The truth I wish I knew 8 years ago

Advice is tough to give, and the older I get, the less inclined I’m to share any it. Because the more I teach and coach and communicate, the more I see how rarely my words are actually interpreted as I’ve meant them to be. If I could go back eight years and talk to a 20-year-old Jack, I think he would be very stoked in many ways about where I’m at now. And I know he’d ask for advice on how I got to where I am. And so reflecting on life a bit recently, I think there’s three key things that I’d like him to know that I thought I would share in this video. The first is that advice won’t work. No one can tell you how to build a business, how to make good content, how to speak Spanish any more than someone can tell you how to be strong.
The only way to actually know anything is to do it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to my business coach and asked him, how do I make good content? How do I make good videos? And his unwavering response every time was Make your process sustainable. Figure out how you can do this consistently, long-term indefinitely, because that’s all that matters. Everything will come from that. And this isn’t what I wanted to hear at the time at all. I wanted answers. I wanted to better understand things in the moment. I wanted to have a clear plan of how it was all going to look, and he didn’t give me that. And in hindsight, I see that he couldn’t. And his advice was actually the best thing I could have ever received because it wouldn’t matter how much I tried to consume on marketing, on writing, communication, belief change, consumer psychology, social media, attention, retention, I barely made any content.
And so I was shit at making content and I was going to continue being shit until I’d put in enough reps to be a little bit less shit. And then that same process would continue forever and it still does. And this applies to just any result you want in life. You want to be in better shape. How much do you think a deep theoretical understanding of strength training, biomechanics and physiology is going to get you jacked? Good luck with that. I could lecture you all day every day on the details of how this stuff works. It will not make a difference to your waistline. The only way you change your body is by conditioning it, taking action consistently for a long period of time with the training that you do and what you eat. And while that’s somewhat obvious to us, I think so many of us missed the point that that is exactly the same for anything you want to learn and the results that you want to get from that in your life.
Have you ever noticed to have every piece of advice that exists? There is also the opposite. Truism that’s just as common. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Fortune favours the bold opposites attract. Birds of a feather flock together. Good things come to those who wait. The early bird gets the worm. Every piece of information that you can receive from the outside world is not just raw fact. Everything that you hear is interpreted through your own lens, your own beliefs, the mental models that you have that literally are your version of reality. So whether any specific piece of advice is useful to you or not depends on your specific worldview right now. And so no matter what advice you were to receive on how to achieve X goal until you’ve done enough of it and actually achieved the goal, there’s always going to be something missing from the advice.
How can I possibly summarise 10 years of experience in a field? In a few words, it won’t work. There will always be gaps. Until you have tried and failed and learned enough times, there will always be gaps in your understanding of the thing. And so I would say to young Jack, firstly, advice doesn’t really matter. You don’t know what’s relevant to you and what’s not. And the only way to know is by doing the thing enough such that all advice becomes utterly irrelevant because you already get it inherently yourself as a result of the experience you’ve had. And you would be shocked by how simple it is to get results in anything. In fitness, in business, in language learning, in personal development, there’s only one thing that’s really required that makes it hard and that is failure. And so the second piece of advice I would give myself is to say that failure is not the obstacle to try and avoid in life, but the path to reaching your goals, you’re not as strong as you want to be.
So you train, you hit failure, you try to move low that you’re physically unable to move, and that trains your body to go and adapt and build muscle, get stronger so that you’re more capable of doing it. And you repeat that process of failure every week incessantly over a long period of time. The result is a body that’s strong and lean and looks great and is functional without the failure, without trying hard to do stuff that is currently on the edge or outside of your ability, you don’t change and neither does your life. And it’s like that with anything. You start off shit. You do it anyway. You continue to be shit trying to learn a language without failure or mistakes, then good luck ever learning the language. The people that progress the fastest are the ones that throw themselves head first in, which is why my recent language learning process has been fully about immersion in stuff that I don’t even comprehend yet.
It’s too hard for me. That’s diving into conversations not yet ready for because those experiences just trigger growth faster than anything else. But you have to be okay with the discomfort of failing constantly. Business has taught me this all over again. The only way you get half decent and making content is do so much that is not good, but it’s your best. And every single rep, every piece you put out into the world gets a little bit better because you learn from it. In business, the only way that you improve anything is by things breaking, by finding pain points by things not going to plan, because that shows you gaps, that allows you to find areas for improvement. And only then are you able to improve things. And this is why what I inevitably come back to with everything in life is simplicity. Because if failure is the inherent necessity to reaching goals, to getting results, it’s an inherently painful experience.
It’s emotionally charged. The reason we learn so well from failing is because it’s emotionally coded to be very salient. We realise when we have failed, it’s psychologically the same as physical pain. When things don’t go to plan, when we’re not as good as we’re trying to be, it sucks. And that’s why it helps us because if we didn’t care if it felt fine, if there wasn’t that strong feeling of negativity, we wouldn’t learn. We’d stay the same and no growth would happen. And so what I hate about what so many people preach with fitness and business and personal development is the complexity that gets in the way of people taking action. You can try and over optimise things as much as you like, but what I’m trying to express here is that everything you want is very likely simply on the other side of you just doing more.
And how much is trying to over optimise and over intellectualise and go really deep on how much is that helping you to do more versus paralysing you from taking any action? What finally allowed me to start really getting traction with my business and content creation was narrowing my focus down completely to just doing one YouTube video a week. And I know that sounds very simple, but it was only the elimination of all this other busy stuff that I was trying to do at the same time that created the space for me to actually just put focus and energy into doing this one thing and gave me back the time and cognitive resources to just do it well. So I think the less you can buy it off and do consistently over a long period of time, in many ways, the better. This is why that’s exactly what I’ve preached with fitness because it works so well not only for all my students who love the time efficiency, but it’s just what makes sense for me.
It’s the space physically in terms of recovery, but also just mentally in terms of focus. The less you have on your plate, the better you can get that done. And so it’s the same thing. I’ve applied to language learning. I’m very aware of how much brute effort is required to get enough experience to be able to speak fluently. So as soon as possible, I made my goal just read a book. That’s it. And so the 20-year-old Jack, I would say advice won’t work. And that failure is the path that is going to take you to where you want to be. And so the best approach is to narrow your focus, get your goals clear, know what you want, and once you do, narrow your focus down and optimise for doing, don’t try to optimise the doing itself that will come with time and experience and from getting enough reps under your belt.
What matters now is making sure your process is simple and sustainable so that you can just get the reps of failure under your belt and make it as easy as possible to just cop all those experiences. And the third piece of advice I’d give young Jack is about staying the path. Because whatever your goal, it’s all failure until it’s not. Nothing worth discussing is quick, otherwise you’d already have it sorted. And so it’s going to take you a long time to get to where you really want to get to. But it’s almost like as soon as you have locked into a process and get used to just failing and learning and iterating and improving and continuing that cycle, suddenly you look back and realise your entire life has changed. It often feels in life that nothing’s changing. And this is true in my experience of business and in fitness and in language learning.
And any example I can give you, it feels like nothing’s happening until suddenly you realise you’re literally at your goal and you look back and it’s insane. And I think if there’s anything important to take away from that, it’s that there are many ways to reach your goal. You only need to find one. And so this is why it’s so important to just stick to one path, decide on this minimum of inputs that you are going to focus on because as soon as you start looking around and seeing what other successful people are doing, it’s very tempting when you’re not at the goal yet to want to add things in and do more stuff to put more on your plate. But paradoxically, that’s exactly what will stop you ever making any progress in one direction. You look at any individual person, what inevitably makes them successful is that they’ve done very few things very well, very consistently for a very long period of time.
And so the more you expose to what other people are doing and to different pieces of advice, the more you distract yourself from your path because it will work. But not without a lot of time and a lot of wraps, no path works until you’ve stayed it for long enough. And reflecting back to my coach’s advice on content, it’s why it was such good advice was because his point was bang on about this needs to be a long-term thing. It doesn’t matter what next week’s video is, it matters that I’m still making a video every week in two years time. It’s so easy to get caught up in what’s happening now. And from that lens, failure is scary and negative and it throws most people off ever pushing through. But in hindsight, that was just one rep of many that have all stuck up to lead to this point.
So if you can learn to enjoy this process of tiny cycles of iterative improvement, if you can put your head down and ignore what everyone else is doing, consume less and just focus on the input that you’ve set out for yourself, eventually things are instantaneously going to look very, very different. But when they do, nothing will really change. You don’t get fit so that you can then stop training and eating in the way that got you in great shape. You don’t build a business that you love so you can then down tools and stop working. You don’t get fluent in Spanish so you can then never speak it again. The path that takes you to your goals, you want to stay on forever. And so if you can learn to enjoy it now and you learn to make it something that’s sustainable and simple and fun in the short term when you’re not where you want to be yet, then when you do get there, there’ll be no reason to stop.
And it’s the infinite games, the games that you play for a lifetime that are ones, in my opinion, that are worth playing. And so my final piece of advice to Young Jack would be to put your head down. Learn to enjoy what you’re doing now if you don’t change it and ignore everybody else, because what everyone else is doing is irrelevant. All that matters is what you are doing every single day. There’s some thoughts. I hope, something that resonates or is useful. And I fully understand the irony of advice doesn’t work coming from me, someone who gives advice for a living. But that is truly why I try to make all my content about removing complexity and just encouraging action because whatever the goal is, my thesis is that failure applied consistently over a long period of time by building a super simple, sustainable and enjoyable process is the way to get what you want in life.
And the more complexity that we throw at people who aren’t doing anything, the worse we make their situation. And I think the best advice that I’ve ever heard from other creators that helped me achieve my goals with fitness and everything else has been from people who have complicated things and encourage simplicity and action. And that advice has changed my life. And so I’m trying my best to pay that forward with everything I got. And so if I’m managing to do the same, for some of you, it’s an honour to have the opportunity, keep getting after it. I appreciate all of you. Speak soon.