Knowledge and How to Get It

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

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

And we need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul podcast.

Weak men assume what they need to know will seek them out. Men of great character and drive search out the knowledge they need. That's a quote from Stephen Mansfield, from his book, Mansfield's Book of Manly Men, and I've had Stephen on as a guest, I a couple of months ago we had him on. Really great guy and that's a really great book you should all check out. What we're going to be talking about today is how to find the knowledge you need.

How to find the knowledge you need to move forward in your life and to live your best life. And I'm going go into a little bit of my own history, but I also want to deliver some resources for you that can help you along on your way. And these aren't just a bunch of websites I'm gonna give you. I wanna I wanna talk to you about where you can find knowledge. Before we get into that, I just wanna tell you a couple of different things.

Number one, if you haven't been here before, this is the Warrior Soul Podcast. And my name is Chris Albert. And the reason why I do this podcast is because over the past decade and a half of war, the veterans of our community and our country have faced a lot of different issues. We have a very high suicide rate. We've got a really high rate of veterans homelessness and a really high rate of chronic disease all in the veteran community.

And the reason why I do this is because a lot of people out there have been trying to raise awareness about these issues, but I don't think awareness is enough. What we need to do is we need to be delivering solutions, we need to be educating each other, We need to be pushing each other to be our best. Why? Because we can't expect the government or anybody else to do it for us. It's on us.

And so the goal for each podcast is to give you a tool, a tactic, or a strategy that you can use to apply to your own life and living your best life. I'm not trying to trying to just keep veterans from killing themselves. I want them all to truly live. If you're not a veteran, stick around because everything we talk about here could be applied to your life, regardless of whether or not you served in the military. Sometimes I go into things that might be a little bit esoteric to the veteran community.

I am unabashedly patriotic and I love this country, so if that offends you, sorry. You can go somewhere else and listen to somebody else. But my goal here is to help. I don't ask for anything in return. All I ask for is that you share these episodes out with people who can use them, and that you go to iTunes, and that you write us a review if you got helped by a particular episode.

That really helps us to spread the word about the show and it helps me to help more people. If, you want to support the podcast in other ways, you can always check out our sponsor and that is F Bomb Nutrition. They are absolutely amazing people and they help us to pay for the bandwidth and to pay for the software that goes into creating the show. They make an amazing product. It's packets of fats that are easily portable that you can carry around with you, and they make some of the most delicious macadamia nut butter I've ever tasted.

They mix it up with chocolate, with sea salt, with pecan butter, with coconut butter and it's really good, no sugar or anything like that. The other thing about them is that they are also unabashedly patriotic and they've been sending boxes of this stuff to the troops overseas. And that's something I I really appreciate. Didn't have to ask them to do this. They wanted to do it on their own, so they've been sending this stuff out to a bunch of FPOs and and really, really great, awesome company run by great people.

If you want to get your own F bombs, you can head over to www.dropanfbomb.com and use the code Warrior Soul at checkout to get yourself 20% off of your first order. Now, let's get into this subject matter. Where do you find knowledge? And I want to take you a little bit back to my own childhood. You know, I didn't know my father.

He left when I was around the age of two. And so my mother had to fulfill a bunch of different roles. She was our provider. She was our teacher. And she was really the the mean driving force behind any desire I've ever had to become anything.

I've watched her. She worked two to three jobs throughout my childhood. She was a nurse. She'd work at delis. She worked in grocery stores.

And it was all for me and my sister. Help us to to have the lives she wanted us to have. And I am so appreciative of her. Because a lot of people, you know, they ask me whether or not the Marine Corps, was the thing that that gave me my determination. And you know what?

The Marine Corps did a whole lot for me. It taught me so much about being a man, about having upright moral character and about doing my best. But my mom is the person who put determination in me. Being that she was a single mother, and that I didn't have a regular male role model in my life, she pushed me to find that knowledge on my own. She pushed me to read.

She pushed me to read about great men. She pushed me to read about leaders. She pushed me to educate myself as much as possible. She pushed me to become physically stronger. I remember I wasn't a very athletic kid, and she saw that.

She knew that I wasn't talented in that way. So she said to me, you know what Chris, you gotta make yourself stronger. So one day she just dropped me off at a gym. She said, go learn how to lift weights. And when it came time for football tryouts when I was going into high school, I didn't want to try out for football.

She literally dropped me off at the football field and then sped off because she wanted me to make sure that I was doing some sort of organized athletics and doing what I needed to do to become stronger, to learn about dedication to a team, to really become part of something. And so, yeah, it was my mother who instilled a lot of this stuff for me. But as we move forward into adulthood, lot of times, you know, your path isn't as clear because when you're a kid, normally you have a set path in front of you. Know, you you've got to go to school. You got to get your education, you know, If you've got parents put you into sports, you know, that that it's clear. As an adult, it becomes a little bit less clear. We become a little bit more distant from a path.

And that's because, you know, as you enter adulthood, there's and less people guiding you and telling you what to do. There's this popular concept out there that you need to get a mentor. And I'm a big believer in that. Mentorship helps so much, but not all of us are in geographic locations or in the, the right circles in order to get direct mentorship from somebody who who's where we want to be. So, in those cases, what do you do?

What do you do? Well, and this is a common one, you read books. You start to try to download knowledge from people who've been where you want to go. Who've been in positions where you know the same positions that that you want to be in. And that in and of itself is a gift.

Our ability to communicate through words, ability to download information, our ability to learn from people who've been where we want to go. And the reason why that's a gift is because when you read about these people, you also learn about their mistakes. You learn about all the pitfalls they had. Secretary of Defense Mattis, is an avid reader. When when he was a general in the Marine Corps and throughout his Marine Corps career, he encouraged everybody around him to read as much as possible.

Why? Because he didn't want to be surprised. He said because of my reading, nothing ever surprises me. I have been able to learn from those who made mistakes in command. I've been able to learn from those who've been in combat throughout history.

And so through that, that's part of what made him an absolutely fantastic military military leader. At the same time, while books are probably the best way to get indirect mentorship, you also need to get experience. You also need to have the ability to to, you know, directly experience these things. And the more experience you get, the better you're going to be at it. So that leaves open a very, very big path to learning.

And that is actually trying things out. Now, I run into a lot of people. And as I talk to them, I I run into a lot of people who want to open up their own businesses because I've been coaching people on opening up their own businesses for the past few years. A lot of you guys don't hear about that stuff because I don't market myself on here. But through that, I've learned a lot about people, and that is that people will wait, will wait to to try to start something for a very, very, very long time.

They'll wait. And the reason why they'll wait is because they don't think they're ready. Because they they don't think they're at a point where where they can try and have a fair shot. And the bottom line is, a lot of people are scared of failing. That's something you should never be scared of, especially if it's something that's going to require a good degree of mastery.

Why? Well, no matter when it happens, when you're going to start something out, there's going to be a bunch of times where you fall flat on your face. And you need those times. You need that experience of making a mistake. You need that experience of failing at something before you can become good at it.

And you know, a big thing, example I'll put out there is with jiu-jitsu. Right? I I walked into the jiu-jitsu studio the first time. I thought I was a very strong guy. I wrestled in high school, but I ended up getting tapped out by a kid who was half my size and, you know, was about 14 years old.

That's insane. But it also taught me that I had a whole lot to learn, and the more I got tapped out, the more that I made mistakes, the more I got mounted, the more I, you know, went through that process, the more I learned. Now I'm still not a master at jiu-jitsu, and and I still get tapped out quite often, but the more I learn, the better I get. And the more I'm able to put myself in better positions, the more I'm able to to, you know, tap out some people. And that's that's a really important thing to consider.

You don't know how you're actually going to act, and you don't know how you're actually going to react until you're actually in the situation. So if you're out there and you're looking for knowledge, know the tendency is going to be to search the internet, to read as much as possible, and you should do that. But you should also try. If you're thinking about starting a business, you should try to create a situation where you're gonna be able to try to sell whatever you're gonna try to sell. And it's very easy to do that these days.

You could put up a landing page for practically nothing. You can start to do you can white label a product or you can do drop shipping or you could do so many different things that could allow you to test out your business idea before you ever end up trying to quit your job or doing anything else. The point is that if you wait years to do that, those will be years that you have wasted. They will be years that you wish you had in getting the experience you need to get in order to become a master at what you're trying to do. So don't wait.

Those are two things we've covered so far. Reading and getting experience. Now the next thing is this. When you go through a failure, when you go through a situation where you become defeated, where you fall on your face, your first tendency is gonna be to retreat. Your first tendency is gonna be to back off and say, you know what?

This probably wasn't a good idea. And that's a mistake. Why is it a mistake? Well because in those situations, I've talked about this concept of letting the world happen for you or letting the world happen to you. If you're letting the world happen to you, you're a victim.

And you get nothing learned from the mistakes you made, the failures you've had, or the bad things that happened in your life. But if the world's happening for you, then you can learn from those mistakes. You understand that that mistake, that failure, that awful thing that happened, it happened for you to teach you a lesson. And what you need to do is you need to strive to learn the lessons from your failures. And you almost need to be glad that you've gone through a failure.

You almost need to be glad that you made a mistake. Because that gives you a chance to learn, to increase your knowledge of that situation, and potentially to begin to learn new skills, and to learn new things that are going to help you to eventually become successful. That's the driving point. So understanding your failures are not failures, they're opportunities. Now, the last thing is this: There's going to be a lot of you out there who have never had the opportunity to fail.

You've never had the opportunity to not the opportunity not to fail, but the opportunity to really try anything. And that's because a lot of you are struggling to find ideas. If you're trying to find ideas for a purpose for your life, if you're trying to figure out what your purpose is, start to look at your own problems. Start to look at the obstacles in front of you. The reason why you want to look at those problems is because if you've got those problems and those obstacles, then other people have them too.

And then if you figure out a solution to those problems and to those obstacles, then you're going to have something that could potentially help other people and that people would probably pay money for. There's an opportunity there in those obstacles and those problems. And I can't think of anybody who doesn't have obstacles or problems in front of them. Really the world is full of opportunity. Just to give you an example of this, prior to starting Warrior Soul, I had been exclusively in the fitness business.

I had been training people. I had been doing online training for quite a while. And I developed a disease called ulcerative colitis. Now, at the time when I developed it, it's a miserable disease. Your immune system starts attacking your intestinal tract and I ended up having to run in the bathroom up to 50 times a day I was running and screaming pain to the bathroom.

And that sounds embarrassing and something that a lot of people who have the disease don't want to talk about. But the doctors at the time were telling me that the only solution was medication. That the only solution was me taking medication, or going on corticosteroids, or going on biologics. Despite taking the medication, I continued to express symptoms. And, you know, a year or two with the disease I was at the end of my rope because it was ruining my career, was ruining my life, was making me severely depressed, And I needed to figure out a solution.

So I started doing my own research on inflammation. And I started developing my own diet protocols to handle the symptoms. And the more I followed those diet protocols, better I got. Eventually, I ended up putting myself into remission. And through that, I began putting advice out there for people with autoimmunity and putting advice out there for people with ulcerative colitis.

I got my own certifications for working in nutrition. Began taking on clients and helping people with these types of problems. And that's a big part of why I was able to make my living and a big part of why I was able to start this company Warrior Soul because I was able to bootstrap it financially. So that's the thing. Those obstacles that are in front of you.

Each and every one of them are opportunities for you to get better. This is something I've talked about over and over again on this podcast. But I think it's something that we constantly need to revisit if we're gonna get better and if we're gonna make this community everything it needs to be. So that's all I got for this week, guys. I hope that you got a lot out of this episode.

If you did, let me know. Let me know what you think. You can head over to our private Facebook group, the Warrior Soul Fitness Academy. It's free to join. You don't have to do anything or buy anything to get in there.

You just come on in and and let me know what you think about this episode. And if you can, head over to iTunes, write us a review, let let me know exactly what you thought. And, you know, again, that's what helps us to spread the word. We'll be back at you next week with another awesome episode. I got Dave Bray USA coming on on Monday, really awesome musician.

And I'll talk to you guys very soon.