Transcription
Consistency doesn't guarantee that you'll be successful, but not being consistent will guarantee that you won't reach success. To be successful at anything, the truth is you don't have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren't. Consistent, determined, and willing to work for it. No shortcuts.
Consistency. Consistency. Consistency, man. That's the name of the game, bro. Don't get much simpler than today. If you keep going every single day, and don't stop, your competition will fall off. Grind every day, one foot in front of the other, bro, and I promise you going to be lapping these folks, bro.
Do so much work, it would be unreasonable for you not to be successful.
Every single day, work at it. I mean, it's been a struggle. Some days, I won't lie. Some days I'm like, man, this is this is tiring. This is hard. Now, I embrace the hard. If you don't see results in the first two days or first week, I'm done. That's the mentality of most people. The struggle is too real. We're not patient. No one is patient. And for you to lose weight, for you to stop drinking, if you where the hell you're going through, it takes a lot of patience, a lot of time, and a lot of plateaus. You're going to hit so many plateaus. If you don't know how to get around that plateau, it's not going to happen fast. There there is no hack, man. There's no hack. Instead of spending time getting in the mood to work, just start working. Confront the work. People think they need perfect conditions to start when in reality starting is the perfect condition. This is your opportunity to change anything behaviorally. You can change anything you want. Not everything you want, right? That's the problem. You can become anything you want behaviorally, but you can't be everything you want. So you need to pick a small number.
What would have to happen at the end of next year to look back and consider this year a success. I think that really helps to just give you a bit more perspective. And it usually comes down to only a few things. Setting the bar unrealistically high does not increase your performance. Imagine this. Imagine that you went into a buffet and you made your plate as big as possible. You said, "I want all of these things. means I'm going to put all of this stuff on my plate and my stomach is going to expand to be able to fit it. That's not the way that our stomachs work and that is not the way that our workloads work. So, first rule, in order to pick something up, you have to put something down. Don't assume that just because you've loaded more onto your workload plate, your work capacity will expand to be able to fit it into your stomach. Now, that's not the way that it works. Make the assumption, I can do no more than I'm doing now. I can switch stuff, but I can't add more in. Maybe you can. Maybe you're going to be able to squeeze your phone time. Maybe you're going to be able to become more efficient, more productive, whatever. But it's safer to just assume this is the pie that I'm playing with. And in order to pick something up, I have to put something down.
That means I'm going to have to take something off the play. We don't think about subtraction cuz we think of addition. Unfortunately, you can't take somebody else's purpose or success. You can't wear it as a suit. It's a bad idea, right? Cuz it's going to not fit. Let go or be dragged. That means if you're not careful with how you design what it is that you chase after, you can spend your entire life realizing that you climbed a huge ladder that was leaning up against the wrong wall. The big picture goals are going to be hard for you to to get to. But if you just think one year ahead, okay, now we can start to talk about a plan to do that. If I could only achieve one thing today, the start of every day, if I could only achieve one thing today, what would that be? And it's the big thing. It's usually the scary thing. It's usually the thing that you probably don't want to do. How many times does someone go and clean the cupboard in the kitchen that hasn't been touched for 6 months? rearrange. I'll rearrange all of the plates because they don't want to have that conversation with their boss because they don't want to face that particular piece of work which is like big and scary and I don't really know how to tackle it, how to begin. You will do everything that doesn't need to be done in order to avoid the one thing that does. It's because it's a big scary task. People will endure months, years, decades of misery to avoid a couple of days of pain. And that makes sense. It's a good trade in some ways, but over time you're going to accumulate an awful lot of discomfort. Permanently being busy stops you from being able to listen to fleeting thoughts that are in the back of your mind.
And that quiet voice is usually the really powerful one. The answers you seek are in the silence you're avoiding.
In this training that I went through, you for for the moment maybe take all the spiritual part out. Simply the kung fu training, the Shaolin kung fu training. There is a saying which is shaolin kung fu literally means walking through the valley of pain. So what does it mean? When you are doing stretching stretching stretching stretching it's going to be painful. When you are doing strength training is going to be painful. When you do conditioning training it's going to be painful. So the whole pass on this martial art journey, it is just filled with working yourself up to the level of where it feels uncomfortable. Getting some consistency into the practice until the point where that uncomfortable feeling just started disappearing. Why? Because somehow you broke that initial comfort zone. So but then it doesn't end. Now next level is not that I do not feel pain. I also feel pain. Maybe I feel it later. But the essential part is that my connection, my relation between the pain of the body towards what would it affect in the way of how I take my decisions that is a different one. I feel the pain but at the moment I feel the pain but I see no necessity to still change something about my way right now. Why? Because I can take the pain. Whereas when you are not used to this pain you feel it and then it tells you let's say it's painful the mind okay is not good and so you directly change something and this is and this is just the difference. So it's not that I became numb. No, I just feel there is an additional layer that I can observe about myself. It is painful but it's okay for right now. This is absolutely inner work. This is nothing to do with doing work out here. It's inner work.
How does one begin the journey of doing that inner work? You give trust in the vision that when you are investing your time right now to become more aware of yourself, of your emotional state, then this is going to benefit your life. That's the starting point.
You believe in it.
You believe in it. So you don't do it because somebody tells you you're supposed to do it. You do it because you genuinely believe this is the way. Yeah. I want to know more about myself. I want to really understand what is it that I am made out of. You want to figure out is there something inside of myself? I tried to look away for many years, but I know it's still there and was afraid to look at it. All of these things, there's only one way to make yourself free. You need to become transparent. Yeah. If there are if there are spots inside of ourself where there's no light yet, it can't be. It can't be. Bringing light to everything that has been in the dark. This is another area of the past. which at some point everybody will face. Even though that this is not just like a saying but just the idea whatever you're doing, whatever you're thinking, whether people are around you or you're alone, just imagine there is one who always sees what you're doing. So live your life based on that. It is the elevated version of you. But it's true. It's you and you.
But this is one of the problems of over cooking your goals for the next 12 months. I think you can probably do two big things in 2026. Two big things. You could probably lose 20 lb and get a boyfriend that you really, really love. You can't do that and move cities and start a new business and and learn to play the piano. No. And that again is why don't go into a buffet and assume that however much food you put on the plate, your stomach will just expand to fit it in. Because what you're going to guarantee is that you fail next year. You can almost guarantee that you fail at doing this thing. Is it great to set your sights high? Yeah, that's real cool. And maybe you've got lots of things that you want to do, but just what would have to happen by the end of next year for you to look back on it and consider it a success. And what if you created a rank ordered list and okay, I need to kill one of these. And you left yourself with one or two. What's left? You only do one thing next year. Cross that off. Cross that off. Cross that. What am I left with? I really want to lose the weight. There we go. Now we can break that down into individual steps. I need to get a gym membership. I need to get some cool gym wear that makes me feel good as I go to the gym.
So 50, he uh he did his first album called Power of the Dollar and it's absolutely fantastic. But right before it was to be launched, he got shot and the producers dropped him on the pro dropped his the album. They didn't release it. They dropped him from Columbia Records. It's too dangerous. And so he was thinking, you know, the failure instead of if it had been a big hit would have gone to his head, he'd, you know, who knows what would have happened to him. Here he was like completely at back to square zero. In fact, worse, he had nothing. He done all this work and he had this price on his head and and nobody would come near him. And he wanted to learn what the lesson was from this from his this failure. Well, the lesson is I can't be dependent on a record label. They're too conserved. They're too cautious. I'm somebody who lives on the edge. I'm not going to put out a record. I'm going to do mixtapz and I'm going to sell them on the streets of of Queens and then Brooklyn and then Manhattan. He learned from that. He learned not to take success for granted and he built on that. And so he's not a one-hit wonder. So sometimes success when you're in your 20s is the worst thing that can happen to you because you have no discipline. You have no perspective. You think it's just going to keep going the way it is. You're not aware of all the dangers out there. You don't have life experience enough to realize how things can turn on you very quickly. I had had so much failure until I was essentially 39 years old, pushing 40 that I had perspective that I know what it's like to to fail. And so when I had success wasn't like, "Wow, I'm the greatest thing that ever happened. I can just live off this forever. My next book's going to be fantastic." No. I have a little voice in me that says, "Robert, you failed so many times. You're probably going to fail again." Right? You've seen so many people who started off hot and and and and bombed. I had experience to know that I can't take this for granted. I have to be careful. I have to be strategic. I have to build on it and not let the success go to my head. You know, you want to keep your feet on the ground. You want to know that failure is nipping at your buds. That put keeps you on the edge and you don't take your success for granted.
So, lessons about problems and stress. Number one, problems are a feature of life, not a bug. And there will never come a time when you have no problems. What did you you think you were going to wake up one day and there be no more problems? Like completing a video game level and going to a map where there's nothing there, right? Things are always going to incur problems. Your problems will change, but having problems is going nowhere. Uh number two, whatever negativity is consuming your thoughts probably won't matter in 3 months time. Like in 3 months you won't remember the corrosive texture of your own mind or the boring repetitive things that you thought or or maybe even what you worried about. I think what were you worrying about 3 months ago right now? Probably can't remember.
Remember, but all of the time that you spent worrying will have passed. So you're sacrificing your joy and your presence in the moment for a problem that you won't even be able to recall in the future. So learning comes from the edges. Number three, change is uncomfortable and it rarely occurs without a lot of stress.
Learning comes from the edges.
From the edges proximate zone of development.
What does that mean? You pushing yourself just beyond what you're comfortable with. And sometimes this can be emotional pain too. Leaving the job happens when you get pushed out of region beta on the bottom end or growth happens when you overextend yourself the right amount. Not so much that you get injured but so much that you're challenged that this is a new zone for you to get into. I'm curing up. Wow. And it expands your potential, your idea of what you're able to do. And it pushes you so that your system becomes more resilient on the other side. Many of the periods of radical important change that you have had in your life have only occurred because of severe challenges you faced. Like look back almost all of the big periods of growth in your life have germinated from your lowest points. Like in retrospect would you have avoided them if you could? Probably not. So yeah, this challenge is a gift. You can uh lean into discomfort as if you invited it through the door. It's like, oh, there we are. Hello.
When we talk about metrics of success, you talk about observable metrics and hidden metrics
of success.
Yeah. So, a lot of the time we'll trade a hidden metric for an observable metric. Something that's observable would be your job title, or your salary is per year, how many people know you, your bank balance, the size of your house, the car that you drive, things people can see.
Yeah, of course. The only way that your success can be judged is outwardly. So naturally, we trade something which people can't see for something that they can see. For instance, lots of people would trade a longer commute for a higher salary or um a better job title. One of the problems that you encounter with that is that the length of your commute is one of the most correlated uh stats with your happiness. Longer commutes reliably make people more miserable. And what's the hidden metric that you've lost by doing that? Well, that's less time with your family, with maybe your kids that are growing up, with your wife to connect. That's less time to pursue your own passions, even if your job is your passion. So, what about uh a more stressful career? going to move into a different industry that's way more stressful, but it pays more. Observable metric. What's the hidden metric? What about the peace of mind that you have as you go to sleep at night? What about what that does to your health and the quality of your relationships and your ability to be present on a weekend? You're not able to turn your phone off cuz your last job was 9 to5, but this one is 24/7. Well, it's difficult to say cuz you're like, people want and need real resources. I want to improve the quality of my family. That's a noble thing to do. But after a while, you have to admit if you already live a comfortable quality of life and you trade it, you you trade your happiness or your your peace in order to get more, you're making a bad choice because you're going to sacrifice something that you want, which is happiness, peace, connection for something that's supposed to get the thing that you want. There's a wonderful idea called productivity dysmorphia. So the inability to see your own success.
It's like uh to acknowledge the volume of your own output. So it sits at the intersection of burnout, imposter syndrome, and anxiety. And you think of it like ambition's alter ego. Basically like the pursuit of productivity spurs us more while robbing us of the ability to savor any of the successes that we achieve along the way. So first off, people are not particularly good judges of how productive they are. I think so many people are whipping themselves into submission saying you're not doing enough because in the past that motivated them to do more and after a while you have to accept I'm I'm doing quite a lot. And if you were an athlete on a sports team and your coach only ever pointed at you when you made a bad play, you wouldn't feel particularly motivated by that. But a lot of people have this sense of productivity debt. They wake up every day feeling as if they're already behind. And only if they dominate their entire day perfectly, can they drag themselves back up to some minimum level of acceptable output. And only then can they go to sleep that night without feeling like a loser. This means that your set point is loss. And the best thing that you can do if you crush the day is get to a draw. You never win. And then there's this sort of weird drill sergeant in the back of your mind that's saying, "All right, you can have a little bit of a break now, but just so you know, as soon as you wake up in the morning, it's all going to happen again." This seems to me that on every hero's journey, as soon as they make the commitment to go from where they are to where they want to be, their self-belief never waver. Like, sure, there's ups and downs in the journey and the progress, but their conviction doesn't slip. It's like at that moment the clouds parted and I was sure I was going to become a UFC fighter. I was going to become a businessman. I was going to get off drugs, change my mindset, whatever. In my experience, that's not the way it is at all. Like your entire journey of personal growth is just steeped in doubt and self-pity and uncertainty and it tarnishes the whole experience. It's not sexy. It's not cool. You're like, "This is supposed to be my rocky cut scene. and it's 3 and 1/2 minutes in the movies, but it's been 4 years for me. What's going on? There's not even the promise that there's any glory on the other side of it. And this is exactly why it's so much easier to just go back to your old patterns. I guess this lonely chapter idea is a consequence of what will happen when you go in pursuit of a big goal. You want to start the business, you want to quit the job, whatever. Explain to me what the lonely chapter is.
The lonely chapter describes a time in your life where you're so developed that you can't really resonate with your old set of friends, but you're not yet sufficiently developed that you've built a new set of friends.
Give me an example. You have decided to stop drinking. Your New Year's resolution is 6 months. I'm going to stop drinking. You can go out with your friends that want to go to the pub on an evening time, but you feel a little bit ostracized. So, your change is creating some friction between you and them. Your friends like to play Xbox on an evening time and that's how they hang out, but you want to start going to the gym, but your friends don't go to the gym. And then when you do hang out with them, you're talking about the gym cuz that's your new thing. And they're still talking about Xbox. So, there is a a friction that happens as you try to grow because if your friends don't grow at the same pace as you, you don't speak the same language. A friend referred to it as changing your dialect so much so that over time you and your friends don't even speak the same language anymore.
And it's very uncomfortable because it's tempting to go back to the old life that you're used to. The old patterns, the old routines, the old friend groups, the old everything. And you have to stop doing the things that you know bring you validation in the moment to start doing the things that you have no idea about whether it'll actually work. like you're going to tell me that I'm not going to go out with my friends this weekend cuz I'm going to keep my meditation streak going. Who even knows if meditation works, right? It's so much easier to just stay in the routine that you were previously doing the same sort of things. For you to pull away from that, you're going to have to do stuff usually that makes you more different, more easy to be mocked, and more alone. And the initial sad reality is that on your journey of personal growth, at some point you may need to leave a group of friends behind who aren't growing at the same pace as you. But the really sad reality is that if you do it a lot, you may have to do this multiple times throughout your life. And it's not a value judgment about who's better or who's worse. It's just a stark reality of what happens when you start to make changes in your life. People make small changes. They do little things, lose 5 lb or they change companies. But how many people do you know that have really changed their mindset, lost 50 or 100 pounds or change careers or moved from the city that they grew up in? It's rarer. And I think the reason that I love this lonely chapter idea is that it it names something that a lot of people feel is a bug, not a feature of personal growth, which is this discordance with their old patterns and their old friend groups and the fact that they don't know whether the uncomfortability is supposed to be there. Is this discomfort right? Is my self-doubt? Surely I should just believe and see it, believe it, achieve it. Am I not supposed to just be, you know, single-mindedly going toward my goal? This doubt is supposed to be there. I I can promise you that every single person who has gone from a place where they didn't want to be to one where they did has had to go through this lonely chapter and deal with all of this. You can just do things. Just do it anyway. Do it tired. Do it sad. Do it lonely. Do it without a role model. Because if you're waiting for somebody to come along and give you that helping hand, sometimes you're going to be waiting too long.
It reminds me so much of um Jeff Bezos's shareholder letter where he talks about resisting the equilibrium.
In his final 2020 sharehold shareholder letter said, "Differentiation is survival and the universe wants you to be typical." And the way that this doveetails into what you've said is your environment is very very much holding you in place. And actually in every facet of life, every organism is currently expending a huge amount of energy just to resist the pull to be typical.
Regression to the mean.
Exactly. So if you were to like leave your friendship group now, the the amount of energy it's going to take to stay untypical is tremendous. To be different in any context or environment, work is being done. Like to stay atypical. And I think about this as we come into the new year, which is if you're planning to be different, quit the job. Go and be the violinist in Peru. start the cupcake business, it's going to cost you so much energy to resist the equilibrium that you better, going back to what you said about subtracting things, you better save energy somewhere else.
You know, I had a neuroscientist on the podcast that it was the neuroscientist that discovered we have a biological budget of energy and literally like a bank account. And what tends to happen, I think, and why the the New Year stats are so horrific in terms of the amount of people that stick to their goals is we go in search of a new state, a new life that's going to cost us even more energy to resist the our current environment without budgeting for it by saving elsewhere. And I think about this through the lens of as a business owner because as a company we'll become like the mean the minute we stop the fight. The minute we stop experimenting, the minute we stop pushing the boundaries, the minute you give up the fight, you will become every other show. That's what I meant when I said problems are a feature of life, not a bug. Like there will be no day when you don't have any problems. And uh railing against it. Why is the flight delayed? Because flights get delayed. Because flights get delayed. That's why. And did you think that there was going to be a day when no flights were delayed? That you going to reach some escape velocity where this was no longer an issue? I love this analogy using escape velocity. Imagine that we've got a uh rocket ship here. So, when this is taking off on the launch pad is when it needs the most energy. The inertia is the highest, the resistance is the most. So, that's when you need to use whatever fuel you've got. Use the chip on your shoulder from the kids that bullied you in school. Use your desperate desire to be seen by that girl out there. use your need for validation from your parents, whatever it is. What happens when this takes off, this fuel source switches off and then the booster rockets come on. That's as you get to a different level of altitude and now you're using a different sort of fuel source and then this falls away, the bottom falls off and it keeps on going and then it gets into escape velocity. Use what you have at the start. And at the start, most people have way more discontent than they do love. There's I mean even this ties right back to New Year's resolutions because if I am going to make a change and reach escape velocity then I'm going to need to focus all my energy and therefore save leakage like save wasted energy in this moment of time and I I've heard you talk about this when you do your annual review that again it goes back to what I was saying like you do need to cut some [ __ ] and you can't have it all at the same time if you are going to change your life. But this is one of the problems of overcooking your goals for the next 12 months. I think you can probably do two big things in 2026. Two big things. You can probably lose 20 lb and get a boyfriend that you really, really love. You can't do that and move cities and start a new business and and learn to play the piano. No. And that again is why don't go into a buffet and assume that however much food you put on the plate, your stomach will just expand to fit it in. Because what you're going to guarantee is that you fail next year. You can almost guarantee that you fail at doing this thing. Is it great to set your sights high? Yeah, that's real cool. And maybe you've got lots of things that you want to do, but just what would have to happen by the end of next year for you to look back on it and consider it a success. And what if you created a rankordered list and okay, I need to kill one of these and you left yourself with one or two. What's left? You could only do one thing next year. Cross that off. Cross that off. Cross that. What am I left with? I really want to lose the weight. There we go. Now we can break that down into individual steps. I need to get a gym membership. I need to get some cool gym wear that makes me feel good as I go to the gym.
What is the most important things we haven't talked about? The strivvers who want to make make change, become someone else.
Stop taking life so seriously. Like no one is getting out of this game alive. Literally in three generations, no one will even remember your name. And if that doesn't give you liberation to just drop your problems for a moment and find some joy, I don't know what will. Like life is inherently ridiculous and guaranteed to end sooner or later. So, you might as well enjoy the ride. This is this deferred happiness syndrome thing, dude. Like, don't wait. Life really is happening right now. There there is this belief that once life's duties are out of the way, then you can finally start doing the thing you want to and fully living your life. It's uh called the provisional life. This sort of strange feeling that you're not yet in your real life. for now you're doing this thing or that but there's always the fantasy that at some point in future the real thing will come about. There is a kind of urgency that I think we could all do with and uh that's not to put pressure on people so that they feel um like a failure if they fall short. It's not to deny the fact that people have got real legitimate resource and time constraints that mean that they can't do a thing. But don't wait. This life really is happening right now. And I can't think of many times when you're going to regret trying to make something happen. You're just not listening to yourself. You've lost touch with who you are, the core of your being. You're on social media too much. You're listening to what other people are telling you. You're listening to what your parents told you you should be doing in life. Listening to what your friends think is cool. You're listening to what the culture is all about. You know, the entertainment industry, etc. You got to cut all that [ __ ] out. You got to listen to yourself. And you got to be a bit bold and you have to embrace what makes you different. What makes you different, what makes you particular strange, if you want to use another word, is your strength is your source of power. You've lost touch with it. Let's go back and try and find it. And that's the whole problem here. How do you find it? Well, it's a process. You have to be patient. It's not going to come like a light bulb in your head. Ah, I was meant to do this. That's not how it works. It takes time. To do anything in life takes time and hours and patience and work. And so, what the game of life involves is knowing your uniqueness, is knowing who you are, is knowing what makes you weird and what makes you odd. And the problem is is that we're social animals. And the pressure, continually honest, is to fit into a group, is to be like other people, to have their ideas, to have their values, to have their tastes, to dress like them. But look at all the powerful people in this world. They're one of a kind. They're different. They stand out for something that's truly different. You know, even Albert Einstein, there's nobody else like Anson. There's nobody like Da Vinci. That's where your power lies. Know who you are. Know what you're, you know, deep down your core. What you love, what you hate, and what you were destined to create in this world. That's like the most important process you can go through. The whole thing has to start from you. It can't start from the world. It can't start from what other people are doing. It can't start from what's sexy. It has to come from within. If it doesn't come from within, then you're going to be floundering for years and years and years. You have this quality, you can't really control it. It's who you are. So, make it work for you. Find the way that it's a strength and see it as a strength and use it. And don't have second thoughts about it. Use it for power. If if everything is easy in life, um if everyone loves what you're going to do and you have no enemies, you have no opposition, nothing to resist, you're just going to be mush, you're not going to amount to anything. You're not going to be able to push yourself. You're not going to be able to change, evolve. Muhammad Ali said, "If I didn't have Joe Frasier around,
I would not have become the great boxer that I am." Um, I mean, he would have been a great boxer anyway, but a a nemesis like Joe Frasier put me on a a much higher level. Is there not a line in Batman where the Joker says,
"No, you you me." But it it is the truth that without the Joker, what's the Batman?
Yeah. I I I love the idea you should uh relish the chance to prove yourself. Um, pressure is a privilege in that way and because the harshness of your circumstances often transforms you. People who have it easy in life never have to work on themselves, right? But people who have the worst circumstances in them, they're either crushed by it or they use it to develop themselves. And it brought out best in me. It made me do things that I had never done before. It made built up my self-confidence. So, it's the equivalent of somebody doubting you because there were a lot of doubters around and a lot of people thinking, "Well, Robert's kind of finished here. We thought he was this, but he's not really." And so, having that kind of pressure, like we talked about deadlines and having people doubt you, it can crush you, but it can also make you a lot stronger. It can make you a better fighter. You know, when you focus on something, the world just kind of opens up. But you have to be focusing on the right thing. At so many turning points in my life, I could have been discouraged. You know, I had somebody say, "Robert, you're never going to be a good writer in life. My parents tried to funnel me this way or that way." I was stubborn and I was rebellious and I did my own thing. Because of that, I have a different voice from other people, right? I'm searching for that voice, for that voice of somebody who's different, who has something different to say, who has speaks in a different tone of voice, that has their blood and their personality in their writing. And I don't find it often, but when I do, it's a great thing. And so to me, success in life, it's a process of becoming who you actually are and realizing what it is. And is there a strategy that young people or really anybody that feels lost or aimless in their life should and is able to deploy to find their purpose to find the direction the the thing they should be aiming at. You have to go inward. So you have to resist the pull that our culture gives you. You have to also really want this. That's probably what it really comes down to. Are you unhappy? Are you frustrated? Are you hitting kind of rock bottom? Is this a turning point in your life where you realize if I keep going this way in 5 years, it's going to be really serious? Okay, it has to be important to you and you have to have a sense of urgency. And with that sense of urgency, you have to make some decisions. And one of the decisions that's absolutely essential is to pay less attention to what other people are doing, to pay less attention to what other people are saying, to pay less attention to what people are telling you you should be doing, and to go inward and think about yourself, and think about what you love and what your interests are that have nothing to do with what people are doing on social media, the things that grab you, that excite you deeply inside in a way that's almost irresistible. The people out there, you have that. There's something like that. You had it when you were a child. You had it when you were 2 3 4 years old, 5 years old, and you've lost it because you're listening too much to other people. So, it's kind of like archaeology would be the metaphor. You have to dig and dig and dig and find those bones and those relics and those artifacts from your past, the things that really excite you as well as the things that you hate. There's a lesson for people, right? But it all begins from a sense of urgency. I can't go on this way. I have to find something that I love. When you're 20 or 21, maybe you don't feel that urgency because you're so young. But you have to be careful because time passes really quickly. Those years in your 20s, they go by faster than you think. You don't learn anything if you're not excited by it. So, you have to have a sense of fun and adventure about this. So discovering what your life's task can't be this dreary, boring thing that Robert's advocate you do where you, oh, I have to spend time with myself. I have to look, you know, do a journal, blah, blah, blah. No, it's fun. It's an adventure trying different things that fit into this general shape of what you were destined for. It's a blast. So, I don't want your life to be boring. I want you to learn. I want you to have adventures, but you have to have a sense of direction, a sense of purpose to guide the kind of different adventures that you go on. Don't be too hard on yourself and um be patient and it's a kind of a mix that you have to go through a bit of a dance. So on the one hand, you want to be serious about life. Life doesn't go on forever. Your youth will be over in 10, 12 years. You better believe it. It goes faster than you can imagine, right? So take it seriously. You want to realize what your life's task is. You want to develop those skills that will make it so when you're in your 30s, things will come together as they fortunately did for me. It's a common story that 31 32 is is that year where things turn around for people, right? But on the other hand, you don't want to be so damn serious, so damned linear in your thinking, I've got to head down this path to make this amount of money, etc. You're young. Have some fun, have some adventure, have some excitement, but at the same time, also have that sense of discipline and that sense of purpose. You can do both things at the same time. We are born into a very, very strange and mysterious and wondrous world. You take everything for granted, but you don't realize that to be alive, the odds are absolutely astronomical. To be around with all this technology where we were as humans 20,000 years ago, something you can't even begin to fathom. And when you're a child, you ask these questions. You know, Albert Einstein said the same thing. You know, genius is able to keep questioning, to be that child, to keep wondering about things, right? So your ability to wonder, to ask questions, to not feel like you know all the answers isn't a beautiful thing. It's not just to make you more intelligent. It also makes you happier. Cynics start from a place where they know everything. The world is just so rotten. Everyone's out for power. Everyone's like, I'm like an ulterior motive. It's all just about these, you know, you're really not interested in other people, Robert. You're interested in making money, right? Cynicism reduces everything to this one level. It has nothing to do with reality because reality is much richer and weirder and more mysterious than that. When you're a cynic, you're missing the beauty of life. But also, people don't like to be around cynics because yeah, people like maybe some sarcasm. I don't deny that. But people want to feel that sense of innocence. They want to feel excited. They want to feel enthusiastic. And if you're a Debbie Downer, if everything is like, "But oh, that's what's really going on or you're not really about blah blah blah." But eventually they're going to push you aside cuz they don't want to hear that kind of stuff. Particularly young people today, I mean, maybe it's always been that way, are so afraid of being different. They're so afraid of being odd. You have that potential. It's just you're not putting the effort into. You were lazy. You want to fit into the group. You want to conform because it's easy. But your oddness, what makes you weird? What makes you different? That little strange quirk in how you want to dress yourself. That little strange quirk in your musical tastes. That little quirk in the food that you like to eat. That is who you are. Those are signs from deep within from your core or from your soul that are this is who you are. And if you lose that, not only are you not going to be successful in life, you will also lose yourself. And you will be mis you will be unhappy. You'll be unfilled. You'll be alienated from who you are. And you can get away with that when you're young because you're happy. You look good. You've got energy. Things are going right. You get into your 30s and you're like everybody else. You don't know who you are and you don't know what you like anymore. You're just following the trends. You start to get depressed and you start going down this this rabbit hole and things can turn really ugly. So, you need a bit of courage in life. If you need to go, okay, I am weird. I am strange. You know, lean into it. When I had the 48 laws of power, when it first when I first wrote the book, it was a very strange looking book. And it reflects my own strangeness. Things on the margins, stories, everything broken up, images, quotes here and there. It's kind of how my brain is, a hodgepodge, kind of a mess really. And the publishers, they bought the book, but then they came back to us and they said, "Robert, can you kind of maybe make this more like other books? Can you get rid of all those sections and everything?" And I said, "No, take it or leave it. This is the book as it is. It's odd. It's strange." They didn't like that because if it doesn't fit into all the other books that I've had successful, it's too big of a risk. If this movie isn't like the movies that were made last year, who knows? We'll go see it. people are so conservative. But because it was odd, it stood out and it was successful. If I had succumbed and I compromised and made it more like other books, I wouldn't be here talking to you. So sometimes you need a little bit of cooness. You need a little bit of courage. You need to stand up and say, "I'm okay being different." It's fascinating that lots of people, maybe most people, want to be extraordinary in some way, but also don't want to stand out in a way that allows them to be mocked. But, you know, the latter is the price of the former. You can't behave the way that everybody else does and expect to not get the results that everybody else gets. You know, you have to get out of the this this way of thinking that that so many people have, which everything has to be simple and linear. and I'm headed this direction. There's got to be a solution. Like I'm hacking my way to the truth. Life doesn't work that way. Life is very complex. This world is filled with so much choice that it's difficult in a way to take a decision which direction to go, what is right to do, what is not right to do. But ultimately it's only yourself who knows the answer. Which means learn more about yourself. This is where it starts because if you have the wrong perspective of who you are, what you are, everything else in this lifetime you base your decisions on is just not going to be placed in the right direction. You want to reach your goal, how to reach the goal the quickest, be focused with your energy. Meaning, be focused with the mind. Don't lose the goal from the mind. Whatever you do from the moment of waking up until the evening, whatever you do,
Keep the goal in mind. This is the quickest way of making this goal become real. The truth is, the lifetime of what you carry right now and what I carry right now, it's limited. And now, just imagine you would be, let's say, the director of your own movie. Jump out of the body and watch yourself right now when you are writing your story. How do you want to write the story? Do you want to feel uncomfortable, feel unsafe, feel unloved, feel unsatisfied with your whole life, cry, or anything like this? Or how do you imagine what is a really nice way of living for you the next 50 years? And based on that, purpose can be different. You say, "I do like to travel. I do like to invest this lifetime in this body to have the feeling, at least, that I can contribute something to all the fellow brothers and sisters that are around there." It makes me like I wake up. I like to do it. It gives me purpose. So, it is something very, very personal.
There is always the struggle between doing and being. Doing: I would ask, "Why are you doing?" So, why do you want to go into action? Mostly, there is a goal. The goal: Why do you have that goal? Because you're aiming at receiving something that, in the moment where you have it, apparently you are lacking. So, that means this type of goal setting, in my perspective, I would automatically refer to it already that your goal setting already comes from a space of lack. You feel like you're lacking something. That's why you need to do. You feel like you're lacking something. That's why you need to educate yourself.
Okay, so this is the one direction. Now, coming back, maybe it sounds again too philosophical. Connected with the source, there's nothing to add and there's nothing to take away from you. So, apparently, when somebody has this very, very high ambition of doing something, achieving something, it is coming from the idea of wanting to nourish or create an identity. An identity that represents something that you think you want to represent. So, this is the one area, the doing versus the being.
There are five hindrances that could make it difficult for you to reach that goal in the mind. There is sensory desires, ill will, dullness, restlessness, and then self-doubt. I make it super simple. When it comes to the five hindrances, literally, it is like this: Whatever appears in our life, if I have my goal set right now, what you are not supposed to do is to witness something. And now, if you have, like, the number one sensual desire, sensory desire, what we tend to do is we start to pull things towards us. Okay, that's number one.
The second thing, what not to do, this is what it all belongs to that family of non-judgment, is like when ill will, something appears in your life. Something you witness. Yeah. You meet a person you don't want to meet, you get a message you don't want to read that message, whatever it is, and you try to avoid it by doing actions in order to push it away from you. So, what it ultimately means is don't do any of them. Because whatever you try to hold on to, the nature of things is that this is happening >> swinging away. >> It's going to move away from you. And whatever you try to avoid and push away from you is just a question of time until it's going to move, like, pretty close towards you.
Also, in the way of how it's expressed, don't touch the water. If you don't want to have a life that is too shaky, don't touch the water. Because in the moment you touch, your touch is the initiation for the ripples to appear. Same way, you want to follow that goal. You want to have it easy along that goal. Don't touch any additional water along your goal. Don't touch it because you like something, and don't touch it because you dislike something. Because when you walk towards the goal and you do here and here and here, you're just going to ripple your whole surroundings, which ultimately means your energy is being just drawn away from your initial goal. You don't like something, and then you invest the energy there. You like something, and it draws your energy back to there. Don't push, don't pull. Be very aware who you are letting into your circle and ultimately rely on yourself. Maintain the purity of your intention.
How does it help people to know the hard stuff? Well, because I do think that it is symbolizing this way of life. It is symbolizing the patterns of what you are going to go through in this lifetime. Living this lifetime is not easy. The more wishes you have, the more difficult it becomes. The more ambitious you are, the more you will have to face. So, bottom line is, I do think that in the moment where you just on a regular basis put yourself consciously and willingly in different situations and circumstances that actually represent a little bit the structures of life. There are moments in this lifetime where you are going to be super tense, super tense. And then it's good to know already how does it feel and what is it that you can do? Well, to learn and release the tension. That's why releasing tension is also a big part of the exercises. The one thing is learning to release tension. The other thing is, like, when you are too sloppy, when you're too slacky, how to increase your tension, how to increase the energy level again for you to get back into structure again. So, it's always this balance. >> And so you're almost training to do hard things because hard things are an inevitability of the life we live. >>
When we talk about metrics of success, you talk about observable metrics and hidden metrics >> of success. >> Yeah. So, a lot of the time, we'll trade a hidden metric for an observable metric. Something that's observable would be your job title, or your salary per year, how many people know you, your bank balance, the size of your house, the car that you drive, things people can see. >> Yeah. Of course, the only way that your success can be judged is outwardly. So, naturally, we trade something which people can't see for something that they can see. For instance, lots of people would trade a longer commute for a higher salary or a better job title. One of the problems that you encounter with that is that the length of your commute is one of the most correlated stats with your happiness. Longer commutes reliably make people more miserable. And what's the hidden metric that you've lost by doing that? Well, that's less time with your family, with maybe your kids that are growing up, with your wife to connect. That's less time to pursue your own passions. Even if your job is your passion. So, what about a more stressful career? Going to move into a different industry that's way more stressful, but it pays more observable metric. What's the hidden metric? What about the peace of mind that you have as you go to sleep at night? What about what that does to your health and the quality of your relationships and your ability to be present on a weekend? You're not able to turn your phone off because your last job was 9 to 5, but this one is 24/7.
Well, it's difficult to say because you're like, people want and need real resources. I want to improve the quality of my family. That's a noble thing to do. But after a while, you have to admit, if you already live a comfortable quality of life and you trade it, you trade your happiness or your peace in order to get more, you're making a bad choice because you're going to sacrifice something that you want, which is happiness, peace, connection, for something that's supposed to get the thing that you want.
There's a wonderful idea called productivity dysmorphia. So, it's the inability to see your own success. M >> It's like, to acknowledge the volume of your own output. So, it sits at the intersection of burnout, impostor syndrome, and anxiety. It's you think of it like ambition's alter ego, basically. The pursuit of productivity spurs us to do more while robbing us of the ability to savor any of the successes that we achieve along the way. So, first off, people are not particularly good judges of how productive they are. I think so many people are whipping themselves into submission saying, "You're not doing enough," because in the past, that motivated them to do more. Yeah. And after a while, you have to accept, "I'm doing quite a lot." And if you were an athlete on a sports team and your coach only ever pointed at you when you made a bad play, you wouldn't feel particularly motivated by that. But a lot of people have this sense of productivity debt. They wake up every day feeling as if they're already behind. And only if they dominate their entire day perfectly, can they drag themselves back up to some minimum level of acceptable output. And only then can they go to sleep that night without feeling like a loser. This means that your set point is loss. And the best thing that you can do if you crush the day is get to a draw. You never win. And then there's this sort of weird drill sergeant in the back of your mind that's saying, "All right, you can have a little bit of a break now, but just so you know, as soon as you wake up in the morning, it's all going to happen again."
It seems to me that on every hero's journey, as soon as they make the commitment to go from where they are to where they want to be, their self-belief never wavers. Like, sure, there's ups and downs in the journey and the progress, but their conviction doesn't slip. It's like, at that moment, the clouds parted and I was sure I was going to become a UFC fighter. I was going to become a businessman. I was going to get off drugs, change my mindset, whatever. In my experience, that's not the way it is at all. Like, your entire journey of personal growth is just steeped in doubt and self-pity and uncertainty, and it tarnishes the whole experience. It's not sexy. It's not cool. You're like, "This is supposed to be my Rocky cut scene. It's 3 and 1/2 minutes in the movies, but it's been 4 years for me. What's going on? There's not even the promise that there's any glory on the other side of it." And this is exactly why it's so much easier to just go back to your old patterns.
Stop taking life so seriously. Like, no one is getting out of this game alive. Literally, in three generations, no one will even remember your name. Then if that doesn't give you liberation to just drop your problems for a moment and find some joy, I don't know what will. Like, life is inherently ridiculous and guaranteed to end sooner or later. So, you might as well enjoy the ride.
This is this deferred happiness syndrome thing, dude. Like, don't wait. Life really is happening right now. There is this belief that once life's duties are out of the way, then you can finally start doing the thing you want to and fully living your life. It's called the provisional life. This sort of strange feeling that you're not yet in your real life. For now, you're doing this thing or that, but there's always the fantasy that at some point in the future, the real thing will come about.
There is a kind of urgency that I think we could all do with, and that's not to put pressure on people so that they feel like a failure if they fall short. It's not to deny the fact that people have got real legitimate resource and time constraints that mean that they can't do a thing. But don't wait. Life really is happening right now. And I can't think of many times when you're going to regret trying to make something happen.