Transcription
Most of the things you need to do, you already know what to do, and you delay doing them under the guise of having a better plan. But the reality is that your plan is always going to change as soon as you get new information. And so the point is to start. Period.
And learn. I love this from, from Andy Forel. He said, "Personal excellence is the ultimate rebellion." And so I think, like, you want to be a rebel? Be excellent, and do it for you. Like you want to stick it to the man? Now, just be great. You just have to be able to do things without seeing an immediate reward. Like, if there's one meta-skill that overshadows all of this, it's your ability to delay gratification—is to delay a moment of reward.
I will read you the quote that Lila had framed and put in my office: "Ask the girl, shoot the shot, launch the business, run the ad, quit the job, take the risk. Cuz when you're 85, 5 years old and on your deathbed, you're not going to wish you had fewer crazy stories."
I think most people have the potential to be exceptional. And I think most people are peculiar in their own way. They just st that because they want to be accepted by most people. But in so doing, never accomplish what they want to do because they conform. It comes down to truly valuing your opinion of yourself more than other people's opinion of you.
The real world's very different from school, which you've already—if you're watching my stuff, you already kind of have an idea about that—but I want to give you the more, the behavioral definition around it. Is that with school, you have very clear directions and a clear outcome with a clear timeline, and you get a grade immediately. So that's kind of like the roar or feedback loop, right? And sometimes it's pop quiz, same day, next day, you get the feedback loop. But the thing is, the world is completely opposite of that. And so the, the thing is that beginners are paralyzed to make a decision because they assume the real world works like school and only has one right answer. But reality is that there are many right answers with only one wrong answer, which is doing nothing.
Fear of not making it work; fear of other people's disapproval—who don't matter anyways—that you aren't cool anymore, or because you don't show up to social events, or because you don't blow money on stuff that doesn't matter anymore, or you're not wearing the brands that they think are cool—is all of that worth you for the rest of your life having the crushing feeling of mediocrity, knowing you could do more?
In the early days, hard was, "Ooh, stop, this isn't good. I should, I should—this is a warning sign, this is a red flag. I should slow down, or I should stop. You know, I should pivot." But the more I think about it as a competitive landscape, as I'm clear on what this path is supposed to look like, and these rocks and these dragons are things I'm going to have to slay along the way to get the princess or get the treasure, I get happier about the harder it is because I know that no one else will follow.
I'll walk you through a three-step framework that has been unbelievably valuable to me, and this is from Dr. Cash: Logic, evidence, utility. Logic is, what does that mean? So you have demons, okay? What does that mean? Define it in terms of behavior. What does that mean? Okay, got it. Now, how do you know that? Evidence. So you say, "I have demons." We unpack that, and it means that, uh, for you, you self-sabotage, which again, define that. Okay, it means that I show up late to meetings after I get into a job after two months of being on time. Okay, so after two months of being on time, you start being late to stuff. That we translated from "I have demons" to "I self-sabotage" to that is the behavior that occurs. Got it. Now I would say, "How do you know that?" Now, a lot of times people are like, "Well, it's happened," but when you actually look at it, you're like, "It happened three times over in, you know, in my, my last job." Okay, is it really a problem as you define it, or it happened in those three occurrences? Okay, got it. So now you know. Now, most times people are like, "I don't have any data," and you're like, "Okay, so then this is basically made up." And when I say made up, I'm not saying it's like you are a liar. I'm just saying that humans work in narratives, and a lot of times we add narratives, stories to things that don't actually mean anything, but it's convenient, and it's fun, and we like talking about it, but it doesn't mean it's true. And so then you move to the third one, which is, and so what? Utility. Who cares? Why does this matter? And so then you say, okay, well, this matters because it decreases the likelihood that I will be able to retain future employment. Fine. Then what do we do about it? And so you can walk through things that you have struggled with in the past with simply saying, "Let me define this in terms of behavior. How, what evidence do I have that this is actually true that I've defined it based on these things, and who cares?"
Every single human being on Earth has gone through their version of 10 out of 10 pain, which normalizes pain across the spectrum, which then leaves you with the only natural thing you have left, which is, "What do I do now?" And if you wanted to design the perfect version of you—the savage competitor, the gladiator at the end of the life that has the scars and the scraggly beard but has been through [ __ ] has done things and has, and has realized their potential—what would you do to maximize the likelihood that you become that superhero? Would you give them the padded lifestyle? Would you give them the immediate win? Would you give them the easy life? Probably not. You would probably put you through what you're going through right now to become that person. And so why would you resent the chapter you're in? Because it's a requirement for becoming who you say you want to be.
It's about what you do, not what you say you're going to do; how much you want the outcome from what you're doing; how much you think you deserve the thing that's going to happen after you do it; or how hard you try. Because one, no one cares; two, reality doesn't care either. 'Cuz the only thing that matters that you can control is input. Work ethic is the currency of respect. If you want to earn respect, you earn it through work. And sometimes that's working on yourself; that's sometimes working on a skill; working on a product. But it is all through work, through effort. It won't get harder. Like, this is the hardest part. And so if you can just make it through this, everything else is downhill. It's not that the things that you're, the dragons you're going to slay aren't going to get bigger—they are—but you become so much more equipped to slay them, and you have so many more allies. You have people on the stands cheering for you; you have the audience; you have all of these other things that are behind you. But in the beginning, it's just you with a stick against a bear. And arguably, that fight is a harder fight to win than beating a dragon when you have a nuclear bomb and six nations behind you. And so it's not even like the size of the hardship; it's just also the resources and how few of them you have, and how so much of the beginning is literally burning the one thing you have, which is time, because you have no leverage. You don't have the money to pay other people to help you; you don't have the resources to go like get someone to, to—you know, no one can learn it for you. It's like there's a lot of the things that, that we care about a lot, like no one can work out for you; doesn't matter how much money you have; no one can learn skills for you.
Expecting it to be easy is what makes it much harder than it ever is. If an expert goes into any setting that they're expert in, they have so many faster feedback loops that reward them in the moment before the ultimate outcome. So if you're a master video editor, there's so many things that you can do that while editing, you make one change, and then it looks right. You have a positive feedback loop. And so I think when you're on the start path, you can't look at the outcome as the only positive because you will never make it. And so the positive frame that I've always used is, sure, you can have the external ones of like, I like thinking about my first videos had like 13 views, and I'm like, "Well, if I had an audience of 13 people, I used to spend years pitching, you know, weight loss stuff to rims of 13," and that was fine. And so thinking about that way was helpful. But the most helpful frame was thinking about who I was becoming as the asset that I was building. So in real time, whenever I finished a long day's work, I was becoming more like the type of person who could work for five years without reward, and that would be part of the story I would someday tell. And some, some of the biggest reinforces I've had in my life has been future-casting the story that I would tell about the shitty period that I was in. And so like, no one ever tells stories about the hero who made it all happen immediately and had no hardships. No one cares, right? Like, okay, you were born to a billionaire. Is there a story there? Not really. But everyone loves the story because we can see ourselves in the character and how much we hope to be like them. And it's the being like them, not the having what they have, that we usually like. And so reframing ourselves as the hero of that narrative in my harder times was what really got me through that, and thinking, "I will tell this story someday."