Mark Metry is a Forbes Featured keynote speaker, on an Amazon Prime Documentary Series & podcast host interviewing world-class human beings on my global top 100 Humans 2.0 show who once upon a time couldn’t even make direct eye contact with anyone and suffered from social anxiety.

Now, Mark spends his time on this planet as a 22-year-old trying to impact & influence others.

As the Host of a Top 100 podcast, Humans 2.0, Mark’s podcasts and videos have been viewed over 50+ Million times with his podcast hitting #96 of the top podcasts in the world with Tim Ferriss, NPR, Lewis Howes & Gary Vaynerchuk.

Mark’s work has been featured in Forbes, Influencive, Inc, Huffington Post, Fearless Motivation, and been a guest on over 100 radio and podcast shows.

Takeaways:

  1. There’s a difference between taking responsibility and thinking that something is your fault. While circumstantially most is out of your control, what is in your control is your responsibility to who you are and how you react.
  2. If your mindset is uncultivated, you’re always going to focus on what’s negative, what’s not happening, what’s worse.
  3. The only person to compare yourself to is the person you were yesterday, and the person who want to become tomorrow.

Transcript:

BRYAN WISH: Tell us about your One Away moment.

MARK METRY: Before any big moment in life, there’s always a series of events, a series of dominoes that can begin to fall and could potentially lead someone to that One Away moment. For me, I remember I was in my freshman year of college in Boston, Massachusetts. I remember going to this party for the first time. Growing up, I’d never played around with drugs or alcohol at all.

When I was 18, I was at this party. I began to drink alcohol and I got drunk for the first time in my life. Nothing like uncontrollable or anything, but when I got drunk, I could literally walk up to anybody at that party and say, “What’s up?” I’d never been able to do that because literally, throughout my entire life, I have faced a tremendous amount of social anxiety of always being the quiet kid who doesn’t have any friends or doesn’t even talk. 

When my brain kind of showed me this because I was inhibited, it kind of freaked me out in the sense of, “Wow, so if I change my brain chemicals, I can move my behavior. I can change the way that I act.” I’m sure, like a lot of other people, after that part, the next day, it’s not like I had those superpowers forever. They went away. I no longer could talk to people. That was the first conscious awareness moment of a major problem that was really stopping me in a lot of environments that I was just always invisible to.

When I was first aware of that, because I didn’t have anything that we call today like a good mindset. I wasn’t positive, I didn’t think like a leader; I was just this 18 year old, super anxious college student. When I realized what I had done, I was like, “Wow, I have social anxiety. I can’t even talk to people. I can’t even express the way that I really feel even though I want to.” There’s no easy black and white, 1, 2, 3 how to get out of that. It’s like the same thing with any of our fears. Anybody who has a fear, just because you know it’s there doesn’t mean you can pretend it’s not there. It still very much sort of controls your life. 

From that moment, I had a few month period in my life where I honestly began to feel bad about myself. I was like, “I’m like this 18 year old. I’m super socially anxious. I’m super anxious.” That kind of brought me down this dark spiral where I actually got pretty depressed. I started using not just alcohol but also things like food and binging Netflix as my own escape. Literally, in a matter of a few months, there’s this thing people refer to called the Freshman 15. It’s like you’re a freshman in college and you gain 15 pounds. For me, it was like the Freshman 65. I literally gained a crap ton of weight in a super short period just because I was trying to cope with my feelings.

Next thing I know, I’m over 200 pounds. First time that I’ve ever been overweight in my entire life. My social anxiety that I’ve had my entire life is now going to an area of socially isolating myself. I had roommates, at the time, but literally all I would do is go to class and then I’d come back. I wouldn’t talk to anybody. I’d just watch Netflix for the rest of the day and eat food. That combination brought me down this really dark path of being depressed and almost suicidal.

There’s other events that I can talk about that led me out of there, but that’s really my one moment that gave me a shot at either facing this head on and tackling it or trying to run away from it and go into escapism and vices that I probably wouldn’t be here by now if I went down that path more. 

Where it all Began

BRYAN WISH: What do you think, in your early life, led up to maybe you not being able to be socially aware or have the ability to communicate well?

MARK METRY: The fact you asked me that question means that you’re trying to identify and figure out what the root cause is. I’m an author of this book called Screw Being Shy and the very first chapter of the book is titled Social Anxiety is Not Your Real Problem. Basically, what it goes into is from that moment that I just talked about, I thought that was the biggest problem that I had in my life. A lot of other people, like when I’m speaking at an event, that would jump into the bucket of introverted, shy, quiet, maybe even socially anxious, they would say probably the same thing. “My biggest problem is that I don’t know how to talk to people.” 

For me, when I went down my journey of speaking and learning from people that are much smarter than me, like experts in their field; talking about psychologists, behavioral analysts, I really began to discover that the reason why I had this issue was because in the 3rd grade, when I was 8 or 9, I had an interesting series of events happen in my life. To take a step back even from that; my parents immigrated to this country a couple years before I was born.

We kind of lived in the not so nicest area; usually in super crowded apartments, and we moved all the time. I remember we lived in the city. In 3rd grade, we moved out of the city and moved out into the western part of the state that’s much more rural and we moved into this small town with just 5,000 people. It was a super small town mentality. It was sort of like its own bubble locked away from the outside world. I remember the very first day at school walking into the classroom where my teacher introduced me to the class. I remember looking around and literally every single person in my class was white. I’m not some racist person, by any means, but when you’re a kid, it gave me a little bit of hesitation. I was maybe one out of three families in that entire town that were not white.

This was a 99.5% completely white school. I never really had access to that. At that same time, this wasn’t too long after 9/11. The Middle Eastern brand in America was declining quite rapidly. I remember going to the playground and a ton of kids grabbing me, beating the crap out of me, taking my head and shoving it to the bottom of the woodchips, telling me I’m a sand nigger and a terrorist and I’m going to blow up the school. I had a fair share of racism and bullying all the time, every day from 3rd grade up until probably the end of middle school. There’s a ton of other stories I could go into.

At that same time, while that was happening, I also began to go to the doctor for a lot of issues that I see a lot of kids in America have that are primarily autoimmune-based issues. Things like asthma, issues with my stomach, skin issues, issues with sleeping, have ADD; all those things began to develop at the same time. What ended up happening was I was in a terrible social environment.

For sure, there were a lot of nice people. It wasn’t all people like that. If your mindset is uncultivated, you’re always going to focus on what’s negative, what’s not happening, what’s worse. On top of that terrible environment, I also was having health issues. I was taking a ton of different medications that their side effects were low energy, fatigue, restless sleeping, and things like that. I had terrible health issues, and was in a very poor environment. 

Unable to Talk to the World

The thing I’ve realized about social anxiety is that it’s not the worst issue someone could have, but I believe social anxiety is probably one of the biggest meta-problems and issues on this planet. The reason why I say that is because when you can’t communicate with other people, you can’t communicate the fact that you need help. If you are facing some kind of other problem like addiction or PTSD, you can still talk to people. You can still get help to the best of your ability.

When you can’t talk to the world, you’re literally just trapped into your own bubble and cage. I literally didn’t talk to anybody about this — not even a therapist. Sadly, I didn’t even know what the word positivity or mindset or self-development even were. I was this kid that got hit by psychological trauma and then his nervous system got stuck in that same exact position.

Looking back at my life with all of the information and knowledge I know now, that is why I have social anxiety. The interesting part about this is a lot of the bullying and racism for me stopped basically by my freshman year of high school. My social anxiety got worse after that point and it’s because my brain and my nervous system was still traumatized. It didn’t process anything. It wasn’t probably until last year or the year before where I began to get an understanding of this. 

BRYAN WISH: You went through something traumatic. It continued to perpetuate. You didn’t know how to communicate. It perpetuated in other ways, into your health, and even though the bullying went away, you were still left with the issue because you didn’t know how to communicate and deal with it and boom, it all came crashing down. I think that’s amazing. You can articulate it as well as you can. Most people who have issues can’t. That led you to this One Away experience that has really taken you on the journey you’re on today. Before we go there, at that party, when you become consciously aware for the first time that it was an issue, what were your next steps?

MARK METRY: Because I had no friends, because I had severe social anxiety, my escape then as a teenager, it was not food or drugs. I guess it was food, but it wasn’t drugs or alcohol. For me, my escape was the internet. Long story short, I began to launch so many websites. I learned how to code. I went deep into technology. When I was 15 years old, I ended up starting this thing randomly online that became a six figure business that was making me hundreds of thousands of dollars. My parents had no money at that time. That completely changed my life financially speaking.

When I was in college and had this One Away moment, it was the fact that I had social anxiety and I became aware of it, but it was also because I kind of saw these two voices in my head. I had one part of my brain that was telling me, “Hey, Mark, don’t talk to that person. You’re a loser. You suck. You’ll never amount to anything.” Just previous chatter that my brain has picked up from people who used to bully me, teachers, people that just didn’t really believe me. 

I had another part of my brain that was like, “Mark, yeah, you’ve had a lot of issues but there’s a part of you that has real potential. You’ve become financially successful at an age where almost nobody in the world does. There’s a little bit more potential to you only if you tried and you began to go on the right path” and for sure, part of that was eliminating my social anxiety. A lot of this wasn’t even conscious in the moment.

I’m able to realize it looking back now. I had these two conflicting ideas in the back of my brain. I think a lot of people have this too. This is what’s referred to as cognitive dissonance. When you have this, it can create a lot of anxiety because parts of your conscious and unconscious mind don’t even know how to talk to each other. They haven’t even reconciled. They don’t know how to communicate with each other. 

This was happening at a deep end, backend level in the back of my brain. I think I did what a lot of people normally do when they’re brought up against this. When they have some kind of internal conflict, you try to escape. Instead of figuring out what you should actually be doing with your life rather than just work some random job that you don’t even want to work but you’re just following some path that the 18 year old you was forced to make because of parent/teacher pressure to go to this certain college and to go to this certain career.

Now instead of actually figuring out what you want to do, at the end of your shift, you just go to the bar every night with your friends and you just drink alcohol and that shuts off that part of the brain. Then you wake up in the morning and you do the same thing again. I was in that cycle, for sure. That’s what I talked about in my dark time. That’s where I gained a ton of my weight. I was literally just trying to escape myself. 

BRYAN WISH: The dark time happened after you became aware of this, correct?

MARK METRY: Yes. 

BRYAN WISH: You were trying to escape the feeling of understanding what was going on.

MARK METRY: And not just the feeling, but when you realize what the problem is, then a sense of responsibility usually arises to make sense of that problem or to come to terms with it and tackle it head on. A lot of people ask me, “Why are you doing this? How did you get on this journey?” A part of it is by my own hand but a part of it, I don’t think. I think I have to be here.

The reason is when I was in my dark time, when I was in a ton of pain, it got to the point where the vices that I was using stopped working. It didn’t matter how much weed I smoked or how much alcohol I drank or how much food I ate or how many TV shows I binged; my brain would still not turn off. It got to that point where I couldn’t fall asleep at night anymore. All those things I had usually gone to to help me fall asleep at night and just shut off that voice, just so I could survive, stopped working. Throughout my entire life, I’ve been a terrible sleeper.

At the end of 2015, beginning of 2016, I’m basically freaking out. I literally cannot go to sleep anymore. I’d have nights where just genuinely could not fall asleep. I would try. I’d close my eyes and then I’d hear my roommate’s alarm clock go off at 9AM and I was like, “Wow, I’ve been awake for seven hours and I still haven’t fallen asleep.” 

If you remove someone’s sleep, it’s only a matter of days before they start tripping balls and start doing crazy psychological things. The solution I came up with was go outside and just go for a walk. I was in such a bad headspace then, and in so much pain that I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was never properly educated on healthy coping mechanisms, so I couldn’t go to sleep and I didn’t know what to do. It got to a point where I came up with this idea to start going for walks at like 1 or 2 AM. The park that I lived in in Boston was a pretty nice area but it was also on the border of another section of the city which is not so nice.

It was really bad. We’d get alerts on our phone from our college that was like, “Don’t go to this street because there was just a shooting here like 20 minutes ago.” I basically came up with this idea to go outside at 1-2AM, walk in those really terrible areas, and I don’t think I had the courage to kill myself, but I was basically getting in the headspace of, “I’m going to go outside. This is my plan. I’m going to do this and I’m just going to hope…” I was sort of fantasizing about someone walking up to me, trying to mug me, and just killing me. I didn’t know what to do with my life. My psychology, my brain was so out of whack that I was like, “I just need to end this right now.”

What ended up happening was I did that for 2-3 weeks straight just pretending that someone would walk up and kill me. I remember one night I wasn’t listening to any kind of music on my phone. There was nobody in the streets. No cars, zero noise… it was a weird, still moment. I felt my intuition for the first time. The world outside of me and inside of me got so silent that I could actually hear the real voice that was on the inside of me.

It’s not like my intuition told me anything, like it told me this one sentence or anything. It’s things you can’t really put into language. I think I had a brief transformative experience that enabled me to experience a different feeling that I’ve never gotten before. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the fact I was desperate enough to have gotten to this point. Maybe it’s the fact that for once in my life, I had no distraction. I had full silence that I was actually able to listen to my own dome for the first time ever. 

At that time, when I felt that and heard that, it was almost as if a deeper sense of reality poked me. This is hard to explain because it’s something I don’t really think I can put into words. I had a moment of maybe this same old stuff that I see happening in my life, time and time again in black and white, maybe there is something much deeper. Clearly, I felt something. I felt my intuition for the first time and I’ve never felt that before. It gave me a much deeper sense of reality. I was like, “Wow, maybe I don’t know what’s going on.” 

A week before this time, I started listening to podcasts on my walks. I remember I listened to this podcast with Tim Farris. It was random but crazy how this happened. It was a podcast episode where he talked about him when he was in college and he was also suicidal and he had tried to kill himself. I was listening to this stuff a few days beforehand and I guess in the back of my brain, I was thinking, “Wow. I get to listen to this guy Tim Ferriss who was also in a dark spot; the same exact spot I’m in right now in college, but now this dude is a baller. Now he’s doing a thousand different things in 10,000 different industries. Everybody knows him. Maybe I could potentially do the same thing.”

It was a combination of these ideas. I remember on my dark night, where I kind of highlight this transformative experience, I remember falling into tears because I didn’t know how to process any of this stuff. I remember running back to my dorm room. Looking back at it now, it’s like 2AM. I’m crying and running. It’s like some scene straight up out of a movie. When I was running, I came to realize one of the main reasons why I was in pain. That was because any time an experience unfolded itself in front of my eyes, my brain was always trying to compare the story that already happened to what I wanted to do that’s new.

Let’s say I’m in college and I’m in the cafeteria and I’ve never sat by somebody who was sitting alone. There’s a part of my brain that’s like, “Mark, go talk to that person. I bet they’re cool. They look like you. I bet you guys could have a great conversation.” There was another part of my brain, the socially anxious version, that would be like, “Don’t sit next to him. He’s going to think you’re a loser or a creep. Why would you sit next to some random stranger? What if he doesn’t know how to speak English?” A thousand different things. 

I realized, on that night, the reason why I couldn’t choose to go sit next to him, I couldn’t choose what I actually wanted to do, is because every event that I could potentially go into, a part of my brain was always like, “You can’t do that because that’s not what Mark Metry would do.” I had this vast catalog, this history of previous events that I would do with different people that would all backup me being socially anxious.

On that night, I realized the reason I’m in so much is because anything I want to do new for the first time, that I want to have freedom to and express myself, I can’t do it because I’m always comparing myself to the old me and saying, “That line of behavior, that action would not line up to this character like in this movie or this book that always acts this way.” 

It was a culmination of a lot of different things but I remember when I got home that night from walking the streets and running and crying. I remember looking at myself in the mirror and it’s almost like I had a new filter on life. With a new set of eyes I looked at myself and it’s not like I became conscious of any of the stuff that I told you now, but I was just like, “Things are different.” I was looking at myself in the mirror and all of a sudden, I could feel like the pants I was wearing, I could feel them be tight.

I would look down at my shirt and like all my clothes were tight. That was the first time that I realized that I had gained a ton of weight and I was actually at my rock bottom moment. When I realized that, it was like, “Holy shit.” It’s not like after this night or after this day I went on some crazy mission. That came later. It took many other events to bring me here. I’m still a super stubborn guy. That’s an event where a ton of things in my life began to change at a very deep level. 

BRYAN WISH: I got goosebumps three times. The best content comes when you give the other person goosebumps or you get goosebumps yourself. Your parents sound like great people but they were immigrants and maybe they weren’t aware of everything going on. Were you blind to what you were going through? Could they not pick up on it because you were in your own mental trap? 

MARK METRY: People see how vulnerable and transparent I am in my story and people that want to tell their story, they always ask me about this because they’re like, “My parents suck or my parents did this.” I think the only reason why I’m not more screwed up and honestly, I’d be some kind of statistic, if it wasn’t for my parents. My parents are human. I thought they were great parents but obviously, not perfect. Nobody’s parents are perfect. I remember the first part of my life; I didn’t really see my dad because he was always at work.

Mainly, I was raised by my mom and my sister. The times where I did see my dad, I have the craziest moments of me as a kid of me being in the car with my dad alone or being at some store and him telling me the craziest things in a good perspective. It’s almost as if my dad read that book Think and Grow Rich that has all those success principles like work hard, believe in yourself, you’re smart, don’t let other people tell you what to do. My dad would always tell me those things. As a kid, I never really understood them. 

My parents immigrated to this country two years before I was born. They came here with no money — just $200. They were working all the time and they didn’t know English at all. Also, they didn’t know anybody here. I try to imagine it from their shoes. Like imagine living somewhere with your family, going to college, getting a degree, getting married, and then all of a sudden, you’re like, “Hey, let’s go take a gamble and let’s go move to a different country to potentially give our kids better lives.” My parents left their security and they went out on a limb to the land of opportunity which is America.

They definitely taught me a lot of great things but I think there was a sense of potential fear when you have any kind of immigrant environment especially where there’s that level of stability.  I think I’d be so much more socially anxious without my mom. I remember so many moments in my life where I signed up to go to like my YMCA to swim or do some petty thing that involved some amount of people. The day before or day of, I’d be like, “I don’t want to go anymore,” but my mom would always encourage me, “Mark, just go for it. Try. If you don’t want to be there, you can call me and I’ll come pick you up.” 

I talk about this all the time in my book. My parents, not perfect, but very loving people. They don’t really lie. Very truthful people. Have a high sense of morals. Always really supported me. Even when I was younger in school and they realized I wasn’t a good student and I kind of began to do my own thing, at first, they were kind of skeptical but then they started to support me a lot more than I think most immigrant families do. I think a big part of this is – I shared this on Instagram on Christmas Day and I think it’s relevant. I basically shared that throughout my entire life, anytime I had my own birthday or I had some major holiday, I would always get super depressed on those days.

Looking back at it now, it’s not because I wasn’t around people that love me. My parents are awesome. We don’t really come from much but it’s very much simple, humble beginnings. There isn’t a single moment in my life where my parents did me wrong or abused me or anything like that. the reason why I was super depressed is because I was surrounded by people that loved me but I couldn’t actually feel the love because I didn’t have it on the inside of me. I was so trapped in my bubble that it didn’t matter what kind of friends or family I had around that genuinely loved me; I could still never feel it because I never learned how to do that myself. That’s a major part of it and for sure, if I didn’t have the parents that I did, I think things would have gone way worse, 100,000%. 

When I was facing trouble at school, I remember my parents came to my school and they talked to my guidance counselor and the principal. I was bullied by a decent amount of people and also like teachers. Teachers would literally tell me I was stupid. I was literally going to work for McDonalds the rest of my life. My parents came to my school and reported them but it’s not like anything changed. 

BRYAN WISH: What happened next?

A Hard Look in the Mirror

MARK METRY: To go off that moment of realization that I had in the mirror at the very beginning of 2016, I sort of drifted. After that moment, I still did not do too many different things. I slowly began to think about things differently, down this path, but I wasn’t doing anything meaningful in a legitimate way at all. I remember after that semester, in April, I moved back home to my parents thinking the only thing I was conscious of I don’t even know what that was but all I know is I don’t want that anymore.

Instead of spending my summers how I normally always would of basically playing video games all day, maybe hanging out with my friends doing stupid things, I was like, “No, this is going to be different.” From April, when my semester ended, all the way until August, that entire summer break, I literally spent every moment learning. I kind of felt I was in a position where I didn’t know anything about life. This is a really interesting thing, Bryan. I realized that even though I had no self-esteem, no self-confidence, and couldn’t even articulate myself in front of other people, I had a massive ego.

Realizing this is one of the primary reasons why I wasn’t getting help. I always thought that I knew everything. I always thought I knew all the answers. Looking back at it, on that night, my ego died. I had an ego death. The lens that I had after was, “Wait, who am I? What is this world? What can I touch? How can I experiment with this?” 

I’m in the summer semester and I’m just learning a ton. For the first time, I start to read articles online. I’m starting to read books for the first time in my life in self-development. What I began to do was I was literally Googling, “How do I lose weight?” At that time, I didn’t know  there was something wrong with my mindset. I didn’t know there was something wrong with my psychology.

The most forward facing problem I could see was the fact that I was overweight. I was like, “How do I lose weight?” So, I went down this whole rabbit hole of trying to figure that out. I ended up reading some good books on nutrition and health and what ended up happening was I ended up going to Egypt on a summer trip with my family. When I went there, a few interesting things happened. I began to realize that my parents did a crazy thing for me. My parents really took a major gamble to give me and my sister and our family a better opportunity. 

The reason I say that is because the time we visited in 2016, Egypt was just getting out of their own revolution. There was crazy stuff happening in that country from terrorism, to people not finding jobs. When I went there, I was like, “Holy crap, I could literally still be one of these kids that would have still grown up in Egypt if my parents never did that.” That almost gave me inspiration. The story coming together of me figuring out my roots. I don’t know how much you believe in this — I don’t even know how much I believe in this. Is it scientific or anything? I don’t talk about this in my book.

People talk about chakras. It’s talked a lot about in yoga and meditation. It’s this idea that there’s different energy centers in different parts of your body. There are seven energy centers in different parts of your body and they do different things and they’re geographically located in spots on this planet throughout thousands of years. There’s seven of these geographic locations. Funny enough, Egypt is directly in the middle of one of these locations. It’s only one out of seven places in the entire world. The chakra that’s for Egypt is specifically about the throat and the voice. I couldn’t talk to people back then.

The really interesting thing was as I began to read these books on health and as I lost weight, what ended up happening was I ended up getting this thing called TMJ. A lot of people have it. Temporomandibular dysfunction. I honestly believe that happened at the same exact time where I realized I had social anxiety and I tried my best to talk about it. 

A lot of the people I’ve talked to say that when psychological trauma happens, your conscious brain accepts it and if it’s not processed, it is stored in your unconscious mind which is the body. I believe that when I went down this path, I went back to Egypt; I got in touch with my chakra in terms of the voice and thoughts. Honestly, I believe that whatever you believe in, in terms of negative energy, I believe it was almost trying to break free. That’s why I got TMJ. This isn’t scientific or anything. 

BRYAN WISH: I’ve read two books recently. One is called Many Lives, Many Masters and the other is called Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home. I brings up the concept of energy and how it’s carried with you in your physical presence. It was saying when we have these traumas that happen to us, they do permeate in other ways. Pain shows up in really weird places. Until you actually release that and set it free, it’s going to be carried with you or if you die, its going to go with you to whatever you evolve into next. It’s actually deep and dense and crazy and philosophical. That pain has to go somewhere. It might not be physical pain, but if it’s mental weight on your shoulders, that’s a heavy load to carry. You have to wipe that clean and move forward. 

A Trip to Target

MARK METRY: I basically come back from Egypt. I go into my second year of college and I’m invigorated. I’m inspired. I’m like, “I’m going to do things differently this time.” I still don’t really have any idea what’s going on, what’s happening. I specifically remember this. This is November 6, 2016, I had come back from class and I took a nap. I woke up and I was in this half-awake state, half-dream state. I had this overwhelming feeling that I just had to get up and do something differently about my life. At the same time, I was eating a totally clean, healthy diet.

I felt my brain had energy and clarity that it never had before, and I was also reading a ton of these books about successful people and mindset. I had always heard that people always put things off. People always delay things and procrastinate. The next thing you know, you’re on your deathbed and all that time went by and you didn’t do it. I felt that feeling when I was taking a nap; I had all this knowledge, all this awareness but I wasn’t doing anything with it. On the fence, recalling the weekdays, I would always try to eat healthy and try to do stuff. On the weekends, I’d party and eat like trash. I was basically half pregnant. 

This day, November 6th, I woke up from my nap and I feel this. If I don’t do something about this differently, if I don’t deviate my line of behavior… I want this dimension right now to be the dimension that Mark changes his entire life around. I get up. I’m still stumbling and don’t know what’s going on. My first idea is to put on my shoes and go outside and walk to Target. I don’t know why.

As I walk to Target, I’m beginning to realize, what is it actually going to take for me to change my life around? What is it going to take for my thoughts to actually be done in real life? I realized a major reason why I hadn’t really thought about what it would take before was because I didn’t want to take responsibility for my life. When I went up and made this commitment to myself, I forced myself to take responsibility for my life, to take responsibility for a lot of the bad things that had happened to me, and also a lot of the great things.

There’s a difference between taking responsibility and thinking that something is your fault. Will Smith talks about this a lot. It’s not your fault that your parents got divorced when you were eight years old, but it is your responsibility to who you are right now because that happened regardless. 

As I was beginning to realize this, I had to take responsibility. Looking back at it now, I had always treated myself like I wasn’t in control of this life. Like I wasn’t even in control of me. I felt this fish that was just being destroyed by waves. I was just at the whim of the other whales and the other bigger fish around me. The real big thing I had to understand is the word responsibility – you look at it – responsible. You break that word down and it means response able. You are able to respond to your life because now you’re taking responsibility and ownership of it. If you don’t own something, you can’t control it. 

When I’m on my walk to Target, I’m beginning to realize this. Another transformative moment happens where I begin to break down and start crying. It’s almost as if I go through a series of flashbacks of all the bad things that I was aware of at that time and all the good things that have happened in my life and realize that they were all my responsibility right now. When I realized that, I walked into Target.

This is still the time where people are still getting into school and buying school supplies. They barely have any school supplies left. I go in and find a white board. I was like, “Hey, I’m going to start writing down my goals.” I also read it in books. You should also start to journal and write down your thoughts and goals. I go to the journal section and there are no more journals left. Literally, in the corner of my eye, in the corner of the shelf, I see this one, single journal and on the cover of the journal it says, “Ideas Become Things” and it was just like a question mark.

Back in my dorm room, I start writing down goals, my objectives, how I want to live my  life differently. I remember having different quotes of Steve Jobs up on my white board. Also, I began to journal and meditate every day. When I began to meditate, I felt like I got access to a real deep sense of someone I used to not be in touch with, my younger self.

When I began to do that, I began to exercise for the first time in my life. I began to sleep well for the first time in my life for 7-8 hours. I began to pick up a stream of momentum of trying to stay healthy. A month after that, I start a business. Seven months after that, I started my podcast. I started by podcast because – it’s not like I was trying to build a brand. It was literally I was on my self-development journey and I was stuck in so many places. I was running into this problem that I’d never faced before.

How do I deal with this? How do I deal with that? I realized that if you want to get the real information, you got to talk to the real cutting edge experts. Initially, I was like, “there’s no way they’re going to talk to some 19, 20 year old that just wants to pick their brain…” So, I said to myself, “I’m going to start a podcast to build a platform to actually build my own little selfish self-development tool. Week after week, year after year, that led me to where I am today. 

Find Mark’s Work

BRYAN WISH: Your podcast Humans 2.0 is great. I think all the things you’re doing and the content you’re sharing, it’s so insightful to your own journey and how you’re doing it that you care. It comes across so fluidly. Where can people find you? Where will they be able to buy your book? How do they connect with your awesome story?

MARK METRY: You can look at everything on my website markmetry.com. You can find a link to the book. You can get it on Amazon, Audible. Stay up to date with me on LinkedIn, on Instagram. User name is my first and last name. If you listen to this podcast and you want to connect with me, send me a personalized connection request on LinkedIn and let me know you came from this podcast. I’m a pretty open guy and pretty easy to get in touch with sometimes.