Transcription
Doesn't it feel like the world is changing so fast? Crypto's popularity disrupting the whole financial market. AI disrupting the whole job market and the future as we know it.
What if the answers you're seeking about your future aren't in what's going to change, but in what never does? That is the core question of this book, Same as Ever by Morgan Household. And in this video, I'm distilling down 250 pages into 10 ideas that you can use to change your life. Welcome to the book breakdowns.
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What's up, guys? Hey, so I'm doing an update. When we first started this channel, like 14 years ago, I was doing a lot of book summaries, and then we just stopped doing them for some reason. What are we doing when we're really taking a whole book and putting it into 10 ideas? We're doing a breakdown. Selfishly titling it so I can reference my touring days, pop punk, metal core, and uh breakdowns. It's not a midlife crisis. What are you talking about? Let me know if you dig it. Here's episode one with Morgan Hustles. Same as ever.
Kicking us off with a story that sounds dark, but I promise it'll relate to you. In 1961, NASA needed to test their space suits. So NASA got the great idea to send a man in a helium balloon 113,000 ft in the suit. Victor Pratt was that lucky volunteer, and the suit worked flawlessly. He's up there scraping the edge of space. His head didn't explode. Mission accomplished. So on his way back down, Victor opens his visor, takes a big breath of fresh air, overlooking the view. But here's where things go tragically wrong. As the recovery team was retrieving Victor over the ocean, he slips and falls in the water, which wouldn't have been a problem because the space suits were waterproof. But because he had lifted his visor, the suit filled with water and he unfortunately drowned.
As dark as it is, I think it illustrates a really important point for you. See, so many times we want to prepare to prevent. If I can prepare what will go wrong, then I can prevent it and it won't go wrong. That's how our mind works, right? I mean, what is anxiety? It's anticipating future situations that could go wrong and trying to problem solve before it even happens. But the truth is risk is what you don't see. And there's a saying in the book that risk is what is left over when you've thought of everything. Take NASA. Had the most brilliant minds, best engineers, and the thing that made the mission a failure was the simple act of celebrating. Taking a visor, opening it, taking in the view. No matter how many situations you simulate or prepare for, there's always going to be something that you don't anticipate.
Big idea number two. When I say the word sunken cruise ship, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? The Titanic. And sure, the Titanic was a tragedy, right? It claimed 1500 lives. But did you know that it's not even the biggest maritime disaster? Cuz if lives were the thing that make us remember it, why don't we talk about the SS Kianga in the '40s that claimed 4,000 lives or the Donna Paz that claimed 4,500 lives? Donna what? Kianga? Who? So, why is the Titanic so famous? It's because the next point, the best story wins. You instantly picture the luxury wealthy passengers and the blockbuster hit movie that starred Leonardo to freaking Caprio, right? Charles Darwin wasn't the first person to discover evolution. I didn't know that till I read this, but he was the one who told the most compelling story around it. In business, storytelling, also called marketing. Steve Jobs doesn't just didn't just sell iPhones and computers. He told stories. Look at his presentation. They're stories. They get you bought into the vision. There's like a cult around Apple. There's a lot of people, for lack of a better word, full of that are just good storytellers that get a that rise to the corporate ladder. Get ahead. Why is that? Because they're presenting themselves. Their story is the best. They're able to connect with people even if they don't have credentials. This isn't saying don't have credentials or be good. But understand the balance here that it's not the smartest person that wins. It's not the most qualified. It's the one who's telling the best story. I'm willing to bet you're already qualified enough and you just need to put yourself out there. What if you were already ready? What if you didn't need the extra certification or the extra uh book on the topic? What if you just needed to market yourself and tell a better story?
So, why do stories work so well? Why are stories so popular and get you ahead and you know people uh whoever tells the best story wins? Comes down to one thing. They're extremely simple. But humans we get lost in the sauce of complexity. And that is the next point here. The illusion of complexity. Most areas in life it can be boiled down into three things. And do this with me. All right. Take finances. Like pretend you're the expert right now. Okay? You know everything about finances. Break it down into three things. If someone comes to you and they say, "How do I master finances?" What three things would you tell them? First up, get out of debt. Second up, find a way to earn more than you're spending so you have stuff left over. And third off, invest it somewhere. You know, real estate, stocks, whatever you're comfortable with, and let compounding take over over decades and do its magic. Isn't it really that simple? And yes, there's details that matter, but essentially boiled down three things. I'll give you one personal one here on YouTube. You know what you're seeing right now, like content creation. I have conversations all the time with people who are so overwhelmed with how to get started and they talk about the algorithm and lighting and okay, how do I articulate my thoughts on camera and the script and the the SEO and the tags? Who wouldn't be overwhelmed? Three things. What do we got here? Talk about something you genuinely love or you're strongly curious about cuz that's going to come through on camera and then you don't have to worry about articul tonality and voice like like just just pure raw passion. Okay? Talk to one person, one market, someone who has a problem that you can solve and don't quit for at least 2 years. That's it. And I know that works because that's what I did to get my first million subs. I didn't really know anything about cameras or lighting. I have no film degree. I didn't take a single film class. I just shot on auto. Literally, I just whatever the camera settings was, it was like a $800 camera. I just hit record and threw up like a ring light. And that got me a million subscribers because I had those three things. I didn't quit. Obviously, there's layers, but simplify it down. If you're ever getting overwhelmed, what are the two or three things that really matter? Or as the saying goes, it's a simple task to make things complex and a complex task to make them simple.
Which brings us to big idea number four. Talk about complexity. There's no dude who thought more complex than Isaac Newton. Someone who you can make the case changed history more than anyone. Gave us the laws of physics, found out about the universe from him. Gravity. I mean, dude's LinkedIn resume if he was alive today is just stacked. What if he just posts on there? I was having a conversation with a colleague the other day. Dude's really famous and smart, right? So, at Cambridge, there was an auction and someone spent a ton of money on a treasure chest that Newton left behind and inside was a bunch of writings. So, if you're the buyer, you spend a boatload of money, you're like, "Hell yeah, I'm going to get the behindthescenes download on one of the smartest dudes out there." You know, I'm going to learn all about his unreleased theories. I'm going to release them to the public. But it was like Storage Wars where they don't show you what's in there. They just have like a flashlight. Yeah. It looks like a guitar. And then somehow they're going through a box and everything's like, "Oh, this is 200 bucks. This is 500 bucks right here." And it's like a pack of CDs. I digress. When he opens the chest, what was in there? Essentially nonsense. Bunch of scribbles, thousands of pages on alchemy, turning lead into gold. So he's like, "What? What did I spend all this money for? What is this?" What led Newton to be so prolific and genius was curiosity. The same curiosity that allowed Newton to obsess over laws of physics and find some really cool stuff out also drove him down some strange rabbit holes that ended up being an utter waste of time. Genius sort of borrows from other areas of your life. If 100% of your focus is here, often times zero 0. Genius is rarely balanced.
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So the next point is how you apply this to your life. Because it's so tempting to see someone who's amazing and say, I want that or that's inspiring or I'm modeling after that, which can be good. You can learn a lot. But there's a great quote by Naval Ravocants on this point. The real breakthrough for me was when I realized that all people I was jealous of, I couldn't just cherrypick and choose little aspects of their life. I couldn't say, you know, I want his body. I want her money. I want his personality. I have to be that person. Do I actually want to be that person with all their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life? If I'm not willing to do a wholesale 24/7 100% swap, then there is no point in being jealous. I think that one's in the book, but I can't remember if I just pulled it and put it in there. But the point is this, cuz we just talked about how genius is rarely balanced. If you're going to compare your life to someone, you need the full context. And I've said that in other videos cuz it's so damn important. And I wish I learned it in my early 20s when I was coming up. and comparing to guys, you know, 15, 20 years ahead and social media landscape and where everything's manicured and perfect. You can't compare because you need the full context. It's like in fitness, if you're comparing to someone's body, but you don't have the full context of everything they're doing, the little secret sauce they're on behind the scenes, right? It's impossible for you to compare to that because you're not on the secret sauce. If you're comparing to the entrepreneur who's preaching you got to post 16 times a day, but you don't understand that he's spending $80,000 on a team of 16 interns, like it's impossible for you to keep up and do that. You'll literally destroy yourself trying to. And if you're comparing to the relationship on social media, but you don't know the behind the scenes where they're like at a party and want to like push each other off a balcony because they fight so much. Like those people, they get divorced in 20 years and you're like, "Wow, I didn't know that was going on." And look, I'm not judging anyone. I am not perfect. I'm the first person to say I have tons of flaws and there's probably a lot of things you don't want advice on in my life. None of us are perfect. And that's the point. Self-acceptance is this hot term of like I'm going to accept myself. But like it means accepting all of you. Relating this to the book of what never changes. We're always going to want to compare in the future. And if it's at this stage of your life, you know, the next stage you'll have other things to compare to. How are their kids versus my kids? You know, what school did they get into verse this? Or how much finances do we have versus them? It's never going to end. Just drill in your mind. We don't see the full picture.
Big idea number six. We're talking a lot about extremes. And this next point I love blew my mind. We, you and I, are really bad at understanding really big numbers and really small ones. Take the saying, there's a one in a million chance that happens. Have you ever said that or you've heard someone say that to you? Well, with 8 billion people on the planet, one ina million things happen 8,000 times a day. Even a one ina billion chance happens on a global level eight times a day and you add that up over the course of your lifetime that eight one ina billion things are happening every single day. The chance that the impossible happens just might. Now breaking this down more practically for you in your life. Think about your phone and your short feed or your news feed. Well, you're constantly seeing these one in a billion things that happen eight times a day. It used to be that we just uh consumed our local news, right? You just turn it on. Oh, that's what's going on in the neighborhood. Oh, someone got murder. Wow, that's really bad. But now you turn on and it's global news, not even your country. Global what's going on. The result is that you feel like the world is falling apart or that things are constantly getting worse. The perspective here of are things actually getting worse or am I just seeing one of the 8,000 one in a million things that happen every single day.
Now, we just spoke about what's going on as a bad thing, but here's a different angle of how it might actually help push innovation forward. So, during World War II, factories had a max capacity of, let's say, 2,000 units. But then the war happened. All of a sudden, those same factories were producing 4,000 to 5,000 units a week. Without adding any new machines, without adding any new people, the production doubled. How is that even possible? Stress induced innovation. Things like penicillin, antibiotics, medical technologies, government technologies, these all came out of necessity during times of war. And there's a really interesting argument to be made that the lives those technologies save over the long term outweigh the lives lost during times of war. We don't have to agree with that cuz that's a tough pill to swallow. But the principle is that stress induced innovation when your back is against the wall, you produce without having any extra resources or time. So how do you apply this to yourself? Sometimes the magic happens when your back is against the wall.
Big idea number eight. Businesses are always getting asked, "What's your profit going to be?" And that's what's predicting the stock market going up and down. They're under pressure to get bigger and more. And if you return less than you did the previous year or quarter, then your stock goes down and it turns into this chaotic downward spiral. Like we're obsessed with more with bigger. We go to the gym and can I lift more weight? Okay, am I packing on more muscle? And then there's a whole other angle of how fast can we do it? That's what social media is covered with, right? I lost 80 lb in 2 months and then someone comes along, I lost 100 lbs in 2 weeks. And it's just like the most extreme examples, bigger, faster. But know this that everything has its most convenient size. And when we try to go bigger or faster, things break. Take humans. There's a condition of gigantism. Gigantism. Gigantiism. Where the human body has a most convenient size. And when we get too big, it can actually shorten your lifespan. Or you have all these different health conditions. Or you can barely walk because the body is not meant to go beyond that. most convenient size. On a personal level, I realized this back in a couple years ago, I was going to all these masterminds where it's just about growth, growth, growth and faster and scaling. And I was crushing it at the time. I mean, the YouTube channel was uh some months getting like 60,000 subs a month. Um revenue was just coming, you know, record month, record month. Uh shorts was just exploding. I was so obsessed with pursuing growth that I lost my sanity. I burnt out hard and I eventually shut everything down and needed to refocus. What do I actually want? And what I found was I wanted a better business, not a bigger one. You see on social media, oh, if you're not growing, you're dying. I don't know if I believe that. People say like, I want to build an empire. I'm like, what the hell does that even mean? Am I trying to build an empire? Like, no. I'm trying to do something I love. I'm trying to help a lot of people. I'm trying to go to bed feeling good and waking up feeling awesome. Thinking about kids and, you know, getting married in this next year and having kids, starting the family, like I want to be present for that. I realize that business growth, whatever we're doing here, like this has a most convenient size. And it doesn't always mean you have to hire team members and pursue this and like if I don't do that, does that make me a bad entrepreneur? No. Because you're getting clear on what you really want and understanding there's trade-offs that I see people who are preaching, you know, go bigger faster and then lo and behold, their marriage falls apart or their kids barely see them or they don't like themselves or they gain 100 lbs, right? Like these things happen or they have health conditions. If you want a really deep thought, unrestricted growth is cancer in the body. That's what we call it, the cell division. Just going crazy, that's cancer. Unrestricted growth in your life works like that cancer. It can break things down. It sucks energy away from people. It sucks your presence away. Maybe you're exactly where you need to be right now. And us achievers, I know you're one if you're watching this. You know, we get our identity through doing and achieving and checking things off and winning awards and medals. But maybe you're exactly where you need to be right now.
Big idea number nine, the two types of information. The first type of information is expiring information. This information feels urgent right now but often becomes irrelevant in the future. For example, how much did Microsoft make in spring of 2005 or the new celebrity who's getting cancelled or the current event? Like stuff that grabs your attention but probably won't matter 5 years from now. The second kind of information is permanent information. The stuff that stays relevant beyond 5 years, 50 years because it's about human nature and timeless principles. For example, how do humans behave during times of uncertainty? What motivates human greed, fear, motivation, other principles like how to think, cognitive biases, psychology, behaviorism. Okay, Clark, but relate this to me. You ask yourself this one question that I have said um when I whenever I'm presented with something, I ask it and it has helped massively. Will this matter 5 years from now? Will this matter 5 years from now? But it's hard, man, because like scrolling through your news feed feels really effortless, entertaining, enjoyable. But then you look at like permanent information, pulling out your journal and going to therapy or meditating, learning about yourself and self-awareness that you can use in 5 10 years from now and build on compared to this. I mean, it's like fast food verse healthy food. It's tough. It takes discipline and it doesn't mean you can never pursue entertainment. But yeah, not tricking ourselves that this entertainment is education and really knowing the difference between the two and more importantly asking yourself if you ever find your attention getting sucked away in something, will this matter 5 years from now.
Big idea number 10. So, we've been speaking a lot about big ideas. What I love in this book are big questions. And these are a few that I took, put in my journal, and had a field day with, just riffing on. So, I want to give you a few here and close out with some of the best questions that you can take and ask yourself. You want to write these down. And more importantly, you want to answer them yourself. Who has the right answers, but I ignore because they're not articulate or charismatic? What do I desperately want to be true so badly that I convince myself it's true even when it's clearly not? What are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly obvious in the future? How do I know if I'm being patient, a skill, or stubborn, a flaw? Who do I look up to that's secretly miserable behind the scenes? What's something I believe true but in reality is just good marketing? What haven't I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive about how something really works?
That, my friend, is the first episode of the book breakdowns. Hey, if you dig this series, let me know in the comments. And if you want five more books that'll change your life, I'll link up our video right here. Same as ever as one of those books, but I'll give you four more that you'll love. I'll see you in that video. Remember, do hard things, bet on yourself, and make your future self proud. Peace.
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