I want to talk about a mistake that I made pretty much all summer.
So before I tell you that, let me go back to March of 2023, about nine months ago.
And in March, that's when I discovered a book called Reality Transurfing.
And I learned of it through a YouTube short video.
And it was basically a fan page talking about Iman Ghaji, my bad.
I realized that I was pronouncing it wrong for a long time.
But pretty much that YouTube video, it was basically someone interviewing Iman and asking,
well, the person basically said, so Iman, you've recommended all these books.
Like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and the guy listed some other books.
And then, but basically these books are for beginners.
They're really beginner level books.
And he was asking, what Iman reads nowadays?
What kind of books does Iman read now?
Now that he's advanced further than the common man and he's actually become very successful.
And Iman responded, well, I read Reality Transurfing.
That's the book that I'm studying right now.
And so I just saw that video and I'd never heard of Transurfing before.
And I just saw that video and then something just clicked inside of me and I just went
to Amazon right away and bought the book.
And the funny thing is that I was very frugal with my money.
I was not very frugal, but I was more frugal with my money back then than I am now.
And it took a couple days for me to convince myself to buy a $20 book.
That's just how I was back then.
And the strange thing about it is I just saw this 10 second clip recommending Transurfing
and it caused me to go to Amazon and just buy it on impulse.
Even though it was the most expensive book I'd ever purchased in my life.
It was like $60, which was, which is a lot for a book.
So I bought it, it came and I read it.
And I read, it was actually 750 pages long.
So I read like maybe the first 300 pages and then on the surface I said I got bored.
But in reality, I actually couldn't handle the truth.
And so I just stopped reading it and switched to a different book.
And then eventually I went back to reading that book and I finished it.
And then after the second kind of after the second try reading it, I realized how valuable
it is and how like serious and how real it is because it really explains the truth.
So after maybe a month or two of not reading it, I just finished it and then a month or
two passed and I re-read it.
I re-read the whole thing, but this time I didn't just passively read it.
I actually bought a journal specifically for this book and then wrote down all of the quotes
that I liked, wrote down my thoughts, wrote down different things that I was thinking
about.
And I essentially copied, I probably wrote at least 100 quotes.
Like I filled up an entire journal and if you're watching on YouTube, here I'll actually
show you the size of the journal that I filled up.
This is a different journal, but it's pretty much this big and it's fairly big.
It's probably the width of a quarter and it's the size of like a classic like spiral notebook,
but it's not a spiral notebook.
It's a hardcover.
It's basically the size of a normal standard sheet of paper, maybe a little bit bigger.
But I filled up an entire journal full of notes.
So I really took this seriously and this book, Transurfing, was all about, man, it's all
about your worldview, about how you think, how you perceive things.
It's about manifestation.
It's about achieving your goals.
It's about all of the things.
And so I really got into that book and talked about it all throughout my podcast.
There was probably a maybe 80 day period where I was just reading, Transurfing, and talking
about it on my podcast.
Maybe less than 80 days, but I was talking about Transurfing a lot.
And if you go back on the podcast, Ascend Momentum, it's, and you look for the, and
you look for the episodes that are called Transurfing Principles.
You can listen to what I was thinking about back in the day.
And so I've gotten this Transurfing Principle pretty much ingrained into my mind.
It's not fully ingrained, but it's fairly ingrained.
And back to the story of how I talked about in the beginning of this episode, how I fell
into the trap of inaction.
And I thought that I could just manifest my way through my thoughts to my goals.
So basically over the summer, I really locked in on Transurfing.
I was studying it and I was practicing it on a daily basis.
And I remember I would go to the park every single day and I would go with my friend also.
And he was studying Transurfing as well at the time.
So we would both go to the park and we would just practice the Transurfing Principles.
We would just walk around, practice staying conscious, staying present.
And then we would also practice our visualization and we would also just strategize in general.
All of this talk and all of this thinking, and then we would go home.
I actually don't know what, I can't, I don't know what my friend did when he got home,
but I would go home and I would just take action.
And I say that with bunny ears.
I say that with quotes because the type of action that I took was reading books and it
was also just looking at websites or YouTube videos.
Now that is not action.
That's inaction.
And that's basically what I did all summer long.
I just was paralyzed into inaction and I thought that I was moving closer to my goals because
I was visualizing every day.
I was visualizing and I was doing all the things, but I wasn't doing the simple act
of the work.
And then I went down this whole kind of spiral where I was just in inaction and then eventually
I saw a YouTube video because I actually did, I was taking action, but the action that I
was taking was just recording podcasts.
And so I was recording podcasts, but they weren't getting really much better after a
while.
And so I had to figure out something.
And then the first kind of change, the first kind of initial spark that caused me to change
was I went to, I actually read a book called 10X is 10X is easier than 2X.
And in that book, it was basically just talking about like evolving as a person and evolving
as an entrepreneur.
And one of the concepts that I learned about in that book that I, to be honest, I believe
that I already knew I was just kind of pushing it away.
And I didn't really want to, I didn't really want to confront that emotion or that truth.
And the truth was the thing that I learned in that book was that quality is better than
quantity, but quality quantity, wait, wait, wait, it's quality is better than quantity,
but quantity leads to quality.
So basically what that meant to me was I was, I had recorded a podcast episode every single
day for the past 80 days at that point.
And on, on 65 of those days.
So ever since episode 15, I've been recording daily one hour episodes at that point.
So I probably had 70 hours worth of practice over 80 days.
And that's high quantity.
I was recording one hour, which is a lot, it's high quantity.
But then I was also recording one hour every single day.
So I was getting one hour of practice every single day.
So that is quantity, but I was also posting it just raw footage.
That's quantity right there.
And so the reason why I didn't want to confront the truth was because I was definitely improving.
Ever since, if you go back to my first episode and compare it to this episode or even like
the last episode of season one, episode 104, I believe, then you'll realize that I was definitely
improving.
That high quantity practice helped.
But if you compare episode 60 to episode 80, I really believe that you won't find much
of a difference.
And that's because after a while I was plateauing.
Like in the beginning I was skyrocketing with growth.
But then I was just kind of plateauing because after maybe 40 episodes or 50 episodes, I had
done the daily one hour practice every single day and I hadn't changed anything yet.
And so I'm on episode 80 and I haven't changed anything and I'm plateaued.
So then I move forward and I just keep doing it because I still don't want to confront
the truth even after learning of the truth from the book.
So I keep doing daily one hour episodes and then eventually it got to the point where
I saw a YouTube video and it was Alex Formosa.
He basically said all that remains is the work to be done.
And then he talked about the anti-routine, which is basically cutting out all the nonsense
and just focusing on the work.
And at that time I was already kind of realizing that I needed to transition to higher quality
videos.
So I realized that I needed to edit the videos.
But then I realized that I wasn't going to grow even if I had the best videos possible
on my podcast because there is no discoverability feature on the podcast like there is on YouTube.
And so I realized I needed to make a transition to YouTube.
And so now I was playing in a whole different ballpark.
I was making YouTube videos instead of podcasts.
So now I had to edit the imagery and learn how to make better YouTube videos.
But this all didn't happen until months after, until months of inaction.
I was literally just visualizing every single day for months over summer and no progress
was made.
But now I realized that it's the work that is actually going to get you to move forward.
I'm reading a book by David Goggins right now called Can't Hurt Me.
And he's basically talking about all these crazy things that he's done in his life.
Like he ran a 100 mile race with no training.
So imagine if you got out of your bed right now and ran not five miles, not 10 miles,
not 20 miles, which 20 miles would be insane for most people, much less 10 miles with no
training.
If you got out of your bed right now and ran 100 miles, that's like three and a half marathons
with no training.
And his nutrition was terrible.
And he just hit a crazy leg day the night before.
Like imagine that he did all that.
That's action.
And I kind of connected the dots because he took action and achieved that feat.
You can't get that by sitting around visualizing.
So that's why I believe that there is no, if you don't have action, you don't have manifestation.
Like you must have action in order to manifest stuff.
And so I'm reading this book by David Goggins and I'm realizing that this is a man of action.
And yes, he does visualize.
Like he was talking about how he visualizes possible.
He visualizes like the race track, the course of the next race that he's going to run, or
he visualizes his past successes.
He visualizes many different things.
Action is a tool, but it's not the means to the goal.