Welcome to the Bipolar Excellence Podcast, Helping High Functioning Bipolar People Find And Use The Positive Aspects Of Bipolar To Build Their Passion Projects. I’m your host, Ken Jensen. Please always keep in mind: I do not offer any treatment advice. I am not a trained medical professional. This podcast and its adjoining website contain my experiences, thoughts and opinions about bipolar.

Always seek the advice of a medical professional when dealing with any mental illness. On with the show!

Welcome to the Bipolar Podcast Episode 22: I Don’t Care What It Takes. I’m Never Giving Up.

Besides being one of my favorite topics, this is part of the Life Of An Outsider series. You’ll find a link to the series in the footer of the website, BipolarExcellence.com.

Okay. I’m never giving up. This is me. The unstoppable force applied only to me.

I am bound and determined to see this thing you’re in right now become a huge success. A financial success for me, but also, I want to change lives, I want worlds to be built off the back of my guidance and advice and caring and conversations. I want to watch what you guys do. I want to know in a very selfish way that I helped to kick those things off.

I don’t want or need anything else from you guys than that. Purely selfish. I want to point to it like an architect at a bridge. I designed that. The engineers built it. You’re the engineers. I want to help design it to whatever degree. I want input.

Don’t even want to help to design it. I just want to be part of the processes of highly functioning bipolar people who have a dream and want to see that thing come to fruition.

We are some of the coolest people I’ve ever met. And our brains need to be out there as a force for good, building the cool shit that only we are capable of building. That’s the purely, purely selfish, just for me, part of this that comes from working with and through you. I want to see you guys make it. And I want to just know that that’s how I spend my life.

I love that. I’ve mentioned the Seven 21 Media Center before. I was in a world where that’s all that took place. Every turn, every hallway you went down, every door you went into. People were creating awesome stuff.

And I was part of it in whatever way. And it was the most fun I’d had in my life that didn’t involve drugs and alcohol and sex. It was nuts.

It was so cool to be around these people. They were all different. They were all doing different stuff. Their goals were small and large. A lot of them were doing things that had nothing to do with… like the end result did not interest me.

But how they went about achieving it greatly interested me. And talking to people in the middle of building dreams and goals and companies like this hugely interested in me. That’s what I want out of this, working with and through you guys.

As far as never giving up? I don’t know how to give up. The only thing I know how to give up, usually, is jobs and that’s not even giving up. I learned a long time ago, a book by Barbara Scher S H E R. What was the name of that thing?

Oh, it’s right on the tip of my tongue. Something that’s called… well, we’re seekers. There was something else she called it too. But we stay with a thing, particularly with jobs, we learn whatever we need and we’re done. That’s all we needed. And we quit.

To the world around us, the standard world, the world that has existed in the last century, really, more than anything, employment wise, we look like, I look like a quitter. Can’t stick with anything. That’s incorrect.

I stuck with it as long as I needed to, to learn what I must ,so that I could get good at doing the thing that has you listening to me right now. That’s the only thing I quit.

As far as bringing my vision to bear, which is the helping you bring your vision to bear? I’ve been interested in for a lot of years. And I get better at it all the time. I enjoy the process of sharing what I know about it, more, all the time.

I professionalize every aspect of this all the time. And more of you are landing in my lap and we’re doing fun stuff together,in whatever way that takes shape and that feeds my soul. Why would I give that up?

Why would I not drive for all I’m worth, all the time, to make that become larger, better, more effective? Having said that, do I hammer away at this 24/7? No, I am also something… and you might be too.

Garrett Le Porto wrote a book called the DaVinci Method.

There is no method. The method is how you are a DaVinci type, you know, like a Renaissance man, good at anything you touch, but it’s many things. You don’t stay with anything forever. He explains that in his book.

He’s an MIT engineer, among many other things. And he described people like me as this: we’re the hunters in the villages. The hunter lays around, sometimes for weeks on end, napping snoozing, aimless, not doing much of anything. It looks like a bum to the village.

But when it’s time to eat, that’s when he shines. He goes out into the jungle and he’s gone for one or two weeks killing things, hunting things, and doing what it takes to bring that pile of meat back to the village.

Now he just fed the whole village. He’s out. He doesn’t want anything to do with cleaning the streets, tidying up the huts, gathering water, making clothes, teaching the kids. Nothing. He hunts.

He feeds everyone off the back of what he does. And if that’s not what needs to happen, leave him alone. And people do because that’s his value.

His value is that one thing that he can do that none of them can. And they don’t want him doing the other things. They’ll handle that. I’m that hunter. So what this looks like is, I apply myself with a certain amount of routine regularity throughout most days of the week, not even every day.

But if I went at this all the time for all I was worth, I’m not that guy.

I’m not that… what do they call that? That’s the the Type A people, best as I can understand it. Drive, drive, drive, drive. I don’t have that. I apply a certain amount of my energy, a certain way, a certain amount of time each day, and it’s not even every day, to get this done. I get it done better and better through the use of systems and automation.

Right now. This is, I don’t know, the eighth or ninth episode I’ve recorded in one sitting. Now I’m going to go to my job over at the halfway house. And when I’m done working all through the night with the guys that need my help, I get a couple hours to myself at the end of each day, they don’t what I do.

I take these audio recordings, I throw them in my transcription service. It turns into written word that I can then throw on the web pages. Now Google knows what to find to send people that ask questions that, maybe whatever I said on that page, fits.

So there. I let you a little deeper in on my my work world of all of this, than I realized I was going to. But I guess what I want to say is don’t drive yourself crazy with all of this. You don’t have to give up.

But don’t go at this so hard that, like I said in one of the other episodes, you lose everything else that matters to you in your life. There will be times when that’s exactly what’s required. Day after day, week after week, sometimes more months in a row, it will take to really hammer out whatever the next step is.

Find a way of preparing the people in your life that matter most, so that they can accept that and live with it until you’re done. And then get it done and then bring more of yourself back to them when you’re able.

It’s a dance. You’re not always going to do it well, but you can’t give up. If whatever brought you my way is important enough to you and to those you care about, you cannot ever give up.

On a final note. One guy that speaks about that extensively is Steven Pressfield. Former Marine. He wrote a bunch of little books I’ve talked about before. They’re very easy to read. Very quick reads, very easy to consume. Each page is gold. Gold.

If you want to know what it takes to never give up and pursue something, even when it looks like it’s never going to come to fruition, read his books. Great little motivators when you just hear his life story about how he became somebody, whose name is even known from, nobody knew who he was.

Take some strength from that. I have a similar story to his. Take strength from mine.

You might not win this over overnight. You’re not, probably not gonna win this overnight. You just don’t give up. If you give up, you’re guaranteed to not finish. That’s the only common denominator between anybody that’s well known for anything. They just didn’t give up.

Accept that. Embrace it. Do it sanely. Do it systematically. Parse out your energy wisely and your emotional energy. And whatever it is you’re trying to bring to bear? You’re going to birth that thing and it’s going to be beautiful.

And I’d love to help you go find me over at BipolarExcellence.com. Alright! Next episode.