Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the sheep get sheared podcast.
I'm your host, Austin Creed.
My friends, hopefully for a while this will be the last audio only show.
But what I wanted to talk about today is about minimalism.
Now a lot of us, we go through stages of difficulty.
We go through times of rebirth.
We go through different chapters in our life where either we have to rebuild or we don't
have a lot.
We have to build up something in the first place in myself.
I'll use myself as an example because I'd love to use you as an example.
And some of you have told me a little bit about your stories and I would love to discuss
it in the comments, but I don't know enough to always discuss your situation.
I'm going to only speak for myself.
When it comes to minimalism, I found that being not being tied down to a single up single
place, a single town, a simple a single community have allowed me to expand my horizons.
So allowed me to gain a perspective, live in different places and be exposed to different
realities that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to do.
And when people equate success with something that's usually with stuff, and the more you
have the more stuff you have, the more you end up being tied down to a certain area or
at the very least, you have to find a way to store that stuff, find a way to manage
that stuff.
And it tends to prevent you from expanding your horizons to new places, new people and
new experiences.
And when you live by yourself to a certain place with certain group of people, or to
a certain routine that you never change, that becomes a that becomes a level of comfort
that can tie you down.
You end up becoming more exploitable, because you tend to not want to jump into a new place.
And you tend to not want to disrupt this flow that you have.
You know, in my life, since I've left high school, high school was probably the last
time I really had a solid routine that I never saw changing.
After high school, I went to college for a little bit that I went to the military that
I went back to college.
Now I'm doing now in a different state doing roofing.
The whole thing is wildly crazy.
But you know what, that through that wild and craziness, I found new places, new experiences,
met new people, and it's allowed me to test my current belief system.
I don't understand people, whether I agree with them or don't agree with them, who don't
want to challenge their preconceived notions.
They don't want to put their views to the test.
They don't want to put their worldview on the line.
I don't care if it's about women, about money, about religion, about politics, all of it
is important to test.
Because if you just want to live in an echo chamber, you're never going to grow as a person.
Never.
You're never going to grow as an individual if you only hang out with the people that agree
with you, the people who don't challenge you.
I'll be honest, it's tough, very tough.
It's not comfortable.
It will always put you in a position to where you have to learn something new and you have
to decide, hey, you know what, do I want to accept this?
Do I want to integrate this?
Or is this not going to work for me?
Maybe I should test this farther.
Maybe I need to experiment a little bit.
But you see, that's all part of your growth as a man.
And some of you, you went through this when you were young, but now you're a little bit
older.
Now maybe you've gone through a marriage, maybe you've gone through a couple tough
relationships that aren't necessarily a marriage, but what they still shaped your view of relationships,
or maybe you made hard investments.
Maybe you wanted to be an entrepreneur.
And it didn't work out and you gave up or you pivoted and now you're trying to do something
else, but you don't have the capital.
There are any number of different scenarios that you could find yourself in.
But the common denominator I found, which is not a lot, something people like to discuss
the lowest common denominator, if you watch enough content on the internet, whether it's
about relationships, about wealth, about religion, about politics, or any of these different
topics or more, people tend to want to blame others for their misfortune.
They want to blame other people and give them the bill and not say, Hey, you know what,
out of all of these different experiences, out of all these different scenarios, the
common denominator was me.
So whether it's 10% or 100%.
I have some level of accountability to take here.
A lot of people, they don't want to do that.
They want to blame others because it's just easier.
And I don't blame them for wanting to blame other people.
It's natural because then you have to admit that you made a mistake and that you need
to adjust and that you have improvement to me.
And that's tough.
That takes maturity to say, Hey, I have something I must change.
I have something I did wrong.
And now there's something that must be done.
Now my friends, what you might be asking yourself, well, Austin, what does this have to do with
minimalism?
Well, I've found that minimalism will help you maintain leverage.
For example, in the workplace, there was a time, not even that long ago, one of my mentors
I grew up around, he's worked for Apple for years and years since the company before
even what public, if you can believe it.
And he's told me back in the day, the company used to be loyal to the employee and then
the employee was loyal to the corporation.
That doesn't happen much anymore.
The story about that guys, I got excited about this.
This is something I know a lot about because it's been explained to me multiple times by
multiple people that I respect.
So when it comes down to it, loyalty is not a guarantee.
And therefore you must have leverage.
You must ensure that you, my friend, have the appropriate ability to not depend on a
corporation on a different person.
And this is taught to women a lot more than it is to men nowadays.
A lot of women are taught, oh, don't go out there and depend on a man.
And a lot of mothers and fathers, they do this because they don't want their little
girl to be in a terrible relationship, which is ironically not the biggest problem out
here anymore.
But maybe it was in their time or some anecdotal level, it was something they were concerned
about, which is totally understandable.
But guess what?
Nothing is free number one.
And there are consequences to your actions.
Number two.
And this is why it is important to have leverage.
And so when you live a minimalist lifestyle, you don't have a lot of furniture, a lot
of stuff.
How much saying have to do this forever because you don't.
In fact, you shouldn't have to do this forever.
But initially, especially or during times when you're trying to reinvent yourself, this
is going to help you out the most.
If you don't want to sacrifice, well, then don't be upset when you don't see the success
that you would like to see.
It's that simple.
You could it's easy to make fun of people on the Internet who live this reality.
It's another thing to not understand that you might suffer from the same problem.
It just looks a little different.
For example, you might say, hey, Austin, I'm not like my job.
My job sucks, or I don't like it.
And I want to work this job, but I don't know how to do it.
Answer.
Well, let's figure it out then.
What are you willing to give up if you want something you have to give?
You can't just get and get and get without giving.
The world doesn't work that way.
You can't get crops without planting seeds.
You can't plant seeds without buying them or without giving up part of your crop from
the year before to then have the seeds.
That's how that works, my friends.
In the same way that you can't see the success you want in your life.
You're not going to sacrifice things to get to that success.
I don't care if that success is a relationship that you want to have or that success is a
certain dollar amount you want to hit in your bank account or your investment portfolio.
These are all things you must understand.
I had to understand the hard way, by the way.
You think I like this?
It doesn't matter whether I like it or not.
What matters is if it works, if it actually turns out the way that I know it turned out,
because I've done this before.
I've made sacrifices and I've seen success as a result of my sacrifices.
One of the biggest sacrifices I've made that I would argue has been pivotal to my growth
as a man as sacrificing my sexual satisfaction in the short term.
Napoleon Hill, one of the men that's helped change my life, even though I'm pretty sure
he's dead.
His writings have changed my life.
And one of the things he wrote in his book Outwitting the Devil, through his character
ironically the devil, was the following statement.
He said that if man took half, not all, not three quarters, but half of the energy he
uses in the pursuit of sex, he will never know poverty.
In other words, if you take half of the time you try to run game, you try to mat these
hoes, you try to take girls out broke dating, if you take that time, that energy, that attention,
that money, and you put it towards something like a new business venture or building your
resume up to look better or whatever have you, then you will make more money.
And you can use that money to gain your time back to focus your energy on places you want.
There's an old saying that money doesn't buy happiness.
And there's truth to that.
It does not buy happiness, but I'd rather have money.
I'm going to be unhappy whether I'm broke or rich.
I'd rather be rich.
And when you're rich, you have the ability to have things done on your terms.
You can use your money to leverage attention from others, other people's energy, and you
allow yourself to buy back your own time using money.
So when we get into this idea of minimalism, sometimes you got to go through periods of
minimalistic living, whether it's your living outside your means, or whether it's you're
just going through a time of reinventing yourself, trying to recreate something, trying to build
because you've lost whether it's a marriage, whether it's a loved one, whether it was a
job, it doesn't matter.
All these things with new car when you encounter loss in your suffering, you must sacrifice
to get yourself out of this funk and into a new area of success.
That's what I found to be true.
If you found another way to cheat the system, God bless you, but cheating the system only
works for so long.
And the same way that you only cheat on somebody tests or cheat on whatever, until you eventually
get found out.
I found that all this living law may not work instantaneously to change your life.
Fast money tends to bring with it fast problems.
The same way that we must not take shortcuts in this life, shortcuts often lead to the
most expensive problems.
So my friends, when it comes to maximizing your results, you might have to go through
minimalistic living situations, because that'll give you leverage that'll give you new opportunities
that then can lead you to a better life.
That's my opinion.
And if you disagree, you're more than welcome to do that.
I would love to hear what you disagree with or how you've done this yourself and how you
made it how you've sacrificed and that's led to your success.
I'd love to hear it because I think a lot of people are afraid to lose.
We go through phases of our life where we see a sacrifice thing as compromising and
I disagree with that 100% disagree.
My friends, you let me know how this has impacted your life, how you've sacrificed in your life
and how that sacrifice is paid off or maybe you didn't pay off or maybe it paid off in
a way you never expected.
Please let me know.
I would love to hear it.
I think it would help other men in this community when we're we've all gone through these phases
and some of us might be in it right now as I am.
Now I'd love to hear what you have to say.
In the meantime, my friends look out for new videos because I'm going to be pumping out
more videos, not just the audios, because I'm finally getting to move into my new place
later today.
So hopefully I can handle all this and get it all sorted out.
But I've really, I've really sensed that somebody needed to hear this and it wasn't
just me.
My friends, take care of yourselves.
Let me know in the comments answering the questions I have or any questions that you
want to raise.
There you are.
I'd love to hear them.
Take care of yourselves.
I'm out of here.
Bye.