AMPING up your courage meter

hey friend, it’s your friend: jack 👋. today we are going to dive deep into an all too common phenomenon known as Courage Depletion and how you can build your own courage and do some cool s**t.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 55 seconds

Creation log update

Every week I put here a creation log about what I’ve been up to in hopes it inspires you to create more too. Here’s the weekly rundown, feel free to skip!

We are at 6600 installs on Curiosity Quench (my app to end doomscrolling) and every day I’ve been working on it for 2+ hours to make it better and more helpful. There is still a long ways to go to make it amazing but already it’s been helping people explore their curiosity and DO MORE STUFF!! (you’ll see why thats important after reading this post)

My book “Consumption Control” is officially in editing stages, I finished the 1st draft this week! You can also preorder and read the 1st draft now if you want to :)

oh yeah and Curiosity Quench now has QUENCH LEAGUES! which let you compete in a point system to climb ranks and earn free credits… and I also added a simple focus training screen to help people work their attention span muscle to be able to focus with more ease.

Finally deep work depot (my deep work focus timer) has gotten some upgrades, and I’ve been adding login to it this week.

Courage Depletion

“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

― Vincent Van Gogh

Something I have noticed in a lot of people who are stuck in a negative consumption loop is not that they lack a desire to stop, or change: it’s that they lack the courage to really try something else. To take a risk, or a bet on themselves. I know this because it has been the case for myself too. I didn’t stop my undesirable habits of consumption when I blocked the apps, or gathered the willpower to not open social media… I stopped when I had something better to do with my time.

I stopped when I finally gathered my courage and accepted that doing something with it would be better than doing nothing. I figured if I was scrolling through social media, then I wasn’t really doing much of anything. It was passive. I'm not sure which day it happened, but at some point I took it upon myself to solve the problem, head on. I decided to not just find out how I can control my consumption, but how I can really spend more of my time doing the things that I want to live the life I really want to live. 

This required a good amount of courage. I dropped out of school, even though it wasn't what any of my close family members would have chosen for me. I started doing the stuff I actually wanted to do. The things that I thought would bring me to the life I actually wanted to live. That same season, I quit my job at McDonalds. I made a lot more money in my first years on my own than I ever would have made after school in a lined up job (dumb luck). I also then proceeded to lose almost all of it (oopsy). What’s one of the biggest takeaways I’ve come to realize?

If you just do stuff, and tell people often, and then get better, you can quite literally shift the world around you and bend the future to your will.

Yes literally, “stuff”. Do stuff, create stuff, move around, EXPERIMENT! Try things, fail at things. Learn, explore, be a curious cat. DO STUFF! This is how you bring yourself enough courage to make positive change. This is how you can start to realize the magnitude you’ve been downplaying yourself at. The case here is likely that you are capable of much more than you can currently imagine.

Playing scared will get you nowhere my friend, don’t let your lack of courage as it stands now stop you from just doing stuff. The trap of your fears are no match for the anxiety that follows knowing that you could have done much better under the circumstances you were given, but you didn't. The only way to counteract this anxiety is to just do stuff; gather your courage and take on the challenge life is presenting to you. On the other side of painful struggles is momentous growth.

Watch out for the trap! The trap is sleek, and it stomps down much of all  human courage. The trap is modern thinking. Modern thinking tells you that you are not free to do as you please with your life, even though in most ways: you are. Modern thinking tells you that you have to stay inside the lines and you have to live in consumption mode so the wheels can keep spinning.

In reality: What you ‘have’ to do just depends on what you want from your life. The thing most of us fail to do in the process of growing up with modern thinking in our heads is to ask ourselves what we really want out of our life. We are not taught to think for ourselves, quite the opposite actually. Can we alter the default path laid out for us? Yes YOU can. How do YOU want to alter it? Re: What do YOU really want out of life? Who do YOU want to become? (You will see these questions many times throughout this book, there is a good reason for that.)

A lack of courage will stop you from ever asking these questions. But if you don’t ask these hard questions now, the cost later is much harder to endure; infinitely harder, I would say. Courage depletion is a phenomenon that is all too common, everyday there are millions of people who walk around with a depleted courage meter, not willing to keep going on with what they really want out of life. They have given up not only hope, but in trying to do stuff to push them to where they want to go altogether.

The only way to knock this meter back into shape that I know is to act. To do stuff, and to gather as much courage you can to do more stuff. Slowly your meter builds up as you complete things, or fail at things and keep going in spite of said failure. Eventually you may notice that you can choose to travel in any direction you want. The only stopping force is a lack of courage. Gather your courage, try things, keep going, and in turn you will gain more courage. I must warn you though, there is no secret backdoor to gaining more courage. You must use courage to get more of it, this is the only way.

To avoid being depleted of courage when things aren’t going my way, something I like to remember is the following: Struggle and failure are signs of progress. And progress is equal to growth. Therefore the only way to grow into the life you want is to struggle and fail, a lot. Do not become discouraged when something is hard, gather your courage and accept the call to grow.

Don’t worry my friend, you don’t need to decide exactly what you want out of life right this very moment. When you do decide though, what you want out of life: you also must note that your answers are subject to change, and they likely should change! After all: getting things right on the first effort is not the natural recipe of making progress or learning: Failure and struggle are.

Before I end this post: I want to thank you for having the courage to read this chapter to the end. I know a lot of the words in this chapter seem intense, like I’m calling you out, and the truth is maybe I am. I am because I want you to decide which direction you take your life. These words are what I would tell my past self if I could. When you know what you want and have the courage to act towards it: you become one that is in control of their fate. Keep going my friend, your courage meter is rising.

End of post words of wisdom:

Better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all.
― Sean-Paul Thomas

The only failure is not to try.
— George Clooney 

The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of
success is how we cope with disappointment.
― Deborah Moggach

Failure is how you grow, struggle is how it will show.
- jack friks

Thank you for reading my friend, take care, I love you.
- your friend, jack ♠️

Whenever you're up for it, there are 4 ways I can help you:

1. Curiosity Quench: Destroy your scroll —addiction— and get on a roll with the stuff that actually matters. (app)

2. Consumption Control: Learn how to control your consumption tendencies and get on a roll with the stuff that actually matters. (eBook)

3. You Were Built To Create Cool S**t : Click to start. (book)

4. Deep work focus timer: a simple timer that gets you locked in and feeling good about it.