How I Turned my Frustration into Action

Use your discomfort to drive you forward

For 10 years, I lived abroad.

In 2005, I moved to Hawaii, and several years after that, I moved to Germany. I look back on those experiences as some of the best years of my life.

It was as amazing as you could imagine. It felt like I was living life to the fullest. I never wanted it to end.

But when it was apparent that my job in Germany was finishing, we planned a graceful exit strategy that would get us back to the states, and would be a smooth transition for the kids. We opted for Charleston, SC — my wife’s hometown and a city I had fallen in love with for many reasons. If life abroad had to end, Charleston seemed to be the best choice.

I didn’t expect to have such a hard time readjusting back.

Back… to houses that all look exactly the same (for the first six months I often pulled into the wrong driveway). At exactly 7:30 AM, everybody got into their identical SUVs and minivans, and all went off to the same jobs, all ate at the same restaurants, and all wished they were doing something else.

And I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I felt a sense of discontent. To leave such a unique life to go back to “normal” life, it felt like I somehow missed the mark.

I mean, how did I go from THAT back to THIS? I spent the last 10 years trying to get away from this, and now I’m right back exactly where I was???

While I was living abroad, my best friend took a very different path in his life. He spent those years learning how to become a sales copywriter, and he ended up becoming tremendously successful. These days, he’s one of the world’s greatest sales writers, an angel investor, a philanthropist, and has built his company to 900 people with no investors.

Not long after I came back to the states, I found myself in LA at one of his parties. Nearly all the guests were entrepreneurs, bestselling authors, marketing geniuses, philanthropists, innovators, visionaries — just the most amazing group of fascinating, ridiculous people who were making big things happen.

You get a group of people like that together, and it’s exciting to think about what could happen. Conversations could turn into ideas, ideas could turn into action, and maybe, just maybe, I was in the room when an idea could be born that would have a massive impact on the world.

That’s my idea of success. It’s not the trappings and other stuff (well… much). Just the power to live life on our terms, create our own destiny, and leave our mark on the world.

Those are the kinds of people I want to be around.

More to the point, that’s the kind of person I want to BE.

And that’s when something really big occurred to me.

Every one of those people figured it out. They went through a process and made it happen.

No one inherited their fortune or lucked into it. There were no trust fund babies, no lottery winners — just a certain type of person who came up with an idea and wouldn’t stop until they realized their vision.

That thought stuck in my mind, and wouldn’t leave. They DID it. Which means that it (whatever “IT” is) is possible. And there was no escaping that realization for me — that the only reason I hadn’t reached that point myself was because I hadn’t figured out how.

I went home at the end of that weekend, leaving that wonderland behind and I returned back to “the real world”. But the thought was still with me, and wouldn’t go away. I was frustrated and a little depressed. This vision that awoke in my mind — what COULD be — was just a little too far out of reach for me.

But it was there.

How do I get there? What can I do?

I didn’t have a clue.

But I knew it wasn’t a matter of simply working hard. We all work hard. Day in and day out, we’ll go to our jobs and work hard. But never advance.

No, there’s something else at play here. The “hard work” is coming up with the right idea. And if we don’t, we’re doomed to do it for someone else, without ever realizing our own potential of what we can be.

I remembered something that my best friend told me, that his mentor Gary Halbert told him:

“One great idea had walking down the beach can be worth more than a lifetime of hard work”

Great words. But I still had no idea.

Frustrated, I tried to share my thoughts with a few friends to see if they ever felt the way I was thinking, if they’d ever experienced something like this.

And what they said just blew me away.

• “Dude, what I wouldn’t give to be where you are! Why are you frustrated — just be happy with what you’ve done!”
• “Don’t compare yourself to other people. You have a pretty good life!”
• “You don’t want to be one of those rich assholes. Mo money, mo problems.”
• “I’d rather be happy than rich.”

Suddenly, it all came together for me. That was the “Aha!” moment I needed to have.

Do you see it?

If you haven’t figured it out, here it is:

There is a path from here to there. I don’t know what that pathway is, and it’s different for every person. All I know is that it exists, it’s possible to get there, and it’s on us to figure out how.

If we don’t figure it out, we have no one to blame but ourselves for giving up.

But whether we find it or not, it’s still there!

In fact, this realization was so profound to me that I believe that how you confront the unknown defines who you are.

So, all those people deciding to not think about it and not let it bother them— they’re basically saying “I don’t know how to figure this out, so it’s not worth doing”

They’re avoiding discomfort. They comfort themselves by trying to justify why it’s not worth doing.

That might work for some people. But it wouldn’t work for me.

I just couldn’t buy into that self-deception. No excuse, no rationalization would ease the pain of knowing this thing is out there and I just haven’t figured out how to find it.

It’s a painful thought, to know that there is a solution out there to a problem you just can’t figure out. Sometimes it just seems easier to not suffer over it.

Suffering… Someone once defined it as this:

“Suffering” is expending emotional energy over something you have no control over

Well, this is something we DO have control over. I mean, we COULD figure it out, maybe if we just dedicated enough time to it.

So I decided that I WAS going to dwell on it. I was going to obsess over it. And I’d think about it all the time. I’d beat myself up over it, and I’d make myself as uncomfortable as I needed to until I figured it out.

And once I put myself in that position…

It took a week for me to come up with a plan. And that plan became the business model I’m using today.

If this resonates with you, and you’re feeling a bit uncomfortable, that is exactly how you are supposed to feel.

It’s OK to feel this way. That is a sign that you are ready to grow. Think of it as the potential to discover a tremendous opportunity.

And rather than pushing this uncomfortable thought out of your mind, I want you to keep it there. Think about it tonight. And in the morning, revisit it, and think about it again. Don’t let go of it. A little bit of discomfort could pay off the biggest dividends of your life if you’re willing to walk through this door you just opened.

Because once the discomfort fades, you may be left with another thought, a vision of what life CAN be. And that vision will be worth the discomfort it cost to reach it.

Let that vision drive you forward.