Transcription
The Joe Rogan Experience. Some happy little place where you know someone's feeding you peeled grapes. That isn't what it is. It's it's more like it's my more like victory on the honorable battlefield or something like that. You have the the perception that people have of ultimate success and ultimate happiness is it seems motivated by what they don't have rather than an understanding of what success and happiness really is. Their their idea is that one day I'm gonna go and I'm gonna be in my golden years and I'm just gonna be able to sit around and do nothing and tell everybody to [ __ ] off.
You won't be happy. Yeah, I talked to one of the people that I was working with who had a like a vision for retirement. Said, "Well, what's your vision for retirement?" "Well, I see myself in the beach, you know, some tropical country drinking margaritas." And I thought, first, that's what I plan—that's a travel poster. It's like, okay, let's let's walk through this. All right, so you go down to this tropical country and you go sit on the beach and you have a margarita. It's like, okay, well, how many margaritas? Like 10? Do that for six months, you'll be dead. Yeah, well, you'll be this like pathetic sunburned like fat. Yeah, I'm happy. So how long can you have a margarita on a beach? Like maybe you can do that once every six months for like 10 minutes. Something like that. It's not a vision.
It's true, but when you are working and slaving away, you think about that beach with your feet up. Yeah, and the waiter comes over, "Would you like another margarita, Mr. Peterson?" Yes, but it's like this 16-year-old fantasy of paradise and it just doesn't work out. So yeah, and and the thing the thing is is that the thing that sustains people through life really is the lifting of a worthwhile burden. It's something like that.
Yeah, that's partly because we're social animals, right? It's like we're evolved to be useful to the people around us because they're much more likely to let us live if we're like that. Yeah, so and and it's been very fun talking to, especially talking to young men about this, is like, well, and that's the other thing too, is I think the world the world is full of darkness, let's say, and we should say each of us have a little bit of light and if we release that light, if we let it shine properly. Christ, it's too clichéd to go on with in some sense, but the world is a lesser place if you do not reveal from within yourself what you have to reveal. And the fact that the world is a lesser place actually turns out not to be trivial. Like if you want everything you could be more, people will die, more people will suffer, more evil will be unconstrained, more tyranny will reign, more chaos will remain chaotic and dangerous. All of that.
Do you mean this by this in the sense of like the old proverb of the wings of a butterfly fluttering become a hurricane? It's it's it's something similar to that, but it can even be more local. It's like your family is more messed up than it could be if you were less messed up than you are, right? So if you just got your act together like 10% more, your family would be 1% better, right? It's like, well, do it. And that would ripple off and demo people today and it ripples fast. Yes, that's the other thing that's so cool is that like people think, well, there's seven billion of us and each of us is just this separate dust mote like floating in the cosmos and what the hell difference does it make what you do anyways? It's like that is not how we're connected. It's like you're the center of a network and you know, well, you know way more people than this, but let's say typically you know, without you're gonna know a thousand people in your life well enough to have an impact on them, okay? And each of those thousand people is going to know a thousand people, so you're one step from a million and two steps from a billion. And we are Network technically. That that's how human interactions work. And so when you do something that you shouldn't do, it's worse than you think, and when you do something that you should do, it's better than you think. And so you think, well, this is why I've been telling people, clean up your room. That's like, well, your room is actually networked too. It's not that easy to clean up your room to set it. So you want your room to be set up so that when you walk in there it tells you to be better than you generally are. It's organized, it's got direction, everything's in its place. You try to do that in a chaotic household. You know, I've watched people do this because I had students do these sorts of things as assignments. I'd say, "Look, pick a small morale goal, clean up your room, and just write down what happens as a consequence." So maybe these are students in a chaotic household, the whole place is a bloody mess, no one's taking any responsibility for anything, and so they decide they're gonna start to clean up their room. And then the people in the household notice. Well, the first thing they do is get pissed off. It's like, "Who do you think you are? Like you think you're better than us? Yes, like why do you think this is worthwhile? Who made who died and made you God?" All of that. So just by trying to organize this little part of their life, they immediately run into the people whose actions they're casting in a dim light by trying to improve themselves to some degree. They might have to have like a thorough war in their household to be allowed to do something as simple as keep the room orderly. They find out very rapidly that eh that's way more difficult than it sounds and be that the consequences of it are far more far-reaching than people think. So that's quite fun, you know, because maybe part of it is is that like everything around you is full of potential, everything maybe more potential than you could ever possibly utilize. And so maybe all you have is this little rat hole of a room and some rundown place in the world. It's like fix it up. There's more there than you think. See what happens if you fix it up, and you'll fix yourself up simultaneously because you have to get disciplined in order to fix up the room. Then you have a fixed-up room and you'll be a more fixed-up person. It's like you think that nothing will happen as a consequence of that. It's like all hell will break loose as a consequence of that. Worth try it. Is worth trying. And it's it's a concept that seems alien to people, but if you think about it, it makes sense. Well, people don't take what they have right in front of them seriously enough. It's like the wasting time thing. They don't do the arithmetic, you know, and they'd also don't understand, they devalue what they have right in front of them. Like another another client I worked with, it was having a hard time putting his kid to bed at night. And so we did the arithmetic. It's like, well, I'm fighting with my kid for 45 minutes a night trying to get him to go to bed. Okay, so let's analyze that. All right, so what does that mean? Well, it means that both of you end the day upset. That's not so good, because why would you want that? It means that you're spending 45 minutes fighting when you could spend 20 minutes doing something positive like reading. You say means that you don't get to spend that time with your wife, so she's not very happy with you, plus you're annoyed because you don't see her, plus you blame it on the kid because he's the proximal cause. It's like that's pretty damn ugly. And then and then let's do the arithmetic. It's like seven days a week, 45 minutes a day, let's call that five hours, 20 hours a week, 240 hours in a year. It's six—you're spending a month and a half of work weeks fighting with your four-year-old son. I think you're gonna like him. You don't like anyone. You spend a month and a half a year fighting with. It's a bad idea. Fix it. It's important. Get him to bed, make it peaceful. You do it. Like these things that repeat every single day, that's a motif in this book to your life isn't margaritas on a beach and in Jamaica. That happens now and then, those are exceptions. Your life is how your wife greets you at the door when you come home every day because that's like 10 minutes a day. Your life is how you treat each other over the breakfast table because that's an hour and a half or an hour every single day. You get those mundane things right, those things you do every day, you've concentrated on them and you make them pristine. It's like you've got 80% of your life put together. These little things that are right in front of us, they're not little, that's the first thing. They are not little, and they're hard to set right, and if you set them right, it has a rippling effect and and fast, to way faster than people think.
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