Brutally Honest Advice For Hard Days | Ep 872

The single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. I've had some of the hardest days of my life this year, uh, and so maybe you feel the same. And so in this video, I want to share a 4-part framework that has helped me move forward even when life sucks. If you can be in a bad mood for no reason, then you might as well be in a good mood for no reason too. And so One of the things that's been helpful for me is just actually recognizing the math of hard days. And so if you think about you having 100 days, right? Let's just say that, you know, last 100 days of your life. Well, the top 10% of those days, you're going to have 10 days that are smiley face days. And then you might have, you know, kind of the middle 80, that's going to be kind of neutral days, right? And then you're going to have your bottom 10% days. Now, this is just normal because of a standard distribution of how days work. I think the most important skill that you could have is being able to reframe reality. And I say this because I had a very good friend of mine this year say something to me, and it was, it was really powerful. And it's been top of mind since he said it. And he said, well, I'll tell you what he actually said. He said, you're Alex fucking Hormozy. You can get away with whatever you want as long as you frame it right. And I really thought a lot about that. And I've, I've brought that perspective to a lot of the conversations, a lot of difficult things I've had to go through, through this. It reminds me of a quote from Viktor Frankl who wrote the book A Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote while he was in the concentration camps during the Holocaust and he survived. And, or he wrote about that time period. And one of the things that he said is, he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. And so if you think about that, the why is the reframe for dealing with the how. And so it's like, how can I frame this, this difficult thing, right? This thing that I'm about to go through or that I just went through, how can I reframe that? In what world would this be an amazing thing, right? In what world where when I tell this story 40, 50 years from now, would I be like, this is a pivot point for me. I had to have this origin story in order to get to where I wanted to go or to become the type of person I wanted to be. And so, um, These have been some of the mental reframes that I've used on some of the harder days that I've had. So this year I had a gigantic bill come out of nowhere. So it was a multi-eight-figure bill that was required to get paid in 72 hours in cash. And so I, you know, thankfully had that, you know, available to me, but I had obviously different plans for that money than dealing with this gigantic bill that I had to all of a sudden pay within 72 hours. And so, you know, there's the, the basically the moment between when I got the news to me paying it to then kind of reflecting back, 'cause it almost felt so fast where it was like, I've got, you know, I've got all these plans and then boom, this happens. And then 72 hours later it's like, wow, okay, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? Kind of moving forward from this. And there's this great quote by Marcus Aurelius, which is, what are you so afraid of losing when nothing in this world belongs to you? And I really thought a lot about that, which it's like, I can't take it with me in the end. And so being sad about losing something that was never really mine anyways, like I'm going to have to push all my chips to the middle of the board when the game's over, right? I'm going to have to cash my chips and somebody else, you know, other people are going to distribute my chips whatever way when I die. And so it's like, I'm really just a steward of these chips. I'm just renting these chips for a minute. And so like to be upset and to ruin the one thing that I'm only— that is finite, which is the present moment for something that actually doesn't affect how I live. So this is the second piece. This is actually kind of a utilitarian perspective. It really helped me, which is by losing that money, I asked myself, what does this change about what I do? What does this change about my life? It doesn't change the food I eat. It doesn't change where I live. It doesn't change where I work. It doesn't change what I do. It actually changes nothing. And so all that changed was just like, in my mind, I had an expectation of the future that changed. That was it. And I said, okay, do I want to— because of this thing that existed in my mind, I am choosing to punish myself for not having seen this or not paying attention or whatever number of reasons I could blame myself for. But at the end of the day, I was like, okay, so you just get to pick how long you want to beat yourself up for. I was like, huh. Well, what am I so afraid of losing if nothing in this world belongs to me? Nothing. This wasn't mine to begin with. And so that really kind of helped me, helped me quell that kind of negative thought pattern pretty quickly. And so I found it helpful when I'm in a bad season, uh, like I am right now, to be fair, I don't try to like put big labels on things, but I guess I'm just giving myself a little bit of grace. Um, but to just focus on having a good day. And so it's like, okay, even though this is a bad season, I'm going to have a good day in a bad season. It's kind of like a bite-sized victory. And if I start stringing enough of those good days in a row, I'm going to turn a bad season back into a good season. And it makes it feel a little less bad because I feel like I'm making progress. And so I heard this, this little bit by Bill Ackman who was like getting sued. He was going through divorce. He just lost $4 billion in Pershing Square for his capital. So he was like, honestly, all of this happened the same time. And he realized all these projects were these big massive things, which is a lot of kind of the stuff I'm dealing with right now. They're not like, okay, I had a bad day. They're like things that just la— they last and they prolong. Right. And he said, you just gotta, you just gotta, you just got a little bit done every day. That's it. He's like, you just gotta make a little bit of progress every day and kind of like compounding and investing. It's like, you don't really, you don't see it in a day or two or a week or two. It's like, but you look at back at 30 days, you're like, all right, I moved the ball a little bit. Right. You look back at 90, you're like, all right, I made some progress. And it's just like, if you have big goals, you're also going to have equally large obstacles. And so you can't assume that, oh, my big goals are going to take many, many years. And then the obstacles that I have to maneuver around are going to happen overnight. Sometimes the obstacles that you have to maneuver around might take a year or multiple years to get around. And so you have to be able to manage your headspace and basically keep your internal combustion engine going during those harder times. And so it's kind of like a monkey swinging from good, good moment to good moment. 'Cause even going from bad season to good day, you can even have bad day and good moment. So I was trying to thought, okay, today was a shitty day. Fine. What good moments did I have? And by focusing on the moments, the thing is, is like when I look back on my life, you forget most of your life. Like if we're being real, like you can't recall most of your life. Most people can't even recall what they ate like 3 days ago, but you can have the moments. And so the moments when I think about like at the end of my life, looking backwards, those are the only things I'm really going to remember. And so I just want to make sure that I take those down. And so what feels like a bad season now, I can try and forget most of the bad stuff and just try and remember the good moments. And so in retrospect, I can, I can have rose, rose colored glasses when it comes to this, this season. So it's like, all right, well, how do you, how do you have a good day? Right. And I think this is different for everyone, but I'll tell you what my little formula is for having a good day. So I actually have this written on my wall in my office, which maybe I'll be able to put a picture up somewhere. But good day formula. For me, there's only 3 things. Number 1 is eat with people I like. Simple enough. Number 2, lift with people I like. And the third is write something. If I do those three things, I had a pretty good day. Like I look back and I'm like, I earned my shower today. I feel good about this. And so maybe for you, your three things are going to be entirely different. Now I'll give you a little wrinkle on something that's been really valuable for me, like absurdly valuable. The thing that I noticed that made these two things significantly better really all 3 of these things is not being in a rush. Like if I have to lift and it's like, I only have 60 minutes to lift. I don't like that. Some people are fine with it. Some people are like, well, this is how my life has to be. That's fine. I have come to a point in my life where I was like, I have a lot of money and I have the ability to not work anymore. And there are not a huge amount of things that bring me big joy. And so if these are the few things that bring me joy, which is eating without a clock with people I like, lifting without a clock with people I like, and writing something for as long as I feel like, then I should organize my day so that I don't have as like many, many hard stops so that if I want to lift in the morning, I don't have something at 9. And if I do something at 9, it's something that's movable. Right? Like if I have to, you know, make this video, it could be at 9, but the team knows if I show up at 9:30 or 9:45, because I lifted longer, that's fine. It's all good. And that has made the— it has, it has taken my good day formula and made it like my super good day formula. And so sometimes it's like, what are the tiny nuances that actually make something different between good and great? And so I thought about, it was like the days that I had these 3 things happen, and then I had better days that had those 3 things happen. I was like, what was the difference? And the difference was that I didn't have to be somewhere else. And in trying not to have a rush, it means I have to give something else up. Right. And so then the question is, is the thing that I'm giving up worth having a better day? And so for me, I was like, yes, I'm willing to give up some money or some upside in order to have consistently better days. And that's a trade I'm willing to make at this point in my career. If you want to achieve a goal, you're either going to have to accept boredom or pain. And the bigger the goal, the more of both you'll get. And when I started my gym, I actually lived with 6 other people in one house. So this was like off a beach town. And so think like sand everywhere, people everywhere, dirty dishes everywhere, like not enough room in refrigerator for food. Cooking was an absolute mess. There were almost all of them had dogs. So one had, so a couple had two dogs, another couple had one dog, another guy had a dog. So we had four, four different dogs in the house and they were like all marking territory. It was horrendous. And I was splitting one room with a guy with a bed, like two beds. My bed was on the floor. His bed was, you know, elevated because he, uh, he could afford that at the time. And I would sleep with a fan on my face. I couldn't hear anything. That was my secret, like, as the fan, like, you, there's like the wind over, like, that's all I could hear. The thing is, is like, I was doing that when I was making like $20 grand a month take home. And so like, there's always trade-offs, right? And the trade-off for me of living in that condition was that I could invest in the dream and build the business that I had at the time. And now I could look back because I ended up losing everything, um, you know, a few years later. And so I try, you know, you get this negative cycle of like, all of that suffering was for nothing. But it wasn't for nothing because I learned all these skills along the way. And so you also can't operate from the perspective of like, I might lose it all in the future, which means everything I do today is not worth anything because like you're going to lose 100% of everything the moment you die. So trying to say that you might lose something in the future is a reason not to do something is ridiculous. You're going to lose everything at some point. You cannot wish for both strong character and an easy life because the price of one is the other. And so when I think about pain, I think about what thing am I paying for right now? And is that thing something that I want? And if so, it reframes the pain as the price of the thing that I want. And so what's very interesting, this is super interesting, is they've done research on this where they have somebody who like accepts like shocks, right? And then they have, they can like opt out at any point. If you have the same man who's getting shocked and then you tell that man in the other room, every shock he takes, his family doesn't have to take, his threshold of pain like quadruples. And so this may seem like some quote mindset, whatever. But the thing is, is like the bigger your goals, the more pain you're going to endure, whether you want to or not. It's the price. And if you can endure 4 times more pain than someone else, I don't actually think that it feels 4 times more painful. I think it feels the same level of pain, but you have this padding that makes it feel worth it. Give a man a purpose and the ability to achieve it, and he will crawl over broken glass with a smile. And that broken glass, like, how can you have a smile during the pain? It's because of what the pain itself represents. Now I'm going to get, I'm going to get a little bit into behavior because I think it's, it's valuable. So if so, so we talk, I talk a lot about reward and punishment, right? But those are kind of more colloquial terms when it comes down to behavior, it's actually reinforcers. And so a reinforcer can be negative, meaning it can be something that's aversive. So for example, if I know that every time I hit my hand with a hammer, I'm going to grow muscle. Then if that hitting my head with a hammer or taking the shock for my family means something positive, which is that I'm protecting my family. I'm helping my country. I'm, I'm doing something that I deem meaningful. The pain itself can become a positive reinforcer because, you know, you're making progress towards the thing you want. Now, you might think of that and be like, well, I don't want to have the pain. The thing is, is that when you're going through it, if you have this frame, it isn't as painful. And so in a lot of ways, it's like we are our own sculpture that we're working on. And as we chisel away, we also get to reveal the type of person that we want to become, the traits and the behaviors and the belief sets that go with the man or woman that we're trying to, trying to grow into. And so I wrote this story, um, I want to say a year ago, maybe 2 years ago, um, that related this that I just want to share with you. So imagine you're talking to the creator of the universe about the person that you want to become, right? And so you say, you know, I want to be courageous. And the creator replies, then I will give you monsters that terrify you. That way you can conquer them. And you say, well, I want to be patient. And the Creator replies, then I will make you work harder and longer, and nothing will come easy to you. That way you can learn to wait. And so they are like, okay, well, I want to be wise. And so the Creator says, then I will give you failures that will crush your spirit. That way you can learn the value of judgment. Then you say, that sounds like a hard life. Can you give me a good life? And the Critter replies, just like we measure the quality of a blacksmith by the strength of his steel, I measure you by what you are at the end, not the fire and the hammer that it took to make you. A good life isn't an easy life. A good life makes you into a good person. And that, my child, is a hard life. And so it's about who we become doing the work more than the outcome from the work itself. And I love this, and this is a reframing of Proverbs, but the work works on you more than you work on it. Adam Hernandez, right? Like, in all labor there is profit, meaning we always benefit from work, even if the thing that we work on gets destroyed, even if you went bankrupt, even if, you know, that relationship didn't work out, even if that partnership falls apart. The work you did is eternal because it changes you. And so for those of you who don't know, who are new to my channel, I lost everything 5 years into my entrepreneurial journey, and then I made a little bit more, and then I lost it all again. But the thing is, is that I had this idea that, oh, I have to start from scratch again. But that's not true because you can only start from scratch once. Every time after that, you start with an experience. A man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an opinion. And you transition from the second to the first, the moment you begin working, because you're no longer somebody who has an opinion. And the vast majority of people who are in the comments section right, who are making the remarks, who are in the sidelines, are just people with opinions. And as soon as you know what that truth is, because you've been there and you've actually done it and you have the scars to show for it, then their opinions matter significantly less. And so I'll give you a different reframe that I've had for redefining pain as it relates to other people, which is You can summarize just about every hateful comment on the internet into one thing. He lives his life in a way that I would not prefer. That's it. Everything is he lives his way, his life in a way that I would not prefer. To which I respond, yes, I do live my life in a way that most people would not prefer. And they live their life in a way that I would not prefer. And that is why it is their life. And they can live their life the way that they want to live their life, the way they prefer it. And I will live my life the way that I prefer it. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all 8 functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. Um, and so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap. R-O-A-D map. Roadmap. And so they make these things, they cast these stones at you as though, as though it, as though it matters. And so my dad told me this when he was going through his divorce. He said he went through this like divorce conference and the speaker on stage said to somebody in the audience, he said, hey, here's a ball. And he threw it to him and he said, okay, throw it back to me. So he caught the ball. He said, now I want you to imagine that this ball is a steaming hot pile of shit. And he threw it to the person again and the person caught it. He said, why would you catch it? And so the lesson of that is just because someone hurls shit at you doesn't mean you need to catch it. You don't need to choose to participate. And I thought that was a really interesting frame. It's like people can hurl whatever they want. It doesn't mean that they have justified a response or that you need to accept it. And that little reframe of, oh, I live my life in a way that other people would not prefer. Well, that makes sense. I'm not trying to live the same life as them. So of course. And then they say he made trade-offs that I would not make. And I say, of course, of course I did. Why is this, why is this somehow an insult? And so the thing is, is like when I was making those trades in the earlier days, Like I didn't, I didn't know when I would be successful or if I would be successful. The only thing that I knew for sure was that I wasn't going to stop. And that was it, right? Like I know I can just not stop and that's something that I can commit to and that's controllable. And so I think a lot of the big gift of hardship is that it doesn't define you, it reveals you. And so. The benefit is that you get to see who you really are and you make that decision yourself every day. And so I have this perspective on loyalty, which is that like, you cannot say that you are loyal until your loyalty is tested. You cannot say you're patient until your patience is tested. Otherwise it's an opinion, not an experience. And so you can't say that you, you can handle hardship and that you are emotionally resilient until you've had something to be emotionally resilient about. And so the gift of the hard time is to give you proof of who you are so that the rest of your life you get to know that you did that. And you get to tell that story and relive that story to yourself for the rest of your life. And to me, that gives the hardship memory dividends that pay forever until the day you die. So I'll tell you a story. When I was, um, when I, uh, so I went to a school in the SEC. and, you know, some of the SEC schools are renowned for hazing and aggressive stuff. And so I was, you know, going to join a fraternity and, you know, obviously they, they, you know, build up how hard, you know, pledging is going to be and all this stuff. Right. And I called my dad to, to talk about it. And he just said, remember, there is nothing that they can do to you that is harder than what you've already been through. And it was a great reframe because I remember the times, you know, like when, you know, things would be quote hard during that, that season of pledging. And I would just think about the things that I had already survived, the things that I had already been through at that point. And it made what they believed to be suffering appear childish. I was like, this is cute. But for the people who were present in the moment, rather than being able to relive through their memory dividends as using it as a shield, right? For my emotional affect during the moment was like, all right, I have these 8 weeks where I have to stand here before you apparently give me a stamp of approval. Fine. Then I will do that. I live my life in ways that you would not prefer. And that, that carried me a pretty long way. And so let's say that you've used these tools to redefine pain, right? And you've realized that you are the outcome. The work you do is the only thing you control. And the person you become becomes the evidence of the work that you voluntarily subjected yourself to. And not only does that pain or that difficulty or discomfort make you better, it's also what separates you from everyone else. And, and whenever I do go through those moments, I do have these slight, like, crook of the smile, you know what I mean? Crook of my lip that goes up because I'm reminded that everything that I'm willing to tolerate and deal with is what everyone else who wants to do the same thing will be incapable of doing. And so if it's hard for me, it will be just as hard for somebody else. And I think for some reason that gives me some sadistic pleasure that I will be able to, to keep moving forward. And so that's kind of a perfect transition to number 3, right? Which is endure what others won't. And so all of this becomes your competitive advantage, and that competitive advantage compounds. The more memories you have of hardship that you've been through, the more it stacks, the more it becomes a trait, the more it becomes ingrained in your behavior, and the more it takes to shake you because you're like, Well, this is my baseline. This isn't even close. It's not even, it doesn't even register on my scale of something that's an inconvenience. We've all met that person where like, if a, if a, if a call gets moved or a, you know, a dinner plate is late, it's like, it's like a nuclear bomb went off, right? It's like, well, what's the opposite of that? Like, what's the person who like, it doesn't matter if a nuclear bomb went off, but all you see is a straight line completely undisturbed by the things that are going around them. And so like you can beat 99% of people without being smarter or luckier, but by be willing by, because you can beat 99% of people without being smarter or luckier, but by being willing to endure pain and uncertainty for longer. And so if it's hard for you, it's hard for everyone else. And most people avoid hard things, which is why you can beat most people by just trying and continuing to try. And the main thing is, is that I think most people don't even know what trying feels like. And so Layla and I have been going through this season, so it hasn't just been me. And, um, she had, she had a mentor. Say something to her that she told me, and I really liked it. And so she said, hey, you know, we had this difficult situation and, you know, we're kind of relegated to, you know, this option or this option, and neither of the options were particularly good. And she said to Layla, are you settling or are you moving mountains? And I really like that because like Whenever I'm looking at these choices that I feel like sometimes feel bad, I'm like, is there another option that I could see if I move the fucking mountain? And that has just dramatically increased the willingness to work, to really try. And so I keep thinking to myself like, okay, well, if I was going to get killed or Layla was going to get killed or people I cared about were going to die, if I didn't come up with another solution, or if I made the thing that I wanted to have happen happen. What other things would I do? And usually it's a lot more. And so whatever way you have to unlock that level of trying, that level of effort, like most things are hilariously easy to do. It's just more easy. It's easier to just do nothing. And so most people do nothing and get nothing and are dissatisfied because their expectations that they would get something for that nothing of work. Right? But like, what's crazy is that The highest levels of effort are so rare amongst people that you can unlock most things in the universe with it by just really trying like your life depends on it, because it does. Hey guys, first off, I want to say thank you. There's one person who's been sharing this more than anyone, and that is you. The only reason this podcast continues to grow is because you guys are sharing it. And, uh, my only ask is that if this has provided value to you or you think it would provide value to somebody else or more importantly. If you could DM it to them, if you could Slack it to them, if you could text them a screenshot or a link to this podcast, it is the only way it grows. And that's what fills the hole inside of my heart for the approval of others so that I can go to sleep at night. And that's why I really do this. Anyways, enjoy the rest of the pod. And so like most of the time we know what we're supposed to do. We just have trouble doing it. Like, you know what you need to do to get a six pack. You know what you need to do to build muscle. People already know this. Like, you don't need to know anything about training to do that. You just stop eating crap, maybe eat some protein, right? And add more weight to the bar over an extended period of time. That's it. That's all it is. You know that already, and yet you haven't begun because you haven't really tried. Like it's hilarious to me. It's, it's, it's apparently rarer to have a six pack above age, like 30 than it is to be a millionaire. Like, think about how crazy that is. And don't cite the sources. I have, I'm like, I, I heard that and I believe it, but it, cause like, think about it's, it's whatever, 9% of Americans have a net worth over a million dollars. Surprising, right? 9% of Americans certainly don't have a six pack. And so it's like, it's, it's. It's rarer to have a six-pack than be a millionaire. And so I just, I think about that. It's like, we know what to do. It's just, we're not willing to endure what it's required to get it. And we're not willing to reframe that pain as the price of the thing we want and to give our pain meaning. And so fortunately or unfortunately, you know, humans, we live in a competitive environment. We seek status because of, you know, evolutionary back, you know, back, backdrops, right? And so how do you beat other people? Right. And I want to be clear. I don't really think you need to beat anybody, right? If you just beat you every day, you'll beat everybody by default. And I think that you'll get to the end of the race and realize no one else is really racing anyways. But the main, main is that you need to get out of— I had actually a conversation with somebody on my team this morning. They're saying they want to do this training. For the department that they're in. And they wanted to talk about running on clean energy versus dark energy. And I was like, what does that mean? He's like, you know, you know, clean energy is like you're going towards something. Dark energy is like you're running away from something. And I thought, I think there's a really good and noble idea. The problem is no one's going to know what to do with that. Because what it really meant was if you guys do your jobs, using quote clean energy or knowing when to use quote dark energy, you will be more effective. Okay, fine. Now we have conditions for behavior. And so I asked him, I said, if you want this training to be significantly more effective, I need you to do two things. Number one is define what having clean energy looks like. How do I observe someone who has clean energy? What do they do? Do they talk differently? Do they ask different questions? They have different cadence, right? And to the same degree, what do I, how do I, you know, having dark energy, you ask more times. You know, you, you push back more often. Like, let's define this in terms of behavior. And then what we'll probably find is that there's no such thing as clean or dark energy. There's only behaviors that under certain conditions increase the likelihood of a positive outcome or our desired outcome. And so then we have, okay, in these conditions, do this, and in other conditions, do that. And so then we can get away from these amorphous terms. And the reason I'm bringing this up is that we have to define everything in terms of the actions that you're going to take. Sadness comes from a perceived lack of options, which is why it feels like hopelessness. Anxiety comes from many options. Anxiety comes from many options, but a lack of priorities, which is why it feels like paralysis. So looking everywhere, but moving nowhere. And so you solve sadness with knowledge and anxiety with a decision. And so the goal from here is to see the path. That's available to you. And you have to do that by learning. Once you have a path, if you have too many paths, then you have to start cutting paths off so you can say, this is where I'm going. And then I have no more anxiety around this. So if you don't know what to do, the answer is to learn. If you know what to do, the answer is to do it. And if you're already doing it, the answer is to never stop. And what I will reinforce here is that none of those 3 actions that I just defined have anything to do about how you feel today or in this moment. And so I want to be very clear. People think that I'm this unemotional or zero affect person. That's not true at all. Of course I feel things. The difference is, so what? Like I can feel terrible. And still do the acts that increase the likelihood of success. And so it's not trying to negate the fact that you have emotions or that you have bad feelings. It's about continuing on the path one step in front of the other, despite that. And I think that the more you learn to act, that your actions do not need to be equated to how you feel, the more these feelings can just be in the backdrop. And ultimately they make you resilient. So let me show you what resilience looks like. So I give you a little picture here. So let me show you what resilience looks like. Which one's resilient? This one. Why? Because you return to baseline behavior faster. Now, toughness is a different thing, which is how much does it take before I have this decrease? And then there's a third vector, which I'll find the word for it, but when you do have the decrease, how low do you go? And so to me, the ideal scene is that. And the thing is, is that all of these things are happening throughout this whole period and the other people in your lives are doing this, right? Or they're just doing low and they just never recover, which we've all met those people. And so if you want to become resilient, what are the actions that you take? You say, okay, this occurred. How long will it take me for my behavior to return to baseline? And if my behavior never changes, Did it bother me to begin with? And maybe it might have bothered you, but it didn't matter because it never changed your behavior. And so one of the things that will set you apart is the ability to move forward despite how you feel, right? And so this is, you know, Layla's classic, uh, her most known quote, which is, uh, fuck your mood, follow the plan. And I would say like a lot of you guys don't know Layla that well. Um, Layla is one of the most mentally resilient people. That I've ever met. And she pulled herself out of a deeper hole than I ever did. She started from a poor family. She had a worse home situation. She had a worse personal— she had, you know, she got arrested 6 times before she was 18 or 19. Like she, she has worked on her more than any person that I know. Not to say that it's not more than any person in existence. Of course not. I have no idea. But of the people that I've met, she has done the most active work. And I've learned a lot from her. And so let's imagine we're going through this, right? So you've learned the greatest skill of reframing. You've redefined pain in a new way so that it actually could be progress for you. We're willing to endure and take actions that other people aren't willing to take so that we realize that they were never in the race to begin with and it's all about us anyways. And so what's the, what's the, what's the fourth thing, right? So the fourth is that you zoom out and you keep going, right? You will die. Months later, no one will care. And so why care about what they think so much when they care so little about what you do? Like, take the risk, right? Shake off the losses, shake them off, right? Because in the end, you live for the story only you can tell to the only person who was there with you the entire time, which is you. And so you might as well make it epic because you're the, you're literally the story writer. And the story listener, the story consumer, literally everyone else on earth, like we, we, we die alone. We, we, we were born alone. We're born alone and we die alone. And so even if other people captured your entire life, they still don't know what was going on in your head. They don't know your intentions. They don't know what you were thinking through at every given moment. Only you do that. And so that's why being able to over time, in my opinion, be be the judge, jury, executioner of your own faith and your own judgment is one of the most valuable things you can do because you're the only person who can say good job. Because you might win in some circumstances and not have tried. To me, that's a loss because, you know, you could have let— you could have put more in. You could have— you didn't, you didn't empty the tank, right? You left some on the field. And to the other degree, the other extreme, if you follow a logical thought path and you did, you moved mountains. To try and accomplish something. And if you actually had exhausted every possible path that you could think of, truly, beyond costs that were no, that were not worth the price of whatever you were trying to get, you exhausted all of the paths that were worth it, and you don't get it, other people may have said that you lost, but you know that there's, there's nothing else you could have done. And so you can still say good job because of the effort that you chose to put in. And so I have a few frameworks for zooming out that I think, may help you. So one of my favorites is the frame of the veteran, which is, okay, something bad happens. If it happened 1,000 times in a row, how would I feel about it the 1,000th time? Well, I'd probably be like, well, this is just how things are and it would no longer bother me. And so if it no longer bothers me then, then it means it's a choice for it to bother me now. So I might as well choose not to have it bother me today. The second frame is cosmic irrelevance. Right? Which is basically zooming out so far that you realize that we're just a tiny little marble in a galaxy. And, you know, humans have only been alive for this tiny sliver of time throughout the billions of years. And the likelihood that your boss saying something mean or some person on the internet saying something snide or someone making a video just hating on you, right? Or some parents not approving of your current life path or somebody trying to discredit you for not being legit. Does not matter. And so the third one, this is a really good one for gratitude, is what I'll consider the grandfather frame, which is basically you zoom all the way to the future. You're 85 years old. So you're an old man, right? You've been, you know, you're in pain. Everything hurts. You don't have the energy you used to. You're slouching over and you're, you know, you're counting down your days, right? right? And then you imagine yourself waking up in whatever age body you have right now. And you turn to your, you know, your right or your left and you see your wife and you're like, man, she's so young. I couldn't, can't believe she's so young right now. Right? And you look out the window and you're like, oh man, this is before they developed this whole area. And we hold these sky, sky, you know, sky, sky rises, sky rises, skyscrapers, high rises. There we go. Before we had all these high rises. And then you like, you get out of bed and you're like, oh man, like I'm not in pain, you know? And you wake up and you're like, you know, I don't feel like foggy. I feel like my memory's sharp. I'm like, I'm acute. I know what I'm going to do. And you're like, wow, this is amazing. And the thing is, is like nothing good has even happened yet. Right. But the thing is, is because life just gets so much harder as you get older, you can imagine how like gratitude comes from imagining a terrible thing and then removing that thing that was terrible. That is gratitude. Like, how do you operationalize gratitude? Imagine something terrible and then remember that that terrible thing has not occurred. That's gratitude. Like, people are like, oh man, I'm so grateful for my health. How do you get grateful for your health? Imagine that you have cancer and that you're about to die and then realize that you don't have cancer. And then you're like, wow, I'm grateful that I don't have cancer. But you have to put that thing in there. You have to imagine that terrible thing. You have to go all the way there. And so I'll tell you something that happened recently. Leila had a doctor's appointment for something and I was, I was corresponding with our EAs and I said, you know, how's everything going? And my EA responded, she has cancer. And I was like, okay, got it. This is reality now. And then I, and I've obviously I'm texting back like, you know, what kind, what's going on? Like, do I need to be there? You know, what's up? And then she was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. I meant the person who was the front desk. The reason they messed something up was because she had cancer, not Layla. And I was like, got it. And so what ended up happening, um, was that Layla ended up having, you know, something that she was dealing with and they figured out what it was. So it wasn't good news, but what had framed that bad news was that she was potentially on her deathbed. And so for me, I was just incredibly grateful that she didn't have cancer. And so it just gave me this really wonderful reframe by accident of like, it could be worse. And so like, you're not dead. And so if you're like, the fact that you are alive is living proof that you can endure it. And the day that something kills you, you won't have to anymore. And so your life every day exists as evidence that you can handle everything that has come your way. And I think that if you've ever had any need for evidence, let that be the greatest evidence of all. And so when I need advice, because I'll be real with you, like everybody here, you know, everybody's listening to this, like being honest with, you know, honest is the right word, being vulnerable, right. You know, uh, with other people. Is tough. And there's, I think there's some reasonable reasons why. One is like, you don't want to be a burden to somebody else, right? Number two is like, you don't want to be that person who always just like emotionally dumps on others. Like, that's not good, right? And at the same time, like, if you're going through hard stuff, especially if it's related to other people, people don't forget the hard thing that you're dealing with with somebody else. And so you might end up getting out of that and forgiving the person or whatever, but the person you tell will always remember it, right? And sometimes it's difficult to like, Let's say you have an issue with your spouse. Who do you tell? Right? Do you want to tell your homies? I don't know. That feels a little bit of a breach of, of kind of like the marriage, you know, the marital covenant. You're not going to tell your employees, right? You don't want to tell your family because then they're going to start, they're going to see your, your, your, your husband or your wife differently. Right? So who do you tell? Because you could tell a therapist, but maybe you don't want to do therapy because you don't like it. Right? So what do you, who, who do you tell? Who do you get advice from? And so I'll give you who I think about this. And, you know, unfortunately, uh, the, the, the more status you accrue, the more valuable dirt on you is. And so if you're going through a hard time, the more people will want to gain that information to use it to their own advantage. And so it actually makes it even lonelier. And so I use Solomon. Right. The Solomon frame as my way of getting the therapy that I think is helpful. And so the reason I call it Solomon is because there's a thing called the Solomon paradox, which is there's a human tendency to be better at offering wise advice to others than it is applying, than it is to apply that same wisdom to our own situation, our own lives. And so they called the Solomon paradox because Solomon was this big wise guy, but he actually, his life was a bit of a mess. And so it's almost like, um, Merlin could see the future for everyone except for himself. Right. And so the way that I use this is I think I want to imagine talking to my 85-year-old incredibly wise self, or at least wiser than I am now. And I ask him what he thinks I should do. And what's weird is it takes you out of your current frame and puts you in this other frame and you become more objective. About your current situation. And so I actually had a little, you know, I had a conversation with a business owner who was out here in Vegas at one of our advisory practice events. And she said, I've got all these businesses, not really sure what I should do, blah, blah, blah. And so I said, and she happened to have like a business academy as one of her businesses. And I said, let me reverse the tables on you. I said, let me pretend to be a business owner. And I'm going to say back to you everything you just said. What do you think you should do? She was like, well, yeah, I mean, it's obvious when you think about it like that. And I'm like, right, it's obvious. And so it's only difficult for us because our judgment is clouded by our emotions because we have emotional context. We have emotional ties to the people or the situations or the investments. You can be like, more logical decision-making is a good thing. And so by pulling out and thinking about your 85-year-old self, you are able to be less emotional about the current situation. Without sacrificing any kind of confidentiality, because it's still you talking to you. You don't have to waste any time giving context or, and let's be real, if you know how to persuade people, you can jade your data that you give to somebody else so that they give you the answer that you want rather than giving them the whole picture, which you might be embarrassed to share. And so in my opinion, this framework of having these conversations, and to be fair, I don't do it all the time. I do when I need it. If I'm like, man, I got to work through this. I just have this little chat that I open up and I just start writing through like a DM to me in the future. And I literally just put, you know, enter space, enter space. That includes me mocking my younger self, which I do frequently, or at least my 85-year-old self does. Such a dick. Anyways. And so in my opinion, it has been more helpful than therapy because you have all the context, right? And so this has helped me make significantly better choices when I feel like I have emotionality that could be affecting me. And so, to do a callback to the clean and dark energy thing, there's a lot of judgment online about how people choose to work, what fuels them, which fundamentally is it reward or punishment? Are they going away from an aversive stimulation towards, you know, a positive one? The answer in my opinion doesn't matter. And what I mean by that is I think the first rule of all entrepreneurship is use what you have, because that's not going to change. Today you have what you have. And so those are the only resources you have available to you. And so you must become more resourceful. And that means that if you have shame and people tell you shame is bad, in what world could shame be good? If the shame you have creates this amazingly positive thing in your life, was it bad? If, you know, your, your dad not hugging you enough created the catalyst for you to go to the gym and live 20 years longer because you work out regularly, was it bad? Do we need to label it at all? All we know is that it happened. And so what? And so the thing is, is that there are these actions that increase the likelihood that you get what you want, whether you do them because you had some negative thing or because you're going towards some positive thing. I think for the vast majority of people is narrative. They only, they create the story because if I told, if I said, hey, why did you do this thing? We are trained to give an answer, but that answer may have zero grounding in the truth, not because you lie, but because you have no idea. Because most people don't know why they do what they do. They just do it and then they ascribe a reason afterwards. And so if we know that it's mostly BS and you're not going to have a double-blind, you know, controlled placebo study on your life to be able to determine what the true root cause of— was this the dependent variable? If you're not going to be able to do that anyways, who cares? Use whatever you've got to get whatever you want. And so I'll give you a behavioral, you know, thing for this is like, you might be going through something difficult or a hard season or a bad day or a bad moment. Right? And I've heard this saying, and it drives me absolutely bananas, which is that bad things come in threes. Anyone heard this before? Right? I so wholeheartedly disagree, but I will explain why I believe that saying is a saying. Bad things do not come in threes. Bad things occur. People do not know how to cope. They allow one bad thing to snowball into more bad things. And bad stuff sucks. And the only thing worse than letting one bad thing be a bad thing is to let one bad thing ruin many good things. And so if you think about a bad thing as a cancer, it's like, well, we want to isolate that cancer as fast as possible and not let that cancer of you losing your job affect your marriage and then let you affecting your marriage affect how you're, uh, you know, a parent and let you know how you're a parent, you know, uh, affect, affect how you are going to pursue this new endeavor. Right. And so people just basically give themselves an excuse for misbehaving. I had a bad day, therefore I now have a legitimate excuse for being a bad husband or not being nice to my wife. They use it as an excuse to not exercise self-control. And that is when things snowball. And so this is why resilience is so important. Can something bad happen and I recover before I talk to somebody else? When things get bad, it looks like this. Something bad happens, something else bad happens, something else bad happens, and it keeps going down. Until eventually everyone in your life that is good has removed themselves. And then you slowly recover or you don't recover at all. And you've seen these people. He lost his job, he gained weight, and man, he's just never been the same. Pull your head out of your ass. And so there's this Buddhist parable. I've been actually looking a lot more into Buddhism lately, weirdly enough. And so the Buddha asked one of his students, if a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful? The student nods yes. And then the Buddha asks, if a person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful? The student nods again. He's like, yeah, it is. Then Buddha explains, in life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional. And so a lot of suffering that we incur, like Mark Twain, right, said earlier, like, is optional. It mostly happens in our own mind to things that never actually occur in reality. And so a useful frame has been like, if it has not occurred yet, I will not worry about it. Because the thing is, it's like I used to really obsess about planning out contingencies. And I still sometimes have this tendency. But if you're like, I want to play out this, I want to play this out, I want to play this out, I want to play this out, all these different scenarios in a negative frame. I'm not saying planning is bad, but I'm saying ruminating on negative, you know, potential futures can be negative. By the time something like that happens, number one, it will not happen in the way that I imagined. It almost never does. Number 2, I will have different resources available to me at that time versus what I have today. And so the path will become immediately obvious and apparent to me when that occurs. And if we're really honest about it, most serious thinking doesn't require that much time, but worrying can take all day and all night. With all that being said, sometimes you have to give yourself a little bit of grace because in some seasons of life, maintaining is winning. Just not losing ground is the W. And so you're not having a bad year. You had a few bad days that you're thinking about for the rest of the year. And so this has been something that I've been really visiting a lot, which is like, we try to, we think about our, you know, our lives like this and say, this was bad, right? All of this was bad. But the thing is, is that these types of labels only happen in the abstract when zoomed all the way out. And so the flip side is when we're making our judgments, we want to zoom in because when we look at this line, our days were like this. And so I might have had a bad moment or another bad moment. And so I can just say I had these two bad moments, but I had plenty of good times. And so by percentage, I had 85% good and I had 15% bad. So all in all, not a bad year. And the reason I think this is so important— I'll end how I started, which is the single greatest skill that you can develop for whatever goal that you're trying to achieve in life is the ability to stay in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. I hope this helped.