YOU OWE IT TO YOU IN 2026 - Best Motivational Speech | Chris Williamson

This is your opportunity to change anything, behaviorally. You can change anything you want. Not everything you want, right? That's the problem. You can become anything you want behaviorally, but you can't be everything you want. So you need to pick a small number. What would have to happen at the end of next year to look back and consider this year a success? I think that really helps to just give you a bit more perspective. And it usually comes down to only a few things. Setting the bar unrealistically high does not increase your performance. Imagine this. Imagine that you went into a buffet and you made your plate as big as possible. You said, I want all of these things. I'm going to put all of this stuff on my plate. And my stomach is going to expand to be able to fit it. That's not the way that our stomachs work. And that is not the way that our workloads work. So first rule, in order to pick something up, you have to put something down. Don't assume that just because you've loaded more onto your workload plate, your work capacity will expand to be able to fit it into your stomach. That's not the way that it works. Make the assumption, I can do no more than I'm doing now. I can switch stuff, but I can't add more in. Maybe you can. Maybe you're going to be able to squeeze your phone time. Maybe you're going to be able to become more efficient, more productive, whatever. But it's safer to just assume this is the pie that I'm playing with. And in order to pick something up, I have to put something down. That means I'm going to have to take something off the plate. We don't think about subtraction because we think of addition. Unfortunately, you can't take somebody else's purpose or success. You can't wear it as a suit. It's a bad idea, right? Because it's going to not fit. Let go or be dragged. That means if you're not careful with how you design what it is that you chase after, you can spend your entire life realizing that you climbed a huge ladder that was leaning up against the wrong wall. The big picture goals are going to be hard for you to get to. But if you just think one year ahead, okay, now we can start to talk about a plan to do that. If I could only achieve one thing today, start of every day, if I could only achieve one thing today, what would that be? And it's the big thing. It's usually the scary thing. It's usually the thing that you probably don't want to do. How many times does someone go and clean the cupboard in the kitchen that hasn't been touched for six months? I'll rearrange all of the plates because they don't want to have that conversation with their boss. Because they don't want to face that particular piece of work, which is like big and scary. I don't really know how to tackle it, how to begin. You will do everything that doesn't need to be done in order to avoid the one thing that does. It's because it's a big scary task. People will endure months, years, decades of misery to avoid a couple of days of pain. And that makes sense. It's a good trade in some ways. But over time, you're going to accumulate an awful lot of discomfort. Permanently being busy stops you from being able to listen to fleeting thoughts that are in the back of your mind. And that quiet voice is usually the really powerful one. The answers you seek are in the silence you're avoiding. So lessons about problems and stress. Number one, problems are a feature of life, not a bug. And there will never come a time when you have no problems. You think you were going to wake up one day and there'd be no more problems, like completing a video game level and going to a map where there's nothing there. Things are always going to incur problems. Your problems will change, but having problems is going nowhere. Number two, whatever negativity is consuming your thoughts probably won't matter in three months' time. In three months, you won't remember the corrosive texture of your own mind or the boring, repetitive things that you thought or maybe even what you worried about. I think, what were you worrying about three months ago right now? Probably can't remember. But all of the time that you spent worrying will have passed. So you're sacrificing your joy and your presence in the moment for a problem that you won't even be able to recall in the future. So learning comes from the edges. Number three, change is uncomfortable and it rarely occurs without a lot of stress. Learning comes from the edges? From the edges. What does that mean? Proximate zone of development. What does that mean? You're pushing yourself just beyond what you're comfortable with. And sometimes this can be emotional pain too. Leaving the job happens when you get pushed out of region beta on the bottom end or growth happens when you overextend yourself the right amount. Not so much that you get injured, but so much that you're challenged, that this is a new zone for you to get into. I'm clawing up, wow, and it expands your potential, your idea of what you're able to do. And it pushes you so that your system becomes more resilient on the other side. Many of the periods of radical important change that you have had in your life have only occurred because of severe challenges you faced. Like look back, almost all of the big periods of growth in your life have germinated from your lowest points. In retrospect, would you have avoided them if you could? Probably not. So yeah, this challenge is a gift. You can lean into discomfort as if you invited it through the door. It's like, oh, there we are, hello. When we talk about metrics of success, you talk about observable metrics and hidden metrics of success. Yeah, so a lot of the time we'll trade a hidden metric for an observable metric. Something that's observable would be your job title, what your salary is per year, how many people know you, your bank balance, the size of your house, the car that you drive. Things people can see? Yeah, of course. The only way that your success can be judged is outwardly. So naturally we trade something which people can't see for something that they can see. For instance, lots of people would trade a longer commute for a higher salary or a better job title. One of the problems that you encounter with that is that the length of your commute is one of the most correlated stats with your happiness. Longer commutes reliably make people more miserable. And what's the hidden metric that you've lost by doing that? Well, that's less time with your family, with maybe your kids that are growing up, with your wife to connect. That's less time to pursue your own passions, even if your job is your passion. So what about a more stressful career? Going to move into a different industry that's way more stressful, but it pays more. Observable metric. What's the hidden metric? What about the peace of mind that you have as you go to sleep at night? What about what that does to your health and the quality of your relationships and your ability to be present on a weekend so you're not able to turn your phone off because your last job was nine to five, but this one is 24-7? Well, it's difficult to say because you're like, people want and need real resources. I want to improve the quality of my family. That's a noble thing to do. But after a while, you have to admit if you already live a comfortable quality of life and you trade it, you trade your happiness or your peace in order to get more, you're making a bad choice because you're going to sacrifice something that you want, which is happiness, peace, connection, for something that's supposed to get the thing that you want. There's a wonderful idea called productivity dysmorphia. So it's the inability to see your own success. It's like to acknowledge the volume of your own output. So it sits at the intersection of burnout, imposter syndrome and anxiety. You think of it like ambitions alter ego, basically. Like the pursuit of productivity spurs us to do more while robbing us of the ability to savor any of the successes that we achieve along the way. So first off, people are not particularly good judges of how productive they are. I think so many people are whipping themselves into submission saying you're not doing enough because in the past that motivated them to do more. And after a while you have to accept, I'm doing quite a lot. And if you were an athlete on a sports team and your coach only ever pointed at you when you made a bad play, you wouldn't feel particularly motivated by that. A lot of people have this sense of productivity debt. They wake up every day feeling as if they're already behind. And only if they dominate their entire day perfectly can they drag themselves back up to some minimum level of acceptable output. And only then can they go to sleep that night without feeling like a loser. This means that your set point is loss and the best thing that you can do if you crush the day is get to a draw. You never win. And then there's this sort of weird drill sergeant in the back of your mind that's saying, all right, you can have a little bit of a break now. But just so you know, as soon as you wake up in the morning, it's all gonna happen again. It seems to me that on every hero's journey, as soon as they make the commitment to go from where they are to where they want to be, their self-belief never wavers. Like sure, there's ups and downs in the journey and the progress, but their conviction doesn't slip. It's like at that moment, the clouds parted and I was sure I was gonna become a UFC fighter. I was gonna become a businessman. I was gonna get off drugs, change my mindset, whatever. In my experience, that's not the way it is at all. Like your entire journey of personal growth is just steeped in doubt and self-pity and uncertainty. And it tarnishes the whole experience. It's not sexy. It's not cool. You're like, this was supposed to be my rocky cut scene. It's three and a half minutes in the movies, but it's been four years for me. What's going on? There's not even the promise that there's any glory on the other side of it. And this is exactly why it's so much easier to just go back to your old patterns. I guess this Lonely Chapter idea is a consequence of what will happen when you go in pursuit of a big goal. You wanna start the business, you wanna quit the job, whatever. Explain to me what the Lonely Chapter is. The Lonely Chapter describes a time in your life where you're so developed that you can't really resonate with your old set of friends, but you're not yet sufficiently developed that you've built a new set of friends. Give me an example. You have decided to stop drinking. Your New Year's resolution is, six months, I'm gonna stop drinking. You can go out with your friends that wanna go to the pub on an evening time, but you feel a little bit ostracized. So your change is creating some friction between you and them. Your friends like to play Xbox on an evening time and that's how they hang out, but you want to start going to the gym, but your friends don't go to the gym. And then when you do hang out with them, you're talking about the gym because that's your new thing. And they're still talking about Xbox. So there is a friction that happens as you try to grow, because if your friends don't grow at the same pace as you, you don't speak the same language. A friend referred to it as changing a dialect so much so that over time, you and your friends don't even speak the same language anymore. And it's very uncomfortable because it's tempting to go back to the old life that you're used to, the old patterns, the old routines, the old friend groups, the old everything. And you have to stop doing the things that you know bring you validation in the moment to start doing things that you have no idea about whether it'll actually work. Like you're going to tell me that I'm not going to go out with my friends this weekend because I'm going to keep my meditation streak going. Who even knows if meditation works, right? It's so much easier to just stay in the routine that you were previously doing the same sorts of things. For you to pull away from that, you're going to have to do stuff usually that makes you more different, more easy to be mocked and more alone. And the initial sad reality is that on your journey of personal growth, at some point, you may need to leave a group of friends behind who aren't growing at the same pace as you. But the really sad reality is that if you do it a lot, you may have to do this multiple times throughout your life. And it's not a value judgment about who's better or who's worse. It's just a stark reality of what happens when you start to make changes in your life. People make small changes. They do little things. Lose five pounds or they change companies. But how many people do you know that have really changed their mindset, lost 50 or 100 pounds or changed careers or moved from the city that they grew up in? It's rarer. And I think the reason that I love this Lonely Chapter idea is that it names something that a lot of people feel is a bug, not a feature of personal growth, which is this discordance with their old patterns and their old friend groups and the fact that they don't know whether the uncomfortability is supposed to be there. Is this discomfort right? Is my self-doubt, surely I should just believe and see it, believe it, achieve it? Am I not supposed to just be, you know, single-mindedly going toward my goal? This doubt is supposed to be there. I can promise you that every single person who has gone from a place where they didn't want to be to one where they did has had to go through this Lonely Chapter and deal with all of this. You can just do things. Just do it anyway, do it tired, do it sad, do it lonely, do it without a role model because if you're waiting for somebody to come along and give you that helping hand, sometimes you're going to be waiting too long. It reminds me so much of Jeff Bezos's shareholder letter where he talks about resisting the equilibrium. In his final 2020 shareholder letter, said differentiation is survival and the universe wants you to be typical and the way that this stuff tells into what you've said is your environment is very, very much holding you in place and actually in every facet of life, every organism is currently expending a huge amount of energy just to resist the pull to be typical. Regression to the mean. Exactly. So if you were to like leave your friendship group now, the amount of energy it's going to take to stay untypical is tremendous. To be different in any context or environment, work is being done. Like to stay atypical and I think about this as we come into the new year, which is if you're planning to be different, quit the job, go and be the violinist in Peru, start the cupcake business. It's going to cost you so much energy to resist the equilibrium that you better, going back to what you said about subtracting things, you better save energy somewhere else. You know, I had a neuroscientist on the podcast that was the neuroscientist that discovered we have a biological budget of energy, literally like a bank account and what tends to happen, I think, and why the new year stats are so horrific in terms of the amount of people that stick to their goals is we go in search of a new state, a new life that's going to cost us even more energy to resist our current environment without budgeting for it by saving elsewhere. And I think about this through the lens as a business owner because as a company, we'll become like the mean the minute we stop the fight, the minute we stop experimenting, the minute we stop pushing the boundaries, the minute you give up the fight, you will become every other show. That's what I meant when I said problems are a feature of life, not a bug. Like there will be no day when you don't have any problems and railing against it, why is the flight delayed? Because flights get delayed. Because flights get delayed, that's why. And did you think that there's going to be a day when no flights were delayed, that you're going to reach some escape velocity where this was no longer an issue? I love this analogy using escape velocity. Imagine that we've got a rocket ship here. So when this is taking off on the launch pad is when it needs the most energy. The inertia is the highest, the resistance is the most. So that's when you need to use whatever fuel you've got. Use the chip on your shoulder from the kids that bullied you in school. Use your desperate desire to be seen by that girl out there. Use your need for validation from your parents, whatever it is. What happens when this takes off? This fuel source switches off and then the booster rockets come on. That's as you get to a different level of altitude and now you're using a different sort of fuel source and then this falls away, the bottom falls off and it keeps on going and then it gets into escape velocity. Use what you have at the start and at the start, most people have way more discontent than they do love. I mean, even this ties right back to Nia's resolutions because if I am going to make a change and reach escape velocity, then I'm going to need to focus all my energy and therefore save leakage, like save wasted energy in this moment of time. And I've heard you talk about this when you do your annual review Again, it goes back to what I was saying, like you do need to cut some ---- and you can't have it all at the same time if you are going to change your life. This is one of the problems of overcooking your goals for the next 12 months. I think you can probably do two big things in 2026, two big things. You could probably lose 20 pounds and get a boyfriend that you really, really love. You can't do that and move cities and start a new business and learn to play the piano. No. And that again is why don't go into a buffet and assume that however much food you put on the plate, your stomach will just expand to fit it in. Because what you're going to guarantee is that you fail next year. You can almost guarantee that you fail at doing this thing. Is it great to set your sights high? Yeah, that's real cool. And maybe you've got lots of things that you want to do, but just what would have to happen by the end of next year for you to look back on it and consider it a success? And what if you created a rank ordered list? I'm like, okay, I need to kill one of these. And you left yourself with one or two. What's left? You'd only do one thing next year. Cross that off, cross that off, cross that. What am I left with? I really want to lose the weight. There we go. Now we can break that down into individual steps. I need to get a gym membership. I need to get some cool gym wear that makes me feel good as I go to the gym. What is the most important things we haven't talked about? The strivers who want to make change, become someone else. Stop taking life so seriously. Like no one is getting out of this game alive, literally. In three generations, no one will even remember your name. And if that doesn't give you liberation to just drop your problems for a moment and find some joy, I don't know what will. Like life is inherently ridiculous and guaranteed to end sooner or later. So you might as well enjoy the ride. This is this deferred happiness syndrome thing, dude. Like don't wait. Life really is happening right now. There is this belief that once life's duties are out of the way, then you can finally start doing the thing you want to and fully living your life. It's called the provisional life. This sort of strange feeling that you're not yet in your real life. For now you're doing this thing or that, but there's always the fantasy that at some point in future, the real thing will come about. There is a kind of urgency that I think we could all do with. And that's not to put pressure on people so that they feel like a failure if they fall short. It's not to deny the fact that people have got real, legitimate resource and time constraints that mean that they can't do a thing. But don't wait. Because life really is happening right now. And I can't think of many times when you're going to regret trying to make something happen.