This excerpt is from a YouTube discussion (Capitalism.com) between Ryan Daniel Moran and Aubrey Marcus about what follows external achievement. Moran poses the question of "what exists on the other side of achievement" (money, relationships, physique, cars). Marcus answers that once external goals are attained they often fail to deliver lasting happiness or resolve anxiety and depression; instead he describes a learning process—sparked by a recent accident—that led him toward internal sufficiency and reframing achievement as a game (Monopoly) to lessen toxic emotional attachment while still engaging in ambition.
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A question that has come up a couple times over the last day and a half has been.
What exists on the other side of achievement. I think entrepreneurship is kind of a really fast way to hack personal growth because.
First you uncover all your junk that's holding you back, and next, once you make it, all your junk comes back or is amplified until you work through that. And.
So the question, like, once you have the money, once you have the girl, once you have the abs, once you have the car, well, what's next? And so, well, let me ask the guy who has all those things. Let me ask Aubrey.
What comes next is you run out of things that you can chase to actually find your happiness. You know, it's like, for me, my learning process. And I'm glad and I'm grateful for all those things, and all those things have been enjoyable. But the big lesson is, like, okay, you want all those things? You can have all those things. Go for it. Get them. You happy yet? And I would answer, and I really answer that like, no, because of the revelations that I've talked about here, which is, you know, the accident was about three months ago, and the deep learnings about being enough without all those things. So there's ways. You know, part of what you learn is, okay, those things are awesome, cool, and I'm glad I played the game that way, and I appreciate that I'm in the place that I am. But they didn't give me the happiness that I was chasing. They didn't release the anxiety that I carried. They didn't buffer me from the depressions that I had. So it had to be another answer. And that's been one of the great gifts of that process. And so as that has forced me to look for what those other answers are, what the universal things are, then I've been able to start to find those things. And I didn't have to move into a monastery and give away all my belongings and give away all my things. Like, that's a very physical representation of the release. But you can do that with your head. Maybe you need a few reminders. Maybe you need to smash into a guardrail every now and then, or something needs to, like, jolt you and wake you up.
But, yeah, I mean, ultimately, you realize that those things are part of just how you're playing the game. You know, it's like. It's like playing. How many of you guys played, like, Monopoly?
Pretty much everybody, right? Like, you can play Monopoly, and there's some people. Do you. Anybody ever play with someone who played Monopoly? Like, it was for reals. Like, it was like this really mattered. And then put them in a fucking, you know, if they didn't win or they would get, like, super emotionally invested. Well, that's. That's cool. But ultimately it was a game of Monopoly, you know, and, like, part of the fun was getting your emotions involved. And part of the fun of life is, you know, dealing with the emotional dance. And that's all cool, but, like, to really be able to look and say, like, yeah, I'll play Monopoly to win, but if I don't, that's cool too, because we're all. We're all the different pieces on the board and we all have access to the properties. Maybe it's not ourselves, but it's somebody else who's also of source who's achieving that. So it can also just reframe your perspective. So then instead of being in that toxic emotional environment about the Monopoly, you just are able to laugh and joke with each other and, you know, have fun throughout the whole game. And when you land on that luxury tax and have to pay and you land on that hotel and out, and your buddy gets in there hooting and hollering and, you know, doing their little dance, like, you can laugh too and just. And play the game with that kind of joy. And I think that's the invitation that we all have is to be able to. Yeah, play Monopoly. Like, go try to get all the properties, build all the hotels, like, do all that. Sure. But no, it's still Monopoly, you know, like, know that you're still playing a game. It's just actually the game of life. And I think that's really the thing that achieving all of these external validation symbols and still not finding my peace and happiness is showing me, because I don't think I've learned all the lessons, but that's what it is showing me.
