Do What You Can With What You Have Right Now

Stop wishing things were different, start changing your life

The quicker you accept the circumstances of your life, the better chance you’ll have of building a better future.

Acceptance doesn’t mean you’re okay with the situation. It just means you have no illusions about it.

Here’s a phrase I like to use:

“This is where I’m at and I have to deal with it.”

I used it when I was a college dropout with a rap sheet working a $10/hr job. And it paved the path to transforming my life, building a multi-six-figure business, and doing what I love for a living every single day.

You can change your life, too, but you have to change the way you think.

Seek to Abandon Useless Ways of Thinking

You have an addiction to negative thought patterns that serve no positive purpose. Let’s explain what some of them are, why you do them, and what you can do to stop or change them.

The first one I call “the replay.”

Something happened in your past you wish you could go back and change. You do this mental replay in your head where you imagine the scenario happening a different way and what your life would be like now had the original scenario played out differently.

Why do this?

Spotting where things went wrong can help you avoid a similar outcome in the future. But you go overboard by trying to re-imagine the scenario instead of accepting it, analyzing it, and moving forward.

You fix this pattern by constantly reminding yourself a bajillion times.

What’s done is done.

If you catch yourself dwelling on the past, remind yourself that there’s nothing you can do about it except use that situation to guide your decisions moving forward.

Develop the Serenity to Accept the Things You Cannot Change

We all have things we’d like to change about ourselves and our situations, but if you can’t change a certain variable, you’re better off accepting it. Also, you have to train yourself to stop having the “if only” mindset, which I’ll explain in a bit.

Maybe you wish you were taller, better looking, smarter, or more well-connected. Maybe you wish you had a different upbringing and a better starting position in life.

Some skills come more naturally to you and others you have to work on. You might wish your strengths and weaknesses were different.

The “if only” fallacy happens when you think your perceived flaw prevents you from being successful.

• If only I were taller, I’d be able to get a date.
• If only I had the right network, I’d be able to build my business.
• If only I grew up in a good neighborhood with wealthy parents, I’d be able to succeed.

If you want to break this belief, you just have to observe people who somehow seem to succeed even though they share the same “flaws” or “flawed situations” as you do.

Your perceived flaw isn’t keeping you from succeeding. You are.

Break the Cycle and Create a New Loop

The last one I’ll share is the misguided belief that the past predicts the future.

You develop parts of your personality from past experiences.

There are two important concepts you must understand to understand your own nature:

• Feedback loops
• Self-fulfilling prophecies

Here’s how a feedback loop works:

• You take a certain action
• You get a result
• That result creates a narrative about who you are

In either direction, the more a feedback loop is repeated, positive or negative, the more it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Losers continue to lose because they see themselves as losers, which causes them to go into situations with low confidence which causes failure which causes them to feel like even more of a loser, and so on and so forth.

You want to flip the cycle. Get some sort of win, the tiniest win, and try to build on that to create a positive upward spiral. It’s challenging to break a negative cycle, but you start by ditching the belief that your past predicts your future.

It doesn’t have to.

You break it by getting fed up with your situation. While you should accept that the circumstances you’re in right now are the circumstances you’re in right now, you shouldn’t accept that that’s just the way things will stay.

Years back, I had to accept that I was broke, made huge mistakes, and was now in a bad spot. But I decided I was going to figure out how to fix it. And I did.

Let’s talk about how I did it and how you can do it too.

The Two-Step Process to Permanently Change Your life

This is a two-step process:

• Brutally honest self-assessment
• Acceptance + figuring out your next move

Until you’re objective about your situation, you won’t change anything. As best you can, try to see through your rationalizations and analyze things as they are.

• How did your decisions affect your current situation?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• Where have you placed blame elsewhere when you should’ve taken responsibility?
• What negative patterns and mistakes are you prone to?
• What are you tolerating in your life that you shouldn’t?
• Where are you selling yourself short?
• What lies are you telling yourself to stay stuck?
• What resources do you have available to you right now?

Circumstances aside, your decisions played a role in where you’re at right now. Analyze the past only to extract those lessons about your decision-making and move on.

Next, figure out the next move based on where you’re at right now, even if your moves are harder to make because of your situation.

If you’re a single parent with barely any time to yourself to start a business, that’s just the position you have to start from.

If you’re $200,000 in debt, that’s the hole you have to dig yourself out of.

If you’ve been working in the wrong career for a decade, come to grips with the fact you did the wrong thing for ten years and start working on the right thing.

What can you do, with what you have, right now, to change your life?

How I Changed My Life (And How You Can Too)

I was dead broke. I had no connections, no money, and no degree. I didn’t have a lot of resources at the time, except for time.

I worked a second-shift job, which meant I had a ton of free time on my hands during the day.

I figured if I wanted to change my life, I needed to get smarter. I started reading a bunch of books, watching content on YouTube, and ending up buying a 67-day self-help course.

I committed to taking that course and doing what it said, every single day, for 67 days. That was my big challenge to change my life. I finished the course. I was still broke. I still didn’t have any connections or a degree. But my mindset was totally different.

I started to see opportunities everywhere and I started seizing them.

• I got a new job and doubled my income.
• I started writing.
• I learned how to make money with my writing as well as other strategies to make money online.

It all started with me saying:

“Ok, I am a broke college dropout. It is what is. What’s the next move?”

Your next move could be reading 30 minutes a day.

It could be going for a ten-minute walk or cutting back on soda to get in shape.

It could be going to a local networking event.

It could be researching a business idea.

It doesn’t matter what you do. It just matters that you get yourself in motion. Make the tiniest move, today. Get a small win. Tomorrow, make another tiny move. Get another small win. Create a streak of wins. Next thing you know, 90 days to six months later, you have momentum.

In fact, 90 days is about how long it takes to shift the course of your life permanently.

It doesn’t take much, but you do need to fight like hell to get that initial momentum.

The Deck is Stacked in Your Favor

Whether or not you do what you can with what you have right now will determine how your future turns out.

I have good news for you.

Modern society is set up in such a way that you mostly need to change your mindset.

You don’t need a ton of money, a bunch of connections, or amazing circumstances to change.

You need to have the willingness to use information that’s freely available to you.

You can learn anything you want on YouTube. Most Ivy League universities publish their lectures online for free. There are a bunch of paid resources that can help you change different areas of your life.

You could start with cheap ones first, like books (that’s what I did), then move on to higher investments once you have more money to invest, which you will because you implemented the information from the cheaper resources.

You can build a network. All you need is the willingness to put yourself out there. Go to local events, get active on social media, make a point to be friendly, and talk to people when you’re out and about.

One of my favorite quotes:

“The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet. The tools for learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.” — Naval

Once you turn on the desire to learn and couple it with a bit of action, you’re off to the races and the world opens up to you.

You Already Have Everything You Need

I’m about to cringe a little saying this, but it’s true.

Your resourcefulness matters more than your resources.

If you’re being honest with yourself you’d admit that your effort level isn’t near what it needs to be.

Don’t beat yourself up about that though. Use it to motivate you.

Imagine what your life will be like once you dial up your effort level.

Understand how much upside you would have if you started doing the work more often.

See all the endless possibilities you will expose yourself to because you’ve decided to accept where you’re at and do everything in your power to change it.

It’s all right in front of you for the taking no matter where you’re starting point is right now.

Do what you can with what you have right now.

This post comes from my weekly newsletter — The Monday Motivation Letter. Join here to make sure you start your weeks off with momentum.