How to Be an Adult Who Keeps Growing

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

You know, life is a funny thing. And, you know, the more you live it, the more you build structures around yourself. I I equate it a lot of the time to painting the floor of a room. So when you're young, when you're a kid, you haven't painted much of that floor. You're really relegated to a little corner, right?

You are learning things. There's a lot of chances where you can make mistakes, right? If you use the wrong color or something like that, you can paint over it, right? And a lot of us probably made a lot of mistakes when we were kids, right? We got in trouble at school or we misbehaved at home and our parents punished us, but it wasn't a big deal, Alright?

And then, you know, you paint a little more in that corner and all of a sudden you're in your teen years. Right? And you're all of sudden you're you're you're not quite to the middle of the room yet, but but you're you're using wider brush strokes. And during that time period, consequences are are still not grave, but they're a little more serious. Like, you might get in trouble at school, you might get yourself suspended, you might get yourself kicked off of a team, or you might get a really bad grade in school, then that that might prevent you from going to college or something like that.

But you still have a lot of room to catch up. Right? If you if you didn't get into college, it's not the end of the world. If you didn't get a job directly at a high school, it's not the end of the world. There's things you can go out there and learn.

There's things you can do to to catch up. Alright? And also during this time, it's it's your opportunity to to really kind of decide what kind of person you want to be. Right? Do you want to be do you want the room colored blue?

Do you want it colored red? You get to decide. Right? Up to that point, your parents were kind of guiding the painting, and and now it's you starting to make decisions for yourself. And then you get into your late teens and your early twenties, and and now your parents, you know, they might be there a little bit, but they're they're they're kinda gone.

Right? And so this is your time to test yourself. It's your time to to really go out there and be adventurous, and maybe you wanna try something different. That's that's why a lot of us, we decided to go into the military, right? And and we decided to do something very different from what our friends were doing or or what the people around us were doing.

And so we went off and and, you know, we we started venturing and and doing things like that. And by the time you're done with that, you're you're almost a quarter of the way done with the room. Right? And at that point, you're completely in charge. You're completely in charge of what color you're gonna make the room, what color you're gonna make that floor.

And you still have a good amount of opportunity. You go one direction or the other, but, you know, you're you're you're you're getting toward that middle of the room. And once you make that decision there, alright, when you're heading off toward the middle of the room, you're starting to to get yourself further and further into another corner. Alright? And so you get out, you start, you know, racking up bills, you start having to pay the rent, maybe you get married, maybe maybe you have kids, you get a secured job, and all of a sudden, you realize you're you're in another corner of the room.

And there's a good amount of the room that's not painted yet. But you're in another corner, and then there's wet paint all around you. And because there's wet paint all around you, what ends up happening is if you divert from that corner that you're in, if you go and you try and do something different, there's gonna be some waves. Right? There's gonna be some repercussions.

You might mess up the pain. Right? And that's kinda the situation a lot of us find ourselves in by the time we get to be 30 years old. Right? You you've racked up bills, you've racked up mortgages, you racked up rent, you've responsibilities and things like that.

And a lot of us, we wake up when we're in our thirties, and we look in the mirror and we say, how the heck did we get here? How the heck did I get into this life? I didn't plan on this. I didn't realize that this is where I was going. And I woke up one day and I'm here.

And I've had that feeling. I know a lot of you have had that feeling. A lot of my friends who've served and also who haven't served have had that feeling. And the question I want to explore today is, what do you do? What do you do when you're you're 30 years old, 35 years old, 40 years old, and you realize that you put yourself onto a path that you didn't want to be on?

It's a scary realization, and it's one that a lot of us haven't dealt with properly. And the thing that you have to realize here is this. This is where you've truly become an adult. You've got responsibilities, you've got other people depending on you, you've got things that that you need to do in order to sustain a life for yourself and for those that you love. And you can't shy away from that responsibility.

It's not like when you were a teenager, you were trying something and you could you you drop it and then you go do something else. The the the biggest thing you need to understand at this point in your life is that this is a challenge that's been put in front of you, and it's time for you to step up. It's time for you to say, okay. This is my life. This is my life and I have to live it.

And not only do I have to live it, I have to live it in a way that is going to allow me to excel and that is going to allow me to make the best life possible for those who are depending on me. And, you know, a lot of people are in denial about that, and I think that's one of the problems of a society right now. You know, we we live in this time, this place of social media where we're looking at everybody else's lives and how how much more awesome they are than ours. And we sit there and we think in our own self important way, And we think, you know what, I wish I could do something different. And the fact is, you have to admit that you can't, right?

You have to admit that you can't, you have to admit that this is your life. And you've got to live it. Right? And I'm repeating myself now, it's so important to understand you're in a different season right now. A season not of exploration, not of adventure.

It's a season of responsibility and of work, more work that you have to do to make this life. And the next thing you have to realize is that that's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. You're not stuck. You're not shackled, you're still free.

It's just that you have a lot of responsibility. Right? And what you need to do when you gain any amount of responsibility is is what you did before. You see, you didn't when you got into the military, right, you didn't just step in, pick up a rifle, and put on a uniform, and then you were a full fledged marine, a full fledged soldier, a full fledged sailor or an airman, you went through a training process. Right?

You humbled yourself. You gave up a certain amount of freedom so so that you could go and you could learn how to do that profession. And you have to do that again. Right? You have to go out there and you have to actually put effort into the things that you're doing.

You have to learn how to be a good father or a good mother. You have to learn how to be as good as possible at the job that you're doing. You have to put the extra effort in in order to to excel at work so that you can move yourself forward. If you want to be in a leadership position, if you want to to to take charge, then you've got to put the effort in. If you're in sales, got to study sales, you got to read.

If you're in construction, you got to step up, you got to learn about leadership so that you can maybe take over a crew. Right. If you are doing any job, you've got to decide that you're going to become a pro at that job, right. And maybe you don't like that job, maybe you hate it, right? But there's times in life where you got to do things that you don't necessarily like, right?

So what you got to do is you got to do that for a while and then develop a plan for how you are going to do something else while still being able to take care of your responsibilities. Right? So maybe you make a five year plan and you decide, hey, while I'm in this job, I'm going to do as good as possible as I can at this job. And then what I'm gonna do is in that hour that I'm normally watching Netflix at night, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna I'm gonna study. Maybe you want to find a different career path, maybe you want to become a police officer, maybe you to get into real estate.

Create an hour in your night, even if you you've got to lose an hour of sleep. And I know sleep is extremely important, but but for a short time, maybe you got to lose an hour of sleep. Maybe you got to lose that hour in Netflix you're watching. So that you can you can go and you can study real estate, you could study investing, maybe you can learn how to build your own business, maybe you can learn how to put a website together, right? And you could start a side business, right?

And what I'm telling you here is this, there's always opportunity to change, there's always opportunity to improve, right? It's just that most people don't want to make the sacrifice to do it. Most people don't believe that they can go out there, they can work, they can take care of their families, and they can move their lives forward, but you can. You can find time in your day. It doesn't take long to do a workout.

It takes twenty minutes, right? It doesn't take long. It doesn't take you don't have to learn everything in a day about something you want to do. It takes an hour a night, right? And if you start implementing those things in your life, right, that that that that hour, that forty five minutes, whatever time you can muster to read, to learn, to improve yourself, to make yourself stronger, then you're gonna be much better off.

You'll be a much far more well adjusted person. And I wanna emphasize this, at the same time, just because you have ambition and you want to go do something else, it doesn't mean you can give up on everything that you're responsible for. Right? It doesn't mean that you can just drop the job that you're doing. It doesn't mean that you could just go out there and neglect your kids.

You need to be putting effort into those and you need to be making yourself as good as possible at those things. Because if you don't end up doing that, let's say you just quit your job and you start just focusing on this 100%, well, I've been in that position too. I've been in that position where I didn't have a steady paycheck and I had people depending on me. Right? And I've been in that position of of staring up at the ceiling at night wondering how the heck I was gonna pay the rent.

Right? And I was an idiot. I was an idiot. So I don't want you to be an idiot like me. I don't want you to fall off on your responsibilities because you didn't get the signals that this was the time of your life where you had to live up to the things that you needed to do.

This is the time in your life where you've got to be responsible, and you've to do everything you can to live this life to the best that you can with what you have. Right? There is no fairy godmother coming down to to try to fix things for you. You gotta fix them yourself. And I hope that makes sense.

If you got questions about this, please hit me up on social media at Warrior Soul Agoge on Instagram. I am Warrior Soul Gear on Twitter. And, you know, let me know what you think. This is Chris Albert with the Warrior Soul podcast. Get out there and live your best life while you can, and I am out.