Define your path

The moment I announce the title of the book with the word amazing in it, people started giving me a hard time. Amazing is one of those words that freaks people out. And what I try to tell people is listen, especially when we're talking about an amazing life, you get to define what amazing is. So for me. what amazing is for me is that I'm home when my kids get home from school. I love being there to give them a hug and to say, hey how was your day? Help them with their homework, find out what's going on in the world. That's amazing to me! Now of course for my life and I kinda have to balance that out because I also love to travel. I love to speak. I love to teach courses like this. I love to interact with people and experience everything in the world. So amazing for me is balancing those two. And it's not always easy. And I'm gonna tell you right now that very little of this is easy. It's hard work to do this. So as you start figuring out what kind of life you want to lead. And you're trying to figure out these amazing thing that can happen to you you have to define amazing. Only you can do it! I don't know how often that I talk to people and they say C.C. I'm not happy at my job or my relationship or something's not right and the first question I ask them is Ok, what do you want then? What can be better? And more often than not, they just kinda freeze up and go, I don't know but what I got now isn't what I want. That's not right! You cannot get to improvement, you can't have a better life, you can't define what it is you want to get to. So once you've defined what is amazing to you and what you're trying to do, you've got to choose the path to walk down. Now Robert Frost said it best and if you've ever seen Kid President talk about Robert Frost that path is not fun. It's thorny, it's bumpy, there's rock, you fall down and the path of choosing that you choose is usually the harder one. I know when I decided I was going to be a consultant and I was gonna work on my own and launch my own marketing agency, that wasn't the easy path. I had a good job. I had a stable job. Thankfully my wife allowed me to do this. She embraced it, she said, "Go for it, I know this is what you want to do." But you have to remember that you're the only person who can choose the path. The path you walk down, the path you set, if you don't know where you're going, then setting that path is extra, extra hard. So make sure you define where you're trying to get to and then figure out the points between A and B how to get there. Sometimes it's going to be little milestones along the way. Figure out what it is. Maybe you need new skills. Maybe it's new people you need to meet. Maybe you have no idea how to jump into this pool that you wanna jump into. Whatever it is, once you have that path you can start walking down it. And one of the final pieces of advice about choosing where you're gonna go and it's something you know took my a long time to fully embrace is that you need to trust your gut. It's one of those things where, yes people can give you advice, you know people say no it's not a good idea, it is a good idea. But at the end of the day, you have to trust your gut. You know what I'm talking about. You all have had that feeling right, where good or bad a decision you're contemplating whether it's just going out tonight or it's you know, starting a new business, [if] something doesn't feel right or it feels really, really good. Either way, I think people need to trust their gut more and more. I see this a lot in young people where they go to college and maybe their parents are pushing them to do one thing and they really feel like they want to do something else. And then they don't trust their gut. They don't embrace the fact that you know what I need to do this, whatever it is. I need to stand up and make a decision and start doing what I really want to do rather than what somebody else is trying to tell me to do. That choosing the path we talked about I know I speak to a lot of young people and it's something I'm really passionate about and I see everyday that they get on this path that they didn't define and that they are not gonna be happy with where they get to but they think they have to walk it. Then they get to be 25 or 30 or even younger or older and they realize you know what? This isn't what I wanted to do. And I'll tell you what, it's a lot harder when you get down that road. Once you have kids and mortgage payments and things like that, it's a lot harder to be risky. When you're young and you don't have all those attachments, that's the time to take logical risks and everybody's scared of it. There's not a single human on this planet who isn't scared of risks. But those of us who lean into it and don't flinch, we're the ones who succeed. So trust your gut. Find the path and start walking down it.