Welcome to the Bipolar Excellence Podcast, Episode 35, I’m Currently Unwell In Some Way. how Do I Still Grow My Dream?

This is, and we’re coming to the end, part of the Life Of An Outsider series. You’ll find the link to that series in the footer of the website, bipolarexcellence.com.

The reason I made that series is because I’m going to keep referring back to these things, because they’re all at the root of building out a passion project.

And it addresses all the hurdles I ran into as a high functioning bipolar person, while doing the same thing any other artist or entrepreneur or outsider attempts to do. It’s a double whammy.

It’s hard enough stepping away from the herd. Stepping away from the herd and being tweaked in some fashion on top of it? Well, I think maybe it’s a requirement.

I think maybe it’s a requirement.

If that gives you any, any hope and sense of calm. You might not have that. There’s not as much you need to repair. Some of it just is a perspective switch. You need to flip it to recognizing some aspects of your bipolar symptoms as strengths. They’re just being misused. Misunderstood.

Okay. I don’t want to give any direct advice on on how to, how to grow your dream while currently unwell. Not, not like a specific, direct head-on thing. Let me just tell you what I, what I went through and why.

But before I say that, let me, let me emphasize. If you’re unwell. If you’re bipolar has ahold of ya good and solid? You need to focus more of your energy and efforts and money and attention on becoming more well than you are.

You can do both. You can focus on wellness and repair, while building out whatever your dream is. But depending on how bad the illness has ahold of ya, it’s 50/ 50, 60/ 40, 30/ 70. You know what I’m saying?

The wellness has to, has to be the priority at all times. But it does not mean you have to ignore growing your dream.

So when I was coming out of bipolar, one of the strengths I had was I was still more manic than not. And it allowed me to do a deep dive, at length, on any topic I cared to, but wouldn’t run out of steam. I was manic. My mind was crisp.

And I had three dimensional thinking, which I’ve this is what I used to call it. Three dimensional thinking. I could pull from forwards, backwards, up and down, in and out. I could connect disparate lines of thought with seemingly unconnected issues and industries and conversations with people.

I’ve come to understand it was actually four dimensional thought because it involves time. I could see into the future.

I couldn’t see into the future. I could just make predictions based on everything that I was aware of. And eventually I’d be close to whatever I thought would be… when I, when I made a move, it, it land about where I thought it would or get some kind of close. That’s what I mean about seeing the future.

I pull from my past big time, but I could do the same with other people’s information and ideas and their own perspectives.

I could link together so many things. I was at the core of it. And there was just lines radiating out of my mind, all these other people and sources of knowledge and wisdom and systems and desires I had and that they had, and people whose missions had born whatever fruit they did that I admired and how they got there.

And just on and on and on. It was incredible what I could piece together in my head to then come up with a somewhat sane, in the beginning and, and reasonable way forward. I don’t have that skill anymore.

There’s a, there’s a, there’s a, an echo of it. There’s a piece of it left over. That’s for sure. It didn’t go away all the way, but I get tired now at the same time, every night.

Normalcy returned to my life of the type that you would want to have. So, but while I was in all of this, it allowed me to do it, allow it allowed me to do a great amount of experimentation.

I got to try out so many things, sample so many things. And I was forced to find money I never had. That’s always been an issue up to this point and that’s a skill I develop stronger and stronger with the passage of time.

But way back in the beginning, just coming out of bipolar, it was a, it was unreal, the steps I would take to fund whatever I had to fund. I couldn’t always. Some things were just too big of a leap. I could get a lot of things done, but a lot of it is R w a lot of it was based in ways I wouldn’t recommend.

However, I learned a lot. Experimented with a lot. I got to see rapidly where something might take me to see if it worked for me, or if I even still agreed with it.

I found a company. I don’t know if they’re around anymore. I think they are. I used to see they they stuck to a single format of site design and you could spot one of their sites instantly. A lot of customers, myself included, used to beg them hey give us a different template. These things all look the same and they’re outdated, but like, Nope, don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.

I imagine that company’s still around. But the, the key thing they taught was go slow and build a proper platform for a website. There were talking about a website. They taught you how to do keyword research and site structure for proper search engine optimization. How to keep Mother Google happy and feeding you visitors and all kinds of stuff like that.

But it took doing it the way they said it took, took a, what am I taking me? I don’t know. It was many months before I even turned the website on. And when I did it worked as advertised. I had loads and loads of traffic. I think, from that website, I found I got found by an independent film company in New York City.

I got a call and they came up and filmed me for a documentary. The, the, it never got made. I visited their site since. I’m, I’m going back like 12 plus years. But it was really cool. The guys were cool. I don’t even think they call themselves what they called themselves then. But I got found, I got interviewed and it’s funny.

The one, one of the things I remember was I had just moved into the house I had at the time and I had enough money to pay rent. There was nothing in the house. We had beds, we had one dining room table and a certain amount of utensils to cook with and a TV. That was me, my wife and four kids.

And I think we had a I think we had a spare chair. It was grim, but we had a house to live in. And I remember telling these guys, I took them for a tour of the house. And I was like, if you come back in 10 years, this house is going to be full.

Well, that never came to be. But 10 years later, the house was indeed full because when I had a move, I couldn’t believe how much shit I had accumulated and I couldn’t get rid of fast enough. I never wanted to move again. So that came true.

But the cool thing there was that an independent film company found me, drove up from New York City, about two hour drive to reach, reach where I live. And fill me all about how I, at the time, how I had beaten bipolar was that was the, the thrust of the film.

And thye did so because the guy, one of the guy’s girlfriends had bipolar real bad, and wasn’t doing well with it. And he just wanted to know things to see if there was anything he could do to help.

I have no idea where that went for him. I’ve never reached out and asked. And I liked the guys and they’ve done well in other areas with film, which I thought was really cool, cause they were really cool guys. And that, that was good enough for me. Maybe one day I’ll reach out and say hi.

But if you put it, if you put a web to a website together, well, like I did back in the day, that’s a way you can pick, you can pick what to put together. And if you’d like, if you’re not to a place where you feel like launching anything or making too big of a noise, you just, you just seeing what’s in your own head, you could build a website and have nothing on it for anyone to do.

You could even leave a contact page off. If you just want to put something together and see what it looks like, do that. It’s, it’s a nice lukewarm step that can lead to something major without stressing you out yourself out too much.

I’m going to, I’m going to tell you the name of that company just in case. Company was great. They were great people. I even had a management kind of call with em once of above and beyond client level, due to some other companies I was advocating for at the time.

That was another big plan I had. I did some I used to do corporate calls of a sort. I worked at the C level on, on the phone anyway, nothing, really, some cool things came of it, but not a whole lot.

But the company was called SiteSell S I T E S E L L sitesell.com except for their website themes and some other things they did that seemed a little outdated that they wouldn’t let go of. I loved the company. It played a part in, big part, in teaching me about learning search engine optimization.

And a funny thing is the website I have now bipolarexcellence.com. I didn’t do any of that, but I have the similar looking structure. I didn’t do any keyword search. I just hammered out bipolar to the world. And that’s, I’m finding the people that are my match.

I’m looking for high functioning bipol, bipolar people. I can’t really fix anybody of bipolar and I don’t want to try. I don’t want to be anyone’s therapist. But I know enough about bipolar and how I beat it, that I can help you through the wiggly parts. Help keep you stable if you’re a little off center, as we move forward.

Some of the stress of building a passion project or dream vision can reignite parts of bipolar, even as you’re using other parts of bipolar to grow the thing. I can help you keep stable as you do that from the bipolar experience perspective.

So I built that website and I learned a lot from that. Some really good and some not so good. But I put something out into the world for people to find.

Another thing I did was journal. I used to journal like crazy. I used to just pack journals with all my thoughts. And I’d either review them or never look at them again. It depended what they were about.

But the act of writing something down, takes thoughts out of your head and the mechanical action of using your hand, it’s even stronger than if you typed, helps you clarify your thinking and your planning. You might want to journal a lot and see where you’re at with anything.

There’s also mind mapping. Mind mapping. I did that for years and there’s mind mapping software. You just, you just drop, you drop a whatever the main topic is in the nucleus circle. And in mind mapping software allows you to intuitively add arms to the circle, and then you do main topics, subtopics, subtopics of those subtopics.

You get it all out of your head and then you can rearrange it. You can, you can drag things and rearrange. I’m a big fan of, of that. If you got mind mapping software, I don’t have a company in mind. I know I haven’t done it in years. You can do the same thing on paper too. It’s just a little more grueling, a little more filled with effort.

You can do the same thing on paper, and then you’ve got to redraw the mind map to shift things is all. Not the end of the world. Just takes a little more time. If you have no budget, you don’t have a choice.

You can draw out a mind map, look at everything. And maybe with with a blank piece of paper next to the mind map, you can reconfigure your topics and subtopics then draw a new mind map. So you can see your empire clearly.

If everything’s just in your head, you don’t have much to work with. And you’ll just keep spinning your wheels and spinning your wheels and you won’t gain any ground at all. You have the world’s most powerful vehicle stuck in the mud.

So another thing I did was, and this is tricky. I used to talk, I, I I’ve mentioned this before, like suggesting you keep this to a minimal. And I still suggest that.

Wherever it feels right. Okay? Wherever it feels in your gut, like it makes sense, and it’s a safe bet to whatever degree your stress levels won’t climb hideously, tell other people about what you’re doing.

Look for other people who are successful at anything, or even a piece of anything you’re excited about. And talk to them about that thing.

Maybe you mention what you’re doing. Maybe you just keep it bland and just tell them you’re thinking of doing something. You’d like to know more from them.

On that note, there was a guy whose name I no longer remember. I see his face in my head clear as day, but here’s something if you’re in a position to do so. This guy interviewed something like a hundred rich people. His whole thing was making money online.

This was like I said, 10, 12 years ago. Online marketing was a hot, a hot button and it was hot for me. I wanted to make a million dollars and fix my life. And yet, yea. Didn’t quite pan out that way.

But it could! And it will, as I move forward with what I’m doing at. This is just more, a more rational, more easily sustained, organized, doable approach, how I do things now.

But this guy, he interviewed something like a hundred successful entrepreneurs to find out how they became successful.

He himself was a blast to listen to. He was a younger guy, like in his twenties when he did this and I was already in my thirties by the time I found him. And just he was some like somewhere down around New York City, Jersey area. So he had that accent. Worse than the one I have. And it just, it just made everything more entertaining. to listen to. Lotta energy. Good heart.

And what he found was after he interviewed these hundred people, he learned quite a bit about growing a business as an entrepreneur, but however it panned out, he didn’t make a dime doing it. But he did create a book. He recorded all those. It wasn’t a podcast back then. It was, it was a recorded interviews of some fashion.

He turned those into CDs and I think probably DVDs. Yeah. And a book. So there’s something you could do where it’s both a teaching thing and can turn into a product you can sell. And you can do it in any industry. Just quiz the people you’re in admiration of, for what they’ve achieved.

And don’t ask anything from them. Ask if you can help in any way, but don’t ask anything from them. Don’t eat, don’t eat up a lot of their time. And see if they’ll talk to you about something. Record it if you can, if they’ll let you, ask permission.

And see what there is to learn, and you might have something that you can then if not sell, at least give away for whoever your crew is, to help share your dream.

Now, I forget how it worked, but I ended up on the phone with this guy and he ended up sending me, he ended up sending me like 20 DVDs. I didn’t ask him for that. Whatever I was asking them for, was something very simple, basic, probably involved no money. We had a good talk.

And then in the mail, weeks later, I get like 20 DVDs, a book, CDs. It was crazy. Man it was Mike something. That’s all I can remember. I loved him. I, I haven’t heard anything from him since, or I can’t remember his name or I don’t know what he’s up to. But it just played a part.

It played a part in what he taught me at the time, how he treated me without even being asked to. He gifted me those things that, you know, that’s a couple bucks. And. I thought it was really cool of him. And here I am talking about him 15, probably 15 plus years later.

So you never know what you’re going to learn for someone above you or how they’re going to impact you or how you’re going to impact them. Unless you reach out. Just keep it in mind. See what you’d come up with.

Let’s see, what else did I do to build my dream? Well seminars. I taught myself a lot. I still do that. I would buy any seminar or webinar that I could afford to. I’d buy reports and white papers and books.

I’d go on Amazon and look for used books. You can get don’t damn near any book for a penny. The shipping costs more than the book. I bought a lot of books for a penny. And then, and read them all up. And it all got put into my, my repertoire of moving forward on all fronts.

The flip side of that is after awhile, I realized I got sick of reading business books. There’s only so much to learn. It really is. There’s nothing new beyond changes in technology.

The only thing I really see that’s new. It’s more of a psychological nature. And it’s how you position yourself, how you talk about yourself to people to get their needs met, in order to get your needs met.

That changes a little bit every now and then industry-wide but I can probably, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen these changes.

So don’t get too deep down the rabbit hole and various business strategies and tactics of marketing strategies and tactics pick one thing. That’s a huge lesson I can give you right there.

Pick one thing.

Like I built a website. It’s rather complicated because I wanted a certain amount of control in how I presented my information and how I generated a sale. And how I reached out to people.

And from everything I knew it became what I have now, whatever the site’s like now. And then this podcast. I don’t do social media. I can’t stand it. I get a, I get a very bad feeling in my whole body just going into Facebook. I’m still in there because that’s how some friends find me that are important to me.

But I it’s rare, I literally do not feel good going in there. And so I don’t. And you don’t have. Don’t think anything anybody tells you is how it has to be. Test things, find the one that sits well with you and just max that thing out.

The people that are everywhere at all time? All times? They have a team, they don’t do everything by themselves. It’s impossible. Maybe, while you’re still manic, it’s possible. Because I certainly did it way back then. But you’re going to burn out.

Don’t don’t beat your brains out, trying to do everything. It’s it’s not only pointless. It’s counterproductive. I’ll reach a point when this series is done and there’s like three more. And then I can just do, just do a regular podcast where I say what I say, once or twice a week.

Or I have someone I’m interviewing. I have people on I’m waiting to interview and we’ll see what happens with that, but I’m just the podcast. And that was really one of my immediate goals was to get the website, which was a ton of work, to a point where all I had to do was add the podcast and then write a post in my newsletter.

Now you can get the newsletter by going to bipolarexcellence.com and I’ll give you a free PDF download that describes the, the hidden gifts within bipolar and how you can act on some of that and improve your life immediately, just by following some of the steps I share and visiting some of the people I talk about.

So that’s it. Don’t overwhelm yourself with this, especially if you’re, if you’re close, closer to unwell than you’d care to be. Then it’s your job to find a safe operating pace and set reasonable expectations.

And this is one of the, and this, this next thing is one of the biggest lessons I can possibly ever teach you. And it applies to everybody doing anything ever.

Do not make decisions from a place of desperation.

It’s it’s too much like pulling the arm on the slot machine. Maybe ya win. Most of the time, you won’t. You’ll learn something. Either way you’ll learn something. But most of the time, I don’t think you’re going to like what you learn.

I know that when you’re struggling and money is, is minimal to non-existent and you got responsibilities and pressures, and there’s not a lot of happiness and joy in your life. You get desperate to do something, anything that can turn that around and put more dollars in your pocket to then hopefully become something bigger .And do it from a place where you’re not constantly struggling.

Oh my God. Do I get that? But as best you can, don’t let that lead your decision-making process. It takes you down the road to doom. I’ve wasted more money, embarrassed myself more times. Or just simply spent way too much time doing shit that just didn’t matter, because I had the energy to do it. I had the vision in place to see how it could go.

But only until I got to the end or had done it forever and ever, and ever, and ever did I see, I shouldn’t have started that in the first place.

Good god is that a lot of experience talking to you. Hard won experience.

I don’t think, I don’t know when you hit this level, but if ever, I don’t think you can always tell when that’s, when a thing is something that I don’t know, we should, we should proceed carefully, maybe, maybe this. You got to try no matter what.

I think, I think the lesson here is try to get better. They call it failing faster. You fail faster. Do anything that comes to mind. Don’t let anything stop you from moving forward, but try to learn more quickly when it isn’t working right.

And I’m sorry to tell you nothing but experience is going to teach you that. I could even work with you and look from the outside and be like, geez, I don’t know. But you’re not even gonna believe it until it happens and, and you learn whatever it was to learn.

And. This makes you stronger. And it’s going to feel like you went further away from your dream than closer, but in a larger scope, you did not. It was something you needed to learn. Now you’ve learned it.

Take a moment or two to feel a deep and over bearing sense of pity and S and loss in self-esteem.

Give yourself a day or two to walow. Yeah, you won’t, you need it. I think it’s like crying. It’s it’s a, you need to just get that out. And then get right back up on the horse and figure out what the next move is going to be.

And you’ll find the next time you screw up, because you’re going to screw up more than get it right, it will not have lasted as long to hit the screw up. And you just rinse and repeat.

Okay, guys, I want to thank you all for tuning in. There’s more of your showing up every week. Well over a thousand people a week at this time, which is a super exciting to me. That’s at my website. I’m coming up on 800 visits to the podcast, since I started screwing around with it in November.

And I’ve reworked it a bunch of times and done some screwy stuff with my WordPress based website, in order to present the, the podcast episodes the way I wanted to on Apple Podcasts and such. And I think that caused at least Spotify to lose its mind.

My son showed me Spotify. He’s like, you know, your episodes are all out of order. I was like, no, I did not know that. I was like, well, I think I know why that happened. I fed, I fed Apple Podcast. Then I changed my mind. And on Apple, it didn’t matter. Everything’s in place. It’s the way I want. It looks great.

I kept learning little nuances to the website podcast part of my website. Cause it was a completely different system that runs that. I use a PowerPress. And I’ve learned a lot of things the hard way, even to this day with that.

Things were missing, I didn’t know they were missing. Things weren’t doing what I thought they were. And I hadn’t looked at them in months, cause I thought it was good. Things are out of order. And I’m like, I don’t, I don’t give a shit. I really don’t give a shit. Enough of this is the way that I need it.

And you guys are showing up from some damn where, which means it’s doing what I wanted it to do. The rest is finesse. And I’ve found those other mistakes and repaired them. There’s gonna be more. This never ends, until I get my own quote unquote guy.

I live to have a guy, or girl, to step in and be like, would you just fucking do this for me? I hate it. It’s not my thing. So until I’ve reached that level, you know, I got to just hammer away at this and I feel good in that, when I find something terribly out of place or just completely missing, it is frustrating.

I do get pretty upset. But it’s brief. Because I’ve been down this road so many times over the last, like 15 years, I know from experience, I’ll fix it. And I know I’ll get it quicker than not, no matter how bad I feel about it.

So I focus on not feeling bad for too long. Cause this shit even still happens to me. It doesn’t matter. I keep moving forward and the numbers are proven that it’s working the way I want. It ain’t going to be pretty. It doesn’t have to be pretty.

Like, I keep telling you guys. Just move. Move. Do something. Pick something. More often than night, more often than not you’re wrong, but you learn something good from it that wouldn’t have come any other way.

That is the investment. That is the price you pay that involves usually not $1. You pay in frustration, you pay on an emotional level and you pay on an academic level to learn.

It’s the fee for entry to greatness. And I hope I hear from you one day and we work on these frustrating things side-by-side. Can’t wait guys. See, on the next episode.