24 Controversial Truths about Success and Failure (Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson) | Ep 752

There've been so many times in my life where I knew I needed to do something and then I filled all this extra time not doing that thing. And then the moment I did it, I was like, wow, that took way less time than I thought it was going to take. And not only that, it took way less time than it took me to delay to actually get to this point. And if I had only started with just doing what I was supposed to do, I could have done 4 or 5 other things that I was also supposed to do by this exact same point. And so thinking about it from that perspective, I've tried to eliminate as much time between I think I should do this thing and beginning doing it. And I think you get this positive reinforcement cycle that occurs every time you start. I call it pulling the thread. It's like I just need to start pulling the thread and then all of a sudden what feels really unknown becomes very tangible and you're like, oh, I understand the 6 problems I have to solve to do this big thing, but now I know the problems. And then it feels like you can, you can wrap your arms around it and then you can start taking it one bite at a time.

This same thing works in reverse as well, that when you put something off, it makes putting it off more. Mañana, mañana, mañana.

I used to define power by the distance between thoughts and reality. Meaning, if you think about somebody who's omnipotent, so if God or the God figure would be omnipotent, as he thinks, things are. So there's zero space between thoughts and reality. And so if we want to be more God-like in our lives, The distance that we can shrink between wanting to do something or thinking something should be done and it being done is a direct indication of our personal power in our lives. And so that has helped me basically think, don't be a powerless bitch. Like, just shrink the, shrink the gap. And I think that's why a lot of my, my little like personal hacks of waking up and then trying to shrink the time between when I wake up and when I start working and shrinking the time between one task and the next task. Like, you don't need to take 30 minutes of getting ready to start working. Like you can just start working because as soon as you get into it, you start pulling the thread and you're like, oh, here it is. And all of the time that I was getting ready to work, I was just using up my best brainpower time on things that truly don't move the needle at all.

Yeah, I came to call that the productivity rain dance that you sort of do this weird sacred ritual beforehand. And we've spoken about this before, but it's, you know, there are certain things that you can do that will make success or productivity or focus more likely and better. That doesn't mean that you should disregard them. That overreliance on them makes a very fragile, unrobust way to get into working.

I would delineate the difference between preparation and routine. And so if I'm preparing for a presentation, for example, I might assemble my notes. I might read some stuff about the audience ahead of time. I might read about whoever's, you know, doing the, the event and learn more about that. I see that as preparation for the thing. Which I still see as work. And I think some people— I made a post about how preparation is like everything. I put a lot into preparation. They're like, oh, see, you have a morning routine. I was like, no, no, I don't need to, to, you know, stand on one foot and do 17 cold plunges and write 6 affirmations because none of those things are directly related to the work that I'm going to do. And so for me, if it's basically preparation is just a stage of the work, and so if I need to prepare to work, then that's fine as long as it's related to the work that I'm going to be doing.

Well, we spoke about this yesterday, the difference between focusing on inputs and focusing on outcomes. If you optimize for outcomes, the inputs are always optimized. But if you optimize for inputs, you go, what did I actually get done at the end of the day? So the person that does do the productivity rain dance and it takes ages and everyone's done this, everyone's got a blank piece of paper in front of them and they end up washing dishes that they never use. You know, the weirdest tasks become alluring because of that. Focusing on outcomes.

I— so we— when we brought this up, it was perfect because I had a whole thing that I was wanting to talk to you about this. So I'm a big proponent of something I call the Rule of 100, and I'm not the one who invented this, but it's basically 100 primary actions. So I talk about this within the context of advertising. So you make 100 minutes of content, you do 100 outreach if you're doing outbound, you do— you spend $100 a day on ads, you— or, and if you've already spent the money on ads, then you're doing $100— 100 minutes a day of writing ad copy, looking at other people's ads, looking for hooks, and then trying to create more advertisements for your business. And the rule of 100 for most people takes about 4 hours a day-ish. And the thing is, is that's pure inputs, not output. But I've already taken the time to define what those inputs are that create the outputs. But later on in the book, $100 Million Leads, I talk about the rule of 100 on steroids, which is something that I learned from a guy who owned 13 or 14 really successful gyms, and he called it open to goal. And he said, yeah, yeah, he said, my managers work open to goal. And I was like, what does that mean? It's like, so they work open until they hit their goal. And so sometimes that means they hit their goal by noon and they can cut out, or that means that they have to go from 5 AM until midnight that night because that's how long it took them to hit the goal. And so I've seen this across a lot of high achievers across domains. So like, I'll keep shooting free shots until I hit 100 free shots. I will, uh, run until this happens. I will practice my presentation until I do zero mess-ups, right? Or whatever that, that output is that you want for quality or quantity. And I think that you have to first figure out what the input is that most closely correlates or tracks with the output you want, and then you jam as much as you possibly can into inputs. Because if I said, hey, go get me 10 customers, Yeah, exactly. You freeze because it's like, well, what do I do? And so then normally people start, they skew, like behavior skews. So it's all over the place. It's scattered. It's shotguns, sprays. And then they eventually figure out one thing that works. And then it's like, once you hit that, then you just jam that button as hard as you possibly can. And I think that I've been disproportionately successful in different domains of my life by ruthlessly focusing on one input. I mean, even when I was a kid, when I played video games, it's like if you find a spawn point for zombies right before the end of the level, I would just sit there for like 8 hours and just wait for the troll to come up and just slice them again and get my little diamonds and put it in. And I would just do that for hours because I was like, oh, I got to level up my avatar. Um, but I think I play the game of business the exact same way.

Andy Groves says there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little, and that's the lack of correlation between inputs and outcomes.

Yeah, I think the vast majority of business— I'm obviously, I come from the business perspective— the last vast majority of business owners, um, work a fair amount. They just work on the wrong stuff and they do it the wrong way. And so they get so little for their effort that they wonder when they're at home empty-handed in bed, why isn't this working when I am working? But if you define work at least the way I do, which is output So I define work by output, and in order to get output, it's volume times leverage. So how many times you do the thing times how much you get for each time you do it. And so that is the— do you work smart or do you work hard? It's you do both. You do as many reps as you possibly can, and you do it with the most leverage possible. So if I make 100 phone calls, the leverage that I can have there would be how skilled I am. So if I make 100 calls, I might get 10 times more, and so I worked more, I had more output than somebody who has less skill. But the only way you get skilled is by doing more inputs, by working more. And so it's this virtuous cycle of doing more and getting better, and then you get more for what you do.

Yeah. Magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding all the time. Every single time that there is, we're not making progress in this way. What is the highest pain task that's in front of me that I've put off the most? It's always that one. It always is. You know, after you spend enough time thinking about work and deconstructing the way that you piece your day and your life together, you sometimes believe that the answer is still out there. And what you actually realize is that you've already learned it. And it's like, it's that quote or that insight or that book. It's one of the first books you read because all of the big insights from productivity and personal development are the lowest hanging fruit. They're the ones that are repeated across the most books because they're the most reliable, scalable, and robust. It's like, I don't need to be looking out there for most of the new insights. They're just shit that I already learned.

Yeah, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. It's one of my favorites.

Bad things don't come in threes. Bad things happen, people don't know how to cope, and they allow one bad thing to snowball into more. Bad stuff sucks. The only thing worse is letting one bad thing ruin many good things.

I'm glad you found that one. Um, that was one on that list of things that, uh, You know, quotes I wish had gone more viral. Um, the amount of, I think it happens more when you're younger, but, you know, girlfriend breaks up with you. Okay, then you go into work and you sulk because you're distracted and then you don't do the same level of effort and you're not enthusiastic. And then all of a sudden your work suffers and you get, you get put on a PIP or you get fired. And then now you're fired and you don't have a girlfriend and then you start gaining weight. And you stop going to the gym and all of a sudden you're like, man, bad things happen in threes. It's like, no, bad things happen all the time and they only become interrelated if you let it affect your behavior. And so I think the equal opposite of that is thinking, okay, this bad thing occurred. What can I do to decrease the likelihood something else bad occurs in the meantime? And then boiling everything down to activities or the actions that I have to take. And I think about that actually a lot, which is how, like, if you think about from the power perspective of, okay, something bad happens, how much will it affect my behavior? Well, the person who's indestructible would have something terrible happen and then nothing would change. And I love that.

Or they'd get better.

Exactly, yeah.

That's antifragility, right?

Yeah, the sword of Gryffindor. It only drinks in that which makes it stronger.

Ah, fucking Harry Potter reference. Weren't expecting that. Yeah, the people don't know how to cope thing, especially with bad stuff, is, it does explain why you end up with this weird spiral. Tiny little avalanche pebble at the top and then this huge sort of over-exaggerated reaction downstream.

Yeah, people don't know how to manage their emotions. I think the more, at least for me, the more I've tried to create space between how I feel and what I do. The more consistent my outcomes have been.

What do you mean?

So if I need to create content and I'm not feeling it, or I'm feeling tired or things like that, the more times I give into that excuse or that feeling, then the more superstitious I become about doing it in the future. Whereas a lot of times if I can just start when I am tired or when something is painful and then still execute about the same as before, I look at game tape or I look at video or look at the content from those sessions, for example, and I see that I remember feeling terrible during the session, but you can't really see anything. And I think the more times you get that loop going, the more you can separate how you feel and what is required. And the more times you do what is required to get what you want, the more times you get what you want.

I spoke to Huberman last year. I think it's called the anterior midcingular cortex. It's an area of the brain, if I've got that right. Fucking yes, bro. The best advert for Nutonic ever. Basically, there is an area of the brain that tracks when you do something that you don't want to do and you strengthen the connections in it by doing things that you don't want to do, especially when you really don't want to do them. So you're hypertrophying. It's this exact sort of intuition that you've got that Some people would call it resilience or willpower or whatever, but there's a, this is neurologically represented in the brain. These connections get stronger. So I think it's so funny, gym bros will need a gym analogy in order to be able to believe that their brain changes, but it's really useful to think, hey, you're hypertrophying this area of your brain. I snapped an Achilles. I had to do a very particular series of rehab movements in order to grow it back. This is just the same.

Yeah. Agreed.

Successful people. This is kind of similar to what you were talking about. Bad things don't come in threes. Successful people see opportunity in every failure. Normal people see failure in every opportunity. Both are right. Only one gets rich.

Yeah. So I was, so this has been something I've been thinking about a lot, which is basically the shittiness of stuff, which is when you're growing in a business, it's very painful. When you're stagnating in a business and you're plateaued and you don't know what to do, it's very painful. When you're declining and you also don't know what to do, it's very painful. And so that means that all conditions of reality are painful. And so if pain is a prerequisite for reality, then it means it's just a signal that we are alive. And so in thinking about that, Rather than pain is a problem, it is a signal that I'm breathing and then becomes irrelevant.

How do you ensure that you're not suffering unnecessarily? You know, pain can be a useful signal. It can tell you to move away from certain things that are suboptimal.

Yeah, I am, I probably have relatively contrarian views on this. But just even the judgment on pain, I relatively reject. Just like, pain is good, pain is bad. I mean, in the, in the gym, to give a gym, gym example, they found that the pain that you experience when you're going to work out, and there's a difference between like massive joint, like, oh, I just snapped a muscle and like just feeling bad, but feeling bad has zero correlation to your performance in the gym. And so I remember reading that for the Olympic, you know, weight teams. They talked about that and I was like, oh, well, if it has no correlation, then it's almost irrelevant and I can just keep living my life. And so I think the ultimate version of the resilience that you were referencing earlier is rather than, you know, in the beginning you're like, I feel bad. And then you think that that should weigh on the decision of whether you do the thing that you're supposed to do. And then you start realizing that you can do the thing even though you don't feel good about it.

That's right.

And you start hypertrophying it. But I think the ultimate version of the hypertrophy, when the muscle becomes a tendon or it just becomes fused is when you don't even consider how you feel. It's just not a thought. You just keep, you just do it.

That's that movement from sort of type 2 to type 1 thinking, you know, from it being very conscious, very effortful to it's just a reaction. I get up and I start to write.

Right. And then you don't use up any willpower.

No, because it's just what you do.

Right.

There's Rory Sutherland that we were talking about yesterday. In his, he's the only guy that I've ever heard swear in a head talk, and he gave me this idea, which is kind of related. Things are not what they are. Things are what we think they are. For instance, you're doing a hard workout, which gives you a signature feeling. You're laid on the floor, panting, heart rate at 180, sweating from everywhere with the taste of metal in your mouth. This is oddly enjoyable. But if this exact same sensation was to spontaneously occur in your car while sat in traffic, you'd call an ambulance for fear that you're having a heart attack. Framing is everything. Rory Sutherland says, sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. The problem is, when you're not smoking and staring out of the window, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot. If you stand and stare out of the window with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher. The power of reframing things cannot be overstated. It's significantly easier to find a way to reframe your experiences as enjoyable while you improve them rather than waiting for them to be done before you give yourself license to be happy.

So a friend of mine, she's a very, very successful therapist, and she always asks her patients when they come to her and say some terrible thing happened, she said, "What would it take for this to be amazing?" And so for example, lady comes, says, "We're getting a divorce." And she says, "So what would it take for this to be amazing?" And so it just completely shifts the reality of like, okay, how could this be an amazing thing that could happen to me? And this is relevant for me shifting gears because I, we just had a big tryout inside of our company for a presentation slot that we have an event. So we had a bunch of the leaders in the company.

There was like the fucking Hunger Games.

Yeah. We put a cash prize out there.

Fight to the death. Pitchforks.

We did. No, we put a big cash prize out there. Oh yeah. I totally did that. I told him, I was like, I'll have no, no expression.

Just in a toga.

Yeah, exactly. And, um, and I could tell that some of them were nervous and I thought about this because You know, I speak a fair amount and I don't get a lot of nerves in general, and I have a whole bunch of thoughts on that. But, um, the most basic one is that if you're still feeling anxiety, which many of them were like, hey, I'm so nervous, or hey, I have a lot of anxiety before going up. I thought about it and champions just interpret anxiety as excitement. And if you're excited to go up, then you're like, I'm amped versus I'm stressed. But it feels the same. The way you frame it totally changes how you feel when you're stepping on stage. Um, But my two cents of, if you are feeling lots of anxiety, it means you need to practice more. That's just my two cents. And that comes for everything, whether it's to have a meeting or give a presentation or write an email or do a book. Like, if you feel nervous before you release it, then you probably didn't work on it enough. And I think the reality is that most people, to get not anxious about whatever they're doing, you have to do it so many times that by the last time you're doing it, you're bored of it. Like, you don't even want to see the thing again. When you're sick of it, is the point where you'll have no adrenal response to the stimulus because you've seen it so many times. You could do it in your sleep because you hate it at this point. And then when you get up, you're like, oh my God, let's just do this because I'm— I can breathe this shit over with. Yeah.

What's the gap between your expectation of what is going to happen?

Yeah.

And the, um, requirement that you need to perform, right? This is where I need to be and this is how I think I'm going to perform. As opposed to the other way. So I saw this firsthand when I did the live tour last year. So I did, I think, 17 shows in 28 days, 3 continents, right? Like proper tour, like real proper tour thing. And, you know, I did 4 work in progress shows and then that run all around UK, Ireland, Dubai, Canada, US, Canada again, US again. And I could see because it was around about every other day for a month. And each time that I stepped out on stage, every single time that even though I'd done the prep, I'd spent all of this time, I'd done the thing, I'd tried to, you know, I'm not nervous, I'm excited, I'm not nervous, I'm excited. Still, that degraded over time until at the end of it, and this is why comedians, I think, when they end up doing really big tours, one of my friends did a 300-day tour of the same show. He said, I no longer felt like a comedian. I was a performer.

Oh yeah.

Because he's not stepping out on stage. He is so dialed and routinized that he's bored while he does it. And, uh, yeah, that's how you look at, oh my God, Joe Rogan just did Netflix Live to fucking God knows how many millions of people. Metropolitan area of San Antonio's internet probably went down for him to be able to get that connection moving. And, uh, how could he do that? All of these people watching and all the rest of it. That set that Joe did, I've seen at the Vulcan Gas Company, downtown in Austin. And I've seen it at the Mothership in different iterations for coming up on 3 years now. And his last special was 6 years ago. That guy has said those sentences and waited those times and got those laughs and understood the inflections and the little pauses he needs to do maybe 300 times on that one set. There's no more degrees of free— the only thing that could go wrong is a real quirk mistake that's kind of, to be honest, out of your control. If you misspeak a word when you're paying attention, that's not your fault. So yeah, that's how people have unbelievable performance ability. It's just a case of stepping there, sort of one degree of competence at a time.

And if we think of confidence as the percentage likelihood of what we think is going to happen will happen as a predictive metric, then in order to be more confident, we want to have more proof that what we think will happen will happen. And so the easiest way to do that is to do it a lot of times. And so it would be reasonable to say that you're confident that it will go the way you want because it has gone the way you've wanted so many times in a row before.

I've just realized, I've never thought of this before, the fact that the word confidence, as in how we describe it from a psychological perspective, and confidence as in the interval level that you have numerically, are the same fucking word. That's so funny.

Operationalizing. What? How do you become confident? Do it enough times that you feel like it is unlikely that what you think should happen won't happen.

My model of the world is accurate.

I'm confident when I go up to girls. Well, you start going to girls and you start tanking, and then 1 out of 10 times it goes well, and then you do it another 10 times and 2 out of 10 times goes well, and then 4 out of 10 times, and then 8 out of 10 times, and all of a sudden you're confident because you have a high degree of predictive power when you say it will go this way.

That's such a good reframing of confidence. And the best part is you get to use the same word.

And you can boil it down to inputs. You just have to do more.

This is my favorite one, I think, from you over the last few months. You once wanted the life you have. And if you don't like the life you have, you probably won't like the one you want but don't have either.

Yeah, this one I think about all the time because I think about the life that I have now and I know that I wanted this life, but I obviously do a lot of thinking about this type of stuff. Um, but the equal opposite of that is that when I was poor, I was pretty happy. I was okay with being poor. And now that I am rich, I'll put quotes on that, degrees. Um, it's about the same. And so then it just goes down to, well, then the richness had nothing to do with the level of contentedness, which means that my wants in past and present and future all go into the bucket of irrelevant in terms of their ability to affect my perception of reality in the present. And so in thinking about that, it makes my wants have less stake today. And so a lot of anxiety that I think a lot of people have is around things that haven't happened yet, either good or bad. Like, I hope this speech goes well, or I hope I get this job promotion. But the reality is that once you get the job promotion you wanted, you resettle. And the negative version of this is— and you've probably seen this stuff— but when handicapped people get handicapped, so they have a terrible accident, they get paralyzed, or they lose a leg or whatever, there's a dip in their subjective well-being. But after 3 to 6 months, it typically restabilizes, which means that If I didn't get paralyzed, or even if I did get paralyzed, I'd be just about as content as I am right now. It's like, whatever is about to happen is probably not as bad as that. And so that's the worst case scenario, which is nothing. So, okay.

Good things aren't as good as you think they are. Bad things aren't as bad as you think they are.

Yeah, life is life.

Well, it's the, it's the, you've already achieved goals that you said would make you happy. Again, it's the other side of this. And, you know, The fact that we take for granted things that only in recent memory we would've begged to have had the opportunity to have been able to have, and now we're flippant about them. The new car that you thought about and you researched for 18 months and then you finally got it and you just curbed the tires yesterday and you go, all right, whatever. And you're like, you really, you spent all of this time thinking about it. The house that you were going to move into, the marriage that you were going to do, the holiday you were going to take. I told you about this last time. Morgan Housel steps out onto, after this huge big buildup with his kids and his wife, steps out onto the balcony of this holiday that he'd taken. And his first thought was, wow, it would be so good if we could come back here next year. That was like during the process of experiencing the thing, he was thinking about the next thing. And he caught himself and thought, okay, this means that success isn't a goal. A journey or a destination. When you get it wrong, it's a horizon. Every single step that you take towards it, it runs one step further away.

So during my year off that I took after, you know, during the year of the sale when I couldn't, you couldn't, I couldn't really work on the business because you don't want to change anything major when you're going through a sale. Um, but I didn't know if I was going to be owning this business soon. So I basically just had to do nothing because I also had to demonstrate that the team could do it without me. So that's still a sellable asset. So I basically just sat there for a year. That's when a lot of my like thoughts kind of caught up from, you know, when I had started years earlier. And that was when I kind of refined my kind of theory of living for me, which is that hard work is the goal. And so it's not like work hard so that X, because as soon as you have a so that, then the X is the thing. But if the goal is to work as hard as you possibly can, then the only real output we have is who we become along the way. And so in reframing that, then it's something that I can win or measure myself against every day in real time throughout the day, which is how hard am I working? Because that is the goal. And then even I say this just for audio, but like everything else takes care of itself still puts the everything else as the goal. Still, it's just being vaguer. But if you just say like The only point is working hard because I know that whatever I'm going to get is stuff that I will become accustomed to. And the, I guess, opposite of the hedonic treadmill is like your— the resilience piece is that my ability to work hard itself is growable. And so I just need to keep my RP, my rate of perceived exertion, at 8 or 9 or 10, because I know that when I look back on my life, the days that I loved the most were days when I had nothing left in the tank. And there's this thing that Jesse Itzler has this, and I love it. I hate him for having it because it's so fucking good. But he has it. He taught us to his kids, which is he has them. They have a little zero means that there's nothing left in the tank. And when they finish a race or they do whatever, it's like, did you leave? Did you leave anything in the tank? And I thought about that. And the best days of my life were ones when I had nothing left in the tank. And so then the goal becomes to empty the tank. Not what, where I drive, but just to drive the car as hard as I possibly can. And that means that in the beginning it's just straightaways and just seeing how high I can rev the engine. But as I become more advanced, it's like, all right, well now we've got turns and then it's turns in elevation and then it's turns in elevation without guardrails because we have risk. And so when I think about how hard I want to work, the interesting thing about that is that the only person who can judge you on your success is you because you're the only one who knows how much left in the tank you really had. And the better you get, and you can resonate with this, you start winning exteriorly. And that's when people are like, it felt so empty. It's because they didn't actually work as hard as they could have. They just worked hard enough to beat everyone else. But that discrepancy between how hard you could have worked to work your hardest versus what was required in order to win, to me, that's the opportunity that shifting towards the work being the goal unlocks for you. And I work harder now than I did when I was poor. And I think it's because I've learned to enjoy it.

How do you ensure that the hard work focus doesn't detach you from outcomes and inputs? This seems like there's a little bit of a tension with what we started talking about at the beginning.

Oh, totally.

It's direction over speed is the first one, but we're now talking about maximizing for speed. So how do we balance direction and speed?

So with the question, if the outcome that we're trying to have is being present, then the outcome actually is irrelevant because it's about how much you empty the tank. If we're talking about the science of achievement, then the outcome, the outcome does matter, obviously. Um, and so balancing both of those things, which is that if I want to accomplish all my goals, then I need to make sure that my inputs are tied as closely as humanly possible to the outcome. If I want to be satisfied, it doesn't matter at all. And so I think it's marrying those two ideas where the perfect world In my opinion, would be you work as hard as you possibly can because you thought ahead of time, what is the input that has the closest correlation with the outcome that I want? And then you put your blinders on and you start digging.

We don't rise to the standards we have when others are watching. We fall to the standards we have when no one is watching. The only work that really matters is the work that no one sees. It shows you who you really are rather than who you say you are.

There's this line that I heard David Goggins say on Rogan, and I can't remember who he's saying it to or what he said in response to, but he just said, I'm David Goggins, bitch. And I remember him saying it and I thought to myself, like, you want to be able to say that in the mirror to yourself and not laugh at yourself. And the only way that I can do that is know that when no one's watching, I work harder than when they're watching. And thinking about it like that has given me this persistent and ever-present scorecard or third party that's like, no one's watching, which means now you have to work because otherwise you're full of shit. And so it's this continuous reinforcing cycle of the me and other me holding the whip behind me. To see how much I can take, but with each lash of the whip that I take, learning that I can take it and continue to trudge on. And so, as long as you keep going, you bear witness to yourself of what you are capable of. And I find that incredibly satisfying in the trenches of misery when you have to go through it.

It means you're not full of shit.

I'm still here.

It means that you're not full of shit. What it comes down to is, I think I told you this story about when I was with Sam last year in LA. So, um, Sam Ovens used to make content on the internet. Now he's very much an operator rather than a front-facing, which is funny to think about Sam the creator as opposed to Sam the operator. And I asked why he'd stopped making content. And he said, because I felt like I had to start living up to in private the things which I was saying in public. And he was beginning to feel discordance between the two. You know, he was making changes personally, but he'd created a brand publicly. But I think if you can get to the stage where the public version of you is the best version of you, and then private you has to live up to the best version of you, and then you get to do this sort of self-reinforcing cycle, that's kind of the virtuous version of that, which I guess is kind of similar to what you're talking about here.

So I think what we're teasing at is authenticity. And so a lot of people feel like imposters because what they think, what they say, and what they do are completely different. But from an operational perspective, because that's how I like to define a lot of words, which is what do I have to do to be that, right? What do I have to do to be authentic? And you can describe someone as authentic by saying, how would you behave if there was no possibility of punishment? And so if you could not be punished at all, That behavior is who you are authentically. And so in my opinion, our degrees of freedom are predicated on how much, to what extent we act as though we could not be punished. And so if what we want to do and what we do have no possibility of punishment, that is what we are when we are our true selves.

Jimmy Carr talks about, um, nobody throws a Coke can out of the window with kids in the back.

Right.

That means you're a fucking monster.

Yeah.

It's what you do when there's no one around. Your old one about authenticity. People are attracted to authenticity, but it's hard to define for me. Here's my best attempt.

Mm-hmm.

True alignment of what you think, what you say, and what you do. The hardest part is realizing that our thoughts are fucked and that we have to fix them instead of faking the next two.

And it's exactly that. And I think that, I actually think ground zero of that is living out your fucked thoughts. And then slowly try, like, I think it's, it's, it's, I think the hardest jump is actually doing and saying what you think when someone's like, hey, what do you think about this? And you're like, I wasn't paying attention at all. It's like, oh wow. Okay. And so then you basically become, because I think if personal truth of not lying to, if you start by not lying to yourself and then you start saying those things, then you start not lying to other people. And I think if you can decrease the friction between what you really think and what you say, it starts to create some virtuous cycle outside of you that starts to orient your behavior so that you actually start doing what you really think. And I have integrity, but in the truest sense, is one of my personal kind of goals. But it's jarring to people when you're just honest and like really honest. Like, hey, what do you, do you want to go to this, to, to Sarah's birthday party? No. And they're like, what do you mean, you busy? Like, no, I'm not busy, but I don't want to go. People have a hard time just saying no to things. And I would encourage you, if you're listening to this, like, try saying no to— try actually telling the truth when you don't want to do something. Because we say we have so many social niceties that we say, oh, I'm really busy, or it's a really bad time right now, or whatever. It's— I had somebody the other day, I was with a friend, and he like— I didn't notice that I did this. So sometimes it's nice to have somebody from the outside. And so somebody came up to me, we were looking at a real estate property and someone knew I was gonna be there and said, that guy showed up unannounced or whatever. And he was like, hey man, can we do a podcast? And I was like, um, I'm just in town, gonna hang out with Layla for the next few days. Like, not really trying to do that. And he asked again and he was like, hey, um, maybe like 20 minutes. Let's like, we can just, we can just rock one out. And I was like, well, Let me show you my calendar. And I pulled up my calendar and it was all empty. And I said, see, it's, there's nothing on there. And I was like, and I just want to keep it that way. And I didn't think anything of it, but apparently he left. And then my friend just start, just starts crying, laughing, just thinking how hilarious he was. Like, I can't believe you said that. You just, that was so boss, blah, blah. And I was like, what is he talking about? He's like, you just showed him your calendar that you had nothing and you were still like, you're still not going to get any of my time. And I didn't perceive any of this extra narrative that he added to it, but I think just being able to say no to stuff when people ask you for it, because people ask you for stuff all the time and it's these little, these little nibs, these little tiny things. Hey, can you do this? Or hey, can we show up to this thing? Or hey, you're supposed to, or hey, your aunt did that one thing for you, so therefore you owe her. Um, and saying like, I don't subject myself to those rules. And I had a New Year's resolution, which I do believe in making resolutions, like why not? Um, if you stick with them. And so one of my more recent ones was, um, there are no such thing as social obligations, only consequences. So you have no social obligations, you have social consequences, but you don't have social obligations. And so you have to go. I don't have to go. If I don't go, they, what will happen as a result? It decreases the likelihood they will invite me again, which is great because then I, I won't have to say no again. So this actually saves me time in the future. And so a lot of people don't play out the like, what happens if? It's like, oh, more of the thing that I would prefer, which is not getting invited to these stupid weddings or not getting invited to these, you know, Christs or whatever they're called, you know, Brits, whatever, I don't even know, Bris, whatever the thing is. You probably know what the word I'm trying to say. I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah. Well, kids getting circumcised or, uh, I think it means circumcision.

What, you go watching? It's like a viewing gallery?

That's a common thing. Yeah.

Is it? Yeah.

Uh, circumcision. I think it's a Bris. Whatever. It doesn't matter. All right. Point being, if you say no and are honest about why you said no, people will be jarred. But then you get this muscle when we're talking about that muscle of being authentic, which is just saying what you really think. And I think that when you do that, you unlock a certain level of confidence in yourself where you're like, oh, I didn't die. Oh, actually what I would prefer to have happened happened as a result of that. Oh, you know what? It's Friday night and I am going to get a good night's sleep because I do have a clear day tomorrow and I'm going to work my face off and I didn't have to Go to Sarah's thing. And to me, that's like, over time, I think I just do more and more and more of that. And it feels better and better and better.

It's funny that your friends saw that as a flex, that it was, and I can see why. And I think I would too. Oh my God, dude, like you totally owned him with that thing. Like you showed off the fact that you've got nothing. But really, if we're all being honest, if we didn't want to do it, that is the truth. The only reason that it feels like a flex is that it's such a left turn. From the social mores that people typically go through. I said this to you yesterday. Dan Bilzerian's superpower is his frictionlessness from what he wants to his mouth. Say what you want about Dan, but he's lived very unapologetically. And that's— what are the things that you can get downstream from that? I mean, maybe you don't like his values or his principles. Maybe you think that he's a bad guy, or maybe you think he's worth more or less money than he actually is, or all of these things. But what you can't say is that you don't trust the things that he does are not the things that he wants to do. And that commands a level of respect that absolutely, and it should command a level of respect.

I actually think that when you live that way, people trust you more because their ability to predict your behavior.

100%. If I can't trust your no, how can I trust your yes?

Right. And I think when people see you say no and then later say yes, your yes means a lot more. Of course.

Because It's the same thing Peterson talks about, that a rabbit can't be good. It just has no choice to be otherwise. You can't, the vicious, actually, I think that some rabbits are a bit like the twats. So you probably can find some that are nasty. If you want revenge for the bad things that have happened in your life, start with the version of you that hasn't lived up to your potential.

So I think a lot of us have the battle of the other self that we're the, the lesser version of ourself that we're trying to kill every single day. And so a lot of times we have this desire to point the blame finger externally, but wherever you point the finger of blame, power follows. And so whoever I blame for the life I have is the person who I give all the power over my existence, over my circumstances. And so it hurts, but if you turn the finger inwards, and you start saying, huh, I don't like my life. The person that I need to punish or get back at is the real person who got me here, which is me. And so you may be right that other people did certain things or you got dealt a bad hand. It also doesn't matter because the only thing that you can control is obviously the actions that you take. And the only person who's in control of that is you. And so the revenge porn is thinking about what the version of you who got you here did, and then acting in the exact opposite of that as many times as you possibly can. And the pain that you feel by rejecting the thing that you used to do that got you into this bad circumstance, that's the real revenge.

It's kind of like the Stoic fork, the dichotomy of control, but it's just taking all of that and just lumping it all on you. Yeah, it's, you know, I mean, this is kind of the pushback against victimhood culture that externalizing the locus of control, it is the fault of the politics or the economy or it's the state of the dollar or it's the patriarchy or it's whatever. And he goes, hey, look, you will get 100x, 1,000x your returns placing your efforts to try and change those things on you as opposed to on the world. Like you, I think basically the best way to move through the world is to see your entire surroundings as immutable and you as mutable. You're the only mutable thing in the entire world. You're the only thing that can change. Everybody else, people, opinions, places, economy, politicians, policies, all of that. None of that's going to change. You, you can change. That's it. And then maybe some of the other stuff does, and that'd be great.

It's a really interesting concept. So do we accept the world and change ourselves, or do we change the world and accept ourselves? And so it's a really interesting dichotomy when you ask the question, because on 'cause both of those sound right. You're like, I should accept myself and change the world. But on the other hand, you're like, wait, no, I should accept the world and change myself. And so, yeah, 'cause they're both pithy, pithy aphorism porn. Right. And so, um, I think all of it comes down to when you change yourself, you will change the world because you'll change how you see it.

I think as well, when it comes to accepting yourself, do you want to accept you? Do you want to accept a version of you that you shouldn't accept? One that you're not proud of, one that doesn't live up to their word, one whose thoughts, actions, and intentions aren't aligned fully? Well, I mean, I can, but I don't particularly feel good about that. That feels like the higher version of me, the potential version of me that I want to live up to is I'm sort of derogating them, that it's— this isn't really the tribute to them that it should be. And yeah, that's why the self-acceptance movement— that's why people feel icky about it. People feel icky about the self-acceptance movement because they know that people are accepting a version of themselves which is falling short from what it could be.

I would say that they're not accepting themselves in saying that they accept themselves. So if I say, is there a version of yourself that's better than you are right now? And most people hopefully would say yes. It's like, great, accept that person. And I think that to me, when we talk about the authenticity, accepting yourself is accepting the ideal that we can live up to. And that's, that is what we accept, not the shitty version of that that we are today. And I think that marries both sides of the argument.

Jimmy Cobb, Adam Hernandez broke my brain with this one. Everyone is jealous of what you've got. No one is jealous of how you got it.

I love that quote.

My God. People see the trophies, but not the training ground.

Everybody wants the view, but no one wants the climb. I love it. But the people who win love the climb. And the real mountain has no peak. And so the view is always present the whole way up the climb.

And it seems to me, to push back there, it seems to me like a lot of the time you're head down. The pleasure comes from the climb, not the view.

Sure.

For you, again, maybe sort of non-typically constructed. From a psychological perspective. That was nice. That was diplomatic. So what would you say? And this is something that I think, you know, with these episodes that we do, I often want to try and get you to push a little bit more to adapt your ideas and your insights for people who maybe do have a little bit more of that emotionality that comes through to try and sort of soften this up. Like, I understand that people need more degrees of freedom than me typically. I understand that people probably can't get themselves to the level of work that I can. So do you ever sort of play with that idea of, okay, what does a little bit of view taking in look like whilst we're climbing?

I think a lot of the discontent comes from the judgment people have about what they should or should not do along the way. And so they take my description as prescription for what they should do. So I describe my life and then people think I'm prescribing what they should do, and it couldn't be further from the truth. If you want to take a break at every 2 steps and take in the view, do it. I mean, in 4 generations, no one will remember your name. And so enjoy the view if you feel like it. I just happen to enjoy how much I can see that I can do. That's what I enjoy. And I, and I feel like I am most present when I work. And so I'm not going to go on to work-life balance, whatever, because we already know where that conversation goes, but people have a harder time accepting that someone can just work all the time and, and truly love it. And I define that by there's nothing else I would rather do at any time. And so for me, I feel like I exercise absolute freedom in my life. And freedom is reinforcing for all species, dogs, cows, fish, humans. Freedom is one of the most positively reinforcing thing that people have, that everyone wants freedom.

Everybody wants to be able to say fuck you.

Right. But once you say fuck you, you have to do something because you can't just stand there and saying fuck you over and over again for hours for the rest of your life. You start to do something. And that thing that you choose to do after you do, after you say fuck you, is what you want to do.

That's an interesting point. So there are certain things that you have to do to get to the point where you don't have to do things you don't want to do. And then when you're liberated, there is a whole new challenge now because it's a completely blank map where you have to actually define that. That's one of the things, you know, about working for yourself. There's a lot of derogation about 9-to-5s and university education and kind of the typical track and stuff. Like, bro, I, you should be very cautious about criticizing people that have more normal salaried 9-to-5 jobs because I look at most of my friends and they can't not take their work home with them. So for certain psychological makeups, who's more free? The person that actually gets to shut their work laptop at 5 PM. In France, they've got this new policy now where you can't email staff after, I think it's maybe 5 PM or 6 PM at night in certain businesses to try and sort of enforce this work-life balance and stuff like that. So for certain people, you're shaking your head. What's your problem?

I mean, my first thought was, well, France just took the, it's a relevant economy and just made it less relevant. And secondarily, the person who made that rule is somebody who fundamentally doesn't understand human behavior. So if they were to pass that rule for me, then what they did is they actually made my life worse.

This was the thing when Elon took over Twitter. So it's one of my favorite stories over the last couple of years. Elon buys Twitter. Elon finds out that 80% of the staff base just drink smoothies and go on hot girl walks all day. And he fires them. Yeah. And says, this team, it was him and a bunch of Asian dudes, selfie. And he says, this is the team that's going to run Twitter now. And he puts, I think, a job posting out maybe on Twitter. And he says, I want people who want to work harder than they ever have on the most difficult problems in the world and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he got tons of shit for it. And they said, this is a regressive policy for industry. This is taking people back to sending kids up the chimneys and so on and so forth. And it's just a complete failure of theory of mind that there are people out there for whom that is the job advert. I want to work harder than I ever have on the most difficult problems in the world at an intensity that would kill most people because that's where I derive pleasure and satisfaction from. That's the best situation that I could hope for. And trying to take your model of, well, yeah, but what about my maternity leave? And yeah, but what about, you know, Jeans Fridays? And yeah, but what about, you know, hot girl walks? All of that is That those are things that people don't want. Adding those in gets in the way of the thing that they do want.

I think a lot of the confusion around the people who are wanting to work harder than they are, or don't like that I work hard or that you work hard, think that they take this statement as a judgment or criticism on how they live their life. And it's because on the other side of that free line, you're like, okay, I'm now free. I have a blank translate, if I do something or you do something that they deem painful for them now or something that they don't enjoy, they then say, "You are suffering and that is bad." And both of those things I reject wholeheartedly. First, you don't know that I'm suffering because you have no idea what's going on inside of me, comma, and also, what does your judgment mean at all to me?

There's a Tim Cook internal memo that he sent. There's a saying that if you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life. At Apple, I learned that is a total crock. You will work harder than you ever thought possible, but the tools will feel light in your hands.

So good. Chef's kiss.

Chef's kiss, Tim Cook.

Feel like you crushed that one.

I have a friend who worked for a very high-level recruitment company, C-suite execs for the biggest companies on the planet. I don't know whether it was some internal intranet thing or whether they actually saw these people or they maybe pool candidates with other companies, but he was able to see breakdown interviews with some of the best CEOs in the world. So he was able to see the summary of Tim Cook and Susanna Wozniacki, the lady, and apparently the first line. So these guys are seeing everybody, the best on the planet, right? And I was like, okay, so just explain to me the interpretation difference between the guys that are already AAA. And then Tim Cook. And he said the first line of Tim Cook's summary just said, "Rockstar." That was the first thing. All it said was rockstar. And he realized that in a pool of the best executives on the planet, people like Tim and people like Susanna still are heads and shoulders above the rest. I just thought that was so cool to like see these people in their nascent stage before they've got the thing that they're going to really magnify.

They had all the attributes. They didn't have the proof yet.

Yeah, they didn't have the playground. They didn't have the petri dish to be able to show just how much they could multiply it.

Yeah. Which I think about that a lot when it comes to kind of like potential energy versus reality for people on their way up. And so there's this huge time delay between when we start behaving in a way that a winner behaves and when we start winning. And the problem is that The bigger the mountain you're trying to climb, the bigger the W you're trying to get, typically the more delayed it is.

The longer the lag.

Yeah, between when you start behaving like a winner and when you start being a winner. And most people don't get the fast enough feedback loop to know that they're on the right path when they are taking these first steps in the right direction because they have this really big goal, but they forget that With that really big goal comes the even longer delay that it takes to get there while still continuing to act with no feedback from society.

No positive reinforcement.

No nothing. Whatsoever. And I think that's like, if I actually had to put a real, like, what's been, what has worked so well for me and why the input over the output focus has been so powerful is that I can extend the time horizon basically indefinitely because The goal is me, and then the external goals occur.

You don't need the positive reinforcement. I mean, everybody's seen it.

No, I need the positive reinforcement, but the positive reinforcement is coming from me. I'm just being like, just because I think it's important.

The positive external reinforcement that most people are looking for.

Right. But if you, if you are the goal, then the actions you take every day are reinforcing who you believe yourself to be. That's where the confidence comes from.

As long as they're directionally correct.

And if you just want to be satisfied, then just work your ass off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, everybody's seen one of those exponential graphs. And I, one of my good friends, George, bought me Ad Professor.

He's great.

He's fucking fantastic. I found, I'll tell you once we're off air. Fucking won't let me say it. But he's just got the most insane client. Like one of the coolest companies on the planet. He bought me for a gift last year. It's, uh, the 1 million subscriber announcement post that I did. Uh, it's the first ever test footage episode I did in 2017. And in the middle is the play graph that goes between the two. And you look, and it is up until a year at the time, up until like a year before it's flat. There's nothing. There was days, I remember looking back, there was days when we were doing this show in March, April, and May of 2018 where we did zero plays. We'd already launched. I was releasing an episode a week and there was days where we did no plays and I released an episode and we did no plays. I went back through and looked. I don't think I even told you this. I messaged every single one of the 1,000 contacts in my phone that I'd accumulated from nightlife promo on WhatsApp saying, hi, I've just launched a podcast, would you mind subscribing to me? Yeah, a thousand different people bunched into 50-person broadcast lists because that was the maximum broadcast list you used to be able to do. And I was the most ground floor door-to-door sales to try and accumulate an audience. And it just keeps happening. There's no presuming that you keep on going exponentially. It makes every previous version paltry. And yeah, being able to continue doing something without seeing the results of your work is one of the best competitive advantages because everybody else is feeling the same discomfort that you are. Everybody else is going, I don't know if this is going to work and this is hard and why is no one telling me that I'm doing a good job and fuck another day with no plays, that's stupid. And then you end up looking at The top 100 podcasts in the world, I think, account for 80% of the global plays. 100 shows out of about 4 million account for 80% of the plays, which means there's what, 399,900 and fucking— that has got the entire rest of it. That's 20% for those. That's it.

The leading indicator of a successful person is the ability to act without anything happening. And when you continue down that path, it happens slower than you expect and then faster than you can imagine. And I think that's the part that everyone misses is they expect the faster than they can imagine and they imagine really big. And so then their expectations are really big, really fast, but they've, they take the intensity and they don't apply it to a timeline that's appropriate.

This is from Mark Manson, Why I Hate Being Around Negative People. Being an asshole is a weak person's idea of strength. Complaining is their connection. Never let yourself be held back by other people's fears. People criticize what they were afraid to do themselves because bold action reminds them of their own inaction. If you're afraid to be criticized, why do you care about the opinions of those who are too timid to do it themselves? If you are the criticizer, does tearing down someone who has the courage you lack make you better?

Yeah, people criticize because it helps them justify the risks they chose not to take in the hopes that it'll dissuade you from doing it so that you can be in the exact same position as them, which then justifies that they made the right call.

This happened when I stopped drinking. You know, it was now going low and no on alcohol is kind of in vogue and super duper common. But as a club promoter in whatever, 2015, 2016, that was pretty rare. And I think a lot of the pushback that I got from the people around me, some of the people around me was your behavior is throwing my behavior into sharp contrast. And you know, this is the lonely chapter, right? This is why the movement away from your existing friend group. This is Neo. You've already been down that road. You know where it leads. You know you don't want to go there. It's all of those things. But because, at least for me, I always have such inherent uncertainty of my own opinions and such a sense that everybody else is balanced and actually knows what they're doing, that I give undue weight to the criticisms of others. Oh, maybe they are right. Maybe it is stupid for me to stop drinking. Maybe this does make me boring. Maybe it is pointless for me to do, like, who even knows if meditation works? Fuck Sam Harris, right? Like, you know, all of these doubts that start to creep in and that, like we were saying before, this is the discomfort that everybody feels, whether you're launching a business or doing personal development or doing all the rest of it. And as opposed to thinking about it as a bug, think about it as a feature. And as opposed to thinking about it as something that's a personal curse that's difficult, think about it as the selection criteria that everybody has to get over. That's the reason why so few people are equanimous and actually have peace in their mind. Because meditation is hard and everyone thinks, am I doing it right? This kind of sucks. And I'm twitchy and I'm tired today. Why are so few people in shape? Because going to the gym and sticking to the gym is difficult. Maybe it's a tiny bit easier for some people that like it than others, but for most people, most of the time, it's really, really hard. Thinking about the challenges that you need to face, it's just a selection criteria, the cost of doing business, right? This is just the cost of doing business. And I need to pay it.

It's rarely the information or the intensity that makes things hard. It's the sticking with it that makes it hard. And so the desire that we have to quit is simply breaking the consistency. And so that's why consistency has always been the hardest thing for most people to achieve. But the intensity of what you have to do to be successful is much lower than most people expect. And so oftentimes they suffer significantly more in a short period of time than is required to be successful over a much longer period of time with a much lower intensity. And so it's just like if you walk for 5 minutes a day, you're going to get, you know, 50% of the health benefits, probably more than that, I'm sure, um, of just even exercising. You add 10 years to your life if you walked 5 or 10 minutes a day. Um, And the path of personal development is befriending uncertainty. And so I obviously sit from the entrepreneurial perspective, but almost all decisions that you make in the beginning, you have incomplete data and you have to make decisions anyways. And so it's growing comfortable with taking your best bad guess and being directionally correct rather than searching for a perfect answer because a perfect answer Assumes perfect information, which you could only have after you begin. And so in some ways, making a decision is the perfect answer so that you can get the information feedback to then improve the quality of the decision later. And I think that one loop is what a lot of people miss out on, is they spend— they obsess for years sometimes on the perfect pick, the perfect business, the perfect job, the perfect mate, when most of the times beginning each step illuminates the next step, which means the information, the feedback that you get from walking gives you more about where to walk than trying to sit at the beginning in the darkness and pick a direction.

Well, it's the difference as well, I think, between people who are super advanced, super developed, super far down the line, and people who are beginning. It's like, dude, what have you got to— what are you risking by trying to do this thing? You've, you, you, for you, it's fine for you to spend 18 months negotiating with Sam on the school deal.

Yeah.

But if you are yet to do any business, that's probably not necessarily the right way to go about things. Uh, Tim Ferriss says, in the short term, your success depends on your intensity. In the long term, your success depends on your consistency. Do not sacrifice the latter for the former.

Hmm. What's wild about the fear that people have when they're starting out is that they say things like, I have nothing going for me. I have no advantages. I have nothing to my name. I have no money. I have no network. I have no resources. But using Rory Sutherland's reframing, it also means that you have nothing to lose, which makes you incredibly dangerous. And I think people wildly underestimate how many shots on goal you can take when you have nothing to lose. Whereas when someone has something to lose, they have to be more and more selective about the shots they take. And so you have the perfect conditions for taking risk because the worst case scenario is baseline, is where you're currently at.

Correct.

Yeah.

Your downside is this.

Which means that it's like going to the casino and playing craps, but they say that you can just keep playing until you win. But people are afraid to roll.

Reminder for anyone internally debating weekend plans. If you don't want to go, don't go. If they care whether you go or not, they don't care about you. And if they care about you, they don't care if you go or not. Just because you have free time doesn't mean anyone who asks for it is entitled to it.

I think the, the second part I want to start with, which is if you see that you have an empty calendar, most people assume that if someone asks you for that time, it's therefore theirs. And it's only not theirs when someone else has claimed it, which means that your time only belongs to other people. And then you're surprised by the fact that your investment of time has yielded nothing for you when you've given the only and most valuable asset that you have to everyone else, who often give a very poor return on it for you. And so in the beginning, if you don't have money, the only thing you have is time. And so that is the only thing that you— it's the only currency you can spend to improve yourself or get closer to your goals. And so if that's the one currency you have, then why on earth would you give it away?

I think it's genuinely right to say that your calendar is a better measure of your wealth than your bank account.

It's also the easiest way to know where someone's going to be in 5 years or even a year.

How so?

You just see what they're, where they're investing their time and you can predict like more accurately what their life is going to look like in a year based on what they're doing today. And it's a good thing, you know, for us from, I'll— it's hard for me not to put the business stuff into it, but a reminder that the life that I'm living today is a result of the work that I did 6 and 12 months ago. And so if you were to look at my calendar 6 and 12 months ago, then you might extrapolate out to what I'm doing today. But just like people want the immediate reward, they also see their current condition as a result of the behavior they're doing today. It's not— not at all. And so that's why I think having in some ways a very vivid imagination of like, this is where I think the benefit of quote visualization comes into play. I don't see it as much as a benefit for like, oh, I have to imagine this thing to happen. But I think it's more powerful to think I'm doing this thing today and I'm imagining it happening. So it's an approximation of the feedback loop that you want to have. And so it helps you substitute and get through the period where nothing's actually happening.

This is It was so cool to learn this. Going to the gym is one of the very few pursuits that you can do where in the act of doing the thing, you get a brief window into what it will be like if you continue to do the thing.

Yeah.

If I go on Duolingo and try to learn Spanish, I don't briefly become much better at Spanish, like where I'm going to be at in 6 months or 12 months' time. But if I go to the gym and get a pump on, I go, hey, that's me hopefully flat in 9 months' time. Like how I look now at the end of the session is where I want to be toward the end of this year. And that reinforcement loop is so good. I think I genuinely think no one's spoken about this.

The pump preview. Yeah.

But like that I think is the feedback mechanism that makes the gym so compelling. It's one of the reasons why it makes the gym so compelling. You get this brief window into a future version of you and you go, fucking dude, I look so— my delts look fucking awesome. I can't wait for that to be how I look when I wake up on a morning. And you go, okay, that's how I'm going to get there. And that's why it's such a— it's so gratifying, right? It works in the moment and it works over the long term.

So one of my closest friends, or my closest friend, Dr. Kashey, and I talk about this, but the difference between experts and beginners is that experts have more ways to reward themselves in a given condition. And so if you think about an expert salesman, there are so many interactions they can have that they are good at that they can find rewarding and positively reinforcing. And so the goal is to develop enough skill that your external environment conditions can deliver enough positive feedback that it can become self-sustaining.

Give me a tangible example.

So if you're an editor and you edit videos for a living, in the beginning you have to, you know, you watch a video and then you try the thing. And if it doesn't work, there's no, there's no, I mean, there is a feedback loop. It's null. Um, and then you go back, you try it again, and then you do get a positive feedback. Oh, I'd made that transition happen. I made that color grading occur, whatever I'm talking out of. You get the idea. There are some roles like sales and editing where there's a lot of people who are music where people become passionate because there's enough fast feedback loops in the beginning where they can try something and then get good. A master musician can pick up any instrument and have positive feedback loops everywhere. And so the more you master any skill, the more ways you can win. And so it allow— and that's ultimately what makes the rich get richer is that because everything is so positively reinforcing, because they start to develop skills, then they do more and more of it. And as they do more of it, the rich get richer, the better get better, the better become best. And then everyone who's starting out is like, how on God's earth does this guy have this work ethic? But it's really that he has high levels of skill. And I'm going to go on a tangent here, but I think it's going to be worth it. So I think about everything in terms of skills, and I have more or less divorced myself from the words like feelings, psychology, uh, intuition, whatever. I've just, I've just taken it out of my vocabulary and some character traits and try to focus ruthlessly on what are the actions that I can take to become patient. And if you say, hey, be patient, what does someone do, right? They have to figure out what to do in the meantime. That's the definition of patience. If you say, hey, be more charismatic, the problem with that directive is that it's a bundled term. And so I say charismatic, but what it really means is 12 skills underneath of it. That means that when you walk into a room, stand up straight. When you walk into a room, look everyone in the eyes. When you walk into a room, announce yourself, speak louder, shake people's hands and look at them while they're talking. When someone talks, nod your head. If you do all of these 12 behaviors or 15 behaviors, people will begin to describe you as charismatic. And In the path of personal development, we want to become more of these things, but we haven't chunked down the bundled term into the series of behaviors that create the description that people will then call us later. And I think by breaking things down, then it's not like, oh, I'm just not that insert character trait. It's really, oh, I have not mastered these 12 skills. And so by doing that, it demystifies.

Much more precise.

Exactly. This is from a business perspective, also really good for training employees. So like, for example, on our team, I was like, Caleb was the first person who did video with me that I ever enjoyed. And so I was like, why? And then somebody else came in and I was like, I'm not having as much fun in these sessions. And I'd like to recreate the conditions of success. And so how can I make it so that I—

Operationalize fun.

Exactly.

The most Alex Hormozy thing I've ever heard. Hey, hey guys, let's operationalize fun for a moment.

And so we had to, but then the, this is the part that everyone misses is that you then have to look with a microscope and say, what are all the little things that Caleb does that other ones, other people don't do? And so it turned out when he was behind the camera, he would be nodding his head. And if I said a banger line, he would, he would stick his thumb out. And so I'd get these many positive reinforcement loops while I was recording. And then as soon as I was done, he would come over and be like, dude, that was fire. And then he would take out his phone and have all of these really interesting follow-ups because I could see that he was actively listening and he had thoughts. And so then. When we retrained the team, we said, hey, when Alex is talking, nod your head slowly so he sees that you're actively listening. If he says something cool, do one of these, give him a thumbs up. And then all of a sudden, my recording sessions without Caleb became as good as my recording sessions with Caleb, and we operationalized Calebism, right? And so I could say, I just need you to be more like Caleb, but that's not helpful to somebody. But if I said, I need you to do all these things, then I can operationalize that. The reason I'm hitting on this so hard is because this has been such a core change in how I see the world, and it has been so useful in terms of making, bending reality to what I would like it to be, because there's this huge disconnect between what people want, how they describe what they want, and what it takes for that to occur. And by, by being able to look with detail about the character traits Or the things that people who are better than you at a certain thing do, you can then stop being like, man, people think I'm a dick. It's like, well, if someone says stop being a dick, not helpful. I mean, good to know that whatever I'm doing is not working, but doesn't give me any active directions. And so we just try to break down at acquisition.com, but in general and for myself, what are all, what is the 18 things that I have to do? And oftentimes it's significantly more things, but they're also much easier than you think. If I just said, I need you to nod your head while you're going on camera, it's not that complicated to understand. And so when you break it down that way, all of a sudden it becomes, you wrap your arms around it and you're like, oh, so this is what it takes in order for me to be an exceptional videographer. This is what it takes for me to be an exceptional podcaster. I'm sure. And we call it like, this is why I love living by checklists. But right now, if you were to, if I were to say, hey, what makes a good podcast? You'd be like, probably about 128 things. Or more, right? But everyone on the outside says, you're just so, you're so natural on camera. You ask such thought-provoking questions. Like, man, you just get the best guests, right? And you're like, sure. And so this is, but the thing is, is I think this is the mysticism. This is the unknown that the beginners or the people who are at the very beginning of their path don't understand is that there is no magic. There is no mysticism. There is no spirituality around this. Everything comes down to behavior and just, and by doing that, you can take out all of the, the hullabaloo, all of the, the voodoo that unfortunately is so prevalent on social media. And so when you hear the, the podcast clips and whatever of people saying you just need to be more this, if they haven't described it by a behavior, it is useless. And so this has allowed me to also separate signal from noise when I'm consuming content in general, or if I want to learn something, I'm immediately thinking, Well, what does this mean that I have to do? And if someone can't break it down into the behaviors, then they don't know either. And they may be very good at the thing, but they may be very bad at teaching it. And being able to separate those two skills, because those are skills too, being able to transfer a skill is a skill, will allow you to audit who you're listening to so that you can get the highest return on your effort, because then you know that you're doing activities that lead to the outcome that you want.

We'll get back to talking to Alex in 1 minute. But first, I need to tell you about Shopify. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. They are the global force behind Gymshark, Allbirds, and Nutonic. Shopify is the commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. You can think of Shopify as your business sidekick, the Robin to your Batman. You come up with genius ideas and Shopify handles all of the heavy lifting. You can sell without learning to code. Or design. Just bring your best ideas and Shopify will help you to open up shop. Plus, Shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way. You didn't get into business to learn to code or to do design or to do inventory management. Shopify helps to get all of that stuff out of the way and allow you to focus on what you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at the link in the description below, or heading to shopify.com/modernwisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com/modernwisdom. Now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. We have this big nebulous term of anything. Let's call it confidence. And then there's these component parts that confidence is made up of. And only by defining those can you actually bring it closer to you. Yeah, I think, you know, in terms of getting people past the paralysis of be confident, like, what the fuck does that even mean? Where do I start? What are the component parts of confidence? And yeah, you know, breaking down any big thing into small manageable steps is kind of the key to achieving large goals. Breaking down nebulous concepts into high-resolution, very tangible, very obvious individual skills. I really like that. I really like that.

I think it may be the single source of— single's tough— one of the largest correlates to what has worked for me in my life, because a lot of this obsession around this in and you probably know more about it off camera than people can hear on camera, has come from me fundamentally not understanding the world. And so I put so much effort into trying to understand when people would say, dude, like, stop being that way, or you're, you're really cocky, or you're really arrogant. And I was like, how do I not be that? And, or you're really distractible, or you're really, you know, you're scattered. And these were all things that like, You know, it hurts when you hear these things, but you're like, okay, but what do I do? And so I would encourage you, if you have either negative traits that you're trying to get rid of or positive traits that you're trying to accrue or become more like, to simply demystify it by breaking it down into the behaviors. And when you do that, you'll realize that though there may be many variables in that there are lots of little things that it takes, they're usually not nearly as complex as you'd think. And so then you just start looking at it as a checklist and saying, okay, people think I'm arrogant when I begin my conver— begin talking to them about how much money I make. Okay, so I have two options. I can either be around people who like talking about money and don't see it as arrogant, or when I'm around people who I think have a high likelihood of that and I care about their opinion for some reason, then I won't begin that way. And then all of a sudden, fewer and fewer people begin to describe you as arrogant. Now, you are still the same, but people would describe you less in those terms. And so I'll give you a different example. It's completely off the wall here. So one that was really helpful for me was defining love. And so the problem with the English or all languages is that there's many words that mean the same thing. And so we can look up what, you know, Webster's dictionary or whatever. But if you actually look at the definitions, I think most words are actually poorly defined because if you just define them by what someone has to do, then most definitions fall short. And many of them, if you'll find online, are circular, right? But like likingness and loving to me are a continuum. It's not like I like this person, I love this person, just exists on this, I hate to, I really like. Cool. Now, if I were to say, I love you, what does that mean operationally? So for me, I define love by what I'm willing to give up to maintain my relationship with something or someone. And so by using that definition, I was able to see, huh, maybe I don't love my family as much as I thought because I'm actually not willing to give up very much in order to maintain this relationship. And I might actually love my friend, or I may love my coworkers a lot more than I love my family if we use the definition of what I'm willing to give up in order to keep it. And then the more I thought about it, I was like, I was like, oh, I love my goals more than I love anyone. I'm not willing to give up my goals in order to maintain a relationship. And so I actually, when I realized this, I sat down with Leila and I was like, hey, I think I love my goals more than I love you.

How did that go down?

Great. Because she was like, my whole goal in life has been to help you accomplish your goals. And I think the reason that we've had such an aligned relationship is that both of us want to help the other person achieve their goals. And in so doing, then you're aligned and it's like, wow, I, I would give up everything to maintain peace. Because if Layla is the person on earth that helps me accomplish my goals more than anyone else, and my goals mean more to me than any, anything else, then all right.

Layla is now the conduit between the two. Yeah, she's like Inception mindfucked you into— Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And now some people get really uncomfortable by me saying that.

That. But it sounds transactional in some ways, and it is, and I believe—

but I believe in transactions and relationships in general. But when we sat, like, for some reason in marriage it sounds weird, but on a first date, the first thing you share is, these are my goals, this is what I want to do. Like, is that at all interesting to you? Because if it's not, if you're not aligned with where I'm trying to go, then maybe we shouldn't walk in this path together. But for some reason later, that no longer applies. I believe what you apply on first date should also apply on 10 years in. At least that's what's worked for us. And if there's ever been a moment where we're like, hey, we feel off-kilter here, this feels like it's conflicting with what we, our earlier agreement, then we reconcile it, right? And so I bring this up because there are so many terms like loyalty, trust, and I spend a lot of time trying to define these terms so that I can say, not do I trust this person, but how much do I trust this person? This person is honest. Or not. No, how honest is this person? And the only way that you can know someone is honest is if they have had the opportunity to lie where it's not socially beneficial for them, where they lose status by still being integrous and saying what really occurred. And so I have this massive list on my phone. It's got all the terms that I refer to frequently, but I would encourage you to define them by what behavior you have to do.

Have you got your phone on you now?

Yeah.

Can you pull up one and give us a, give us a term that you like to look at?

I'll give a fun one. I have tons. This is fun.

Well, it's words. And that's one of the things that, uh, I appreciate is anybody that spends enough time crafting words and thinking about them precisely ends up having a very accurate view of the world because all of the fluffiness that comes about, we mediate our experience through language. And then what, you've got a shit-eating grin on your face.

Oh, I've just got so many.

Okay, well, pick one of your favorites.

I'll do 2, 3 of them. 2 of them that are related and then a different, and then a third one. All right. All right. So this will be really good. This will, this will be nasty for the people who are listening at home. So learning means same condition, new behavior. So phone rings, you answer the phone, you say ABC. I say, cool, read this script instead that says DEF. Phone rings, same condition. You say DEF, you have learned. Same condition, new behavior. Intelligence is rate of learning. It's speed. It's a measurement of speed. And so it means how many times do you need to be exposed to the same condition in order to change your behavior. If I teach someone something, that script, and then on the first try they say DEF, and someone else, it takes 5 tries for them to say DEF, they are not as intelligent as the first person. Here's why this is interesting. Every person who's listening to this right now has listened to 1,000 fucking podcasts, and they're in the exact same condition, and yet they have not changed their behavior, which means 1, they have not learned, and 2, they are dumb. Which also means that if you can control your behavior, you can also control how intelligent you are. And so if you want to be a smart cookie, then it means that you just decrease the amount of times that you do not change your behavior under the same conditions. And so when I think about this, when I teach my team, when I teach anyone, I think in these conditions. And so every time you watch or you consume a piece of content, you read a book, if you think, what behavior am I going to change as a result of this? If the answer is nothing, you wasted your time and you pretended to be learning, but you were really entertaining yourself. And so that frame has been incredibly helpful for me to speed up how quickly I take action because I don't want to be a dodo bird. So that's two, two different ones, learning and intelligence. One that I've been thinking a lot about with Dr. K and I, we go back and forth, is motivation. So I'll tell you a story and then I'll bring it up. I'll bring it around. So I had a, I was at an event and a young lady said, Alex, can you just give me 60 seconds of motivation? And of course it's like, you know, dance monkey dance. And so I, I, you know, I took a deep breath and I was like, define motivation. And you know, she just like melted. She had no idea, right? I was like, so you're, you want me to answer a question or make a statement about something that you can't even define. And so how would you have any idea of whether or not I actually did it? And so then I probably gave her the answer she really wanted, which was, let me define motivation for you. So motivation is the equal opposite of deprivation. So we are, we are most motivated when we are deprived of something. I'm most motivated to sleep when I'm sleep deprived. I'm most motivated to eat when I'm deprived of food. I'm most motivated to have sex when I haven't had sex in a while. Now, That logic carries for physiological needs, but then you want to get into psychological things or, or intangible constructs. So like, let's think about money. By that same logic, you'd think, oh, poor people should be more motivated because they're deprived of money, but that we don't see that in reality. Many poor people are not that motivated. So it would then follow, and I've seen some incredibly rich people who are wildly hungry for money. And so then it would follow that the deprivation comes from our reference point. Because money is intangible. And so it's how much do we perceive our deprivation around money? And so if all of my friends are billionaires and I'm worth $100 million, then I have a $900 million deficit that I have to come up. I'm $900 million poorer than the person who just is at $5,000 a month who wants to make $10,000 a month. I'm more motivated to make money than they are because I'm more deprived of it. And so So in thinking about this, I then think, okay, what am I deprived of that motivates me to go get it? And also when I want to try and judge the behavior of others or predict their behavior, I have to think, what things are they deprived of? Because I have a much stronger predictive power than trying to say, how do I motivate this person? Look at what they lack.

It's a much more accurate way to predict the things that people are going to chase after.

Operationalized. What do they do?

So I found this quote from Timothy Leary, and it really, it's really fantastic. I think that you'll like this. Find the others. Admit it, you aren't like them. You're not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food, good, sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching "normal people" as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say "club passwords" like "Have a nice day" and "Weather's awful today, eh?" you yearn inside to say forbidden things like "Tell me something that makes you cry" or "What do you think déjà vu is for?" Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on a conversation with a stranger? Everybody carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.

There's many Matrix undertones here. I mean, I think we might have, we might have covered this on a past podcast, but, um, the idea that many people want to be exceptional, but they're afraid of being an exception, I think is such a, it's, it's wanting, it's wanting an outcome without the requirement that the outcome has. And so We can't do the same thing that everyone else approves of and then somehow get a different outcome that everyone else does. And so I think it's, that's why high, that's why high agency for me is something that I look for in other people, which is, you know, asking someone, why do you believe what you believe? And we talked about this yesterday, but if you have a belief and you can't explain why you believe it. It's not yours, it's someone else's. And most people walk around parroting other people's words for the vast majority of their lives. And so they basically act as recorders where they clicked record at one point of their life and then they click play in another time in their life and they're just clicking record, play, record, play, record, play over and over again. And the reason there's that, in my opinion, that other self that's behind it is because none of those words are yours. And so it makes sense that people feel alone and they feel like they're acting because they never say what they think. And as a result, they also sound like everyone else because they were never themselves to begin with.

It's those first 3 lines, admit it, you aren't like them, you're not even close. And it sounds quite sort of self-aggrandizing or kind of narcissistic in a way to, oh, you're considering yourself as being above other but I think, I don't think it's to do with that. I think it's that so many people curtail themselves and optimize for a mean that may not exist. You know, they're reverting to a mean that's just a figment of everybody's imagination. And the only reason that people coalesce there is because other people think that other people are going to coalesce there. You know, the Keynesian beauty contest? Like same, same as that, basically.

I don't know what it is.

Oh, okay. So Keynesian beauty contest is is people make judgments on not who they think is the most beautiful, but on who they think other people think are the most beautiful. And then knowing that other people know that other people are going to make that decision based on that, you end up with this infinite regress of trying to predict things. This is what's happening with politics, right? It's not about picking the person that you want in your area. It's about making the most tactical pick to ensure that overall, accounting for the other people and what they're going to choose, that the person that you really don't want in power doesn't get the seat in your area, but somebody else in some other area. So when you have this sort of recursive, but it happens socially too. I say the thing that I think that you want to hear, knowing that you know that I could say the thing that I want. But so what I say is some mediator halfway between what I want to say and what I think you want to hear from me. And it just ends up with people, nobody being themselves and everybody being some weird simulacrum of what they think everybody else wants them to be.

And if we go back to motivation, the question is, what, quote, motivates people to do this or to behave in this way? And so most times it's fear of something, right? And so they're afraid of something in their minds, but when you actually play it out, which is one of my favorite frames in the world, which is, let's take this to the hypothetical extreme, or let's play it out two more, two more plays, two more turns. And most times you end up getting way closer to what you really want the moment after the bad thing that you think will happen happens. And so we've, we've discussed that, that there's so many amazing things that have happened in my life and your life and many people's lives that happened immediately after they get out. They have something bad happen that gets them out of that realm of just barely good enough, but not really. And so we have this fear of disrupting the just barely good enough, but not really, but you're also already miserable. And so the fear of disrupting your misery feels ridiculous. And so when you think about it like that, right? So when you think about it like that, exactly. The only thing we have to lose is the current misery of mediocrity that we're trudging through every day. And so worst case, you're just also still miserable, but maybe you won't be mediocre anymore because at least you won't be like everyone else, but there's also a possibility that you are not miserable and also not mediocre. And by doing that, you might also just start seeing who you really are, because I think a great portion of our identity comes from the proof that we give ourselves of the things that we've done and said in the past. And so if we want to build towards a different version of ourselves, then it begins with accruing, stacking evidence that aligns with that future self. And so in some ways, break the plate, take the shot, get rejected. Look, because when you do that, then again, the worst case is you have a broken plate, but you didn't like that plate to begin with. Yeah.

It is astounding how many people want to be spectacular in life, but also want to fit in and be normal. Like by being normal, you are by definition aiming for average. Normal people get normal results. Weird people get weird results. You literally can't do what everyone else does and not expect to get what everyone else has. By doing what everyone else does, you guarantee average results.

It's your brother, your mom, your friend, the one comment they're gonna say, you've changed, why are you doing another kick like this? Oh, you're gonna try that now? Okay, here we go again. And the thing is, is that it's not about them being right or wrong. Again, it's about how right and how wrong they could be. And so for example, let's say you wanted to start a podcast in the past and you did 3 episodes and then you fell off. And then they think, I told you so, stop with these dreams, stop with this crazy content stuff. You're never going to become an influencer or whatever your goal is, replace influencer with whatever your thing is. The thing is, is that you are still closer having done 3 than having done 0. And so it's just about directional correctness and realizing that criticizers are more often correct, but when it matters most, incorrect. And so this is where frequency and intensity become flipped. So somebody, I mean, from the investment world, it's like, okay, if I take 10 bets and I lose 9, some people might say he must be a bad investor. But the question is, how much did I lose on the 9 and how much did I make on the 1? And the best investors in the world understand the benefits of outsized returns, both on the upside and the downside. And so, meaning, the perfect way of betting is having no downside and having unlimited upside. You want to make as many of those bets as you can. And in the beginning, that is literally what you have. And so the problem is, you have a bet that you take, you make 3 podcasts, and you didn't stick with it. And so then Criticizer gets 1 point. But you lost nothing. You maybe even gained a little bit of skill. Gained some experience, which means you're actually still better off than you were when you started. So it is a zero-loss game by choosing to begin.

That's the thing about cynics. Right 99% of the time and wrong 100% of the time.

I use this example because I think it really drives it home. So If you, if you have judgmental parents or judgmental friends or judgmental whatevers and you date people and you bring them home, if they say, I don't think this is the girl for you, they're right every single time your entire life except for the one person that you decide to marry. And then they are absolutely wrong at the time that it mattered most. And the thing is, is they get to say on your 6th girlfriend and 7th girlfriend and 8th girlfriend, because let's face it, you've been alive for a while. I have a perfect, I have a perfect guess. I'm right 100% of the time. This rela— we'll see how long this one lasts. And 2 years in, they're like, see, you finally broke up with her. I told you at the beginning it wasn't gonna last. Well, it never fucking lasts except for the one that's gonna stick. Duh. And the business never works until it's the one that does. And the episode doesn't take off except for the one that does. And whether it's 10 or 10,000, eventually one does because when you do more, you get better at doing.

Which is why not quitting is the best skill.

And the only thing that matters. Because by default, with an infinite game perspective, which I encourage everyone to have, the point of the game is to keep the game going. It's the only objective. Because even if— I obviously come from the business world, so even if your goal was to be number one at business, it's like By what metric? Enterprise value, growth, profit, revenue. All of a sudden, okay, maybe it's richest man in the world. Okay. For how long? Look at the history of mankind. Not one person has ever been richest man forever. And so you get to touch the top, even if you're that one guy for a moment, and then it's gone again. And so you can't have that as the, the endpoint because it is by its very nature finite. But the competitor whose objective is to continue to play can't be beaten because by playing he wins.

This is why I think a lot of people have chips on their shoulders once they get to even a modicum of success, because everybody that starts off has this huge amount of escape velocity that's needed to be accumulated. They're starting from total inertia, lifting off where the gravity's strongest, going past all of these, the disbelief and the criticism and the lonely chapter and all of this stuff. So they've had to go through all of these trenches and get over all of these hurdles. And then they finally get to the stage where they're in a little bit more light altitude. They're floating out there a little bit more, and maybe their velocity gives them, or their fuel gives them more returns in terms of their velocity. And now people say, "It must be nice for you." And you go, "Dude, fuck you." Like, if you could have seen how much criticism and hard work and lonely nights and all of this stuff when nobody was watching and I was unsure of myself, chronically miserable, and I criticized and all my friends took the piss at me and I did all of these things. I had to go through all of that for you to now say, must be nice. And that's why Cameron Haynes carries this rock up a hill and it says poser on the back of it. It's 72-pound rock and he carries it up a really, really steep hill. and he does it with, sometimes there's cameras around, but a lot of the time there's no cameras around. And, uh, he does that to, it's the, the only work that matters is the work that you do when nobody's watching.

The reason the goal isn't coming at you fast enough is because every person you've seen accomplish the goal, you only see it the moment they accomplish it. And the reason that it hurts so much when people are like, must be nice. Oh, that happened overnight is because every time you fail, no one cares and no one sees. But when you finally win, people take notice.

Discredited.

But it's the only time they notice is when you actually win. And so to even further reinforce the point, the fact that everyone looks like an overnight success means that the 10 years where they sucked, no one saw. And so the fear that you have about people noticing the fact that you fail is ridiculous because they're barely going to notice when you succeed.

Yeah. I think this is one of the reasons why tracking the journey, this is something that, uh, Chris Bumstead's done very well. You know, he's had his, um, videographer Calvin with him for forever, essentially. And, you know, tracking autoimmune disorders and, and depression and now his wife's pregnant and having a kid and I gotta come back. I can do, yeah, yeah, all of that. I think one of the ways that you can at least lighten the load or bring it into land a little bit more effectively is to construct that story arc. You know, the story of you sleeping in the gym and the cars go over the top and it makes a loud noise and stuff. That is an important part of getting people to buy into where you are now by proving that you were there when the line was flat. Or actually somehow managed to break through the floor, got negative a number of times. And, um, I remember I was watching Maisie Williams. She was one of the— she was Arya Stark in Game of Thrones. And, um, somebody asked her what she wished that she'd done differently. And, you know, I think she starts on that show and she's 11 or 12, and it's all of the most formative years of her life until she's 21 or something into a decade of doing this show. And somebody asked her what she wished that she'd done differently. And she started journaling, I think, in season 5, and there's maybe 9 seasons or something. And she had no recollection of what happened in the beginning. And she really wanted that. And I think that if there's a regret that I have with this show, it's that we didn't track more of what was happening behind the scenes from the very beginning. Partly for everybody else to show just how much shit I went through to kind of prove that, but more so for me to remind myself of where it was. And I'm sure that, you know, there's a couple of photos, you know, the bed in the corner of the gym, like, fuck, I wish like I had that and I wish I had this and I wish I had another one. You know, if you'd had Caleb with you the whole time, imagine how fucking—

I'd be poor and broke. Yeah. I never would have made it out.

Probably in fucking hospital as well for being on the back of a motorcycle.

Cycle.

But yeah, I think it's important. I think it's important to track that journey for yourself and for other people. But it's such a, it does piss me off. Like, I wish that human psychology wasn't so easily manipulated. Like when you see that trick, when you see the, well, if you go zero to hero, even if you go zero to hero to zero to back to hero again, like as long as you can construct that narrative sufficiently strongly for people, you can just get other humans to buy into you, but it hasn't changed what you did. It's just changed the way that you presented it to people and the story that you told. So when you start to see things like that, it makes, I find it disenchanting because it reminds me how fickle crowd mentality is. And it's why Ethan Suplee, big Hollywood actor, weighed 500 pounds or something. And now he's 260 and he used to play fat guys funny roles, and now he plays jacked, bearded biker dude roles. And the reason that his transformation is so fantastic is that you know him from before and you know him now. But the dude that just gets in shape or that goes through the silent, quiet challenge and didn't track the progress gets none of the accolade despite going through all or maybe even more of the challenge.

So much to unpack. Um, I'd say one of the strongest mental frames that has gotten me through my hardest times is thinking, this will be the story that I will one day tell. And that means the harder it is, the bigger the dragon, the more epic the story, and by consequence, the more epic the hero. And if you think about the difference between winners and losers, winners define themselves by what they made happen, and losers define themselves by what happened to them. And the difficult part of the lonely chapter is that the Rocky cutscene lasts 90 seconds in the movie and lasts 5 years in reality.

With no promise of it ever ending. No guarantee of glory.

What's interesting about, and I don't, again, I don't like using the word psychology, but I'll say what's interesting about humans is that our ability to endure is very robust if we know that we'll make it out. And so they've done mice studies where they drop the mouse in and then they let it drown and it drowns really fast. And then they drop a mouse in and then before it gets to the point where it drowns, they pick it up and then they put it back in. And the second time they put it in, it can last like 20 times longer.

I think for the stats is something around will drown in less than an hour. If it's taken out, dried off, and allowed to relax, it'll swim for a day.

An absurd amount different. And so if I were to say, hey, I need you to hold your breath, but I don't tell you how long, 20 seconds in, you might be thinking, this is stupid. Is he going to stop? Is he going to wait for me to pass out? And all these stupid thoughts go into your mind. But if I say, I need you to hold your breath for 3 minutes, your lungs might burn, but you can see that there's this end that's coming. The difficulty with personal development and entrepreneurship is that you don't know when the end is coming, but you still need to fight like the second mouse who gets out, gets dried off, and gets put back in. And the only certainty that I can give you is that it's the same thing that every other mouse, every other person who got through that period went through. And you won't die. And if you do die, you won't care because you'll be dead. And so best case, you win. Worst case, it won't matter.

It's the same mentality. It's the same reason why Uber works. The reason that Uber works is partly because you can get a car from anywhere, but the real reason is that you know when the car's gonna arrive.

Mm-hmm.

You know, remember back in the day you'd ring a taxi and then just wait and you go, I mean, he's some far away. I don't know how far away. And then it ends up coming along. We've mentioned it a couple of times today, a frame that I've used an awful lot over the last year or so is this is the price of doing business. So reframing things from bugs to features. You know, you need to get into one of my nightclubs 10 years ago, there's an entry fee at the door and this is the cost of doing business. I remember Facebook got this, the biggest fine in tech history, maybe 10 years ago or something like that. And their fine some obscene numbers, absolutely huge number. And somebody worked it out that it was like half of one quarter of one territory's profit. And you think, well, I'm aware that in sort of absolute terms, this is a massive number, but in relative terms, they can just go, okay, well, we'll just factor this into the P&L and go through this. So thinking about the byproducts of things that other people see as a luxury that you have, reduction of privacy that comes along perhaps with increasing the size of your platform. And you go, okay, well, I can shout and scream and rail against this. People saying, must be nice. You know, that's a good one. Fucking hell, that's a difficult one. I'm going to get people saying, must be nice because I just got a promotion at work. And that's unfair because I worked hard for that. And I want them to say to me, well done. I know that you probably went through tons of hardship that I didn't see. Or, wow, you've really changed the texture of your mind due to all of that meditation that you did. I'm sure that 500 mornings in a row sat on a cushion in your bedroom in buttfuck nowhere listening to Sam Harris speak in your ears was really, really tough. They're not going to say that. They're going to say, well, I mean, it's all right for you, man. You just don't seem to get angry that easily. And you go, dude, you know fucking nothing about me. You have no idea how hard it was for me to get from where I was to where I am now. But instead of seeing that as, you cannot change what other people are going to say because that is the natural human response to minimize progress that other people have made in order to shorten the gap between you and them. Because if it's due to hard work, that's something that they could have done. If it's due to natural innate innate talent or genetic predisposition, that's something that they have no control over. So it shortens the gap of work and worth between you and them. So instead of seeing it as, oh my God, this is malignant and a personal curse and so fucking unfair, you just go, this is the price of doing business. If I want to be a mindful person, people are going to say to me, dude, you just seem so calm all the time. I wish I was like you. I wish I was built like you, but you know, I just had too hard of a childhood. Childhood, or, dude, you, you're doing so well at work. I wish that I didn't have the kids or I didn't have those restrictions or that my parents had taught me more about business. It's just the price of doing business.

You know, a fun frame with that is when someone says, must be nice, you can just say, yeah, it is. Or someone says, man, you must have exceptional genetics to have the body you have and it just happens so easily for you. And you're Yeah, it's sweet. And the thing is, is that if we think, if we were to just say, like, if we lean into it, right, to some degree, by leaning into it, you also eliminate a competitor, if you want to hear my ugly side. Because if I just affirm the fact that they think it happened overnight, or that it was genetic, or whatever, it makes it more out of reach, right?

Yeah. I've thought, dude, I've thought about this. So this is such a good point. Such a good point. That somebody telling you, going David Goggins mode and somebody saying, this is how hard I had to work to achieve this thing. Look at how hard I had to go through and look at all of the setbacks I had and look at just how in the red I was before I got to the black, before I got to the green. Just look at all of these things. People see that as a threat. People see that as a humble brag, but what it is is a treasure map. This is where I was and this is where I went. And me with all of my inefficiencies and deficiencies and setbacks got from there to here. You aren't even as far into the red as I was. So all of the talk, I, I understand why Hustle Pond kind of gets a cringe pushback from the world, but what it actually should be is an unbelievably empowering message that anybody can get from wherever they are to wherever you The much more disempowering one was, yeah, man, you know, it just comes to me easily. So yeah, if you really want to fuck somebody up, tell them that it's ineffable. Tell them that it's ethereal and astral and you can't get here.

One of my favorite ways to help someone overcome an excuse or a limiting belief is to tell them I believe them. And so if I'm like, hey, why don't you double your prices? And then they give 4 reasons why they can't double their prices. And then I'll say, then you'll fail forever. And then they're like, well, no, because X, Y, and Z. And it's like, great. Glad we got there.

That's like your thing about only one person can be in the angry boat. One person can only be in the negative boat.

Yeah. It's unbelievable how powerful that is. Um, what's interesting about a lot of the discontent that we have around how people judge our success or achievement is that we have this unspoken demand that they have a visceral understanding of everything that we went through without having been there. And the problem with that is that if they understood everything, then they would have a complete understanding of how to do it themselves. And so it's making an impossible demand of strangers to somehow be successful already so that they can appreciate our success.

And also removing your competitive advantage.

And so it's interesting, this is just for everyone who's listening, is that, Chris, you can probably attest to this, is that, um, of the people that I've met in my life who've been extremely successful at any endeavor, there's this kind of, and I want to make a video about this, but it's what people say in the back room. And there are these common things that we say to one another that other people wouldn't believe. So we're like, they just don't get how much actual work it is to do a podcast like this. Like, you don't actually get that what 100 hours of preparation for one 1-hour event looks like. You can understand it conceptually, but when you actually set a timer and you only use that timer and you pause it when you stop working and you do 100 hours of work, all of a sudden by the end of that 100 hours, you have a very different understanding to the very granular level of what it takes to be great at anything. And that's 100 hours, not 10,000 hours, but 100 hours with feedback. Everyone's like in the back room. They want this magic pill. They want it. They want to know the secret, but there is no secret. It's just hard work. But I think the thing that everyone who's, who's listening lacks is the context on how hard hard work is, not in that it's complex, but just in that it's a continuous and unending focus on one thing and noticing the details that separate mediocrity from greatness. And if you're like, I don't know what the difference between those two things is. That is the opportunity that hard work reveals, is that it takes watching 10 hours of you presenting and then taking notes at every time that you say, um, or that a transition between slides is unclean, or that the audience kind of gets lost there because I can see that there's no reactions to that. I should probably add a visual there. And then when you go slide by slide, realizing that, okay, I can put 1,000 slides together for 90 minutes of presenting if I really put put one thought with one visual per slide, and every one of them— and I love this description— is like a coat of paint. It's like you just put another coat of paint on the skill set or the achievement that you're working towards. And most people expect that the pencil wireframe that they do on their first shot is hard work because that's the hardest they've worked, not the amount of hard work that is required in order to get the level of outcome that they say they want or that they expect. And so there's a divorce in reality because they don't have the context from which to make a judgment because they've never been great at anything. And until you get great— because as soon as you get great at one thing, you realize just the tremendous amount of hours and work that it takes to be great at one thing. And then there's this oh shit moment that I can express personally, which is you realize that there's so few things that you can be great at, right? And then the discipline comes down to What are the 2 or 3 things that I can be really good at in my life? Because it will take me 5 to 7 years to be exceptional at this one thing. And so like, even like making content, a lot of people see my stuff now, but I just had a friend send me a video that he interviewed me before I made any other videos. And I showed— I sent it to my team and he was like, dude, I, I watched it. And he was like, and it was you. But then I like, I covered the face and he was like, I mean, it's your voice. But it's like your clarity of thinking wasn't there in the way that you articulated. And the thing is, is it's, it's, uh, if to the untrained eye, to a beginner, they look at that video and they look at my current videos and say, I don't get why he blew up because it's the same dude. But the master or the expert level can say, I can give you 100 different things that could have been better about his his now, or his old videos compared to his now videos. And it's the granularity of that feedback that allows you to see the discrepancy between your current and your desired. And I think that once you actually give yourself the reality glasses, not the woe is me glasses, but think, no, really, if I had to do this, what are, what are all of the things that I would have to improve? Then you see how incredibly long that list is. And then you take this deep breath and that list is the hard work. It's starting at the top and then wanting to cross the first one off after your first day, but then realizing you still haven't done it well enough to cross it off. And you're like, wait, I have to do another day and I still haven't, quote, made a dent in this list. And then you do it another day and a third day and a fifth day and a fifth week. And then all of a sudden you're like, okay, I think I've got the first one done. And then you still look at this list, but along the way of doing that first one, you realize 20 other things that you could add to that list for every one that you you cross off, you create 10 more because you start to win in the weeds.

You start to look at a higher resolution.

And that's the never-ending cycle of excellence.

It makes great things seem closer than you thought and further than you thought at the same time.

At the same time. 100%.

There's no perfect way to live your 20s. You either live them up and become an underskilled 30-year-old, or you work them up and become an underlived 30-year-old. You just have to figure out which you'd rather be, accept the trade-offs, and know that there are no do-overs.

And/or 3, if you consider work life, then you get to do both. That one ruffled a lot of feathers.

Well, it's because people look back on their 20s and realize that they are one or the other?

All right, I'm going to lean into this. I am okay. I had a conversation with my team about this and I said, I am okay being a beacon of relentless hard work. I'm okay being the guy who says, fuck your mental health. I'm okay with it because I've given it a lot of thought. I think that there is The other side is wildly overrepresented, and I'm willing to sit on the logical extreme because I think it will help more people. And there are more people that I have met in my life who are dissatisfied by their live it up 20s than dissatisfied by their work it up 20s. Because most of the time in your 20s, you have no idea what you want, but knowing what you need to do to work and move ahead is fairly straightforward. And so you can take the known and make progress on the one that you have high confidence that you can make progress on. And then along the way, gain perspective on what are the things that are actually important to you in your life. And you may find out often that there are far fewer of those things than you really originally thought, because what you thought live 'em up in your 20s was, was actually your mom and your two homies who are both mediocre and you don't care about their opinion now when you're 30 anyways. But what a waste of a life it would have been to to, quote, live up your mom's dream or your friend's dreams, to then only get to your 30s and realize you didn't live it up and you also didn't work it up. And now you have neither.

I think a lot about, you know, the first day that I sat down at university, my first ever seminar, I sat next to my what would be future business partner for 15 years. So I'm skint. I say to him, I've spent all of my money partying during Freshers' Week. The first week I'd spent my entire maintenance loan, which was supposed to be food and everything else for the rest of the term until fucking Christmas. And it's September the 29th.

It's a big week.

It was a good week, which I could not survive now. And I think back to sort of the time that I spent and the endless hours, I'm not kidding. And I don't talk, I don't reflect that much on the club promo stuff, maybe to my detriment, I should do it more. I've spent between 5,000 and 10,000 hours stood on the front door of nightclubs. I've spent at least 3,000 hours stood on the front door of the same nightclub. Only on Saturdays, right? I didn't miss 202 Saturdays in a row. I took 4-day holidays from Sunday to Thursday so that I could come back to come and do this thing. And I look back at my 20s and I think, you know, was that— how much was living? How much was accumulating skills? And the grass is always greener with this because in hindsight you think, well, you know, you imagine that you could have gone back and still accumulated all of the insights and the skills that you really value in yourself, that would've still happened, but that you would've got to maybe have more variety or you would've maybe the fun or the whatever the thing. And when I look for me with my constitution at what I value most in myself, almost all of those things have been accumulated by having a 20s and now a 30s that has been dedicated to work it up, not to live it up, to 4-day holidays in between those things. Now, remembering that now is not forever, I think is really important. Again, you're on the outlier right-hand end of the distribution for work. Most people are going to pull themselves back across in terms of balance between work and play, but you can periodize what you're doing right now. You can accumulate all of that work, all of that experience, all of that explore time to work out. Actually, I don't like doing admin stuff. It turns out I'm really great at creative, or I really don't like traveling. It turns out I'm really great at routine. All of those things, there's like a buy-in. You remember CrossFit? You do the, you do a buy-in thing. You go, it's a 1-mile run and then it's this workout. You have to do that buy-in. Let's say everyone has to do that buy-in. Doing that buy-in when you're 25 is way easier than doing that buy-in when you're 40. Right? I finally work out who I am in the world because you start to accumulate all of these better directional assistances. You're moving in a more directionally accurate way earlier, which means that you make more progress over the long term. So in retrospect, I'm glad that I did Work It Up 20s, and I'm glad that I did Work It Up 30s as well.

So I'll say two, two things that are, might be helpful. Um, one is You obviously know my stance if you're listening to this on work-life balance, but maybe as a, as a concession for you, your work-life balance obsession may just be too narrowly focused on the present and not extended into seasons. And so you can have work-life balance where I work for 3 years and then I have a more chill year. And I think that most people think about work-life in terms of their split of the day rather than their split of the year or the decade.

So good.

And I think that you can have a much better outcome on both sides if you were to split it up on a longer time horizon.

So good. I mean, everybody knows what it's like to go through it every January, intense period of diet. I fucked it at Christmas again. Too much chocolate, too much dinner. And you go, okay, well, what are you going to do? I'm going to work hard. I'm going to focus on my diet and my training for a while, and then I'm going to hold those gains for a period, or I'm going to build a business. Okay. My health's probably going to take a hit for a little while, or I just got out of a relationship. I need to go dating. All right. Well, I'm probably not going to be able to spend so much time at work, or maybe I'm going to be sleeping later. So my, my fitness is going to knock off a little bit. All of these things happen for periods of time. And Yeah, remembering that now isn't forever is, and that's such a great frame, like a hyperbolic discounting, an inability to be able to imagine that this is not the way that it's always going to be. And that's good for good things and for bad things. This isn't the way it's always going to be. So I better enjoy this win. This isn't the way it's always going to be. So I better not get too disheartened by this loss. You will come back. That's the beautiful thing about the sort of hedonic renormalizing. They go, good things aren't as good as you think they are. Bad things aren't as bad as you think they are.

So if you, if you use that extended frame as a way to approach different types of goals, I'll break a very standard one, which is that people measure the amount of calories that they need to eat per day. But very few people measure the amount of calories they need to eat per week. And so people will blow the day and say, well, screw it. I messed up today. I might as well have a pizza on top of it because I had chocolate and I went off my diet or whatever. Forever. But if you have a weekly outlook even, then all of a sudden you're like, oh, well, I can have a pizza tonight. I'll just like skip most of my food tomorrow besides protein. Or I'll have a wedding weekend and know that this whole week I'm going to be light. And so I have, you know, 13,000 calories for the next 7 days that I can work my way through, which gives me a tremendous amount of flexibility. And the thing is, is that the further you extend the time horizon, the more flexible you can be with your achievement of it, as long as you only get the few things that matter most. And so it allows you to focus and prioritize on those few things that move the needle rather than be overly obsessive on such a small, narrow window of time that is irrelevant anyways.

So there's a, there's a coordination problem that happens when you try to balance too quickly, when you try to have a little bit of fun and a little bit of play and a little bit of fun and a little bit of play, whether it's task switching, whether it's just sort of the cognitive effort of, uh, your personality. Like your identity is, I'm gym guy for 3 months. Hooray. I'm work guy for 3 months. Hooray. But when it's, I'm gym guy this morning, I'm work guy this afternoon, it's tough. It's tough to do that. So yeah, kind of the same as you get diseconomies of scale as a business grows because there's more interconnectedness and communication between each person, the more yous there are going on inside. So this is an argument for sort of aggressive periodizing.

I'm, uh, I'm not a hyper proponent of one single narrow focus. I'll define two more terms since the audience didn't ask for it. Sadness is a perceived lack of options. It's why it feels like hopelessness because you don't know what to do. You don't know what options are available. You see none, which is why it feels like there's no way out. Anxiety is many options, but no priorities, which is why you feel scattered, but you can't decide. They feel very different, but fundamentally Those are the difference in the conditions that make people feel like they're anxious or they feel like they're sad. And so when we're working through what you were just talking about with, okay, I want to be gym guy and I also want to be work guy, we have many options, but a lack of priorities. And so we have anxiety over the fact that we're not making progress on any of them because we have not been able to say, this comes first. And so if we think about what priority means, it means prior, it comes before everything else. And what I think a lot of people have a hard time doing is being okay with saying no and saying, okay, I will allow myself to just not get fatter rather than get fitter during this period. And what's interesting about most skills is that the amount of effort that it takes to maintain a skill versus the amount of effort it takes to grow a skill is like one-tenth the amount of effort. And so this is where the effort arbitrage is so important in terms of allocation. And so if you do a 4 out of 10 on 10 things, you will make progress on none. You'll make the same amount of progress that you could have made if you just did 1 out of 10, which is none. You just don't regress. But the extra 3 points that you save on the 9, you could put on one other item and have a 10 out of 10 or a 13 out of 10 in effort. And then after every periodized chunk of time, have a big W or win that you can look back on and say, I did that, and therefore I am. And so I think that that's how you step up the mountain of progress when you're trying to work on many different skills, quote, at the same time. It's just that the at the same time is over a year, not over a day.

George told me this while we were on mushrooms in Nashville. Fucking brilliant. So I'm there watching.

That's the hook.

Gotta get people in the door. And 4th of July, George turned to me and he said, general ambition gives you anxiety, specific ambition gives you direction. There is nothing more anxiety-inducing than I want to be better and I don't know what at and I don't know how. Like just think about that for a second, sort of embody that. It's sort of a chasing, it's a lean in and it's tight and sort of your shoulders are up and there's a ringing in your ears. And you have no idea. It's like a threat. You've heard a noise in the forest and you have no idea where it's come from. Specific ambition gives you direction.

And I think the concept of specific versus general ambition ladders up to bundled terms. I want this big thing, but I haven't broken that thing down into what I can actually do. Once you get specific into the actions, you don't have a lot of anxiety because you can see what is required in order to get it. And so to circle the loop back on sadness, which is, because some people who are listening to this may be sad, so this is for you. To get out of sadness, and I've been sad many times in my life, the thing that's helped me get out of it is realizing that a perceived lack of options is what causes sadness, not a lack of options, a perceived lack of options, which means that all I have to do is figure out what I need to do and figuring it out becomes the option. And so then I have clarity on the one thing that I need to do to pull myself out of this moment of sadness, which is, oh, I just have to figure out what to do. And that is how I get— at least for me, have gotten out of my Saturn periods.

Controversial take: you really can solve a lot of male problems by getting in shape and making money. You still have problems, they're just smaller, and you have more resources to handle them. The world is there for the taking for anyone who can learn from their mistakes, do what they say they were going to do, and stick with it, even if it's not sexy. What used to make a man acceptable now makes you extraordinary. The bar for winning has never been so low.

Show me two groups of men that need to learn a new skill or achieve anything where the men that are in shape and have learned to make money do worse than an identical group of those men who are out of shape in shape and have not learned to make money. And it's a skewed purposefully test because the skill of getting in shape requires many other skills. The skill of making money has many other sub-skills. And so the real question is, give me a group of more skilled men and less skilled men, and I promise you the more skilled men will do better. And so for anyone who gets offended by that, you're a moron. And so the idea is All men and women benefit from learning more skills. There is no world where being more skilled hurts you.

What about the bar for winning has never been so low?

If you think back to college when you were a freshman, you think, wow, this is so hard or whatever. And then by the time you're a senior, like, man, Man, these kids are so soft. And so we remember things as harder than they were. But I also think that there is a thread of reality, which is that the younger generation is softer. And I think we are softer than the generation above us. When I think about the guys who were storming Normandy and I think about the people who'd be attempting to do that now, as a class, I think that we are softer. And so the thing is, is that if you can barely decide to take any action at all and peel your eyes away from your phone for just a moment, it's so much easier to beat everyone else because most people are overweight. They're distracted. They're poor. They have so few skills because it has never been easier to start a business, to make money, to get in shape. It's just also never been easier to do nothing. And so in a world where it's never been easier to do nothing, doing something becomes extraordinary.

Yeah. The bar genuinely never has been so low, which is, it really does blow my mind, sort of the self-defeating cynicism mindset. And I think also that's why the idea of the lonely chapter resonates so much with people because it literally is like taking the red pill. If you see this version of the world where you go, I can impact my outcomes. I can learn a thing, apply a thing, and then I change as a byproduct of doing that. As soon as you take those steps, you realize Almost all of the people around you who have parts of their life that they're not happy about are kind of making a choice for it to be that way. Now, it may be an uninformed or an ignorant choice because they haven't taken said pill. And then you go, oh, fuck, that means that all of the things I don't like about me and I don't like about my life are my responsibility because I can change it. But given that you've got generalized cynicism everywhere, as opposed to thinking, I'm despondent, this sucks, I wish that the world was more hopeful, you can still think that and also go, that means that my competition has never been weaker, more vulnerable, more fragile. The ability to set myself out from the pack has never been easier.

I think people struggle a lot with the concept that something can be be both painful and empowering. It's this hurts, therefore it's bad. When taking full accountability of your life with all of the deficiencies that you have may be the most painful thing that you do when you look at yourself in the mirror and say, this is my fault. But in saying this is my fault, those are also the first two steps of progress because it's my fault, not anyone else's, which means It's my responsibility and my action that can change that. And I think that marrying short-term pain with long-term progress is one of the first connections that most people who are on that path have to make.

This is the lead indicator of what will be the lag indicator that I want.

People get frustrated not achieving what they want because they assume that they're going to jump across a cavern in one leap. But if you picture your goals like you're trying to build a bridge across that crevice. And every brick that you put on that bridge is progress. And each one of those bricks represents a skill that you need to learn along the way. It just takes all the way until you get to the other side that you can actually walk across. And so the walking across is the outcome. It's the external perceived achievement. But if you can reframe your progress as What are the 100 things on this checklist? What are the 100 skills that I need, the micro skills that I need? Then you can have much faster feedback cycles of wins that you're achieving along the way. And I think if you can define it that way, then you can feel like you are winning A, more often, but B, with higher intensity because as you win, skills stack on top of each other. And so I give this example a lot, but I like it, is that If you are, you learned how to do math, that's a skill. Great. If you then learn how to do accounting, that's a leveled up version of that skill, but you require, you have to know how to do math before you can do accounting. Once you learn how to do accounting, you can learn how to do transactions and structure deals. And then all of a sudden you can become a CFO. And if you learn how how taxes work and insurance work, then all of a sudden you become, and you learn how to raise money, all of a sudden you can be a rainmaker. But the thing is, is that the gap between rainmaker and I know how to do math feels very big. But if you look at all of the micro things along the way, you might not get your first major deal done, which is what everyone in the, man, he did that deal and made $20 million on one signature. Must be nice. Right? And it is. But if you, if you break those things down into the, into the requisite skills, then you can make significantly more progress along the way. And I think that is more positively reinforcing. And I'm just, I'm sharing this because this has been a perspective that has served me so well in my life because the goals that I have now take many years to come to fruition. Like I'm working on a goal that in the next probably 18 months, I will have been working on for 13 years and it will, it will probably come due. And the crazy thing is, is that the bigger your goal, the bigger your timeline has to be. But the even crazier thing is that the bigger your timeline, the easier it is. If I said, you just have, you have to learn French and you don't speak French and you have to do it by tomorrow, it's impossible. You're not going to do it. There's no way that you're going to be able to do it. But if I said you have to learn in a decade, you're like, oh, I could, I could easily do it. You could probably learn 10 languages in a decade. And so all of a sudden, the goals that you have can be significantly more achievable, and you can feel like you're consistently making progress by moving out your timeline. But because people are so short-term minded, because they can't just stop scrolling over and over again, they actually make it harder for them to achieve their goals because the only goals that they deem acceptable are ones that are on an unrealistic timeline. And so they doom themselves from the beginning.

How to avoid tons of problems in life. Go to bed on time.

So I love these. I want to find single behaviors that have many positive outcomes. So if you think about leverage as what you get for the effort you put in, if you have lots of leverage, then it means you can do one thing and get many big outcomes, right? Or one very big outcome. That's high leverage. If you put a lot of work in and get a very little bit out of it, you have low leverage. And so the highest form of leverage I think of are What's one behavior or one skill that I can learn that then has many, many downstream impacts? And so for, and this is specifically, I'll say for the, the 20-ish year old, so 20 to 30, 20 to 35, if you can simply go to bed on time, you avoid drinking and getting in a DUI. You avoid early pregnancies. You avoid missing, messing up your work because you don't sleep well because, uh, you show up hungover the next day and then you don't get the career advancement that you want, or you get the judgments from your coworkers from the fact that you're responsible because you drank, even though it might have been responsible drinking, but you still smell like booze because it's in your system. If you go to bed on time, it's less likely that you'll get mugged. It's less likely you'll be in a car accident. Like there's, there's all of these downstream impacts from one single behavior. And you also have better quality sleep in general if you go to sleep at the same time every day over and over again. So that means that you have life extension things that happen. You look younger. And so now 5 years, 10 years later, people are like, wow, you look so good for your age. There's all of these things from one central behavior, which is just fucking go to bed on time. And so if you want the action for this, you set your alarm for when you go to bed, not for when you wake up. If you set your alarm for when you go to bed, you will always be able to wake up naturally at whatever time you wake up. And it's very difficult to oversleep when you go to bed at 9 because you can get 8 hours of sleep and still be up by 5.

What are some of the other behaviors that fit in that category, do you think?

Oh, the mega bang behaviors?

Mm-hmm. Maybe one that a friend gave me, one of the things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Buying a dog was his. So externalizing your sense of self, having something which gives you unconditional love. Your step count has just quadrupled at least. There is a sort of degree of responsibility. It's sort of early onset furry child rearing that makes you a better parent in future. Just downstream from this one decision, an essentially infinite number of good things happen. What are you grinning at me for?

My team's smiling because they know that there's probably like one thing that I tell everyone not to do.

Get a dog?

Yeah. Wow.

Why don't you want them to get a dog? Dog.

So I think that getting a dog for the reasons that you outlined makes sense for living life satisfaction. Like, if you don't walk, walking a dog is a good thing. If I already walk, I don't get that benefit. If I have interpersonal relationships and an outside version of awareness of self, then I don't necessarily get the benefit. But there are significant costs to having a dog, which for me, from a making money perspective, because that is the game that I like to play, uh, it costs a lot. Dogs cost a tremendous amount. And so they cost you not being able to go to events. They cost you having to break up in the middle of the day to go home to let the dog out. They cost actual money. Uh, the amount of total time that you spend walking the dog, if you already work out, is most of the time just wasted. Now you could say, hey, I'm listening to a podcast, fine. But But it will interrupt deep work for the most part. And so, to give you context on how extreme I am about this, Layla bought a dog and then I got her to give it away.

What sort of dog was it?

King Charles Spaniel, the little 8-week-old one.

Nice, strong British dog.

Yeah, super nice dog. Nothing wrong with the dog. Good dude.

Racist decision.

Yes. I just gave it to somebody else in a good home and it's very happy. And you know what? It probably forgot about me instantly.

What else? What are some of these other big benefits?

I mean, there's obviously the exercise because like if you think about the, what are the, what are the big things that, cause the dog one was downstream from, I mean, for me, a big one there is exercise. Like if you walk, it's one or two times a day.

It's like physical and psychological health basically.

Yeah. So it has multiple there. Um, I would say. Eating your body weight in grams of protein per day. So if we think about, uh, lean body mass is one of the big predictors for long-term health and things like that. Um, there are only 3 things that are anabolic: hormones, resistance training, and protein. Like if someone doesn't eat protein and they start eating protein, they have more muscle. Like you don't have to exercise. If you just eat more protein, you gain muscle. Muscle because you have, you lose less muscle because more of it comes from your diet than eating away the muscle you have. That's it. Like those are the 3 things. And so like you can do one of them. And the nice thing is for most people who want to operationalize this, there's this big idea. And I'm not going to get into food and fitness stuff because dear God, but people think I have to eat healthy and it's this big amorphous But if we chunk it down, it means that you need to pick 2 things that you like to eat in the morning that have the macros that you need to hit. And you can try as many times as you want because you only need 1 or 2 that you actually like, and then you can stick with it.

This is one of the best insights that you had about diet, which is people overcomplicate trying to deconstruct what a diet consists of. But if you actually look at what you eat across a year, it's probably 5 meals on rotation. Maybe less. I think I've probably got 3 good meals in my locker. You know, my Gordon Ramsay would be fucking ashamed of us coming from the same country. So, okay, we'll just optimize those 3 meals or those 5 meals.

And that's it. And the thing is, is that a lot of personal development things, business things are a lot like that where they feel like an elephant when you are trying to, trying to break down this math. Like I have to learn nutrition. I have to, There's 5 meals, 10 meals max that you eat 90% of the time. You just need to shift the dynamic of those meals.

Even the restaurants that you go to, even the way that you order your food in the restaurants.

That's it. And so that would be one that I would say is a super high leverage. One thing you can do is just change the 3 to 5 meals that you eat most commonly to be the ones that are more aligned. With what you want.

And go to bed on time.

And go to bed. I mean, shoot, if you go to bed on time and you do that, king of the world. King of the world.

This is one from me. Having a clue is overrated. There's this funny myth that people actually know what they're doing. I've spent time around some of the richest, smartest, highest status people on the planet. And let me tell you, it's idiots all the way up. Normalize saying, I don't have a clue. I'm going to work out how to do it anyway. Having a clue is overrated.

One of my green flags for intellect is someone being able to say that they don't know. Like, it's almost inverted at this point, because I think at some point during school, if a teacher calls on you and you say you don't know, you're punished for that. And so we have such a repetitive cycle of both having it happen to us and watching people like us have a punishing experience that It's very, very hardcore taught to us to never say that we don't know, but that most basic lie trains us over and over again to never say what we actually think. And if we don't know, then that may be one of the easiest ways to start telling the truth.

It's kind of the same as the If I can't trust your no, I can't trust your yes.

I love it. Yeah.

It's the exact same energy.

Not knowing is really powerful because then learning becomes the only clear directive. And so if we know what learning is, which is same condition, new behavior, then it's like, what do I need to change about what I do in order to learn this thing? It also allows us to say, Many things are not worth learning because they probably won't affect my life in any way.

Well, think how much you pity the person who, like, it is literally the worst. If you imagine a quadrant of knowing and not knowing and thinking you know and thinking you don't know, the worst quadrant to be in is thinking you know whilst not knowing. Right? And that is every single person who isn't prepared to say, I don't know.

Yeah.

And internally doesn't believe it. I've already got the answer for that. You know, they are unable to transition across into white belt or beginner mentality. They're always in the, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about that, I know about that.

I think Mark Twain said, it's not the things we know that kill us, but the things that just, that we think we know, but just ain't so.

A lot of self-work can be summarized into thoughts aren't true, Thoughts aren't true. Feelings don't require actions. Things aren't good or bad, they just are. Our greatest enemy is ignorance. To change your life, change your surroundings. Our actions, not our pasts, define who we are. I think that's pretty much probably 95% of self-work.

I stand by my statement.

Thoughts aren't true. Feelings don't require action. Things aren't good or bad, they just are. Our greatest enemy is ignorance. To change your life, change your surroundings. Our actions, not our pasts, define who we are.

Man, I could unpack all of those. So let's start with ignorance. So I am not a moralist, but if I were a moralist, then I would say that ignorance is the only evil. And Therefore, knowledge is the only good. And so most atrocities, if we define them that way, that humans inflict on one another comes from ignorance. We don't know something about the other person or the other party. And if we had absolute context on why someone does what they do, if we lived their life, then we would have absolute knowledge on it and then we would be them. And so then we probably wouldn't try to hurt them because we would be them. And so So I see the pursuit of knowledge and its corollary, how I like it, the pursuit of learning, changing our behavior, to be my ultimate purpose in life. Because if I think about myself as going through life, then I want to learn as much as I can, which is changing my behavior, ideally suited to the direction that I want to go in. As for the, if you want to change your life, change your surroundings. If we want to behave a certain way, then we want to increase the likelihood that a behavior occurs. And so B.F. Skinner said this, and I just love this. It's like my most savage quote of his. He says, people say you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. False. Said, if I dehydrate the horse, I salt its mouth, I put it in the heat, and I put its face one inch away from water, I can veritably guarantee that it will drink. And I think about that visual all the time when I think about myself as the horse. And I think to myself, what is the behavior that I want? Drinking water. And what is the salt in my mouth? And what is the dehydration? The motivation. For this behavior that I can create. And so I am not a believer in free will. I believe that we respond to the conditions that we've had, and then we learn behaviors as a result of those things. And so, for example, I could get everyone in here, the entire crew, to get naked. Guarantee you, I could do it. All I would do is I'd just crank up the temperature and I'd wait, and eventually everyone would get naked. It would happen. And so everyone has this idea that they have this free will. But that's what would happen eventually. And so if that's true, then we have significantly less control and at the same time more control over our behavior if we can stack the deck in our favor. And so part of the reason going to bed at 9 PM is so powerful is because we're changing the conditions so that we can change our behavior. If all of your friends are poor, Harvard did that long study and said that the number one correlate was your reference group, which is who you compare yourself to. Also note, not who you spend the most time with, it's who you compare yourself to. And so if you want to change your life, change who you compare yourself to, number one. But part of who you compare yourself to is who you spend your time with, or who at least you consume the most of. So if you're doing this, then maybe that's a good thing, or maybe it's a terrible thing because you're comparing the wrong people. But either way, if you want to get fit, if you get around fitter people, you will be deprived of fitness because you'll be the least in-shape person, and then all of a sudden you'll be more motivated. If you are poor, but you're the richest of your friends or the same level of wealth as your friends, then get around people who make more money. And then of course people say, but I can't get around people who make more money. Okay. No one else has ever done it. No one who has had it worse than you has ever figured out how to do it. You're right. Right. Of course you're not right. So shut the fuck up.

Thoughts on True.

Oh, I mean, how many things do we think every day that are just false? One, they can be factually false, but also from the reactionary perspective. I'll give an example. So someone miscommunicates and wrongs me in some way. I get angry and think I should wrong them back. Now that's my first thought. If I then say, what does that behavior increase the likelihood of occurring as a result? What do I want to have happen as a result of my behavior? Well, I want them to apologize, or I want them to just not do that again. Well, then me reacting back to them increases the likelihood that they will retaliate. And so in doing what my first thought was, I increase the likelihood of the negative occurrence that I'm trying to avoid. And so thinking through what happens after that thing in interpersonal dynamics and also from a business decisions perspective has helped me so much. Like I've had, I'll give you an example of one that happened not that long ago. Somebody reached out to me, relatively big account, and says, hey, um, can you read my book? It would mean the world to me if you you left me an endorsement. And I said, "Out of respect for you, I won't just ghost this message or give you a half-hearted answer and then just hope that you forget that I said yes. I'm not going to endorse your book, but you're welcome to send it to me. I will probably just flip through it because I have a lot of other books that I need to read that are more closely related to my goal, but I appreciate the flattery implied in you asking me to do that. Before I wrote that message, I was like, okay, what do I want to have happen after I send this message? Now, if I say the go— if I just ghost him, then I will probably have a null outcome and he'll probably have a slight negative because he'll remember, but, but he'll be like, okay, fine. That was his way of saying no. But if I say, if I compliment him, thank him for the compliment with me and also tell the truth, I'll probably get somebody who in the future will know that my yes means something when I, when I choose to do it. And so it's thinking like 2 steps ahead of what happens after I say this thing back and is how do I increase the likelihood of that second move, not the first move. And it sounds silly to say because people are like, oh, of course, but like, I don't think most people do that. And it has helped me so much. And even like with interpersonal dynamics with, with, with my marriage with Layla, if I want I want Layla to talk to me a certain way, then if I punish her when she doesn't talk to me that way, what she'll really do is she'll avoid talking to me in general. And so it's like I have to find a time when she does that thing so that I can immediately reward her so that I can increase the likelihood that it occurs. And so I think about this all the time with most of the dynamics that we have. So anyways, I'll just stop on that tangent.

But I think this is something, especially over the last year, that I've, as a rehabilitating people pleaser, big people pleaser, being able to make your needs known, being able to make demands is a real skill. And it's so strange given that pursuing your needs is maybe one of the most fundamental human things that there is. Is, but I kind of realized that especially people that you respect in a sort of social dynamics way, people don't want to hear what they want to hear. They want to hear what you actually think about a thing. So, so many times someone will ask your opinion. What do you think of the Oppenheimer movie? What you think they want to hear is whatever they think, which is, oh, wasn't it great? Did you watch it? And I'm actually, yeah, I did. Did you get Sour Patch Kids? Yeah, I did. But what they actually want to hear, if you were to say, do you know what it is, man? Like, I don't know, it was just a little sort of drawn out for me and all of the visual effects felt a little bit more. I haven't seen it. I don't fucking know. But what you think people want to hear is not what they actually want to hear. They want to hear what you think. And that requires you to tell the truth. And oddly enough, that means that telling someone what they don't want to hear ends up with a bigger net positive for you than actually giving them the thing that they want For the business owners or for the advertisers in the room or the people who make content, by the way, this is the ultimate hack, is just tell the truth.

Because when you do that, you will by definition make very unique content because everyone else is so afraid of thinking or saying what they actually think. And so you can stand out without trying to stand out. The problem is that the vast majority of people who quote make content or try to quote add value just regurgitate what they think think adds value rather than just saying what they really think.

It's also the benefit of experience, right? Because it's the only way that you can stress test whether or not this thing that you're trying to talk about is an actual thing. And you also get an extra perspective on that too when you know that this is what most other people say about a thing and I have tried it and this is my perspective on not only the thing, but why other people think that this thing is a thing given that I know that it doesn't work. Feelings don't require action. Very similar.

I think this one is super powerful for, well, really at all phases, but especially the beginner. So if you're a beginner, you have to separate you feeling something and you acting on that feeling because you may feel hopeless many, many times, but you need to continue to do the activities that are aligned with your goal. You may feel hungry. Angry, but you need to not eat the cookie to stay aligned with your goal. You may feel angry, but know that retaliating at your coworker has no likely positive outcome. You may hate your boss, but undermining them in front of the team may make you feel good in the moment, but again, destroy your long-term career prospects. And so I think creating a gap. And so I was talking to one of our CEOs who was having a little bit of stress issue, and I said, I want you to think that you're a Yeti can. I want you to think you're one of these cans that has a vacuum between both walls. I was like, you got your feelings on one side, you've got your internal temperature, you've got your external temperature. And I was like, I just want you to do this.

Pfft.

Just create space. And space within the context of behavior is time. Which is, when I feel something, and I have the desire to act on it, you can, at that moment, you have the lowest action threshold. Which means that you're the highest likelihood of behaving or doing something is when you have this feeling. Feeling. And so I want to make as logical of decisions as I possibly can. Hopefully we're all aligned on the fact that logical decisions in general work out better than illogical decisions. And so if we make logical decisions on a regular basis, then we'll have longer-term outcomes. If we want to increase the likelihood that our decisions in general are logical, then we want to create space between when we feel and when we do. And encapsulated in one sentence, Adam Hernandez. It's just because you feel something doesn't mean you need to act on it. And if you have an idea that you want to act on because of a feeling, if it still feels good in the morning, then do it. But I've never regretted taking time before acting when I was angry, but I sure as hell have regretted almost everything that I've done immediately the moment I felt angry.

Things aren't good or bad, they just are.

Oh, this is the essence of Mosey. I'm not the only one. So I think what makes life more difficult for people is the judgment they have on themselves about what they believe they're supposed to do or supposed to have achieved or that this condition or this thing that happened is good or bad, or it should have been good or it should have been badder. And the story of the boy with the horse in the village, I'll tell it in 30 seconds, which is, uh, Dad gets kid a horse and everybody in the village says, that's amazing. The old man says, we'll see. And then the kid is riding the horse and he breaks his leg and everyone in this town says, oh, that's so horrible. And the old man says, we'll "we'll see." And then the army comes to town to take all of the young men to war, and the kid can't go because his leg is broken. And everyone says, "That's amazing." And the old man says, "We'll see." And the thing is, is that as we continue to play out the timeline of life, we can't know if anything is good or bad until the day we die. And the day we die, it won't matter because we'll be dead. And so it means that at the end of the day, all of the things that occur simply occur. And for me, reminding myself of that, that I think this is bad or I think this is good, it limits the peaks and it also limits the valleys. And saying this just is. And I think it's, in my opinion, absolute acceptance of the world without casting judgment on it. And it's difficult to do because we all want to make judgments and we have to make judgments in order to live. We have to approximate this is a good decision, bad decision. This is a decision that will increase the likelihood that what I want to have happen will happen. But most of the good-bads that we have that are coming up are not are not for our own benefit, are not aligned with our goals. They're aligned with one person that told us something when we were 7 years old, and then we incorporated that and we say, oh, this is bad because someone else, when we were a kid, like you hit your head and then you look at the adult and the adult says, that's bad. And you say, oh, it's bad. I'm going to cry now. Right. And so there are so many thousands and millions of those tiny judgments that are passed on to us that do not serve us. And so for me, it has been more beneficial to whitewash everything and then actively rebuild what I believe to be good or bad based on those things, but with a baseline reality that none of it is.

It is kind of narcissistic or solipsistic to believe that you know whether a thing is good or bad.

Means you know the future.

You know what the outcome of this is going to be, right? There's this story that I couldn't believe. It's about September 11th. So I didn't realize this, the night before September 11th actually had quite bad weather, I think. And it meant that people getting home from baseball games got home way later. And then you'll remember the morning of September 11th, it's beautiful blue, clear skies. So had that storm been only 12 hours later, the whole world would've been different, but it wasn't. There's this story of a guy who was going for a meeting And I think it was his birthday. The lady that he worked with had got him one of these illustration ties, you know, sort of gaudy, hideous thing with drawings all over it. And he was wearing a shirt that clashed with it. And she gifted him this as they had coffee on the morning of September 11th, early, downtown Manhattan. And she says, look, your shirt's wrinkled and it really doesn't go with this tie. Wear the tie, it'll make you feel confident. It's a nice present for you. So he goes back to the hotel. She goes to the North Tower. She dies. He's alive. How on earth are you supposed to say giving that tie was good or bad? You have no idea what's going to happen downstream from the things that occur.

So I know this guy who has a podcast, and years ago, he like snapped his Achilles and could barely walk. And so the crazy thing is, is that many people in that time would have been like, this is the worst thing that could have possibly happened. But because he had snapped his Achilles, he was like, well, I have to make the best of this. I have to do something. I might as well stick with that podcast that I said I was going to start. And then years later, he became a top 50 podcast in the world. And I think an amazing frame is you can make anything that feels circumstantially negative in the moment if you ask the question, what would make this thing the best thing ever? And so I would argue, maybe you would agree, that you snapping your Achilles was probably the best thing that ever happened to you because it got you here. And right now you probably have your version of the snapped Achilles that's going on in your life, but there's also the version of the Top 50 in the World podcast that is waiting for you to take action as a result of your snapped Achilles.

I always had this problem with people who said it was meant to be, right? Because retrospectively, you're kind of taking your agency out of the situation. So for instance, me saying, I'm so glad that COVID happened and shut all of the nightclubs down, which forced my business to close so that I could focus on the podcast so that I would restart playing cricket so that I would snap my Achilles so that I would then move to America and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I actually think that that's quite a disempowering frame to put around things because he goes, it totally takes away the difficulty that you had to overcome. If you're in a car accident and you break your femur and you say, It was meant to be because I met my partner who was the nurse that looked after me while I was being rehabbed back to health. You go, okay. Or on the flip side of that, you managed to be sufficiently charming to get a partner while you had a snapped femur in the hospital. That wasn't meant to be. That was your agency. So retrospectively, you want it all to be on you and no known, and in advance, you want it all to be completely up in the air and unknown.

I think the high-agency frame allows you to break your Achilles and say, what will I do to make this amazing? And I think that's where, that's where the magic happens because then everything serves you.

Our actions, not our pasts, define who we are.

Victims see their past as their fate. Champions see their past as their origin story. And so a lot of people are living through their origin story right now, or they're living through the very reason that they'll never be successful. But it could be the exact same situation. And the only difference between either character is the actions they choose to take, which means that if you're using Joe Rogan's frame, waking up in your main player character today in this moment, as weird of a construct as this is, the past doesn't exist. Just gone. It's not anywhere. And so the only thing that we absolutely have control over is the actions that we take right now. And it's a weird eraser of time to when you really start thinking that like it's only exists in chemicals in my brain, but it doesn't exist right now to think about the past that way. But in some ways it's also very freeing because it means that I get to start with no baggage. And in some ways for me, it makes the present feel light.

Because you're not carrying anything into it. Have you seen that Tim Urban illustration of the tree of time, these sort of branches? So it starts off with life and there's only one black branch that is the particular path that you took. And there's all of these green ones that you haven't taken. And then it gets to now, there's a line where it's now, and then it turns to every branch is potential, right? So you had lots that could have been, only one that was, and now you have lots that could be and an unlimited number that may be altogether. And that's, it is, you're right. It's light. When you think about that frame, it makes the present moment feel Well, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what happened yesterday. It doesn't matter what happened when I was a kid. It doesn't matter.

It only matters if you make it matter.

So Jean-Paul Sartre, someone screenshotted this from a book. I have no idea what the book is, but it's a motherfucker. I have led a toothless life. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting, I was reserving myself for later on, and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.

A lot of people wait for perfect conditions to start but don't realize that starting is the perfect condition. And The part of that quote that I like a lot from Sartre, little French Sartre, is, uh, your teeth can get sharper and stronger too, so that he's saving himself to use his teeth, but he could have had all of his teeth at the end if he had been using them the whole time. And so we have this idea, I call it the fallacy of the perfect pick, but thinking that you're going to have this one shot, this one pick of this one opportunity this one podcast, this one whatever, that's going to take you all the way. But it's the habit of biting that takes you all the way, not where you choose to bite the first time. And I obviously now have a huge history of this, and you do too, which is we have learned to just bite and know that our teeth will get stronger and we will learn how to chomp down along the way. And waiting to begin never got anyone anywhere.

PW: Yeah, I kind of became obsessed with this belief that one day life's duties will be out of the way, and then you can finally start doing the thing that you want to do or you're meant to do. Marie-Louise von Franz says, she calls it the provisional life, 'J'ai l'œuvre.' There is this strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that, but there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about. It's also known as deferred happiness syndrome, the common feeling that your life has not yet begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future. This idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death. There really isn't any other time. And the more, you know, like this is one of the, I guess, melancholy realizations of getting older that you actually think, oh my, you know what it is? There are things that I can't do now that I could have done before. It is going, for both of us, it is going to get linearly harder to build muscle for the rest of time. It's never going to be as easy as it was 10 years ago to build muscle. And you go, okay, well, that's an argument for starting sooner. And the same thing goes for becoming more psychologically healthy, for becoming more balanced, for becoming more wealthy, for investing in good habits, friends. Oh God, Christopher Hitchens. It is a melancholy lesson of older life that you can no longer make old friends. Like find your people now, find your people right now and become friends with them. Find your habits right now and start doing them.

It's never been easier to get in muscle than it was 10 years ago. It's never been easier to make money than it was 10 years ago, but it'll also never be easier than it is right now. It'll only get harder. And so that's actually like a pretty strong impetus to do it now. It'll literally never get easier.

Alex Hormozi, ladies and gentlemen. Dude. Yeah. I appreciate you, man. These fugue state episodes are fun. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with what you've got going on, or what have you got? You got any cool stuff coming up?

Um, yeah, I mean, I've got my next book coming out that's in, uh, you will know about it, uh, but it's, uh, within the next 6 months or so. So it'll be coming out. So very excited about that. Been working on that one for 6 years. So it's finally, finally ready.

Have you finished writing that? Yeah. Cool. Because the last one was a little closer to the wire.

Oh yeah, this one I, so fine, I'll tell you the story. So I wrote this book first. And so I'll tell you the subheadline, which is How to Make Money. And I, after finishing that book and being like, this is my masterpiece, I then was like, oh no, they won't be able to use this unless they know how to advertise. Because you can't use all of these things about making money until you get someone to know who you are. And then I was like, oh shoot, they won't be able to advertise unless they have something to advertise, which is an offer. So I ended up writing this book first and then realizing that I had to write offers two books away and actually release that first, even though I'd written this other book. And then I had to write leads to bridge the gap between offers and this book. But this is the book that I've been waiting for everyone to read and consume because I think it will make the most people the most money, bar none.

Did you have a problem given that your writing ability will have probably improved over the other two books? Have you had to go back and sort of catch it up a little bit?

Oh, I rewrote it 9 times in the last year.

Fantastic.

But the first draft was done. And so the 9th draft, which is now in publication, or not in publication, but is a finished product, um, is now done.

Heck yeah. What else? Anything else?

Um, I mean, we're just, we're continuing to invest in portfolio companies. If you're a company that's looking to scale, you can go to acquisition.com. And if you're a beginner just learning, figuring out, uh, how to make your first dollar, uh, I'm a co-owner of school.com, S-K-O-O-L.com. Uh, you can start for free. It's a cool setup that we have to help people do it. And right now 54.1% of people who start a paid community on school make money. So we have put a tremendous amount of effort, Sam and I, into trying to remove all barriers and all friction for people who are getting started so that they have literally no excuses.

It's a way better strike rate than OnlyFans.

I don't know what their, what their strike rate is, but we've worked really hard. Um, to, if you saw the amount of detail, I mean, maybe you heard some of this from the podcast, but the amount of detail that went into like where buttons go and what things we removed. Was actually a big one, was how can we so pare this down so that people don't get overwhelmed? Because the number one reason people cancel or decide not to do something is overwhelm. And so we're like, okay, how can we funnel action into the clearest possible steps that people go step 1, step 2, step 3, and then all of a sudden they're like, oh, I— this actually worked. And so it's been, um, really cool to, uh, to see the thousands of people who have, you know, made their first dollar, which is what I make all my content about to begin with. And so it's been, uh, it's been, it's been the ride of my life. It's been awesome.

Okay, I appreciate you, man.

Thank you.