How to Be Happy (Without Babying Yourself)
Escaping the romance of indecision.
I saw a video online the other day that was one of those 5-second reels of some metro-sexual man nodding in agreement to the statement:
“Can we normalize being in your 30s and still not knowing what you want to do?”
Then, the man made a heart with his hands, and the video played over again.
I don’t like to take social media content as truth, but I got kind of mad when I saw this video. It made me think about the world that we live in. It made me think about the way that I used to think about myself. It made me think about the way that many men (and women) are living today.
Most importantly, it made me think about the difference between happiness, success, and peace.
Here’s how you can work to build all 3 in your life, regardless of your age.
(Disclaimer: It’s hard)
The risk of moving.
A year ago this week, I loaded pretty much my entire life into my little Toyota RAV-4 and drove down to Austin, Texas, for a month of Jiu-Jitsu training and focused writing.
I didn’t tell anyone at the time, but this was essentially the test to see if I could move to Texas and train full-time here.
The last time I moved out of Chicago, I was still a boy. I was 18, fresh out of high school, had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I was deeply insecure.
The move didn’t work out. I left after about a year.
In the process of moving away, I became depressed, embarrassed that I couldn’t “make it work” in a new place, and terrified that I was never going to be able to stray too far away from the comfort of my family and childhood home.
From 19-25, I moved back to Chicago and lived there. During this time, I got pretty good at Jiu-Jitsu, became a writer, built a career, graduated college, and completely reinvented myself as a person from who I was when I left the first time.
When I moved away from Chicago the second time, I was anxious about moving again (what if my history repeated itself?), but I was prepared.
I moved with a purpose that I had built for myself.
That’s the first step to being happy and not a baby:
Don’t find a purpose, build one.
Brick by brick.
The risk of failure.
My second move was a risk in many different ways.
I was not financially well-off when I moved to Texas. I also wasn’t moving to work on some cool business or at a startup, I was moving to grapple.
I did not have a job. I am not famous enough in Jiu-Jitsu to make a living off of my name alone.
The chances of the move failing due to finances were far better than I was willing to admit. Although I didn’t tell anyone, I was really short on rent payments for the first 7 months that I lived in Austin. I maxed out a credit card, invested a lot in myself, and although I had “control of my calendar”, I was really just working from the moment I got out of bed in the morning until I finally shut my laptop off late at night.
It was a long grind, and it made me feel lost. It made me feel like I didn’t really know what I wanted out of my life.
Burnout does that to a man.
That leads nicely to our second lesson about happiness and strength:
Your purpose is not strong if can’t survive a few tough storms.
The universe will give you what you want, but it won’t be easy and it won’t be free.
Engaging with risk should create strength, not risk aversion.
When I was feeling “lost” or “like a failure”, I felt a lot like the man in the video I described in the intro.
I felt like it should be okay for me to just not know what I was doing with my life. I felt like it was okay for my unpredictable lifestyle to allow me to be impulsive, immature, and thoughtless.
I felt like I was a character in my story, not the author, and I wanted people to accept this because we all just want to be accepted for where we are, even if we are unacceptable.
And that’s really the point of this entire article today:
We shouldn’t normalize not taking extreme ownership of our lives simply because life is hard.
You shouldn’t avoid risk, run from pain, and take a step back from the authorship of your life simply because things are not going your way. Just because life is hard doesn’t mean we should normalize inaction or “lost boy syndrome”.
Instead of normalizing being lost, what if we normalized the action of trying to uncover the truth of ourselves? The action of doing the work to make it work.
The action of not taking failure personally, of taking chances despite unpredictability, and the action of learning from everything we do to build what we want in a longer amount of time.
What if, instead of normalizing being lost, we normalized trying to be found?
Closing Thoughts
One thing that I see a lot today from young people both in Jiu-Jitsu and beyond is this aversion to truly immersing themselves in their lives.
A fear of taking risks. A fear of judgment. A social anxiety that doesn’t just make them nervous to talk to a pretty girl or start a new business, but rather makes them terrified to do anything that might create negative feelings.
The problem is that pretty much everything worthwhile in your life is a byproduct of overcoming some sort of anxiety. The only way you truly can have peace is by earning the right to have peace. The way you do that is by working at it.
Overcoming the fear of failure or judgment must be a central focus in every person’s life, regardless of age, gender, or any other contributing factor. You must take responsibility for your insecurities and work to live despite them.
I promise, the only thing worse than your fears is trying to live with yourself because you’ve never sworn the courage to face them.
You can either face your fears, or you can make feeble attempts to normalize living with them as the writer of the story of your life.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”― Rainer Maria Rilke
The Grappler’s Diary is sponsored by BJJ Mental Models, the world’s #1 Jiu-Jitsu education podcast!
This week’s episode features Giles Garcia! Giles is the head coach at Ronin Grappling in Glasgow, Scottland.
In this episode, Giles explains why it’s so important that coaches help their students simplify their thinking surrounding Jiu-Jitsu.
Give the episode a listen here.
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