I've tried to tell people for 22 years

A lot of this was preventable.

When you look around the world and see people in turmoil?

A LOT of that was preventable. Smart people and wise people have been telling us what the problems are and what the solutions are.

Most of the solutions require us to take our hearts and minds off of auto-pilot though. We have to break our own momentum, and most of us are more comfortable going some bad place fast, than struggling but in the right direction.

When I was 16, I read my first self-help book. It wasn’t particularly good, but I didn’t need it to be good, because it said, essentially:

“We can change the direction of our thoughts, so that our inner worlds are not so mean, and this shift will improve our results in the real world.”

How does that not change everything for every person who hears it? Do you just have to be a weird outsider who already doesn’t have a place in society, so you’re not giving up anything when you change your own mind and try to navigate your life on purpose?

Four years later, I started my first self-help blog, because I was sure that the only thing stopping people from taking ownership over their own minds, was that no one had let them know they had a right to do that. That blog was not met with the kind of response I expected.

Later that year, I tried it as a video channel, vlogging to the camera; multimedia was the key to getting this message out, I was sure.

Another four years later, I decided to try and combine the message of mindset with video games. I didn’t just need to broadcast the message, and get it out with a visual, I also needed it to be interactive, so that people could experience the steps of someone who felt powerless, as they put the pieces together and built themselves a new way of looking at life that left them in control of their own momentum.

Another four years after that, I had a conceptual prototype of how to make a game that slowly taught you how to take control over your own mind. But the prototype was too conceptual; if you were someone who already understood the mind, you thought it was a great idea, but for someone who hadn’t even gotten started working in their own heads, it sounded like a lot of nothing.

Come another four years, and I was 32; twice the years on the planet as I’d had when I first heard someone say you could change the direction of your own thoughts. I’d spent 16 years trying to amplify and clarify and fun-ify this message. But I didn’t understand enough about how audience attention worked, so I had to learn everything I could about internet content marketing and how to break through the noise. But I was having a lot of trouble getting the concepts simple enough that people would be intrigued in the short window of time I had to make an impression.

Last year, when I was 37, I’d combined what I believe to be the final missing pieces. I knew I needed a way to make this message digestible for people who aren’t seeking out this answer; a good teacher knows you can’t answer a question that hasn’t been asked. But a great teacher knows how to bring people in with a description of the questions people do have- I heard this first from Eben Pagan: “if you can explain someone’s problem better than they can explain it to themselves, they’ll sit and listen for a very long time, in hopes that you have the solution to their problem.”

I needed a way to bring people in, and the most effective solution seemed to be, that if I could create characters that audiences resonated with, I could give them the problems that most people have, and offer answers that so few seem to know. But it wasn’t until last year, that I had all of the comedy training I needed, and access to our planet’s top divorce research, that I understood the problem I can model that people will resonate with:

Fights.

Arguments.

Quarrels between cool people who love each other, but zoom in the story on the times when they do not agree, and get a little bit heated.

This month I turned 38. I don’t have full finished projects, but the characters I’m creating now, come easily, and though writing them is still intimidating, it’s been enough of a joy, that I feel like the momentum of this project can after 22 years, really get started.

Which is why I’m much more willing than I used to be, to go online and make an ass out of myself, because even once I get the full text done, and the characters illustrated, and the gameplay programmed, if nobody knows I exist, then all this work will have been for nothing.

38 will be my year of, as Steven Bartlett said:

Embarrassment is the cost of entry for success.

I did a bunch of fucking work, now I’m going to annoy you all into having this conversation with me that nobody wanted to have, because we don’t have to suffer like this. Not all thoughts are easy to change, but we could be devoting ourselves, at least in our heart, to the utility of working together to help us all think thoughts that let us kick ass, instead of thinking thoughts that kick our collective ass.