Transcription
Do hard things. Not because it's fun, but because the win actually means something. You bled for it. You broke for it. You earned it. Easy wins are forgettable. Hard ones change you. That's the point. And that's your line. Everything is hard and no one cares.
They wouldn't be dreams if they were, and you wouldn't call them wins if they were easy. Cuz they would just be you tying your shoes. And what it was once a win when you were five is no longer a win when you're confident. And with increased confidence comes increased stakes. You have to be willing to bet more, put more on the line to win bigger. Which means, like if you're a billionaire playing $10 hands of poker is a complete waste of time.
Uh, Gabe from I Prevail, he's the drummer from I Prevail. You will always think you suck. That's okay. It's okay to suck compared to your standards. As you grow, so will your standards. That doesn't mean you actually suck. Increase in capacity, you increase in standards. And given that your standards will always outstrip your capacity, there will always be this felt sense lack between where I am and where I want to be. But, yeah, that Mark Manson line I think is really important in sort of an era of AI because you can speed run or shortcut getting the outcome without putting in the requisite inputs. Now, because everybody's obsessed with leverage and trying to get as many outputs from as few inputs as possible, that does make sense. But when you begin to fully detach it from it and you don't focus on the journey that got you there in the same way and you're not scrutinizing the outputs with the same level of finetude and and resolution you use.
Cost.
Yes. Yes. And it's not just the outputs that matter. It's not just the output and this is where the sort of leverage crowd doesn't fully come into reality. It doesn't come into contact with the way that humans are telling themselves the story of their life. If all, if you could come up with some sort of super quick code that would write 100 100-million-dollar leads for you, the entire project would feel different. Your process of getting that, it could be word for word the exact same. Take every word that I've written and create this book based on this brief. Think I think this, this, this sits at the discovery between saying the output of your life is who you become and the aggregate set of behavior that you've learned over your life, or if the output of your life is the stuff that you, that exists as a result of you being here. I would say that when I go through harder times, I lean more towards like this is happening for me. And when I'm going through easier times, it's like I'm hap- I, I am happening to it.
Yeah. Yeah.
All right.
Yeah. I'm happening to reality.
The world will reward you in proportion to your courage, not your intellect. The most dangerous person in the world is the one who continues to show up every day, even when the rewards are not guaranteed. Your potential is determined by the amount of uncertainty you're able to tolerate and how long you can tolerate it for. You can beat 99% of people if you can master the shame of rejection, the burden of repetition, and the pain of feedback.
I was asked, um, if you could transfer only one trait to your son, what would it be? Um, and I've really thought a lot about it. I was like, all the traits, what would I trait? What would I transfer? And I think it's courage. Because if you don't have courage, nothing else matters. Like you can't take the, you can't take any action. You can't do anything worth doing. You can't stand for anything. Because you have no courage. Um, and so I think that's why it's, it's so much more preferable to be a failure than a coward. And I think that I would hope that I could transfer just that lesson and try and reinforce as many times as I can in his upbringing that like you have to, you have to take jumps and you have to lose and you have to be willing to lose and then realize that losing doesn't actually make you a loser because losing is the, is the, is the first signal on the path to winning. But like not playing is the actual signal for, for a forever loss.
What is courage to you?
Being willing to take action where there's a large short-term cost with an uncertain delayed benefit. So if you want to start a business and you think that you're going to get made fun of or snide remarks or like, "Oh yeah, you're doing your podcast thing again." Oh yeah, don't, don't, don't, don't miss out, right? You know, don't miss Friday night. It's a big podcast. Um, you know you're going to suffer that short-term. That's a known cost. And then the payoff is delayed and uncertain. Like not only will it come later. If it were guaranteed, if you knew you were going to make a million dollars doing a podcast, then you'd be like, "Whatever, [ __ ] it." Like, it, it takes significantly less courage. But I think it's the fact that it is unknown and delayed. So you basically have to be willing to get kicked in the nuts and multiple times and sometimes for extended durations before the hope that you will get something. But I think the only way to, to, to get through that kind of kicked in the nuts period for however long it's going to be, um, is realizing that you have two paths. One that is guaranteed, which is that the path you're currently on will not get you where you want to go. And the other path, it is not guaranteed to get you where you want to go, but it's the only one where you have a shot where you do.
Do more hard things every day is a great mantra, but it should be less about ice baths and more about making that decision you've been putting off for 3 months.
I think that there's been a big misconception around hard stuff, which is just that like running a marathon necessarily means that you can have a hard conversation with your wife, um, by saying, "I go, I do hard things." Um, but those hard things don't necessarily generalize. And so, I think domain specificity is much more uh narrow unless you decide to generalize to an identity label of like, "I am the type of person who can do hard things because I ran this marathon or because I do these ice baths," and then as a result I can then generalize that label to other behaviors. Um, but if you can make that label and identify with it, then you don't need to run the marathon in order to do the hard thing. You just need the label.
I think it's being cognizant of what, what other, what outside forces are influencing your behavior in a way that is aversive or against your goals. And so, if you're like, "I want to start a business," but I am afraid of what other people will say, then it means that we are allowing those other people to control your behavior. I think when you say it in really plain terms like they're like, "Wow, I didn't know I was giving them that much power of my life." It's like, "I'm not doing this because of them," which means they control me. And to me, like the hard thing is in some ways just not allowing that control to persist or to keep going. But I do think that if you, if for whatever reason you tell yourself a narrative that that you, because, because you did this hard thing, you can do all hard things, then that's amazing, and by all means, if someone's like, "I started doing jiu-jitsu and it completely changed my life." It's like, "That's awesome," but it probably isn't because you learned how to do guard better. Uh, it's probably because like what guard, what learning to do guard meant for you changed these other series of behaviors down the line. The guys who are like, can have quote hard conversations, the attorney who can get through all these complex ideas and have whatever, then sucks on at jiu-jitsu or sucks at in the weight room, or doesn't try hard. I think, um, I just think that skills are more specific unless you generalize them. I think it's, it's creating labels and identity with personality. And so if we, if we, if we ident-, [clears throat] if we define personality by the aggregate of how you behave in all conditions, right? So, all these conditions, how you act is your personality. The label we ascribe to that personality would then be the identity.
Mhm.
And so, if we decide to change that label, then that label, this is getting a little technical, but basically becomes a global reinforcer for your behavior. Like, "I am this. I am honest." And so, we make this label, and then honest has a lot of sub-behaviors underneath of it that we then act because we believe that honest is good. And so, we want to act in accordance with this global reinforcer for ourselves. And so, when we enter a new situation, we think, "Okay, what is in alignment? What behavior is most aligned with this label?" And then we do that. And then when we don't do, when we don't act that way, then we feel guilty because we broke our own rules of behavior.
So, the big lesson here is just because you're doing hard things in one domain does not mean that it crosses over into all domains unless you purposefully try to make your identity wrapped up around it.
Um, so, like let's say you have that story of you went through this hard thing, and then you survived, then it basically serves as a reminder of the reinforcer of the behaviors you did to get through it. And so, it's almost like, um, with a kid who's smaller, if you're like, "Hey, remember last time you did this, you got ice cream?" Um, if you remind them of that reward, then they're more likely to repeat the behavior. And so, I think we basically use that narrative as a reminder to in the short term increase the relative value of a reinforcer. And so, if we think about like, what is motivation in general? That's functionally what you're doing if you motivate someone. Like, if you sell someone something, for the short term, you increase the relative value of a specific reinforcer. You didn't wake up uh wanting to buy cologne, but you see an ad, and for the short period of time that the ad goes on, it increases the relative value of smelling good. Uh, and so as a result, it changes your behavior and then you buy. And so I think stories function that same way where we use them to motivate ourselves in the short term to do the desired behavior that might be less comfortable in the short term, but we're reminded about the larger reinforcing event that we had in the past.
I think some people really do hard things and that's what they capture online is a fraction of what they really do. And I think there are people who 100% of the hard things they do.
Yeah, and they're not even that hard because they've got a squad of people behind them.
The three-step process of how to win. Number one, realize no one is coming to save you. Number two, take responsibility for your current position. Number three, be willing to sacrifice who you are for who you want to be.
I think that those three is really all about power. In the realization, so the probably in sequence, probably the first one should come first, which is you own everything. It's like, okay, if I own everything, then you could still hope that someone saves you, but it still relies on someone else to change your condition. And so it's like, okay, I own all these outcomes. Um, I'm not going to rely on someone else to change my condition. But you're still there, which means you have to take the third step, which is that I have to sacrifice, you have to give up, um, something in order to get something else. And I think I think where people actually stay stuck the longest in their careers from an entrepreneurship perspective or just from a personal development perspective is, um, the trades that we are unwilling to make. It's basically the desire to have everything at the same time. And, and the easiest analogy I have is like, it is totally reasonable to want to have a mountain view and to be on the beach and be walking distance from a Whole Foods. Um, but you probably will not find a place that has all three of those because they are all at apparent contradictions or, you know, apparent odds. And so there, but so, so what happens is we just stay in this paralysis of indecision because we feel like all paths are settling and I think there's this movement or narrative around like never settle and things like that, but people mistake never settle for never make trades. And so we have this obsession with optionality or optionality maxing, but options are only valuable when taken. And so when we never take the option, which means we don't cash in the option that we have available, like some options need to be taken and when they are taken other options disappear because just having maximum potential does not mean maximum reality because you need to commit. Which is the elimination of alternatives. And so like there, I mean, show me anything that was worth doing that did not require commitment, which is an elimination of alternatives, a trade-off. And so in the beginning of our lives when we're younger, we are, we are praised for maximizing our potential, right? How can we have as many colleges accept us? How can we have all the best grades? How can we have all the paths in front of us? [music] But I think many people know people who are really successful early on by for maximizing potential but not realizing potential.
And I think the gap between the maximization of potential and the realization of potential is the commitments that we're willing to make, which is the trades, the elimination of the alternatives when we have to start cashing those options in and realizing that some of them are, are never going to come to fruition because we can only have one life and some of those trades are permanent. You can only not have a kid until you have a kid and then at that point you have a kid. Right, there's no going back, right? You know, some decisions in life don't have refunds.
Um, and I, I, I think I think that is what I would say maybe in the earlier part of my, my career, especially single guys because I think a lot of that's like really prevalent in social media right now, is just options maxing. But we just, even, even in the attempt to options max, you still close off other options, which is that like, you will not have the benefits of, let's say, a committed marriage early on. And like, you will not have the benefits of like a very large business if you try to pursue five or don't pursue any because you want to not make commitments.
Don't listen to other people's opinions. Friendly reminder that most people are fat, poor pansies and don't listen to them when they try to deter you from whatever it takes to succeed. The average person will always try to keep you average. It makes sense that if you want to be extraordinary, you will do things that an ordinary person would see as extra. This is the really hard part that I had to come to terms with. It's that a lot of people want to see you fail because it justifies the risk that they chose not to take. We always have to think about listening to the people who are closest to our goals, not closest to us.
We yearn for the approval of many people who don't have lives that we want. And so if they have a specific life, then it means that that is what they think is valuable. And if we don't want what they have, then why would we value their weight on our decisions? And so it's like, you have this, they're like, we have this mold that is my life. Your life no longer fits my mold. And you're like, right, I don't like the pot that that mold makes. And so somehow when people state the obvious, which is that you were living your life against my preferences, we somehow feel like that needs to change because when we're younger and growing up,
We aren't leave.
Yeah, you can't leave and you do need to live your life according to your parents' preferences, your teachers' preferences, your classmates' preferences, your principal's preferences. Um, but when you get older, you do have to break the mold and decide what mold you want and in so doing you will be against their preferences. And if the vast majority people have a life that you don't want, then you're going to do things that the vast majority people don't agree with.
You only need to get rich once. So you might as well work as hard as you can to get it done as fast as you can. The fastest way to attract what you want in life is to deserve it by doing so much work it becomes unreasonable not to achieve it. Do so much work it would be unreasonable that you fail. The seat at the table is yours if you want it. Do the hard work, build the skills no one can ignore, adjust your mindset to match where you want to go, then pull up a chair and sit down. You want to work with such relentless obsession that when people see you they're grateful they don't have to compete against you. The fastest shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts. Do the work. I think I think there's a lot of power in in knowing that you're doing every single thing you possibly can to win. Because if you are, if you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, "I have controlled the controllable." I think there's some love entirely. The controllable, not the uncontrollable. Those things can happen. I could do my book launch and there can be a lightning strike and there can be no power in Vegas. That can happen. But in the event that that happens, if you, if you leave it all on the field, if you have nothing left in the tank, I don't think there's a feeling that's more satisfying as a man than knowing that you've given everything that you had to give to an endeavor that you deemed meaningful. A man must have a quest. And I just really, really like that.
It's like you need to do something. You need to go towards something. And your quest could be the best being the best father, it could be, it could be being the best musician, the best podcaster, the best businessman, or the best tire replacer, or the best sweeper. Whatever it is, but like I think I think being questless, being aimless and never being able to use the violence that you are capable of in the pursuit of endeavor that you find meaningful is where people find themselves lost and without hope because
hopelessness comes from a perceived lack of options. We don't know what to do. Anxiety comes from many options but no priorities. And so there's many things to do but we don't know for sure which one. And so a quest remedies both of those because you have one path that you're clear on and you know the only thing that you have left to do is destroy everything in your path to getting to where you want to go. And I'm using strong language on purpose rather than saying that you literally need to destroy everyone but more so the ideas, the thoughts, the doubts, the, the perceived risks that aren't even really risks. Um, those are the things that we have to march triumphantly towards and I think, um, having someone in your corner, uh, who believes in that better version of you is one of the, the rarest gifts that you can have in life. And there's a line from 300 that I love. The queen says to Leonidas, she's, she says, uh, "Come back with your shield or on it." And I think that we all want a spouse or a partner who can, who can reward us for the good fight because what that queen is saying in that moment is not like, "I want you to win." She's like, "I want you to die trying." So, and I think that's, that's like all we, I mean, to be fair, that's literally all we will do is die trying. All of us will die trying and I think, um, we'd rather all of us will die, some of us will die trying.
You're behind because you're in a rush. And you're in a rush because you fell behind. You fell behind because you're in a different season than the people you're comparing yourself to. You're not behind. You're just early.
Yeah, it's measuring the output difference with, um, without comparing the input difference. I think it's basically it. So, it's, it's, it's, it's comparing outputs without comparing inputs. And I really just think it comes down to that at the most basic level. Now, most of the time, um, you are early because most people who make that, I'll call it, uh, error in judgment are earlier in their careers.
And I also don't think there's anything necessarily wrong. Like, a lot of people like comparison is the thief of joy. Um, I don't agree with that. I think comparison is how you measure things. Like, this, this, this is the discrepancy. Labeling the discrepancy as bad is the thief of joy.
Yeah.
Comparison in general is how you can know what the discrepancy looks like between what you want and what you have so that you can fix it. So, we should compare. Absolutely. You should compare yourself to Rogan. I'm just using you. But like, you know, I, I, I should compare myself to Elon. Of course I should. Um, so I can look at the massive discrepancy between, between me and Elon. Um, and that just gives me clarity on what things I need to do to try and decrease that. I think that the first, the first action you take when you have not been reinforced for an action you do through modeling. So, and this is why we do these types of podcasts, I assume. I mean, is that if you haven't done the hard thing or the hard thing that you want to do or taking the better, taking the risk, we look for other people who have been the penguins who jumped off the edge first. And was there an alligator? Well, not an alligator for penguins, but polar bear at the bottom to to eat them. Or did they swim and get to the next iceberg and then they found whatever? So we look at other people and so modeling is a very real way to how you learn everything when you're a child is you look at what other people do, good things happen to them, okay, I'm going to do that. And so in the short term we model the long-term play is that once you take that first step, ideally you don't get eaten by a polar bear and instead you also get a fish and then you go up and then you get reinforced for that and then basically every moment after that is your own experience becomes the loop. But the first jump comes from looking at whatever everyone else does and then takes the jump. Now where that's so difficult to do is that you're looking what everyone else is doing or at least the people that you want to emulate, which is, you know, really important like don't listen to people closest to you, listen to people closest to your goals. Which is not as nice as people often not. I want to listen to them, I want to look at, I want to model their behavior. But then also still ignoring all of other people so it's like I'm listening to these people and ignoring these people but behavior is tough because you're still valuing other people a lot. And so I think this is why so many, I would say again, I come from the entrepreneur side, but like, successful entrepreneurs have a very first principles approach thinking because at some point no one has gone to the moon. And you just have to say like, does physics prevent me from doing this? And then when you reason everything from the ground up, you're able to find discrepancies between what people believe and what's true and that's obviously where opportunity exists.