"Money Can't Make You Happy" Is a LIE

How do we get so rich money becomes irrelevant and not be miserable the whole time we're chasing it. Here's Candyland. Or what we're calling the Money Map. It's going to be your guide to millions and smiles. Because the thing is, data shows us that happiness significantly increases up to 500k. The truth is, anyone who tells you money will not make you happy is lying. Money is awesome. But here's the problem. Money can also lead to despair. It takes on average 12 years and 8 months just to sit save 500k at a reasonable rate. That's not even to make it a year. So how do we withstand what it will take to get the money while building? And maybe we can get you there faster. Here's how this is going to work for you. From 0 to 100k to 200k to 500k and beyond. Let's play Money Map. The aim of the game take you to the land of candy, riches and happiness. You start here from 0 to 100k. And there's only one game you play at this level. I call this the heads down zone. Spoiler. It sucks. You, you will have to work harder than you want for longer than you want probably on things you don't want. The key to make that not suck so bad is to become obsessed with learning. This is just the truth. I earned pennies working for 60 hour weeks for other people. But I knew that the short term sacrifice meant that I would win faster. And after two years I was making six figures. When I jumped to Goldman, that accelerated. I was heads down doing the work longer and harder. And you can watch this video here if you want to see how I hit my first hundred K. Maybe it'll give you ideas for how you can do it. Try. Charlie Munger, one of the wealthiest people in the world, said it best. He said the first 100k is a bitch. But you gotta do it. I don't care what you have to do. If it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn't purchased with a coupon. Find a way to get your hands on your first hundred K. That's Charlie's saying. I think the people that oppose my position are idiots. So it feels like this. But if you get obsessed, it gets more fun. That's the secret. Now you're on your 100k. This is what I call the know yourself and jump zone. Two tricks up your sleeve to get to 200k fast and with some fun. The first one's super important. I call this the self interview framework. Was the single biggest thing for me that put me on the right direction, it solves an age old paradox, which is what you're passionate about doesn't always make money. And the things that make money for you sometimes make you want to slit your wrists and throat punch your boss, which is usually frowned upon. So the self interview can help you balance both worlds. There's not a more valuable exercise you can do right now, today. Grab a paper and pen. First, write down your peaks and valleys. The peaks are going to be the things you like to do, the things that you're passionate about. Things maybe like, oh, I like meeting other smart people. I like when I make money, when I do more work. I like when I have freedom for where I live or where I want to work for. Maybe I don't have to go into the office. The valleys are going to be things like a boss you, you hate, a cubicle you don't want to be in. Perhaps work that's really repetitive, continuously. Now, what specifically made you feel that at each time? And list those reasons out. You'll have three peaks. You'll have three valleys. You have a list of what drives you. You'll have a list of what you hate. If you understand your peaks and your valleys and you list them out, then you can start looking for work that you can become obsessed with. Because it hits here, not here, and because we know that it's going to suck for your first year, two years, three years making $100,000 or your path up to $100,000, you can make it suck a lot less by becoming obsessed, because most of what you're doing is peaking instead of traffic. And I then finished a list of 10 to 15 values. That's what you do next. These are gonna be your fulfillment pillars. You rank them from most to least important, and then you put these in a file and you review them. Every time you think about a new job, one step deeper. That's what I did. And that led me to this next thing. Ikigai. We're borrowing this one from the Japanese. Here's how it works. You list four things you love to do, things you're good at, things you can be paid for, and things you think the world needs. Ideally, we start to find some overlap between the four. In a perfect world, the thing that you do fills love, good, pain, need perfectly, and you're in the middle. But instead of being in the middle, you might have something. Like me, for instance, I. I love to write. I'm also pretty good at writing. Have you read our Newsletter Contrarian thinking. Subscribe now. Paid. Ooh. Do people pay for newsletters? I didn't know back in the day and need man, do they need another one? So I was like, man, I love it. I'm good at it. I don't know if I'm paying for it and I don't know if the world needs it. And so what did I do? I launched one and I found, oh, man, the world actually does need more financial knowledge. So I've got that filled. But now we've got two big holes with paid. So then I did another trial. I know I'm good at it. Can I get somebody to pay for it? The answer is yes. So now we have filled my ikigai out explicitly. You're going to figure out does the thing that you love, you're good at, you get paid at and you need fill all of those circles too. You're going to keep rotating until you find one that does. Now you take your ikigai and you fill it in with your top fulfillment pillars. So you want to collaborate with smart people. You want control over your time, continuous learning, interesting work, positive impact, and can I do that with some of the things I'm good at? Will get paid for love and the world's need. I want to tick yes or no for each one of those. And for me, writing hit all five for you. As long as it hits four out of five of those, you found something that'll keep you fulfilled for years. And you have the magic, the most important ingredient of all time, which is obsession. Obsession is really hard to compete with when you are obsessed with something you will win more often. The perfect example is I left Vanguard after 2 years and 2xing the salary. But I would have stayed if I hadn't looked at my list and realized I wasn't hitting those things. They weren't gonna promote me. I didn't love the people I was working with, so I had to leave. And if you look at my LinkedIn, you'll see that I basically do that every two years as soon as I hit that plateau. And that's what led to my first seven figures. If I didn't do that, I would have stayed in one place and I would have had a lot of worrying about what happened. All right, the next one. 200k. This what I call the skin and save zone. Congrats. You've made it way further than most people ever get at 200k a year. Now you got to think about things a little bit differently. And the first way is Called Skin in the game, we switch from salary desires to an ability to eat what you kill. What does this mean? Nassim Taleb wrote, the three most harmful addictions in life are heroin, carbohydrates and a monthly salary. Too many people stay at this level because the comfort of a monthly salary. You don't need to leave your job, but you do need to make sure you if you win, you get paid for it. What does getting paid for winning mean? That means bonuses, upside, equity, profit share, incentive, alignment, comp. That's it. Yes, the CEO of Goldman Sachs earns $2 million a year in salary, but he's making 40 million a year with equity bonuses and upside. Let's define skin in the game really quickly. It means if you win, you earn. It means if you lose, you don't earn or even you have downside. This means you will feed heal your decisions. When I left Goldman, I left six figures on the table with stock options. In fact, I wrote all about in this article about how much money I lost. And you can see what an idiot I can be sometimes. I can definitely be an idiot sometimes, but one thing I don't mess around with is wasting time. I love this resource. This is HubSpot's productivity guide. Basically, as you look through it, you're going to see a bunch of techniques to make sure you don't waste your time looking at it right now. The productivity diet. Apparently a bunch of stuff you should and shouldn't eat in order to be more productive. Salads, good donuts turns out bad. Also, you gotta take a break. There's nothing that can lead to less productivity than you sitting at your desk all day. They talk about the right way to do that, the wrong way to take a break. The Pomodoro technique, which I actively use. Apps like Focus at Will. All of these small tools accumulate into really big things. If you're on my team, you know, I always ask you what's the one thing you're focusing on that can drive the 80% while just being 20% of your time? You can get all these by going to the link in description for HubSpot's productivity guide. So we can get back to the important things like this video. Okay, so we hit skin. Now we're at save. This is what I call lifestyle creep. Your friends are now making six figures, or if you're doing it right, they're probably making more than you. You got a nice car, but they have a nicer car. You're like me. I used to have byob Wine nights. And now we all go out to dinner. This happens all the time. Prepare for me to sound totally out of touch, but I used to fly commercial. That was exciting. Now I fly first. Sometimes I charter a plane. But there's this feeling because a lot of my friends fly private or have their own jet that I should. And I think, jesus, Cody, that's ridiculous. Young Cody would be thrilled to be on any plane. You certainly don't need your own. But that's the sneaky thing that happens is you make more money and you got to cut it relentlessly. You need to level up your life at a rate slower than you increase your income. Naval's quote on this was, people who are living far below their means enjoy a freedom that busy people upgrading their lifestyles can't fathom. Which is true. You don't get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money. So switch what you brag about all humans virtue signal. But start virtue signaling about sacrifices, not spends. I did this way back in the day when I started feeling badly for the things I couldn't buy. I created the sacrifice verse spend framework. This was really important because instead of telling somebody about some new house I bought or shoes, I started giving myself dopamine for each time I didn't buy something. I've had these shoes for 10 years. They're my favorite. I never want to get the new ones. I love that these are all scuffed up and ridiculous. I got this hand me down from my father. Like I love a good deal. And when I had one of my very first businesses selling South, a consulting service for US Mexico cross border trade, I used to brag about how the website I built I had built by hand on Squarespace for 4.99amonth. And the logo I used I got for free from the same service. Being scrappy and sacrificing is how you win. We're finally at 500k. Or what I call the peak, or what I actually think we should call the plateau. There's a weird phenomenon that happens at this stage and it's the entire reason for this video. I call it the career dissatisfaction cycle. This graphic's great. Goldman CEO makes 35 million a year. But Moonlights is a DJ Naval Ravikant worth a billion. But Moonlights is a philosopher on Twitter. And the cycle goes round. The dangerous part about success is as soon as you win in one circle, you just find a bigger circle. So at this point you have the money. But for many, this is where happiness drops off. I got richer faster, stayed there and was happier when I did these things. One comparison is the thief of joy. So stop comparing yourself to someone else who has more than you. If you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you. But if you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you. Little switch. Because the truth is, there's a relative wealth theory. Imagine a bar is full of people who all make a million bucks a year and feel pretty good about themselves. Then Bezos walks into the bar. Turns out then the average moves to something like 100 million, but the average happiness of the bar goes down. So you see, wealth is contagious. It's actually true that misery is contagious too. I call this one the misery flu. Happiness, misery. You can catch them both. This study actually shows that, that if you're around happier people, it'll make you happier over time. You guys have felt that before. I'm sure the same goes with non happy people. I thought this was really important when I became public on the Internet that the first rule about handling conflict is you don't hang around with people who are constantly engaging in conflict. It's the same with misery. You want to be happy, don't hang around a bunch of people who are miserable. Now you have your friend and surroundings matrix, but what about your purchase pyramid? How you spend is critical. Two ways to think about it. Internal versus external validation. Do what you love, not what you think you want, because other people's have it. This is also called mimetic desire. Basically everything that you spend money on at this stage of your career needs to be really intentional if you want to be happy. And what usually happens is you desire a thing. This is you and you desire a thing. I don't know. Let's say it's a fancy ring. Does that look like a ring to anybody? The reason that we desire the thing we think is something internal to us, that's called an intrinsic desire. It's because you want that thing. That's why you're buying it. Well, it turns out often the reason why we want something is not because we intrinsically want it. It's because we have modeled ourselves after somebody else. We see Kim Kardashian wearing this really cool ring and all of a sudden we think we want this ring because she has it on. Rene Girard, famous philosopher, said it, best man is the creature that does not know what he desires. And so if we can't turn away this ability for us to always focus on mimicry and imitation as opposed to natural desires, that it's really, really important who we model ourselves after. That's why people say, be careful what you feed your brain, just like you're careful what you feed your body. All of a sudden you will be wanting a bunch of rings as opposed to something that might be more natural to you. So choose your models wisely. The last aspect of this is prioritizing experience over materialism. The studies tell us why and prioritize actually giving instead of receiving. We are happier when we give, which actually, I guess, isn't that surprising after all. So at the end of this, you've arrived at Candyland so rich but not miserable, except for the first few years achieving it, which I don't know how to get over. But a weird thing happens after you've made about $10 million in net worth, in my opinion. You then know that it's kind of hard to lose or become totally broke again after you've made 10 million. And you start to search after things besides money, power, prestige, fame. It's actually pretty hard to want to get rich quietly. But maybe that's the goal. Maybe the world would be a little bit better off if we were all a little bit richer and a little bit happier. And sometimes it's okay to just be a human being, not a human doing.