- So I've played a lot
of video games in my day, whether I'm playing Fallout
or The Sims or RuneScape, just to clarify, I don't
still play RuneScape. I've noticed there's a commonality to pretty much every game and that's this idea that when
you upgrade your character, your traits and your skills, you get to unlock new
abilities, new opportunities, travel to new parts of the
map and wield better stuff. You know, in RuneScape, if
you wanna wear rune armor, you gotta grind it out,
fight like a billion goblins or guards and grind your
defense level to level 40. In the Sims, if you wanna
make any money whatsoever, you gotta pick a skill, max it out, and then you can start making money. And in Fallout, New Vegas, if you try to make it to
New Vegas before you upgrade your character and your stats
and your perks and stuff, you're gonna get completely
manhandled by a flying bug. Even though this is kind
of a shower thought, it really got me thinking
about how life kind of works in the exact same way. By upgrading your skills,
developing your talents, acquiring positive personality traits, it really opens up a lot of
new opportunities in life. You get to travel to new parts of the map and you start making more money and you get to wield better stuff. And although this is pretty obvious, I feel like we as human beings
forget about this a lot. We focus a ton on outcomes. We wanna pay off our student loans, or we wanna get a girlfriend,
or we wanna move out of our crappy apartment
into a nicer part of town. We get very caught up in all
the good things we want to have happen to us, completely ignoring the fact that some sort of personal transformation likely needs to happen
in order for these things to actually happen, or at least have a higher
likelihood of happening. We're always tempted to
look outside of ourselves for the solutions to our
problems, but we forget that often our situation is just
a symptom of our character, the character we're playing as. Our ever-growing debt
is often just a symptom of our bad spending habits
and our inability as a person to delay gratification. Our lack of friends might be a symptom of our lack of confidence
and low self-esteem, but we don't like to realize that. We don't like to admit
that maybe we're the ones that need working on. Imagine going to the doctor one day, because you wake up, your
whole body's in pain. Maybe you have a history of,
I don't know, a bone disease or something in your family, and you're really concerned and scared. So you go to the doctor
looking for answers and the doctor's like, "Hmm, pain, right? "Here, have some painkillers." You consider him a pretty crappy doctor because he's not actually
trying to investigate what the root cause of the issue is. He's just treating the symptom, but that's exactly how
we often treat ourselves and our own problems. It's like standing at the shore, trying to push the waves
away and prevent them from hitting the shore with your hands, it's just so futile. You might stop a couple of them, but the waves are just
gonna keep on coming. All of this to say one simple
idea, that's really helped me trend my life in an upward
direction is to focus on internal improvement rather
than external improvement. Instead of shopping for
a sexy new wardrobe, that'll make me feel more
confident and give me a little bit of swagger in my step,
I stop myself and I think, what's something I can work on
internally that will help me achieve the exact same goal? You know, how can I feel
confident without having to buy something or get something? Usually that means getting off my butt and developing more discipline at the gym, having a great workout,
starting to eat better. These are things that'll help me feel a sense of accomplishment
and make me feel proud of who I am, which will make
me feel a lot more confident than a new shirt ever could. Or if I'm feeling like my
videos aren't cinematic enough and I'm really tempted to pull the trigger on a really expensive
cinema camera on B&H, I stop myself and think about
what's something I can work on internally that will help
me achieve that cinema look? Well, the answer's pretty obvious. Maybe I should learn how
to light things better, frame things better,
work on my composition. Upgrading my skills as a filmmaker will do a lot more to improve
myself as a filmmaker, than buying a new camera. Usually the best answers to our problems lie within ourselves and
they're really unexciting and they're not as stimulating
as buying something or getting something, but
they're the actual way to solve the problem. And the nice thing about
focusing on internal improvement rather than external
improvement is that you develop a sort of resiliency to the chaos of life, because truth is anything
that you get or attain or any external upgrade you can make, can be taken away from you
in the blink of an eye, whether that's a pandemic
sweeping the nation and you end up losing a job that you
worked really hard to get, or maybe the economy
crashes and you lose all the investments that you made and if you spent all your
time putting your eggs in the external basket, and
it all goes away overnight, then you're left with pretty much nothing. But if you spent your time
investing in yourself internally, then if you lose all the things
you've worked on externally, you've developed the character
to bounce back from chaos. You've developed skills
that makes you valuable to your community and
your family and yourself. You can make something out of nothing and you can be somebody who
naturally creates good outcomes, rather than somebody who's
just focusing on changing the outcomes themselves without
developing the necessary character needed to actually
reliably produce them. So to wrap this whole
thing up, just remember this relationship between
building your character and upgrading your life. If you focus on upgrading your character, then the outcomes have a natural tendency to take care of themselves. One of the best ways you
can invest in yourself is to constantly be learning new things and developing your skills, which is why today's
video sponsor, Skillshare, is such a perfect sponsor
for today's video. As many of you know, I'm
constantly trying to develop my filmmaking and cinematography skill and thankfully there are
a ton of classes for me on Skillshare, including DIY
Cinematography by Ryan Booth, which I'm really enjoying so far. For those of you who don't know, Skillshare is an online learning
community with thousands of classes, covering dozens of topics, everything from filmmaking
to productivity, to how to manage your
inbox pretty much any skill you wanna work on, there's
probably a class for it on Skillshare and one of
the things I love about Skillshare is that it empowers
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are designed for real life. They're extremely practical. So you can absorb what
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up, explore your creativity and as usual, have a great time. If you liked this video,
make sure to hit like, because when you hit like
the algorithm blesses me and it shoves my bald head
into people's homepages, potentially helping them
out, which also helps me out. So it's a win-win for everybody. If you're looking here,
consider subscribing and hitting that bell icon so that you don't miss future uploads. Other than that, hit me up
on Instagram or Twitter, if you wanna just follow me around or check out the second channel, I'm gonna be posting there more often. (soothing music) Now, that monitor turned off. I have been posting there more
often, but other than that, that's all for today. Thanks so much for watching and we'll catch you in the next video. (gentle music) - Ah, Steven.
- Oh, thank God you showed up. You would not believe the symptoms I'm going through right now, man. - Yeah, a lot of people who
come in here are pretty sick. You got me thinking though, what would happen if everyone was sick? If everyone's sick, then no
one's sick, technically, right? - Yeah.
- Yes, it says here that you've been experiencing some issues. - I just woke up this
morning, terrible, dry cough. My whole body's just in pain. I'm checking off every
single symptom of that virus that's going around. Pretty scared about that. So I don't know if you
need to just swab me. - Have you seen any
other doctors about this? - No.
- Very well, very well. - So do you think I have it?
- I don't know. So you said you were
experiencing a cough, right? Well, you're in luck. I have just the thing for that, I have HALLS cherry and HALLS
mint, this is HALLS mint. - You're not a very good
doctor, no, not really.
