Transcription
The fastest way to attract what you want in life is to deserve it by doing so much work it becomes unreasonable not to achieve it. Do so much work it would be unreasonable that you fail. The seat at the table is yours if you want it. Do the hard work, build the skills no one can ignore, adjust your mindset to match where you want to go, and pull up a chair and sit down.
You want to work with such relentless obsession that when people see you they're grateful they don't have to compete against you. The fastest shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts. Do the work. Think I think there's a lot of power in in knowing that you're doing every single thing you possibly can to win. Because if you are if you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, I have controlled the controllable. I think there's some level Entirely. Entirely. The controllable, not the uncontrollable. Those things can happen. I could do my book launch and there could be a lightning strike and there could be no power in Vegas. That can happen. But in the event that that happens, if you if you leave it all on the field, if you have nothing left in the tank, I don't think there's a feeling that's more satisfying as a man than knowing that you've given everything that you had to give to an endeavor that you deemed meaningful.
Do hard things. Not because it's fun, but because the win actually means something. You bled for it, you broke for it, you earned it. Easy wins are forgettable. Hard ones change you. That's the point. And that's your line. Everything is hard and no one cares. They wouldn't be dreams if they were. And you wouldn't call them wins if they were easy. Cuz they would just be you tying your shoes. And what it was once a win when you were five is no longer a win when you're competent. And with increased competence comes increased stakes. You have to be willing to bet more, put more on the line to win bigger. Which means like if you're a billionaire playing $10 hands of poker is a complete waste of time. You can't get rich if you never risk losing money. You can't get loved if you never risk getting rejected. You can't get strong if you never risk getting injured. You have to risk looking broke to get rich. You have to risk looking weak to get strong. You have to risk looking desperate to get loved. Egos hold back more dreams than failure and rejection ever will. It's like risk not have not. It's like you have to put something on the altar. At the most basic level, it's like the first step is what you're willing to lose. And it is trade of a known and inferior thing for a unknown and superior thing. And it's the fact that it's unknown that is the thing that bugs everyone. And I think most of gains most of the gains in life and the the lack of gains come from being unwilling to sacrifice mediocrity.
The three-step process of how to win. Number one, realize no one is coming to save you. Number two, take responsibility for your current position. Number three, be willing to sacrifice who you are for who you want to be. Everyone can get motivated for a moment. It's just like people feel motivated. But like motivation is is incredibly ephemeral, right? It vanishes. And that's why having creating the conditions that make failure less likely is so important because if we can make successful actions the most likely actions, success becomes the most likely outcome. And I think that is like that is the piece that people miss because they actually stack their deck against themselves by never arranging the conditions to make successful actions the most likely action. People fear being less than extraordinary and in so doing sacrifice being extraordinary. Mhm. It's like you sacrifice one either way. And so either you sacrifice being extraordinary to be ordinary or you sacrifice ordinary for the chance of being extraordinary or less than ordinary. Mhm. But if you really think about it, many people who are ordinary have failed and so you're really just still ordinary. And so why would you not sacrifice ordinary for extraordinary?
If you're going to chase a dream, go all in. If you're going to love, love fiercely. If you're going to walk away, never look back. So many people never even give themselves a fighting chance because they never fully commit. If you're going to go go all the way. It's like people don't do enough for long enough to get anything to work. And I think the biggest issue there is because we expect our dreams to be accomplished faster and easier and risk-free when it will be hard, take a long time, and we will sacrifice more things than we expected. Mhm. And I think one of the hardest parts about um accomplishing big things is that the cost is unknown. So even though it is more than you uh you know you're giving up some stuff, but you still don't even know everything that you're going to give up in the process. A race and not knowing how long it is. 100%. Where the finish line is. Yeah. And what's what's fascinating about that is that like if you know where the finish line is, you can usually handle just about anything. If nothing has changed, nothing will change. And so you have to be like something has to be the catalyst and you were the only like either you get car accident, your girlfriend breaks up with you, you can use the negative at least like if you are not happy with your life and then something bad happens to you, be grateful for it in the moment because it means that you a change a chaos variable has entered the building. And that means that you have the ability for a short period of time before equilibrium gets reestablished that you can change things without the same consequences because all your loops got got muddled. Mhm. And so like those are the periods of time where you can go through tremendous change because you're like, well, [ __ ] it. Everything that I thought to be true isn't. So, what else did I think was false but isn't? And then you can start moving towards it.
Came across this line from Beauty of SaaS. It is an unwritten rule of life that after every prolonged period of hardship and uncertainty, there is going to be a period where you achieve quantum leaps across multiple areas of your life. The only requirement is that you do not give up on yourself. Failure and success are on the same road. It's just that failure is an earlier exit. Mhm. Whatever you do, don't be the guy who gives up at the exact moment when you should be fighting with everything you have. You'll make it through either way, but there's only one way you'll look back and be proud of yourself. Losing Losing is good. And feeling bad about losing is good. Because it forces you to change. And that change means that over time, as long as you're changing in the correct direction, you get better. Or else you would continue to do the strategy that caused you to lose last time, and you would just run it back again. Above your intelligence, above your work ethic, you will be compensated in proportion to your risk. Pro tip, if you're afraid to take the risk, write down in excruciating detail what you're actually afraid of happening. Step by step, what happens next when you fail? You'll often find it's not so bad when you spell it out. Fear exists in the vague, not the specific. What is courage to you? Being willing to take action where there's a large short-term cost with an uncertain delayed benefit. So, if you want to start a business and you think that you are going to get made fun of or slight remarks or like, "Oh, yeah, you're doing your podcast thing again. Oh, yeah, don't don't don't don't miss out, right? You know, don't miss Friday night. It's a big podcast." Um you know you're going to suffer that short term. That's a known cost. And then the payoff is delayed and uncertain. Like not only will it come later. If it were guaranteed, if you knew you were going to make a million dollars doing a podcast, then you'd be like, "Whatever, [ __ ] it." Like it it takes significantly less courage. But I think it's the fact that it is unknown and delayed. So you basically have to be willing to get kicked in the nuts. And multiple times and sometimes for extended durations before the hope that you will get something. But I think the only way to to to get through that kind of kicked in the nuts period, for however long it's going to be, um, is realizing that you have two paths. One that is guaranteed, which is that the path you're currently on will not get you where you want to go. And the other path it is not guaranteed to get you where you want to go, but it's the only one where you have a shot where you do.
Stop whining. Every position has an advantage. Younger means cutting edge. Older means more experience. Smaller company means more personalized. Bigger company means longer track record. Rich means resources to use. Broke means nothing to lose. You aren't limited by your resources, only your resourcefulness. Your life does not need to be easier, it needs to be simpler. Your system is designed to handle stress and challenge, but not complication. Mhm. You probably handle hard things pretty well, but feel overwhelmed when they become messy. Do not attribute to difficulty that which can be explained by complexity.
A man must have a quest. And I just really really like that. It's like you need to do something. You need to go towards something. I think being questless, being aimless, and never being able to use the violence that you are capable of in the pursuit of endeavor that you find meaningful is where people find themselves lost and without hope because hopelessness comes from a perceived lack of options. We don't know what to do. Anxiety comes from many options but no priorities. And so there's many things to do but we don't know which one.
Don't listen to other people's opinions. Friendly reminder that most people are fat, poor pansies and don't listen to them when they try to deter you from whatever it takes to succeed. The average person will always try to keep you average. It makes sense that if you want to be extraordinary, you will do things that an ordinary person would see as extra. This is the really hard part that I had to come to terms with. It's that a lot of people want to see you fail because it justifies the risk that they chose not to take. We always have to think about listening to the people who are closest to our goals, not closest to us. It's like you have this They're like, "We have this mold that is my life. Your life no longer fits my mold." And you're like, "Right. I don't like the pot that that mold makes." And so somehow when people state the obvious, which is that you were living your life against my preferences, we somehow feel like that needs to change because when we're younger and growing up, We can't leave. Yeah, you can't leave and you do need to live your life according to your parents' preferences, your teachers' preferences, your classmates' preferences, your principals' preferences. Um but when you get older, you do have to break the mold and decide what mold you want and in so doing, you will be against their preferences and if the vast majority of people have a life that you don't want, then you're going to do things that the vast majority of people don't agree with. Mhm. The path to exceptionalism is lonely. And loneliness is something that we decry as a society, that there's something wrong with it, there's something bad, there's something wrong with you if many people disagree with you. But this is But success and pursuit of large endeavors is one of those few domains where everyone disagreeing with you is a signal that you are actually doing something different. Now, sometimes you doing something different is the wrong move. I think um Larry Ellison said this. He said uh If everyone thinks your idea is stupid, either they're right or you're right. And if you're right, then you're likely to make a lot of money. I'm loosely paraphrasing, but basically it's like we have to be willing to do exceptional things in isolation and deal with the pain of rejection. Um and some of rejection isn't people saying, "No, I don't want to buy from you." Some of rejection is people just rejecting your behavior, rejecting who you're becoming, rejecting the choices that you're making. Um and I think that rejection oftentimes is harder because it often surfaces as snide remarks, Mhm. jokes that are demeaning, that have a little bit too much edge to them, like a little bit too much truth.
A lot of people who want to do things onto around people who know how to do them. 100% And the harder the thing is that you're trying to achieve, the rarer it is to find people who are able to support you in the doing of it. And not even just support you, but give you legitimate advice about how to get that. I I 100% agree, and this is something that I've I've I've struggled a lot with because the what gives you the credibility to gain media and attention is being exceptional in some domain most of the time. And being exceptional in a domain makes you unrelatable. And so, it's kind of this very difficult uh catch-22 where Credibility and relatability are inverse. Right. And I But like, to your point, poor people are surrounded by other poor people and then assume that that is everyone. Because it's everyone they know, not everyone that exists, but it's their everyone as far as they're concerned. And I think that's what makes it so difficult in the beginning to to get out of that first bubble is because you have to look outside and look at some people who might even appear unrelatable and try and grasp at the straws of their character, their origin story. Where again, people could hear me say that I slept on the floor, that I didn't have enough money, whatever. But like they only see me not then. No one's interviewing the gym owner who's sleeping on the floor who's going to someday become something because they don't know yet. You're behind because you're in a rush hmm and you're in a rush because you fell behind. And you fell behind because you're in a different season than the people you're comparing yourself to. You're not behind. You're just early. So it's it's it's it's comparing outputs without comparing inputs. And I really just think it comes down to that at the most basic level. Now most of the time um you are early because most people who make that I'll call it uh error in judgment are earlier in their careers. And I also don't think there's anything necessarily wrong like a lot of people like comparison the thief of joy. Um I don't agree with that. I think comparison is how you measure things. Like this this this is the discrepancy. Labeling the discrepancy as bad is the thief of joy. Yeah. Comparison in general is how you can know what the discrepancy looks like between what you want and what you have so that you can fix it.
I think one of the most obvious realizations that you can have when you hear somebody who complains a lot is that their framework of reality is incorrect. Oh, by a mile. A complaint is you saying why is reality not delivering that to me which I anticipated? Yeah. And reality doesn't care. Reality is just going to continue to deliver to you that which it is giving. Why is there all of this traffic on the way to work? There shouldn't be all of this traffic. I didn't anticipate all of this traffic. Yeah. I assumed there wouldn't be traffic. Reality disagreed with me. Reality is not wrong. It's undefeated.
Many people do not get what they want. They look up at their lives and they're like, "This is not what I want." And so, if you don't have what you want, it means that the model that you view the world through is incorrect. Or you have the correct model and the incorrect variables or insufficient variables. It's basically all it is. And so, for me, the more I have looked purely at inputs and outputs, the more I've gotten my predictions correct. I think one of the big losses or failures of society right now is that we are trying to castrate the teeth from the pain of loss. We're trying to not allow kids, people, the feeling to feel bad. It's like we have determined that feeling bad is bad. But feeling bad is not bad. Feeling bad is a signal so that we need to change. Because if no one feels bad ever, then it means that everyone is doing what they want to do all the time, and that is not how a functioning society works. Sometimes people do stupid [ __ ] and need to know and feel bad for it. Eventually, reality is going to come into contact with your decisions. Yes. And the more that that's put off, the less likely you are to come up with a way to avoid that reality coming into reality. What a gift to give somebody to say, "You can feel bad and not feel bad about it." Yeah. It's in like and that's okay. Like you lost. What will we learn? What will we do next time? Great. Do it again. That's because you feel bad, it means that the path that you're on, like you need to change something. And so, it's equal opposite, which is like, "Okay, if we know that we're on the path getting kicked in the nuts right now, and I know I'm on my 17th or 100th podcast, and I'm still not like a millionaire yet." I I have not achieved what I want yet. It does not mean that I have to change course.
The world will reward you in proportion to your courage, not your intellect. The most dangerous person in the world is the one who continues to show up every day even when the rewards are not guaranteed. Your potential is determined by the amount of uncertainty you're able to tolerate and how long you can tolerate it for. You can beat 99% of people if you can master the shame of rejection, the burden of reputation, and the pain of feedback.
I was asked um if you could transfer only one trait to your son, what would it be? Um and I really thought a lot about it. I was like, of all the traits, what would I trait what would I want to transfer? And I think it's courage. Because if you don't have courage, nothing else matters. Like you can't take the you can't take any action, you can't do anything worth doing, you can't stand for anything because you have no courage. Um and so I think that's why it's it's so much more preferable to be a failure than a coward. And I think that I would hope that I could transfer just that lesson and try and reinforce as many times as I can in his upbringing that like you have to you have to take jumps and you have to lose and you have to be willing to lose and then realize that losing doesn't actually make you a loser because losing is the is the is the first signal on the path to winning. But like not playing is the actual signal for for a forever loss.
Take responsibility for your current position. What's that mean? Um it's identifying yourself as source. And to be clear, it doesn't mean that like your position in reality is 100% because of you, but from a So, this is a validity This is a uh invalid but useful more useful way of going through life, which is that it absolutely might not be your fault, but it is still your problem. Mhm. Mhm. And since you are the only one who you can influence directly, then you are the one who is source. And because like you could still be correct in saying that like because I insert grievance, insert, you know, trauma, insert genetic predisposition, insert zip code I was born in, um, or language or poverty level or whatever it is. Um, all of those things could be true and yet you still have to take action as the only source that can change it.
The interesting thing about no one is coming to save you also means no one is coming to stop you. I think for I mean for me again like the hardest part of entrepreneurship was the first set of friends that you have to relinquish. Because once you do it the first time you realize that you will still survive, you'll still make it through, you'll find new friends. But like in the first time it's it's sacrificing everything you've known and loved for something that you've never experienced and hope will happen and have no idea if it actually will. So the cost is known, the payoff isn't. And that is why I think it is the riskiest and why so many people struggle to make the jump.
Do more hard things every day is a great mantra, but it should be less about ice baths and more about making that decision you've been putting off for 3 months. So respect is letting someone else's word change what you do even when they cannot make you. So if I respect someone, what they what they say changes what I do even though they cannot force me to do it. And so there's two sides to respect. There's the earning of respect and there's the giving of respect.