Why many billionaires I know are miserable (the real point of it all)

When you look at yourself in the mirror, are you like, hey, am I having fun doing what I'm doing? And if the answer is constantly no over time, then you might need to reevaluate what it is that you're working on. All right guys, this is my first car vlog over here. What I wanted to focus on today is on why are we doing this in the first place? Let's say you decide, hey, you wanna strike off into your own and start a business or whatever. Are you doing it for freedom? Are you doing it for money? Are you doing it for both? What you actually end up realizing pretty quickly is once you start to achieve any level of quote unquote success, whether it's you having time freedom or you being able to you know buy the things that you want, like live in a cool spot or you know buy a car or something like that, right? All these things you realize that they get old pretty quickly. What really matters at the end of the day is one family. So I'm here, you know, just all family and hung out for a little bit. You don't realize that when you're starting in your twenties or so. You're gung ho, you're go go go, you're you're building all the time. you're working all the time, and you think that's what it's all about, right? And then you wonder, you look at people that are in their, let's say their 60s, 70s, 80s or so, let's say they've reached hundreds of millions or billions in net worth, a lot of them are miserable. But the question is why? Why are they so miserable, right? And the reason is because they lost sight of what's truly important to them at the end of the day, and what that really means is just friends and family, right? Or relationships, really any type of relationships, right? And they end up dying old and alone. I've seen that happen time and time again. They tie their self-worth to their, their business and all their accomplishments, but nobody really cares about those at the end of the day. And we're only here for a very finite amount of time. You know, I like to say we're a fart in the wind, and that's basically your life. Like, you think about, you know, how long we've actually been around here. How long have we actually recorded history for? 5,000 years, right? And I guess, you know, the Earth has been around for a couple billion years or so, and eventually the Earth will be, will be gone, right? My point of saying all this is that your accomplishments ultimately mean nothing. You know, any hope of having any type of legacy really means nothing at the end of the day. What you can do is you can make the of your life. And that's what life is all about. And you realize that it's really relationships that drive the world. As long as you focus on being a kind person and a person of value, you know, that's all you can ever hope for, right? I'll tell you what, you buy your dream car, okay, that wears off pretty quickly. You go on your dream vacation, all right, you know, you're gone for a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks or so. Let's give you even 2 months. You get bored really quickly. What really matters is that you work on things that matter to you. So family's number one, obviously. But 2, are you enjoying the work that you're doing? When you look at yourself in the mirror, are you like, hey, am I having fun doing doing what I'm doing? And if the answer is constantly no over time, then you might need to reevaluate what it is that you're, that you're working on. You know, I think if you're watching this and you're in your 20s, maybe you're in your teens or so, you shouldn't envy the people that have the Lamborghini, that are showing off the Lamborghini, because those people are ultimately trying to manipulate you into doing something, right? And I don't really poo-poo on courses or anything like that, but I think when you're trying to manipulate people into buying your course by showing them things that they desire at a younger age, that's manipulation. And so I'm not saying don't chase those things. I'm saying that what's gonna happen is, yeah, sure, chase those things, But once you get to a certain level and you have those things, you'll realize that it was never about those things in the first place. I was actually listening to a podcast today. There's this one YouTuber, he's only 27 years old, and you know, he speaks like he has a lot of wisdom, and I think he does. And he's just like, I'm just not interested in those things. I just want to build something cool and build it for a very long time. And here's the thing, I tend to look at life as, as a game. You know, what we're doing right here now is a game, right? You're hopefully gaining value from this. In return, if I'm consistent over time, the game of YouTube will reward me because the algorithm is showing that my retention rates on these videos are good, the click-through rates are good, and, you know, people are coming back for this founder story that I'm telling right now. And who knows what will happen with me long-term, but I think it's fun to document this journey, right? But I think it's just like, as I think about, okay, yes, business takes decades to build something really big, and I'm saying like 20 to 30 years to start to build something really big, I think it's important to stay focused on the main thing in the business, which could change every now and then, right? Like every year you might have one main thing, every quarter you might have one main thing, but the main, main thing at a macro level is, you know, how are you maintaining your relationships with your loved ones? And I think your loved ones could be your family, it could be your friends, and I think it could even be people at work as well. Like, I certainly do love the employees that— especially the ones that I work pretty closely with, right? Because these are relationships at the end of the day, and relationships run the world. I just think a lot of things that we're taught are incorrect and even harmful, I would say, to people. You know, as we grow up, we envy the wrong things. Like, it's envy that really drives the world, right? I believe a life of purpose is being surrounded by your loved ones. And I believe that the money is a side effect as long as you're a useful person. And if you're useful for a prolonged period of time, you're going to get everything that you deserve and more, right? I think when we're younger, you know, we want everything now, now, now. We want everything fast. And that's just not the case. Excited to be back. Yesterday we got back in the office, at least Sean and I did. Immediately we started talking about product roadmapping. We're just talking about the features that we want to build for the quarter. And then we actually got on a sales call. And then on the sales call, we actually asked about some of the features that we were thinking about, and the prospects told us how they would prioritize these. And it just goes to show you that customer development never ends, right? And, you know, a really good point that Sean, my CTO, brought up was that, you know, as human beings, we should all think of ourselves as, as products. What that means is products are always getting better, right? When you think about Zoom or Loom, you think about YouTube, for example, they're always Adding or removing features. They're always thinking about making things better. And that's how human beings should be. We're constantly iterating. We're constantly improving ourselves. Sean showed me something yesterday. Sean's my CTO. The thing yesterday was he showed me 2 tools and I'm like, how much are you going to save from these tools? He's like, look, man, like if I get both of these tools activated, I'm going to save on 10 engineers. Like one helps with QA at scale. The other one helps with something else. LinkedIn ads are great, but let me give you the bad news first. The bad news is that you can't personalize the ads and you can't scale up the ads as quickly. The good news is if you're in a B2B space, you're doing account-based marketing, We have a solution for you called Karrot. That's K-A-R-R-O-T. And the good news is that you can create a lot of these campaigns with the click of a button. You can personalize the ads, and there's a whole host of new things that are coming. If you want to get on the waitlist, just go to karrot.ai. Again, it's karrot.ai, and we'll see you on the other side. Ultimately, we're just getting more leverage, right? And one thing I told my team was that you have 4 forms of leverage, and this comes from Naval Ravikant. You have code, which is like the code that you write for us to make like a YouTube, for example, or any type of program. You have capital, which is just You know, money. Labor is one of the oldest forms of leverage. And then you have media, right? Which is building an audience, which is the time I'm putting into doing these videos, for example. It's hopefully you get some value from it, but hopefully I grow my audience or continue to get to grow my audience. All right, so finishing my thoughts here. So basically yesterday there was 90 minutes, basically maybe even 2 hours of Sean and I meeting and talking about the product roadmap, right? So we have a lot of features mapped out, but the problem is if we're just coming up with the ideas, that's not enough. Oftentimes we need to talk to people and figure out what the needs are, right? So for example, we have these thoughts on, hey, we should build build these one-to-one personalized landing pages, or maybe we should think about integrations, for example. And then some of the people we talked to, like, integrations is actually number one, and we wouldn't have known that, right? So I think there's one thing to say, hey, we know exactly what needs to be built. You know, Ford has talked about, if I ask people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. There does need to be some product vision, but also you have to think about the problems that you're trying to solve, and you can't try to solve every problem at the end of the day, right? So we're really trying to lock in on focus for Q1, and that, that So that factors into the vectors again. And then we had an, we call this a weekly business review where we talk about, hey, how are the metrics looking? And then, you know, what are we trying to focus on? And this is with more of the senior people on the team. And we do that once a week. That's another 90-minute meeting. In there we were talking about how just vectors again, right? What are we trying to do with the services side of things? Are we trying to become a fully like a product-based company, right? And the answer that both Sean and I had was that, you know, look, the cost of software is continuing to come down. And so we believe that every company's gonna be a technology company, every company's gonna products. It's just a matter of who moves faster. And if you look at SaaS companies in the last decade or so, a lot of SaaS companies, they ended up building managed services, right? They built in a services component. And so I don't think it's an or thing. I think it's an and thing, right? It's, you know, you can have the two kind of go together. That's what it is. That's what we're focused on. How do we continue to build tech-enabled services and how do we continue to get our team to think more like making themselves into a product and then continue to think about how we can gain more leverage for not only ourselves, but for our, for our, for our clients. And, and that's what it is. You know, I basically made a 15-minute video today, a 15-minute Loom kind of talking about what's on my mind. And I would encourage you to do that as well because a lot of people can't read your mind. Nobody can read your mind. You're in your mind all the time, right? And so I think getting it out there and telling people, painting a vision, saying, hey, here's where we're going and here's some things that have changed, here's some new developments that tells a story and that keeps people excited, keeps people motivated. And also, by the way, helps people self-select themselves out if they decide that they don't want to be a part of this journey, right? For me, I refuse to accept the status quo. You know, the thinking here is that talent density is going to be a lot higher. I believe that the cost of hiring people will go up. But all right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency, and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing, that's SEO, that's paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative. And there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. You can go to singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. The number of people you're going to have in a company is going to go down over time. AI isn't here to take jobs. It's here to enable people and the people that are that are down to be enabled, those are the people that are, that are ultimately gonna thrive, right? And not to say that the other people are gonna be screwed. I think the other people are just gonna be able to spread their creative wings doing something else. And, and I think that's a good thing, right? I think people are gonna very quickly realize that as we gain more productivity from AI, sitting on the beach isn't what it's all about. It's really about being productive, whether it's for your family or whether it's doing something that you love or creating your own things, right? That's gonna be unlocked for humanity. Hope you've been enjoying these vlog series as well, because by this time, this will already have been, I don't know, maybe the 5th or 6th one. So yeah, talk to you later. Bye. Here's the deal. I hope you enjoyed this vlog episode. This is called Founder Story. If you want me to continue to post these vlogs to this channel, type in a comment, say this channel. Or if you want it to move over to the new channel, type in new channel. That way I can know whether we should just separate it or just continue to serve it here, right? That's all. And we'll see you later.