Just Do What You are Told

For much of my life, I have been good at doing what I am told. 

While we are young, this is an inherent trait that all of us have where we listen to authoritative figures by default with minimal questions as a way to ensure our survival. 

Naturally, we begin to stray from this as we reach adulthood - but not as much as we should. 

For many of us, we blindly follow the instructions of our parents. Allowing them to steer us into jobs and the security that they wanted but couldn’t have. We allow ourselves to live their dreams, sidelining what we truly want out of life. 

Unless you are fully bought in to pleasing them, this becomes harder and harder as you get further into your life. 

You begin to feel more dissonance between what you are doing and what you want to be doing. 

This paradox is exactly what I have experienced in my life. 

The paradox that, by listening to others, you can achieve objective measures of success without actually feeling that success. In fact, I have felt less satisfied in my life the more I listen to others and the less I trust my judgement despite the coinciding “success.” 

I felt this the deeper I got into my football career. By doing what I was told, I went from minimal play time my Junior year of high school to becoming a college athlete. By continuing to do what I was told, I got stronger and stronger my redshirt freshman year and began to get more play time, even traveling with the team, my second year in college. 

Yet, I stopped enjoying football. My coaches were proud of me, my friends, and my family - yet I loathed the control that football exercised over my life. 

The same thing happened in my career. I did what I was told and did objectively well relative to my peers but hated waking up for work. Hated what I was doing and would constantly think about quitting with the only thing standing in my way being my own financial instability. 

I stuck out my career longer than I did football and am in a much better place but it still doesn’t feel like I am exactly where I need to be in my life. 

I listen to others who have similar achievements being satisfied with their accomplishments and, while I feel more fulfillment now, I am left wanting more. I have a strong desire to pave my own path and am actively working to do so. 

I don’t talk to anybody but my wife and you about it as I have no desire to hear their opinions. To get their wisdom about how I should live my life. 

Frankly, if they aren’t pursuing the same goals and if they aren’t where I want to be, I don’t give a shit what they think. 

Anytime I have followed someone’s instructions to follow them down the path they are on or the path they wanted to be on, I have been successful but I haven’t felt true to myself - so I refuse to continue to do it. 

Now that I have shifted my focus to what I want out of life, I feel a much larger sense of purpose and fulfillment. 

When I was working out because I wanted to be healthier or because I felt like I had to as a former athlete, I struggled. I couldn’t find the motivation to get to the gym. I thought I could try calisthenics, or HIIT, or any number of other training disciplines to shake up my exercise routine and push myself to get in more and shave off the body fat that I was steadily adding around my midsection. 

I could motivate myself to go for a few weeks, sometimes even a couple of months - but I couldn’t fully commit. 

Why? 

Because I was allowing other people’s motivations or instruction to lead me down a path for why I should be going to the gym. 

I have been incredibly consistent for just shy of 6 months in going to the gym now. How am I doing this now but I have failed so many times before?

One, I got tired of seeing more and more fat around my midsection and visible deterioration of my muscle tone. Two, I struggled carrying my 140 lb dog around after a dorsal surgery for cancer and refuse to not have giant dogs so I have to be able to take care of them in that state. Three, I have wanted to be ripped my whole life - as long as I can remember - so I can see what ripped looks like for me. Four, this one is the most important, because I am sick and tired of being the person that I don’t want to be. Sick of being the person that takes the easy path in life, doing what other people tell me to do instead of relentlessly pursuing my own goals - allowing trivial life events to get in the way and refusing to do the hard things that will put me on the right path. 

Getting to this point has helped me realize that I have sucked at doing hard things and if I refuse to do hard things because I am living for other people and not for myself, I will never achieve what I want to in this life. 

Fuck that. 

Each day I now have a purpose. To push myself harder than the previous. To force myself to take one more step towards the person that I want to be. Each time I reflect, I get to see the progress that I am making. If I am progressing, great! If I am not, what can I change to set myself up for success? 

This doesn’t mean that I am perfect. Just in the last two weeks I have had a couple of days where I prioritized recovery or spending time with my wife over typing a blog post or working on a YouTube video. But knowing that, I push harder the following day to pick up my slack. 

I am living a life of intentionality instead of coasting and adding 6 hours of play time to Call of Duty every day like I have been for the last few years. Nothing wrong with CoD, I still play it to socialize - I just am not trying to be an MLG and it has dropped from my priority list. 

My priorities have historically been determined by my point in time wants or by what other people think I should be doing. With this continuing to lead me down a path that I didn’t want to be on - a path of dissatisfaction and contempt for my life at the end of each day - I had to be intentional in figuring out what the hell I wanted to do. What I wanted to accomplish. Who I wanted to be. 

I am getting stronger. Physically AND mentally. I am leaner. I am intentional. I am taking steps to  being the best version of myself. I am doing increasingly difficult things to challenge myself. 

You can do this too. You have the power to choose your own standards and push yourself to live the life you truly want.

While I have taken on a physical challenge to help practice doing the hard thing, you don’t have to. 

I just told you not to follow the instructions of others to live their lives, so don’t follow exactly what I am doing unless you feel like it aligns well with your values and what YOU genuinely want out of life. 

Instead, here is a framework that can help you determine if you have simply been following instructions from others and how you can deviate from their goals to focus on your own. 

First, let’s reflect on where you are at. 

What prompted you to pursue the path that you are on? If you are still in school, this could be the job that you are pursuing, the major that you are currently in, or even that you are in school. If you are in the workforce, what made you pursue the job that you are doing? What are you looking to do after this job? What is prompting you to look at that as the next step? In both situations, what are the underlying behaviors that have gotten you to where you are at? 

This should help you establish why you are at where you are at and how you have gotten there. If you haven’t quite gotten there - take a little bit longer to reflect before moving on. 

Once you have an idea of what brought you to your current position, it’s time to forecast the future that you want. 

If you continue down this pathway, will you be satisfied with where you end up? Will you live a fulfilling life or will you die regretting the path that you took? If you won’t have any regrets - congratulations! I’m happy for you that you are leading the life that you want to live. Please share your insights with others! If you think you will have regrets, what is leading to those regrets? How can you change what you are doing to avoid those future regrets? 

This is meant to help you identify the gaps between the behaviors that you are demonstrating versus the behaviors that will set you up to achieve what YOU want out of life. 

We are very fortunate to live in a time where information is readily available and we have infinite directions that you can take your life and seek fulfillment. If you are like me, doing these reflections helped you to realize that you have been living your life on autopilot, following the instructions from others - leading you to a life lacking the satisfaction that coincides with pursuing the best version of yourself. 

While it sucks to know that you have squandered the time up to this point, there are lessons that you have learned along the way that will benefit you in the pivot that you are about to make. That time is not lost and through reflection and intentionality, you can surface many lessons that you have learned subconsciously and utilize them to springboard yourself deeper into this journey. 

This journey is going to last the rest of your life, with inevitable ups and downs. But the difference now is that you’re no longer following someone else’s instructions. You’re writing your own guidebook, setting your own course, and taking intentional steps toward the life you genuinely want. Each decision is now yours, rooted in your values and aspirations—not in what others think you should do. You’ve broken free from the habit of living by default, and now you’re building a life by design. 

Don't let others take that power from you by projecting their dreams onto your life. Trust yourself, and own your life.