Jocko Underground: There Are No Solutions, Only Trade-Offs.

This is the Jocko Underground podcast. It's number 46, Echo Charles is here with me. I got something for, to kick this off today. I want to talk to you about something, a little quote. The quote is there are no solutions, only trade offs. You try to get the best trade off you can get. That's all you can hope for. That is a quote from Thomas Sowell, famous economist. He's written, he's written like 89 bucks or something. I'm actually just ordering them all because that guy, the points he makes are phenomenal. The book that I kind of is one of my favorite books, it's called Basic Economics. I've raised it at certain points on the podcast. Haven't ever covered the thing in full. But anyways, Thomas Sowell, if you don't know who he is, go look him up. He's freaking awesome. But there's no solutions, only trade offs. And this is certainly a good, it's a good way of thinking that a lot of people don't really.

A lot of people don't really understand it. Right? You got to recognize that you're not always going to get what you want. You're only going to get.

Some of what you want. And even to get some of what you want, you're going to have to give up something else. That's the way it works. And people don't want to admit that.

And when I heard this from Thomas Sowell, first time I heard, I didn't hear it from Thomas Sowell at all. I was, I was trying to buy my first house and I was looking at various properties, you know, I had the real estate agent, you know, giving me the looks, showing me and I was being kind of finicky, you know, like, well, I don't know about that. And finally my real estate agent who got frustrated with me because probably, probably because I shut down a couple deals where I was like, yeah, not really. Finally my real estate agent says.

Every house is going to have advantages and disadvantages. Every house, every single house that you want, it's going to have a big yard, but it's going to be a small house, or it's going to be a small house, but it's going to have a big yard or it's going to have a low price, but it needs work, or it's going to be in good shape, but it's going to have a high price or it's going to have a bad layout that's flexible, or it's going to have a good layout, but there's not much flexibility to it. Or it's going to have, hey, a bunch of privacy, but it's hard to get to. Or it's gonna be easy to get to, but you don't have a lot of privacy. So the list goes on and on. And a lot of times it's just the price versus whatever, you know, oh, you can live in this neighborhood, but it costs more. Or you can have a bigger house, but it costs more. Sometimes that's the, that's the, that's the variable.

But here's why I wanted to bring this up. It's real obvious, but sometimes we fail to recognize what the trade offs are and that we can actually parse them out and figure out what part of the deal you want to keep, what is actually important to you so that you can keep the things that you care about and you can let go of the things that you don't really care about.

So when you're putting a deal together, you gotta think about this. But here's the thing.

This is the important part. This is your life too.

Right? This is actually your life too. You don't get to do everything you want to do. You don't, nobody does. You don't get to spend time with your family and focus on work and focus on training and focus on learning and focus on relaxing and learning a new skill. You don't get to focus on everything. It doesn't work that way. We have to pay attention to it though.

And fundamentally what it boils down to is you need to prioritize and execute.

But.

With the time that you have in your life that you want to focus, you gotta weigh out.

And parse out what's actually really important to you so you can get the best, let's say the best deal out of light. You have to, you have to understand.

What'S on the table. You got to understand what's on the table. And I think that's what the mistake. People, people don't even know what's on the table. They don't, they don't pay attention to what's on the table. Like they don't pay attention to what the trade offs are. They don't pay attention to what they care about or what they don't care about. And sometimes they care about something that somebody else cares about and they're thinking that now that's important. Or they just see what's real obvious and they just grab whatever they can without thinking about what they're going to leave on the table. You know, you're going to you can only fit so much in your hands and some of it's going to get left behind. So you got to think about that, you got to pay attention to that. Because if you're not paying attention to it, you're going to leave some things on the table and you're going to look up and you won't be able to hold anything else. So pay attention. Probably a good situation to detach. Take a step back. How do you do that? Write down what's on the table. Actually write it down. That's how you detach from it. You write it down. You make a list of what's on the table, you make a list of what's at stake, you make a list of what the trade offs are and then you prioritize that list to make sure that the trade offs. Because there's no solution, there's no perfect solution. You're only gonna get trade offs. So pay attention so that you're trading off the right things so you can keep as much of what you want as you can and you can let go the things that you don't care about. Little life advice from Thomas Sowell.

Woody.

I remember a long time ago I did this interview with this, it was like a magazine.

But you got interviewed.

Yeah.

And they're talking about work, work balance.

Life, life, work balance.

Yeah. Like how do you do? And maybe the guy thought I was more busy than I really was, but.

But I do, I. But that did make me think though. It made me think like, wait a second. Yeah, like I do kind of like I don't stress, like, oh, I'm not paying enough attention to this or that. But then, so. And my answer ended up being I only carry like about four things really. Like I don't care about like my fashion or you know how like some people, you can see, they care about and I'm not knocking fashion, but some.

People don't care about it, myself included.

Yeah, exactly. Right. And I wouldn't even say I don't care about saying, I, I care very little about it. I'm not over here like staying up at night stressing about I need to spend more time on my fashion. But. But there's like four things I cared about. And it was like, you know, my family, my work, like, like health and fitness and then like jiu jitsu or something. That's kind of it really, you know.

It's a good list right there, homie.

Right. I mean, what else is there really? I mean. So anyway, my question is like, do you like what do you care about?

You think like what's your, I mean, it's the same stuff. But here's the thing. You're not gonna get. You can't get. You can't give a hundred percent to your family.

Can't. Yeah.

And you can't give 100% to your work. You can't. And you can't give 100 percent to your health and fitness. You can't. And you can't give 100% to Jiu Jitsu.

Yeah.

You can only give, you only have 100. Yeah. So you got to be careful.

Yeah.

And, and pay attention to what you're gonna leave on the table.

Yeah.

That's what you got to do. The way it is, you're only going to get trade offs. Not a solution, doesn't exist.

Yeah. So really, by its own nature, you, you essentially, if you can cut that down, the more you cut that down, the better off you're going to be.

The less things you, you need.

Yeah. Like, you know, less, less moving parts or whatever. Less parts taking, you know, taken away from the other. But when you think about, and especially if you take this, this element of, this element of life seriously, which element? This, like the trade off. Always a trade off, you know? Got it, man. You could, you could trim away a lot of BS in your life.

Definitely do that. Because you're probably spending time doing stuff that literally you actually, not only is it stuff that you don't really care about, the stuff that you actually know is bad. Right?

Yeah.

I mean, stuff that you legitimately know is not beneficial to you, is not helping your family, it's not helping your work, it's not helping your Jiu Jitsu, it's not helping your health and fitness. There you are doing it, you're trading it off. It's, it's, it's a bad move. So that's another good point. You got to pay attention not to just the things you want, but what are you investing in that you don't even want at all? And you're investing into it. That's sad.

Yeah. And that's a big price too, right? Because you know, the whole thing, I mean, this is kind of a, it's not a cliche because it's so, so, so true. Where you, you probably spend some money on the, on the BS stuff for sure you do, but you spend time on it like, you know, the kind.

Well, here's the thing though. What is money?

It is time.

Yeah.

You traded your time for some money at some point. Now you're just using that money to spend somewhere else. Yeah. Time is the ultimate thing, right?

Yeah.

That every month, all the money that you have, you. You had to invest time into.

Yeah.

That's weird.

I mean, which is another good reason why you want to set your life up so that you. So that you're. That is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground podcast. So if you want to continue to listen.

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