September 2018 – The Blog of Joe Drager

Failure, my biggest fear, the one thing that ruled my life. I know I feared failure every day. Feared disappointing my family, feared to show weakness, just feared to be anything but normal. Normal was something that didn’t stand out, didn’t stick out, didn’t cause any waves. I could blend it, do things on my own terms, and hide from the world. I am writing this because I feel a lot of people feel this way. They feel like they don’t want to risk messing up for fear that someone will make fun of them, think less of them, think them stupid, hell just about any reason. I was that person, and I know many others are feeling the same way right now. We only get one chance at this life and knowing that why the hell should we not take every chance we get to make it great. Why not go for it every single day? I read a quote, and I never remember where I hear them or who said them, I just know they mean a lot to me at that point or I wouldn’t remember. The quote goes something like this, “If you want something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done.” Now I use to be completely against quotes, but I also had a fixed mindset and thought I was super smart. I am quickly learning that anyone and everyone can teach you something if you’re willing to listen and learn from them. Now, this quote really hit home when I started thinking about the rut that my life had become. I say this past tense because I feel I’m doing better, but every day I have to remember to get outside of my comfort zone. I fail just about every day, hell lets just say every day. Something before that I promised myself I would never do I now realize I do every single day. That is a scary thing to think about if you think failure is final, but this is just not the case. I fail when I eat too much, I fail when I get upset with a rude person and let it bother me, I fail when I oversleep, I fail when I give up early on my last set at the gym, I fail when I forget to call my Mom, I fail when I forget someone’s birthday, I fail all the damn time. And guess what? It’s not a big deal. I eat too much, then I better have a damn good workout the next morning, I oversleep, well I better be productive and make sure to get to bed at a good time the next night, I forget a birthday, then a handwritten card and a phone call means way more than a text message anyway. The point is that failure is not the end, its just a step towards improvement. I recently read a couple of books that showed me this in a much better way than I could ever express here. This will continue to be a recurring theme for a while as reading (non-fiction) has truly changed my life. Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn, and The Obstacle Is the Way. I highly recommend reading these books and soon will put together a reading list of all the books that I’ve read and highly recommend, but for now, just know that if I talk about them they have had a meaningful impact in my life. These books did a great job in expressing to me the importance of not giving up, not thinking failure is final. When you can stop thinking that way, it really opens your eyes up to all the many great things you can do in your life. So this is me living what I’m saying, failing at a Blog until I get better at it. I hope for everyone’s sake that I do in fact get better at this, but for now just know that I’m going to continue to fail over and over while trying to help every single person I can.

I don’t know where to start this, so we’ll start with the beginning so far as I can remember. I wouldn’t say I’ve ever been a happy person, it would be fair to say that I seemed to be perpetually negative. I was always good at putting on a facade for those who needed to see I was doing alright, but truly I don’t think I ever was, alright. I know I have a lot of problems that I internalized as a child, allowing them to change my whole personality. My mother tells me it happened sometime around my 9th birthday, but I don’t remember any specific time. Being myself was all I knew and I was a shit. I loved arguing, absolutely loved it. I’d argue anything, didn’t matter which side you were on, I was on the other. And I loved to win!! Winning was all I cared about when I was young, proving I was better, smarter, than my opponent. Now you’d think this might have led to physical activity, but nope I was a fat kid, and continue to be to this day.

I think I’ve been dealing with depression my whole life, I just never called it depression, and I still don’t call it depression. I never wanted to look weak, and I thought therapy was weakness. It was a weakness to ask for help, to numb my body with medicine, to tell stories of fears and failures to someone whom I have to pay to listen to me. I didn’t want to do it, and I said I never would. Looking back this was probably a mistake, one I’ve paid for many times over. Fear of being weak, and fear of failure set the tone for my entire life. Looking back in a journal I see this was the first line I wrote. “Let me tell you a little about myself. I’m 36 years old, I have no wife, girlfriend, kids, or family that I was not born into. In 36 years I’ve failed to get or allow anyone to love me.” This gives you some idea of what I was going through when I started that journal with the express intent to save my life. I bought that journal, on 5-3-17 as that was the first entry, to save my life. I thought that if I had a place to write out how I felt, I wouldn’t internalize it anymore, it didn’t work. Over the next 13 months I have sporadic entries all spelling doom and gloom. I’ll spare you all the emo details but it may have culminated with an entry that basically said, “Do not give up on this life! You almost quit everything today, you just about ended it all. You tried, but deep down you don’t want to give up, you want to keep living… DO NOT GIVE UP!!!”. After that it went into some plans for change, plans that I never followed.

Well, I did not die, but I gained weight and sought to ruin my life by eating myself to death. It’s quite hard to say that here, quite hard to know that people I know may read this, but it’s true. I was fine with dying a slow death from morbid obesity and apathy. I was pretty sure I was going to die within 3-5 years from something weight related, and I just didn’t care. That was how my life was going to go, and I was watching it from the comfort of my computer chair. With one last attempt to fix everything I started reading books on things I wanted. The first one I read was “Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual” by Jocko Willink. This book was really important for me to read, because it told me what I didn’t want to hear in a way only an absolute bad ass can say it. And I could not argue with a man like Jocko. This was the start to changing my life. That day I wrote in my journal some goals and this was the one I continue to re-read to this day.

“Goal 3 — Suicide: Be done with this thought, this nagging feeling in the back of your mind that you can just give up and end it. This fight is the only fight that matters, the only one I can’t redo if I lose, and the only way to lose this fight is to quit, to give up, to die. If I fight till the very end, if I never quit, if I give it my all, then and only then is it acceptable to lay down the sword and shield and rest.”

Now I had just read a book by a complete badass so I feel that most of my words were heavily affected by him. However, from that point on if I had any thoughts or feelings leading me down that road I immediately shut them down. I wish I could say that it was all downhill from there, but for the next 8 months I struggled trying to build any sort of discipline in my life. I’d do great for a month, maybe two, then shit the bed and gain back weight, fail, etc. I knew I needed more help, help I had been afraid to ask for my whole life. So I went looking for it anywhere I could, and I found it in a place I didn’t expect at all, a podcast. Short Story Long is a podcast that Drama (from Rob and Big, Fantasy Factory) created. I thought it would be something funny, something to pass the time on a long drive. I couldn’t have been more wrong, for during that podcast I heard Tom Bilyeu speak for the first time. If you’ve not heard this man give a speech, or listened to his podcast, or watched a video of him on YouTube, stop right now and go bookmark him for later. I won’t get into all the ways that he is amazing here and now, but I will say that during that podcast he completely amazed me. I wanted to know more and went back to the first interview he did with Drama about a year before. In that first podcast he mentioned a book called Mindset and said its the best book written in the English language, or something to that effect. That sentence changed my life. I went to a bookstore in rural Ohio while on a work trip and managed to find this book. I took it back to my hotel and started reading it, and it absolutely blew my mind. It was like I was reading my life story, and I was the villain, I had the fixed mindset. I did not have time to finish the book that night, however I knew I had to know more and with an 8 hour drive the next day I bought the audio book on Audible and finished it the next day in the car. While listening to this book I was on an emotional roller coaster. This book actually scared the hell out of me. It called me on every lie I’d ever told myself, called me out in every single way as someone with a fixed mindset. It was like going through an autobiography of my childhood, to high school, to college, and then as an adult. When I finished I just wanted to cry, I had wasted my life, squandered all my options and ruined every chance I ever had to be great. I was sad, depressed, angry, and felt ruined. It took me a while to figure out, but I finally started to rejoice, for I realized how lucky I was to find this book. How a random set of events lead me to read this book, and that I read it at the age of 37 rather than say 50. Or the worst possible option, maybe never having read it at all. It was one hell of a car ride I have to be honest. I am willing to say, without a doubt, that this book has changed my life in the best way possible. It is amazing to say that I can do anything I want to do. I have the ability to learn anything. That simple thought in your head changes everything. Finishing Mindset started a fire in me that made me want to find out as much as I possibly could about all the things I was missing. It started me down a path that has led me here, to write this, to share with everyone my weaknesses, my failures, and from here on out my journey. I have purchased 12+ copies of the book Mindset and given them to people in hopes of it flipping the same switch in them that it did me. I usually give it to them with a handwritten note explaining how mind blowing it was for me. I then ask them to say this one thing before they read it, and yes I stole this from Tom Bilyeu. “I am willing to be changed for ever and for the better by this book.” If they say that before they start reading Mindset, or any book, I think it opens the mind in a way that allows them to give it a chance. I have a good friend whom I gave the book to and it has completely changed him for the better. Since he read it, we have shared many stories, read many other books, and are currently helping each other change our mindset every day.

I want to start this blog to share my story, and to help others. It is my greatest hope that someone reading this will also be changed for the better. Maybe they are where I was, maybe worse, maybe on their way to something that can’t be undone. There is a better way, you can truly do anything you want, you just have to change your mindset. It will be hard, it will be a battle there is no doubt. But it is worth it, You Are Worth It!!