Also Available On:
Key Quote
“Once you face death, the fear of it is gone. Why is it gone? Because the fear of death comes from the fact that you’re not accepting death. So the acceptance of death is the freedom from it, in a way.” -Zak Aghbal
Episode Summary
In this episode, journey with us as we uncover the layers behind Zak Aghbal’s transformative life. Growing up in Morocco, the weight of a restricting environment bore down on him. But a couple of unexpected events forced Zak to look at life with renewed eyes.
What do Jim Rohn, a near-death experience, and a profound book by Krishnamurti have in common? Dive in to discover the threads of truth that not only helped Zak break free from his past but might resonate with the essence of your own journey.
Watch as Zak redefines his life, battling inner demons and emerging stronger. Let’s walk with him as he chooses a path of change and discovery.
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Wesley Jackson: Can you relate to this? Picture yourself at the beach. You’re enjoying swimming in the water when all of a sudden you get hit by a wave. Then another. Then another. Before you know it, you’re being dragged out to sea by the current. You try to swim back to shore, but no matter how hard you try, you just keep getting dragged further away.
You panic. Crying out for help. Spending what little energy you have left. You begin to sink as everything fades to black. But then you wake up. After having been saved by nine surfers, one of whom performed life saving CPR on you. You walk away from the whole experience with a deep feeling of regret, that you’ve wasted your life until this point.
This sets you off on a new path towards personal development. But how do you know if this new path you are taking is the one that’s right for you? And if this truly was a life changing event?
You’ll find this out today through a story from Zak Aghbal, founder of Content Creator Life. In today’s Self Help Podcast episode, you’ll learn about major life changes – how they relate to acceptance and how these two powerful forces influence our lives.
Welcome to Surviving Humanity: A Self-Help podcast, where we shift your perspective to help you overcome the obstacles in your life.
We are Wesley Jackson and Andrew Gilley, and we hope to foster a sense of connection and community over our common struggles while providing you with tools to overcome them. As always our Facebook, Subreddit, and Twitter are the best places to go for community, connection, and support.
Links to these are in the show notes. Let’s get started.
So Zak, do you have any stories that you’d like to share that are related to major life changes?
[00:01:32] Zak Aghbal: Yeah, so I would say my life story is the one that comes to mind. So I am originally from Morocco. For those who don’t know, it’s a small country in North Africa. And,I lived in this kind of let’s say, ‘toxic environment’ since childhood.
And my dream was always to get out. I remember you know fantasizing about maybe going to Europe, to the US, or the places. And It just felt that I was stuck somehow in that environment. It’s not specifically about Morocco, but just like I was living in a small town. So it was a mining town.
It was you know, roughly 50, 000 people living there So it has like small town vibes and nothing much is happening there. AndI felt that I was stuck, right?
the turning point for me was basically when I almost drowned. I was like 20 years old, almost 21. So it was actually near my birthday. So I was living,in a sense, like I was livinga life that’s not mine, So I was pretending for a lot of things. I was pretending to be that, to be this. Family pressure, like a Moroccan culture is basically a conservative culture. And there are not a lot of things that you just can do. it’s like basically I want to go and do this.
“I want to be a fitness model.”
“Oh, no. You cannot do that.”
“Okay.I want to go become an artist.”
“No, you cannot do that. You need to be an engineer, a doctor.”
So there are a lot of things that’s narrow your path in life. And it’s really hard to get away from that. It has to do with, a lot of things, basically, my family was super conservative.
So there’s the cultural aspect. There’s the family aspect. And, yeah, there’s this kind of like pressure that I felt of, “Hey, I have these dreams. I want to be this or that.”
And the culture or the environment around me is not allowing me to fulfill myself. So I always had this kind of like struggle inside, since I was very young.
So from age 10 to 15, and then to 20 until that thing that happened to me that I’m going to talk about. So it was always, this internal struggle of “Should I actually,get away from all of this?”
when I say, ‘all of this’, the whole culture, the whole like, country, just get out. And how I’m going to do that.
So it was always like this question of “Oh, I don’t feel comfortable here.”
Like I’m not really fulfilling myself in a way. ‘Cause I had this big dreams, this big ideas and the environment itself is verynarrow and boxing me in. So it felt at the time like,I was being choked.
Like, literally. Until when I was 20 years old. that’s when something big happened in my life. It was a moment of drowning. So I drowned in the sea. I say ‘drowned’ because technically if you’re drowned, you’re dead, but I was resuscitated.
that’s like. Yeah, I actually went there into that stage of like almost dying and then coming back to life.
And that was one of the big moment of my life that kind of like.not immediately. So I’m not going to lie. I say, oh yeah, I just the next day after coming back to life or whatever, and then like,seeing,like remembering what happened that the next day I just, “Oh, I’m going to leave the country. I’m going to do whatever I want.”
No, not immediate. That’s what I’m trying to say. It was a moment of realizing what just happened. trying toreally think about it like for a few months. Of course, where I went to those, familiar stages of like ‘denial’. Then, ‘acceptance’ and then you try to make peace with the fact that I actually almost died. And that was the change in you know, let’s say journey of my life.
I don’t want to say moment because it might sound that it’s immediate, but it’s not. It took me, let’s say, a few years or a few months. I would say like between one and two years to actually make the decision to leave the country and do, you know, go ahead with my goals and dreams, and I would say that specific moment in my life was the trigger point for that.
[00:05:05] Wesley Jackson: You talked about feeling like you were choking and then you went right from feeling like choking in Morocco to literally drowning.
[00:05:11] Zak Aghbal: Yep.
[00:05:12] Wesley Jackson: what were you seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking when you were going through this journey that you mentioned?
[00:05:19] Zak Aghbal: I remember like thinking first, “Who am I?”
So I had to question everything about myself, in terms of religion and stuff. So Morocco is a Muslim country, right? But since I was young, I was never really religious person. Like I was not really into any religion. I could just pretend to be like a Muslim because of like the traditions and stuff that people have to do.
You have to fast for Ramadan. It’s more like a custom thing, not really about the belief. So I was really confused about those things and I was like, “Yeah, I don’t see it that way, whatever they’re talking about. I don’t see it that way.”
And I’m not a confrontational person, by nature. So I was always like just pretending that I am that and this and not really diving deeper or trying to prove to people that I am this or in terms of the religion stuff or like the cultural aspects. It’s weird when I look back at it. It’s like I was living in my own bubble, like a limbo and just trying to get by.
it’s almost like in my head, like there’s a destination that I have to go to and whatever is happening around me, I’m just gonna isolate my mind from it. And I still, to this day, don’t know exactly how that happened to me. was it a natural thing that since childhood I had? Or was it a moment in my childhood that I can’t even remember that, made me isolate my mind in a way. Which was very hard to do, because I lived in a very toxic environment.
When I say ‘toxic’, some people may be in the States, they can call like ‘the ghetto’, for example, a toxic place. Or some people who live in the Philippines, they might live in an environment where, you know, it’s like slums, like India, whatever. When I say ‘toxic’, for me, I mostly not talk about the infrastructure part, I’m talking about the people.
So conversations around me, they kind of like, the whole thing around me that every day I deal with or I dealt with was basically, “You cannot achieve whatever you want to do.”
That’s a foolish,desire to want to be something, right?
Because everything is like, ‘predetermined’. There’s the religious aspect to it, which is like, everything is predestined for you. So you don’t have to really struggle that much trying to get to that thing. And there’s also the cultural aspect to it, which is, if you want to be rich, there are the people who are rich and corrupt and stuff, so you cannot get there.
So I was surrounded by these ideas of “You’re supposed to fail in life.”
That’s the… When I get to the core of it, it’s “You’re not supposed to succeed.”
And any talk about success will be turned down. Somebody will make a joke about your goals. And if you say, “Oh, I want to be healthy. get into fitness.”
“Oh. Come on, just eat some tagine and some couscous and you’ll be fine, Why trying so hard?”
So there was always this kind of I gotta be honest. It’s not only toxic in terms of the culture, but my family or like the surroundings, they were always talking about these unattainable things that I should just forget about.
“Just don’t do that.”
“Don’t go there.”
“You’re supposed to just have a job, have a family.”
get some credit or loan from the bank. Buy a car, get a house. And that’s your life basically. But when I was very young, I was like, “That’s not what all life is about. I think there’s more to this.”
Right?
And it was really hard for me because it’s a family pressure combined with culture, religion, all this stuff. And I’m sure there are a lot of people in Morocco who had different experiences. So I’m just talking about my own experience and how I felt. And going back to your question. I would say the journey for me to get to where I’m at now took a long time.
But when I look back at it, there are some moments that really changed me. So the first one before my drowning experience was when my mother passed away. She had stomach cancer. And that was a big shock to me because I was only 17 years old turning 18. And, I did not even know that she was sick because she told them not to tell me because, I was the youngest in the family of seven, this kind of structure of I’m the youngest and I’m not supposed to know about these stuff.
that was a big slap in my face. in terms of, reality check. And the second one, was my drowning experience. And those two combined, I would think like when I was 17 and then 20 years old, it’s like you said, you put it in a good way. It’s a journey,
So it was slowly coming up to this realization that “Life is not what you think about. Life is there.”
Right? So you have to deal with the reality of it. And that was really difficult for me to do because I lived like I said in a ‘limbo’. I lived in my own bubble. So slowly, reality was unraveling itself and unpacking itself in front of me.
And I had to deal with that,the shock of it. And I would say the journey took me a few years, but a lot of things helped me. It was personal development. So I really got into personal development. So I started reading books. Jim Rohn, for example, was my biggest kind of let’s say idol or whatever you want to call him, as like a mentor, like a virtual mentor for me.
There are also like, things that I start to do like fitness. So after my drowning experience, I really got into fitness because I was more concerned about health. A lot of things that happened to me that time that just woke me up, right? Like, I want to take care of myself, like that. Because once you face death, the actual fact that you’re going to die and you feel it, the whole perspective of life changes for you.
you might think about dying. But it’s not the same as actually facing it. it could be a near death experience or something that happens to you that really shook you. That has a profound effect on your life perspective. It’s not something you can just fake or pretend that you have.
It will deeply, change a lot of things in you that you did not even try to change. So for me, for example was like, I have to find a way to live a fulfilled life It was an urgency for me and the urgency I think came from those things as specifically the drowning experience.
[00:10:44] Wesley Jackson: Yeah, when you had these two big moments within your journey your mother passing away and then drowning You were basically presented with this kind of fork in the road, of your life path. And you had to choose to either react to it or be proactive to it and make changes, and it seems like you chose the latter one, if I’m not mistaken.
[00:11:05] Zak Aghbal: Because of that urgency that I was talking about.
[00:11:08] Wesley Jackson: Yeah, exactly. So with that urgency compelling you to push forward, how did you find a way through all of this exactly? You mentioned Jim Rohn and his books, anything in particular?
[00:11:18] Zak Aghbal: So I’m not a reader. Like I usually listen to audio books or like I watch his like talks, which was like, 2, 3-hours. But there’s one book that really,helped me a lot during this transformation. It’s the “Seven Strategies for Wealth and Happiness”, I think.
I forgot the title, but it’s Seven Strategies for Wealth and, I think happiness or something. Yeah. So that book, for example, or the talks from Jim Rohn structured what I had in mind.
So I had similar ideas about, if I want to get somewhere, I need to be disciplined, right? If I want to achieve something, I have to put all my energy into it. That was about it in terms of my personaldevelopment ideas, right? So Jim Rohn and others, they structured that for me, especially, because English is my second language, right?
So I was trying to learn all of this with a second language. it was really this kind of process of restructuring my brain and my mind around the ideas of personal development. So it’s not something that I just discovered. It was…Some parts of it were intuitive because of the drowning experience and other stuff that I had, which is it is like a universal thing, right?
You have an urgency to do with the stuff you want. So what’s the next step? You’re going to go and find ways to do it, right? The urgency is there. And the personal development aspect was more like finding strategies, a structure to it.
And the second thing that really helped me, especially spiritually was a book by, Krishnamurti. It’s called “Freedom from the Known”.
And I remember like listening to that book, ’cause I told you I’m an audiobook guy. I couldn’t sleep the whole night. Like my heart was beating so fast. The book was so profound because it’s what I felt when I was young, butagain, I didn’t have the vocabu-, the structure to put those things in a nice way in sentences that make sense.
And that book really had a profound effect on me, especially, in terms of, how I see life in general. Which is basically, I am a human being and all the things that, I call. I call myself ‘Zak’. I have this ideas and stuff. Those are fluid, right? But the fact that I am a human being is what really is the base or the truth that I have to come back to.
It’s a simple truth that when I come back to it, just, it gives me peace because it’s true. I know I am a human being. I know I am not a MacBook. I am not a tree. I am not a frog. I know those things. It’s a simple fact that is undeniable. And anything else, my ideas, my ideologies, whatever identity, all this stuff is brought to me, it’s from the outside to the inside.
It’s education. It’s come from language. Like basically, if there is no language, I cannot know a lot of these things. So that book or those concepts of basically we’re just human beings and everything else is just either it comes from education, conditioning, programming, whatever you want to call it.
We start usually with language, without language we cannot even get there. That concept just made me so peaceful in life. ‘Cause I was really struggling with finding my own piece because I had this intuitive ideas like I was talking about, but I could not really structure them. I could not really find ways to understand. The big struggle for me was like, “Am I actually so weird that the whole world doesn’t make sense to me? Or is it the other way?”
That what I have into like in my intuition is true, but the world is messed up. So it was a big struggle. sometimes I tend to believe the other way, which is like, “Oh, maybe I am messed up.”
And then, you start to question your own beliefs and you and that’s the struggle that I think, most human beings deal with.
It’s just how you respond to it. we have this struggle of “Is the world wrong or am I wrong?”
And I think,coming back to this idea that everything that I had since childhood, my story, whatever. My name, religion, whatever people have. It just put into this vessel, right?
But it can be taken out. And that I think a lot of people struggle with this idea or don’t even realize that things can be taken out in terms of what you put in your mind. And once you realize that, it becomes like a game, “Hey, what can I put in?”
it’s like a box and whatever you put in, can help you go forward to wherever you want to do, or you can take stuff out.
And that’s what I start to do in my journey. So literally, taking stuff out. I was like writing my first journal, which was like my own story in a book. And I was like questioning myself. Like I remember writing every day,”Hey, I have this idea about this and that.”
Let’s say for example, an idea about how toachieve success, for example, or how to be disciplined. So I have this idea about how to be disciplined and I had to unpack the origin of it. Like, “Where is it coming from? Is it actually childhood? Did my father or mother said something when I was young?”
And I was doing this thing with a lot of ideas that I had that I was confused about, and it helped me in realizing that most of it is just conditioning.
It’s like cultural stuff. Stuff that happened to me in childhood or you know some trauma that I experienced that put this perspective into me and it’s crystalize the idea that it felt intuitive to me, but it’s not intuitive. It’s just something that happened and I can actually unpack it. I can take it out. And that was the starting of my personal development journey, I would say.
[00:16:16] Wesley Jackson: Wow. Yeah. It seems like you experienced quite the shift in your perspective.
You’ve already mentioned this with the book, with Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, correct?
[00:16:27] Zak Aghbal: That’s the book.
[00:16:28] Wesley Jackson: And you said that you had this kind of feeling of like peace wash over you basically after listening to this audio book. So I want to ask you now, how would you say that major life changes are related to acceptance?
[00:16:42] Zak Aghbal: I would say for me it was basically the idea ofdying. I had to come to the conclusion that I’m gonna die. And all of us gonna die, but actually remembering that moment of drowning and reusing that energy that I felt. And I felt something incredible at that moment when I was drowning and people keep asking me this question and I think we talked about it offline before, which is, “What did you feel?”
“What did you see?”
Some people asking me like, “Did you see any flashes of light or what happened?”
And I still to this day remember exactly how I felt. I don’t remember what I saw, because that’s part of memory, it’s blurry. But I remember how I felt, and I can bring that feeling back.
It was absolute feeling of regret. “I’m gonna die, and it’s over. There’s nothing here, it’s gone. Whatever I was thinking about doing,it’s over. Time’s up.”
And that feeling was so strong, was so bitter, and so toxic, so bad. That even remembering the fact that I drowned could be a trigger for me to have this urgency of, “Oh. I want to do what I want to do. No time for BS. No time to dwell on the small things.”
And that’s what really brings me peace because it’s a weird thing when I try to explain to people because it’s a drowning experience and sometimes people say, “I’m sorry to hear about that.”
I’m like, “No, I used to be sorry, but now I’m not, I’m actually very grateful.”
Because it’s a moment for me to go back to that feeling of “Hey, this will happen anyways in the future.”
And it’s a fact that I’m gonna die. Everybody’s gonna die. But once you come to grasp with that, all the other small things that, might trigger you. The small annoyances in life and, some problem with people and whatever. All those things, which I call ‘BS’, they go away. It’s like they run away, the stress, whatever. Stress, anxiety, whatever. It just goes away. But you have to actually feel that you’re going to die and embrace it.
You can think about, “Oh, I’m going to die sometime, so I should not worry about the small things.”
That doesn’t work. You cannot fool yourself. You can fool everybody else, but you cannot fool yourself. So you have to actually feel that. And I’m not saying to people to go to the sea and try to drown to feel that what I’m saying is that find ways to, like you said, going back to acceptance, go back to this, accept the fact that you’re going to die. Just accept it, and really dwell on that.
So instead of dwelling on the small things, dwell on the fact that you’re going to die and really like meditate for it. I don’t know. Do whatever you want, because I feel everybody has a different way of dealing with themselves. nobody can tell you how you gonna actually be truthful to yourself.
some people might do meditation, might people go to the gym, some people might read, talk. It doesn’t matter. Find your own true way togo back to this idea of “I’m gonna die. We’re all gonna die, but is that actually something that I truly grasp, understand, and face it?”
Once you face death, the fear of it is gone.
Why it’s gone? Because the fear of death comes from the fact that you’re not accepting death. So the acceptance of death is the freedom from it, in a way. And I that’s what I felt and I’m not gonna lie. Sometimes I get… How can I say, I got some anxiety, some kind of like stress, and it just happens because of life, the daily stuff, right?
You cannot always live in this limbo of like spiritual, happiness and everything is nice. No, you have to pay bills, you have to deal with people, you have to do stuff. And it always brings you back to the reality of things. And it’s very tough. Life is tough. But going back to this memory of drowning, it’s my anchor point to go back to that piece.
And I’m really feeling that I’m actually gonna die one day, tomorrow, maybe now, maybe after a few hours. So why am I actually stressing about this? And what is the stress doing to me? It’s not really helping me solve the problem. It’s just making me more anxious and taking away the energy from me to actually solve the problem and move on my life.
[00:20:34] Wesley Jackson: I think that’s the thing that we all have to accept at the end of the day, like you said. that is a major life change. It’s life into death.
[00:20:40] Zak Aghbal: Yep. Exactly.
[00:20:41] Wesley Jackson: So how do you think this story of yours then is related to larger problems throughout society and why is this important?
[00:20:50] Zak Aghbal: I think it has to do with the human being story or the human story.It’s basically, we have a lot of these things inside of us as human beings, because we’re not trees, right? We’re not, lions, we’re not giraffes, we’re not mountains, we’re human beings. And there’s something special about that.
Why did I compare myself to these other things? Because all the other things I was talking about, they cannot actually create things. They can’t. Like a lion can be tough, can be dangerous, can eat, the prey, but cannot create stuff. The creative part of the human brain is what makes us so special.
That’s why sometimes when you want to go around the sea,let’s say a beautiful city or like some great achievement, I always wonder “Wow. This was not here millions of years ago. Somebody came here, something, the human experience came and changed the whole nature and the whole thing and made stuff.”
So that’s for me is so valuable and it always brings peace to me that knowing that we have this special ability to create stuff. Of course, some people can take it to the other side, which is we can create stuff that can destroy the environment and all this stuff, but just the fact that we can createand be creative is so unique in terms of being a human being.
That if you’re not using that energy, if you’re not creating stuff, you’re literally not living the human experience. And I feel a lot of people are I don’t want to say they’re not living the human experience, but they’re limiting themselves by not actually achieving their full potential. So some people say that, “Oh, you want to achieve more than what you can do, or you want to, get bigger, become great.”
For me, those things don’t really make sense. Like to be great, because it means that there is something, there’s a level that you have here, and then you’re going to go beyond.
What I’m talking about is just actually live in the human experience. It’s like, when you’re doing stuff that you’re supposed to do, when you’re so excited about them, when you’re feeling happy, that’s the true human experience.
And when you feel stress and anxiety andyou live a unfulfilled life, that’s a box of human life. That’s a very limited human life. So it’s not about achieving something great. It’s actually achieving what you’re supposed to achieve as a human being. It’s like an intuitive, it’s part of us.
It’s like when we grow up, when we are young and we grow up, then we have this, I would say it’s a pressure and it’s also a feeling of, “Oh, I am just a part of the machine so I can just have a, a job, I have a family, I have a house and that’s it. It’s done.”
And that’s so interesting because as a human being, when you are young, let’s say baby or even a kid. You have so much energy. You think about a lot of things that you can do. But what really brings you down, brings your energy level down, is the structure that we have in society, the systems, all this stuff, and the education, of course. And I feel that if you just take a moment to unpack all of this that’s happened to you in your life, just think about it.
“Oh, I had this ideas when I was young. What happened to me?”
Like I used to really like, for example, drawing, right? Or I used to like to play the piano. But I’m not doing it anymore. I’m just a doctor now and doing my job, or I’m just working in a grocery store. And what happened to my life?
If you try to unpack those moments of your life, you will realize if you do it truthfully, of course, that education, structure, the system, society changed you.
It’s not that you were born like that. And I feel if you just realize that as a human being, that in itself will create the urgency to fulfill your dreams and be creative and create, because that’s what you were born with. It’s just that the system or the structure that, we create for people, mostly because of education, we don’t have time to get into that, but it’s just the idea of how education is done, which is basically, you have a room of like 40 students or 50 and you have a teacher and they’re going to study the same thing, and it’s like a factory education.
process that creates this sense that you are just one part of the system. So you cannot really do much, you cannot create much, but we’re not born with that. What I’m trying to say is that if you dress go back to your childhood and really, feel that energy that you felt before, you will realize that you have so much to offer, so much to do, so much to create, and that in itself is your own like it’s your own journey. The actual process of unpacking your past or what happened to you that’s the piece of actually living life so the process of just realizing what happened to you’re already like 90% there just realizing it because I feel a lot of people don’t even stop and ask these questions.
They might talk about it, but not with passion, not with this deep, deep sense of, “I want to fix something that’s broken.”
And you know it’s broken.
[00:25:36] Wesley Jackson: Yeah, change is necessary if you ever hope to grow, right?
[00:25:40] Zak Aghbal: Yep.
[00:25:40] Wesley Jackson: And change is also inevitable regardless of that as well. So let’s round this up and tell me what is the moral of this story then?
What can we do to become better humans in response to all of this?
[00:25:54] Zak Aghbal: I would say the first thing is to realize that you’re gonna die. Because that will give you the sense of urgency that we talked about so much. The second thing is to, really go back to the moment you were born. When I say go back to the moment you were born. Of course, you cannot have the memory of it. But just revisualize, restructure the moment you come back to life. imagine, visualize, whatever you want to say. And try to feel that moment of coming to life.
Just try. I’m not saying that you’re gonna have a, like a perfect visualization. Just try to actually feel you come from nothing and you are something. And look around you, look at the things, I don’t know, look at the wall, look at the buildings, look at the trees, look around you, and just try to sense how special human life is.
The fact that you’re here. And once you do that, I feel that a lot of things in your life will change. But of course, the trick, right, the catch, is you have to do it with sincerity. You have to be actually curious to know, “How would I feel if I come from nothing? And I’m just born?”
And the sense of like how special that is and how unique, I don’t want to go into the science stuff, but I’m a big fan of the documentaries and science and all this.
And just a quick background, we forgot to talk about it. Like I used to study engineering and dropped out of school because that was not my passion, but something that I learned from studying for engineering school is I have a passion for science itself, not just becoming an engineer. And once you realize that, let’s say, it’s like one in a trillion chance to become a human being, just try to grasp that.
I know it’s so difficult to grasp because it’s like a big number, it’s one in a trillion, what is that? Just try to feel the uniqueness of you being here and trust me that you don’t have to go to Bali to do like a meditation retreat or you don’t have to do this kind of like trendy things about how to discover yourself again.
You can do them after, but like just this simple thing you can do while now listening or sitting, whatever you are. You don’t have to invest a lot of things to do it. Just go back into your childhood and then back, “Oh, I was born.”
But before that there was nothing I was not here. I was not existing. And the fact that I was born, I am here, it’s so unique to be a human life. You’re not a tree. You’re not a dog. Of course. I love dogs.
But anyways, so you so unique to be a human being that the fact that it’s so unique and if you grasp it will create the urgency that you have to do something you have to create you have to be creative. And of course, that comes back to the idea of living a fulfilled life and fulfilling your dreams and your goals because those dreams and goals come from this urgency of, “I want to create. I want to do something.”
And like I said only human beings can do something creative and something that’s really never been seen before.
And the reason I’m talking about this so much, the idea of going back to this uniqueness of the human life is because that’s what I felt when I was almost dying. So we come in full circle, right? From the birth to the death. So when I was about to die, I felt how unique my life was.
And I just wasted my life. Literally, that’s the feeling of regret. Because I wasted my life not doing what I was supposed to do and that’s a bad feeling that I don’t want to be my worst enemy, even though I don’t have any, it’s just a saying. It just live your life to the full, extent that you can. And try to achieve something for the greater good for other human beings.
‘Cause that will also give you the sense of belonging that you are part of the human race. No matter where you come from, what you do, it doesn’t matter. Go back to the basics. Like I always go back to the basics. I am just a human being, and if I just stick with that fact, a lot of things in my life could be improved in terms of anxiety, pressure, social issues, whatever.
I’m a human being. If I come back to this truth, it always brings peace to me, and I think it will bring peace to a lot of people. Because especially now, we need this, we see a lot of division, a lot of problems, and people get stuck into this, ‘identities’ that are not really true. They can be made up.
They can change. They can be flexible. But what cannot change is the fact that you’re a human being. You’re born and you will die. That will never change.
[00:30:06] Wesley Jackson: Very inspiring and a feeling of gratitude emanating from that speech. You were getting pretty motivational there towards the end.
[00:30:13] Zak Aghbal: Hopefully,we can inspire some people by just,sharing the story.
But I’m not trying to do a speech or whatever. It just,comes naturally,
[00:30:20] Wesley Jackson: let’s round it out, then, with one last thing. before we go, Zak, if you had to choose, what is your one tip for surviving humanity?
[00:30:28] Zak Aghbal: That’s a big one. Surviving humanity. I would say, definitely try to go back in time with yourself and unpack whatever happened to you. So that’s the tip that I want to give. because I feel this helped me so much. And the funny thing is that I never realized how much this helped me, until I started to talk to people like you or their friends and they start to ask me questions.
I’m like, “Wait a second. I know how it went from here to here. It’s because I started to question whatever I was not supposed to question.”
So my tip would be ‘question the unquestionable’. If somebody or someone or something says that you cannot question this, that’s a trigger for you to start questioning. And I’m talking about anything in terms of your own personal development, in terms of your ideas, your ideologies, because I feel that the fact that you can question something is what gives you the ability to find the truth.
So if you are not allowed to question, which is something that I grew up with, right? Especially with religion and like culture stuff, like whenever I was asking something, they were saying, “You’re not supposed to ask.”
And that really bothered me when I was young. It’s “Wait. you’re not even telling me the wrong answer, or you’re just like telling me something else. You’re telling me I should not ask.”
And that really bothered me, because, “Why not? What’s the harm in asking? I’m not doing anything. It’s just a question. And if you have an answer, fine. If you don’t, fine, but don’t tell me I cannot ask. I cannot inquire.”
So my tip for surviving in humanity, inquire when it’s not supposed to be a good thing to do, or it’s not something recommended, because there is no harm in asking questions, no matter what the question is. In inquiring, there is no harm in that, but you’re not supposed tohold yourself from asking really deep questions or interesting questions, because I feel the moment you do that, the moment you stop asking questions, that’s the start of the conditioning.
You’re literally being programmed. You’re literally being told what you’re supposed to know, what you’re supposed to feel, instead of actually finding that by your own, again. Inquiry, by your own, questioning.
And I feel that, that’s what really makes us human, right? The ability to question things. “This is not working. Why?”
“Oh, because of this.”
“And why that? And why that? And why?” Just ask these simple questions about anything in your life. It could be religion. It could be spiritual thing. It could be business.
It could be relationship. Anything, whatever it is, ideologies, doesn’t matter. The fact that you have the ability to ask questions and inquire, you will not survive humanity, but you will thrive in it.
[00:33:09] Wesley Jackson: Cool. That’s it.
[00:33:10] Zak Aghbal: Thank you. I hope this was helpful.
Thank you to our guest, Zak Aghbal. Zak is the founder of Content Creator Life. He focuses on providing coaching services and resources for businesses that want to elevate their online content creation. You can find his latest work at “ContentCreatorLife.com.”
I found his videos and interviews on YouTube to be very insightful, particularly for people who are new to content creation.
We highly encourage you to check them out. If you’re interested in learning more about ‘strategic content creation.’ Tune in next Tuesday for our monthly newsletter episode, where we’ll share the top insights from this month’s Surviving Humanity articles. And other personal development tips. If you want to help support us, please join our exclusive monthly book club on Patreon.
Share the podcast with others, and don’t forget to follow, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast platform.
And hey, before you go, do you feel like you can benefit from a boost to your morale? then, why not give our 7-Day Self-Confidence Challenge a go?
For only $7, you’ll get exclusive access to content that will help you determine your core values and strengths, reframe negative thought patterns, and break old habits to build new ones, all while setting realistic personal development goals.
Links to our Patreon and the challenge can be found in the show notes. See you next week!