Transcription
You're going to lose sleep. You'll doubt whether it'll work. You'll stress to make ends meet. You won't finish your to-do list. You'll wonder whether you made the right call and have no way to know for sure.
This is what hard feels like, and that's okay. Everything worth doing is hard, and the more worth doing it is, the harder it is. The greater the payoff, the greater the hardship. If it's hard, good. It means no one else will do it more for you.
I think a lot of entrepreneurship and even personal growth is training yourself on how you respond to hard. Because 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 that 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. It's a selection effect. And I think if you can, if you can shift from "this is hard" to "no one else will be able to do this," then it, it flips from being this thing that you're like, "Oh, poor me," to, "Oh, poor everyone else who's going to have to [ __ ] try." And I think that is so much more motivating as a frame for the exact same circumstance.
Yeah, that's awesome. I was thinking a lot about the lonely chapter that we talked about the last time. That was the best, most powerful idea I think that we came up with. And if you see there basically being no shortcuts toward getting the thing that you want, there are ways to be more and less efficient. There are ways to do things with more and less of a positive disposition, which can actually make the journey feel an awful lot easier. But ultimately, if you assume that largely everyone needs to go through the same challenges that you're going through, every single difficult thing that you do is kind of like a massive wall that you need to get over. And you go, "Wow, [ __ ], I'm so glad that I've got over that wall." And think about how many people are going to be selected out. It's like the Hunger Games, you know? Think about how many other people are going to fall that wall.
There are people who only root for people who don't need it. Like, the amount of times when I was on my lonely path where I was too different from the friends that I had, but not successful enough to be friends with the people that I wanted to be friends with, that's when, that's when you want people to root for you. That's when you want people to support you. Once you've already won, people are like, "He's amazing. He's so good." But like, that's the time when you need it the least. And so you always have to be the person who roots for you before everyone else does. And it's usually a single clap in the auditorium for a very long period of time. It is a slow clap. That's just you rooting for you.
And that visual, I think, is one that you can kind of take because it is people struggle to do things alone. And the path of the exceptional person is one of an exception, which means that you are not with other people. And rather than fighting that or bemoaning it, see it as an indicator that you're on the right path. Because if everyone else were cheering you on, then it means you're not in the right place, because it means you're just like everyone else, and that's not where you want to be.
It's an interesting paradox that the energy it requires to start doing something is way more than the energy required to continue doing the thing. And that the beginning of doing anything results in the lowest amount of reward, both internal and external, than when you've been doing it for ages. So I think about this a lot with the show. There was this stat that Spotify told us, 85% of the listeners of this show found this in 2023, right? And I thought, at the end of 2022, remembering at that point, I'd been on Rogan, we were at like 650k. We've got, you know, we've been doing 550, 600 episodes deep. Like, I'm, I've got, I've done the thing. Like, this is, this is me doing, if this isn't [ __ ] doing the thing. I've moved to Austin, Texas. I've got an O1 visa. I've got, like, the, all the rest of the stuff. Jordan Peterson's been on twice. You've been on. And yet the, what, everything up until that point is two months of growth.
Yeah, I mean, we made, we made more money, just from a revenue perspective, we made more money and more subs in one month, December of last year, than we did in the entire first three and a half years of the show. So it's this odd paradox. And one of the things that you need to ensure, I've had this idea about, protect your passion at all costs. Because if you, if you begin to hate the thing that you do, you negatively change your trajectory. And that means that at the time when you can benefit the most by every single unit of work, which is the later that you go, presuming that you continue to hit that upward trajectory, if you've completely killed any passion or desire to do the work in the early stages because you've, you've not protected it appropriately, that can be by focusing on the wrong things, by not rewarding yourself, by not building it with people that care about you, by, you know, just not, not celebrating when you hit milestones, all of the things that actually help to keep you going. Being a character by the time that you get to the stage where each unit of effort allows you to gain a thousand or a million of each of the things that it would have done at the very beginning, you've inverted the, like, the passion equation.
Takes way more energy to start a thing than to continue doing a thing. And yet, in the beginning, the rewards are way lower than they are at the end. But if you don't protect your passion, your motivation is at its lowest when you are at your highest amount of efficiency in terms of returning your time put in.
I think a hopeful message that anyone can think about who's about, who's in that hard period or in that start period, is that 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 are 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 in 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, 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, 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. And so in the early days, like, it feels so painful because you're like, you look around to see who can help you and then you're like, [ __ ], it's me again.
And I think getting comfortable with the idea that each of these things, kind of like Slumdog Millionaire, if you've seen that movie, where he, I'll give you the TLDR, he goes through his entire life of randomness and he gets on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire version in India and has 12 questions to make a million dollars. And from only 12 random experiences in his life that seemed meaningless at the time, was he able to answer all of the questions? And then ultimately win. The skills that you develop along the way, like Steve Jobs learning calligraphy that then became Apple fonts that, you know, transformed how we type. Those early days, that little trench winning in the weeds, often times gives you these huge advantages later on because you have more context than anyone else. And so rather than lament them and hate the fact that you're going through it, remembering that these will be arrows that you put in the quiver that you're going to be using to slay the future bigger dragons. And so expecting it to be easy is what makes it much harder than it ever is.
I've always loved earning my stripes with the things that I've done, whether it was with Nlife or running the podcast or doing whatever. And I think there's like a degree of nobility to it. But functionally, that's kind of, that's just like, it's a nothing. Like, what the, where does the, was the nobility? But I think the reason that you can feel noble about it and the reason that it gives you a positive reward is you know that you understand every single inch of the things. And that if you want to hold a conversation, we went out for dinner with our new CFO and accounts people on Saturday. They said, "You ask a lot of questions. Most people don't ask very many questions." And I also don't care at all about accounts, really. Like, I'm not doing this for money. But they said, "You ask a lot of questions." It's like, well, I don't ever really want to walk into a room and not be able to hold my own, at least just competently, if it's to do with something that I care about. The same thing goes for this. Like, I, I started to learn about focal lengths and frame rates and negative fill, reverse contrast lighting. And then sure enough, two years after we started doing it, a bunch of different, I sent you the Instagram thing, like this really awesome film Instagram that I've been following for ages picked us up for what we were doing and gave us props, independent of the talk thing, which is fundamentally what we're here for. And we created this entire new industry of like cinematic podcasting, which was recognized by, as far as I'm aware, like the best cinematic, it's called Film Lights, at Film Lights. People can go and see it on Instagram, like the best decoder and analyzer of cinematography. And two years ago, when we started, I remember thinking, [ __ ], like, I love the way that they've broken down what happens in Ad Astra. Oh my God, the whole thing was shot on 35 mil. Each different scene's got two pairings of colors and stuff like that. And then, but the reason that we were able to get there, at least in some part, is I can have a conversation with people. So each of the things that you do, when you not only win in the weeds, but live in the weeds, then allows you downstream from that to see the things that other people aren't seeing.
There's a quote that I love from Dr. Cash. I'll probably butcher it, but "Experts have more ways to win than beginners do." And so 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 on 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 rooms of 13. And that was fine. And so thinking about that way was helpful. But the, 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. Like, I remember when I was sleeping on the floor at my gym because I didn't have enough money for two rents. And I was like, "I will [ __ ] tell this story." And when I lost everything for the first time, I, like, I have the screenshot of the bank account. Like, when I show it people, they're like, "Oh, look, there's that thing." But they forget that there was a person who screenshotted it to be like, "This won't [ __ ] happen again." And I think, think having a larger narrative of where you're ultimately going, one gives you the vision of where you're, like the hero knows where he's going. But it allows the dragons that you have to slay along the way, the hard things that you have to overcome, to feed into the larger narrative of who, of the story that you'll someday tell. 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, 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."
Have you heard Rogan talk about the "be the hero of your own story" thing? Mmm. Oh, dude, it's old now. I think this is maybe even 10 years old, maybe 10 years old. Um, and he's in one of his old, he's in the LA podcast studio. And he says, "Imagine that you're in a movie, and imagine the movie begins now, and you're the hero of the movie. Yeah. What would that guy do? Yeah. What would that guy do right now?" Yeah, because you are.
I just got into a business. Um, so actually just made the investment in School. Um, and I was talking to Sam, the founder. And I said, "What, Sim, Sam, Sim? What's Sim? Sim? That's the way he says his own." Yeah. Um, and I was, and I was talking to him. And I said, "I want to give you the single easiest razor to predict my behavior." And I said, "Whatever will be the most epic story is the thing that I will most likely do." And so often times, the most epic story is not the shortest outcome to victory. It's the long saga that results in this big thing later, eventually. And I was like, "If you ever want to know if you're like, I'm not sure what he's going to do in this situation, just wonder what the most epic story to tell would be." And that's usually what I will do. And I don't know if that's self-aggrandizing, but that's, that's genuinely my razor for even making the like, the big decisions about, okay, I'm going to sell Gym Launch, I'm going to, I'm going to marry Leah, I'm going to slum it and live at the gym, I'm going to fly around and do turnarounds, I'm going to start this whole idea of a media company that just gives exclusively. Like, how do, like, how do I put all these together? It's like, well, what would be the most epic story? And I thought of this idea of just like, when I think about who that story I want to tell is, is this billionaire that documented the entire thing the whole way and just gave. Because I always thought I was like, I wish that Elon Musk and and Warren Buffett and all these guys would have like, and Jeff Bezos like, would have just like, I would love to have seen 1997 Amazon content. And a lot of the content in terms of like, it's getting five views. It's like, it's okay because when we make it, they're going to come back and watch this. So I don't need them to watch it today. I want them to know that it's here when I do. And I think that got me out of the loop of it. I have to win right now. And then every one of them is just dropping, uh, a kernel or a breadcrumb for future meat to refer back to.
We'll get back to talking to Alex in one minute. But first, I need to tell you about Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning. Your adenine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but your adrenal system is. And salt acts on your adrenal system. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte formula of sodium, potassium, and magnesium that helps to regulate your appetite, curb cravings, and improve your brain health. This orange flavor is absolutely insane. It is the best way to start the day. It's a beautiful, salty, orangey drink. It's refreshing if you've been doing hot exercise, and it's just my favorite way to wake up. I've been using Element every single morning for over three years now, and it's still just as enjoyable as when I first used it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/odwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/odwisdom. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that clip with Alex, the full length three and a half hour podcast is right here waiting for you. Go on, tap it.