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EPI 56: Is That As Big As That Thing Gets?

EPI-56: Is That As Big As That Thing Gets?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:11 — 31.9MB)

February 5, 2023

I tried something new with this episode. I read an article from my last website.

This idea popped into my head days ago, then I realized I’d written about it before.

So I read the thing to you.

Hey. It works for Jocko. So I’m liking my chances here.


You never want anyone taking a look at your whole world and posing that question

Better if they ask, “How has she accomplished so much?”

You want someone else to be able to point to your massive body of work and say, “Easy. She put in the effort. She created a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

If you want more out of life, be prepared to give more, first

No matter who I’ve ever tried to help in the recent past, or why, I’ve always stressed two things.

  • Build a platform so that the people whose attention you want have a way to find out about you.
  • And fill that thing with loads of material that explains who you are, so people can understand if they want to give you further attention.

Without either of those two things, just stop.

Nothing you care about will get discovered by too many folks, beyond those in your immediate, daily vicinity.

You don’t have to make such a noise or expose yourself in such a way

You don’t have to.

But don’t lie to yourself, either.

As gently as you can, divorce yourself from whatever hopes you may have for a larger life. It will make the rest of your life easier to take.

Accept the fact that you’re willing to settle for mediocre, average, the same as what the next guy gets, and that you’ll never have the life you dream about when you dare to let your imagination breathe a little.

Nor will your vision ever become what it must to help those whom you see as its ultimate beneficiaries. At least not to any great extent.

Without these two things, you won’t die.

You won’t starve. You won’t be a bad person. And you’ll still be able to get a lot of good done in this life, if you choose.

You’ll probably be able to experience fair amounts of happiness, success, joy and fulfillment too.

Up to a point.

What I’m saying is that you’ll also be placing unnatural limits on the size and scope of any of those achievements, and that you have no right to complain if, at the end, you wished you’d done more, tried harder, or done better for someone you love.

Do you really want to wait until The End to see if I’m right about this or not?

Stepping up is scary, I know.

What I’m doing right now sometimes scares me when I sit and ponder what may come of it that I do not wish to face:

  • Internet trolls attacking me
  • Being misunderstood, taken out of context, or disagreed with
  • Stepping on my own feet and publicly looking the fool
  • Or just flat out failing to make the thing produce anything I need it to, after all is said and done

But I’ve faced these fears before and survived

You will too.

It’s funny. There is a post out there, written about my system to fight bipolar without drugs, by a person whose wording makes clear that mania and fear were guiding their keystrokes.

Pure, blistering venom.

To say it caught me by surprise would be an understatement.

I was pouring my heart and soul into doing all I could to help rescue people from that pit we’d been told by the medical profession was inescapable.

I’d beaten it; discovered secrets and disproved ignorance in a way that led me back to sanity after 8 years of hell.

I felt like a champion whose cause was just and that no one could ever possibly view my work as a negative.

Holy shit, was I mistaken.

This post knocked the wind out of me. It horrified me. It hurt. I wasn’t prepared for this kind of hit to my ego at all.

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise

All I just said about how bad it made me feel was, and still is, true. But what really made it grab my attention was that it brought awareness to the fact that I was no longer interested in pursuing that path as a career.

I’d grown tired of much of what I was doing to help people beat bipolar.

I was (and still am) passionate about providing people with an option like mine and giving them that hope. However, the cost to do so was growing higher than I cared to pay.

I was trapped by tunnel vision. I only knew how to express myself in the context of my fight with bipolar.

I was locked in a mindset that, up until this very upset person attacked me, I had no idea existed!

They freed me.

This was my first step toward transforming into what you see now. And it took a handful of years. But I’d never have built ITGTLW without that earlier punch to the psyche.

Time to thicken that hide

I still refuse to go find that post and review it. Stings like it was yesterday. But eventually, I got pissed that such a thing almost derailed everything.

It made me work even harder.

You’re not always going to be seen as right. And sometimes you will not be right. Don’t let that quiet you. Keep going.

You’re going to face some bullshit when you go public. Keep going.

The going creates clarity, which makes future change easier to pull off and more satisfying when it happens.

Keep going.

If you haven’t started, start

Build a platform. Start filling it with you. See what the world says back. Adjust accordingly. And be patient.

Know you are on the path to a life few get to see.

Know that your struggles are the very thing someone out there needed to watch you endure, so that they too could grow, and that they appreciate you.

You’ll get what you want. You’ll have provided for others. And you’ll face the end of your ride in peace.

Because you had the guts to build it.

P.S. This applies to everyone, not just entrepreneurs, visionaries, do-gooders and fanatics of all types.

You can punch a time clock and still take advantage of this mindset and system.

Hell, you can be homeless and still take advantage of this. It’s only a matter of scale.

Transcript

Just click the “READ MORE” text below for the transcript!

Read More


Hey, this is Ken Jensen. I beat bipolar disorder in an all natural fashion back in the mid 2 thousands. And believe it or not, that’s not even the coolest part of my story.

What I learned through that process and what came next and how that applied to bipolar and why bipolar was ever even part of the process, was mind blowing to say the least.

Bipolar has hidden within its strengths. I’m gonna show you what I mean and how they’ve shown up in my life so you can do the same. Hello, bipolar prone people. This is Ken. Welcome to the show. This is episode 56.

His dad is big. Does that thing get? I am going to try something new. I’m gonna repurpose an old piece of content. An article I wrote back in September of 2015, that I kept on an old site, I keep I keep hidden from public.

It’s all full of articles I wrote back into teens, and I was never sure if I could reuse some of them because I just got all wrapped up into what I what I became next.

I was hoping some of these things would still work, and I found 1 that does. I already had the idea, and then I remembered I remembered that I wrote this article.

I just reread it, and I love it. Before I get into that, I need a hand from you guys. If you’re digging the show, please go over to ITunes, Apple Podcasts, and leave me a nice review.

That helps promote the show, helps more people find me that need me, helps, helps, helps, help, buddy, help help. So go do that for me if you would. On another note, I just got out of the gym.

I was looking at my logbook and I’ve barely worked out like barely over the last 2 months, which is how do you say that word, anathema, anathema to me. It’s against all I stand for, but it just wasn’t possible.

Lifting just wasn’t possible over the last 2 months. Barely at all for a number of reasons I won’t even get into, but I would like to do an episode on just that what that means to me and and and why and how it applies to you.

But it’s like I said, it’s a whole other episodes worth of material. It’s important and I have some things to say about it that sort of go against what I hear other success type gurus and things saying online.

I agree with what most of them say, but I got a different take on it. And I got reasons why that are backed by science even. How about that? So suffice to say I was glad to be back in the gym.

I’m going really easy. I learned a long time ago not to trust how good I feel upon the return. It’s a lie. There are aches and pains and things ready to rip in half if if if I go at it too hard on the return Not a young guy anymore.

And it took a lot of decades of hurting myself unnecessarily to finally learn that lesson. Anybody that’s a gym rat knows what I’m talking about, it’s awful hard to throttle back that desire and and lift intelligently.

But the older I get, what everything I do and in particular to Jim because so much actual physical pain is involved, mastery has become my my keyword.

It has been for some time now. I’m learning my body in ways I never bothered. I’m learning my my my form. Like I never bother than I’ve been learning things over the last couple years.

I’ve never heard of before. But anyway, I’m already getting too far down that road. I wanna stay on this topic of his dad as big as that thing gets. What I’m talking about is your vision for your life.

When you’re doing something like what I’m doing, it can be a lonely path. This is 1 of the few few areas I can count I don’t even need all 5 fingers on 1 hand where I feel lonely because I I don’t. I’m I’m actually someone I’m a loner.

I feel happiest when I’m alone in general. I’m at peace. There’s so much going on in my head. I don’t need anybody else’s input. Not mania, mind you. Just it’s a rich environment up in there that I have a lot of fun playing with.

And I don’t need anybody’s help. Anybody else’s help to enjoy it. But when you’re trying to build something and it hasn’t borne a lot of fruit just yet, and it takes a ton of work and it takes a ton of initial investment.

Really, it’s like anybody starting a small business, which this is as well. The the the the markers, the goalpost, they they say it takes about 5 years before a thing even breaks even. It’s at a loss or running at a loss.

Now I’ve started multiple small businesses and this iteration of me now really has only been going not much more than 6 months. Not really. There was that break in the middle because I lost my dad and had to deal with that.

And some things happened at my work that just turned my world upside down. I had to deal with that. So even though I started working on this about a year ago, there’s about 6 months easily.

I didn’t do anything with this because I couldn’t. So the loneliness comes in people, you can’t possibly explain this to people. It’s 1 of the weirdest things.

The internet is absolutely packed with millions of people running companies that are unique and helping thousands of other people. But until you become a full blown version of that, nobody knows what you’re doing.

They can’t seem to understand it. Even when you provide the other companies as a template I’m doing that. I’m doing like that guy’s doing. I don’t know what it is. And and a lot of times, it doesn’t matter if you have a template.

There’s something about I don’t I don’t get it. Everyone’s on the Internet, yet nobody seems to personally know people that are doing shit like what I’m doing here with you guys, even just podcasts.

Podcasts are a little more prevalent and a little more understood when you tell people that that’s what you’re doing. But I don’t know. It’s just just a thing. It’s get used to it.

If you’re if you’re gonna if you’re gonna pursue this path, you’re gonna be alone for quite a bit of it. And on that note, I’ve decided I’m going to put a community area in my web site and bipolar excellence dot com.

I have to build some things and buy some things and learn some things And that’s in the middle of this other huge marketing push.

I’m getting ready to do where I’ll be writing a lot of, well, written content. And pushing it out through LinkedIn and Twitter primarily, and I’m full.

But I just wanted you guys to know there’s there’s gonna be place where we can meet and talk. So it’s 1 more way I can help you guys and and through that, you’ll me how to do it better.

So I’m rather excited about this. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years, and and every every time I’ve had a a different website, I wanted this to be part of it.

And I understand how I want that to be like never before and as time passes, everything on the Internet gets more easily to easy to understand, and it’s more easy to do.

So Just keep your eyes out for that. Now the thing I’m gonna do now is I’ve never done this before on this podcast. And I wanna try it because I doubt I could say what I wanna say as good as well as I said it back in September of 2015.

I’m gonna read you this article, and then I’m gonna post the exact article under episode 56 on bipolar excellence dot com. You can read the whole thing again if you want. Here we go. Is that as big as that thing gets?

You never want anyone taking a look at your whole world imposing that question. Better if they ask, how has she accomplished so much? You want someone else to be able to point to your massive body of work and say, easy.

She put in the effort. She created a self fulfilling prophecy. If you want more out of life, be prepared to give more first. No matter who I’ve ever tried to help in the recent past or why, I’ve always stressed 2 things.

Build a platform so that the people whose attention you want have a way to find out about you. And fill that thing with loads of material that explains who you are, so people can understand if they wanna give you further attention.

Without either of those 2 things, just stop. Nothing you care about will get discovered by too many folks. Beyond those in your immediate daily vicinity. You don’t have to make such a noise or expose yourself in such a way.

You don’t have to but don’t lie to yourself either. As gently as you can, divorce yourself from whatever hopes you may have for a larger life. It will make the rest of your life easier to take.

Except the fact that you’re willing to settle for mediocre, average, the same as what the next guy gets, and that you’ll never have the life you dream when you dare to let your imagination breathe a little.

Nor will your vision ever become what it must to help those whom you see as its ultimate beneficiaries. At least not to any great extent. Without these 2 things, you won’t die. You won’t starve.

You won’t be a bad person. And you’ll still be able to get a lot of good done in this life if you choose. You’ll probably be able to experience fair amounts of happiness, success, joy, and fulfillment too. Up to a point.

What I’m saying is that you’ll also be placing unnatural limits on the size and scope of any of those achievements and that you have no right to complain if at the end, you wished you’d done more, tried harder, or done better for someone you love.

Do you really wanna wait until the end to see if I’m right about this or not? Stepping up is scary. I know. What I’m doing right now sometimes scare me scares me when I sit and ponder what may come of it that I do not wish to face.

Internet trolls attacking me being misunderstood, taken out of context or disagreed with, stepping on my own feet and publicly looking the fool or just flat out failing to make things produce anything I need it to after all is said and done.

But I’ve faced these fears before and survived.

You will too. It’s funny. There’s a post out there written about my system to fight bipolar without drugs by a person whose wording makes clear that mania and fear were guiding their keystrokes, blistering venom.

To say it caught me by surprise will be an understatement. I was pouring my heart and soul into doing all I could to help rescue people from that pit.

We’d been told by the medical profession was inescapable. I’d beaten it, discovered secrets and disproved ignorance in a way that led me back to sanity after 8 years of hell.

I felt like a champion whose cause was just and that no 1 could ever possibly view my work as a negative. Holy shit was I mistaken.

This post knocked the wind out of me. It horrified me. It hurt. I wasn’t prepared for this kind of hit to my ego at all. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. All I just said about how bad it made me feel it was and still is true.

But what really made it grab my attention was that it brought awareness to the fact that I was no longer interested in pursuing that path as a career. I’d grown tired of much of what I was doing to help people beat bipolar.

I was and still am passionate about providing people with an option like mine and giving them that hope. However, the cost to do so was growing higher than I cared to pay.

I was trapped by tunnel vision. I only knew how to express myself in the context of my fight with bipolar. I was locked in a mindset that Up until this very upset person attacked me, I had no idea existed.

They freed me. This was my first step towards trans forming into what you see now and it took a handful of years, but I’d never have built it takes guts to live well.

Without that earlier punch to the psyche, time to thicken that hide. I still refused to go find that post and review it.

Things like it was yesterday. But eventually, I got pissed at such a thing, almost derailed everything. It made me work even harder. You’re not always gonna be seen as right and sometimes you will not be right.

Don’t let that quiet you. Keep going. You’re going to face some bullshit when you go public. Keep going. The going creates clarity, which makes future change easier to pull off, and more satisfying when it happens.

Keep going. If you haven’t started, start. Build a platform. Start filling it with you. See what the world says back. Adjust accordingly and be patient.

Know you are on the path to a life you get to see. Know that your struggles are the very things someone out there needed to watch you endure so that they too could grow and that they appreciate you. You’ll get what you want.

You’ll have provided for others and you’ll face the end of your ride in peace because you had the guts to build it. PS, this applies to everyone not just entrepreneurs, visionaries, do gooders, and fanatics of all types.

You can punch a time clock and still take advantage of this mindset and system. Hell, you’d be homeless and still take advantage of this. It’s only a matter of scale. That was the end of the the article.

So, yeah, I reread that and I was like, holy shit. I’m good with all of that still. Now I’m kind of excited because I got hundreds of articles in this old website And I felt that article was powerful.

As I’m reading it, I see I linked out to other things I wrote. I can’t wait to click. Haven’t even bothered yet. I I gotta click on these links to see what else in my site I wrote that related to what I said in that article.

So this is gonna I hope this helped you. Obviously, I hope I’m not just, you know, airing out my teeth as I speak for no other good reason, but I know that shit was good.

That was a tasty treat. I just dropped in your lap. It’s all stuff I had to learn eventually. And like I said in the article, when all I was doing was helping people beat bipolar, it it did not lead where I wanted it to go.

And it led down a lot of roads that got real bad real fast, and I had to extract myself. And I it’s That’s part of it.

Whatever you’re doing, you you’re good chance you’re gonna face something similar because you’re new to all of this if if you are new. Even if you’ve been experienced and maybe you’re shifting gears, you’re gonna be new with that pivot.

You’re still gonna find out some shit. You don’t wanna hear. But with experience, it gets easier to take. You don’t take things so personally as you do when you’re brand spanking new to all of this.

And You know, it was like in when I was a security guard, and I worked in a an emergency room And 1 of the things the people I dealt with who were always right completely out of their heads, that’s who I guarded.

1 of their favorite things was to call me a rent a cop or a 9 dollar an hour piece of shit. This was, like, 20 some odd years ago.

They’d basically try to stress what a loser I was for taking such a low low paying job such as what I did, and they weren’t wrong And my friends and I used to laugh because we would agree with him, which would put him off before the big fight that was inevitably going to happen happen.

But we didn’t get mad about it. Not after you heard it enough times. It’s like, well, they’re right. It’s and we were always looking for a better job. We were just you get used to shit being slung at you.

And if you get better enough fast enough and if you if you relax your views fast enough, you might be able to evolve, you know, even quicker than normal to get out of the, you know, get out of this mode where you get attacked.

Find out what you’re doing sideways that even led to the attack or or you might even just you might be in the wrong place at the wrong time and that’s leading to you get it attacked online.

I haven’t been attacked very much. Mostly, all the feedback I got was was either really good or people felt it didn’t pertain to him, but didn’t attack me for it.

But that 1 article, I remember back then, I was not strong enough as a person to take that kind of deconstructive criticism.

That person fucked me up. Fucked me up. It was too much, and I wasn’t right about that for about a year. That’s how much it rocked my world.

And I used to reread the article. I’d go back and reread it. It was like a post on a forum. And it it just it hurts so bad. It was like picking at a scab. I couldn’t stop revisiting it. And finally, I’m like, this is not healthy.

I can’t keep looking at this. That article was like well over 10 years ago when it when it hit. But jeez, it but again, it it it did me a favor. You get locked in a world view too as you’re trying to grow.

I left a job not long ago because the guy at that job I was fighting to stay small and I didn’t realize it because I was I had a lot of things at this 1 job that made life really easy to do.

I didn’t really know how I was gonna get out of it and I was fighting to not only the job, but grow within it in a way that the job, they weren’t gonna let me grow.

They didn’t want me to grow. And the 1 guy that I got into a battle with, because we button heads about how to take care of the people we took care of.

I was ready to kill them. And to my credit, well, 2 things. 1II nothing happened. I I didn’t kill him. And 2, I realized even while enraged, I realized like the next day, I realized this fucking guy did me a favor.

I don’t but why am I fighting so hard to stay here? I’m I’m not making enough money there’s a bunch of things about this job that aren’t that it’s a dead end.

And I’m I can’t change the system. I I was mad in part because people were being treated unjustly and nobody cared. And it’s hard for me to back down a fight.

I’ve always been somebody that stands up for the underdog even when I was the underdog and and I can’t take certain types of injustice. I can’t take bullying. Bullying gets under my skin. Deeply, and I won’t put up with it.

And that’s what I was facing at this job, but I I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t beat it. And my family needed me to do better. Then be at that job. And I did. I found a way out. And the funny thing was, here’s another cool lesson for you.

The next job I got I got it in large part because of all the complaints about the system that I had. I just said fuck it and just dumped. And they’re like, why you wanna come here?

I’m like, well, because everything’s wrong over here and here’s all the things that I find wrong. And then then the eventual new boss was like, that’s the exact kind of shit that pisses us all over here except here.

We’re we’re not only free to do something about it. We’re paid to do something about it and I was like, holy shit, sign me up. So Be careful how much you fight to stay where you are and why with different things.

Sometimes there’s there’s growth. Just growth can be could be a rocky process like like that job was for me and like that forum post was that I that I had to deal with from that person.

Lastly, yeah, don’t I know so many people mostly employees mostly who just they’re not happy but they’re not about to do anything about it to change and the only thing they can think to do to change is get a different job, get a higher paying job, work more hours, pick up some sign of some kind of side gig to where they almost have no life and no chance to sleep.

And bitch about that, It’s common.

It doesn’t make anyone evil or wrong. And a lot of people are stuck where they’re stuck due to a lot of different search circumstances. I I have been for many years at different times. Sometimes you are in fact just fucking stuck.

But even if you are, with the right perspectives, the right training, the right motivation, the right kind of research, the right kind of friends in your network, you can eventually find a way out, and you have to.

What do you do? Just stay stuck. A lot of people do. And I don’t wanna die that way.

I don’t even wanna go into a retirement age like that. It’s I I can’t see throwing away my life like that willingly. I’m hoping if you’re listening to me, you’ll feel the same. Alright, guys. I feel that was a very powerful 1.

I’m gonna end on that note. Thanks again for listening. Give me a nice review. Go check out bipolar excellence dot com. I I give away my entire wellness system now. Probably could open with that way back at the beginning.

I just give it away. You sign up for my newsletter so we can keep talking. You can hit my my whole system for free. It’s extensive. It’s really came out really nice. It’s very helpful.

It’s the exact thing I did to walk away from bipolar and meds entirely. Many years ago. I will only say that. I don’t know what it can do for you, but I know that at the bare minimum, it can help lighten your bipolar load.

I guarantee you that. It will help lighten it if nothing else. And for some of you, if you were like where I once was, a lightning a lightning of the load would be a godsend. Alright, guys. Talk in next week.


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Ken Jensen

People say Ken has a way of "getting" them that few others seem to possess.

They frequently share secrets with him that they haven't told another soul.

One client has gone as far as saying,
"He understands the un-understandable."

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