George Kao argues you can succeed without grinding yourself down. Define what success means to you, then work toward it joyfully instead of painfully. His approach: produce, experiment, joyfully, with breaks for meditation and grounding when you need to reset.
Is it possible to succeed with joy? I think so. I think all of us can. And it first begins by defining what success means to you. I really hope you don't just take somebody else's definition of success. A common definition out there is to become a millionaire or a billionaire or to have millions of hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram or whatever it is that you think it is. No, define what it means for you. Okay. And so for me, I'm really happy to have achieved a stable level of success that I'm really happy with. I get to do what I love, and I'll talk about that. I get to do it joyfully, and then I get to have enough income to sustain myself and my family. I live in the beautiful San Francisco Bay area. And so how do we succeed with joy? First, defining your level of success, what that means for you. And I'll tell you this. The secret is, the less you need, the easier it is to become successful, right? And to be happy as a result, because you've achieved the level of success that you want. But, you know, another part of it is that to even get to the level of success that you define for yourself, you do need to work hard. You do need to persevere, but not in the way that most people think. What that means. Most people think that means suffering and pain. And it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be that way. In fact, one of the folk heroes of this movement these days of hustling and grinding and putting your head down, working hard is Gary Vaynerchuk. And a lot of people misunderstand his message as saying that you've got to be suffering, you know, 12 hours a day, 15 hours a day. And some people say, gary, how can you work 15, 16 hours a day? Don't you have any me time? He says, you guys don't get it. This is my me time. I love the game. I love the climb. I really love what I do. 15, 16 hours. If I work 9 to 5, I'd be miserable. So, again, he has defined success for himself. He's understood what allows him to enjoy life, and he does it right now to get to the level of success that you want. It does require a few things. Instead of hustle and grind and put your head down, I want to give you three other ideas to keep as mantras. Produce, experiment, joyfully. Three words. Produce, experiment, joyfully. So you've got to produce more, okay? Produce the stuff. Produce the kind of work that brings you the success that you want, whether it's more clients, whether it's more effectiveness with clients, whether it's more content, you've got to produce more the stuff that's useful, not busy work, like certain things that you might do on social media, but producing more that brings you the level of success. So produce more. Second one is experiment more. How do you know the things that you do are going to bring you the success that you want? Well, you've got to experiment more, be more open to experimenting more quickly, trying different things until you see what you need to work on producing and finally, joyfully to do it joyfully. To work more joyfully is to do the meta work that all of us are called to, to bring our higher, higher self into the moment. Okay, Bring our higher self into the moment. And so that's the meta work that we're really what we need to be working hard doing. So produce more. Experiment more joyfully. Produce, experiment joyfully. Let that be the mantra that you do to as you work hard without, without the suffering and pain that people think. Bringing your higher self in means to have more calm and, and joyful focus. As you work, do what you need to to be in that state. As you work, you might, whatever practice helps you. For me, it's, I call it my energy reboot. For some people, it's some kind of grounding exercise, some meditation, maybe some journaling, maybe some walking first. Okay. Then breathing, prayer perhaps. Okay. Listening to music. Get into your higher self state. That is our most important meta work before we do our producing and our experimenting. Because experimenting and producing sometimes oftentimes means you need to step outside your comfort zone. And comfort zone stepping outside of that is scary for people. And that's why they avoid it and that's why they don't do the things that are truly productive. So your meta work, again, is to bring your higher state into the moment of work so that you can work through joyfully and therefore succeed joyfully. So until the next video, I'm George Kao. I wish you joyful productivity in every day that you work. Be well.
