Episode 49 - Stop Forcing The Wrong Door And Follow The Signs

What if one long weekend can’t repair what a weekly rhythm prevents from breaking? We open with a candid take on Family Day and why a ritual like Shabbat outperforms one-off gestures, not by preaching, but by offering a simple practice: disconnect from noise, reconnect with family, and repeat until presence becomes your default. That frame sets the stage for a deeper question—are your choices fuelled by applause or anchored in joy?

We trace how so many of us pick paths because they photograph well: the spotlight of celebrity, the prestige of a revered profession, the comforting praise at family tables. Using the cautionary gravity of Whitney Houston’s story and the relentless churn of attention economies, we examine what happens when “look at me” becomes the operating system. Then we flip the lens: start with joy as a principle, align your goals with service, learning, and faith, and let outcomes be the by-product rather than the point. When your work feeds your soul and honours God, each step holds meaning, even before you reach any finish line.

From there, we unpack a countercultural idea about roadblocks. If you earnestly pursue a change—a move, a new career, a fresh start—and keep running into gates, consider that love may be holding the door shut. We offer a vivid metaphor of childproof gates: barriers as protection until the stairs are safe. Instead of forcing the square peg, practise trust, keep doing good where you are, and let timing reveal itself. The result is a calmer inner life, fewer spikes of frustration, and family energy that no longer absorbs our ambition’s fallout.

You’ll leave with a blueprint for weekly renewal, a saner way to choose careers and goals, and a practical mindset for interpreting resistance without resentment. Subscribe, share with someone who’s tired of forcing doors, and leave a review with the one moment that shifted your thinking. Your reflection could be the sign someone else needs today.

Transcript

Secular Rituals And Weekly Presence

Clarifying Choice And Joy

The Lure Of Fame And Its Cost

Whitney Houston And Never Enough

Status Careers And Misaligned Goals

Start With Inner Joy And Values

Aligning With What Pleases God

Aspirations And Divine Timing

Gates, Roadblocks, And Redirection

Acceptance Over Forcing Outcomes

Trust, Contentment, And Closing

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast, the only podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. Good morning, everybody. Happy Family Day. If you're in Canada, I don't know where else they do it. They take a weekend and they attribute it to the family and the success of the family. We don't need a weekend to do that. We don't need a day to recognize individuals, Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthdays. It's nice. They're nice ideas. But they're not Jewish ideas. They're not religious concepts. They're secular concepts that say, hey, once in a while it's okay to stop and acknowledge your family and spend time with your family. I got news for you. We do it every single week. On Shabbat, it's family weekend, every single Shabbat, without exception. Now, if you don't have Shabbat, I'd understand why you would want to have a family weekend, but you don't need to have once a year. You could do it every single week. And if your family doesn't deserve being acknowledged once a week, well then you've got different problems, my friends. That's what Shabbat is for. You see how it works? You remember yesterday I said to you that everything secularism teaches you is the opposite of what God teaches you. They tell you take a weekend every year. Every 365 days, take a weekend and we'll call it family weekend. Spend it with your family. That's what they think is acceptable. They think it's normal that one weekend a year you should be able to stay with your family and lock out everybody else and focus on each other and get into each other's minds and hearts. They don't tell you how to do it, by the way, right? They don't tell you to disconnect from the rest of the world and just focus on your family. They don't tell you to shut off your cell phones or shut off your computers and don't go shopping and spend quality time with each other where you're present. No, they just say it's family day. Do with it whatever you will. Just maybe spend a few more hours this weekend with your families. We do it every weekend and we have a prescription for success. We know how to do it in a way that gives us a massive, massive reward. We feel it, we sense it. Our families are better off because of it. So even though, by the rest of the nations, this is a family day weekend, for us, we know that's every weekend. Now I want to clarify something from yesterday. Yesterday, I may have positioned something a little bit incorrectly or unclearly. Let me clarify it. What we were talking about with regards to joy, the beginning of choice, making a decision, how we make that decision. I said yesterday that the book said that people begin by weighing the relative advantages of the options at their disposal. Nothing to do with what I'm necessarily predisposed to or what will make me happy. What people do as a mistake when they want to determine their direction in life is they base it based on what they think will make them the material success. In other words, I want to become a Hollywood actor or actress. I want to be a celebrity. And the reason I want to is because I idolize these people. I see them on the big screen. They have fame, they have fortune, they have power. Everybody wants to be around them. And I want that so much for myself. And so I want to become a Hollywood celebrity, an actor, an actress. Never mind the fact that you are going to be surrounded by the worst people on planet Earth. You are surrounded by a culture and environment where you are never good enough. You are always competing for the top position. You are always competing for attention. It's all about attention. Look at me. Look at how good I am. Look at how accomplished I am. Look at what a great actor I am. That's the whole principle. So you're constantly, constantly being scrutinized and judged. You're under a magnifying glass. If you see these people when they're being interviewed on talk shows and the like, you see that they lack confidence, that it's all really just an act. And at the end of the day, if you see them really interviewed about their process of becoming actors and actresses, you will see and hear from their own mouths how difficult the challenge is because they're always trying to be good enough. Whitney Houston, just as an aside, she popped into my head. Whitney Houston, if you don't know who that is, you're not old enough. Go back and figure it out. But she was one of the best singers that had ever lived, ever. Such a spectacular talent till today, and I don't think we will ever have anybody who ever comes close to the voice that that woman had. Just watch the national anthem that she sang. It was being circulated last week because her anniversary of her passing was February the 11th. Listen to the voice on this unbelievable individual, and yet, and yet, find her interviews, find her candid discussions, and you will hear or listen to her co-star, Kevin Costner, who was her co-star and good friend early on in her career, and he will tell you that the thing that occupied her mind 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the reason she ultimately got into toxic relationships and at the end of the day took her own life was because she was never good enough. She never felt that she was worthy and that she was as good as the other singers in the world. She put them all in her tiny little pocket. She was a giant, and yet they made her feel insignificant, not good enough. That's Hollywood. So I want to become a celebrity. I want to become a singer. I want to become known around the world. And then they make their decisions based on that. So they start to go down the path that will take them in that direction. Now they're miserable. Now they realize that they're surrounded by sharks. They're surrounded by the worst form of humanity, people who will manipulate you and take advantage of you and use you and throw you out and replace you just as quickly as they brought you on board with the next fad. And you end up living a miserable life. I want to become a lawyer. Why? Because there are lawyers in my family and they're revered. They're put on a pedestal. My parents and my grandparents are always singing their praises. Look at how wonderful they are. Why? Because they have money, they're successful, they have a sense of power and accomplishment. I want to become a lawyer because I want to be revered like they're revered. I want to have the bank account that they have. I want to live the lifestyle that they have. Who said it's for you? Who said that lifestyle is suited for you? At the end of the day, what the book is telling us, and what you should be telling yourself is when you want to determine your next step, first look inward. What will make me really happy? Not on the surface, not from what I see but I don't understand, but what makes sense, what's lasting, not material, but what speaks to my nishamah, to my soul. Let me follow that and make sure it's kosher, obviously. Make sure it's above board and run with that, because that will ensure that you have daily successes, that you are comfortable and that you are happy in your pursuit of whatever it is that you choose to do. Not that the goal is the end, the outcome, because you may never get there. You may set out on that path like many do to become a lawyer and never get there, never achieve that status. Why? Because it's not for you and it never was. And so now you're going to be even more miserable. Or you're going to be a doctor because your parents told you you need to be a doctor. And you don't, you know in your heart that it's not for you, and yet you still pursue it. And you only realize that you're becoming more and more miserable. Start with you. Make the choice. I want to be happy first. What I do for a living, what I occupy my time with, is secondary to my happiness. And in fact, it should bring me happiness. So let me start with the principle of joy and happiness and let it end with whatever takes me there, whatever gets me that real eternal, lasting happiness. By the way, that's not the physicality, that is the spirituality. That is helping people, that is adding and contributing to society, that's learning Hashem's Torah and figuring out what's important to him. Do that math first and then figure out within that realm of what's important to your creator, he who manages everything and has the ability to give you everything, what makes him happy? And let's see where we align. Because if what makes him happy makes me happy, and vice versa, then I'm on the path of success. If he's happy with me because I'm doing his work, that means I've got him at my back. And no matter what I do, I'm going to be happy and successful. Now listen to this. Aspirations. So important, guys, so important. When we truly desire a change in life, a new job, a new home, but we lack the ability to implement such a decision. It's a clear sign that the creator wants us to continue in our current situation for the meantime. Just so you know, this is speaking to me. There are things going on right now in my life. This sentence speaks to me. But I already know this. And this is the approach that I've already taken because of the fact that I've been working on myself for 20 years. I'm trying to make changes. Whether or not those changes take root does not depend on me. All I'm doing is going through the motions. Whether or not it is correct and good for me and my family is entirely in the hands of the Creator. If it doesn't work out, if I am pushed in another direction, if I have stumbling block after stumbling block that is placed in front of me, then I understand the message. The message is stop. I don't want you going there. It's like a little child where he's trying to go around the house, and everywhere he goes, there are gates, and he can't get past these gates, and he's frustrated. Why are those gates there? The parents put the gates there because behind them is danger, staircases that I'm not yet able to navigate. If I'm able to get past those gates, that means now I'm at risk of falling down the stairs and hurting myself or possibly, God forbid, killing myself. So my parents, in their love for me, put gates that block me from going there. Now I can be as frustrated as I want with those gates. It's not gonna remove them. The only time those gates are removed is when I am prepared for the challenge. When I have built myself up enough, when the time is right for me to go and pass that test of climbing stairs, ascending or descending them, only then will my parents, very carefully, remove those gates. It's the same thing. If I want to take my family to live in a different country, if I want to start a brand new career, take what I was doing yesterday and switch it. And I find that there are roadblocks in front of me. Every step that I take is difficult. It's challenging. I can't set up the new organization. For some reason, I get pushback from the government organizations. I'm missing paperwork. I can't find it. Suddenly they've come up with new licenses. Now I've got to come up with a license I didn't know I needed. Now I gotta go back to school. Now I gotta start learning. I gotta pay tuition. Nobody's got time for that. Wait a second. That just put a serious kink in my plans. I have a choice. I either get very upset about it and frustrated and try and find workarounds and push that square peg into that round hole, force it through at all costs, or I take a step back and I remind myself that there is a boss that runs this world who loves me and who wants to make sure that I am happy and successful. That means don't do what you're doing. Don't go where you're going. There is a fence, there is a gate in front of you for a reason. He put it there. Acknowledge that and recognize that that's not what you're supposed to be doing. Do you want a clearer sign than that, guys? Think and be grateful that you have a creator that loves you so much that he's willing to go out of his way to put gates and stumbling blocks in front of you to send you the message. It's the next best thing than him coming down and standing in front of you and saying, Stop. You shouldn't go there because it's dangerous, because you'll fail, because you'll hurt yourself, because you won't be able to recover. Keep doing what you're doing. Now is not the time. Maybe it'll change, maybe in a year from now, maybe in two years from now, maybe in six months from now. But today it's not supposed to happen. So shift your focus back or shift it somewhere else. But certainly the choice that you've made right now is not the right one. When we live like this, guys, when this is your day-to-day, when this is your default, then everything makes sense. You have a clear approach to life that is unobstructed, unencumbered. You don't get triggered, you don't get set off by everything that doesn't go your way. You don't end up taking that negative energy and spilling it over into your family and your current work life. None of that happens. You simply accept. You might want to call it resigning. A lot of people don't like that word. I don't care. I'm big enough to know that I can resign from that effort and say it's not for me. Because my creator told me clearly, it's not for me. Move on, find a different approach or keep doing what you're doing in the meantime. That, my friends, is the secret to success. That, my friends, is what will give you constant state of contentment and do away with the worry and the anxiety and the fear that will ultimately lead to, God forbid, depression and worse. We don't want any of that. This is how you avoid that. Recognize that you have a creator who loves you and is intimately involved in your life. He's on your shoulder and he's clearing the path for you to be successful. Don't fight it. Run with it. Have an amazing day, my friends. Thank you for spending time with us on the Trust Factor Podcast. If you've heard something today that moved you, save this episode and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming conversations that challenge, empower, and uplift. And if you're on social media, connect with us. Leave your thoughts, drop a quote that resonated with you. Hashtag the TrustFactor Podcast. Until next time, keep growing in your trust and keep living with purpose. I'm Jesse Revivo, and this has been the Trust Factor Podcast. Thanks for listening.