Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. Today on the show, I would like to share with you what to do when nothing is going well.

You may hear a little bit of strangeness, a little bit of nasal congestion in my voice. I will try to keep some sniffing and snorting off of the audio, but it's possible that a sniffer snort might pass through. I've got Kleenexes here on my desk. But I am not feeling very well right now.

I'm physically not feeling very well at the moment, and the last couple of weeks have been really personally difficult for me. There's no catastrophe, no crisis, nothing that you need to send me any condolences about, just simply that it's just been difficult. And there have been a number of things.

Well, it just it feels like everything is going wrong. It feels like there's this black cloud everywhere that is kind of affecting everything. Now obviously that's hyperbole, but that's just how it feels sometimes. I've been physically sick off and on over the last couple of weeks, allergies, sometimes something a little bit more.

My wife has been a little bit sick. We wondered if it was COVID. I kind of hoped it was COVID so we could get it over. As far as I know, we haven't had COVID yet, but I don't know. We're going to go get a COVID test in a couple of days and see what that results have been.

Nothing serious, no serious symptoms, just a little bit of sickness. Business I'm behind on most of my goals, behind on most of my business plans, not exactly sure how to press forward, a little bit overwhelmed on a lot of different fronts right now. And I think things are okay.

My kids are fine. Most things are fine on that level, but when things aren't going well, it can feel pretty black. Everything can feel pretty dark. I tend to be a fairly emotional person, pretty in tune with my own emotions, pretty subject to them. And throughout my own short lifetime, I've had so many ups and downs that I've learned pretty well how to deal with it.

And so what I want to do today is supplant some of the programming that was scheduled and just talk to you about some of the things that I personally do when things aren't going well. And I hope that these ideas may be useful to you because I've been here before.

I know I'll be here again. It's a fairly regular occurrence in my lifetime. And I thought you might appreciate a few ideas that would be helpful. So I want to talk about your mind, your mental state. I want to talk about your body. I want to talk about kind of some of the things that I do when things aren't going very well in hopes that these tools will be helpful for you.

The first thing I would comment on, if you're someone who regularly experiences down days, difficulties, times when you're just frustrated, when you're struggling, when things aren't working, when the blackness is closing in, first thing that I always think of is I've been here before. And as I get older, more and more, this is something that brings me a significant amount of comfort.

And you've probably been here before. Now if you're listening to me and you're 16 years old and you're facing your first kind of minor life catastrophe where it feels like nothing is going well, even though it should be, then welcome. Welcome to the club. This is how it works for most of us.

But for me, I've gained tremendous comfort in the fact that I have been here before. No matter what the problem is, at this point in time, I've experienced so many problems, so many trials, so many hardships, so many setbacks in my life that I am getting increasingly comfortable with those problems and those trials and those setbacks.

I personally try not to talk much about them publicly just because I don't think anybody really cares. I don't care to hear much about any other people's problems and so I don't share many of my problems publicly. But I wanted to do it today just to tell you, if you think that this is some kind of strange thing, if you think that other people don't go through difficult times, you're wrong.

We all do. And so I gain a tremendous amount of comfort of recognizing that I've been here before. And because I've been here before, I've developed some of the techniques and the tactics that I'm going to share with you in today's show that helped me to get through them, to help me to press forward.

I think of myself kind of like Tom Brady in the sense that there's a big difference between a rookie for whom everything has always gone well versus a seasoned professional who has had to pull it out from deep, from the deep end, right? When you're way, way down in a game and yet you still stay focused and calm and you deliver under pressure.

I am amazed at athletes who are skilled at that. Having never been a competitive athlete in that sense, I would be all nerves. You're down by 20 points at halftime and you're up against the team with the best defense in the world and yet the professionals so many times just come out and they keep pressing forward.

They keep pressing forward, play by play, moment by moment, and they put points on the board and often they come out with a win. And so one of the things that I have learned in my life is to be more confident in myself. And the fact is that I have never not had periods of difficulty.

I've never not felt under the weather. I've never not had personal difficulty. But what I have done is I have been able to continue pressing forward. And so I begin with trying to get my mindset right. I recognize I've been here before. I'll probably be here again. So let me just press forward right now.

And then the next thing is this too shall pass. One of my personal mottos is this too shall pass. No matter what it is, no matter how difficult it is, no matter how bad it is, this too shall pass. And I comfort myself with those. When I'm experiencing the heights of euphoria, I try to remind myself this too shall pass.

So enjoy it, but this too shall pass. Don't get hooked on it. And then when I'm in the pits of despair, then I just remind myself this too shall pass. And I know it's going to pass, especially because it's passed before. If it's your first time, I promise you, this too shall pass.

I try to pay a lot of attention to my mindset and to some basic core principles that I firmly believe are true. And those principles and those mindsets help, especially during the difficult times. They help during normal times, but they help a lot more during difficult times because they give you something that you can think about.

And so I have a set of them, many of them, that are very comforting to me when I face difficult times. From the big macro ideas based on my philosophical worldview to just the micro day-to-day experience. You know, a simple example. I'll give you a few examples of things that help me.

Whenever I'm going through something tough, I always just recognize that I'm probably going to laugh about this later and I'm going to tell stories about this down the road. I've been over the years in so many uncomfortable situations, right? Traveling and everything is falling apart. It's been another issue.

We had some house issues with no water and some other frustrating things, none of which are in isolation, all that big a deal. But when compounded over everything else, it's just frustrating to deal with that. And one of the things that I remind myself is I'm going to laugh about this later and this awful, difficult, terrible, hard experience is going to give me a fun story down the road.

So if I'm going to tell a fun story about this down the road, then why don't I go ahead and embrace it right now and say, "This sucks, but that's all right. I'm going to tell a story about this down the road, so let me embrace the suck and press on through it." Maybe you're on a camping trip and your tent is pouring in ice cold rain and you're completely soaked, you're completely miserable, and there's nothing you can do about it except huddle up and just try to make it through the night.

Well, that's a story that you're going to be telling for the next few decades. When I was younger, I heard my parents took my older siblings camping in some disastrous camping trip. And I heard about it my entire lifetime, about this one time at such and such a campground when it was just awful.

It was a terrible experience and yet it gave a good fodder for a story. So something simple and silly like that, to me, helps to brighten my mood a little bit and say, "This really sucks and yet I'm going to laugh about this down the road. This is going to be the story that I tell about lying on the cold ground and just completely freezing and being totally miserable and hungry, blah, blah, blah.

And that was when I hit my low and we're going to laugh about it down the road." And little silly things like that help me. I think on a more macro scale, when you look at life and you have a little bit of experience, you recognize that the times that you learn the most in your life are the trial times, the difficult times.

And so with a little bit of age, you start to recognize that trials are actually extraordinarily valuable and I'm going to appreciate this trial when it's over. I'm going to appreciate this difficult thing when it's over. Sometimes it helps you to build empathy. I know that for me, my empathy over the years has grown as I have gone through difficult periods.

I remember the first time that my back got messed up. I was always pretty healthy, always had a strong back. One time, I was in my mid-20s and I wasn't doing anything strenuous, but all of a sudden I did something to tweak my back. And for the first time in my life, I experienced severe back pain and was sitting down doing as little as possible for a couple of days until it recovered.

And it was terrible. It was really tough. But since that day, I have always had more empathy for people with back pain and I've come to appreciate it. Even right now as I'm struggling to work in the face of dumb allergies and not feeling well, I appreciate the good health that I have most of the time.

Whenever I'm sick, I recognize how much of my own personal ability and my own personal success is due to simply having won the genetic lottery of just having good health. And it builds my empathy and appreciation for the difficulties that so many other people face not having those things.

And so it's fairly simple, but it's effective to recognize that when this trial is over, I'm going to really appreciate it. Those are just small practical things. But even if you go to its most fundamental foundation, for example, in my personal worldview, I personally believe that the universe, to use the parlance of the day, the universe is conspiring for my good.

I don't like to use the word universe. I use God, but I believe that God is conspiring for my good and he has promised to work all things together in my life for good because I love him and I'm called according to his purpose. So one of the very useful things that I find so helpful in the Christian faith is simply the idea that you have an all-powerful, all-knowing God of the universe who controls all things and that God knows me.

He knows my name and he is conspiring for my good. He is sovereignly arranging all of the circumstances in my life for my own good. And with his perfect middle knowledge, he has chosen the circumstances into which I am placed for my good. And so, whatever those circumstances look like, if on the outside they look like blessings and abundance or if they look like scarcity and deprivation, pain or joy, I can be confident that these are the circumstances that God has chosen for me and thus I can embrace them with a happy heart filled with joy.

To me, that is one of the most powerful ideas in the history of the universe. If you genuinely believe that based upon good arguments, evidence, being persuaded of the truth of that statement, it gives you a foundation that you can press forward and face anything with. It's powerful. It's powerful.

I find that just a place to rest and no matter how tragic or no matter how uncredible the circumstances are, I can simply rest and I can keep pressing forward seeking to honor God in my daily activities and in the way that I handle the circumstances that come at me.

There are more useful little things that I tell myself. For example, most of my personal issues are usually short-lived, usually a few weeks maximum. I'll go through a few difficult weeks at a time, then I'll kind of be back on the upswing. And I often just remind myself, "Listen, Joshua, you don't have to get every day right.

You really don't. You don't have to get every day right. You just need to get some or most days right, depending on what we're talking about with right. Everyone has a bad day. Everyone messes up. Everyone has times when they feel dark. They don't feel so effective. You don't have to get every day right.

But if you can get most days right, you can have tremendous results. Every workout doesn't have to be the greatest workout. But if you can show up to the gym and most of your workouts are pretty decent, you can get tremendous results. Every investment doesn't have to be a complete winner.

But if you can get most of your investments mostly right, things are going to work out pretty well for you. You don't have to get every day right. You just have to get most days right, and I can do that. Even if I get 20% or 30% or 40% of my days are just simply no good for whatever reason, that's okay.

I can still experience tremendous success with the other 50% or 70% or 90%. Some of the world's greatest sports athletes, the world's greatest baseball players strike out all the time. The world's greatest businessmen go bankrupt regularly. And so reminding myself of those things and kind of taking the pressure off I've always found to be helpful.

I do my best whenever possible to try to get my body right. I think that our body makes a big difference in obviously the way that we experience life. And my list is fairly simple. If everything is going poorly and I can only do one thing, I do my best to get my sleep on track.

Make sure I go to bed on time, do my best to get a good night's sleep, wake up on time and get a good night's sleep. Because being well rested makes a tremendous difference in your ability to fight, to fight through. And so I work really hard to just get my sleep on time.

And the big decision there is simply, for me anyway, some people struggle with insomnia, I don't generally. But the big difference there is just simply going to bed. Turning off the screens, turning off the input and going to bed on time. That's the secret. And if you just simply exercise the willpower to force yourself to go and lie down in bed, I think for most of us that works.

The second thing I pay attention to is sunshine. If I don't feel well, I do my best to get some sunshine and try to get some vitamin D generation going, try to get a little sun on my face. Does wonders for your mood when you can face sunshine. So if you are facing something seasonal and it's gray and it's cloudy and whatnot, try to get some sunshine.

That could mean an artificial lamp, it could mean a plane ticket to Mexico, but try to get some sunshine. The third thing that I think really makes a difference is movement. Trying to get some physical movement. And a lot of times when I'm not feeling well, nothing's working, I'm sitting just staring blankly at my computer, unable to produce anything useful, then going and getting some physical movement changes things for me.

For some people that's a good hard workout, right? Go and take a spinning class. It's hard to come out of a good hard spinning class and really feel frustrated at anything, right? It's hard to go and do a hard CrossFit workout and come out in a bad mood. It's really hard.

But at its very least, kind of low level, I just try to go for a walk. At the very least, what can I do? I can go for a walk. And so many times just sitting there metaphorically banging my head on the desk and walk outside, go for a 20 minute walk in the sunshine, come back and everything is better.

And so if you're struggling for some reason, try to get movement if at all possible. And then the final piece I think is just simply to focus on your food and eat something that's going to make you feel good. Don't eat too much, eat lightly and eat something that you know is going to make you feel good.

You know that if you eat a big heavy high calorie meal and drink four beers, you're going to feel awful and everything's going to get worse. So try to eat something that's going to make you feel good. That might mean some gastronomical delight, might mean a favorite food, but I think this means choosing something that's going to help you to feel better physically.

And so if you're not feeling well, if you're struggling, if you're in a black place mentally, just repair yourself to those things. Sleep, sunshine, movement, food and water. I guess I should add as well, stay hydrated, drink water. One of the things that can often happen, people feeling tired a lot of times because they're dehydrated.

Sometimes when you don't feel well, it's because you're dehydrated and so hydrate yourself well. Those are the things I do to get my body right. Get your mind right when possible. Things I find helpful when I'm in a black place and nothing's working. I think about my goals, I review my goals, I had to keep my goals on an app, my notes app.

So I just pull it open and I take a look and I read through and I think about, I form some mental pictures of things that are exciting to me. I also personally record my goals, I record audio of them. I do the silly thing where I record myself speaking over a dramatic movie soundtrack and so I can put that on and listen to it for a few minutes.

And so think about something that I'm excited about, sometimes will help me to focus me and kind of bring me out of it. To get my mind right, I try very hard to talk to people. I don't isolate. I think that one of the worst things that a lot of people can do is to isolate.

There are times when isolation helps. For example, you may be an introvert who gains energy by being alone and you would know that about yourself. But don't cut yourself off from those that you care about and those who care about you. And so I just try not to isolate.

I often, I almost never talk to anybody about my problems unless that person has a vested interest. Talk to a coach, to an advisor, to a consultant, to a therapist, somebody who can actually help you with something. So I don't talk about my problems with people who can't actually help me with them.

But by not cutting myself off from people, it often helps me to feel better. And so a lot of times I'll just walk away from the thing that are causing me trouble and go do something. I have children, so hey, this isn't working. This day is shot. Nothing is working here.

Everything is falling apart. I'm sitting here again banging my head against the desk and it's not working. So let's go do something fun. Let's go for a hike. Let's go out for ice cream. Let's go to the park and just do something with those that I care about. And the idea here is, as you'll see in a moment when I talk about kind of fallback plans, the idea is have something that you can fall back on when plan A isn't working.

Actually, let me do it now. I'll switch up my order. If you're doing an activity and that activity isn't working for you, having a fallback plan that's still moving you forward in some way will be very helpful for you. Let's use a simple example. I go out and I try to use walking as my main form of cardio exercise, but I don't enjoy walking in the rain.

And so if I want to go for a walk and I find that it's raining when I want to go for a walk, then I find myself frustrated because I can't get my walk in without going and walking in the rain, which isn't very fun. And many times in my life, I have just simply not exercised because it was raining.

Well, that's dumb. That's really dumb. A better plan is to have a fallback, to say, "All right, if it's raining and I don't want to go and walk in the rain today, then what could I do instead of that?" So if I want to walk, could I drive to the mall and walk around the mall where it's air conditioned and there's no rain coming in?

Could I go to Home Depot and walk around Home Depot and the aisles of Home Depot and get my steps in that way? Should I have a treadmill at my house that I can walk on the treadmill at my house or go to a gym and walk on a treadmill?

Should I have some other piece of equipment, an indoor bicycle machine, a rowing machine, whatever it is that I want? Or should I go and just pay for a one-off class at the gym or a one-day pass at the gym to go and walk? Having some kind of backup plan so that the choice is not either go walk in the rain, which I don't want to do or do nothing, but rather, "Hey, it's raining.

I'll quickly go to this backup plan," improves things. And so for me, I have developed over the years a few of those things that help me. So for example, if I'm struggling and I'm struggling to create something, I'm struggling with some business task and it's just not working and I'm frustrated and my brain isn't working and everything feels black and I just want to quit, then I try to have a backup activity that's going to still keep me going.

So one of my primary ones is I'll go and read something. I'll say, "This isn't working," and ask myself, "Should I just power through?" Because there are times you just power through. But this isn't working. I'm not going to just sit here and try to force myself to do this.

So let me go and sit down and read. And so I'll go read. But I'll try to read something that's going to help me. So I'll read a self-improvement book in a foreign language. Then I feel like I'm getting something, I'm learning something, and I'm helping myself study a foreign language.

I'll read a business book, give me ideas that I can apply, and also do it in a foreign language. Or if that doesn't work, then I'll go ahead and say, "I don't want to study business. I'm done with business. I don't feel like doing anything." Well, I'll read a novel.

But then, again, I'll try to read a novel in a foreign language, which is just as enjoyable, but now I'm making progress on one of my language goals instead of just reading and wasting time. Maybe for you, maybe you're a TV watcher, and your choice would be, "Well, I'm just going to read instead of watching TV because it can help me expand my vocabulary.

It's going to be simpler. It's going to be easier for me to walk away in an hour instead of being sucked into four seasons of this particular drama." Or if you want to watch TV, great. But maybe I'll watch something useful. Try to watch a show that's going to make you smarter, inspire you.

Might choose Shark Tank instead of whatever the latest drama is. Or if you're going to watch a drama, watch it in a foreign language. Or if you're going to go to YouTube, browse something educational instead of something that's just pure fluff, pure twaddle. And so for me, I can usually find something that has some redeeming value.

And while I'm walking away from this frustration, I'm walking away from this thing that's just not working right now. I'm not just doing nothing. I'm getting something useful. And then you start to stack. I try to stack these things up. All right, this isn't working. I'm frustrated. So I'm going to grab an audio book, a novel in Spanish, and I'm going to go for a walk.

I'm going to get sunshine. I'm going to get movement. I'm going to get fresh air. I'm going to hydrate myself while I go out. I'm going to listen to this nice novel in a foreign language that I'm studying. And now when I come back an hour later, things have brightened up a little bit and I can work at it again.

Those are some just things that are often useful for me. And then when I get to the end of the day and I look at what I have done and what I haven't done, even if I spent the day reading, well, if I spent the day reading in a foreign language about something that was helpful, basically it's like, well, it's like being in college, right?

I was studying something that was going to help my career and I was building my foreign language ability. Those things are helpful. When I'm in a difficult spot, I try to make sure that there's nothing going wrong except a little bit of time. So this is, depends on where you are, right?

And what the particular crisis that you're facing is. A lot of times the crises that I undergo are just things that are frustrating to me. I can't get work done. All right. I'm in a bad mental state and trying to figure out how to get out of it. So if I can control the big things, then a little bit of time can just pass.

So I don't want to spend a lot of money. I don't want to have anything out of control. A few days isn't going to hurt me. I know I'll feel better next week. I'll lose a week on my timelines, but that's okay. As long as I control the money, as long as I control my relationships, as long as I don't start speaking in an ugly way towards my wife or towards my children, I can have a bad workday.

I can have a bad evening and it's okay as long as I don't do something that I'm going to regret. I'm not going to go out and go gambling. I'm not going to go out and go drinking. I'm not going to go and yell at somebody. I'm just going to control things and recognize that time will fix this problem because time fixes many problems.

So control the things that you can control. Again, for me, that's money. Control the money. It's my words. Control my words. Don't say something I'm going to regret. Don't commit to something that I'm going to regret. Just let a few days go and then come back and start again.

I do find that as I get older, it becomes easier because I'm less focused on the disaster that is today. If I were 22 years old working a job, you expect I can't have any bad days. You get a little older, you get a little money under your belt, your investments start making money for you, your business starts to work and you can press forward.

One of the things that has often motivated me to try to do something, to build a business that has something that works without my presence has been that it gives you options. If you want to wake up richer tomorrow, whether you're going to have a good day or a bad day, then you got to build something that's going to just work.

You got to build a book that's going to pay you royalties because someone buys it whether or not you're feeling good that day. You got to build a business where you have customers and staff who are going to come in and go to work whether or not you go to work in that particular day.

More and more, the days that go by, you face a difficult day and it's not as bad as it was when you didn't have that business built. When you didn't have those employees working on things for you. And so this has often been one of my motivations for building a business rather than simply being dependent on my day-to-day work.

Two more comments that I hope will be helpful. In order to deal with setbacks, I find it usually easiest to just change the timeline. I don't know who to give credit to, but somebody famous said, "There are no unreasonable goals, only unreasonable timelines or unreasonable deadlines." I think that's pretty true.

There aren't really any unreasonable goals, only unreasonable timelines or deadlines. And since you're the one who makes up the deadline in the first place, makes up the timeline in the first place, you can just simply change it. Now obviously you should be careful about renegotiating your deals. Sometimes you buckle in, you pull an all-nighter and you get the work done on time because that's what you said you were going to do.

No question. Sometimes you can just change it. You can just adjust it and say, "This isn't working for me. I'm not going to reach this, so let me just change it and add more time." And if the things that you're working on are things that are worthwhile, they're probably going to be worthwhile just as worthwhile a week late or a year late as they are a week early or a year early.

If you're working to reach financial independence at 45 years old, but you get delayed by a series of failures in your life and you reach it at 47, you can either focus on the fact that you're a loser who missed your goal date by two years or on the fact that, "Hey, even though I faced all these problems and complications, I'm financially independent at 47.

That's awesome. That's a lot earlier than a lot of people are financially independent." And almost anything worthwhile, almost anything that we care about functions the same way in life. Let's say you want to learn Spanish and you think it's going to take you 600 hours to learn Spanish. And you sit down and you say a goal and you say, "I'm going to learn Spanish this year because I'm going to put in 600 hours over the course of 300 days.

This year I'm going to do it." And then something happens. Instead of doing two hours a day, you wind up doing 1.1 hours per day. Well, you're going to be off your timeline by ... Your timeline is basically going to double. But in the grand scheme of things, if you just keep pressing forward, you're still going to learn Spanish.

You really are. It's just a matter of keep pressing forward little by little, day by day. You're still going to learn Spanish. And if two years from now you can speak Spanish fluently, you'll be in good shape. Doesn't matter whether you were a year late. That's all right. It's just part of the journey.

Enjoy the process. Maybe your goal is to say, "I'm going to lose a pound a day." And then instead of doing that, you lose a quarter of a pound a day. That's okay. If you lose a quarter of a pound a day for long enough, you'll reach your goals.

Just change the time and recognize that the forward progress is what's important, not this specific timeline. You've made up most of these timelines, most of these goals. And when they're helpful to you because they're inspiring, use them. But when they're not helpful to you because they cause you to feel overwhelmed and stressed, toss those suckers.

You don't need them. Finally, when you go through difficult periods, dark periods of your life, ask yourself, "Why did that happen? What caused me to face that difficult period?" And you can analyze this at almost any level. Right now, I'm sniffing and snorting today because I have some kind of weird allergies to where I am right now.

I don't know why I have them. I don't know what they are. I haven't been able to figure out what they are. But they have really messed up my work week because when I'm sniffing and snorting and I can't speak, I can't work effectively in creating audible content. When I'm sneezing 20 times in a row, I can't think very clearly to create something useful.

And then I start to get behind. I start to not produce shows and it just starts to mess everything up. So what's my analysis of the problem? Well, this stinks. As I pause the show to sneeze eight times and then three more times, you just say, "All right, this stinks." And one more sneeze.

This stinks. I don't like this. I don't like not being able to work. And what's a solution for me? In my case, I'm leaving. So maybe I need to go spend more time in the desert and not be in the jungle because there's some kind of weird pollen or something that's causing me to sneeze.

Maybe I need to go and get some kind of allergy medication. Maybe I need to try to go through a series of blood tests and figure out what it is that is causing me a problem. Maybe I need to try an elimination diet. You just got to start working your way through the problems and do your best to systematically work on solutions.

Try a solution. See if it works. Does it make things better? No, it didn't. All right, we'll toss that one. Try the next one. Try the next one. Try the next one and keep on going and don't stop until you find a solution that improves things for you. And just keep on going, systematically working your way through.

Back to one of these useful mental principles, the principle of just pressing forward, of trying new things, of not ever allowing yourself to say, "Oh, I'm just a victim of the circumstances. No, I got to get on top of these circumstances and control the things that I can control so that I can eliminate this being sick thing," or whatever the issue is that you're facing.

Maybe you face a thing in your business, right? We have this problem, an unhappy customer, or this thing happened. Okay, well, how can I change the systems in the business? Who can I hire? Who can help me achieve this certain thing? How can I move this forward? How can I stop doing this thing that I don't want to do?

Just keep pressing forward and keep fixing things. Analyze things. Try to come up with creative solutions and then pick a solution if you like it. For me, again, one of my – I do this on my phone, but I have a note. It's called Journaling My Problems. I pick a problem.

I write the problem and I say, "Here is the problem that I'm facing," and then I just start brainstorming solutions. Write a list of one to ten, make myself write ten solutions to it. Then I close the note, move on with my life, come back the next day, open it, look at it, see, and do I like any of those solutions?

Do I think any of them might actually work? Do I want to implement any of them? Are any of them actually good or are they all junk? If they're all junk, I write the problem a different way. One to ten, brainstorm ten new solutions and just keep pressing on.

You do that over time and you start to have fewer and fewer issues. You start to do better and better. You clean up a mess here. You clean up a mess there. Pretty soon, you cleaned up enough messes that the times of bleakness and blackness and difficulty, etc., are fewer and they're shorter and they're less often and that helps.

Then you can just press forward. Those are some of the things that I do, that I am doing and I hope they're useful to you. I always feel a little silly doing these kinds of shows because to me, most of this stuff seems self-evident, but I've done this long enough to know that it's probably not self-evident to anybody.

I hope that if you're one who faces some of the things that I face and emotional swings, etc., that some of these things can be useful to you. Thank you for listening to the show and I'll be back with you with more higher quality stuff as soon as I can.

Thank you so much.