Transcription
Oh, I can tell you why life's not working out for you. Health, wealth, love, happiness. And I can give you the three solutions: one, two, three.
Number one: You ain't humble enough. How many books have you read this year? You might say, "What does that have to do with anything?" It has everything to do with everything. How many books have you read or listen to an audio book? What you're saying is, "I don't know enough to make it on my own, so I'm willing to listen and download." Whether it takes me a couple hours or even a couple weeks to read the wisdom and experience of others who have gone before me, the imminent, living, and dead.
And by the way, some people say, "Why books? Why not YouTubes?" Well, how you going to learn from the greats of the past when YouTube didn't exist? How you going to learn from Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Albert Einstein, Freud, Leonardo da Vinci? You going to do that by YouTube? They're not on there. News flash. So books are the best that we have. Too bad the statue, the uh, Library of Alexandria was burned in North Africa, uh, many millennia ago, because we lost a whole body of information. So the books we have now, treasure them, because we've lost some of the great wisdom of old.
In one, two, three, four, maybe five days, five weeks, you can download the wisdom and experience of titans. You can read a book called *Titan* by John Deere, uh, J.D. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller. Now, you might not like capitalism, but there's something to learn from a man who died with a net worth of $600 billion in today's dollars. You might say, "I don't like capitalism." Well, then study your enemy. And if you do like capitalism, then study the titans. Go directly to the source. Don't listen to other people's interpretation. If you don't like communism, make sure you read Karl Marx, do *Capital*, *Communist Manifesto*. Keep your friends close and your enemy closer. Have the humility to go straight to the source. Let them speak for themselves. You don't believe in capitalism? Read Adam Smith, *The Wealth of Nations*. Read Will Durant, maybe the wisest man of the last thousand years. He wrote a series of books. It'll take you a long time, I'd take you a lifetime to read. It's 10,000 pages approximately. It's the story of the beginning of civilization all the way up until about the 1700s. You can read a short book, *The Lessons of History*, *The Lessons of Philosophy*, short books, literally that you could read in two days, that would be the accumulated wisdom of some of the greats.
I want to pull it surprise for a reason. Number one, your life's not what you thought it would be because you're not humble enough to download quickly and put into practice what people have already figured out before you. There's nothing new under the sun. Why would you want to reinterpret, reimagine things that have already been done? Why would you want to reinvent the wheel? You want to invent fire too? You want to invent fire too? Be my guest to waste your life on that. But as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, "If I've seen further than others, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants." What giants' shoulders are you now standing on? If life's not working out, it's because you're either not humble enough to ask to stand on someone's shoulders or put in the work to read or listen to those. Or you have listened, but you're not a doer.
Which takes me to number two. Number one, you're not humble enough. Number two, you're not a doer. You suffer from paralysis by over-analysis. You do not yet realize that it's the people who experiment the most who win. If you want a simple tattoo, I see people getting all these nonsense tattoos. Get this tattoo: "He who experiments the most wins." Number two, be a doer. Yes, thinking is part, but you think in order to implement the experiment. You don't expect to win. In fact, great scientists, whoever that might be, if you like the original Tesla, the uh, Serbian, he was a man of experiments. Many of them failed. A few of them succeeded. The ones that succeeded pushed humanity forward. Are you a person willing to download the wisdom and intelligence of others, amalgamate it with your own life experience, put it into practice by being a doer, into an with an experimentation mindset? Not saying, "What if this loses?" All experiments lose because you build on top of them. All initial experiments are improved upon because you have the mind of a scientist who was considered the father of modern science, Aristotle, a framework of thought where the way you get what you want, the life that you want, health, wealth, love, happiness, is not a single epiphany when you wake up one day and you're in the shower. The myth of the entrepreneur, and you go, "Oh, I had a great idea."
By the way, number one and two, a great epitome of this is Elon Musk. Love him or hate him, he was humble enough to be part of the PayPal Mafia. He made his first little money, and he invested all into this merger with Peter Thiel, 23 of the smartest young entrepreneurs in the world lived and worked together up in San Francisco, worked very closely together. Pull up a picture of them, 23 people, PayPal Mafia. Some of those, two of them went on to found YouTube. One founded Yelp. One founded Palantir. Here, two of them started Founders Fund. Peter Thiel and actually a friend of mine, Ken Howry. So Elon Musk, first, was willing to be humble enough to realize he didn't have all the answers. He worked in a group of smart people. His sister said he read two books a day growing up. Then, number two, he's an action taker. He's not when his car company, Tesla, many times was on the brink of bankruptcy. He never got discouraged because he saw a set of experiments and iteration, one iteration, one step after another. "If I've seen further than others, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants." He now is the giant. He stood on enough shoulders to now see further and have $300 billion, number one rating on the Forbes. And by the way, this isn't about money. You might not care about money. You might care about your body. Have you downloaded the wisdom of the wisest people when it comes to fitness? You want to find love, dating advice, friendship, at a network? Are you humble enough to listen to the titans in that field? And then, do you put it into action as a doer with the mindset that it's only an experiment? So you don't care if it loses. There's no paralysis by over-analysis because how can you be paralyzed with an experiment? An experiment is built to lose. It's built to improve upon. They call that iteration.
One, become humble. Two, have a doer mindset. Three, and this is the hardest one of all. You know what it is? Never give up. Never give up. They call it grit. The US military did a study and they tried to figure out which recruits in boot camp who would turn out to be the best. Would it be the smartest? Would it be the strongest? Would it be the ones that came from the best families? Would it be the one with the quote-unquote best genetics? And they said, surprisingly, it was people who had grit. Now, you can define grit in many ways. You can define it as resilience, persistence, consistency. They chose to call it grit. "When the going gets tough, the tough get going and keep going." When you know you're on your life's purpose, you're humble enough to listen to others, to build the first experiment, and you become a doer, and you get your own life experience, and then you never give up. You say to yourself, "I will accomplish or I'll die trying." And when you go in with that mindset, you become the opposite of the masses.
I read an interesting study years ago. It said about 80 to 90% of people, uh, sorry, about 80% of people will quit anything after one real setback. Starting their own business, reading a book, starting a diet. 80% of people, when it gets a little bit hard, after one time, they quit. They said after two failures, 90% of people have quit anything that they started. Stopping smoking, New Year's resolutions. The interesting thing was, so only 10% of people will persist past two major life setbacks. Only 10%. Now, I don't know if that's the exact statistic, but it lines up with common sense and experience. The interesting thing is, the top 10% wage earners in the world have more money than the bottom 80%. Now, you might say that's because of capitalism and an unfair structure in the world, and some people are born into poverty, and all that's true. But I found it ironic that the statistics line up very similar, because the average millionaire has three failed businesses, three, not one. Even people like Elon Musk had major setbacks, kicked out of his own company at one point, things like this. Steve Jobs, kicked out of Apple. Apple. So you see, the final and the third ingredient is the icing on the cake that you must have, which is the grit. You can read all the books in the world. You can even be a doer all day long. But unless you continue to do, because I can make this one assurance, I can make you this promise, as Charlie Munger says, "This world will throw tremendous blows at you, tremendous hardships." The loss of a loved one, the betrayal of a friend, an economic recession. These are a given, my friend. This is what we call life on Earth as we know it. If you can persevere and continue to be humble, and continue to download the great thoughts of those who have gone before you, and continue to run your experiments and do, then my friend, the world is yours and all that's in it. Good luck.