Andy Smith is an independent contributor. His views do not necessarily reflect those of FEARLESS.
You’ve probably already heard the story about the tortoise and the hare. It’s a classic that shows how slow but constant progress triumphs over being distracted and complacent.
While the story seems pretty straightforward, there are many valuable lessons to learn from it. This may not be obvious yet, but how might you feel about the competition if you were the tortoise going against the hare?
Would you be excited? Would you be nervous? Would you be scared? Or would you even dare think about going in a race against a hare? How would you be if put in this kind of situation?
To give you a more relatable scenario, how would it feel trying to accomplish a BIG goal in a short amount of time? It’s like trying to finish something that would usually take 10 hours, but you only have 3 hours to do it.
Impossible, right? To some, their approach to life feels like this. They feel so pressured and already make conclusions in their head that they have already been defeated and won’t even make a move. Is this you?
More importantly, what happens whenever you feel overwhelmed, and how do you get through it?
Outside Your Comfort Zone
Regardless of your goal, be it becoming excellent at approaching women or establishing a company, if it’s outside your comfort zone but it’s a priority for you, it can be both exciting and paralyzing at the same time just thinking about it.
But between the two emotions, for some people, it can be more paralyzing than it is exciting. Becoming paralyzed can be the general trend whenever you try to make a move.
Imagine yourself being the tortoise going against the hare. Or, if we could take it a level higher, you could imagine yourself going against Superman. Frightening! What are the odds of winning against him, or what are the odds of you achieving a humongous goal?
To get through this paralysis, you have to know the reason why you become paralyzed. Is it because you think you’re not good enough? Is it because you feel you don’t deserve it? Is it because you think you can’t do it? Is it because you don’t even know how or where to start?
By knowing the most specific cause, you can figure out how to gracefully and dramatically move towards your goal. While it’s important to know your plan, it’s equally important to know what’s hindering you from achieving it.
If you know how you can beat the hare as a tortoise or find the kryptonite of your problem, you’re on your way to becoming victorious.
Knowing Where And When To Start
What’s stopping you from reaching your goal? Is it the lack of confidence? Is it the lack of capital? Is it the lack of a particular skill? Regardless of the problem, if you have identified it, you’ll then know where you can start instead of just looking at the big picture and becoming overwhelmed by the greatness of your objective.
If you think of the goal as a problem, then it will become so. There’s no way for you to become creative if you’re in an anxious state. All solutions go out the window if your mind is not calm. It can be harder or even near impossible to attract solutions or opportunities in a negative state.
Move At Your Own Pace
Remember the story about the tortoise and the hare? You don’t have to force yourself to create a considerable change. If you do, you get paralyzed thinking how big of a goal you’re trying to accomplish.
Remember, in the story, slow and steady won the race. And don’t get too complacent. If you keep on rushing, you can find yourself busy but not achieving any real progress.
You’re filled with doing things just for the sake of you doing something. You can be busy but not productive. This is a good sign that you are overwhelmed. You want to do things, and you do things to make yourself feel better for doing something despite unconsciously or consciously knowing that you are intimidated.
Move at your own pace. There should be a systematic process when trying to achieve goals. You can’t go to number 5 without first going through 1, 2, 3, and 4. Identify your number 1, 2, 3, etc.
Face them head on one by one. Eventually, all the small steps you’re making become a significant contribution to reaching your goal.
Don’t Want It, Be It
The more you say to yourself how badly you want to have lots of money, to become good with girls, the more you may push that very thing away. For example, you want to lose weight, and you say to yourself, “I want to lose weight,” and it just doesn’t happen for some reason.
You retain the weight you have, or even worse, you gain more. Why is this? The psychological reason for this is when you say to yourself that you want to become “X,” you’re unconsciously telling yourself that you are not it, that you are not “X.”
Like if you want to have lots of money and you tell yourself, “I want to have lots of money,” or “I want to be a confident person,” you’re unconsciously telling yourself that you don’t have lots of money or you’re not a confident person.
You’re not it, or you don’t have it because you want to be it or have it. Instead of thinking this way, have a different perception. Think instead that you already are it or you already have it, that you’re not pushing yourself towards a goal but instead pulling a goal towards you.
Acceptance Creates Faster Progress
You can’t choose how your life starts. While we all may be participating in the competition called life, we’re all not handed the option to either become a hare or a tortoise. It would help if you learned how to work with what you have gracefully.
If you have the humility, understanding, and wisdom to accept where you are and what you have, you can better progress in life and even progress faster because you’re not working from a state of denial.
If you don’t like where you are, who you are, and what you have if you believe that you are a victim in life, that might be what you will become. The quality of your life can be determined just by the quality of your thoughts.
If you think this way, this is the challenge that you have to overcome. Accepting who you are is the foundation to taking on all other challenges, hurdles, and goals in life.
If you accept who you are and what you have to work with, chances are, there’s no complaining and nagging. You acknowledge that life is, that it’s consistently unfair, and it’s up to you to change the quality of your life. The challenge is doing so with what you have.
Slow And Steady Wins The Race
If you have a goal, no matter how small or big it may be, consistency is key to achieving it. It’s not the size of the strides you make but the small steps you do each day consistently. How do you go about this?
The first step is to identify your goal, know what’s hindering you from achieving it, then designing a solution to overcome the challenges one after the other. By doing this, you’ll have a systematic and logical progression.
You’ll have a roadmap and a clear idea of where you are in the roadmap.
Work On Yourself
Like the hare in the story, you need to have incredible resilience to keep on pushing on. You need to be passionate; you need to believe that winning is possible and take the race seriously.
Some people are not as competent nor skillful in life as others, but they’ve ended up becoming the world’s wealthiest individuals.
They’ve done this by working on themselves and making consistent progress, and not getting distracted. They’ve done it by accepting who they are, what they have, where they are starting. They know their goal and how to troubleshoot. You can do this, too.
You have a goal, and that’s why you’ve read up until this part. You can achieve it by having a systemic process. Remember, accept who and what you are entirely and upgrade your knowledge based on the problems you have to solve to slowly but consistently reach your goal.
Do you think it’s fair to compete in a race with a hare as a tortoise? What’s your decision today?
Video Transcript:
Welcome to this Sunday’s Fearless Fundamentals video. I’m excited to bring you this one. This one is going to be on a mental concept to help you grow in a weird sort of way faster by going slower. There’s an old saying slow down to go fast. You can think about it in the analogy of the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise was all about speed, all at once, slamming the gas pedal down and going as fast as possible, whereas the tortoise was about consistency. One percent at a time, regular growth. The tortoise ends up winning this race. The analogy here is that we need to slow down to go fast. You need to be consistent, or you’ll burn yourself out, you’ll crash, you’ll be inconsistent, and inconsistency leads to actually going backwards. You start to go forward and then you crash, you go back, and it’s constantly starting over, creating total burnout. This is what a lot of people do when they grow.
Now, I want to relate this to your process of growing with women and dating, because I see this so much with men, women and dating. They go out and they want to learn to be good with women. It’s a lot of pressure, because it’s a major part of your self-esteem as a man. If I’m not attractive to beautiful women or attractive women or women I like, I can’t get that woman of my dreams, I’m not valuable as a human being. That’s kind of the feeling. So, they become obsessed with getting that girl or getting a girl, or getting girls, or getting women, and they obsess so much that the wanting of it pushes them all away. There’s this sense of I’m coming at you, at the women.
I’ve seen this a million times in bars. I’ll be in bars and you can see all the guys hunting the women, and the women are closing off and pulling away. As it gets later in the night, the more the women close off. I see it with pickup groups. I’ll be in the bar and suddenly the anxiety raises in the room, and that’s because some pickup group came in and it’s teaching all the guys to push, push, push, push, push, and eventually, things will start to change. That does work for a small group of men who are already kind of grounded, who just needed to be pushed a little bit, but guys who have a lot of self-esteem, a lot of issues they’re working through, a lot of deep pain they’re working through, that doesn’t work for it. It actually amplifies the pain more and more and more, causing them to push harder, the law of polarity. There’s another law in there.
What it ends up doing is it ultimately causes them to burn out and then crash, and then go all the way down into numbing out and apathy. I’ve seen guys like this work for five years, six years, seven years, 10 years, and they’re no better with women, and most of the time worse with women than when they started. I don’t want you to be that guy. I want you to get this simple principle from the beginning. We talk about it all the time, the one percent rule. Grow one percent at a time, or what your body’s comfortable at growing at, and honor that, respect that, celebrate that. I’m going to show it to you through natural law. I’m going to show it to you through simple principles.
Now, as I say this, I want to remind you guys that I was terrible in the beginning. I was absolutely horrible. Women would run the other way from me. Women did not want to date me. At best, they wanted to be my friend. I had to do a lot of changing to even get started in this area. I had to shift myself a lot. I was really in my head. I was really analytical. I was really a big victim. All of this stuff I’m asking you to do, I’ve done, I’ve been through. You can do it too. I had to surrender ultimately, and I wish I had done it sooner, to taking my time and going at the pace my body was ready to go at. There’s a law of gestation and law of transmutation. So, there’s a couple of other laws in there.
Now, what I’m referring to are the seven natural laws as I talk about this. You can learn more about that in my video on the seven natural laws. It’s on the YouTube channel. We’ll see if we can get a link in here. It comes up pretty quick if you look it up. It’s a powerful video. It’s got a lot of great comments. I think, as an addendum to this video, it can be awesome. Also, just so you understand where I came from, what I’m going to do here is I want to flash somewhere on this screen a picture of me the way I used to look before I started all this, and how much I’ve changed. You can really see the lack of embodiment, the disconnection from my body, and feel free to put a comment in there. I’d definitely love to read the comments on what you see in that picture.
Now, getting back to the principle. The principle is very simple. You do need to take action. You do need to push your boundaries. You do need to step into [inaudible 00:04:28]. You do need to work on your vulnerability, all this stuff I talk about. You do need to work on your embodiment. But you’re going to grow a little bit each day. You think about a bodybuilder lifting weights. A bodybuilder doesn’t instantly go from 150 pounds to 250 pounds. He has to grow a little bit each week. He also has to have the right nutrition, a lot of rest and recovery. He has to take action, bold action, distress, and damage the muscles just the right amount so they’ll grow in response and adapt. This is all the stuff that needs to be in place as you’re shifting the mind too.
The more you surrender to this process, the faster you will change. That’s the oxymoron. The more you try to rush this concept, the slower you will change. When I first started out, I used to think, “I’m going to get over my approach anxiety right away.” I had terrible approach anxiety. So, I’d go out to a bar, and, “I’m going to try to do 30 approaches tonight. I’m going to push, push, push, push, push, and then I’ll do it tomorrow night, and by the end of the weekend, I’ll be a new man and break free, break off all bondage and be really good at approaching women, or at least comfortable so I can get good at approaching women.” I didn’t even care about good. What typically happened was a little different.
On the nights I got the balls to approach a lot of women, I had to repress the approaching anxiety. I’d be shaking, I’d be nervous. Eventually, body armor would come up, and I would get ballsier, but it’s because I wasn’t feeling. I would push, push, push, and then I would think, “Oh, wow. I did amazing tonight. I talked to all these girls.” Then I’d try to do it again the next night. There was more resistance in the start, and then I bust through it, do it again somewhat, maybe not 30, and then I’d think, “Wow, that had to have an affect on my approach anxiety.” The next weekend would roll around, and I was more terrified than the weekend before. What I did was I polarized my nervous system, law of polarity, and as I pushed this way, way outside my comfort zone, I caused the aversion to becoming stronger.
So, the attachment to becoming free and powerful with approaching was so strong, and instead of dealing with that attachment, I activated more of an aversion. That’s how the law of polarity works. Where there’s an up, there’s a down. Where there’s a left, there’s a right. Where something’s four feet from left tor, there has to be four feet from right to left. So, where there’s a strong attachment, and this is a natural law, so it’s true 100% of the time, that’s what makes it a law. So, if something is four feet from left to right, it has to be four feet from right to left. Where there’s males, there’s females. So, where I have an attachment to making something happen, there’s also an aversion. That’s why the attachment’s there. There’s a fight between the two, and you got to deal with both sides to truly go free of it.
The natural solution to this is to stop polarizing so much and work within my comfort zone. This doesn’t mean I don’t push my boundaries. This doesn’t mean I don’t step into vulnerability. It just means I step into the right amount. As I go to lift weights, for example, if I lift just the right amount of weight and really be conscious of the negatives, for example, like going down and go down slow, and then I can shoot up really good and then come down slow and really work those muscles. The other day I was doing a four-second down on my decent, and that really tears up the muscles, causes metabolic damage, and then plenty of rest to heal. What I’m doing is being really present with the process, and working right in my range, not giving bad form, not falling apart, and really pushing my boundaries at just the right level.
This causes a massive growth in the end because I gave the body everything it needed and the right doses. This is where everybody gets it wrong. They try to do too much too fast, or they try to do too little thinking. “I’m scared to do it, so I’m just barely going to do anything,” but they have one toe in and one toe out. It’s really about fully committing to the right amount of tension and vulnerability. So, how do you figure this out? Well, you go out there and you ask yourself if I need to work on approaching today, for example, approaching a beautiful woman, and approaching that beautiful woman over there is a 10 on the Richter scale, “I’m going to blow up, I’m going to die. My head’s going to blow off, and telling her she’s hot, and I think she’s sexy, and I want to get to know her.” Well, that’s not going to work. It’s not even probably going to get a good response because I’m going to be so reactive when I approach.
So, what I want to do is find something that’s nice and easy, that’s a small progression from where I’m at. Zero is no tension, and what’s a three? Maybe a four. Twos are fine too. I wouldn’t even go up much above that, except on occasion when I really want to push myself as a stretch. But most of the time, two, threes, and fours. I’ll say, “Okay, what can I do to approach that beautiful girl or to push myself in the direction of that beautiful girl that’s a two or three today?” Then I’m going to go do it. I’m going to fully be present with the feelings and emotions that come up. Then I’m going to do either a releasing process or a journaling process, and then I’m going to let them go, and I’m going to walk away from those emotions. I’m going to drop them and then do it again, and then do it again, and do it again.
Maybe I’ll do four or five approaches, maybe 10 or 20, then I’ll journal about what’s coming up for me. Then I’ll also acknowledge how I’m improving, how I’m growing, what I did better. You got to constantly acknowledge the growth and the improvement and the successes and celebrate them. I do the approach at the right tension level, vulnerability level, and then I acknowledge what I’m realizing from it, learning from it, through journaling. Then I also celebrate what I did really good, how I grew. I sit in that for a minute and appreciate it. It’s like after having a good workout and you’re like, “Wow, I feel great. I really pushed my body. I know my body’s going to grow from this.” Then the next day, you do it again, and the next day, you do it again. Maybe you take an occasional day off, but with mid-work, you can kind of be pretty darn consistent.
At the end of a month, two months, three months, you can have a radical shift in your growth. What are some laws, if laws are true 100% of the time that we’re working here? Well, we’re getting the polarity in the right range. We’re not causing this massive polarization, which causes the pain to activate massively. We’re also working with the law of gestation. When you’re working on something, it’s going to take a period of time. Making a baby takes nine months. Working in this area of growth is going to take a period of time. The more dense my thinking is, the more pain I’m in, the more I’m judging myself, beating myself up, the longer it’s going to take the process those emotions. I have to be present with them. I have to work with them, have to relax into them. The more fluid my beliefs are, the more relaxed I am, the more work I’ve done in the past, the more I have a really good foundation, the faster I’m going to go.
Where you’re at is where you’re at. I was way behind the eight ball. I was super negative, super hard on myself, so it took longer, and I had to go slower. The law of gestation applied there, and it was a lot of work. That was great. It’s fine, because once I accepted that, it actually started to move pretty fast, because the full acceptance of that idea causes the growth to speed up. So, I want you to kind of let that idea in too. The next law I want you to play with, so we’ve got three laws here, law of polarity, law of gestation, and the law of transmutation. The law of transmutation states that as you work through something, especially if it’s low and heavy on the emotional scale, like apathy or even fear, you’re going to have an emotional response that’s intensifying, that’s intensification, you’re going to feel something bubble up, you’re going to feel this weirdness or something you don’t like. Something’s going to change.
Just like the phoenix burning up and being reborn, the mythology of the phoenix, imagine being the phoenix and suddenly lighting on fire. It seems like everything’s going wrong. You’re burning up, but then you’re reborn better than ever before. Same with the caterpillar. Caterpillar turns into a cocoon, turns into goo, falls completely apart, and then is reborn a butterfly. Well, we all do this. As we go through some of the lower emotions and then we finally surrender to them and let them go, we’re reborn better than ever before. There’s a transmutation that happens there. So, it’s the law of transmutation, which has an intensification, weird feelings. At the higher level, it just feels good. It feels like you feel yourself processing and you’re going through something because you understand it, you’ve been through it, you get it. This is perfect.
At the lower level, it feels kind of like you’re going backwards to go forward. That’s perfectly fine too. Realize that happens and learn from it and process it, and don’t make it wrong. What happens in the law of transmutation, where we go wrong, like in gestation, the law of gestation, it’s not going fast enough. In the law of transmutation, where we think there’s something wrong and all this emotions and feelings that we’re experiencing, “There must be something wrong. I’m feeling all this sadness and this grief,” instead of just processing and letting it go and realizing that’s stuff coming out of your subconscious to be released. In the law of polarity, we’re trying to push too far too fast. Also, we’re stretching and we’re causing the opposite side of the polarity to activate the aversion to grow stronger.
So, as you work each one of these, you begin to wake up and realize that growth is not a hard process at all if you work within the natural laws. If you just think about these three natural laws, there’s seven I talk about in that video, but if you think about these three, you can have a big shift in your reality fairly quickly. Give yourself a month to three months and look back and see how much you shifted. I would say each day as you journal how you’re growing, and then look back at all the things you journal, start to track all your gains and successes along this month to three-month journey, you’ll really see a powerful process of transmutation happening overall. The big picture will start to come together around approaching or whatever else you want to work on.
So, to me, this was one of the most important things I ever did and got in alignment with and I get all my clients in alignment with, is that you’re going to grow at the rate you’re going to grow. The more you surrender to that, the faster you grow. That’s a weird oxymoron, but it’s so true. Once you surrender to that, it all becomes more pleasurable and fun anyways. You get to learn from every step, and the next thing you know, you have a whole new life and a whole new way of being. You literally change who you’re being. It’s like the phoenix. You burn out to be reborn better than ever before. Really powerful. For those of you that are Christian, it’s the same analogy of Jesus on the cross. You know? Being to the cross and God, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Then dying and then being reborn better than ever before.
That’s what that analogy in my mind represents. It’s very powerful. When you start to understand that, you understand, that’s what we go through with every trauma and drama in life, that we face it, we don’t become a victim to it, we penetrate through it, we show up anyways at just the right amount. We just stay present, and then what happens is there’s a transmutation process that happens. We don’t take that personal. We’re then suddenly we’re reborn more confident than before, and we keep doing this. Same with bodybuilding, damage the muscle, rest, feed the right nutrition, repair, and the body becomes stronger and bigger. Same with developing flexibility, same with everything. You see it everywhere. So, I want to invite you into this process. It’s the one percent rule, which is something else I wanted to talk about in this video. It’s the one percent rule in action. If you can just honor these one percent gains, compounding interest is radical.
If you think about compounding interest and you look at a compounding interest chart, you can look one up on Google, or if we can get one up here, we’ll get one up here. But if not, you can look one up on Google, at one penny a day, doubled every day, in 31 days, you have over $10 million, Okay? One penny doubled every day. It looks like nothing’s happening along the way, but at the end of that doubling, there’s a skyrocketing effect. That’s where the quantum leap happens. At first, it looks like nothing’s happening, but through one percent a day, there’s an eventual quantum leap that blows your life up and everything changes. This happens overall with your whole life. When you get in alignment with everything I just talked about, through your whole life, not just with dating, your money reality, your health reality, and you start getting all of these different areas compounding at one percent using these natural laws, what happens is one day you look back and you’re like, “Wow, I’m a whole different human being,” and it will only keep getting better from there.
So, if you really want a radical change, watch this video over. Watch it several times. Watch it throughout the process. Commit to a month, two months, three months, and keep rewatching it and getting more subtle realizations about everything I talked to you about. Check out my seven natural laws video, keep a compounding interest chart, keep reminding yourself about it. Look at that original picture of me and get a feel and look at how much I’ve changed since I started this process, and realize that change is not only possible, it’s inevitable when you work within the natural laws.
With this said, I hope you liked this video. I would love to hear your comments on it because this one’s personal to me. It’s very powerful to me. It’s how I changed my life and share the video. I’d love for you to share the video to anybody that needs this man, woman, child, in different areas of life, help them to understand what it takes to truly change. Smash that like button if you liked it, and subscribe. With that said, remember, only the confident really live. I’ll see you in the next video. Have a beautiful day, a beautiful week. Take care.
