Episode 4: The Power of Simplicity

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

Good evening. This is Chris Albert and welcome to Warrior Soul Podcast episode four. I want to thank you guys all for coming and listening to me tonight and to listening to the past three episodes. I've really been enjoying doing this project and bringing some really great knowledge about some really great books to you guys. Tonight, we're not gonna go over a book.

It's going to be a little bit of a bit of a quick podcast because I have to head to Philadelphia tomorrow and so I need to get ready for my flight and for my trip. And I wanted to get a podcast out for you tonight because I'm not going to be able to get one out for you next week. What I kind of wanted to do today was just talk about the last three episodes and kind of give you an overall sum of what I feel is one of the keys to living a good life. And we talked about fear a lot in the second episode. We talked about resilience in the first episode.

In the third episode we talked about persistence. Today I want to talk about simplicity. When you think about a guy like Chesty Puller, who we talked about in episode three, We don't hear about him really complicating his life all that much. He, his main focus was on his goal, which was his career. He had becoming a Marine officer in mind, and he went after it regardless of anything that the Marine Corps threw in his way.

And if you listen to the last episode, you know that he tried three different times to become a second Lieutenant, and the first time he had to resign his commission, the second time he failed out of OCS, and finally on the third time he he finally made it, and then he spent five more years after that as a second Lieutenant. And that was after ten years of serving as an enlisted man, serving in Haiti, and he got denied from OCS one of the times he applied, and he just kept going. But what we see there is simplicity. He didn't live a complicated life. His purpose was fulfilling his purpose.

His purpose was becoming a United States Marine Corps officer, and then after he did that, his purpose was being the best Marine Marine Corps officer that he could be. One of the problems I think we all face, and this happens a lot more in the civilian world than it does in the military, is that we allow a lot of extraneous factors to get into we're doing. We start to focus too much on the little things. We start to focus too much on the things that don't really matter. And so a lot of times, especially in the civilian world, you know, we fill our lives with material possessions we don't need.

We spend our money on things we don't need. We spend our money on fun. And while fun is important, it also tends to be a distraction. A lot of times it can be mental masturbation where we're just filling our time with things to preoccupy ourselves because we're bored and we want to find something new to life, or we want to add some excitement to life. And what we fail to see at that point, when we start to occupy ourselves with things that don't really matter, is that we do have options.

We have choices. We have choices to do more meaningful things. Now that doesn't necessarily entail building, you know, the next space age rocket, or becoming President of The United States, or you know securing world peace. It could be as little as learning something new every day. It could be something as little as deciding that you're going to go to the gym every day, deciding that you are going to invest in your health and your fitness, or maybe you want to open up a side business.

Maybe you want to start a new hobby. Something that's going to be productive to enrich your life, make it better, and not just get you to preoccupy your mind with something that's going to rust, rot and depreciate, or with some sort of cheap thrill. And so the biggest thing I want to convey to you tonight is to think about what you could get out of your life right now. What can you get rid of right now, that if you got rid of it, make your life better. Now I could think of a couple of things that I've done throughout my life that I've gotten rid of, that made my life a 100% better.

I used to be the guy who went to the bar from I'd go Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And then on Monday I'd take a night off. And as soon as I stopped doing that, I was saving more money. I was, you know, getting more time out of my day because I wasn't waking up hungover. And I was getting more hours out of the night because I wasn't spending my time just drinking and just occupying my time with something that really wasn't helping me in any way.

When I think back on it, the reason why I was doing that was because I had this fear of being alone. I had to be around people. I had to be around people all the time because I feared the darkness. I feared those thoughts that used to creep into my head at night. You know, those dark thoughts that come.

And I'm not talking about suicide. I'm not talking about, you know, anything kind of heinous. But I'm talking about the voices that where I would tell myself, you know what, you're not good. You're not good enough. You're never gonna become something.

And the whole time I was doing that, I was trying to deaden those voices. I was trying to get them out of my head. And a lot of it I think was because I felt this immense guilt. You know, when I served in the Marine Corps, on my first appointment I didn't have a very eventful deployment. And when I came back, I was stop loss, so I got out.

And then when my unit went back, they had a much harder deployment. We lost Marines. And I wasn't there. You know, one of my friends got severely wounded and I wasn't there. So for years I would torture myself and I would tell myself, you shouldn't be here.

You should have been on that deployment. You should have been wounded. You should have been killed. You should have had something bad happen to you. And right now, these dark feelings you're having, those are punishment for the fact that you weren't there with your brothers.

You know, guilt's a motherfucker. Guilt will cause you to take everything good in your life and put it off. And it will get you to focus on nothing but the bad stuff. It will get you to focus on every reason why you shouldn't advance yourself. But here's the fact, you know, one of my brothers who died, not one of my brothers who was wounded, would want me to be in a position where I wasn't moving forward.

Not one of my brothers would want me to be in a position where I was feeling sorry for myself, because that's essentially what it was. Yes, it was in a very scornful and self deprecating way, but it was basically me having an excuse for why I wasn't doing anything. It was me having an excuse for going out and drinking my face off and deadening my senses to reality. So that's the second thing I want you to ask yourself. What kind of excuses have you made for yourself?

You know, dig deep, really try to figure those out. Because a lot of times there are things that are right in front of our face that we're not paying attention to. You know, the fact that we might be blaming someone else for our problems. The fact that, you know, maybe we're blaming our parents. Maybe we're blaming our experience in the military.

Maybe we're blaming some past experience, some breakup that we had, some way we got our hearts broken. Maybe we're blaming those. But the fact is if we're blaming those events, we're letting the past rule our lives, and we're not taking charge of our lives in the present. We're not taking responsibility for our lives in the present. And it's a funny thing because a lot of us who've served in the military, we tend to be conservative.

We tend to be people who subscribe to conservative politics. And I don't know if you do or any you don't, whatever you subscribe to, I'm a conservative and I believe in conservative values, but we forget that conservative values, we stand up for self responsibility. We believe that people should be in charge of their own lives and not rely on anybody else to help them, to give them a handout, to give them an honorable mention medal when they performed sub optimally and they couldn't place. That's because we believe there's more value in getting people to work and getting people to push themselves to move forward. Getting people to take responsibility for their lives and be at a point where they don't have to rely on anybody else.

The reason is because in independence there's liberty. If we are independent of anyone trying to help us, trying to give us a handout, we're more free. We're more free to do what we want. We're more free to live the lives we want. And we're more free to pursue the things that we want to pursue.

The beauty of the capitalist system in my mind, is that we have the ability to be so creative. We have the ability to build so many amazing things, because we're not ruled by any governing concept, concept, ruled by any regulation that's gonna keep us from creating. And I think that's amazing. And if somebody else makes tons of money off of an idea and I don't, that's fine. Because I have an iPhone in front of me that allows me to connect with anyone I want to in the world.

And that allows me to download any book I want to, and read it immediately, or listen to it as a recording while I'm doing something else. And that's pretty damn cool. There was a time in history where books were illegal. Books were the tool of the upper class because only the upper classes got to read. They were the keepers of the knowledge, and the only ones who were supposed to be able to get knowledge.

And that's how they ruled the peasant classes. But our capitalist system that's supposedly so bad that so many people people think it's so bad. We spread ideas everywhere. Even ideas that are contrary to the ideals of the ruling parties, the United States government. And that's the type of freedom we have.

And for us, those of us who are trying to make something, trying to build something, trying to be better people, or for those of us who might be in a stagnant space, and we're not moving forward, and we don't know what to do. We have an easy answer right there. Information is everywhere. We can learn about anything. We can read about anything.

We can make ourselves better in so many ways. And so if we're thinking about living a really great life, one of the things, one of the only things we need is information. Books, the ability to learn new ideas, and the ability to be humble enough to know that we need to seek this information out. And I think that that's one of the bases of what we talked about in our first episode, resilience. If you want to let your experiences make you a better person, if you wanna let your experiences make you stronger, you have to open yourself up to learn from them.

Sometimes the answer is not right there. Sometimes something bad's happened to you and it seems like it's the end of the world. But sometimes you come across some information and you realize that, you know, that thing that happened to me, that time that I failed at something or that time that, you know, maybe my girlfriend broke up with me or that time that I lost a loved one. Maybe we could see it as something else. You know in the case of a death, one of the things we have to realize is that we're all going to die.

And death in and of itself is part of life. And we talked about ways of seeing death. We talked about how you can fear death. We talked about how you can mock death. We talked about how you can use death as a messenger to yourself.

You know when you one of the things that scares us about death is that when we see somebody we love die, it reminds us of our own mortality. It reminds us of the fact that someday we're going to die. And it reminds us of the fact that this life that we're living right now is completely temporary. And that's hard. It's hard to realize.

It's hard to realize that your friends could be here one day, and then the next day, the next minute, not be. And when you lose someone sometimes that makes you super aware that everyone around you is going to face the same fate. But the biggest thing you have to realize is that you're going to face the same fate too. And at the end of the day, the fact that we're going to face that fate, the fact that we're all going to die, the fact that I'm going to die, the fact that you're going to die, means that we have a limited time to do what we should be doing here on this earth. And if this is all temporary, if this is all just something that's going to last for a short time, because in the grand scheme of the universe, our lives are not even a blip. What are we all so scared of? Why are we scared to pursue the things that we want to do? Why do we waste our time with things that give us temporary fun?

When we could be working on big things that bring meaning to this short time that we have here on this earth. It's an interesting thought, and I think it's because a lot of us just get around that fear. And there's a lot of us out there who say that it's not fear. It's just the fact that we are sad and depressed because we lost our friends. But it is fear.

It's fear because it keeps you from actually having real relationships with people, or developing real relationships with people, because you're afraid to lose them. It keeps you from actually developing a real relationship with yourself, because you're afraid of dying. And you know that because you're gonna die someday, You become paralyzed by that fear. And that's something I said in that episode too. We're all born into a tragedy.

We're born into the fact that we are gonna die. But it's only a tragedy if you look at it that way. You can either live your life in fear of the fact you're gonna die, or you can live your life because you're gonna die. And for me, regardless of what the actual truth is, because my truth may not match your truth. It might not match the universe's truth, but for me, as an average mortal, as a humble human being, who knows that my time here on this planet is short.

Who knows that my time here to do what I wanna do is short. I choose to live because I know I'm gonna die. I choose to do everything that I can to make the most out of this life because I know it's temporary. Because I know that someday my beautiful girlfriend is probably gonna outlast me, because I'm a lot older than she is. Not pedophile style or anything like that.

Mean I'm 37, she's 26. But I know that, you know, we get married someday, I'm probably gonna die before her. And I wanna make this time that I have with her as beautiful as possible. But above all, and this might sound selfish, I wanna make the time I have with myself as possible. Because the only person that you absolutely have to spend your time with, like yes, you have family.

Yeah, you might have family obligations, but the only person who you are physically attached to is you.

And so you have to take care of yourself and you have to take care of your wants. And I don't mean your base wants, those things we do for fun. What I mean is your inner desire to accomplish. To be exactly who you want to be. To do the things that you always wanted to do.

And to get that crap out your mind that you can't do them. Because the only reason we have that crap in our mind is because we've preoccupied ourselves with the little things. We filled our lives with material possessions, and we've spent our money, our hard earned income, on satisfying those base needs that are only going to last for a few moments of time in our life, and not bring us a lifetime of satisfaction. So again, comes back to simplicity. What can you get out of your life right now?

That's gonna allow you to focus on what's important. What can you eliminate from your life right now that's gonna allow you to focus on the bigger picture? And I think back to when I lived in lived out of my car, and I was homeless, and I'd lost everything. It was so funny because the only time I could actually see it, the only time up to that point that I could actually see it was when I'd lost everything. Because I realized that losing everything wasn't so bad.

I had no reason at that point not to do everything I wanted to do. Yeah, I didn't have money. Yeah, I was living out of my car, but I was free. I was free because I didn't have to worry about paying my credit card bill. I didn't have to worry about paying my rent.

Because the only focus I had was in getting to a point where I wasn't living out of my car. I basically got reset to zero. And I'm not saying that you have to do something similar. I'm not advising you to live out of your car. I'm not advising you to go homeless, but there's an easier way for you to do it, and that's just to focus on what's important. So that ends that diatribe. And sometimes when I talk about these things, my thoughts might not come out as clear as I want them to. But I hope you get the message, and I'd really appreciate if you left some feedback for me on iTunes by leaving a review. But I also want to answer some questions tonight, and I got one particularly interesting question today.

And I kinda wanted to go into it because it plays a little bit into what we've been talking about in this episode, but it goes to something that I think a lot of us neglect because we let the little things creep in, but we forget how important it is, and that's Fitness. Remember when I said the only person you're physically attached to is yourself? Well, that also means that the only two assets you have in your life are your mind and your body. Your money is not going to get you to live longer. I mean, yeah, you could buy better medical treatment, but when your body's broken down, your body's broken down.

And when your mind's broken down, your mind's broken down. So we have to think about the things that are going to allow us to live. And not only allow us to live, allow us to live fruitfully. And that means being active, being able to physically do everything we want to do, and being of the right state of mind. The right clarity of mind to be able to do them into our later years.

And in order to do that, that means taking care of your fitness. So let's get into this question. The question says, first and foremost, I love your emails and what you're doing. It's a huge inspiration for me. I know you're a busy man as am I, which is why I won't reply very often with my issues or concerns.

One big thing I do struggle with is finding the the motivation to actually go to the gym after work. My seventy two or forty eight hour shift, depending on the time of the week and when I do find the motivation, it's a struggle to find somebody to go with me, and the last time I went the gym by myself, I tore my posterior labrum, resulting in being laid up for nine months. During that time, I allowed myself to become depressed. I was finally cleared in February, and now I'm battling this slope to get back to where I used to be. Any tips on how I can beat these mental barriers?

Well first I want to tell all of you don't ever be hesitant to send me a question because that's why these podcasts exist and that's why my videos I wanna answer your questions. So feel free to. Second, let's get into a little bit of what he's saying here. And he says he was really getting into fitness. And when he was going to the gym by himself, he accidentally tore his labrum.

The purpose of training, especially resistance training, is to make you healthier and to prevent injury. So anytime we're getting injured from weight training, it means one of two things. We're either using really bad technique or it means that we're going too heavy. So the big thing I think you have to think about here is when you go to the gym, you really need to train yourself and not your ego. You know, I I've been a power lifter since the age of 12.

I've lifted a lot of really heavy weight. I used to own Metroflex Gym in Long Beach and everybody there trained heavy. But what I started to realize about halfway through everything was this, the more I tried to approach my workouts with my ego, the less I really got out of them. And the reason was because I would go to the gym and I would have a savage workout, but the rest of the day I would be brain dead. Wouldn't be able to do my work.

My relationship sucked because I didn't want to do anything else because I had no energy. And so it really wasn't adding anything to my life. Was taking things away. And the only thing I had because of my bodybuilding powerlifting workouts was a satisfied ego. It was that part of me that wants, you know, the Mercedes Benz.

That part of me that wants to get noticed in the bars by girls. But it wasn't helping me any. It wasn't helping me to build my life. It wasn't helping me to advance my businesses, and it wasn't helping my mind. And it was ruining my relationships.

I think training is the most important thing you can do in your life, next to learning, right? But if we approach training in the wrong manner, it drains us. It doesn't add anything. And so the first thing I'll say to you here is that if you're not able to go to the gym by yourself because you're afraid you're gonna get injured, the biggest thing I'd say to you is train yourself, don't train your ego. Learn to perfect the techniques that you need to learn.

Learn how to squat. Learn how to take care of the muscle imbalances that you need to in order to squat properly. I would definitely suggest checking out Kelly Starrett's Becoming the Supple Leopard. That book is an amazing investment in learning about your own body. Learn how to perform all the techniques the proper way.

And when you're training, challenge yourself, but never pick up a weight that you can't handle. You know, if you're doing a weight you can't handle, the only thing you're satisfying is your ego. You're not building muscle. In fact, you're probably not recruiting much muscle fiber at all. And the only way muscle is built is through muscle fiber recruitment.

You're probably maximizing a very small percentage of your muscle fibers because muscle fibers get recruited after the tighter ones are fatigued. So it's only after the muscle's fatigued to a certain point that you're gonna get all of your muscle fibers. So train lighter and learn how to go to the gym by yourself if you can't get anybody to go. If you're waiting for somebody to go to the gym with you, then for all intents and purposes, that's an excuse. That's you putting something off that could advance you and putting it into the hands of other people who don't really seem reliable. So if I were you, I would take control of that situation, because that's part of your life that you need to pay attention to. And if you do it the proper way, it's gonna make you healthier, it's gonna make you leaner, it's gonna make you feel better.

Now, the other thing you can do in this situation is rather than going to the gym, if you can't get to the gym, say you're you have young children and you're not able to go to the gym for an hour and a half. Well, what you do in is in whatever spare space you have, you put a pull up bar, you put a kettlebell, you try to get some something to dip with, maybe two chairs or you could build dip bars. And then if you have the space for it, you put a squat rack and a barbell set. If you don't, just use the kettlebell squat or get a set of dumbbells and you can front squat with those. And train with those.

There's a lot of really good simple workouts that you can do if you have that basic equipment. And what I'm trying to get at here is this, the gym is one of those things that we use to complicate our lives, right? We focus a lot of times on the wrong things because of the social factor at the gym. We focus on doing too much weight. We focus on doing meaningless exercises that aren't gonna help us and not doing the ones that really can.

We get stopped by the crowd because we have to wait in line for certain pieces of equipment. And the fact of the matter is, a lot of us stop training all complete, altogether completely when we have families because we can't get to the gym. So my advice to you is if you've been having problems getting there, maybe because you have small children, maybe because you have a family that needs you, then get it in in your house. Figure out a way. And then the final thing is if you don't want to build a home gym and say you can get to the gym, rather than coming home and grabbing your gym bag, stick your gym bag in your car.

Put a change of clothes in there and go to the gym either to your on your way to or on your way from work. And the because the reason is if you come home, you're gonna sit here and you're gonna give your yourself an excuse not to go. And so that's my advice if you were trying to bring fitness back into your life. So I'm gonna end there and again, I'm sorry for the short podcast. Next week, we will have a much more in-depth one, and we'll pick a book for that week.

But for now, I'm gonna head out to Philadelphia. I'll be putting some videos up on YouTube just from Philadelphia, just from my travels around there. I'm going to be in Philadelphia at the end of this week and I'll be in Connecticut next week. That's my home home state. I'm going to go visit my mom and get some good Italian food.

And if any of you are out there or anything like that hit me up on Facebook or hit me up on Twitter. If you've got questions for me on anything at all, hit me up on Twitter and my handle is Warrior Soul Gear. That's W A R R I O R G E A R. Hit me up on Twitter anytime or you can hit me up on Instagram and my name is Warrior Soul Apparel. If you want to support this podcast, can go to warriorsoulfitness.com and you can get one of our awesome t shirts or you can buy some supplements from Onnit.

Best supplements in the world. Nothing but earth grown nutrients. Alpha Brain is probably my favorite supplement of all time because it really adds to my focus while I'm trying to do my work. Or you can check out our bookstore, powered by amazon.com, and you can get any of the books I ever mention here on this podcast on that bookshop. So until next time, thank you all, and live life to its fullest.

Take care.