How To Get Ahead of 99% of People (Starting Today)

If you're ambitious, you've heard 1,000 tips on how to live a happier, better life. Forget all of them. I grew up in a blue-collar family, and today I know lots of different billionaires. I've met thousands of successful founders, and I've hired hundreds of people. And across all of those lives, I've spotted patterns in the people who are most happy. But instead of giving you another list on how to live well, I'm going to invert it. Here are 5 guaranteed ways to live a miserable life. Do the opposite. You might actually live a good one. Step number 1: Don't have a best friend. If you want to be miserable, tons and tons of acquaintances will do just fine. One of my favorite philosophers to read about is Aristotle, and he broke friendships into 3 different types. The first is utility, and these are friends where you get something out of them. For example, money, favors, connections. Basically, once the usefulness ends, so does the friendship. This is sort of like coworkers. The second is pleasure. And these are friends that exist just for fun. You get together, you party, you have a good time, and then once that ends, you're done. It's basically like when you are 3 years old and you play with another friend. Once the playdate is over, the friendship is over. And finally, virtue. These are the rarest and most valuable. These are people who you admire and they admire you back and they make each other feel better and you stick with them no matter what. In modern terms, they're your best friends. If you want to have a great life, focus on that last category. The good news, according to Aristotle, is that you only need 1 to 3 best friends. I've got 3. It's Jack, Ramon, and Neville. If you ever seen that movie The Town where Ben Affleck, he goes into his buddy's room and he says, I need your help. We're going to hurt someone and I can't tell you what it is and you can never ask about it. And then the guy responds with, sounds good. Whose car are we going to take? That's Ramon. I've got one of those friends. A grown man calling another grown man his best friends and me telling them I love them. Make fun of me all you want, but knowing that these guys have my back and have my best interest in mind, it makes me sleep like a baby. Now, I want to show you a study that proves my point. So for the last 85 years, Harvard has been running this study, which is now the longest study of adult life ever done. And they tracked hundreds of people from youth all the way to old age. The Atlantic, they put together a 15,000-word article all about this study. It's a wonderful article, but I'm going to save you the time and tell you exactly what the results were. After decades of data, the number one predictor of long-term health and happiness— it was not money, it wasn't fame, it wasn't power, it wasn't even exercise. It was the quality of close relationships. They found that what protects you is having a few people, even just one, one person who you can count on through thick or thin. In other words, a BFF, baby. Step number 2 for living a miserable life: don't decide. Spend tons of time planning and thinking and very little time doing. Miserable people are indecisive, and if you want to join them, don't commit to anything. Stay in research mode forever. Careers, where you live, who you want to date. Just keep on shopping. Let me tell you a story about Dan Gilbert. Dan Gilbert is a psychologist who's the GOAT on studying happiness. He's got this amazing book called Stumbling on Happiness. So my favorite part from his book is an experiment where he went to a college campus and he selected two groups of students. Now, both groups, he let them come and select a piece of artwork that they could hang in their dorm room. Except here's the difference. Group 1, they were allowed to come in a week later and swap out their art if they were unhappy with their original pick. Group 2 was locked in. Whatever they picked, they had to keep. Now, here's the results. Group 1, the group that was allowed to change out their art if they were unhappy with it, they were less and less happy with the art that they picked over time because they kept wondering, did they choose wrong? Group 2, the ones that had to be locked into the ones that they originally picked, they actually got happier when they measured them over time or over the trailing handful of months. They convinced themselves that they love the piece of art that they picked. And the takeaway is once we're locked into a decision, the brain makes peace with the decision. It literally manufactures happiness. Happy people take more action while other miserable people wait for the right decision. Let's say it takes someone 6 months to make a business plan and the same amount of time that that person is planning, you could have started 6 months prior and run hundreds of experiments and in that time figured out what does and doesn't work. Now, if you're like a lot of people and you are in this indecisive bucket, I've got good news for you. Nearly all decisions are reversible. Now, let me tell you a quick story. When I was about 21 years old, I left school. I left college a little bit early, and I moved from Tennessee to San Francisco because I wanted to get into startups. And I was incredibly afraid. I didn't want to fail, but also I didn't want to be homeless. And I didn't have a lot of money, but I saved up around $2,000, which at the time was more than enough money to buy a plane ticket home, back to my hometown of St. Louis. And I remember calling my mom and I said, if this doesn't work, am I allowed to move back home for 6 or 12 months? Is that okay? And she said yes. And in my head I just thought, then the worst case scenario is taken care of and anything that I achieve above that, I'm happy. So I shouldn't doubt this decision because the worst case, the downside, it's protected against. I'm okay and I accept that. Now, how do you make different decisions reversible? Well, I think if you were to sit down and figure out what can I do to test or try something, you can figure out a lot of ways that you could do that. So for example, when I was deciding which neighborhood or which city I wanted to live in, it was pretty easy to just go and rent an Airbnb in different neighborhoods a week at a time. And although this did at the time cost a lot of money, it was significantly cheaper than just going and buying a home or renting an apartment and regretting that decision and having to be stuck with the long-term consequences. So most decisions are reversible, and it's your job to figure out how do you tiptoe and try before you buy. Which is true in a lot of different situations. Now, in order though to make this all work, most decisions, which we're going to talk about later, need to be time-bound. So if you're deciding where you're going to live, where you're going to work, who you want to marry, I think it's a lot easier in life to say, I have 6 months to decide this. And at the end of this 6 months or at the end of this month, I am making a decision no matter what. Because more often than not, making a decision and acting will lead you to be a lot happier than spending months and months just thinking. Now, if you guys want a really embarrassing story, when I was younger, and it involves moving to San Francisco still from Tennessee, I read this book by Dale Carnegie. It was called How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. And he had this amazing quote. It was, "Inaction breeds doubt and fear, so get out and get busy." Now, that was sort of my live, laugh, love moment. And so we'll put a screenshot on YouTube, but I've got a tattoo on my feet that says ACT. Now, cheesy, kind of lame. Of course it is, but very effective. Step number 3 on how to be miserable: don't set goals and certainly do not track progress. A book that changed my life was Titan, which is the biography of John Rockefeller. John Rockefeller, he was a tycoon in the early 1900s, and he was the richest man to ever live. He was 2 times richer than Elon Musk is today. Now, one of my favorite stories from the book is When John was 16 years old, he said, I want to be rich. And according to John, his first step in becoming rich was tracking all of his expenses and his salary. And he had a book called Ledger A where he wrote down every expense and wrote down every bit of income. I stole that idea from him, and when I was around 23, 24 years old, I wanted to try to save up to $50,000. And so in order to do that, I had to reduce my monthly expenses to $2,000. And when I did that, I spent about 6 months tracking every single cent. Every time I spent anything, any dollar, any cent, I wrote it down manually. And just doing that, just doing that tracking thing, it became so much easier to reduce my expenses to $2,000 and to track them. So I'll give you another example. If you want to lose weight starting today, if you track all of your calories and weigh yourself every single day, if you only do those two things, you will 100% start to lose weight. But if you really want to improve, you have to pair tracking with goals. So many people come to Sean and I to ask for business advice, and the first thing that I say to them when they're asking a question is I go, wait, hang on, just really quick. Where do you want to be in 5 and 10 years? Do you want to sell your company? Do you want to make it huge with tons of employees? Do you just want a little lifestyle business? Do you want to make $500,000 a year? Do you want to make $2 million a year? Do you want to sell the company, make $100 million? Imagine going to a trainer and being like, hey, make me fit. It'd be impossible. The trainer needs to know, do you want to have all this muscle like Arnold Schwarzenegger? Do you want to be lean? Do you want to be able to run a fast 5K? Do you want to get great at swimming or cycling? Because you have to have a goal in mind in order to determine where you want to go and what actions you're going to take on a daily basis. Now, when it comes to goal setting, I don't think people really do it well. A real goal is SMART, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Let me give you an example. When I was younger, about 23 years old, I had a goal to make $20 million liquid by the age of 30. That meant I had 7 years to build a business that could get to around $15 million in revenue, which I could then sell for around $30 million and walk away with $20 million after tax. And that's where the idea for The Hustle came from, the newsletter business that I started. And I broke this down into small chunks that made it very approachable, and I felt very achievable. And so my goal for the first year of my newsletter business was to grow the subscriber base by 3% every single week, because I knew that if I did that and I had the audience, advertisers would then come. And so every week it was just a question of did I grow subscribers by 3% or not? What am I going to do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? I'm going to do anything that it takes to grow that subscriber base by 3%. That forced me to focus and it meant no side hustles, no different business ideas, and just meant work on that one thing for 60 hours. And by the way, it worked. I ended up selling. I was 31, not 30. But the goal, in my opinion, it doesn't really matter if you hit it. It just matters that you have the goal and you break it down into chunks that you can act on every single day. And then that goal is specific and time-bound. Because having a place, a destination to go to, it makes life so much easier because distractions are incredibly loud and miserable people. They listen to those distractions and goals help you keep on track. Now, the last thing about goals, here's how I think of goals. I track my fitness quarterly. I track my spending monthly. I track the things that I'm learning every month. I track my income annually, my net worth every 5 years, and my company. I try to look at it over the decade. The reason I chose those intervals is because achieving anything great, it takes a lot longer than you think. And also I need a little bit of dopamine hits. And so having a dopamine hit every month where I could look at my spending, you know, am I doing good or am I doing bad? That helps me keep going. That gives me progress. Fitness goals, you can see progress typically on a fitness-related thing every 3 months and tracking it that way. It gives me motivation to keep on going. But it also allows me enough time to achieve something pretty interesting. Now, I want to tell you guys a story. My wife and I, we do something very nerdy. So every single month on our calendar, we have one actually this Tuesday at 8:30 PM. We have a meeting where we call it our monthly recap meeting. And it started earlier, like 9 years ago when we were just getting our careers going and we were only about a year and a half into dating and we had combined finances where we would do a recap on our income and our expenses. And we basically would ask ourselves back then the same questions that we ask ourselves today, which is, are we happy with how we are spending money? Is there any experiences or services that we want to acquire to make our lives better? I'll give you an example. When we were younger, it was like, hey, you know, I'm spending a lot of time cleaning the house. $150 is all we would have to spend in order to have a cleaner. And that could save me many, many, many hours. Let's try that this month and see if that makes us any happier. And those are basically the same conversations that we have now. And maybe some of the numbers might be a little bit bigger, but honestly, they're really not. The majority of decisions that we make during those monthly meetings are pretty small, and it's kind of fun to see what changes our happiness the month after. All right. A few episodes ago, I talked about something and I got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper into explain, and that's what I'm about to do. So I told you guys how I use ChatGPT ChatGPT as a life coach or a thought partner. And what I did was I uploaded all types of amazing information. So I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals, different books that I like, issues going on in my personal life and businesses. I uploaded so much information. And so the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life. Like, how should I respond to this email? What's the right decision knowing that you know my goals for the future, things like that. And so I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing the audience, showing you the software that I used to make this, the information that I had ChatGPT ask me, all this stuff. So it's super easy for you to use. And like I said, I use this like 10 or 20 times a day. It's literally changed my life. And so if you want that, it's free. There's a link below. Just click it, enter your email, and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes. And I'll show you how I use it again, 10 to 20 times a day. All right, so check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode. Step number 4 for being miserable: switching from thing to thing every quarter or every year. Mastery and compounding, it's for suckers. Starting from scratch will be a lot easier. This is actually the number 1 most common miserable traits I see amongst ambitious people who have a ton of promise. They don't stick to things for long enough to see the eventual payoff. And I've thought about this a lot, and I think the reason why you or anyone else tends to switch from thing to thing is because anything worth doing, it basically requires you to pay a known cost today for an unknown payoff in the future. And it's that uncertainty plus a lack of discipline that makes people switch from thing to thing because the pain of focus, it shows up daily. In time, in energy, and in money. But the reward doesn't come for months or sometimes years. And that uncertainty, it's very painful and it makes people quit. But if you're ambitious, you need to know that the path to winning, this is how it feels. You lose sleep, you second-guess yourself, and you wonder if you're wasting years of your life. You put in hours and you burn so much energy, and the scoreboard still basically says zero. And it says that sometimes for years. But this is the price that people pay if they want to win. And the worst part is that no one is going to be able to tell you if the thing that you're doing is actually going to work. The only way forward is to keep paying that cost while the end payout is still unknown. I want to tell you a quick story. Last week I was with the founder of Eight Sleep. It's this guy named Matteo. Eight Sleep is a company that makes these really smart mattresses that does hundreds of millions in revenue, and it's worth billions of dollars. The entire talk that he did, it was about how his company failed and nearly died 5 different times, the most recent one being like a couple of years ago. Now imagine if he switched projects after failure number 2. Switching just because something is hard and uncertain, that's a trap. The times I've grown most in life are the times when I felt like I wanted to quit most or I wanted to go and start something new. We've had a guy in this podcast named Palmer Luckey, who's a billionaire. He invented the Oculus. And he has another company worth tens of billions of dollars. He has this amazing quote: At some point in business and in life and in romance, you have to commit to a path. A lot of my peers, they keep all of their options open, so they end up jumping from thing to thing. If you don't commit, you're going to fail. You have to say, this is the path that I'm on, for better or worse, and I'm going to double down on it. Step number 5 is going to make a lot of you guys angry. I know the comments on YouTube are going to be full. I know a lot of people are going to tweet at me. You're going to be pissed off. But step number 5 is to don't buy index funds and instead invest all of your money picking individual stocks. The reason I have a thing about finances on here is because a lot of you listening to MFM, you're here because you want to make money. You're here because you want to get rich. I think there's basically only 4 ways to get really rich. One is to get lucky by marrying someone, winning the lottery, or joining a rocket ship startup. Two is to get into sales. Those guys make unlimited amounts of money. 3 is starting a small business, which this podcast is a lot about. And 4, which is probably the most practical and straightforward way, is to have a good salary, live below your means, and invest all of your extra money into index funds. But if you're listening to MFM, you like action, you like doing stuff. That was the whole point of the first couple steps of How Not to Be Miserable was about acting. But when it comes to getting rich, one of the best ways to get rich is to have patience and not actually do a ton of acting. If you invested only $6,000 a year into the S&P 500, by retirement you'd have over $1 million. Now, most of you listening, you make over six figures, and so you can probably actually get there a lot faster. But here's the trap that a lot of you guys listening— this happens a lot to young men. This happened to me when I was younger. It's thinking that you are smarter than the market and you're in a rush. Now, let me tell you some facts. So over the last 10 years, 97% of active stock fund managers, so basically people who pick stocks on a daily basis, they underperformed the index. These are people whose job relies on making money off of stocks. They're Harvard MBAs. They are just these nerds that stare at Bloomberg terminals all day. They've got thousands of employees, they have teams of analysts, and they still can't beat the index funds. And I've done this before and I get why people do this. So my dumb story is at the bottom of the market during COVID I sold all of my positions because I thought the market was done. And then it ripped right back up. And I have lost a fortune because of that mistake. And that's when a smart friend told me afterwards, he said something that actually changed my life. It's a very cliché thing, but he said, it's not about timing the market, it's about time in the market. Over the past 20 years, if you were to stay in the market, stay invested the whole time, you would have made roughly 10% a year, which is pretty good. That means that your money doubles every 7 years. However, If you missed the best 10 days, your returns halved to about 5%. And if you missed the best 20 days, so the best 20 days out of 3,650 days, your gains would be almost exactly zero. Picking those 20 days, picking those right stocks, it's very hard. It's nearly impossible. Very few people do it. And if you're listening to this, you probably aren't in that category and you probably should not do it. If you want to be happy. I sold my company in 2021 and I put almost all of my money into a very basic Vanguard index fund. And over the past 5 years, it's now worth 71% more and I've done nothing. Now, we've lived in a great economy and markets have been ripping. But the fact is, is that since the beginning of the stock market, it has grown consistently over a long period of time between 9 and 10% a year. Now, a lot of people are going to get mad because they like buying stocks. It does feel good. I get it. It feels great. And if you are in that category, you should buy very few, a very small amount of stocks, and that should be part of your entertainment budget. So if you want to make a lot of money in your sleep and not do a lot of work and have very little stress, invest in index funds. And if you really want to get rich, try and start a business. That can be a risky thing. But picking individual stocks amongst most everyone I know who does it, it almost always ends poorly. So just buy the index. So if someone's looking over your shoulder right now and they see what you're watching or they see that you're listening to something and they ask, I want you to tell them, I just listened to something that told me the 5 simple steps to live a miserable life. Now, if you want to tell them how to have a good life, here's a recap. Step number 1, have a best friend. Have someone who you love to death and you know that they have your best interest in mind. Step number 2: Decide. Spend more time acting and doing and less time planning. Step number 3: Set goals and track progress regularly. Step number 4: Do not switch from thing to thing every quarter or every year. Mastery and compounding, it works. And step 5: Get rich. And one straightforward way on doing that is to invest in index funds. Do not go and think that you are a stock picking genius. It's nearly impossible. All right. That's it, my friends. Go to YouTube if you're not already there and let me know what you think about this in the comments. I'll talk to you guys soon.