A Bet You Can’t Lose

I had a young fella come in to my office the other day. I’ll call him Peter. He’s 26 years old and he’s made a bunch of poor choices in the last eight years. All of these choices have had negative consequences. He came to me because now he’s depressed and has uncomfortably high levels of anxiety.

First, when he went to college out of high school he choose to party instead of study. And he didn’t just have a good time but he literally didn’t study and often didn’t go to class. This inevitably led to expulsion by the end of his first year. Now, in and of it’s self this isn’t terribly unusual. Lots of kids miss the point of college the first time.

But then he exacerbated his problems by spending time with friends who had no plan for where they were going and he ended up engaged in a number of self-defeating and even self-destructive circumstances. All along he knew what he was doing didn’t really fit who he believed himself to be or what he stood for. Nonetheless he found the peer influences dragged him into things he certainly now regrets.

But instead of disengaging his “do nothing, go no where friends” he justified his continued involvement with them telling himself that he could change his behavior without changing his social life. “I thought I could party on the weekends with my friends and still follow through with what I knew was right during the week.” Of course he now realizes this was a recipe for self-deception and disaster.

He did, in the process, get involved with a young woman and she became pregnant. She had the baby but their relationship didn’t last through the pregnancy. He now has routine involvement with his daughter but recognizes that it’s far from an ideal situation.

In the meanwhile time was elapsing. Now, he is in his mid twenties and probably has a year and a half of college credit. He has a daughter that he pays minimal child support on. His buddies from high school have mostly graduated from college and some have gone on to graduate school. Many of them have kids too but they are married and trying to build a family.

He is increasingly aware of how the consequences of his choices are having a cumulative effect on him. But in spite of these complications, at age 26, he can have a second chance if he will begin day-by-day to make better choices.

I told him that if he committed to working harder on the one thing he can change, himself, than anything else that I would bet him $10K that within six months his life would be significantly better. I said that he should come and talk with me in six months and if he looked me in the eye and said that everyday, for that six month period, he’d worked harder on him self than anything else and nothing had gotten better I would pay him the $10K. But if he looked me in the eye after six months and said that everyday he had worked harder on himself than anything else and his life was significantly improved he’d owe me $10K. Now, I’m not a betting man and I certainly never offer to bet if I think there is any chance I’ll lose. And of course Peter smiled at my offer to bet and said he wouldn’t take it. He knew he’d lose.

Then I challenged him again. If you are so sure that things would get significantly better by working harder on yourself why then don’t you do it? He smiled again and didn’t respond.

You see it’s so easy to do and it’s so easy not to do. And that’s the problem. Drift. We know what we should do and we just don’t do it.

So if your young adult, whether still a teen or not, has a similar pattern and has dug a hole encourage them to focus on what they can do: Work on themselves.
They need to know there is hope. And they need to know that they are empowered. But they also must understand that it is up to them to do it and the operational variable in the change is their effort. If, for just six months, they will work harder on themselves than anything else everything in their life will improve. It’s a bet they can’t lose!