepared and it seems like he or she doesn't care. Do you want to work with someone like that? Of course not. So don't be that person. So I treat every single day as if it were a meeting instead of waking up at the last moment and then rushing to get everything ready in the mornings, I wake up extremely early, sometimes around four or 4:30 a.m. And I started the day on my terms. Now I don't think everybody should wake up at four or 4 30 in the morning. It really just depends on your schedule. For example, if you're a bartender and you tend bar until, like, four in the morning, I wouldn't expect you to wake up at 4 30 start getting after your day. If you worked until four in the morning, then maybe you can wake up the next day around noon or one instead of sleeping in until four PM whatever your schedule looks like, I advocate for not oversleeping, never hitting the snooze button and getting out of bed immediately when your alarm goes off . If you do these things in the morning, you're showing yourself that you take your day seriously before going on to the next video . I want you to do this. Grab a blank piece of paper and at the top, right. Foundations of discipline. Below that, I want you to write time. I used to wake up, put a colon and write the time that you normally would wake up. So if you wake up at 6 a.m. Right, 6 a.m. then I want you to cross out 6 a.m. Forcefully. Get mad at it. Say, I'm never going to wake up at that time again. Then underneath that right a time. That is one hour before the time that you used to wake up. So if you walk about 6 a.m. Right, 5 a.m. That is going to be the new time that you will wake up every single day. Say to yourself, This is the time that I wake up. This is the time that I shut my alarm off. I don't hit the snooze button and I get right out of bed. I'm not gonna be crawling deeper into the covers saying five more minutes. I'm not gonna make excuses. I'm getting up and I'm winning the first battle of a day. Now you might be asking. So what am I going to do with this extra hour in the mornings? We'll talk about that in the next video. 3. Planning and Prioritizing: all right, Now you have an extra hour in the mornings. What you gonna do with it? One thing that I recommend doing in the mornings is writing. Even if you're not a writer, per se, like maybe your auto mechanic, I still recommend writing to you in the mornings when your brain is ramping up and things are all scattered in here. I think it's important for you to write things down because it forces your brain to slow down, and it kind of gets the junk out. It's also good for just getting out random ideas that pop up. So during the first half hour of your writing, write about whatever comes to mind. If you think about giraffes, start writing about giraffes. If you come up with a new business idea right about it once the 1st 30 minutes is up, then I want you to start writing about the dream that you're pursuing right about why you want to achieve it. How will add value to your life? Why do you want to achieve it? What are some of the challenges you expect to face while you're chasing your goal? Finally, during your last few minutes of writing with your dreams still fresh in your mind, go to your foundations of discipline sheet and write one thing that you're going to do today that will be in service to your goal. Let's say you want to write a novel, right? One thing that will get that novel closer to being finished. If you haven't even started your novel yet, the first thing you can write is right. First page of first chapter, then put a little box next to that thing that you going to do. This will show you that this task is still incomplete. The box is not checked yet. So at this point, you've woken up early, written for an hour and got one thing that you know you need to do today. If you still have time in the morning, start and complete that one task immediately. I think it's good if you can do it earlier, because let's say you go to work for 10 hours and then come home. You're gonna be tired at the end of the day, and you're not gonna want to do that one thing that you put on your list. But if you have to get ready and then goto work. Keep your task in mind throughout the day. Also set a reminder for yourself to go off near the end of your workday. That way you have another reminder so you can think about your task while you're going home . When you get home, don't make dinner. Don't change out of your work clothes. Don't sit down on the couch. You need to think to yourself I'm still in work mode. I still have things that I need to get done. Then do that one task that you wrote down earlier that morning. When you finish that task, check that box boom. Another victory. As a bonus, you can scratch through that whole task to show yourself that you not only finished it, you destroyed that mofo great job the next day, do the same thing. Wake up early journal. Write that one gold smashed that one goal and repeat. If you do this every single day throughout the week, you will easily become a more disciplined person. So in this video we talked about what you should do during the week. Now we'll talk about what to do on the weekend 4. Executing and Executing Distractions: Okay, so if you're like me, you work a full time job. You work something like 9 to 5 10 to 6. Or maybe you work 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Something like that. Like many people, you may look forward to the weekend all week. You look forward to having two days to yourself to do whatever you want. You can sleep in, watch Netflix go out with friends, go to the beach. Whatever. You may see weekends as times to one wind, but I see them as times to ramp up there times when you can accelerate your progress towards achieving your goals during the week when you're doing your 9 to 5 thing, you've only got one or two hours in the morning and one or two hours in the evening to do things that are in service to your goal. But on the weekend, you have up to 18 hours on Saturday, in 18 hours on Sunday that you can use to chase your dream. That's up to 36 available hours over the weekend. Now, actually, don't expect anybody to grind on their goal for 36 hours over the weekend. That's unsustainable. I mean, you still have to eat and rest and whatnot. Maybe you could do it like one weekend if you have a really intense project to finish, but you can't do this every weekend. What you can do is the vote at least four and up to eight hours on Saturday and Sunday to work towards your goal. In order to maximize your time on the weekends, I recommend making a list on Friday of things that you want to get done over the weekend, right them on your foundations of discipline sheet. Then prioritize them by putting your dream tasks first and then your other tasks later. Another thing that's crucial on the weekends is to wake up at the exact same time that you were waking up during the week. Don't sleep until nine or 10 or 11. Get about your normal time, write in your journal and get ready to tackle your tasks. Before you start executing the things on your list, you need to execute distractions. Notice how I didn't say limit distractions. You need to kill them. Don't allow them the chance even to become distractions. The biggest distraction is your phone. That's a sit picture. Oh, my God. Oh, this is why, Before you start your tasks, you need to take your phone, put it on the ground and smash it with a baseball bat. Just kidding. But do turn your phone on silent, not vibrate silent. And don't keep it next to you. Put it on top of the fridge away from you. You want to keep it far away from you so that you don't get tempted to look at it. Don't look at it for at least four hours. Just do the things on your list. If you're working on your computer, turn off your notifications. Don't go to Facebook. Don't go to YouTube. Don't browse the Internet. I know it's hard because we've been conditioned to go onto the Internet and distract ourselves with meaningless crap. But don't fall into the trap. Just handled the things on your to do list. Now it's about time to talk about setbacks 5. Setbacks: pretend you've been doing all the things outlined in this course for six months. You've been waking up early, journaling, doing at least one thing every single day that will help you move you towards your goal. Been ramping up on the weekends and you've been making huge strides. You know that in less than a year you're gonna be right there. You're gonna have it. You're on the cusp of getting it. And then from out of nowhere, life punches you in the face. You have an accident. You lose your job. One of your family members passes away. The project that you've been working on gets lost or destroyed. Everything is ruined. All of your hard work is down the drain. You are making such good progress. And now life is pulling you back, pulling you away from achieving your dream. What do you do? You fight, You do the exact same thing that you were doing before you maintain discipline. You keep pushing. You keep waking up early and you keep doing at least one thing every day to move you towards your goal. On the weekends, you keep ramping up, even if you're not able to do as much as you were doing before. You have to at least do something. You do what you can until you can overcome this setback and get back to the levels at which you were performing before. Remember the story about when I crashed my bike the next day? The next day I was editing again. I wasn't able to edit as quickly as I was before, but I was able to do something. And through excruciating pain in my shoulder, I kept editing and I kept myself from losing my client. So whatever you do, don't stop. Even if you have a setback. In fact, a setback should make you feel like you want to be even more disciplined. Instead of feeling weak broken, you need to fight back. Tell that setback you will not stop me. I will fight. I'm going to push through you and destroy you. This may seem like an intense way to look at it, and that's because it is. You're fighting for your dream. You have to be intense about how you chase it. All right, let's take a little breath. Go ahead, watch the last video so that we can wrap up and you can start chasing your dreams. 6. Final Thoughts: all right, we can wrap this up with just a few final thoughts on discipline and setbacks. I think that the essence of discipline is getting things done, even when you don't want to do them. One thing that's helped my mindset in relation to discipline is that when you have things that you don't want to do, you're not wanting to do them is a sign of weakness. Now. I don't want to be a weak person, so I do the things that I don't want to do in order to show myself that I'm strong. Once I've gotten that one thing done that I didn't want to do. I'm happy because I showed myself that I will not let myself defeat myself. I will not live according to my weaknesses. I will destroy my weaknesses and I will be strong. So when you're pursuing your personal goals, it's easy to stay on that path. When things are going well, setbacks happen and they make it harder for you to stay on that path. Like when I had my shoulder injury and I was on the couch and excruciating pain. I really didn't feel like editing my video, but despite the pain and despite not wanting to edit, I did it any way you can do this, too. It's a simple choice. You just have to choose to be disciplined and strong. And it all starts with the foundations waking up early, doing at least one thing and service towards your goal. Doing that every day, taking advantage of every single opportunity to move you forward. And the longer you stay disciplined, the easier it is to maintain. I hope that you found this class useful, and I hope it helps you move you in the direction of your goals. If you'd like to do the final project and report back in a week, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks for joining me in chasing your dream. Through setbacks. I get out there and chase that dream.