Key Takeaways:
-Long Trucking Trip Details: I discuss a long haul from Buckeye, Arizona to New York City, a 2,700-mile trip. I prefer long hauls over short trips and stop to weigh the truck after loading with Funko Pop toys for a New York Comic-Con.
– The Power of Tiny Changes: Small, consistent changes, like losing or gaining 1% weight over time, can drastically affect life. This applies to health, finances, and personal growth.
– The Myth of Overnight Success: I emphasize that massive success doesn’t happen overnight. Instead, steady, daily improvements lead to long-term results.
– Accountability and Self-Awareness: Taking responsibility for one’s situation and making small improvements daily can lead to meaningful change. Blaming external factors prevents progress.
– Compounding Habits: Both good and bad habits compound over time, greatly affecting one’s future. Minor daily decisions will accumulate and either improve or harm long-term health, finances, and life satisfaction.
Too often we convince ourselves massive success requires massive action, whether it’s losing weight, advancing in the trucking industry, becoming an owner operator, or any other goal. We put immense pressure on ourselves to have overnight success. We see all these people winning, and we want to replicate what they have going on, but we don’t want to go through any of the suffering that they had to go through. Everybody wants to lose weight and wear nice fitted clothes, but not everybody wants to put the time in at the gym, nobody wants to count calories, we all have excuses that we make up in our minds.
Overnight goals, overnight accomplishments, overnight success is not real. You are chasing something that is not possible. I’ll tell you what is possible tho, becoming one percent better than you were yesterday, even becoming one percent better than you were last year is better than the opposite, which is becoming one percent worse! Your life is on a trajectory, whether it’s going up or down it’s going to depend on you. There is no such thing as a stable median trajectory, meaning, your life, your health, your money will never be in a consistent flat line. You will never be in an equalized state of mind or finances. You either work on your goals, or your goals evaporate. Work on your health, or your health diminishes. You Work on making money, or you work spending it. Up or down.
One thing is for certain, time is working against you. Time will reveal it all. It will show if you have been slacking off or if you have been disciplined. You can’t travel back in time to try to change all that time wasted watching Netflix, doom scrolling social media or jerking off. You also can’t travel into the future, but I promise, the future will show you and everybody else exactly what it is that you have been doing with your time. If you have been eating junk food, if you haven’t been exercising, if you haven’t been watching what you’re eating like you promised for the 100th time, if you haven’t started to walk around the truck stop like you said so many times, the future will expose you and all your lies. And to be frank, nobody cares about your lies in this world. I don’t care, your friends don’t care, even your family don’t care. We all have too much going on in our lives to care about yours. With that being said, why do you feel the need to keep lying to yourself? Does it make you feel better in the short term? Cuz In the long term it does absolutely nothing but hurt you. Don’t shoot the messenger, just calling it how I see it. I see it very clearly, cuz I’ve been there before. I’m trying to wake you up.
Imagine your dreaming and you hear a voice in the distance. Everything is black so you can’t quite tell who or what it is but you can hear something very softly. You kinda want to know whose voice that is but not to the extent of waking up, so you just turn the other way and try to tune it out. That voice is me yelling at you at the top of my lungs, shouting at you and you can’t be bothered with the crappy life that you’re living. What’s fascinating is that so many truck drivers have become so comfortable laying down on a bed full of thorns night after night. It’s mind blowing. The bed could stink, have holes, or not even have a bedspread, and most of you drivers wouldn’t even bat an eye at the complete disgust of the so-called “bed” that ya go lay down. I don’t even want to imagine the smell inside the cab. A quick way to find out about who a truck driver is, how well they maintain the inside of their truck. After that’s where they live for weeks at a time. I consider my truck like my house, it basically is. One thing I know for a fact is that you never know who’s going to show up to your house uninvited. Could be a DOT officer, a fellow truck driver, random inspector at your company or even a lot lizard. If an unknown person walks in randomly to your house, aka your truck, what would they think about you? Would they be surprised by how clean you keep your house and how it smells good or would they make a face of complete disgust?
When my life started to change it’s when I decided to look inward of myself, I had to become self aware and get pissed off at my circumstances. I had to take accountability and blame myself only. Once I stopped blaming all external factors, once I stopped blaming people that had no control in my day to day activities, my life began to change. My life started to go on an upwards trajectory, and not only my life, but those around me.
Getting one percent better every day is a lot more meaningful and has a better payoff in the long run. One tiny improvement daily can change your life forever. Losing one pound per week for a whole year is 52 lbs. How many truck drivers do you know that need to start losing that kinda weight!? That could be done so easily with a few simple changes, nothing drastic, just one percent change on a daily basis. On the other side of the same spectrum, gain 1 pound per week in a year, you’ll gain 52 lbs. And that is much easier to do than to lose weight. Now let’s do a minor change to the numbers. What if it was only half a pound a week? You either gain or lose 26 pounds per year. That’s still quite a bit of weight. Multiply that one year into 2, 5 or 10. Do you see it can start to compound very easily as time goes on? For a person to be stuck on the same weight is extremely rare, and I hope you don’t think you are the exception.
Why are so many truck drivers overweight? With so much fast food and unhealthy snacks so readily available, who would want to go out there and do something that is hard? Like cooking your own meals or exercising while being over the road. Life is full of tradeoffs and you have to delay gratification. Be lazy, Eat fast, fried unhealthy food now, your future will pay for the consequences. On the other side of the coin, Delay trying to satisfy your taste buds, you will meet a completely different person in the mirror within 6 months. I promise you.
The same way your money builds compound interest when you invest it, your habits will multiply the more you repeat them. In the short term it’ll make no difference, but that’s not the point of compound interest. What you want to look for is the difference in the long term. All your good habits and all your bad habits, will become apparent in 5 years, in 10 years. If you are having a hard time right now, whether in life, finances or relationships, it is because in the last few years, you haven’t done anything to improve yourself. Your current situation is the
Accumulation of your past. The good thing is, your future can look so much better if you start to change right now. Not tomorrow, not Monday or next week. Today!
Building compound interest can be a hard concept to grasp, especially when we feel like these minor changes ain’t doing much. If you lose 1 pound, nothing in the mirror has changed, if you workout for a whole week, you’re still out of shape. If you save 5 bucks, you’re still not a millionaire. After making a few small changes and getting discouraged by not being able to see the difference, we go back to our old routine of ‘o well who cares’. Unfortunately bad habits are easy to dismiss when the process takes a long time. If you eat an unhealthy meal, it’s not like you’re going to gain 5 pounds. If you skip a workout today, there’s always tomorrow to do it, one bad day is not going to ruin your life. A small bad decision is easy to ignore, but what happens when you ignore it for a long time, day after day. A small bad habit can greatly impact your life in the future. Nobody woke up one day and magically got type 2 diabetes, chronic disease or cancer. All those small daily bad habits have now compounded into a very ugly toxic result. It’s the accumulation of bad decisions. It is a one percent decline for a very long time.
If a truck driver decides to change the trajectory of the destination by one degree, that’s going to impact the destination. If you decide to change your life by one degree, how would your future look? You were hoping to live till your 80 with a semi healthy body, but now since you decided to go downward 1 degree instead of up since you were in your 20s, you’re barely going to make it to 60 with more than likely some type of health issues. A very slight degree in change can lead to a very unknown destination. Same things the opposite. A minimal change in doing good daily habits, can change who you are and who you could be. Goals are met by repeating small daily habits for a long time, not overnight.
If you have a destination, you need a plan to get there. If you are taking a load from the West to East Coast, you need to plan how and when you’re going to get there. Without a plan, it’s easy to deviate from your goal. What matters the most today is that you start changing the plan to reach your goals. Your goals haven’t been met cuz your plan sucks! So change the plan! If you eat more calories than you need, you’re on a downward trajectory. And the scale might be going up but your health is going down. If you’re an owner operator and you spend more money than you make, you’re on Downward trajectory. Nobody wants to gain weight, nobody wants to lose money, but there are only 2 directions you’re going to go, up or down. One apple a day, keeps the DR away. saving a dollar a day, helps on a rainy day. You get what you repeat. If you want to see what your future will look like, just look at your daily habits and multiply it by 100. Your future will be defined by what you are currently doing. What does your current trajectory look like?