Matthew Hussey breaks down five life lessons from Gatsby: building social connections, having emotional vision, believing in yourself, planning your future, and pursuing your goals with intention. He explores how Gatsby's ambition and focus offer practical insights for your own life.
I think we can all learn a thing or two from Gatsby. If you've read the book or you've seen the film, then you know that Gatsby threw these crazy opulent parties where people were falling over and hundreds of people poured through the doors. And one of the interesting things about being that person is that if you're throwing the party, everyone knows you. What's everyone's common point of conversation? You. So now you're the favorite topic of everyone who's there. Everyone gets to know you better even if you're not in the room because they talk. The great thing about being a connector of course is that by putting people together, people want to help you, they want to do you favors, they want to look out for you, they want to find ways that they can integrate more with your life. You become important that way. What people sometimes miss is that you don't have to be the one throwing the party all of the time. The person throwing the party is the person we call a hub. You don't have to be a hub. What you do have to do, however, if you're not going to be the hub, is you have to be the person that knows the hub. Because if you know the person throwing the party, then you always have a way to go and meet more people. See, I don't need to throw the party every week. In fact, I don't like throwing parties. It's messy. I have to clean up the next morning. But if I know the person who throws the party, I can go to that party, meet a whole new group of people, and go home again. The next week I get to go to the next party. The same person invited me but a new group of people are there. That's the benefit of knowing the hub. Now one of the things we also know about Gatsby is through all his achievement, how did he do it? He had an extremely emotional vision of where he was going. Now one of the things I'm always coaching is that in order to get somewhere you can't be driven by logic. Logic doesn't last. The thing about logic is It becomes something that's boring. You start to run on willpower and willpower will never last. So you have to run on emotion. Now what does that mean? It means finding something that drives you on a visceral gut level. For Gatsby it was a woman. It was that ideal he had in his head and of course that became an unhealthy ideal because it became unrealistic. But all unhealthy ideals aside, he had something driving him that was bigger than an amount of money or the size of a house. It was a vision of his life with somebody. We all have to find that emotional vision that's going to drive us through all of the hard times. The fourth thing I learned from Gatsby, believe you're destined for greatness. Gatsby believed this even as a boy. Now, we all have to believe on some level that we're destined for great things. That's different for different people. What makes you special? For some people they believe it's their beauty, for other people it's their brains, for other people it's just the mark they're going to leave on the world, how hard they're going to work, how creative they're going to get. We all have to believe that we're special, that on some level we're going to achieve greatness. How will you do it? The fifth and final learning point from Gatsby. He had a plan. See, Gatsby had a way of improving himself constantly. he saw himself as a great asset. And we see this from the things that he did. His dad found a journal, and in this journal Gatsby's plan was there. His daily diary, September 12, 1906, rise from bed 6 a.m. and it goes all the way through this day, dumbbell exercise and wall scaling, study electricity, work 8:30 till 4:30 p.m. baseball and sports, practice elocution, poise and how to attain it. Then he had these general resolves, resolutions about the way he was gonna live. No more wasting time at shafters, no more smoking or chewing, bathe every other day, save three dollars a week, be better to parents. These are all ways that act as a compass for how he's gonna live. I once heard someone say, if you're thinking about what you want to achieve when you wake up, it's already too late. This has to be done the night before so that when you wake up, you're straight into it. You know exactly where you want to be. Now, Gatsby had his flaws. I feel like we can all learn something even from flawed men, even from vulnerable people. And when we take his best parts and we combine them with the learnings and what we see from afar, that's when we achieve our own form of greatness.
