Control Freak Or High Standards?

what did you call this the podcasting booty call we come together for a very
intense 3 hours don't see each other for
six months until I text you again and say what you doing it's exactly that all
right so we're going to go through some
of the best lessons I've learned from you over the last couple of months first one
control freak is a word people with
low standards use to describe people with high standards you're not a control freak
you just want it done right the
first time you're not anxious you care do not expect mediocre people to support
worldclass goals I think most people feel really
lonely when you want something that doesn't currently exist and so some people call
that dream some people call
that goals whatever it is you're trying to pull something from your mind into
reality and you want it done a certain way and if it's not done that way it's
not what you imagined and so people on the outside will throw stones and call
you names that they think will change your behavior and get you to stop and and the
more I have been the person
trying to pull things in the reality The more I've tried to weather and build kind
of defenses against those things so
that when those stones get hurled at you by being called a control freak or by
saying you micromanage things or that
you have incredibly high standards the answer is yes because I want it done
right the first time because either way we're going if you have enough will it's
going to get done the way that I want it
to get done regardless and it'll be less painful if we just do it the first time
because we will still have to do it and you may have to do it three or four more
times but eventually you'll just succumb to the fact that we're going to do it this
way and I think all of the great
things that have happened for Humanity have been from one man or woman who had an
idea and just wouldn't let people
shake it from them the standard of right isn't
actually that insane when you think about it it's just right it's just done without
error and I guess that the margin that some people consider to
be right and other people consider to be right just changes I'm trying to think of
a really
good example for this but like the level of detail I mean it's
it's the difference between it's the difference between a book that gets 10 or 100
festar reviews
and a book that gets 100,000 festar reviews and everyone wants a silver bullet but
most of the things that make
great products is 100 golden BBS and so that's one of the things we have is there's
no silver bullets only hundreds
of golden bbb's there's just hundreds of tiny little improvements it's like how can
we look at the can how can we
improve the way it ships what about the weight what about the color scheme how does
it sit on the shelves how are people going to look at it in this
market versus this Market are like how does this name appear on hats and on
shirts and on and on sites and what's the RGB you know whatever the color SC scope
is here versus there and it's just
a thousand details that someone who does not care will not put the work to look
into because they're trying to check a box rather than to make something that
people will love or um I heard this from
shoot I can't remember where it was from um but basically that the best art is Art
where the artist makes it for
themselves and where you see commercial work is where a bunch of people are trying
to make something for an audience
and so it's they're trying to like rinse and recycle stuff that actually solves
no one's problems because no one is actually the audience whereas when you make it
for yourself there's thousands of people just like you who will who
have the same depth of understanding of it but it feels selfish in the moment to
make something for yourself but when you make it for yourself you actually make
it for everyone but you can be reliably informed that there's some non
insignificant minority of people who
also think like you yes who also have the same problems as you who also have the
same fears as you so I'm going through two projects at the moment one
being a book and the other being UT tonic that is nent and it's new and that
means that there's lots more of these small things that are actually quite big
things but I was telling you before we
started about the fact there's a hyphen and there's a hyphen missing between one
piece of copy and another piece of copy but it's printed on a million cans think
for [ __ ] sake but being concerned about being seen as
someone who has too high standards is something that for quite a while I felt
ashamed about yeah because you feel like a bother you feel like you're being
necessarily it's not even detail oriented it's picky cumbersome yes yes yes yes
laborious um and I realized
probably last year took me until last year to realize that not succumbing to
stopping doing that is probably one of the only reasons why I've had any success I
mean I think if so for anyone
who's listening if you have that I I would considered a gift um it makes sense for
the majority of people to be
opposed to that because you do make more more work for everyone
else but the product of that work is so much better and so if you want the work
that you have to last and to be meaningful and make an impact it comes from a 100
golden BBS of 100
particularities of 100 peculiarities that you are picky about because the
whole thing needs to work and what happens is if you have a big project lots of
people have to get involved but there still needs to be one vision and
otherwise it looks like a Frankenstein where everyone just checks a box of
something they did in the past they just copy and paste it over and then it
doesn't resonate with anyone because again they just did it for everyone rather
than for the artist and so using
that as a frame has given me permission to be me in an unreasonable world and so
like I told I told this last time I was on but when I did the book launch I had
I I practiced that presentation three times a day every day
for 30 days so I did a 100 run throughs full length run throughs first where I
did it out loud and recorded it second time where I would watch the recording um
and then edit in real time and then
do it again and I did that every single day and so then when I came live and had
half a million people or whatever it
came out I think flawlessly but people were like man you're such a natural at this
it's like well I did it a hundred
times and so sometimes people even hear 100 it's just a big number but when you do
a 100 repetitions of something the
first five times you're like wow I'm so much better but then like the difference
between five and the next 95 times is
what goes from being great to being a masterpiece and like it's that next 95 that I
think is what makes people world
class and that's where everyone falls off and that's why most people aren't there
is this pull I think from people
who don't have high standards to people who do have high standards to drag them
back it's this like uh moving back
toward the mean yeah is killing the only competitive advantage that you
had couldn't agree more it's I mean it's it's conforming right
it's like they people want you to do what they find comfortable and most things
that are like most companies
deteriorate when the founder leaves because and it happens slowly because it's you
go to from 100 golden BBS to 99
golden BBS and it doesn't look that different and then there's 98 golden BBS and
they're like I don't know and then two years later three years later you're
like I don't know it doesn't have the same like magic as it was what it was and
that's because the art behind it
isn't there because it's not unified anymore it's not congruent anymore it's a 100
departments making decisions with
people copying pasting things for an audience that doesn't exist rather than one
person who's trying to be satisfied for an ideal that they are trying with
all their might to live up to I suppose this is one of the important reasons to
have a singular figure that is the Hub
and all of the spokes come off it because they're the only person that gets to see
absolutely everything and typically that would be the founder in a
podcast that would be a host in any other in a um solo music band that would
be the lead singer or the songwriter or whatever they get to see everything for
instance we've done some episodes before where it's been the night before and I've
been not happy with the color grade
because the way that something displays on mobile is slightly different to the way
that it displays in Premier Pro and
it's slightly different to the way that it displays in a 6K photographer
videographers curved screen I've gr guys
it's like it's not up to scratch well we're not going to be able to get it in time
for the export we're not going to be able to get it in time to get it
uploaded and then there's checks that go through on YouTube like well it needs to
happen like it just
make find a way to make this happen and yeah that um that impulse of just
actually seeing it as something that you should lean into okay well it's not and if
you set the standard and if everybody
else gets up to that standard what it shows is the people who continually push up
against that and don't meet that
standard they're just not built for this particular company they're built for
someone else that makes a mediocre product but they're not built for you
who's making a world- class prod and I I I really want to jam down someone's throat
right now um the whole like don't
be a perfectionist like you're proc like it's just another word for procrastination
I actually think that's
complete [ __ ] I think that that's my quote being is it perfectionism is
procrastination masquerading is quality control yes okay so then I'm going to I'm
going to put us sub a sub footnote
on it that I think will will add context which is that most people who claim to
be perfectionists are not perfectionists they're actually procrastinating because
they're not doing anything and so it
just is a socially acceptable label because the real perfectionists feel
this this sickness where they like want to itch their skin off until the thing's
done but they are trying to get it done whereas the perfectionist or the the
procrastinator uses that to say like I'm not sure I'm just getting it right but
like the person who's an actual
perfectionist one wants to finish and is working every hour of every day on the
thing and seeing progress towards it
because if you don't know how your thing is getting better you're not a
perfectionist you're just ignorant they're also moving toward the goal
every single step of the way as opposed to just sitting back I had this huge list
of things that are not doing the thing planning to do the thing isn't
doing the thing thinking about the thing isn't doing the thing getting angry at
people on the internet that have already done thing is doing the thing and um
there's also a people who are perfectionists within
the thing that matters most are prepared to see things that are anciliary to that
for instance you're not absolutely a
perfectionist I'm going to guess with the short form content that goes out on your
Instagram it's like this is sawdust
as you call it this is just it's extra right it's it's it's freebie stuff look if
we have one in a 100 videos that have
got a a typo or The Hyphen missing or something all right but if we're talking the
school announcement release if there's a fcking typo in that or in the the video
one of the links is broken or even if one of the links is slightly pixelated yeah
that's something that I can have a
problem with so picking your battles as a perfectionist I think actually or someone
as someone with high standards
is super important because you can't have that degree of high standards at
absolutely everything because if you
don't pick your battles you're not going to make sufficient movement at the
velocity you need to actually make so find the areas that are the highest
contribution yeah don't compromise on those and it's funny you say that because I
the way
that I immediately reframed that was that the perfectionism was around volume
it's like that is what we will that is what we are optimizing towards and then we
can't because if we look at if we
knew how people responded ahead of time to content then we would make things
differently than we do but I probably like you am often surprised pleasantly
and sometimes unpleasantly by the stuff that just grabs hold and then just goes you
know viral as hell um in content and
so I think part of that is making up for our own Ignorance by increasing volume and
at and so that would be like it my
reframe on the perfectionism there is like we know that if we make 10 pieces of
content it is more likely that we
will have more people see it than if we try really hard at one and so we make 10
because the net benefit of the 10 is
and so that's the ideal that we commit to Thiago Forte has a fantastic take on this
where he talks about perfectionism
allows people to sit back and not produce work at a rate required to work out what
actually works have you heard
the the story of the the pottery class oh I feel like the all right wellow I this
feels like total modern is this
where someone comes in behind and then holds the thing in front so there's two two
uh there's a teacher and he's got
two classes that he teaches and one class he said says the only assignment for this
whole semester is that you come
with a come back with a perfect uh clay pot that's it that's the assignment the
other class he says your objective is to make the most total quantity of clay pots
and you'll be measured by how many
pots you make and at the end of the quarter the pots that came from the team
that had to just make sheer volume not only did they make more pots but the quality
of all of their pots was better
compared to the teams that only had to make one and it just under lines the the
biggest lesson that I've learned in my
life which is that volume negates luck is that you can try to be lucky and pick the
one perfect thing and try and make
it but if you don't want to try and be lucky you can just do so much [ __ ] work
that you will you will brute force
your way to figuring it out like if you do a thousand podcasts you'll be pretty
[ __ ] good at podcasts right but if
you try to say okay you're you're rent you're brand new and all you have to do is
make one perfect podcast the problem
is that you don't have to perspective itive from which to make a judgment to say
what is good because you have zero data to base anything off of and so
you're basing your idea of a perfect podcast on something that you've literally
never done before and so doing the volume gives you the perspective to
then have the best podcast at number 1,000 or 1001 anyways I just thought you'd
love The Clay Pot I I know that
story but I thought it was photography oh okay so anyway but no I I again I don't
disagree and it's finding the
thing that is to try and make this tactical what is the thing
that you don't need to focus on volume today the goal is not to try and fit 10
podcasts into one set it's to make this one as good as possible but if it's
shorts or reals or tweets or something it's lower leverage it's lower input just
get just get it out there all right
next one here's how to get older without getting better keep relearning the same
How People Get Older Without Getting Better
lesson if you keep making the same mistake over and over the mistake isn't
the problem you won't so I Define learning by same
condition new behavior and so when you go to a video game and you battle through
the level and you battle the
boss if you keep doing the same thing to the boss and you keep losing then you have
not learned because you have the
same condition and the same behavior and so I often say that like for anyone who's
listening to this podcast if the
goal is to get better and you're like man I really want to learn something from
this podcast if you listen to this podcast and then you're in the same
exact conditions as you before and then you do not change your behavior you learned
nothing and so using that
definition has at least allowed me to change my behavior faster which then goes
into rate of learning which I
Define as intelligence and so a lot of people are like man he's so smart but he
just doesn't it's like well then if he
doesn't change his behavior and he's in the same conditions he's a dummy he's not
that smart and
so if you are trying to battle the same boss over and over again and you don't
change what you're doing and the boss keeps beating you then it's not the game's
problem it's your problem you are
the problem and I think that's um like if you if you continue I talked about
obviously I'm I talked to a lot of
entrepreneurs but I usually do this when I have a crowd I say like hey raise your
hand if you work all the hours of the
day and a lot you know most of the crowd raised their hand I say okay who here has
been stuck at the same Revenue level
for 6 months or more and then I said keep the hands up and like honestly most of
the time the same hand are raised and
say you're doing the wrong [ __ ] like if you put all your inputs and the outputs
haven't changed then you have the same condition and the same behavior and so you
have learned
nothing and so that has always just been my reframe and so over time if if you're
moving up in entrepreneurship or you're
moving up in career your behavior should change because it means you've learned
exposure
to information isn't learning great deal are it's true it's true and it's the
same with memory it's literally the way that memory works the best way to work out
how the human memory system works is
repeated recall not repeated exposure right you have to drag it out of memory
and use it not just see it a million times and this is kind of the same thing with
the lesson it's you can listen to
any of the podcasts that exist on the Internet or the ones that we've done or the
ones that you love or whatever
and if you don't apply anything it it's a waste of time and this is the best
solution for this is Tim
Ferris is the good [ __ ] sticks look what's the thing from the podcast or the book
or the audio book or the the
whatever that you read or listen to that you can't stop thinking about that you go
to bed and you think about it that
you took a screenshot or a screen recording and sent it in the group chat that you
like texted your mom about it 3 in the morning oh this really explains
the way that I felt in school or the way that I felt when such and such broke up
with me or whatever that's the thing
that's the thing to focus on but a lot of the time the me the problem with mental
masturbation is that the amount
of information you can intake versus the amount of change that you can deploy is
asymmetric yeah when I was getting
started on my um entrepreneurial journey and I would say this like pre this I was
when I was a entrepreneur like I hadn't
quit my job yet I started reading all these self-help books and I remember reading
like it was probably like my
10th book in a row and I realized that the words in that book contradicted like the
second self-help book that I you
know one was like it's it's all about goals the other one's like it's all about
taking you know steps or whatever it was right and I and I all of a sudden
I was like you know my life is the same I've read all these books but my I
I still literally live in the exact same condo in Baltimore doing the same job like
nothing has changed and so I just
made the commitment that whatever the next book that I was going to read I would
just not read another book until
i' done everything in that book um and I that's when I quit my job and I did a
whole bunch of other things and um I've
actually more or less stuck with that in terms of like when I read books or even
listen to podcasts I usually do it with
an intention to get something out of it and um I usually have notes up and so
that's so my intake on information
because because I get asked a lot I'm sure you do like I actually don't read that
much um I definitely don't read
non-fiction I read like fantasy every once in while Red Rising baby that's right um
but it's because usually I get
overwhelmed with the amount of things I would have to do and so I'm like I don't
need more information I'm like I'm like
I could read a chapter and be like all right that's it I like it'll take me two
weeks to do this and then like the rest of the time is doing that and so how do
you ensure that the things that you're reading are giving you good advice because
if you didn't move on before you
took two weeks to go and do the thing but the thing was dog [ __ ] you've spent two
weeks going backward so I would
probably I would make the argument that I wouldn't have gone backwards cuz I would
have gained the experience and so
I would have more context to know what the second thing was going to be and that's
just kind of like the trial by fire learning through iteration and I
think I tend to do more of that um sort of a all learn philosophy yeah and I I
would say that like there there are entrepreneurs who are definitely like super
super duper planners and there are entrepreneurs who are more like let's
just move and break [ __ ] and we'll figure it out I tend to be really this on the
micro in terms of like move [ __ ]
and break you know like we'll figure it out as we go and I just tend to be a
planner only in the big like very Grand
like what do I really want to do in 10 years but the majority of the time it's like
let's see and we'll we we'll learn
I've learned so much like so much of the content that I have comes from just
[ __ ] up in business and people were like this is such original concept I was like
this is just cuz that's what my
life was I just like I made this mistake and it didn't work but I said this one
thing one time and then all these people bought and I was like ooo how do I do
that again and so like it was always through iteration and I I I read all these
books but there's just between knowing how uh or sorry knowing that and
knowing how like knowing that maybe this works maybe but once you do it it's a
different type of learning where at
least for me it's about been that way you could read you could read a 100 books on
sales but when you take your first cold car all of that goes out the
window because you actually have to you actually have to sell we'll get back to
talking to Alex in one minute but first I need to tell you about element element
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wisdom this is related to something I wrote last week don't be so worried about
people who imitate your work they
Don’t Be Worried About People Who Imitate Your Work
only know the what but not the why if you stopped being creative so would they
a photocopier isn't an artist even if it can recreate the Mona
Lisa I love that because you think like you you are Source in that situation and
so everyone is there for like a subset of you and they require you to live you
don't
require them and the equal opposite is I think we should be more fearful of when
everyone stops cop copying you like the day that no one copies you is far far more
frightening than the day everyone's
copying you yeah Jimmy car refers to China as a cover band you know great it's like
they're
the cover band of The Beatles And he says you know they're they're good and in many
ways they're able to produce things at more scale and so on and so
forth but they're not driving The Innovation forward in that same way yeah the idea
of getting upset about people
copying is just ridiculous like yeah that's all I that's all you
understand why it's painful right if someone's gone through okay let's test and
test and test and test and test and then finally find a particular form
formula that works and then 10 people Downstream get the benefit of this hard
laborious effortful late night grind and iteration and they just got to be like
oh that thing yeah I so I think that like they they'll
be able to copy what they can see but they won't be able to copy what they can't
see which is understanding why each of those pieces are in place and
when something changes in the future they won't be able to iterate from there
because they don't know why it was there in the first place why right and so like
I mean I've obviously dealt this with in a business context where like real dollars
are at stake and so like in the gym world you know gym launch for those
who don't know I had a big licensing company we had 5,000 locations and anyways so
we had basically business processes that we would you know iterate
and figure out why this worked and so then I had I I used to keep a list of names
and then I just it got too long
and tiresome to keep the names of all the people who tried to take the stuff and
then sell it as their own um I say their I say their names every night
before I go to bed you think I don't remember you I remember all of you um and
so none of them 10 years later are still around and not and none of them even
came to a tenth of the sze of Jamal and it was because it wasn't theirs like the
person that I would be far more afraid
of somebody who comes out with a significantly better system than what we had to
help gyms make more money and help their you know help their clients
more um but like to this day like they're still isn't one and that one's Tim lunch
is still the category King in
that in in that industry and so it's like just and that's because we put and we
were talking about this earlier
everything is an R&D for us and so we actually like were the only licensing company
that had an R&D department and
we would test uh we call them plays but we test plays every every 14 days and so
we'd spend 50 or 100 Grand on just a
test we would be like all right let's test this new marketing campaign or we'd say
hey let's test this new uh High
ticket sales processor hey what if we did what if we tried to sell memberships via
chat let's just give it a shot see
what happens and and honestly 70% of the time it would it was worse than the
control like it didn't
work as well and what we would do is we'd present it to the lenses and say hey guys
guess what we just spend 50 Grand on that you don't have to spend
money on look at the results of this sell membership yeah yeah the thing is is that
most people are actually really
happy to to know that it didn't work cuz it felt like they were scratching it like
oh great I don't have to do that
one like someone did that test for me so anyways um all that to say uh unless you
have that that trail of bodies behind you that led you to figure out this one thing
when there is a kink in the system
because some external condition changes which it always will they then don't know
which means you're always still
going to be ahead yeah that's very interesting yeah because if you understand the
physics of
the system if you understand the Dynamics of why you're doing the things that
you're doing and something changes you can respond but it goes back to
people with high standards you have to presume that you
win in the weeds yeah you have to presume that you win in the weeds and if
you do and if you're continuing to be this close to it yeah as soon as things
change you go that's interesting why has
that happened and that then allows you to continue to iterate and you see it cuz
you're in the weeds right somebody who's
all the way zoomed out just like yeah copy paste that they're like they're one
they're late cuz they have to see that
it's working see that it's working consistently so they're already 3 6 months
behind then they start trying to figure out how to implement it and then
they start implementing it and then what they don't see is the things that made the
conditions that made it work to begin with and so like if you just
assume that you're always in the lead then it means then sure second through 10th
place will always copy number one
but to the victory go the spoils and so you like no one gives a [ __ ] who is
fourth place at the Olympics
The Cost of Being Exceptional
reminder that if you want to be exceptional you're going to be different from
everyone else that's What Makes You
exceptional you can't fit in and also be exceptional both have discomfort when you
fit in you have internal conflict
because you're not being 100% you when you're exceptional you have external
conflict because everyone sees you as
different pick one when your friends start to say you've changed remember
it's because they don't know how to say you've grown
I Define words a lot because it helps me kind of like made sense of the world and
um like exceptionals is like an obvious one right we use the word exceptional like
you are not like everyone else um
but even saying it like that like you are not like everyone else and so if someone
someone says you're not like everyone else then you can just reframe
that as like I'm exceptional and that's not a bad thing um and most and I I
don't and I actually think that most people have like this might be counter to most
people's beliefs but I think
most people have the potential to be exceptional and I because most people are
peculiar in their own way they just
stifle that because they want to be accepted by most people but in so doing never
accomplish what they want to do
because they conform uh and so like if there's probably a lot of things about the
world or even your world around you
that you're like this never made sense to me but then you do it anyways and I I
think that a lot of innovation and a lot
of what makes people exceptional is feeling you know thinking that thought or
seeing that thing and then being like
huh I don't think I'm going to follow that rule anymore like why do I need to
shower
twice a day huh like I don't know like why do I need to wear different
clothing huh like there's just a lot of these social norms that people people you
know usually pass down to us or
they're you know bred into us in high school and college and things like that um
but it's like you see a guy who you
know wears a cowboy hat and dress a certain way and he basically wants to say I am
this I am this archetype of
person but if cowboy boots aren't as comfortable for you as New Balances are and
you know that and you still wear
cowboy boots I would call you a fraud because like that is like it's a it's like a
micro Rebellion against yourself
it's like there is and like I look at old people a lot because usually they don't
give a [ __ ] anymore they've just
like given up and uh there was a survey that they did where the number one reason
that old people like don't have
as much drama and they're happier is they say they they cited they literally don't
have time for it like literally
they don't have time for it and I found that so interesting and I was like well if
I'm going to eventually be that way when I'm 80 I might as well just start
being that way now and so they usually wear like really comfortable Footwear and
like they they keep their
surroundings like whatever weird peculiarities they have they just accept them and
so I think a lot of like if if
life is a long journey of self-acceptance I think the earlier you can accept your
own peculiarities as just part of you rather than trying to
justify them or mold to what you to the archetype that you think is acceptable
within your Social Circle um at least
for me like there's this period of discomfort when you change anything because
everyone around you wants you to fit within the label that they are comfortable
with but they also have the
anchor of what you were before yeah exactly and so they try and like they they
people don't like that and so they're like no no I like you in this
box so just say I I know you're having a little thing right now don't worry just
just and they just want to shove you back into it and there's there's a lot
of uncomfortable conversations that you have to have where it becomes really
socially awkward um and so like I I said
one the other day about like going home for the holidays and the reason I don't
like doing it is because often I have to
confront a lot of people that I haven't seen in a long time and they'll speak to me
in a way that I don't like and before
that I would roll it off like whatever no big deal but but um I don't accept
that didn't you torpedo a family holiday a couple of years ago
many yeah I think but that's the when your friends start to say you've changed
it's because they don't know how to say you've grown and because they see so few
people who have so it makes sense that they don't have that so I see that as a
lack of skill not not malice like it's not that they're bad people they just don't
even know it because so few people
do change so few people do grow have you seen this image it's a person whose
heart and head are flowers it's kind of a 2d drawing it's a bit of a sketch okay
and um they say this person with the
kind of smaller flower head and heart says you've changed and the person on
the other side with this huge Blooming Thing says I should hope so yeah I
haven't seen it but I see it in my head yeah it's brilliant one of my friends
George Mack told me this 5 years ago I
think think I'm astounded by how many people want to be spectacular in life but
also want to be normal by being
normal You Are by definition aiming for average normal people get normal results
exceptional people get exceptional results you literally can't do what everyone
else does and expect to not get
what everyone else has got by doing what everyone else does you guarantee average
results okay so this comes down to
everything that like business I mean obvious I come from the business and invest
World um like if everyone is
jumping on to crypto like by the time you have all the information to make a
perfect decision it's too late and by
the time you have consensus where everyone's like that's a good investment it
probably isn't because it's already been mispriced because it's already like
it's already inflated it's above what its intrinsic value is and so like good
investors fundamentally can think for
themselves and it's such an easy thing to say and such a hard thing to do and so
it's being able to say if I shut
myself in a room and and I had to come up with a value for something and just use
my own mind to come up with what I
think this is worth it's that that answer that you get in a room in isolation with
no internet connection
that you believe in that number more than every single other person's and most
people can't do that but like that
ability and then what happens though is if you really have to believe in that
rather than everyone else's you double check your [ __ ] math because if it is
different than everyone else's you have the op you like that is what opportunity
right it's like and you have the
potential to make a shitload of money or lose a ton of money because you didn't
check your math and so the more I've
been reinforced for thinking independently and in the beginning it's on small
things and then you just continue to reinforce that cycle of huh
I came to this conclusion on my own it seems different than everyone else's but I
think I think my thing makes sense so
I'm going to do that how would you advise someone to overcome that
regression to the mean that pull to not make way to not be heterodox or
non-typical when it comes to their decision making CU it's hard you're talking
about this internal conflict versus external conflict how do you make
the internal conflict more important than the external conflict for me I was more
miserable trying to make everyone
else happy that I am now with everyone else unhappy with me and so I think like
from the social
group I had before I quit my job before going all the way like Ground Zero to today
I talk to no one from that time in
my life compared to today and I was absolutely miserable and unhappy and
unfulfilled and I would say that the majority of those people probably don't like
me today because I changed I didn't
do what I was supposed to do he thinks he's so fancy now etc etc and I think
I'm just okay with that and so I think coming to terms with the idea that I could
be absolutely rejected by everyone
I know but like me I was more okay with that because the alternative was I
didn't want to live anymore and so obviously there's degrees and there's continuums
and there's stages of where people are at with that but as that
being the taken to its logical extreme would I rather live for them than live for
me I would rather be hated by
everyone and like myself there's a degree
of honesty is the right word but it's also too simple like being completely
100% truthful with yourself if that's the way that this is why have I told you
about the uh Motocross the rally cross
thing that me and my housemate love okay so you know like Colin McCrae these guys
that drive four-wheel there's the dude
in the the co-pilot seat and it's five left Bend all that [ __ ] um these guys
that go to go and watch this are in the middle of some [ __ ] wood in Asia
right in Scotland and it's pissing wet and it's November and they've got a pawn
show on and they get to drive for
however along to get to this PL you can even see thinking about it the hairs on my
arms are standing up this is how [ __ ] dope it is so these guys are
there and they see some dude in overcast rain freezing cold soaking wet
go and then they turn to the turn to all of their boys and they're like watching
someone who loves anything
with that much Purity yeah fires me up it fires me up like we love watching we
don't watch it for what the cars are doing we watch it for what does to The
Spectators and that degree of like just
unencumbered passion yeah not being apologetic like they've probably they're
probably wearing comfy [ __ ] they're not wearing cowboy boots you know what I mean
no one they they look like a like a large condom in this pwn show do they
care right they don't care and that's Purity yeah that's
truthfulness and and honesty and really like what what are you hoping to
be able to to look back on your life or for people to say after you're gone if you
don't do
that he was such a good guy and he never rocked the boat yeah he was such a good
guy and he always conformed to our expectations he was such a good guy and
he was so predictable right like people think and I did throughout a lot of my 20s
I thought
that what people wanted from me was someone that they could easily
predict but I realized when I thought about the people that I loved in my life I
didn't love them because of how
predictable they were yeah I love them because of how unapologetically themselves
they were MH
I have a friend who nearly ended a relationship that he's still with who the love
of his life
who's probably going to end up marrying because he refused to not sleep on the
floor for 6 months as part of a Alex
Becker is doing it at the moment like he's like sleeping on the floor seems to be
like a pretty dialed idea and she's like I'm not sleeping on the floor well
I am so so they didn't sleep together for like you know for for like a long time
yeah like that's those are the
people that you love and those are the people that you can because they pay such a
high price to do that yeah you
can be very reliable at presuming that they mean what they're saying mhm
because if they didn't really mean what they're saying they would conform they
would take any e a
path I love all of that my I was trying to kind of
consolidate it for for myself and the listeners for me it it just it comes
down to truly valuing your opinion of yourself more than other people's opinion of
you
and it's it's just it's an easy thing to say and it's incredibly hard to do because
that means that if you disagree
with everyone else in the room there's this meme that I love I don't know if you've
seen it this this little cartoon
of this one little guy and then there's like an ocean of people that way and it
just says yes you're all
wrong and I just like I feel like that Meme I my uh teror cashi my my uh
brother and editor in the books in the battle against nihilism and and and towards
truth um we send that Meme back
and forth to one another when we're like yes everyone is wrong about this word like
we are right and I think it's just
being willing to like but the only way you can believe in a thing or an idea or
even yourself is because you have the
evidence behind you that supports that your belief isn't full of [ __ ] so that
when you're in that room and you come up with that one number and you say I think
everyone's wrong I think this is actually what it's worth you're not just making it
up to to
say you believe something different you actually have proof and evidence that
you're not full of [ __ ] and I think
that's the work is like I did a I looked into a lot of the stuff on the on the
floor sleeping I think it it checks out I'm going to do it like I think everyone
else is wrong I think everyone else is
wrong and everyone's like you're an idiot and you're like I think you're wrong and
that's okay you know what I
and and it's just most people can't do that just the idea of being weird is too
much like just like did you ever see did
you ever um this is quite old now it's at least a decade old I think it's called 50
days of rejection or 100 days
of rejection I love it already so it's a it's a a series of experiments that you
do every day for 100 days there's a different one each day and one of them is ask
for a free coffee when you go to
Starbucks oh I love it just say hey can I have this for free yeah and it's I don't
know whether it escalates over
time but there's like weird stuff things that you do to people in public things
that blah blah blah and it's trying to
overcome that like it sort of it's in your throat you know when you feel that and
your
cheeks get flush and everything kind of gets hot embarrassed around here yeah it's
that embarrassment it's that shame
it's that what if they think yeah what yeah what if they think what
yeah so yeah I I someone should redo that it's like a decade old now but
someone should redo I think I'm certain it's called 100 days of rejection YouTube
idea that would be a great YouTube idea to do 100 100 days of
rejection or whatever it is um all right next one next one I I just want to like I
promise you if you can actually go
through 100 days of rejection your life will change because you will realize that
at the end of The 100 days you're
still alive and nothing changed but it's I'm going to die yeah that's the fear the
fear is I'm going to ask for the
coffee and they're going to say no and then everyone's going to laugh at me and
then I'm going to be alone and then I'm going to be unsheltered and then I'll be
dead yeah it's catastrophized to death we all do it and so I mean obviously I come
from a sales background so getting
people to say no to me is something that I'm now if you've asked drunken Newcastle
girls where they're going
tonight darling for a decade and a half on the street trying to give out wristbands
for a free entry to a club
night no one wants to go to you you get good at rejection as well that's what I I
honestly think that uh
Everyone is always going to campaign for the thing that they did right you're
always going to say something along the lines of I think people can learn a lot
from sales and I'm always going to say I think people can learn a lot from being in
club promo but like honestly dude the
the Insight that you get into human nature from doing that from seeing what do
people object to and why do they
object in that way and what happens if someone like gets physical with you because
you tried to do and you go oh
well I wasn't in the wrong so de escalating there should actually be quite easy and
I can have faith that everyone's going to see me as the right
guy even if somebody else took objection with what I was doing so yeah long story
short become a club promoter all right next up next one there's a big difference
between
Differences Between Fame & Respect
becoming known and becoming respected don't let an algorithm convince you
otherwise I mean I think this is probably super ptin for for people in our position
um but
I'll go from the internet perspective and we can Circle back to IRL um but I mean a
lot of people will make content
obviously I make stuff for me too like talk about artists making things for
themselves like I make most of my tweets are just like notes to self um but like
if I ever feel like I have to sacrifice who I am or the values that I believe in in
order to like get more views or
something like that I see it happen more times than not because the algorithm and
the views and the likes become kind of a
proxy for conforming in in their own way like Everyone likes this type of thing do
more of that and that makes me feel
very like dance monkey dance and um I think there's there's few things that kill my
soul more than that and so I
would rather you know I would rather the algorithm shut me off tomorrow and I
continue to make stuff that I find interesting that 10 people find
interesting that is actually the same stuff as me then just have these viral
hits that I feel like I'm Ronald McDonald in um and just feel like I've completely
lost my soul and I I do think
as a side note that if you do the first one where your intention is to maybe help
find the 10 people who are really
interested in your thing you probably will create more of the viral hits but when
you solve for the other way I think
you accomplish neither I have this theory that more creators fall out of favor
because they
become cringe than because they become irrelevant I love that you yeah I love that
I think it's I think it's true I
think if you think about the thing that you do almost anything that anybody is
creating is public facing because if it
wasn't public facing it would just be a hobby doing your painting because you
love painting is a hobby doing your painting to try and sell it is something that
you do as a business or as a a
public project the flywheel is so vicious in
the positive direction and even more vicious in the negative direction if it
becomes cancerous or uncool or untrendy or catastrophic or cringe to be seen to
be watching or listening to or consuming the thing that you make it is you
permanently going to be swimming
upstream and it is only going to get worse which is why you look at Shane Gillis is
a really great example of this
at the moment he's someone who is great at his craft big platform moved to Austin
got all of the multipliers in
place but he isn't cringe and because he's not cringe if you've watched
beautiful dogs his Netflix special it's not uncool it's like there's this idea
in publishing CU I've been doing my research ahead of the book there's this idea in
publishing called the subway test right would someone be prepared to
have the full dust jacket version of your book out on the subway all right
and if your book is like stop erectile this function L see the erection problem
right like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
yeah like like no more flatulence today or something like if that's if that's your
book it's going to be very
difficult or if it's written by somebody where it's like oh really don't want to do
that so and and this is the point
where there are tons and tons and tons of people on the planet who have huge
platforms that nobody respects mhm and I've seen even within my
seven-year career of doing this the Arc of people trade Integrity for exposure
and not be able to buy it back yeah because there is no return policy on
your integrity on your reputation and those people would give anything to be
back in the Cool Kids Club I I mean this is a like I love this
entire train um I was thinking like what what creates
like what's what's timelessly not cringe right like so like if cringe is the
ultimate like what we don't want then
like what would what is forever not cringe and the only thing that I can like
really think of is is just true
authenticity which is an overused word but again easy to say hard to do I think
what is what is forever cringe on the equal opposite side is is pandering like
whenever you're seen as someone who's only doing stuff for other people's opinion
approval likes whatever
especially double cringe when it's for your own personal gain and so if the
equal opposite of that is uh something that is to my personal detriment um that is
truly something that I believe in it
honestly doesn't matter what it is because there are some people that probably
believe things that I don't
believe but I genuinely think based on what I see that they genuinely believe
it and it's and they don't really stand to gain much for believing it yeah there's
no cringe there it's just like
that fan that man [ __ ] believes that and I think that um some of the you know
some of the characters in our current you know piosphere and things like that like
many people you know you say the word Trump and you have half the you
know people who hate you and the other half that love you it's like I think most
people agree that he believes what
he says now whether you believe the content of what he's saying is a different
story but Mo like I don't
think many people have called him as somebody who's like I think he's he doesn't
really think that about himself
like no I think he I think he really does and even I'm just going to push the edges
because that's where you have to like explore the fringe look at someone
like Kanye who's been borderline canell for I mean multiple times right but like
why is Kanye quote uncan because he hasn't been right not really like if he
came out tomorrow with a hit a Hit album I'll bet you it would [ __ ] sell because
I think that at least for me
from what I see I think he does what he believes and people might be like he's
mentally unstable there's all these other but like no one thinks he's being fake
and I think that like if that
becomes the north star of like I just never want to become cringe then it's just
never be fake in other news this
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wisdom a check out that's MK health.com modern wisdom and modern wisdom a
checkout I think that avoiding cringe and and aligning authenticity as best you can
and it's a
permanent battle because you are not inside of a vacuum and you see other people
doing things and there is Temptation and you need to respond to
the audience's feedback in some regard or else you're just going to be making
something that nobody [ __ ] cares about but you also need to not
compromise too much one of your old ones related to this people are attracted to
authenticity but it's hard to Define for
The Key to Authenticity
me here's my best attempt true alignment of what you think what you say and what
you do the hardest part is realizing that our thoughts are [ __ ] and that we have
to fix them instead of Faking the
next two wholeheartedly agree you said
it man yeah that's dead on I've got a I've got a really cool idea herostratic
Fame many people would rather be hated than unknown in ancient Greece herostratus
burned down the Temple of
timus purely so that he would be remembered nowadays we have nuisance
influences who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for
clout herostratic
Fame yeah that's like the you gain the world but you lose your soul kind of I mean
I I'm also the last person to judge
uh and so like if that's what you want then by all means I don't think it's what
people want I think that they they
think it's what they want I've been playing with this idea or this name one of the
concepts that the book will be
focused on intentionalism mhm and essentialism Greg McAn is one of my favorite ever
books and I figured it
would be a nice like hat nod doing what you mean to do and
wanting what you want to want is so [ __ ] hard to do and so
rare because we're built to conform I think one of the my life goals
and I can summarize it in a question but um is to be fearless and it's I mean
equal opposite C courage is another word but I love this question which is what
would you do if you weren't afraid and I just I love thinking about that when I'm
thinking about big life decisions like
what would I do if I weren't afraid and it's usually like the big one the the
bigger thing that I really want to do
but I'm afraid to do it it's like that's what I should do um and to your point
about you had the five things that you
told your team the one that we have is um originally it was something that we
called one of one which
is make only things that we can make like you'll never see a Coca-Cola business
breakdown from Alex rosi
because anyone can do a Coca-Cola business breakdown that's not one of one content
but if I say I doubled the sales
of this company by implementing these four things no one else can say that because
no one else did it right and so it's one of one and
so as the book launch and whatnot came um we took one of one and it became this
big massive thing and it wasn't it stopped being about like what can only do things
that that only we can do it
was about doing things that we didn't even know we could do yet which became one of
zero and that's why that became the brand that I'm going to continue to
wear for the next few years um and build that Association but I think that that
kind of encapsulates my personal life
goal which is like what would I do if I weren't afraid and what would I do if I
didn't if I knew I couldn't fail and the idea that I will never wish for fewer
epic stories at the end of my life and I've never regretted failures I've always
regretted things that I didn't
try and so just along those lines of trying to create more bias internally
towards action rather than inaction and normalizing consequences of failure as
as we said earlier win or learn and I think that that little frame believe it
or not um for anyone who's like on the teetering edge of like what should I do that
thing when I was debating quitting
my job which is still the hardest decision I've made to to this day still of the
many that I've made um was I
figured that if I didn't make the entrepreneurship thing work I would have a hell
of a story for business school
and that was actually like the the reasoned argument that I gave myself for being
willing to quit was that I think
that with my experience I'll still be able to get a job and I'll have a really cool
story of Entrepreneurship that I could use to apply to get into business
school and then eventually get a job later and so most times we catastrophize any
failure to death right which is like
I'm going to I'm going to fail I'm going lose on money I'm going to be homeless no
one's want to talk to me I'm going to die right but like if you if you play it
out two natural steps like okay I lose everything what do I do I would probably
have a couch or floor that someone would lend me because at least socially I
haven't been I haven't [ __ ] everyone I know and so I have that it's like okay so
I would have some capacity to do that
okay is there anything that I could do in the meantime in order to make money well
sure I could drive Uber and strip and I've already you know I've told this
story before but for me that was genuinely my plan B cuz I knew that I could
probably make 70 80 grand a year driving Uber I could probably make 150
stripping maybe 200 strip with the gay bars the guys pay better uh and then uh and
you know boom I've got 280,000 a
year I could live on the floor and then I could restart again and so that's because
I don't have a lot of Shame with that kind of stuff that's not like that
doesn't matter to me but I think playing out the fear Lela says
this and I love it but that fear is a mile wide and an inch deep and so it looks
like this ocean that you're going
to step into and drown but as soon as you step into it you realize it was not that
deep at all and you can keep
walking through it and um I just love that visual because a lot of times when it's
like we have this anxiety around this big decision we have to make if you
actually take the step and realize that it's not death you're not going to drown
immediately there's plenty of other steps you can take from there even if
you get a little wet did I tell you my story about a friend who went through a
cancellation and was worried he was a
coward oh like a like a public cancellation thing okay so
I went for dinner quite a while ago now with this guy that I was pretty interested
in and he knew what I did and
we went sort of bumped into each other and what are you doing uh let's go for
dinner and I knew about the situation
that he'd been through but he didn't know that I knew so I was like tell me like
I'm there's no pressure and he was
able to be unincumbered and basically went through like a a tough cancellation
where kind of the whole world came down
to bear on him and he was telling me this story I was in a very interesting time I
like being very reflective and he said my whole life I'd been worried that I was a
coward was terrified that I was a coward but I'd never been through a
situation where I'd had to bring absolutely everything to bear on my
life and I'm a hard man and I like to hang around with hard men and I like to shoot
guns and do Jiu-Jitsu and and and
be around Navy Seals and stuff like that but I always had this fear in the back of
my mind that I might secretly be a
coward and then he said the cancellation thing happened and it wasn't a very
difficult one rep max it wasn't a really hard crossfit workout it was something
outside of his
control he used this term that I love and he said uh I could always hear my better
self clearing his throat in the
room next door and I always wondered what would happen if I had to really really
Wrangle
everything if the whole world Came Crashing Down on Me and I wanted to work out
whether or
not I was a coward and he said thankfully he kicked the door in and came through
but I just love that I
could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door but he'
never been fully tested done lots of hard things lot of ACC
claim very successful blah blah blah but we all know that's your thing right like
but I'll know about whether or not you've left something on the table and uh
yeah he there was always just 5% still in the tank when he was doing things
about how he felt about how invested he was he always had to get out of jail free
card in one way or another and uh
yeah I love that I [ __ ] I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in
the room next
door two things on that so I think if we're if we're consoling some of the points
we were making earlier the but
I'll know refrain I think that a lot of the personal Excellence comes down to
making
the but I'll know more important than the but everyone what will everyone else
think because the I think the true test
of whether you're a quote perfectionist or not is if everyone else in the room says
it's exceptional and then you
say but I'll know it's not because I don't think it's exceptional yet if you
still break what everyone else believes is beautiful so that you can make the thing
that you make it the way you want
it to make or make it the way you want it to be I think that is probably like the
the truest test of whether or not
you really do value your own opinion over those of other people's and if you really
want to be true to quote the art
whatever your art is AR I'm using it as a generic term it could be the career or
the even like the ex the the financial projection that you're supposed to do at
your company like there is a way you could do it and do it absolutely [ __ ]
excellent and there's a way you could do it that you could phone it in and probably
not get in trouble but the things that you'd know and then you'd be
the type of person who always phones it in and that to me is disgusting and that
would make me disgusted with me and that
is the thing that would make me want to peel my skin off because I would hate me
and I think that's why so many people do hate them because they do settle and
they do make these things and they do know and still ignore it and so they
ignore the man in the other room who's clearing his throat and they shut the door
and they lock it and they never let that guy in and so they look like
everyone else they act like everyone else and they get what everyone else gets
America was built on the backs of
The Power of Imperfect Action
men who smoked cigarettes drove without seat belts and had bacon for breakfast if
you miss your biohacking routine this
morning you're going to be okay there's a time for leverage but there's also a time
for violence which is just brute
force people get really obsessed with optimal which is getting the most bang for
your book but there's also
maximizing which is just getting the most bucks you lose more life trying to
optimize everything than just living it the stress of trying to be perfect is
killing you more quickly than your
imperfections
I think that's an Ode to beinging being willing to take huge
amounts of imperfect action towards one goal and being willing to sacrifice other
things for an extended period of time despite the fact that other people say
they're making a sacrifice like when we enter Seasons I call it you know the
season of no which is where you have I have extended duration where I say no to
almost everything and most people say
that's unbalanced and they hurl that as though it's a bad thing they're like that's
so unbalanced you're like yes
that's the point because if I had a balanced outcome then I won't have the outsized
return on this one thing and so
again like there's so many these little insults that people will throw at you like
you're unbalanced you changed you
that they intend as insults but if you actually don't take your Society programmed
response and say oh they mean
to insult me but if you actually think about what they're saying they're saying
something that's true and then we just
need to be okay with that truth because that was the choice we made to begin with
and so I think about that a lot
which is like how many things do people tell me that they intend to insult me with
that I can take as a
compliment didn't someone bump into Leila walking down the street yeah it
was it happened so recently so yeah we're walking in the street someone bumps into
her I like we don't always walk like side by side cuz there's lots
of people so we like split up sometimes anyways she she comes back to me and she
was like guess what this guy just said and I was like what and she was like he
called me a skinny [ __ ] and I was like what and she but she seemed so happy and I
was like and I was like like I just
kind of shook my head like tell me more like explain she was like I mean he said I
was
skinny and I was like this is the this is the perfect example of him hurling an
insult and her choosing not to be insulted thank you yeah thanks but really yeah do
you really mean
it it it like there like I wonder how many times we've been insulted even like in
my younger days where someone said
something to me that like if I had my current brain I could have been like you you
really mean it thanks
man and um yeah like so unbalanced I me remember I remember I took that as such an
insult for such a long period of time
now part of that was because when I I was being brought up balance was like one of
the big frames of my household was like you have to be balanced which
really just meant you have to be awesome at everything thing um but balance was the
was the word so being unbalanced was
was a term that was used as an insult and so um for so many years I wanted to be
balanced um but then I was like well
nothing great was ever achieved by people who tried to be great at all things and
so I was like okay I'm just
not going to I'm not I might not have a great relationship for a long period of
time I mean there was like a lot of
people don't know this but in the early days of our Rel of our relationship um even
when we were married I told Le so
the first 3 years um I said the business comes before our marriage so a lot of
people don't know that um and I was like
well to me it made sense it was like most people break up over money the
business makes money so the business feeds us and then we will be okay that was
kind of my my thinking around it um
and we eventually flipped that said like if we're good the business will be fine uh
but took three years to get there um
but all that to say like I think having periods of imbalance and maybe to be fair
if we if I hadn't
had that that priority at that time maybe gym launch wouldn't have been what it
became and so I can't look back and say like I should have done it different
because it's really easy to say that now but like I might not be here to say that
if I had been that way Oliver burkman's
got this Great Frame where he talks about choose in advance what you're going to
suck at oh yeah it's in 4,000
weeks and if you are a type a go-getter person who has what I called the curse
of competence your options in life are restricted more by what you choose than what
you can do mhm
you will feel dis Qui when something that you used to be great at begins to
slip because you focused your attention elsewhere you used to be in really great
shape you said that one of your goals
this year was to get a raise or to be able to buy your first house or to find a
partner or to do whatever hey guess
what if you're spending four or five nights a week going to places where you can
maybe date or going out on dates or
doing whatever you're probably not going to have as much time to dedicate to the
gym if if you want to get that raise or
be able to save for your first house or whatever you're going to have to work later
which maybe means that your friends are going to drop off if you
pick whatever the thing is there is a price that you begin to pay and this cycle
began for me so frequently toward
the back end of my 20s where I would dedicate myself to a thing then something else
would begin to slip so I
would then go oh I'll just I'll I'll just give a little bit I'll just give a little
bit to that and it's not an
additive system it's multiplicative it's not 2 plus like three it's 2 time three
and that means that the more that you attend to the thing that you say that you're
going to do the more the gains ACR to you and
then you can still pivot back but you need to periodize things and this is this is
a frame that I wish even now
it's it's still something that I struggle with realizing that now isn't forever the
thing that you're doing
right now doesn't need to be forever yeah if you are coming out the back of
of the searching for the partner thing and you're like hey guess what I gained 15
all right well dedicate yourself for
the next 6 months to going to the gym but this isn't the rest of your life right
and once that thing's done oh well
guess what I'm back to you know 12% body fat I feel great about myself what's next
it's not forever yeah it's just for
now yes we have a frame that we actually use a lot um I I've I always think about
these things from a business context but
they end up retroactively you know applying to life um but when we're making big
strategic decision
we say like which problems would we prefer and so rather than talking about like
the gains and what's the upside if
we have like you know let's say we're going to make a big investment in software
for this company or we're going to make a big you know huge a new service line or
we're going to just
decide to develop a physical product right I mean I know you you're L like you're
literally on the just back half
of of a big decision like this yourself it's like okay let's imagine what the
problems are going to be if we if we decide to do this new service category well
some people are going to complain that they're not getting results from
this thing uh we're going to have a ton of like we might have some negative reviews
in the short term that we're going to have to deal with like let's
look at what happens when one of our favorite customers tell us the [ __ ] off like
what like like let's really sit in
what each of these problems is and then when we when we spell out all of the
problems and we don't even think about
the upside say which of these problems do we prefer and which Are we more equipped
to deal with sometimes we have
really amazing Innovation and in my opinion like really solid decision- making that
comes afterwards that
minimizes kind of the the post-decision regret because we also know what
negatives would have come with the path unchosen because most most times like our
regrets from Come From the Path and
chosen because we imagine it only with the upside we only think about I think
there's a um there's a [ __ ] there's a
book that where a girl lives many different versions of her life and Midnight
Library yes and the thing is is
that there's these pieces of her life that she imagines are going to be amazing but
then she realizes her best
friend's dead or all of a sudden she's pregnant and you're like whoa what happened
and so we don't take into
account on the paths not taken the things that we would have lost along the way and
so I think really good decision-
making and also regret minimization is that when you make the decision you think
about the downsides too and you remember what those downsides are and
for me that has been one of my strongest frames for like I didn't decide to do that
were all that oh yeah those were a
lot I'm glad I those are problems I'm very happy I don't have to deal with now in
other news this episode is brought to
you by nomatic you might have seen that I recently was on the Road for a full 28
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matic.com
wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout thinking about the Perils of
Be Careful to Not Over-Optimise
over optimization is something I brought up with huberman last year and you know I
think a lot of people I have a friend
who's a very well-known DJ that told me he was falling out of love with dejing
because he knew that it was damaging his sleep and because he knew how important
sleep was to Performance that he' kind of got him the bar stool had been turned
upside down a little bit and the thing
that he was trying to do was being sacrificed for the thing which is supposed to
facilitate it mhm and that's
where the you lose more life trying to optimize everything than just living it the
stress of trying to be perfect is
killing you more quickly than your imperfections all right so I I I'm glad we came
back to optimization because um
there's obviously on the extreme there's uh guys like Brian Johnson with blueprint
who are trying to like live to 200 or live forever um and I I I respect
the I respect dedication to anything always um and interestingly around I've
always been a maxim so I've actually not really been an Optimizer in my life it's
just like as soon as I have an input
output equation where it's like n equals X and it's like and if I want 10x I do
10 n I'm like great then can we do a th n like I just want to do as much of that as
I humanly possible um but when we
like I love competitors who like optimizing because I always see it as a weakness
because it's so easy to exploit
it's like oh you need your eight hours of sleep or you need your morning routine or
you if you don't have your supplements you're just totally [ __ ]
or like I didn't have my coffee this morning so I can't function like I love to
compete against people like that
because they're so easy to break it's fragile yeah and so what happens is the
optimizations become Superstition
correct and so my my fear around and I and maybe I take a more extreme stance
on this but like I've always wanted to be able to with an internet
connection and a laptop and a foldout chair go make money and always have that
as my star that anything else is extra and I feel like I lose
more quickly when I get into this optimization cycle around because I remember
years ago I um I bought one of
those rings that tracks your sleep and I kept trying to like set sleep PRS and
you can only get so high anyways and then I started stressing more about not
hitting sleep PRS that I was sleeping
worse than when I wasn't tracking it and so then I was like well [ __ ] this thing
and I slept fine the next night and so
um obviously microcosm I'm a big believer in tracking progress in general but just
the idea that we become so
overly romantic around these things that sometimes you just have to break [ __ ]
and sometimes you have to be violent and
sometimes when you're on your journey you're not going to sleep much and you're
going to you're going to like there was a a two-year period where I
did uh turnarounds for gyms I flew around the nation every month I would do a new
gym I ate out of gas stations and
I ate gas Station food and I gained weight during that period of time and it was
for then and not forever and I'm in
shape now and so whatever who cares and so like I used to tell this when I was
selling weight loss to people I'd say
like who cares if you get in shape for 6 weeks out of 80 years and like right as
they're about to
sign up for a membership I was like you want to and then this is how I would sell
longer memberships but like it's also true it's like you want to sign up
for the six weeks but like Susan like who cares if you lose 20 lbs
and you're still overweight 6 weeks from now and then you gain it back the next 6
weeks and you're still the exact same weight for the rest of your life and so
I just I think the absolute dedication to maximization so that becomes a part of
your identity and your character has
been one of the outsid returns that I've gotten in my life and just being
absolutely willing to S like I'm I'm
pretty violent about this but like list all the things that you aren't willing to
give up for the dreams that
you have and that is what the person who will beat you is willing to give up
there's a phenomenal blog post that
talks about why guys aren't getting girlfriends and this is premodern mating
crisis so it's not it's not to do with like imbalances on Tinder and tall girl
problem and all that all that stuff it's
a a guy who thinks that the bare minimum is acceptable so he talks about how I'm
always on time and and you know I hold the door open and I say please and thank
you and I'm nice to my mom and the dude I'll never forget it there's this line in
in the blog post where the guy who's
like having this pretend dialogue with this imaginary person goes so [ __ ] what
there's a guy who does all of those
things and he plays the guitar well it's like the the song lyric
uh baby you the whole package and you pay your taxes um yeah I mean I think
also to the same degree I mean like I'm I'm no mating whatever expert like no idea
I got married early did all the
things that you know whatever you're not supposed to do um yeah and
yet if you like if you are true to you like what's the most unring thing right
is you being you I'm pretty sure that I turned away
plenty of girls so were like this guy's successful he's in shape uh you know
decent looking strikingly handsome um but they'd meet me and they'd be like what a
[ __ ]
weirdo but the thing is is like they like and I remember I had um there were so
many girls that I was like you're
pretty and I I I just don't care at [Laughter]
all and so I like I just I wanted someone who got my peculiarities who was
like not only like accepting of them but just like down for it and so i' I walked
through most of my and to be fair as a side note for anybody who like wants to
quote be exceptional you're going to be different and people are going to think
you're weird and like you might not get
second dates but real real you're not going to want the second date to because
they're not like you like when you get unplugged you're like oh wow everyone's a
sheep this is weird and you just go on
a zillion First Dates to be like yet another one yet another one and every once in
a while you see a glimmer in
someone who they're like oh you think for yourself like you can make your own
conclusions I remember when Leela and I went on our first date we were we were
we went at a at a frozen yogurt store and so of course I'm like so you know how
they make their money here right I was like so these things weigh this they
charge this per ounce and I was like breaking this whole thing down and she was
like oh yeah and they do this and this and I was like wait you see this
too like you it wasn't like just like Alex just talking about the child out of the
[ __ ] six sense or whatever it is
I was so excited because normally I would just have to like talk I would talk about
the stuff that at least I like to talk about because then we' pass
the not good dating strategy I'm want to myself yeah but then she also like talk
about this stuff and I was like holy [ __ ] what's the alternative the alternative
is to find someone who falls
in love with a role that you're playing right that's the best that you can hope for
right and then lock yourself in to a
future of having to perform in a way that this person has become accustomed to and
there's nothing that can be more
lonely than I can possibly imagine then pretending every single hour of every day
that you're someone you're not do you know who Dr Robert Glover is No More
Mr Nice Guy no but I like the title had him on the podcast last week this guy is a
[ __ ] boss so cool like mid-60s or
something now huge goatee smoke cigarettes uh probably probably rip starts that by
this this office by the
way is completely it's like smoking enabled we're in Vegas um and he had
three Essences of an attractive man and I think it's a really lovely frame the
essence of an attractive man he's
comfortable in his own skin he knows where he's going and he has fun while he's
going
there nailed nailed so good so good but like
that if you think about that as okay so if if if if you're and like even like an
attractive man whether you're married or
not like I mean on the flip side it's like do you want to be married and then
choose to become unattractive well no of course not and so it's like if those are
three ideals it's like you have you have Direction in your life you're internally
comfortable and the fun part is what makes you I mean partially attractive now mind
you if you just have one of the
three you can you will find a mate who's attract like if you just know with all
your [ __ ] soul you're going somewhere
people will want to Rally behind you even if you're not having fun and even if
you're not got 10 kids right and even
if you're not that comfortable in your own skin but you're like that guy like no
matter what he's going to [ __ ] get there on the flip side if you don't know
where you're going and you don't even have much fun but you're like that guy is
comfortable like say what you want but that guy is good with him that's an
like that Al like if you just had one and if you just have a shitload of fun you
don't know where you're going and you're not that comfortable like you'll
still have people um I'd probably prefer the first two to the third but you know
but like as ideals like [ __ ]
very strong the only insults that hurt are the ones we believe next time someone
How to React When You’re Insulted
insults you remember they're going to die everyone will forget about them and if no
one will remember them then you
might as well forget about them now they are irrelevant your dream your actions
your outcomes so now you know what the
inside of my head looks like um um I mean I I uh I put almost
everything immediately to death um and that's like maybe it's a coping mechanism
maybe it's a perspective
mechanism um but like you want to hear I I was really strongly considering having
a parody um tweet profile of my own that I also run that no one would know that I
run that is just like all my very very controversial beliefs um but I'll I'll
I'll throw a taster out now um murder is just picking when someone
dies so it's like if you hate someone it's like you can just look at them be like
oh you're going to die
eventually like and so like the idea is like in your mind you could murder every
enemy you have you just just don't get
to pick the time but I just find that so such a like murder only changes when not
that someone's going to die and so if you think about like retribution on someone
it's like this person said this thing to me H I want to kill him it's
like oh no you don't even have to they'll die they're going to die already like you
don't even have like don't worry about it they're going to die and
so it sounds so silly but just connecting those two dots I was like wow that's
incredibly peaceg giving so like
why have a vendetta when life will take care of them for me uh and so I just like
you know as a as a as a totally
different frame I was talking to somebody who has cancer uh in my life and uh they
were like really concerned
they were like this has uh has a 95% mortality rate over the next five years and um
you know me being me I was like
well you know 70 year olds probably have a 60% mortality rate over the next five
years anyways I was like and life has 100% mortality rate so you know worse
yes but like how much worse and So like um they didn't think it was funny
but but just as a as a it it was intended to be comforting it didn't succeed um but
uh all that to say uh
these these things that people cast on us um it
just Whispers In The Wind right like if we think that our whole meaning is is so
infantes the idea that someone else can influence our trajectory when they
themselves will disappear and become irrelevant seems so silly to me and they
don't have our best interest at heart no they have the opposite of our best
interest yeah they're literally trying to destroy you what about the only
insults that hurt are the ones we believe what about that oh yeah um well
I cuz I like other people get Ed with things and then I've also had times where
someone says something with the
intention to insult and it doesn't and I was like how can I get that to happen
every time and so it's the classic
example of you know Chris you have green hair and then you would say okay whatever
sure but you don't believe it
so it doesn't really matter and so I think there's there's a there's kind of a
dual-sided like lesson at least for me
in this is that when we are insulted I try and pay attention to it
because I think okay either there's something here that they're right about and
that I don't like about myself in
which case the response is to agree and that's what's so frightening
and so it's like if someone so recently had someone someone made some thing
blasting me about um I don't go home for
the holidays I made this whole I made this video about it um and in the first 5
Seconds of the video of course I'm like if you love your family [ __ ] go
home this is not this is for everybody else right but of course no one actually
watches that who makes that piece of content and so they just went on this
tie rate about me and I just said God I suck period as my comment and
because there's no the the the the stoic response to hate is to agree and one up
so level one is agree so someone says Alex you're a [ __ ] idiot and you're like
believe me if you knew half of it
you'd think more than that because it's the only way you can respond and so my
mental Judo for these things and I've
just I try to now the good news for you and I is that we get lots of practice right
every day we have people hating on us and so I get to I get to pract so
like people people meet you in real life and they they trying to insult you you're
like dude I have so many reps on this like oh good and so it's just like
can I want up their insult like if someone insults me it's like dude let me I dude
you think that's good let me tell
you how to really get me right and so just the frame of agreement evaporates
conflict yeah that's your thing about um most people are more interested in winning
than being right yeah so you
just say sure you're right yeah Alex you're an idiot all of your business
advice is terrible be like you're right now what Where Do We Go From Here
Right wasn't that fun and so we talk like because like I like it human behavior a
lot but like
it's called it's it's a it's a extinguishing event so like when you when you when
you pull a slot machine
when when null is the outcome it nullifies agreement is the ultimate nullifier for
insults and I I think that like if the the faster I I reprogram that so it's like
if you ever feel insulted either
like first is it is it true like if you are insulted you believe them okay uh do
I believe them because there's an element of truth if there's an element of Truth
why am I insulting I should agree with them it's just because we
have some ego behind it of like I I'm going to be perceived a certain way or maybe
because it's poking a hole it's
wedging into the inauthenticity that someone has brought into the light something
which we thought we were able to keep in private one of my other life
goals is to die with no secrets why just
be because if we think about at least for me if I think about authenticity um to be
seen as I truly am then I would
have no secrets and I try you know I try really hard uh to not hold anything back
content or otherwise um so that I don't
need to have I don't want to have a hundred faces because if you always have
something in the back room that it means
that to these people you're this person and this is in the back room to these
people you're this person in the back room but the fewer back rooms I have the
more everyone is in one room and I can be just me and that means that some people
will hate me um and some people
will like me but they will actually like or hate me not the idea or some facet
like we were saying earlier that when you're in a relationship putting on the ACT
and putting being the performer they're not hating the idea of me they
actually hate me and at least there's some weirdness about like at least that's
true in other news this episode
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mowis all lower case that's shopify.com wisdom to grow your business now no
matter what stage you're in there's a a lesson that I learned from Rob Henderson
which is like an interesting addition to
what we're talking about here and he asked the question why do we feel insulted or
why
do our cheeks flush when somebody accuses us of something that we know that we
haven't done and the issue here
is that we don't exist in a vacuum and we care about other people's interpretations
of us and a
disinformation campaign even if it's grounded in falsehood can still negatively
impact us status mhm so even
if you know that this isn't true and all of the rest of it functionally to
everybody that isn't you or maybe many people that aren't you or maybe some people
who are influential that aren't
you this can have the same impact as if it was true yeah so
that the man being an island and I have faith in my own word yeah as soon as you
start to build this out it's there's a reason for trepidation there mhm I think
so I was trying to think about like the what are what are counter examples so like
if someone attacks your character
right so let's say uh someone comes out and says Alex did some sort of sexual
allegation or something like that that I
know isn't true whatever but they say that now that's going to bch my reputation
right now I can't be like
you're right and if you really knew right like right so I
can't if you knew the half of it um so like so like those those are the
situations right so so like if someone just says like you're you know you're full
of [ __ ] or your business advice is bad or whatever then that's one thing um
but in those situations um the only counter that I have seen is
to be louder and so if someone increases the
volume on something I don't believe that you draw attention to that person I
actually I've more or less not been in
the I'm going to address someone directly but I make counter what this person says
without addressing them and
be 10 times bigger and louder about it as a way to counteract that and so like
I had a bad reputation in college which I i' I've shared some of that in my story
before um and the reputation was
that I was a philanderer and was you know all about girls and whatever and so I
wanted to not have the reputation and
so it wasn't like I was going to go talk to those girls and be like I need you to
recant your story um I had to make my
actions so much louder that I was no longer going to be that way for an extended
period of time to counteract
that thing and so if we're thinking about like how to respond to people being
shitty to you if you believe what
they say and it's true agree and one up if what they say is something that isn't
true but does bmer your reputation then you can only be respond by being louder
with the truth and I think that like I I think about these things obviously we're
in a position we have to deal with this
all the time um as like almost playbooks for dealing with shots well this is one of
the things
that people got wrong about Dave portnoy's cancellation so I didn't even know he
got canceled Dave had sex with
maybe two two or three girls that sold the story no separately okay sold a story to
the Atlantic I think yeah [ __ ]
num um sold sold a story to someone and they were they were looking around and I
think they're still going I'm pretty
sure that only a couple of months ago they tried to notify some pizza event that he
was doing do you know that we're
investigating him about that and then he called them out so what's happened is
there's been
million me to allegation things that have come across people saw the way that Dave
pno responded he came out of the
fences absolutely swinging like swinging so hard said this is [ __ ] bollocks
it's baseless I think he maybe even somehow had video evidence or or audio evidence
or some kind maybe internal
CCTV cameras basically all of stuff is dog [ __ ] yeah people took Dave pnoy
didn't take any [ __ ] and and and he didn't back down and he didn't do an apology
and he didn't do the rest it's
like yeah guess why because he didn't do it right because he wasn't in the wrong
yeah if
you are the guy that did do the thing yeah you don't have that that's a firm
foundation what you're doing there is
just creating this like Cathedral of of lies and dog [ __ ] on top of a sand castle
of lies and dog [ __ ] which will
then get found out and you get hit you get slam 10 times way way way harder yeah
rightfully so to be fair you'll get
that's the thing so learning okay why did he do this particular tactic well he ran
that play yeah because the basis of
where he was at allowed him to loud as [ __ ] about the truth one one thing that
Can People Actually Get Cancelled?
we talked about earlier with cancelling and I have um so relatively contrarian
views on cancelling um I genuinely
believe that you cannot be canceled you only are you can only be canceled in two
ways you can be canceled if you choose
to stop making content stop being public or all means and methods and channels of
communication that you do not control remove you from it so like for example uh
there's Tate right and he had his uh
like he's not allowed to be on the platforms but they allow his content be on the
platform so has he been cancelled
no I would argue not and there's still other platforms and he continues to make
content so you only so I to me this is
actually really um uh kind a heartwarming uh security feeling I I get warm and
fuzzies around it reassuring
thank you um because it means that cancellation is you have to agree to be
canel no matter how bad like if you mess platform one yeah a yeah if they if they
L if they had AI face recognizing him and and eliminated from the platform he would
be canceled like there's no method
of communication outside of in person he would have no leverage agreed but barring
that if you continue
to make content no matter what you did people will find out about you more
people will know about you and your message will get disseminated and whether you
choose to like recant
something that you did you know like right or wrong apologize or do what Dave did
and say like this is complete
bollocks he's my little UK term uh and just be even louder you choose to be
canceled and I I
like that because I I like to have as many things under my control as I can yeah
the i' I've been like thinking
about the stri and effect because everyone's always said you know cancellation
makes people bigger I think that is cope I think it's massive cope I
don't think that cancellation makes people bigger Alex Jones for instance when he
got he got about as close to
unpersoned I think as you can get very very I wasn't seeing for the last
whatever five years eight years whenever he got taken off Twitter I wasn't seeing
him on YouTube unless he was on somebody
else's show uh I wasn't seeing him on Instagram I wasn't seeing him on Twitter
Steve will do it as a good example as well like he can't even be in the background
of other people's YouTube videos and he's got shares in Rumble and
he's doing all of this other stuff but still that's a pretty big unperson and I
think it's kind of cope to say oh but so
many more people are searching them like the entire internet is built on
convenience yeah if you think that
making it more inconvenient for someone to access someone makes them bigger you
are fundamentally forgetting Human Nature now maybe in this you know beautifully
utilitarian rational view of
the world the person that wants to see the thing they might go and get the thing
but it's like hey guess what like Tik tok's got an unlimited scroll yeah
and they're just going to keep going and if they don't appear they don't appear and
to draw this into IRL for everyone who's like okay well that might be
convenient for Alex Jones and whatnot like he can't or he can or can't be canceled
whatever I think that at least for me the through line on this is like
if you do some embarrassing thing which happens we're human the only way it
compounds into being like a much bigger problem is if you become a recluse you
choose to not go out you choose to not you choose to disassociate with everyone
else like you choose to agree to the terms that the people around you are
telling you you have to agree to and that's where I think you can say no Destiny's
got this idea he told me this
story I think it was like VidCon or vidsummit 2012 and Destiny's sprayed it
around a bit in his career and he was at this huge YouTuber convention and his
ex-girlfriend or something got access to his Twitter account and leaked his
dickpics on his Twitter while he's at
this vidsummit thing surrounded by his peers so he's trending so it's not only oh
my god look what's happening on the
Internet it's oh my God the internet has now become real life and it's in front of
me and there's thousands and thousands of people and they all know
what's going on and you know Finding Nemo just keep swimming just keep swimming
from Dory his is just keeps
streaming he says everybody only remembers your last four streams yeah so sure
enough you went on first stream
just the chat is lit up taking the piss out of him and oh like here it is second
second one still lots and lots and lots
of jokes third one uh like a few less then fourth one was pretty much gone yeah
after four stream it's not funnym
we've all heard it yeah so true Jordie got um he's like a British UK uh
YouTuber big guy and um a few years ago his DMS got leaked from his verified
Instagram account saying some like
pretty dirty sex stuff to a girl and she was of age she was of age yeah there
was no it was like it was kind of I guess it was intimate it was intimate and like
embarrassing or whatever for
him but he uh he was silent pretty much silent for 5 days and then got probably
the best roast comedian in the UK to come on and annihilate him yeah
for 20 minutes in a video and put it out on his own YouTube channel and it's that
B rabbit thing tell these people something that they don't already know about me
like what joke are you going to make that Steven Tes like literally the
most vicious funny sardonic UK roast person hasn't already said and it showed
that he could laugh at himself dude this is the uh so this is the take what they
say oneup them right and so like I'm
going to take what they say find a person who is professional at one-upping them
and then bring them in and then
publish it to your million person YouTube channel yes like we um we so we actually
teach this from a customer ser
I know I'm going totally across pilot Nation here but we call there's there can
only be one person in the angry boat
and so customer comes in they're shouting and I learned this from my like ear one
of my earliest business mentors
I worked at a fur coat dealer uh so like brushing you know Furs it's a glorious
job um I was 18 it was a summer and so this lady walks in and I was at the the
retail shop which normally I was in the
warehouse where the The Peasants were and uh and so this lady comes in and she's
making a whole mess of noise and
the guy walks towards me cu the owner and I see like roll his eyes and then as he
turns turns the corner to go where
she can see him he like his face turns into a smile and then he's like he's like
Miss Robinson and then he just goes
into rage mode and I was like whoa what's happening and he was like wait there was
a button missing on your
jacket he's like give me that jacket he like pulls it out he's like who sold this
to you who let you walk he said did anyone see you in this and and he was
like tell me their names right now I'm going to get the they're going to be out of
here like we're going to end like we're going to get terminate their
employment we're going to make sure that they never eat again all the stuff
whatever and she all of a sudden she back she was like oh no no you know it
no one saw me in it I just got I just saw it when I got home if you guys could just
of course we're going to fix it of
like no question whatsoever and so of course she he takes the ticket she leaves he
comes in the back and he just
looked at me and he was like only one person can be in the angry boat and I and it
was a lesson that has
stuck with me in like and so in this in this instance everyone is angry at you
and so the only thing you cuz people are contrarian by Nature all you can do is be
angrier than them at whatever it is
and so like getting the comedian to like oh you think he insulted me like here's a
picture of my cold shrivel dick after
a nice cold after my Polar Plunge you want to see like so it's just it's like can
you do that and it's just leaning
into what feels unnatural and uncomfortable but it's the only way to respond you
cannot wish for a strong
The Price of Strong Character
character and an easy life each is the price of the other what if what you're going
through isn't hard what if you're
just s sensitive I think that most of us can
look back on our lives to 10 years ago and think about the problems that we were
dealing with then and think about
how much of a pittance and how small those problems were compared to the problems
that we deal with today at
least that's how I probably feel maybe you feel the same way and so I then think
okay well if I
feel that way about the problems that I had 10 years ago then 10 years from now
Alex will look back at the problems that I'm dealing with today and feel the same
way and so if he feels that way then
about the problems that I have now then the only difference is the perspective that
he has that I don't have and so I
might just be a sensitive little pansy and maybe these aren't problems at all maybe
these are just Facts of Life and I
need to habituate to them because I remember um my first lawsuit right because it's
like when you're in
business long enough you make enough money you're just going to get suit it is what
it is and I was listening to um Elon mus talk about this and at any
given time Tesla has hundreds of lawsuits at any like just they they have they have
massive Departments of legal
just for all the different things that are going on and it was thinking that a
requisite for success is a problem like you cannot become the wealthiest man in
the world and not get sued like getting sued is a is an indicator that you're
actually is a is a requisite for being there there's no no person has been there
without this and so reframing what
I used to consider a problem as a as a point of evidence that I am on the path that
I originally
chose I remember the first time that I ever tried to Incline chest press 20
kilos and as I got it up this in the center for sporting excellence in Newcastle
gym and as I got it up there I
didn't have the tricep strength to be able to keep it and I watched this thing
slowly come down to my and it just
landed on my nose and I like sort of bailed it bailed it out off my nose yeah and
and now it's not even it's not even
the warmup to the warmup to the warmup set so the problem is that we don't have
very good memory we don't have
theory of mind for ourselves for a previous version of ourselves I've always
thought that it would be such an amazing talk maybe neuralink can do it
some point in future you know how people want to go back in time and they want to
see a different place I would love to go
back in time in my own mind mhm and remember the texture of my own existence and
what were the things that I thought
about I've told this story before but it's pretty illustrative day one is a journal
that
you can use for your phone it's pretty good and for me it's big [ __ ] it's like
big things are happening if I open day
one some some [ __ ] shit's going down um
and breakups and and and illnesses and and being worried about people dying or
whatever the whatever the [ __ ] I once
opened it to write down that the MC in room 2 the R&B room room of our
Saturday night club night had told me that he was leaving to go to a competitor
event 15 miles away and I
remember thinking that it was so Salient to me that it deserved to go in along with
breakups and and do I go on this
reality TV show or do I not because I was adamant that that would be the beginning
of the end because the only reason the Asian sock the Asian Society
came down was because they like this particular MC and if he went then Asian sock
would stop coming and if Asian stop stop coming then that would mean this
and then and then the whole business would go and I'd be dead
but I don't think that anymore and there was one there was one time where I hadn't
worked our events for quite a
while and a DJ that used to work for us came through and he thought that he'd wind
me up by saying 3 minutes before we
opened that something was up with one of the cdjs something's up with one of the
cdjs a couple of minutes before you open
things are bad because there's usually not a spare and it means that the night's
going to be delayed or whatever and there was lots of people outside
waiting to come in or whatever it might be and he was expecting a response on from
a previous version of me which
would have been the one that would have gone into day one and typed about the fact
that the CDJ hadn't worked and I
just said oh okay well uh I don't know we'll
fix it and he called out broke the fourth wall and said oh I like it's not
broken at all like I just thought that I'd wind you up but you didn't play the game
I'm like oh right it's the like
you've grown or you've changed thing yeah he was Juke the don't don't punk
the game yes don't punk the game yeah I think the point is to always Punk the game
as many times as you possibly can
especially if you're the one getting the game played on you by yourself what's your
framework for
How to Know When to Quit
quitting things and moving onto something new how do you know when you're quitting
because you're being a
[ __ ] yeah and how do you know that you're moving on from something that's no
longer worthwhile man so there's a there's a
handful of questions that I think everyone faces that um you never know the right
answer to and so it's like how
much is the right amount to invest versus consume is one of those answers like if
you invest if you consume
nothing and you invest everything into it to tomorrow you end up with a life where
you enjoyed nothing and then you
have a big pile of delayed gratification in the extreme results and no
gratification right and so like there these are these are rather than either
ores they're continuums and so to be managed more than uh problems to be solved and
so I think just from a a
decision-making framework that's number one um number two is so with regard this
one which is do you push or do you pivot which is how I I frame this question um
pushing like do I push through whatever
this hardness is and there's like something that's in sight that I think I can go
to or there are fundamental
things that have changed that make my original hypothesis
wrong and so I'm I'm I'm telling the secret right now um but for
me I won't quit if no new information has come to light and so if I say I'm
going to do this based on these assumptions if those assumptions have have still
held then it's a push
situation if there's new data that's come to light that changes the nature of why
I'm pushing or
the outcome for what I'm going to get from pushing or the way that I'm pushing is
incorrect then I would quote quit but
quitting has a lot of um heavy terminology in you know I'd say personal
motivation masturbation pivots much softer right because I think that everything is
a pivot except for
stopping and so I think even reframing like language matters a lot and I care a lot
about language and so like nothing
is quitting unless you stop and if you continue to Pivot and you continue to
push either of those are activity and so you will stumble upon something that does
work in which case do more of it um
and so that has always been my frame but it's I have an initial assumption or
series of assumptions for a desired
thing so let's say I want to I want to build my social media brand I say okay I
believe that if I make you know content
about things that no one else can make content about that is more higher level
business stuff than is out there because
most of the YouTubers are YouTubers not business people there will be an audience
for that and in the beginning I will have fewer people who follow it but
if I make really good stuff over time eventually people would tell people and I
will get better at making content and
that will grow so if I'm at year two and and it's and the thing is is like do
I have leading indic ators and so like even in business stuff like we I don't need
the outcome but are there lead
leading indicators that are telling me that this I'm on the right path and so
identifying ahead of time just like we have a problems that we identify like
okay if we succeed like people are going to recognize you in the street you're not
going to be able to go out as much like all these other these are problems that I'm
have to deal with cool I'm
willing to pay for those but what are the what are the things along the way that
will tell me that even though I haven't achieved Mr Beast them that I'm
on the right path and so I think having those little indicators allow you to keep
taking steps towards the the
ultimate thing and continue to push I mean I have a different um tweet which is
that the world belongs to those who
can continue to work without seeing the result of their work continue to do without
seeing the result of they're doing and it's really the person who can
do that for the longest period of time and that's usually because they're still
getting leading indicators it's just that it's am mounting to a much bigger
mountain and so like if you want to do big [ __ ] it takes a way longer period of
time because the the easy [ __ ] the
little Hills everyone conquers really quickly I'm on time I say please and thank
you it's like so [ __ ] what and
so like if you want to do something that most people can't do literally just extend
the time Horizon on the things that most people can't weather like
there's so much opportunity on the other side of being willing to persist for an
extended period of time on the correct
path without getting positive reinforcing from your environment and the longer you
can stick with something without that positive feedback loop in
terms of the big external thing the the the easier the opportunities are because so
few people can pursue them in James
Clay's Atomic habits I think he interviews maybe the Chinese weightlifting team's
head coach and he asked what is the difference between the absolute Elite
world champions and the ones that simply qualify and the coach said the absolute
Elite are the ones who can continue to come in every single day without getting
bored that was it and Matt Fraser talks
about it as well where he says that doing an hour and a half of monostructural work
on the rower you've
got to do zone two hey guess what you don't even get the benefit of feeling like
you work that hard you just get to
kind of yeah whatever like 24 Strokes a minute
or something like slow zone two whatever the whatever the thing is um but no one's
fired up for that he said people
make a mistake in believing that I'm fired up to go and do that session I'm not
fired up to go and do that session I
just go and do that session we was saying um so there's a lot of people say like do
the work um
and in gym launch and it's continued into our stuff today but do the boring work is
what we call it and uh boring is
what make you rich boring the boring activities it's the it's the double-checking
the emails it's writing
the follow-up sequence that you really don't feel like writing and honestly just
getting it done will make you significantly more money than not
getting it done and so it's like it's it's it's following with a lead from a month
ago and just being like hey by the
way are you still interest in that thing it's the stuff that you don't want to do
like no one's like I can't wait to follow up with these leads that haven't
resp resp to the last two text messages I sent but if you respond if you follow up
to everybody you will make more sales than presuming that it's an effective
strategy because there are ways that you can continue to chug away and do a thing
with no positive reinforcement but hey guess what that's the direction that you're
supposed to be going in and
you're walking over there yeah that's a push and pivot right like if if no one
responds then I would say I have zero
leading indicators but if you have enough response rates then it then it's worth
the the toil um but I I so I mean
Michael Phelps talks about this too with h with swimming like just laps after laps
after like he doesn't even have the
variety of like different moves or different like it's just laps just sheer
volume of work and um I call the rocky cut scene and almost
every successful person that I have ever encountered has gone through not a month
or a year but many years of doing work
without reward where they have to do things that other people find boring and
they have to sacrifice things that everyone finds interesting that most people want
to do during that entire
season of their life and they basically sacrifice a season of other things that
they would prefer to do to do stuff that they would not prefer to do because of the
one thing they want most
and that's the rocky cut scene and instead of lasting five minutes it just usually
lasts five or 10 years you're
Everything Worth Doing is Hard
going to lose sleep you'll doubt whether it'll work you'll stress to make ends meet
you won't
finish your to-do list you'll wonder whether you made the right call and have no
way to know for yours this is what
hard feels like and that's okay everything worth doing is hard and the
more worth doing it is the harder it is the greater the payoff the greater the
hardship if it's hard good it means no one else will do it more for
you I think a lot of Entrepreneurship and even personal growth is training yourself
on how you respond to
hard because in the early days hard was ooh stop this isn't good I should I
should this is a warning sign this is a red flag I should slow down or I should
stop you know I should pivot but the
more I think about it as a competitive landscape as I'm clear on what this path is
supposed to look like and these rocks
and these dragons are things that I'm going to have to slay along the way to get
the princess or get the treas
treasure I get happier about the harder it is because I know that no one else will
follow it's a selection effect and
I think if you can if you can shift from this is hard to no one else will be able
to do this then it it's it flips from
being this thing that you're like oh poor me to oh poor everyone else who's going
to have to [ __ ] try yeah and I
think that is so much more motivating as a frame for the exact same circumstance
yeah that's
awesome I was thinking a lot about the lonely chapter that we talked about the last
time that
was the best most powerful idea I think that we came up with and if you
see there basically being no shortcuts toward getting the thing that you want
there are ways to be more and less efficient there are ways to do things with more
and less of a positive
disposition which can actually make the journey feel an awful lot easier but
ultimately if you assume that largely
everyone needs to go through the same challenges that you're going through every
single difficult thing
that you do is kind of like a massive wall that you need to get over and you go wow
[ __ ] I'm so glad that I've got
over that wall and think about how many people are going to be selected out it's
like the Hunger Games you know think
about how many other people are going to fall that wall there people only root for
people who
don't need it like the amount of times when I was
on my lonely path where I was too different from the friends that I had
but not successful enough to be friends with the people that I wanted to be friends
with that's when that's when you want people to root for you that's when you want
people to support you once you've
already won people are like he's amazing he's so good but like that's the time
when you need it the least and so you always have to be the person who
roots for you before everyone else does and it's usually a single clap in
the auditorium for a very long period of time it is a slow clap that's just you
rooting for you um and that visual I think is one that you can kind of take
because it is people struggle to do things
alone and the path of the exceptional person is one of an exception which
means that you are not with other people and rather than fighting that or
bemoaning it see it as an indicator that you're on the right path because if
everyone else were cheering you on then it means you're not in the right place
because it means you're just like everyone else and that's not where you
want to be it's an interesting Paradox
that the energy it requires to start doing something is way more than the energy
required to continue doing the
thing and that the beginning of doing anything results in the lowest amount of
reward both internal and external than
when you've been doing it for ages so I think about this a lot with the show that
there was this stat that Spotify
told us 85% of the listeners of this show found this in
2023 right and I thought at the end of 2022 remembering at that point I'd been
on Rogan we were at like 650k we've got you know we've been doing 550 600
episodes deep like I'm I've got it I've done the thing like this is is me doing if
this isn't [ __ ] doing the thing
I've moved to Austin Texas I've got an 01 Visa I've got like the all the rest of
the stuff Jordan Peterson's been on twice you've been
on and yet the what everything up until that point
is two months of growth yeah I mean we made we made more money for just from a
revenue
perspective we made more money and more subs in one month December of last year
than we did in the entire first three
and half half years of the show so it's this odd Paradox and one of the things
that you need to ensure I've had this idea about protect your passion at all costs
because if you if you begin to
hate the thing that you do you negatively change your trajectory and that means
that at the time when you can
benefit the most by every single unit of work which is the later that you go
presuming that you continue to hit that
upper trajectory if you've completely killed any passion or desire to do the work
in the early stages because you
you've not protected it appropriately that can be by focusing on the wrong things
by not rewarding yourself by not
building it with people that care about you by you know just not not celebrating
when you hit Milestones all of the things that actually help to keep you
going being a character by the time that you get to the stage where each unit of
effort
allows you to gain a thousand or a million of each of the things that it would have
done at the very beginning
you've inverted the like the passion equation take takes way more energy to
start a thing than to continue doing a thing and yet in the beginning the rewards
are way lower than they are at
the end but if you don't protect your passion your motivation is at its lowest when
you are at your highest amount of
efficiency in terms of returning your time put in I think a hopeful message that
anyone can think about who's about
who's in that hard period or in that start period is that it won't get harder like
this is
the hardest part and so if you can just make it through this everything else is
downhill it's not that the things that you're the dragons are going to slay aren't
going to get bigger they are but you become so much more equipped to slay
them back and you have so many more allies you have people on the stands cheering
for you you have the audience you have all of these other things that
are behind you but in the beginning it's just you with a stick against a bear and
arguably that fight is a harder fight to win than beating a dragon when you have a
nuclear bomb and Six Nations behind
you and so it's not even like the the size of the hardship it's just also the
resources and how few of them you
have and how so much of the beginning is literally burning the one thing you have
which is time because you have no
leverage you don't have the money to pay other people to help you you don't have
the resources to go like get someone to
to you no one can learn it for you it's like there's a lot of the things that that
we care about a lot like no one can
work out for you doesn't matter how much money you have no one can learn skills for
you and so in the early days like it
feels so painful cuz you're like you look around to see who can help you and then
you're like [ __ ] it's me again and
I think getting comfortable with the idea that each of these things kind of like
Slum Dog Millionaire if you've seen that movie where he I'll give you the
tldr he goes through his entire life of Randomness and he gets on Who Wants To Be A
Millionaire version in India and it
has 12 questions to make a million dollars and from only 12 random experiences in
his life that seemed
meaningless at the time was he able to answer all of the questions and then
ultimately win the skills that you
develop along the way like Steve Jobs learning calligraphy that then became Apple
fonts that you know transformed
how we type those early days that little trench winning in the
weeds often times gives you these huge advantages later on because you have more
context than anyone else and so
rather than lament them and hate the fact that you're going through it
remembering that these will be arrows that you put in the quiver that you're going
to be using to slay the future bigger dragons and
so expecting it to be easy is what makes it much harder than it ever
is I've always loved earning my stripes with the things that I've done whether
it was with nighlife or running the podcast or doing whatever and I think there's
like a degree of nobility
to it but functionally that's kind of that's just like it's a nothing like what's
the where do the is the nobility
but I think the reason that you can feel Noble about it and the reason that it
gives you a positive reward is is you
know that you understand every single inch of the things and that if you want
to hold a conversation we went out for dinner with our new CFO and and accounts
people on Saturday they said you ask a lot of questions most people don't ask
very many questions and I also don't care at all about accounts really like
I'm not doing this for money but they said you ask a lot of questions said well I
don't ever really want to walk
into a room and not be able to hold my own at least just competently if it's to do
with something
that I care about the same thing goes for this like I I started to learn about
focal lengths and frame rates and
negative fill reverse contrast lighting and then sure enough two years after we
started doing it a bunch of different I
sent you the Instagram thing like this really awesome film Instagram that had been
following for ages picked us up for
what we were doing and gave us props independent of the talk thing which is
fundamentally what we're here for and we created this entire new industry of like
cinematic podcasting which was
recognized by as far as I'm aware like the best cinematic it's called filmlight at
filmlight people can go and see it on Instagram like the best decoder and analyzer
of cinematography and two years
ago when we started I remember thinking [ __ ] like I love the way that they've
broken down what happens in ad asra oh my God the whole thing was shot on 35 M
each different scenes got two pairings of colors and stuff like that and then but
the reason that we were able to get
there at least in some part is I can have a conversation with people so each of the
things that you do when you not
only win in the weeds but live in the weeds then allows you Downstream from that to
see the things that other people
aren't seeing there's a quote that I love from Dr cash I'll probably butcher it
but experts have more ways to win than
beginners do and so if an expert goes into any setting that they're expert in
they have so many faster feedback loops that reward them in the moment before the
ultimate outcome so if you're a
master video editor there's so many things you can do that while editing you make
one change and then it looks right
you have a positive feedback loop and so I think when you're on the start path you
can't look at the outcome as The
only positive because you will never make it and so the positive frame that I've
always used is sure you can have
the external ones of like I like thinking about my first videos had like 133 views
and I'm like well if I had an
audience of 13 people I used to spend years pitching you know weight loss stuff to
rims of 13 and that was fine
and so thinking about that way was helpful but the the most helpful frame was
thinking about who I was becoming as
the asset that I was building so in real time whenever I finished a Long Day's Work
I was becoming more like the type
of person who could work for 5 years without reward and that would be part of the
story I would someday tell and some
some of the biggest reinforces I've had in my life has been futurecasting the story
that I would tell about the shitty
period that I was in like I remember when I was sleeping on the floor at my gym
because I didn't have enough money for two rents and I was like I will
[ __ ] tell this story and when I lost everything for the first time I like I have
the screenshot of the bank account
like when I show it people are like oh look there's that thing but they forget that
there was a person who screenshot at it to be like this won't [ __ ]
happen again and I think having a larger narrative of where you're ultimately going
one
gives you the vision of where you're like the like knows where he's going but
it allows the dragons that you have to slay along the way the hard things that you
have to overcome to feed into the
larger Narrative of who of the story that you'll someday tell and so like no one
ever tells stories about the hero
who made it all happen immediately and had no hardships no one cares right like
okay you were born to a billionaire is
there a story there not really but everyone loves the story because we can see
ourselves in the character and how
much we hope to be like them and it's the being like them not the having what they
have that we usually like and so
reframing ourselves as the hero of that narrative in my harder times was what
really got me through that and thinking I will tell this story someday
have you heard Rogan talk about the be the hero of your own story thing M oh dude
this is old now I think this is
maybe maybe even 10 years old 10 years old um and he's in one of his old he's
in the LA podcast studio and he says imagine that you're in a movie and
imagine the movie begins now and you're the hero of the movie yeah what would
that guy do yeah what would that guy do right now yeah because you
are I just got into business um so actually I just made the investment in
school um and I was talking to Sam the founder and I said what sim sam Sim what
SIM SIM that's the way he says his own oh yeah um and I was and I was talking to
him and I said I want to give you the
single easiest razor to predict my behavior and I said whatever will be the
most epic story is the thing that I will most likely do and so often times the most
epic
story is not the shortest outcome to Victory it's the long sag that results
in this big thing later eventually and I was like if you ever want to know if
you're like I'm not sure what he's going
to do in this situation just wonder what the most epic story to tell would be and
that's usually what I will do
and I don't know if that's self-rising but that's that's genuinely my Razor for
even making the like the big decisions about okay I'm going to sell gym launch I'm
going to I'm going to marry Lila I'm
going to slum it and live at the gym I'm going to fly around and do turnarounds I'm
going to start this whole idea of a
media company that just gives exclusively like how do like how do I put all these
together it's like well
what would be the most epic story and I thought of this idea of just like when I
think about who that story I want to tell is is this billionaire that
documented the entire thing the whole way and just gave because I always
thought I was like I wish that Elon Musk and and Warren Buffett and all these guys
would have like and Jeff basos like
would have just like I would love to have seen 199 7 Amazon content and a lot
of the content in terms of like it it's getting five views it's like it's okay
because when we make it they're going to
come back and watch this so I don't need them to watch it today I want them to know
that it's here when I do and I
think that got me out of the the loop of it I have to win right now and then every
one of them is just dropping uh a
kernel or a bread comom for future meat to refer back to until you win f it
Don’t Expect People to Root for You
always goes and noticed get used to it no one roots for you until everyone roots
for you that's just how it works
yeah yeah people only root for those who don't need to be rooted
for it's strange to think
about how mimetic and fallible everyone
me and you everybody that's listening to this is the stuff that I've said on this
podcast for like six years since the first time that I ever said it seven
years and it's only been within the last 18 months that it's gone viral it's the
same sentence the exact same sentence said into the same microphone slightly nicer
lighting and in some ways it's reassuring because you go I [ __ ] knew that was
right I
knew that thing that I was saying was right and I kept saying it until people
realized that it was right but another part of it
is the medium matters more than the message in many ways the frame matters more
than the
picture I would say that the medium the medium and the message are inextricably
linked like if Elon Musk tweets I'm
taking a [ __ ] it will get a zillion shares no because he's the richest man
on earth and has done more entrepreneurial Endeavors that have pushed Humanity I
think more than anyone
else at this point and so like you can't separate the message from the messenger
and I remember when I was in Middle School I
learned this lesson where I was in Spanish class and there was you know there was
the class clown or whatever
and I was like I want people to laugh at my jokes and so I made a joke that was a
joke that that guy probably would have made and it was a self-deprecating joke um
but the thing is is that like that
guy was kind of a bum and like him making self-deprecating jokes made sense
because of the context of who he was but I was a straight A student who was really
good at sports yeah and no one
thought it was funny and fast forward you know 10 years there was a joke that had
in our fraternity which is there's
nothing funny about an in shaped body and so like the the I agree with
you and that the me the the medium of the message matters and so people won't root
for you because we use the the
delivery mechanism usually as a filter for whether we should even trust the sword
and so I tell the story of the the teacher who's talking about dollar cost
averaging into the S&P and giving
investing advice like they might be like man like I give better investing advice
than
Warren Buffett does like he's saying the same thing as me it's like and you know
what you're probably right the only problem is you didn't build Burkshire
hathway and so no one gives a [ __ ] and so the thing is is that we use someone's
evidence and Authority as a filter for
how little we need to process the information because if you're listening to a
teacher you have to then think okay can I separate the message from the
person can I independently analyze this and say is it good is it bad if Warren
Buffett says you should buy this you
don't need to analyze you figure he knows more than me he has more perspective and
I will just take it as fact and so it's actually lazy
consumption on behalf of everyone else that gives Authority so much resonance
and so much sharability because they're also protected because if you share
something Elon says you're protected by
Elon and his brand and so the hard work is getting to the point where you have the
evidence that people are willing to
feel safe agreeing with you and the only way for them to feel safe agreeing with
you is for you to disagree with them for
a very long period of time until you prove that you're right Rory Sutherland's got
a an idea where he says
no one gets fired for hiring KPMG yeah such a good line and it's true people
would sooner fail by following a blueprint that's been done before than
risk succeeding by trying something new because if you try the new thing any
failure is on your shoulders if you follow the BL blueprint even if it's been total
dog [ __ ] the last 10 times
that you've tried it but we followed the blueprint you know we did the thing that
was the same before Michael malice uh
like P literal professional Internet troll told me when we one of the first
times that we met I wouldn't be able to say one tenth of the [ __ ] that I can if I
was taller than 5 foot s he's like a
small guy but he can get away with being kind of like the Loki of Po
on Twitter because if he's you know 6'5 and built like Alan richer yeah it's
going to seem like he's bullying yeah but it's there's something funny about him
like like you know dip dip dipping
away there's also something the like until you win effort always goes
unnoticed I realized this with and and it made me like a little dispirited how
fallible people are around success so do you remember Billy McFarland guy that did
fire Festival that festival at Pablo
Escobar Island and then everyone got stranded and nearly died yeah um if he'd
been able to pull off an even remotely passable event people would have hailed
him as a marketing genius yeah regardless of the fact that he was continually
flying back to New York to
raise money in an unethical way for a project that he didn't know if it was going
to work and all the rest of the stuff so literally the line
between charlatan grifter who's out of his depth and Visionary Pioneer who makes
things work when no one else believes that they can is just outcome everyone thinks
you're crazy until it
works and so I mean if if you think of of the outcome as the trump card then
all of the pain and suffering that you lead up to that point if you're just I'm
trying to think of a an
appropriate saying um I was going to say balls deep certain um that no matter
what you will die or you will get there then the likelihood that all of
the things that you've done up to that point will then be justified in retrospect
is super high and I actually see that as super
um compelling as a as a thing to latch on to in harder
times yes but the ends justifying the means is a slippery slope I'm a Mak guy
so have you seen speaking of that and you mentioned Robert Green earlier on uh you
should buy the 25th anniversary
edition of 48 Laws of Power just came out last year yeah leatherbound gold emboss I
have it oh you got it and
you've seen the thing on the edges yeah his face is very cool the the super cool
printing yeah dude so for the people that don't know you remember you would get
those things in packets of seral
when you were a kid and you could sort of move a a little bit of plastic from left
to right and it would look like a football player was running or something
like that it's basically the same but on the edge of a book if it's flat it's just
gold foil if you open it one way so
that the pages spay out it's Robert Green's face and if you open it so the pages
playay out in the other way it's Macky Valley's face the
[ __ ] coolest book just and I've seen a lot of influencer gifting of books is
a big deal at the moment you know you send the book out and maybe they'll post
about it and it'll help with sales or whatever and there's some very elaborate
ways I'm sure that you've received some of these um because I know that you're on
the same mailing list there's some of these
that are super super elaborate and I remember being like Oh that was like I don't
know like cool or whatever
but that Robert Green book as soon as I saw that it did that like I'm sending a
[ __ ] video of this to anyone that I
can like this is like magic yeah so yeah what is it you're doing sales because you
sucked at marketing you're doing
marketing because you sucked at product it's a great noism yeah it's so funny cuz
um like with the the book
launch I I I didn't do any of that I just always I wanted people I want people to
read the book because
like if someone posts about the book before the book's out then like I wanted no
one to have read the book until the day it was out you know um but yeah I'm
the the longer I've been in at least the business game and we were talking about
legendary Foods um it's just product
like I had a roommate way back in the day who's now a really successful
entrepreneur and we were both like early
days poor as [ __ ] um we Happ to live together and he read this book he just told
the title and just like stuck with
me he said too good to fail and I just love that as a frame it's like if I open a
sandwich shop how
can I make the sandwiches too good like just if someone takes a bite they're like [
__ ] this is the best sandwich I've
ever had like if you just get that then the rest of it doesn't matter and so when
you're like I mean I think about
this in business decisions but probably also in life decisions is I think Tim
Ferris talks about this the one big Domino it's like what is the one thing
that if I just get this one thing right everything else shrinks into irrelevance
and I think about that from
like the hero story of what you said with Joe Rogan which I love that frame it's
like okay boom now you're present in your movie what would that guy do
it's like well what one big thing could that guy accomplish that would make all of
the all of the mediocrity of your
life up to this point are relevant and why are you not putting
every single ounce of your effort to prove that one point so that you could then
justify everything up to that point
so it wouldn't have been mediocrity it would have been the path to get there exact
thank you it would have been the journey people want to find their
How to Find Your Passion
passion but you don't find it you create it and you create it by getting good at
something and to get good at stuff you start by doing something you suck at then
you get good then you like it then
people ask how you found your passion answer by starting when you sucked and not
giving
up yeah I hate the passion Mantra I really do I mean part of it was because
um I'll even I'll even play it out so I I read all the same self-help books
early on when I was you know in my entrepreneurial days and I was trying to find my
passion and I was into fitness and so I was deciding between fitness
test prep because I was good at test prep and uh frozen yogurt because I like
dessert right so I've like these are my three quote passions which let's just
translate that into things you're interested in and so as soon as I started the gym
my
passion disappeared it became work and I had a different Mentor later in my life
who said never create work around your passion because then it'll become work and
he was a guy who's a very successful
business guy and I think about that actually more than I than I share
because it's just complete and utter [ __ ] because it assumes that what you're
going to be doing every day is
the thing that you're currently really interested which also doesn't make you money
and so your behavior has to change
and whenever you're doing these new things one the they'll be new which means you
will suck at them which means you'll probably not like them but it's
also part of it and so like I would prefer to take the extreme opposite position of
everything will suck and
eventually you will get good at the things that you suck at and then you'll enjoy
being competent at that thing
which will then probably give you status and you'll enjoy the fruits of status more
than the pain of doing the thing
and in so doing create a positive feedback loop that you'll actually keep sticking
with it and so I'd rather set
the expectation that everything is terrible all the time for forever now let's see
if we can make our
now let's see if we can become the person who can still do it anyways um and start
that as the Baseline rather
than trying to assume that I need perfect conditions in order to start
because I mean starting is the perfect condition like whatever condition that
you're in that you start was the perfect
condition there is such a thing is intrinsic motivation though as well as extrinsic
you can do something there's a
whole myriad of things that you could be potentially good at and many of them could
give you Renown and and and money
and social clout and that feedback loop but there are some that you will enjoy
doing for the sake of doing them more I
don't disagree I was remember a note that I wrote to myself when I first started
the podcast and I decided to
turn pro with it which is one way to turn something you love into a labor is to
monetize it
okay because as soon as you decide that you're going to really really go for this
if you want to turn pro at
something I use this example in in my live show of a pickle ball player so this guy
loves playing pickle ball and
he gets to turn up on a Saturday and play with his friends you know if it's cold
outside he doesn't need to go and
play and if he's tired he doesn't need to go and play and if he's hung over he
doesn't need to go and play and then he decides to turn pro and he thinks I'm
turning pro at this thing that I love I can't wait to make what I love into my
career but he doesn't realize that hey
guess what if you're hung over you still need to go and train yeah or actually no
you don't get to be hung over anymore
because the guy that isn't hung over is the guy that's training better so you now
need to stop going out with your
friends and you need to train when it's cold and you need to work on game tape and
mindset and hydration and nutrition
you need to do snc and you need to have a Physio and you need to not see a family
as much all of these things came along for the ride as soon as you
decided to turn pro is that a price that you're prepared to pay and that's an
interesting question to ask yourself am I prepared
to sacrifice my pure unencumbered unmolested love for this thing in order
to try and become the best at this thing I think it's really tough and I'm
I'm gonna I'm gonna shoot I'm gon to shoot my own advice right now in the in the
head or at least my positioning
right now which is that it's very easy for someone in you know my position or
in your position to say this is kind of what it takes and or rather this is like
you should find your passion because like transparently what I do now every day I
actually really do love um I live
more or less the same day seven days a week and um like I'll tell you what it is
just so we can have context but I
wake up and then I go to my office here and I work for 6 hours writing my next
book and then I take two hours is of calls typically and then after that I
lift in the gym that I custom designed with all the pieces that I love and then I
go and eat with my wife and then I go
to my condo and I sit in my recliner that overlooks the entire city and I read and
then I go to bed and I do that
every day and I love every aspect of the day with the exception of maybe the two
hours of calls that I have to take but I see those as a necessary thing for
everything else that I have there now could I stop doing that maybe but for me
to say that that's what your day needs to look like in order to get into the top
floor with the view that looks over these things and so that you can not make money
for 2 years while you write a
book that eventually makes money or whatever is is not true and so it's the
difference between like oh I should fly private because that's what rich people do
I should play basketball because I want to
be tall and modeling the top the behavior at the top of the mountain
rather than the climb and so they're completely different and so this whole idea
unfortunately and I don't blame the
people who do this is they see their current life like I would see mine and say
well what do I do now I do everything that I love okay okay but I
didn't get here doing everything that I love I did a fuckload of [ __ ] I hate and
I did it for a very long period of time
and I did not have anyone to root me on and in fact I had many people who were
actively trying to destroy my path and tell me why it was a terrible
idea I had this idea about um why you should stop taking advice from successful
people MH because most of
their advice is not about what they did when they were at your stage it's about
what they do now right and it's the same
thing around pushing work life balance you know I what I found after 50 years
at Disney is that really the most important thing is what all right well how did
you get to this stage what did
you do when you were two years in because that's where I am yeah what did you do
when you were broken living on
the gym floor because that's where I am don't tell me about the complicated
routine or the the the the balance or the flying private the bar stool's
upside down and you're you're mixing up the ends for the means
everything on my write up so this is I mean I I remember in a lot of excruciating
detail what it took me to
get here um but I will say that I had a ruthless focus on dollars per hour and
so and I'm just giving tactical advice right now but everything that I could
trade away for more time doing the thing that made me money was what I did and so
I remember the first time I made a five 00 sale and it took me 30 minutes and I
was like every hour of every day this is what I going to do and anything that is
not talking to someone in exchange for them giving me a credit card so that I can
charge it and make
$500 anything that makes me less than $250 per hour or per per 30 minutes I'm
giving to somebody else and so after that first sale was like I'm never cooking
again I'm never going grocery shopping again I'm not cleaning again
because I knew that in one sale I could pay for that person for the month and so
like as like the ruthless focus on what can I do that creates an input to Output
being money equation and me at least for me it was pouring everything I possibly
could into the input and eliminating everything else I made this video on Facebook
before I was quote Alex rosi
years ago when I still had six gyms before I even did the turnarounds and I I made
this video almost this
documentation but I said so I want to open up my 7th 8th n9th and 10th location and
I have the spots picked out
and I'm already working all of the hours that I'm awake and I've already given up
Saturdays so the only thing that I have left is like Sundays and evenings and so I
am no longer going to
be watching any football and I'm no longer going to have Netflix at all and
that is what I'm giving up for seven eight n and 10 and I remember just making this
video
of like that's what I'm sacrificing and I think a lot of people create these Todo
lists when in my experience it's
been so much more useful to write down all the things that I'm willing to sacrifice
because if you sacrifice
everything there's nothing left than to do the one thing that matters and I think
Jerry Seinfeld talks about this
from a writing perspective he says that every day no matter what he sits down and
he writes for two hours now he
doesn't have to write but he's not allowed to do anything else and so he can sit
there but there's nothing else
to do except for write jokes and so I think a lot about that from The Climb
perspective which is like
most of everyone who's listening to this who isn't achieving what they want is [ __
] with their time they think that they're spending all their time working
but your output like you don't even know how to work I'm being really real with you
like you think you know how to work you don't know how to work like the
amount of output like and I I'll measure this by like what is your output it's
probably not as high as you think and so
rather than trying to learn all these productivity hacks the ultimate productivity
hack is no n o is you stop doing [ __ ] and then
when you create space then you can fill it with the thing that matters but trying
to add on more to your schedule
of all the things that you're not willing to sacrifice is the very reason that
you're not doing what you need to do a lot of people would look at that
life of I'm going to sacrifice evenings and I'm not going to watch football anymore
and say well what's the point if
you make yourself miserable on route to achieving the goal totally if most of
your life is Journey not destination and it makes you miserable on root to it why
do that so that was
the thing I was mentioning earlier where it's like let's take the absolute extreme
of it's going to suck and it's
going to last forever how can I be okay in that circumstance and I do have the
fundamental belief that circumstances nothing to do with how what your subjective
well-being is and so if monks
can be super chill in wherever monks do monk things and have nothing and have
higher subjective well-being ratings than anyone else here in the Western World it
clearly isn't external and so then if I'm going to be
just as miserable being mediocre as I am doing this [ __ ] that's going to amount
to something then I might as well do the
[ __ ] that's going to amount to something and be miserable there and at least have
something to show for it does this story I learned about
Victor Hugo famous writer from history do you know this about what he did with his
servant M so um Victor Hugo needed
to make himself right so he paid his servant each night during the middle of
the night to come into his bedroom and remove the bed clothes from him turn the
heating off and then lock his bedroom
door from the outside and he wasn't allowed to leave until Victor
slid six pages of handwritten work underneath so you know you look at opal
which is this app for um iPhone which stops you from using apps or frozen turkey uh
cold turkey which is the same
thing for desktop and uh that's just the digital equivalent of Victor Hugo being
locked in his bedroom with no bedding and just a quill and a few pieces of
paper and then having to slide it underneath the door and I want to push back on
something that you said right before Victor Hugo which is you know
somebody somebody might ask like why would you do all this stuff if you're not
happy that assumes that my goal in
life is to be happy what is your goal in life to do epic
[ __ ] genuinely to be useful and so why Place do epic [ __ ]
over be happy because when I look back on my life in retrospect the things that
bring
me the most joy in the moment are the things that I was willing to sacrifice for
for an extended period of time and
those pay memory dividends far greater than the momentary cost that I had in the
moment and so I think it's a a
long-term short-term thing but a frame
that continued to paralyze me for a long period of time was an obsession with
happiness like it was truly an obsession
it was an obsession of mine in college I almost almost got into positive psychology
because I thought that was
really interesting that's what I that's what I my passion right I consumed all that
stuff and I drove myself mad with
it and I actually was more sad and depressed than anything which is probably why I
was trying to find all this positive uh dippy stuff
and I just cracked one day and I was like [ __ ] happiness because it felt so Out
Of
Reach that I was like just [ __ ] it I'm just not I'm not even I'm not even going
to shoot for it I'm just G to do stuff
and that's all I'm going to do I'm just going to do stuff and what happened was
like a few years later dot dot do a few days later um I looked up and I was like
huh I'm not not miserable and so I actually identified for a very long period of
time as I'm
not a happy person comma and that's okay I'm fine with that I accept that and
there was this huge Conflict for such a long period of time where I was like you're
supposed to be happy why aren't
you happier like there's something wrong there's something wrong with you something
needs to change rather than saying like maybe the
level of happy that you are is fine who am I like what happy am I
comparing myself to and also if whatever your current state is if you just say like
happyer which is really when people
are like I want to be happy they're just saying I want to be happyer than I am
which means that you create this distance between where you are and where
you want to be which is the recipe for being unhappy is saying that I want to be
happy ER so it doesn't matter how
happy you are you want to be happy and so by relinquishing the desire to be
happy I ended up enjoying a lot more of the stuff that I was doing because I did
make it a requisite for for my
activities so then it became a pleasant surprise I was like oh this doesn't suck
huh how nice two famous psychologists
Daniel Gilbert and Daniel caraman have uh quite Divergent views on happiness is
quite interesting so uh Daniel Gilbert talks about how if you spent every
minute of the rest of your life on a floaty Lilo in a pool drinking cocktails
in retrospect you might not have found much meaning but each individual moment
of experience would have been enjoyable and he believes that constitutes to him a
life that is well lived I disagree
with this guy entirely Daniel Carman and this is my position too which is a
well-lived life is one which in retrospect you are glad that you lived right uh so
one is leaning toward
hedonic pleasure and the other is leaning toward meaning so one you could say is
happiness and the other is meaning it's my belief that your
disposition largely influences where on that Spectrum from Lilo to do hard
things you need to sit and you will have friends and I did for a very long time
in The Nightlife industry have friends that just seem to be so [ __ ] happy
not doing stuff like just they would float through life and they wouldn't ask
themselves am I actualizing my [ __ ]
virtue is this the highest Integrity that I can do with these things and all the
rest of it and I was envious of those people you ever seen a dog you see
a dog on the floor and it's just lying there and you think oh my God if only I
could beat that dog like it just wants to go for walk and have food and and
like go pee pee that's it that's all it wants to do and you think [ __ ] it would
be great to be that dog but like guess
what if your Constitution doesn't allow you to be that dog the only way out is
through and this was something the first
time that I went to go and see Peterson someone asked him a question and they said
the depth of my Consciousness causes me to suffer is it a blessing or
a curse to feel everything so deeply he thought for a little bit and he
said take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that
girdles the world around you the only
way out is through and it's kind of like as soon as you realize that there are
things that you do that give you satisfaction and there are things that other
people do that give them happiness
and you've tried that route the only way is to continue doing
the thing that you know that works and I think that you were an example of someone
who is optimizing heavily for
meaning rather than for Hedonism and that's not to say that there are people and
this is I said this on the last
episode the fundamental thing that people don't understand as far as I can tell
about your worldview is that the
thing that you do for work and the thing that you do for fun of the same thing they
can't imagine that because
that's not the way that it is for them and it's not maybe the way it is for most
people
but if you're the sort of person that finds meaning more enjoyable than
happiness you need to optimize for the thing that you enjoy the
most and I'll toss in and meaning lasts
longer and so I I'll be super upfront if that those friends of yours in in the
night life I've there's nothing wrong with that in my in my way like as I see the
world like if that's you and you're like I [ __ ] love everything I do then like
you won like just keep doing that you
know what I mean um but I think a lot of the message that Chris saying here is if
you've tried that path and it hasn't worked for you then you have this dark
door that's in the corner that you've been trying all the other ones that have nice
gold edges and really shiny things
but there's that door that you keep looking at and it's the other side of you
that's clearing his throat in the
other room and it's like you just have to bust through the door and I think that
the like giving yourself permission
to be unhappy or at least for me giving myself permission to be unhappy for an
extended period of time in order to get what I wanted gave me so much relief
from honestly I don't like using the word nowadays because it has so many
associations but just from like the
depression or the funk that I was in for a few years yeah I just I just didn't
like my life and I'd achieved by most measure because I I did I don't have the um I
you know School failed me I was
whatever like I wasn't that I finished in three years and I did really well in
school and I had a really good job um
but it was empty for me and so my like my goal is things we talked
about earlier but my my personal goal is to squeeze every ounce of potential out of
whatever I have and I think that if
you feel like you have potential left over then it will eat you alive until you do
something about
it not to piss off the positive Poes in the room but if you haven't gotten what
Admit You Suck, Then Improve
you want then you're not worthy of it period and that's okay now you can admit that
you suck and improve better to know
you're bad for a season then pretend you're good for a lifetime you're not making
as much money as you want because
you're not as good as you think you are you're not struggling from imposter
syndrome you're a student and pretending
to be a teacher no students say they feel like like frauds for trying to learn
you're a fraud when you get up to
teach the class and you've never done
it deep I think it's just giving yourself
permission to suck it's giving yourself permission to be unhappy it's giving
yourself permission to not achieve while
you do for a long period of time it's giving yourself permission to lose friends
it's giving yourself permission
to do things that's different than people your Social Circle or your age group are
doing it's giving you
permission giving yourself permission to be an exception so that
you can become exceptional and a lot of that the whole positive poly Mantra of
like the I saw that I saw a post a girl made and she was like you are worthy and
that's what made that tweet all my tweets are just responses to [ __ ] I see and so
this girl was like you like I say this to myself in the morning like you
are worthy you are amazing you are a goddess and I was like you're not a goddess
cuz you don't control me um and
you don't have the things that you want you keep thinking that you saying that
you're worthy is going to somehow make it true but like the way that you know
you're worthy is that you have it that's it like that is the litus test
are you worthy of a billion doar well are you a billionaire no then you're not
worthy and so just like I think we have
these things it's it's like uh you're unbalanced it's like you're not worthy
there's these things that we're programmed to say oh that's bad you have
to tell everyone they're Worthy you're everyone's beautiful no if everyone were
beautiful then no one's beautiful and
yet again we're back at square one and so it's it's I guess drinking the tonic
it's it's going through the [ __ ] which is honestly the boring stuff that no one
wants to do for an extended period of time and
uh accepting that you suck and that it is okay because the
first step is accepting that you stuck you suck so that you can do the Second Step
which is doing something about it
what about you're not making as much money as you want because you're not as good
as you think you are
that's I mean I'm obviously in the business space and that follows up with the
other one with the Imposter syndrome like people are like man um how do you
not suffer from impostor syndrome I was like because I've done what I said I've
done and the people who get up on stage and try and teach a class on [ __ ] they
haven't done it's like that like you
feel like an impostor when you're an impostor like don't try and kill that voice
listen to that voice and get the
evidence to make that voice shut the [ __ ] up like if like if I get on stage
and I say I can bench 315 is there like do I feel like an imposter when I say that
no I stay fact
presumably if you're if you're pioneering and breaking new ground you know you're
you just put the biggest
investment that you ever did into this new thing that is a new level that you get
to and that's one that's to do with
Finance but there could be another one that's to do with capacity or competence you
could be sitting down in a room doing a deal which is time Bound in a
way that it's never been before or is in an industry only tangential to one that
you've been in before each time that you
do something new by definition you're an impostor because you haven't done it
before now if you're teaching that's
different but if you're entering if you're growing sufficiently quickly most of the
time it's fresh snow so I like
this is a f a topic I love but I think the difference between doing something
new and being an impostor is one is pretending you be something that they're not so
like I made the biggest
investment school I'm making a bet that I think communities are going to be huge
and I think that there's a ton of people who want to you know teach skills they
have in communities Etc and school.com can help but like it would only be an
imposter if I
said this is like I guarantee it no matter what this is going to be the biggest
thing ever
and one of the big things that I repeat and from the marketing front I say it all
the time I say State the facts and tell the
truth like the best Marketing in the entire world is truth now if the truth
isn't compelling it doesn't mean you lie it means you change the world to make
the facts compelling as in if I say man I want to
be like I you see this one all the time uh 18-year-olds who like want to be a
motivational speaker right you say okay
well what are your facts you've done nothing great so they then lie so that
they can try and claim success that they don't deserve so they can get Authority
that they can't back up and eventually are called out and are flat and to be fair
they only impress people who don't know anything
anyways so if they're honest about it they look at their fact sheet and say
What would what would a motivational speaker have to have in order for them to have
authority and then that becomes your action list of what you need to do and then
once those facts are the truth then
you can State the facts and tell the truth and then people will be like wow that's
so motivational but all you did was tell the truth and so like that is
why I've so wholeheartedly rejected one like you are worthy you're not worthy if
you had it then you wouldn't even need
to say you were worthy because you'd already [ __ ] have it and if you were and
like I struggle with impostor
syndrome why you only struggle with imposter syndrome because you're [ __ ] lying
like that's why you feel like an
imposter and Ne like well I didn't the thing is is you can fudge the truth like you
can you can not lie is very
different than telling the truth like I can make something seem a certain way
without deliberately breaking the law
but I'll know and that's why you feel like an imposter because you [ __ ] know and
there's the guy in the other
room who's clearing his throat be like that's not [ __ ] true and then that Discord
but if you just say what you
have done or you say what you are doing I'm making this big investment it's a big
bet for me the reason I'm making
this bet is because I see this trend and I think it's a good idea I could be [ __ ]
wrong but I'm not going to feel like an impostor because of it because
that's the truth thinking about the community thing
I had a conversation a little while ago I don't I don't think that you're that
you're far off wrong especially in an age of automation this guy made a really
great point which you probably thought of which is one of the very few things that
you can't automate is community
can't AI community no what you're going to have I mean maybe BS yeah yeah
exactly one guy one guy and a thousand Bots that are all doing it maybe GPT 10
can do that or whatever but the next this inter quartile period whatever
we're coming up to yeah is the easiest way to to hedge against automation I
think is to focus on community all right next one if you can be in a bad mood for
no reason you might as well be in a good
Be in a Good Mood for No Reason
mood for no reason if it's not going to change your life it shouldn't change your
mood if the cost is peace of mind
don't buy it yeah if you can be in a bad mood for no reason then you can be in a
good mood
for no reason which means that if you can do something that's amazing and
still have a [ __ ] day it means you can do something that sucks and have a good
day which means the entire excuse around
I don't want to do all these hard things because as a proxy it makes my mood sad
is ridiculous because it means that we are ultimately in control of how we want to
perceive the work that we do and so I
think that is ultimately the most freeing thing that you can do in terms of how you
can equip yourself to get through those harder
periods why do you think there's so much cynicism at the moment especially on the
Internet it's easier you can always
defend no like we we actually do with this a lot at acis.com from an investment
perspective and um we
actually have to check ourselves which is it's always easy to find a reason not to
do an
investment so we have a no bias and you should have I mean you should overall have
a no bias like you should say okay
here's all the things that could go wrong and you have to kind of think that way
because you have to manage risk but
if you say no to everything you're always right in the short term but you're but if
you never make an
investment you're wrong in the one way that matters which is you get no return and
so like you always miss the
short-term losses but you lose the big long-term gain and so it's again this is a a
Continuum to be managed more than a
problem to be solved but cynicism is shortterm it's like every so when you so
okay this is so when you go home right and you want to start a new business or you
have a girl that you're bringing
back and your friends and your family are like she's not going to last or like
this isn't going to this isn't going to be forever they are right literally
every single single time except for the one time you bring your wife home and in
that time they're all wrong and it's the one time that [ __ ] matters and so the
idea like but the thing is is because of
the false positives or the true positives they might have been right literally 19
out of 20 times and if they
were right the first time and the second time and the third time and the fourth
time why would they bet against no on the fifth time or the 50th time but you
only need one yes or one positive to change your entire life and so there's
this habit and that's where cynicism comes from where we get so many positive
reinforcers for saying no and being right but it's only short-term being
right because you have to make big bets to win big and that also means that you're
wrong plenty of times and people
aren't willing to look stupid for being wrong this school bet could go wrong I'm
betting it's not but everything has risk and I've been public about it right and
so like if anything but like I've played this out so like I like I'll tell you how
I played this out I was like if it
goes wrong I'll document the things that I that I learned and that I'll apply next
time and I'll do what I've always
done State the facts and tell the truth it is strange to think about
how being cynical or skeptical or kind
of sardonic or cutting or aloof it's used as a proxy for being
smart oh the worst thing that body could be
accused of as naive that's what they're trying to optimize against they don't want
to be seen as naive oh you [ __ ]
you hope that everything was going to be good a that's I mean that's cute like you
know the world will teach you it'll
don't worry don't worry it's like it'll it'll you'll Lear you'll Lear yeah people
don't want to be naive and
they'll be right and that's what's that's what's painful is that it takes more
effort to
start in the beginning and more people are right about the fact they're like hey
you're not going to hit it big and guess what a month in you're not but
they're only measuring on months and at 6 months you're also not going to have hit
it big yet and they're going to be like I'm still [ __ ] right and at a
year you're still not going to hit it big and they'll still be [ __ ] right and
every day that you haven't hit it they're going to feel like they were
right but they're wrong because they're measuring in days and you're measuring in
decades there's this idea from gnda
called the cynical genius illusion cynical people are seen to be smarter but
sizable research suggests they
actually tend to be Dumber cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute
for it a way to Shield
oneself from betrayal and disappointment without having to actually think there was
a there's a tweet on um
a doomsday Money Twitter guy and he said uh yeah he's predicted uh 16 out of the
last three
recessions and the thing is is that no one no one recalls the other 13 times that
guy was
wrong yeah and and they don't recall all of the gains that probably were made in
the marketplace by people who didn't
sell during that time period there was this uh broad you you know people
forward [ __ ] on WhatsApp and if it's been forward lots of times it even says it
the top forwarded many times it's
like a little warning and this happened I think around uh covid there was an image
of one guy one squatty wearing
like army gear walking through the Streets of London and this was forwarded on what
as evidence that the Army was
going to come and hold people in the house at gunpoint and if you left it was going
to be martial law was going to be
deployed on the Streets of London and this went [ __ ] nuclear completely
Interstellar absolutely
everywhere what happened with that right what happened with what happened with that
thing not a single person who
decided to spout this half [ __ ] baked opinion that never turned out to be true
ever got held to account for that and I must have received that message like five
times yeah like hey you you don't
get to just make these like ridiculous like actually stupid [ __ ] claims
about the world and then no one call you to account I'm going to hit on the
cynicism
Point um the world belongs to optimists because if you're going to do
anything big you have to believe that it can happen otherwise it never will that
Shan
Puri thing the get to be right and the optimists get to be rich yeah like if
you look at it from a percentage of success rate I've been wrong more times than
I've been right I have failed more
times than I've succeeded but you always succeed more and or write more in the
big ways than the people who've been right all along and are wrong Trevor says this
my my editor he says uh 99%
right and 100% wrong so like they're they're right 99% of the time but they're
wrong 100%
because the only thing that matters is the big one at the end like your family and
friends will say that every girl
that you ever a date is not good enough except for the one time you find the girl
that you're actually going to
marry and then it doesn't matter or like this won't last or like this business idea
it's not going to work and you
might have nine failures i f my first nine businesses didn't really amount to
anything nine nine as in the first one
spent time [ __ ] failed second one this one will be different [ __ ] failed third
one this one this is the
one and then seven six more after that right I'm just painting this picture because
like it's painful as [ __ ]
because the whole time everyone is telling you I told you so and they're
right today but not forever if the cost his peace of mind
don't buy it why I use the Peace of Mind as a as a
indicator for breaching values so that's the I want to become
known rather than and sacrifice my reputation in order to do so and so for
me I would lose piece of my like right on the edge I'm like I don't know this is a
little bit edgy I had a guy um who
shared a A bash clip of me and what's a bash clip oh like somebody like took my
clip and then was like this is wrong whatever and um and so I looked at the guy's
profile and I saw he was a VC and I was like huh okay I know who this is oh and
so I dm' him and I was like um do you disagree with this and uh he said something
and then I
just eviscerated him uh and he was like you're right I overstepped because I
wanted to try and do a viral clip you are fundamentally right and I was wrong
and so like that is what I would never want to be like that is disgusting to me
and so the cost of making a viral clip to try and Trend jump when I know
that fundamentally the thing isn't right is not worth the price there's a this
shows up in in other ways so I had to what the [ __ ] did I do
I I think I tried to throw a used Splendor packet
in a bin in a restaurant you know yeah did that but I was leaving and
I was like it's next to the bin someone will get it and I walked oh yeah 30 yards
away
yeah [ __ ] yeah turned around went back put it in the bin yeah you'd know that's a
pece of mind yeah
and this is another one of those interesting reframes this is really really
interesting to me if the cost is
peace of mind don't buy
it you can see and I did for a long time
my inability to move in as ruthless of a way as I as other people do as a
weakness as a vulnerability and I realized in retrospect that it's
just a higher standard that I'm holding myself to and that can be that that will
result in many times me doing things
that and and and having things that I need to overcome I'm working on my people
pleasing Tendencies as hard as I can at the moment to not to not yeah I I
end up um I don't like to disappoint people true I don't like to do things that
causes other people to feel bad or
uh feel hurt or to tell them things that uh they don't want to hear that's why that
um Dr Robert Glover the no my Mr
Nice Guy was just so [ __ ] like very very very incisive uh but I realized even
with that I had I had a
conversation with a friend and it's to do with this book and there's a bunch of
ideas that
everybody's been working on in my friend group for quite a while and I was like I
really want to write about this thing
and sent him a long overly arduous voice note explaining about how conflicted I
was because it's not my idea now no one owns the truth that's one of the brilliant
things about working through
quotes and things like this is no one owns it right like if it's accurate nobody
gets to own the truth it's just
an it about the way that reality exists so I sent him this big long voice note and
he replied to me and
said and I in it I'm over patent matching a lot of the things I'm doing as people
pleasing like it's the I think
I sent you that tweet about um I just learned about the recency bias and of all of
them I have to say it's my favorite one right it's like you see
this new thing and it's the hot new toy that you're playing with or whatever the
like shiny new toy and uh he responded and he
said uh I wanted to say how grateful I am that you in amongst all of the stuff
and the book and the show and all of the different people pulling on your attention
that the first place that you would go to when thinking about this
idea is how I would feel rather than how you can like Weedle it so that
you get the outcome that you want or whatever uh I would be be very hesitant in you
saying or you calling that people
pleasing when it's one of the reasons that I love you as a friend I was like
huh that's interesting that's a reframe that I hadn't anticipated
and that is again the Peace of Mind thing now your level for Peace of Mind
may be different to somebody else's but I don't think that that's something that
you should be ashamed of you know as a fun challenge for
anyone who's listening try telling the truth in Social
settings so when someone invites you to a party instead of coming up with a fake
excuse that you both know is a fake excuse just say I don't want to go
really [ __ ] with you um and if someone like says hey can you uh you know help me
move you're like
I don't want to it's very freeing because the thing is is that like their response
is on
them and if I just I try and anchor myself to truth if I just tell the truth
and state the facts I'm good with me and if someone and I I ask because I had a
exchange recently where I said that um I say it often and now people who are around
me are accustomed to the fact
that I will just State the facts and tell the truth um I said would you have
preferred that I've lied to
you and the guy just I was like so you would prefer that I lie I will not be
associated with someone who would prefer that I lie to them because it makes my
life difficult because then I'd have to lie which then would breach one of my my
values so in the future you know I I had someone who um recently was like hey um
hey if you need anything you know let me know how I can help i' be like you don't
mean that because if I actually need
something you will not help and so it's it's really uncomfortable for a
lot of people because it it breaks a lot of social norms but I think that learn
it's kind of like the hundred NOS is
like being comfortable like it's just being comfortable with the truth and the
truth is one of the the scariest ugliest
things you know like why don't you want to go on another date with me I don't like
you
you're not worthy but like people are so
uncomfortable with that and I think that the the I've just tried to shed [ __ ] as
much as I could for my life and it's
just made thinking a lot easier and also dealing with relationships a lot easier
because you also by shedding social
niceties when you do also State the truth when I say I think you [ __ ] killed that
people know it [ __ ]
carries weight because you don't just say that and so I would say most of my team
for example if I pay a compliment
they know that I mean it and I don't have to say like hey like if I'm being honest
I really you like I don't have to
I don't like and it makes your words mean what you say and I think that is
like I I I aspire to be a man who when I say things people know that I mean them
and I think a way to do that is to stop saying things that I don't mean and so
I'm trying to cut as much of the words that are niceties and things that I don't
mean and are nonsensical and
[ __ ] that I've been taught to say in this social situation when someone says that
make sense I say no it doesn't make
any sense people are like oh um because when when someone says make sense at the
end of a sentence we are trained to just nod and say yeah yeah yeah even though if
you didn't even process it but if I
don't think it makes sense I say no I don't think it makes sense or no I don't
understand and again you don't want to look stupid but
looking stupid in the moment so that you can better understand something makes you
not look stupid for the rest of your life when you actually understand it and
so I've just that has been a huge effort of mine is to
make make words great again um make words mean what they mean again yeah and
I and I and I really I I Aspire do that in my writing and I especially in my social
relationship because time is so
valuable and we have so so little of it and I don't want to waste any of it
pretending to be someone or say things
that I don't mean it's normal to not know what you're doing yeah if you did it
wouldn't be
It’s Normal to Not Know What You’re Doing
called growth high-five your fear uncertainty and doubt and carry on do
you get tired stressed sad hungry frustrated unfocused do you feel misunderstood
great you're human you
don't need medication I have a a huge vem distaste
for uh mental medication and I think one is because it's overprescribed two because
people over WebMD themselves and fundamentally people find a problem with
being human and I think a lot of that is because of the social Norm that we should
be never hungry never sad never angry never frustrated never feel like we're
misunderstood and those are the those are the troughs and peaks of humanity
and we can't only wish for sunny days because otherwise we'd have droughts and no
one everyone would die and so it's
wishing for something that isn't true and will never happen it's wanting a lie
which is why I'm so against it now are there people who they can test their
neurology and whatever maybe but like
honestly a hundred years ago this [ __ ] didn't exist and people just dealt with
life
and I think people were happier then than they are now and so clearly this solution
hasn't hasn't been much of a
solution at all and so I if I I you know I try have I don't have that many
extreme stance well maybe I do but one of my extreme stances is that there is
nothing wrong with you because even if
there is something wrong with you how do you benefit by saying there is something
wrong with you and then accepting that
label unto yourself because the alternative to that is accepting your current
existence as
maybe this is better than everyone else's and I'm just choosing to believe that
it's wrong and all of this is around some big Mighty should that we
think and that we worship that it should that we should be a certain way that we're
not and I think that discrepancy
that word I've tried to eliminate as much as humanly possible from my vocabulary
because like I should what I should nothing according to whom why
should I be happier why should I be have less anxiety why should I feel more
understood and so like pretty much the
beginning of every ad for like Levitra or whatever you know whatever the new
serotone you know s SSRI thing is it's
like they describe Humanity they just say like are you hungry are you tired are you
horny are you like are
you dissatisfied in any way well the Cure of that is a pill which I
wholeheartedly decry anything that gives an if than statement for
happiness so like you will own nothing and be happy like you want to say that
you're going to change my external
condition to change how I feel I just I just reject it as a as any kind of if then
I will be happy but like the pill
overmedication part I'm I've had too many people too close to me ruin their lives
topping from SSRI
SSRI and getting on cocktails of pills and and and they've got a sleep Med and
they've got a wakeup Med
and they're just they're just a walking Pharmacy it's crazy for people who
aren't American to look at the way that America deals with this I remember so in
the UK just for context you can't get prescribed melatonin you can't buy it over
the
counter you can't buy it on Amazon my video guy when he flies over here takes it
back like some like he [ __ ]
smuggle like he's Pablo Escobar but with melatonin tablets instead like going into
CVS am I allowed to get this
uh that's the degree of difficulty that it is to get prescribed anything
and in America the first place that people turn when they have a problem is the
pill bottle I mean I have two
physician parents so like and I would say Western you know for the most part
Western medicine through the just
believe in all Pharmaceuticals and all that kind of stuff and so I've I grew up
really close to it my grandfather is a
physician so like just lots of medic medicine in the family in general and I um I
just hate it I really do I don't
hate a lot of things but I really I really I hate I hate what it does to people and
more the underlying thing is
that they reject Being Human and they think there's something wrong with them and
so many people waste all of their
time trying to solve a problem that is life rather than living it and it drives
me nuts like they they they they search for
the medication rather than confronting the problem like you don't have an anxiety
problem you need to deal with
whatever the thing you're worried about is like I I mean man I have too many
controversial beliefs I'm getting into
much of it like you drink a lot because you're
stressed if you de with the thing that stresses you that's the trigger for you
drinking so yes there's addictive
properties to drinking I'm not going to I'm not denying that but the thing that
leads the drinking the condition that
creates that that's something that you can attack and so I think so little
attention is given to accepting reality rather than saying there's something wrong
that people waste their entire
life searching for an answer that doesn't exist what about it's normal to not know
what you're doing if you did it
wouldn't be called growth high-five your fear uncertainty and doubt and carry
on if you knew what you were doing then you would be stagnating
because you'd be doing nothing new and so if you're going to do something new then
that is what would be the Catalyst
for growth and so you can't want to grow and also want to know everything you're
doing at the same time it's like the two
beliefs contradict one another and so I think that's a lot of a lot of the
discontent that people suffer from is they want two things that are Polar Opposites
they want the really strong
character they want the easy life like one is the price of the other you have a
hard life to have great character you have an easy life you have you have shitty
character everything came easy
you want to grow you don't want hardship hardship creates growth and so they want
both and you
can't like it's it's wanting the Jordans without paying the price they're the and
the price isn't bad it just the price is what it is and so it's just do you want
the Jordans or not and if you do then
don't lament the price tag pay the price tag and be happy you have the Jordans and
if you don't want the Jordans then
don't buy them there's something in here is around
comparing the lessons that people who have achieved success tell you about how to
also achieve success when they're
using that pattern which is well they look like they know what they're doing I
should look like I know what I do I
should feel like I know what I'm doing but you don't know what you're doing right
you're you're a white belt
and that person's a third degree black belt in whatever it is that you're trying to
pursue State the facts and tell the
truth I mean my I mean the amount of you know
900 follower Instagram accounts that all I see is people espousing advice on how
to grow their social media
following you're never going to win like you don't get it like you like i' I've
been following like you don't get it because the content of what you're putting out
sorry the evidence that
encapsulates your message disproves literally everything you say before you open
your mouth and the thing is is that
people are obsessing about the algorithm and this type of font and I should do
vertical format and I should do
horizontal format and I use this as an analogy that you can draw to anything but
everyone has that friend who is a
train wreck on relationships who gives relationship advice it's just like it
doesn't even
matter if the advice is good you're a train wreck it's the fat friend who gives
viice on how to be fit it's just
like and they're like citing all these studies and you should try these supplements
it's like you're a fat [ __ ] just shut up stop like there's don't
waste your breath no one is listening and so it's just it's missing the big obvious
thing and so again it's like
that big Domino you're like I want to get into fitness like there was a friend of
mine actually um who's in the fitness
space and he's like I really want to grow my Fitness business and obviously like I
have books on it and I videos and
did that for a whole past life and um I was like dude you're not in shape
he like but I know all these I was like you don't look like someone that anyone
wants to look
like and so the thing is like for whatever you're doing the big one thing is like
if you were look like a shredded
God you could say eat fried chicken every day and people would buy your [ __ ]
cuz like what's the one big Domino that if I just did that everything else would
take care of itself do that and every
ounce of effort you're putting into not doing that is a waste basically the vshred
model actually really nice guys yeah they're in Vegas well he's like Public
Enemy Number One for the fitness Bros yeah what was your definition of trauma that
you taught me on the phone oh yeah
so um because this word is so thrown around on social media my god um I was like
okay I have to Define this so that
I can try and like understand it um so I believe trauma is when you have a
punishing event that permanently changes Behavior that's it
so if you uh you know are a kid and you touch the stove and you burn your hand
and you never touch a stove again you were traumatized now the thing is is that
that's a positive
consequence so is trauma bad I don't know was the consequence bad
in that situation no and so a lot of people use the this person traumatized
me as the as the the transgression whereas the question is
what was the result of that quote trauma because trauma is just accelerated
learning and so if you have PTSD for
example if you were abroad and had lots of bombs going off then you had rapid
learning so you have trauma that permanently changes your behavior around loud
noises and so you generalize loud
noises from this environment to now when someone honks you you know freak out and
you think about those situations right
and so just defining the world around me has helped me navigate it a lot better so
that I can understand what we're talking about because there are so many you know
people like trauma is a feeling in your
body that you have to you have to release the trauma I'm like what the [ __ ] are
you talking about you know
release trauma you changed Behavior due to a stimulus that's it and so if you
want to change your behavior back you create a new condition that reinforces
the new Behavior you want period because otherwise we appeal to mysticism and we
just say lots of like nonsensical [ __ ] that the whole woo woo world is all about
I actually spoke at a woowoo event which was really funny how did
that go uh surprisingly well I just started by being like you will all disagree
with most of the things I say
but they uh they kind of mystici my my nihilism so it worked out fine how' you
do that uh well because I just describe actions and so they describe those
actions as attraction for what whatever and I was like attract repel whatever if
you you know make 100 calls you'll have
more people who know who you are than if you don't that's the same as putting out
an energetic frequency to the quantum realm it's that saying that you want
money I have no idea what any of that means dude there was a podcast that I got
linked to from a
girl in Austin who got inducted into some weird cult that was sacrificing
period blood at the full moon so that they could get birken bags yeah Austin's a
weird place so you you
were there for a while I was yeah well too weird for me spat you up Alex I
appreciate you man thank you for coming
on what's next what can people expect from you next few months um well all my
What’s Next for Alex
effort is in the the school games so we're uh I mean I can talk about him I cannot
talk about him yeah um so yeah so
I I just made the biggest invest in my life and now co-owner of school.com um it's
a platform where you can build what
you want to build learn what you want to learn and uh schools will give you the
tools community in the education to help
you and so we've actually created a whole thing where people can start all this
stuff for free um because I just I
believe my whole platform has been education that's what I believe in um I think
the education system is broken and
um teachers don't get paid or given the resources to actually teach students and
they're you know they're supposed to teach tests that they know don't help students
students get educated on stuff
that doesn't matter in the real world and they own amounts of debt for a piece of
paper that doesn't make them anything to pay off the debt that they're in for
the rest of their lives and I just I hate all of it which is why we started making
the content that we do and so um
this is one big investment that I'm doing to try and make my small dent towards
helping fix that and I don't
like I obviously talk about business that's what I know okay um but one person
can't can't do that
like I can't change I mean I can try you know but like I I don't I don't think one
one person is going to change the world and so um I wanted to invest in a
platform that would help other people do that for one another and so whether it's
like you know how to paint and you want
to teach people to paint you know how to fix Hondas and you want to teach people to
do that like there are so many more useful skills that we can trade with one
another and I think Ben Franklin said there's no more High there's no more noble a
deed than to help another no
more to educate and I I wholeheartedly believe that and so so um I mean that's
what I'm investing my my dollars and my time into and so um yeah that's that's
the that's like my whole next year in terms of what I'm investing obviously
acquisition. we continue to invest we're
family office and so if you have a business that you want to sell or scale
you can hit us up hell yeah I'm going to enjoy watching it happen man appreciate
you thanks for having me on thank you
thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Alex you will
love my 2-hour conversation with David
Goggins which you can watch right here go on tap it
Stop Caring About Other People’s Opinions
today we're going to go through as many of your lessons as we can in about three
hours and we're going to see what we can
get through first one a friendly reminder that in three generations everyone who
knew us will be
dead including the people whose opinions stopped you from doing what you wanted all
along imagine that someone you know
achieves every dream and hits every goal they have years later they get old and die
two years after that how much do you
care about as much as everyone else will if you accomplish your goals and dreams do
it for you
so I think about death all the time because it's probably the central theme it's
probably the thing that I think the
most about and I think that influences how I see time and also how I think how how
it influences agency like what
actions I'm willing to take despite the Judgment of others and so a lot of times it
might be because I have more
insecurity than everyone that I think like man I want to do this thing and then I
hear all these other voices of reasons why I shouldn't do it or why
somebody else will say like that's bad or yield bad or like that's wrong whatever
and so I think I've had to come up with a lot of these devices to get around my own
insecurities to take action despite those insecurities and the biggest one
that I think about is that it doesn't matter whether I achieve all of my goals or I
don't achieve all of
the goals in three generations I'll be forgotten and the only people who were
nacing against me will also be dead
and so then it's like just do it for me and then
when I wake up every day there's only one voice I have to listen to
but that means that you need to be able to work out what to do from first
principles you now no longer have
societal Norms or assistance or Role Models or archetypes or expectations and
that's also difficult in a different way I think that the more you Flex whatever
that muscle is of like independent thinking the more it becomes the default way
that you think and then everyone
else's action is to start looking more and more insane to you what like what's an
example of that that
you can think of I mean shoot just the most basic ones of like living the life that
you don't want not wearing
what you want to wear not dating who you want to date not living where you want to
live like you're living at home and
you want to move and your parents say no and you don't make the move or you're
digging a girl because she's socially
accepted you know by your friend group she's safe but like there's always some
distance in between you but you're like
I don't want to risk it right or like you're in the the job and every day you go
there and you're like I mean it's
okay and the idea of just living an okay life just sounds so terrifying to me that
the freedom to fail over and over
again is still more fulfilling to me at least it feels like it's real then walking
through kind of on
autopilot and so I think that's a lot of the choices that other people make that
seem insane to me now but didn't didn't
seem insane to me a decade ago you know what I mean I think it's just like as you
practice taking more agency taking more
responsibility for the decisions then you just get better and better at it and then
it just seems more and more ridiculous you're like they're like I
just can't quit my job and you're like why like no physically why like why can't
you quit your job like like you know I
mean they start hyperventilating it's like you could could you move in with your
parents could you move in with a friend could you split rent I mean I
could but I mean other people who are going to die in a hundred years would think
what
and one of my favorite ones is um and I say this all the time to Layla like
whenever we're getting to some sort
of like mini complaint it's like you know if you zoom out far enough you can't see
the Earth so we're talking
about like oh man they're gonna mess up this order on this vendors like you know if
you zoom out far enough you can't see
the Earth it's just like it just puts everything immediately into perspective of
how ridiculous some of the things that we're
concerned about are Sean puri's got this thing where he says don't follow what most
people do because
you don't want the results that most people get the average person is obese likely
to be divorced and has less than 1K in the bank it feels safe to do what
everyone else is doing but it's actually a terrible decision it's like the best way
to guarantee to
not have the life that you want is to do what everyone else is doing unless you
want what everyone else has
with no one which no one does yeah it's um being able to
think for yourself and and treating it like a muscle I think is a smart way to
consider it because in the beginning
it's really really hard you've been resting on societal norms and the way you've
dealt with past trauma and your
parents expectations and what all of your friends do and what's accepted and all of
this stuff for so long
that when it first comes to you needing to step on that muscle it's like trying to
move your ears like all humans have
got muscles that can move their ears but because no one works it as a child they're
just atrophy away uh and this is
the ear muscle of personal growth
I think I had a lot of practice with it because I had a so like a lot of people
have many voices that they hear that
they feel are judging them right they have their friends they have their uncle they
have their siblings they have their cousins co-workers whatever I think I
had just one voice that I heard really loudly and I was trying I was talking to one
of our one of our employees the
other day and I was trying to put it in perspective younger guy and I was like I
imagine how much you care about your
mother's opinion and your father's opinion and your ship and all of those other
people I was like and now imagine that there's literally only one because
I had no siblings I basically had no mother I had just a father
and so like his approval was literally everything and he disapproved of the
path that I wanted to take in my life and so I think a lot of these mental
faculties are these little Frameworks or
these isms just came from like how can I combat this incredibly booming
voice in the background because like when I look at what I was doing at the time
like I was a consultant you know I graduated in three years I took the
consulting job I did all the things but the craziest thing was that the moment that
my father was most proud of me and he approved of my life the most was when
I was the saddest and so that's when I was like maybe his approval isn't the right
way to feel
good about life and so that that started basically the six month journey of from
when I decided
that I wanted to change my life until when I changed it and I think that like as
you become more able or more potent
or higher agency that timeline between when you decide you want to do something and
when you actually do it just
continues to compress right like now if I want to change something I'm like let's
change it like done I like I we walk out of the things like we're never
gonna do that podcast together I don't want to talk to this person again or
whatever it is right whereas before it's like okay I have to sleep on it I have to
really think about it and like how am I gonna it's like why do I care about how I'm
gonna say it this is what it is done and it's just like that timeline is
compressed but the hardest one for me like the first one was by far the hardest and
everyone since then the nice thing is that no matter how difficult
your circumstance is if you have like the bigger the wall that you have to get
through is as soon as you get past that
one big wall you then can use that wall as the evidence for why you can jump over
the next well because that will be
the biggest one and so like after I did quit my job and left my house and and left
Baltimore and didn't tell my dad
until I was across the country because I was so afraid like people think of me as
like some big Alpha whatever dude I was like I was such I was so afraid of my
father's disapproval that I didn't tell him until I physically left the state like
like I'm not like think about that
like I wasn't even just one state over I was like five states over and then I was
like hey by the way I'm going to California and he was like well let's
come over we'll talk about it and I was like I'm in Ohio already yeah yeah all
right you know then obviously he had a
different reaction but like but then after that it was like what do I have to do
now it's like oh I gotta I gotta sell
strangers and I was like I told my dad I didn't want to do what he wanted how hard
could this be and so like it then becomes this one
huge proof point so the bigger the the dragon is that you have to slay the more
evidence you have that you can say the next dragon and I think that is if
there's ever been a good point for why getting over the one first hard one is so
hard is that it will then give you
the reinforcement that you can do whatever you need to do next yeah the life you
want is on the other side of a few hard conversations and you're living
How To Have Difficult Conversations
a life you hate because you're too afraid to have them I think about that a lot
because like whenever I feel anxious or insecure or angry or sad I'm like what
conversation do I need to have that I'm not having and so then and usually if I
just think for not that long I'm like this is the
conversation I've been putting off and then you know I'm not the the the the poster
child of mental health and so um
I'll just call myself a pansy for not having the conversation and then and
then I just have it and so again I think it's like I need to have this conversation
and the time between when I have it versus or when I when I know I
need to have it when I actually have it just because it continues to compress and
if you've ever had like a a breakup or a employee firing one of the or
acquitting if you're an employee like these things that you dread I don't know if
you notice it but like the day you do it the moment after you
do it I'm like how many other conversations can I have like I want to be like yeah
totally because it's a serial
killer for awkward conversations when I so like the next series of hard
conversations that I had after I I left
home was actually like years later so I had I had multiple partners in what I
said I had a I had a partner in one of my gyms I had a partner in four other gyms I
had a partner in a Cairo and
dental marketing agency and all of them relied on me to make money and so all of
their livelihoods were
still dependent on me but I was splitting everything and it was just it was it was
horrible for me at the time and so I remember when I I ended up
getting in a DUI and you know I talked to a a performance coach or whatever
and he was like your stress in these conversations could literally kill you he's
like they almost did so I got a
head-on collision at 60 miles an hour and I walked away no injuries um but it was
like my wake-up call but
not to stop drinking it was my wake-up call that I needed to have these
conversations and that's what I was avoiding when I was drinking it was in
the alcohols what were the things that I'm avoiding that I'm using alcohol to get
away from and so
um the next day I had the first conversation with the first partner and
it was horrible but the moment I was done I was like I gotta call the other guy and
I called the other one I was like this is how it is and the thing is
is I had this backstop of my death of like you almost just died because you
wouldn't have this conversation and so
then it just gave me this courage to just be like like and whatever the reaction
was I was like I'd rather be alive
I think that was it and so it's it's weird though because death has been this
really recurring theme in my life that like
the same thing happened when I was it like the only thing that gave me enough balls
to stand up to my dad to be fair from a distance from the car when I was
driving halfway across the country like let's not make one let's not make me too
big of her out here um was the idea that like I started
thinking like every day I was like I hope I don't wake up you know what I mean um
and that was the that was that was
the thing where I was like this is a big enough problem that like if you don't want
to wake up then
what have you got to lose exactly and that was it and I was like I
have nothing to lose and that was when that was when I think in the last podcast we
talked about this where it's like if everybody who's like at the
bottom and feels like they have nothing going for them reframe that as I have
nothing going for
me which also means that I have nothing to lose by taking action it makes you a
much more dangerous person and I think
that was the flip that I've had repeatedly shown to me in my life that allowed me
to take the step that I was
afraid to take if I told you about the region beta Paradox have you seen that one
okay so this is interesting so
imagine that you had to go a mile or less and if you did a mile a mile okay
if you had to travel a mile or less you would walk it and if you had to go more
than a
mile you would drive it okay so paradoxically you would go two miles quicker than
you would go one mile uh-huh
if you follow that rule the important Insight here is that if you only take action
when things cross a certain
threshold of Badness sometimes better things can feel worse than worse things oh
yeah so if you look around and you
see that people are stuck in region beta this zone of comfortable complacency right
it's the guy that sticks and it's
just okay job because his boss isn't too much of a dick but the pay isn't that good
and he's not really that passionate but it's all right whatever whatever the
person that stays in the acceptable relationship they're not that fired up but
they're not really in love and their partner's not really got much alignment
with their interests or the person that stays in a crappy apartment and there's a
bit of mold in the ceiling but it's
cheap and it's in a good area of town or whatever all of these people would be
better off if their situations were
worse yeah because it would give them the activation energy to kick them out of the
bottom and their only regret would be not doing it sooner
did I love that when I it was funny because if I look
back on the instances that were the most painful in my life
every single one of them without fail has created a disproportionate gain right
like the most painful thing early
on was for me was quitting my job and leaving you know leaving my dad basically and
then that created
the you know my first my first business in the gyms and all of that stuff um you
know getting into the DUI the
head-on collision um and like that whole situation got me out of all of these
failed Partnerships
that I wasn't willing to do but in the in the moment I was like I'm such a failure
like I suck at everything but
that gave me the springboard when I lost everything the first time after that
um that then gave me like the idea that I needed to change the business model
around right and that's what switched me
into the licensing model right so like each of these time and then that became you
know the the first this is kind of
like Alchemy yeah like turning something which is worse than useless yeah into
something that's as precious and useful as possible you know I'm sure you know the
parable of the you know the man in the Sun and
he like buys the son a horse and then it falls he breaks the leg and then they're
like oh it's so sad and then the Army
comes then the sun doesn't die and then it's like oh so great right and so it's one
of those really interesting ones where like whatever negative situation
and this is probably good for the audience but like if you think back to all the
negative situations you had like the really really bad ones when you
expand the time Horizon most times they become net wins and so then it just means
that like if
you're in a really tough time right now you just gotta wait and then you get and
then you'll get
your reference point back on all the things that change those result because most
times when is bad it can't get
worse so then you feel like Well it can't get worse than this and then your action
threshold decreases and you take
and you do all the things you know you should have done anyways and so it's like we
have this big stack of should do's and we just wait until it's two
miles yep and then you just you're like you're just getting in the car like the
firing conversation and you're like well I just fired one person or like I just
ended one partnership I just broke up with one girl or whatever it is and you're
like who else do I need to talk to today really like and then in like a
period like you have these rapid periods of growth that happen and then you have
the next web of comfort because it's way
better than you were before and I think it's I wonder this um this is more just
like an open thought but like I wonder how long
like more successful people stay in that next Plateau like I wonder if their
threshold for Action stays low
yeah they're immediate like oh like I'm getting Comfort like how quickly they get
comfortable into like I need to
change I need to get better um next one the heaviest things in life aren't iron and
gold but unmade
The Heavy Burden of Unmade Decisions
decisions the reason you are stressed is that you have decisions to make and you're
not making them
it's a good quote excited you said it
I think a lot of times the decisions that we make are predicated on the on the
conversations we need to have because usually like that and what's
interesting is like you can Define commitment by eliminating alternatives
so if you're committed you've eliminated alternative actions right like you can say
I'm committed but until you
eliminate other options you're not committed there's always a get out of jail
frequently right and so
a lot of people make decisions to end relationships to quit their job to start the
new thing
but they don't become committed to the decision until they remove the other options
and then you're forced to take
action on it and so I think actually defining those two two different things now
you could Define you know decision is to kill off like decadere from Latin
but from a from an from a colloquial thing I think there are two different
instances it's like I need to change
this and then I do change it um and the making the decision is when it
becomes a commitment why are unmade decisions so heavy I think at least for me
it's because I have this hamster wheel on the my back of my mind where I keep
playing out different scenarios and so I
keep thinking like well maybe maybe I need to change what I'm currently doing maybe
maybe if I just rethought like because I'm I'm a big frame guy so I'm
like maybe I just need to be thinking about this differently right maybe if I zoom
all the way out the Earth doesn't exist maybe this doesn't matter or maybe I'm just
making a problem that doesn't
exist maybe the best action I should take is nothing right like I you know I
reframe all those things um but usually it's just because I'm
afraid of something and then that's why I'm not making the decision and I think
once I name and put a face and it's
usually not even a thing that I'm afraid of it's one person's judgment I'm afraid
of and then when I name the person then
it becomes then it becomes real instead of being this amorphous like people Society
judgment it's like Tom like do I
really care what Tom thinks I guess so it seems like I'm not making this big change
in my life because of Tom looks
like Tom's more in control of my life than I am dude so I remember this
when I was 19 years old I was super angry like all 19 year old men right that's the
standard default right I was
angry at both my parents for who because I was 19. right and I remember blaming
them for everything blaming them for my life blaming for not being a better person
I literally blame them for being a bad person
and I remember realizing that when I blamed them that I gave them control
over my life and then the idea that the people that I hated the most at the time
were the ones who actually were controlling me was the thing that most sickened me
to then actually flip my
narrative to actually taking control like that was the one thought process like my
mother I'm giving her control
over my romantic relief like my mother controls this that I was like
no and so like just the idea that somebody who I was disgusted by at the time
um had that much power is what gave me the power to start taking action see this
hamster wheel thing that continues
to distract you I've got this concept called anxiety cost so kind of like
opportunity cost yeah
um when you have an unmade decision every single second that you spend
thinking about the unmade decision could have been gotten back had you just made
the decision and realizing that it's it's a justification for eating frogs earlier
in the day I need to answer that email the longer that you wait until you answer
that email the more times you
will think the thought I need to answer that email yeah and if we assume that what
truly truly matters in life is the
time and the attention that we spend within that time your time is being captured
and your
attention is being captured by a thought that could have been gotten rid of had you
have just done it had you have just had the conversation broken up with the
relationship left the job told the father whatever done your stretches cleaned your
teeth
had a shower whatever it is that you needed to do all of that anxiety cost could
have been
gotten rid of had you just gone and done it you can move through life at seven
times
the rate of other people by simply changing when you say you're going to make a
decision from end of week to end
of day so think about how that Stacks up so it's like let's say that there were
four decisions that you needed to make if the
normal person takes a week to make the decision and then their mind moves on to the
next thing that they have anxiety
for and start making that decision and decide another week decide another week
decide another week it's a month to make those four decisions whereas the the
super the Superman the takes one decision day one one to six second decision day
two third decision
day three fourth decision day four they aren't even finished the week yet and
they're where the other person is at the end of the month and like that speed of
decision making like not paying the attention cost the opportunity cost of your
time
I think it's really profound in terms of how quickly people move through life in
terms of achieving the goals that they
set out because people were like how did how is that guy so young and he's achieved
X Y and Z it's like well what
takes you a month to make a decision we make in an hour and then the next hour I
make another decision that takes
a year next month and so like that's how you can go 30 times or 100 times faster
than than the quote average person who's
overweight has a thousand dollars in their bank account you know and it's gonna die
at 70. can you just go back to
before you made that first decision with your dad because you've mentioned it you
know people might look at your I would say ruthlessness at least in some regards
with decision making you know
hiring and firing and making these business decisions and there's all of these
great stories about and I had this thing and I realized that partner wasn't
right so I got rid of that business and you know that's the sort of thing that
would tear most people up for six months
18 months maybe forever yeah and to look at that degree of cut throatness or at
least um decisiveness I think is almost unfathomable for a lot of people
are you a representative Avatar is pre leaving Baltimore Alex a representative
avatar for the average person I think so I mean I was high achieving you know I
mean like I did well in school I tried
hard I did those things but in terms of my risk tolerance and my fear of failure
and my insecurities yeah absolutely I
mean if anything real talk I bet you that I have more insecurities than most people
because those insecurities are what drove me to do well in those things
not because I cared about school but because I cared about what other people
thought about me yeah yeah I um I've
spoken to hundreds hundreds and hundreds of high performers
on balance people are driven way more by fear of insufficiency than they are with
some well-balanced perfect desire to
just maximize their greatness in life like the activation energy for almost
everybody is
I'm scared I might be a piece of what hang on oh God I might be a piece of
I genuinely might be a piece of I need to go and do something so outrageous that I
I can't be a piece of
there's no way that it could happen I might be a coward oh my God what can I do to
stop myself from being a coward
that's the activation energy it's funny because if you regress fear to its most
basic form it's death
and death is the greatest motivator and like you can prove it in a simple example
it's like if I all of a sudden go up to anybody on the street and I put
a gun in their head and I say you know point a gun at their head and I say go do
this thing they'll go do it
but if I say you can have anything you want if you do this they're willing to go 10
times harder with a gun in their face to not die and so if you take fear and
regress it all
the way down to its basis form like that's what the insecurity is like if they they
think I won't be enough and if they don't think I won't be enough then this won't
happen if this one happened
this one happened I'll be alone I'll be dead I feel like if you just regress it all
the way down like that's all it is and so like the biggest Achievers in
life I think have have most directly tied them not doing whatever it is that
they want to do to death if whether they're consciously aware of it or not and then
that's what motivates
them harder we'll get back to talking to Alex in one minute but first I need to
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of
Overcoming the Fear of What Other People Think
failing you're afraid of what other people will think of you if you fail but if
you're afraid of that imagine what
they think of you when you aren't even trying oh yeah they aren't
such a dick sometimes um does it is it strange to hear that you're like Angry
toilet tweets
read back to you now in the cold harsh light of day
oh my God that was a particularly difficult poo I was cracking
a real talk the the tweets that I have people don't know this but the tweets are
notes to self yeah so they're just
erected at me so that I can look back on them and like be reminders of like hey
don't don't do that and so like I think
to myself man I'm afraid of doing this and I'm like no I'm not I'm afraid of what
this person's gonna think about me
because if I were to be able to fail in quiet and complete isolation then I
wouldn't care and then I think well what if I what if I what if I don't succeed in
public what
do they think then nothing right they don't think about me at all and so obviously
that comes from the
perspective of uh seeking to gain approval and attention from others anyway so it's
like listen if you're insecure which everybody is let's be
real um you might as well use the insecurity to get something out of it right like
one of my one of my favorite things
about entrepreneurship is like use what you've got and so a lot of people think
that they need to fix their conditions in in order to get like the perfect
conditions before they start but the perfect condition is whatever one you're in
because it gives you whatever assets you have that's the cards that you're
dealt and so it's you just play the hand and a lot of people have great cards it's
like man I'm so afraid it's like
use it it's like I have nothing what makes you very dangerous because you have
nothing to lose right like one of the um really interesting things about I
think about from a business perspective but it probably applies to everything is
that there's always an advantage and a disadvantage from every position right
so like I remember one I mean Jim March is still a big company and still continues
to grow but in the gym licensing space there's not many
people who can compete with us there right and I would talk to guys who are in the
space you know talk you know
talking to conference whatever and you know younger guys would be like well I wanna
I wanna be in this space too and
it's not fair because you know you have this big advantage and I was like you have
a way bigger Advantage than I do I
was like because if I were in your position I would go to every single gym owner
and be like you don't want to be with Jim launch you want to be with Alex you're
just a number to him like you're
never going to talk to him like you're just a cog in the wheel there with me you're
going to get my personalized attention there he's just some employee
down the chain that's following some process right I was like but on the flip side
if I'm talking to that same gym owner then I'm going to say you don't
want to talk to Jimmy he lives in his mom basement he has no proof that he's good
at what he's what he's had the reason that we're number one in the space is because
we've done it so many
times and we have a system that we know that if you go on this side you will get
this result on the outside I was like there's always a position and there's
always an advantage also you just have to play the one you've got and most people
just look at what everyone else's advantages and don't think which one do
I have when you're talking about it's not you that's afraid of failing yeah you're
afraid of other people's opinions about why you're going to fail like the reason I
think that cynicism is so popular on
the Internet is that the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain
of failure that's fundamental it's sour grapes at an existential level right it
is a cynicism safety blanket it is protecting you from ever having to feel the
downside of anything I will assure
my own failure in private so that I never have to face my failure in public
it's kind of like investing like everyone's afraid of losing money when they invest
but the only guaranteed
investment that doesn't work is never investing to begin with and so it's like they
take the long failure rather than the short one
right I mean it's what it is right you just fail long and they're like I prefer
that
um that's I mean that's yeah I it's it's like you and I are going back
and forth on trying to figure out how many different ways can I say that either the
people that you're worried
about judgment are gonna die or that you're gonna die or that even if you do
achieve the thing they won't care
anyways or if you don't do anything they won't think about you to begin with and
don't you want to be thought about to begin with like don't you want some
level of significance foreign
I just you're gonna die and I think like I was very grateful
that so one of my biggest Inspirations or whatever you know influences when I was
in Baltimore was I would have lunch
with my grandfather three times a week so he was 90. old guy so I'll go to the
nursing home and we'd have lunch three
days a week and listening to him talk about the regrets that you had in life
it's so much more painful to watch someone who has no
options left like he's gonna die it means you die tomorrow and he died a couple
years later I mean like and he lost all his mental faculties
you know almost sadly basically when I stopped when I left Baltimore one of the sad
parts is I was one of the only
people that kind of like kept him Lucid you know what I mean and after that no one
really no one really visited him no
one really did anything and so I think he he just rolled down I think the lunches
might have been the only thing that he looked forward to and um seeing
someone old with no options and nothing but regret now not that he had everything
regret he
had things that he did really well and I took those things from him um he would he
would repeat the same
lessons you know like every lunch this would be where a lot of older people kind of
repeat a few key lessons and
everything that he had he flew during and he fled during the um during the World
War II uh you know he fled from
the Germans and all that stuff because he had a Jewish sounding last name um he
wasn't but he it was enough that
he was fleeing right um and he always used to say he's like you have two hands and
one brain I was
like use them there was always this thing they said to me and um I think just like
when I would think
about the things that he was going up against compared to the things that we're
going up against now it just made me feel like all right like this is not
as big of a deal as I really think it is I don't have Germans at the at my door
what were the regrets that you had him
yeah he would have spent I mean again there's deathbed regrets and then there's
real
life regrets but there's there's things that he would have done differently in
terms of the business there's things he would have done differently with his wife
he had he got divorced um that you
know uh he would have done things very differently with his kids so my mother um
and her sisters um which actually talking to him about
how he raised my mother helped me in some way forgive her for
some of the things that I felt were wrongdoings that she had done to me and so
it's funny because you know one of my favorite quotes from Blaise Pascal is to
understand is to forgive and like when
you when you I think there's another saying that I like a lot which is it's really
hard to hate close up
it's like if you really see someone and you see all the things that they went
through and the things that they that happen to them to become who they are
then you understand them and then you understand why they did X Y and Z because if
we don't understand we assume that it's because they're just evil
people and most people aren't that way they're this way because they've been
reinforced or punished for doing something like that in the past and especially for
her she was reinforced
for acting a certain way over and over and over again to the point that it was it
was core to her character and so when that got put on me I was like I hate you
you're terrible you're evil like blah but like when I looked at it on much longer
time rising of like she was four
years old when she came here she couldn't speak English she got beat up as a kid
like all these things I'm like you know what
maybe give her a little Grace you know and I remember when when I came back and it
was right around that same time where I realized I was giving this person all
this power she yelled at me for something when I came back home from college my
freshman year it was a standard fight you know
here's the button that I press to get into the normal fight that we get into um I
just remember she hit the button I just like wasn't that upset and it's
like I felt nothing she like hit the button she like hit it again harder and I was
like and I just remember looking at her and being like I get it I'm sorry
like you had a tough tough life and then she just broke down and you know started
crying because it was like
she felt understood and I think um I know that was a roundabout way of getting back
to regrets but he regretted
how he had raised her but his through his regrets I got to see why she was the
way she was and then it defused the bomb that was between me and her did I tell you
that story Douglas Murray
told me about regrets from Christopher Hitchens brilliant so
In Life You Must Choose Your Regrets
Christopher Hitchens one of the new atheists uh was sat in some British pub
with Douglas Murray when Douglas is Young and did that you know you can imagine
it's some musty Chesterfield
sofa he's probably got a cigarette in his mouth and it's a glass of scotch or
something and uh Douglas is vacillating
between these two different choices that he needs to make and he is
um complaining implementing the fact that I have this thing but I have this thing
and if I do this thing I can't do
this thing and and what do I do and apparently hitch like sat back and
foreign we must choose our regrets hmm
and I was like so I'm three Manhattans deep in Douglas
Murray's apartment in Manhattan at two in the morning and he sneaks off to the
toilet and I quickly write this down
because I know that my like half cut alcohol brain isn't gonna remember it so I've
known it down because that was all
the trigger that I needed which is also a good argument for noting things down and
I reflect I must reflected on that
for a year I must have thought about it for a year in life we must choose our
regrets what the does that mean okay first off
in an existence where opportunity cost is baked in because you don't get to split
test life and by doing a thing you
can't do a different thing I have the chosen going to the gym and going to the
theme park if I go to the gym therefore I can't go to the theme park even if the
decision of going to the gym was the right call I will always have the open loop of
yeah but what if I'd gone to the theme park
you can't ever know right okay so that means that fundamentally
regrets are baked in to our existence and I'd always thought that the reason I had
a regret
was due to some sub-optimal decision I'd made if only I'd made this decision
better I could have ameliorated the regret okay so regrets are an unavoidable part
of being a human and
they're a byproduct of opportunity cost which you can't get away from but what does
it mean that you have to choose
your regrets okay well if regrets are inevitable if
they're going to happen no matter what an easy way to look at the decision is
rather than which do I want to do which
regret could I live with because there are certain regrets that you can't bear
living with now you can
bear living with them but they're going to be worse than other ones yeah so what is
the difference between I need to have
a difficult decision I need to have a difficult conversation with my boss about
leaving to go and do this thing or
I need to that's the regret that's one regret of the sitting down and seeing them
face to face and telling you're
going to leave their small mom and pop business and you're the main sales person
and it's going to be terrible and they're going to cry and you're going to
feel like a piece of that's one regret another regret is looking back at a decade
that you waste in a job that
you hate yeah so in life you have to choose your regrets I love that as a decision
making frame
because it also jump starts our fear engine
because rather than saying like what do I want it's what I what do I hate least and
so we get to run it so then you get
to use your run away from engine rather than you go towards doing yeah the right
Mouse and the cheese again yeah and was
it you telling me that uh with a cat I mean yeah so I'm just going to butcher what
you
told me um but why don't you share the like how much yeah yeah this was on our last
episode so this is the sequel for the
people that were listening um John Peterson talks about the study where they starve
a rat and they put it into a tube
they waft the smell of cheese in from the front and there's a spring attached to
the rat's tail so they can work out
how hard it's pulling how hard it's pulling is a proxy for design for how much it
wants it you'd think this rat is starving it's going to pull as hard as
it can so it whopped the smell of cheese in and it runs towards it and whatever
they do another iteration of the study
this time they waft the smell of cheese in from the front and the smell of a cat in
from behind yeah it pulls harder yeah
why because not only in life do you want to run towards something you want but you
want to run away from something that
you fear and this ties into your the three most common traits of very successful
people superiority complex uh
massive crippling insufficiency yeah and impulse control so superiority complex I
can achieve this thing that's the cheese um crippling sense of insufficiency I
fear the cat impulse control I'm in a tube I mean there's only one direction I can
go I don't need to make a choice yep
I love this a lot as a frame for for decision making because that like think about
the decision that
we were just talking about right so it's like I'm I'm the sales guy and I stay and
like if you were to frame it in
upsides it's like upside is I keep these friends right um
and but I want to leave so that I can start this business right those are the
upsides but when you think about it in
terms of like I wasted decade of my life not living the life I want to me I mean
even when I say it it sounds more motivating even though it's the exact same thing
it's like losing a hundred dollars versus gaining a hundred dollars
people have three times higher loss aversion and so it's like if you can't get
yourself to do something think about
it from the perspective of what you have to lose rather than what you have to gain
you've got a quote that I love my
biggest fear is getting to the end of my life and thinking I wasn't good enough
what's that mean
and I'll Define good enough is I could have tried harder like I want to leave
everything on the
field and one of the things that has helped me a lot I mean in the quote that went
unbelievably viral
um do you want me to do it again do I need to do it again
you don't gain confidence by saying shouting affirmations in the mirror but by
stacking giving yourself a stack of
undeniable proof that you are who you say are outwork yourself doubt and again a
lot of the tweets that I have are
notes to self because like like I have a you know I have a big presentation coming
up we've got 500 000 people who are registered
for this book launch that are coming out and I'm thinking to myself as like how can
I guarantee that when I step off
stage no matter what happens I feel like I've accomplished that I've done a good
job that I can look at myself in the
mirror and say good work and when I was younger I used to have no way to do that
that's because I measured
everything on outcomes but I feel like I've got a little bit more experience I do
have a way to win now but it's hard
and the way that I win is when I finish and I say that there's nothing else I could
have done and so that means that like the reason
that I feel confident about this book that's coming out is I wrote 19 drafts of the
book four full rewrites end to
end to make the book I did six hours a day my first six hours from 6am till noon
every day for two years to get this
book to where it is now and when I was done with the book I was like there's
nothing else I can do to this like this
is it there's nothing else like I can't make it simpler I can't make it shorter I
can't cut it I can't add a visual that I should have added it's done and sort
of the same degree with the presentation that I have I gave myself this framework
of like okay well if I were to speak in
front of 10 000 people I would probably spend a good amount of time prepping the
presentation to make sure it was good I
was like why am I speak in front of 500 000. I was like so I can I can rationalize
spending 50 times the amount
of work and effort and time to make this thing exceptional because I mean the
numbers are hard to Fathom but that is
the numbers like if I had a ten thousand that's what I would do and so it allowed
me to take a presentation and you know I
have 900 slides that I'm going to get through in 60 minutes and I have now every
single day I do a
full draft of the you know I I I'd say that say the presentation of my head and
then I do a
second run where I say it out loud and I record it and then after I record it I
play the recording with the slides up
and I fix or add every slide where I Stumble or there's something that should
be there or Visual and I keep going until now right now I'm a week and change out
and there's there's not much
else I can do to it and so I'll still continue to do that from now until the day
that it happens but I probably won't
have as many changes because I should just keep nailing it and then when I get up
there it doesn't matter if the tech doesn't
work or if the you know the the book shopping page cart you know doesn't you know
doesn't work or whatever it is
because I'll be able to step off stage and look in the mirror and be like you did
everything you could and the
thing is is like no one else will know that because I know that like I could not do
that and I probably like you know
a lot of people were like dude you have so much good will you could probably just
say like cares you know here's the book um but I would know and if I if I
believe what I say I do which is that I'm the ultimate judge during an executioner
of my own self-esteem
then I'm the only person who can say good job or not and unfortunately I have
incredibly high
standards and so I can either just always feel like a failure because I always fall
short of my own standards or
I can create a standard that I I willingly and consciously accept which is that I
will do enough work that there
is nothing left to be done and that means that I can also do fewer things which
means I have to be more selective
about the things that I choose to do but when I do them they will be done well and
they will be done right they say the true hell is on the person
that you are meets the person that you could have been yeah and
a lot of the time I think we look at uh sports stars I'm watching this quarterback
on Netflix at the moment and
Work as Hard as You Can at One Thing & See What Happens
is Patrick Mahomes it's just this artist you know he's he's a halfway
between a warrior and a savant and an artist and a musician and then
everything rolled together right the reason that we love seeing behind the scenes
with stuff like that is it is
somebody at the absolute Zenith of their capacity and they are putting everything
that they can into making this as good
as possible and I think that I sometimes find myself getting I I certainly did
before I had the podcast
I was wistful that I have the raw materials to work very hard at things and I'd
never had a Pursuit that I could
have applied it to there was nothing I remember the first time I ever heard
Peterson say work as hard as you can at
one thing for a year and see what happens yeah and I'd never had a thing that I
could work I could work hard at
business but the line between your inputs and your outcomes is so Meandering and
messy that I can always
excuse away good or bad performances as not being on me and for the most part I
would take responsibility for the bad
ones and not take responsibility for the good ones because that's how I'm wide but
I I never had something that was linear
yeah close to linear I'm like I put an hour in and I get an hour out or more than
an hour out yeah and it's Direct
and then about three years ago I had this conversation with Dean my video guy I was
like I want to turn pro I read Stephen pressfield war of art then I
read turning pro so I want to turn pro with the show what's that mean what would it
mean if I treated this
Pursuit like an athlete does so an athlete they review game tape and they
do mindset work and they've got a sports psychologist and they look at what they
eat and they look at what they drink and they go to bed on time and they're
hanging around with people that are growth minded and they're getting the right
coaches and all the rest everything is done in order to
facilitate performance in the thing that they say they care about um but everybody
has the opportunity to do that
you just need to Define what the thing is I'm never going to be Patrick Mahomes
right yeah I that I no but I managed to
find my thing and then nearly kill myself in dedication toward it there's a photo
that I put up on my Instagram a little while ago uh two weeks after I ruptured
my achilles yeah yeah that's all that and I'm in a boot and I've got the laptop on
my lap and we've created this
arm that'll bring the mic to me because I didn't want to stop doing the podcast
because I'd made this commitment I'm going to turn pro and for three years we
haven't missed a single episode three times a week three times a week three times a
week for three years now and before that it was two a week for a year
and before that it was one a week for a year yeah and it just keeps on ramping up
and the opportunity to commit yourself fully
to something that you care about is Beyond a blessing and when you do it
the way that you feel once you know that you've worked hard is great and we said
before we started you got this big thing coming up which I'm super proud of you
for managing to achieve even though it hasn't happened yet um the difference
between being nervous and being excited before you do
something is your level of preparation in advance of it if you step out on stage or
in front of
half a million people on a webinar which is the craziest sentence I've ever said if
you step out on stage in front of
half a million people and you've done absolutely everything there's nothing to fear
and that's why it's not about what everyone else will think because when I'm on
stage making that presentation
the only person whose voice I'll hear is mine and I will know if I have done
everything in my control to be prepared
or not and what's the best thing that comes out I didn't do everything that I could
to prepare and I managed to fluke
my performance right I managed to like close my eyes throw the dot and oh wow it
hit the bullseye you'll even know
that they'll even be guilt you won't even be able to fully enjoy your success
because you'll have tarnished it with
your lack of input and what's interesting is that when you start defining your own
success that way it
actually starts to feel under your own control but the downside is you realize that
you can do very few things and then all of a
sudden life feels very short because you're like shoot there's like not that many
things I can do before I die if I'm
going to actually do my best and what was interesting is I was talking to a CEO
friend of mine he's a public CEO
um and he was like I need to start making content right I'm like if you're like
managing a billion dollar company I was like you're doing okay man but
because of that type of person he's like I need to be doing better with my content
right he's got a few hundred thousand followers anyways and so
I was like all right well how many pieces of content you're putting out a week and
he was like well I mean I put out one a day
and I was like dude I was like we put out 300 a week and he just he didn't even
respond he
just took he just like pursed his lips and nodded he was like thank you for
resetting my minimum standard it's
always like thank you like and I'm sure like when you talk to Phil Heath and he
talks about the volume that is required in order to gain muscle and how much how
how dialed in he is with food and all the other things um just the amount of sheer
work like
the biggest change in or I'll say biggest reason that I've had
significantly larger returns or outcomes that have happened later on in my career
and they continue to get bigger and
bigger is because the minimum standard for how much work I know I can do on
something has has multiplied a hundred
fold like I look at the first presentation so I was telling Quinn this earlier I
look at the first presentations I ever gave and I remember
thinking to myself when I had this I was like this is a good presentation it's like
25 slides with like a heading and
like three bullets on each slide and being like man this is good I'm like this is a
this is this is a pen this is
like an afternoon but in my mind if I spend a whole day on something that was like
a lot of work now it's I you know I
like using this term like measuring hundreds which is like measuring hundreds of
hours how many hundreds of
hours have you put towards something if you do that I promise you the thing that
you're making will get a lot better and you'll also see how much more you're
capable of which is what I think like my undertone of listening to what you were
just saying with the podcast is like the more you do the more you realize you can
do and so what happens is you're actually even though you're you're going pro right
now you're like
dude next year I'm going pro yeah because this is now just a minimum standard of
course I work out three days a week of course I do three podcasts a
week but dude once we have the the reality TV show and we have the full crew and we
have the headquarter like
because then the path gets lit of where you're gonna go because you're so
singularly focused and you know you have
no other distractions the attention cost isn't you're not paying that down anymore
and you're just like how many times can I repeat this effort and then
that's when you start unlocking Mastery right like I I have this process for
creating presentations and before we
turn on the mics uh we were talking about it but it's like I've done a handful of
presentations in my life and
I've gotten decent at making them but the the process now is so refined which is
like it is game tape it is I make the
thing I do the thing in my head I do it out loud I watch the recording I edit the
thing I do it in my head I do it out
loud I watch the recording I edit the thing and I just keep doing it until it's
glass dude I listen to I listen to every
podcast that I did for probably the first two and a half years I listened back
every single every single time but at the time I didn't cringe because I
thought oh you crushed it anybody can go back and listen to episode one with Stuart
Morton in my old office in
Newcastle upon time and you'll notice every other sentence that he says I go
it's infuriating it's absolutely catastrophic my accent's terrible the
everything everything about it is is awful and yet at the time I thought it was
great here's another interesting
thing I've been thinking about recently um when you don't have anything to say no
to it's easy to focus on one thing um as success begins to get you more
opportunities yeah your ability to say no becomes increasingly important and that's
something that I'm feeling now
yeah just more attention there's we're hockey sticking quite aggressively and
I'm not anywhere near like even middling Zed list Fame yeah but it's enough for
people to see what they think is a penny stock and decide that they're going to try
and throw the hat in the ring yeah which means that there's like
20 things I need to say no to every single week from new people that want to that
want to do a thing why do we try
this thing why don't we do that thing and why don't we do the other thing it was a
piece of piss five years ago to say oh three years ago in the middle of
covert to go like I'm gonna go pro and I'm just gonna focus on this one thing
because what else am I gonna do yeah all
of my nightclubs have been shut down I got nothing else to do with my life now oh
you said you're gonna go pro
interesting let's see what happens when you have 30 other things every single week
vying for your attention now let's
see how committed you are this is my favorite analogy for this which is the woman
in the red dress
but you know every many people have seen The Matrix if you haven't seen The Matrix
you don't need
to have seen it to understand the analogy so Neo is going through the training
program the protagonist Morpheus is his
educator his his teacher and the education program only has one objective and so
he's walking through the city
people are going left and right he's bumping into people going through like crowded
New York and then all of a sudden it's kind of a black and white
palish look it's green black and white but it's still black and white and then all
of a sudden this woman in a red
dress enters the frame and you can't help but stare at this one in the red dress
and she's a complete knockout and
Morpheus is talking to Neo trying to teach him something and as he's talking he's
like Neo we look at me or you're
looking at the woman in the red dress and he says look again and he looks back and
it's agent Smith holding a gun to
his head and he says freeze and then everything freezes in the frame and he's like
if you're not one of us you're one of them and I see that as the
opportunities that we have to say no to every day it's like another woman in the
red dress and it's become a term that we use internal ink right it's like it's a
woman in the red dress and the thing is is that the the more successful you become
or the more able you become the hotter the woman the red dress is right
like you got a homeless girl that you're walking you know past on the streets it's
like all dirty but she's got a red
dress on you're like the thing is is that that Homeless girl when you were in your
apartment actually looks like pretty hot yeah right she's like you
know I'm not you know I I could you know right um but then the better you get the
bigger the opportunities and that's
where you have not your hypothetical 10 but what about your hypothetical 100 yeah
and I had a mentor say this to me
right as we sold uh gym launch he said Alex that you know now that if
it's not a billion it's not worth your time and that was such a single a great
razor for all decisions and so
people come they're like hey we should do this endorsement hey we should partner
with this whatever I mean think about it like we're in the deal world so
how many delay we get we have 3 000 companies a month that reach out to us to do a
deal that's 100 a day currently
and we've done 13 deals in two years and so like if you think about from acceptance
rate it's like you know and
I'm not saying you shouldn't apply by owners go to acquisition icon apply if you
have an awesome business um but but the point is is that like
you're no muscle isn't really a no muscle it's just a yes muscle for the one thing
that matters most yep we'll
get back to talking to Alex in one minute but first I need to tell you about the
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that's shopify.com modernwisdom to take your business to the next level today
heroes and villains
Become a Hero By Using Your Pain
always have the same backstory pain the difference is what they choose to do about
it villain says the world hurt me
I'll hurt it back the hero says the world hurt me I'm not gonna let it hurt anybody
else Heroes use pain villains
are used by it and fukudos here this is a permutation
of what uh Donald Miller said um who's a great writer and he has a number of books
and he he talked about
the first element the second element of that quote is the part that I added to it
um about heroes using pain and villains
being used by it and so one of the things for people who are not
where they want to be is that they have pain like Oodles of pain and I remember
when I was starting
out I was looking for passion I was looking for purpose I was like I just want to
find something that I'm motivated by but it's the it's the cat
and the cheese it's like we're looking for cheese but we have all these cat behind
us and all we have to do is look and remember that they're behind us and
chasing us and so foreign if you have the cat and you're staying
in your current situation you're being used by the cat right you're being used by
the business owner who you know it
doesn't treat you well and is you know and you're in this job they don't really
want to be in right or you're being used by
the situation or the context of the relationship that you're in with the girl that
you're like not that into right versus saying like this is
terrible and because of this terribleness
I now have something that I can run away from and then and then and then like
rather than not looking at the knife or
trying to take painkillers to not feel the pain it's like completely sobering up
taking the knife and twisting it in
your own heart and being like I'm gonna do something about this and I think that
that's that's what the heroes
like if we're heroes in our own story it's not avoiding pain it's choosing from the
very beginning the Alchemy
which is like you have these terrible situations it's like and you have the
opportunity to turn turn them into magic and and and Skip or shortcut
all the growth you're going to have in a really short period of time simply by
twisting the knife and being like I'm gonna do something about it yeah I think
because people presume in the beginning that passion and purpose and meaning and
joy
and fulfillment are the things that get people going but as I've said of all of the
high performance that I've spoken to
the vast vast vast majority of them are driven by insufficiency and resentment
and terrible parents or terrible upbringings or a chip on their shoulder about
bullies in school pick your poison
they have decided to use that to create the activation energy right you can
lower your action threshold and increase how many points you have to prove it's
like oh I I want to live a better life yeah that sounds good it's like I want to
prove the bullies that said I was a
worthless piece of in school wrong it's like that's some potent fuel I do believe
that scaled over a
long enough time it's toxic and I don't think that it's necessarily how long
like a lifetime yeah right like but you I mean it'll it'll fuel you for a decade
pretty well yeah and I think that I look at me I look at you know I was bullied
pretty badly in school and was an only
child and had expectations from parents and and you know I combined all of those
things together and I did have a chip on my shoulder and I did want to prove to the
world that I
was worthwhile and I did want people to to realize that they had doubted the wrong
person
yeah yeah damn right I do I think being really specific about your
pain is helpful so like even being specific about the
cheese really specificity in general is helpful but like even more so like what is
the twisting the pain what is
twisting the knife like what is how do you operationalize twisting the knife right
instead of being like I hate my life right it's
I hate the way Andrew makes me feel when he says that I'm a piece of and I'm
not going to amount to anything comma because he's right like why does it hurt me
like if someone
says Alex you're a piece of you're not gonna amount to anything if someone accuses
you of being polar fat right I I
would have I'd be like I have evidence to the contrary so this will probably not
bother me but the things that bother us are the ones that you know have an
element of Truth or sometimes not an element are comprised almost entirely of Truth
and we just want to look at it and so I think it's
it's the the twisting the knife is looking in the mirror and saying what if they're
right
Success is the Only Revenge
success is the only Revenge as you expand they shrink into irrelevance as
you get louder no one can hear them you don't beat them you cast a shadow so big no
one can see them to begin with when
people copy they copy the wrong stuff because they don't know why it worked to
begin with and when it breaks they don't
know how to fix it because they didn't build it so don't sweat it copycats will
always be behind
good but success is the only Revenge it is such a lovely
there's that um let me tell you the story behind it damn right yeah so I was 15
years old so this was really
early in my life still jacked still jacked always jacked permajact and I uh
it's gonna sound so lame so I had this teacher so I'm freshman in
high school and I might have been 14 whatever the ages and I'm walking through the
hallway and this this
teacher is like an admin of some kind walks out of his office and he's like he's
like son and I was like I'm like
eaters in trouble what am I gonna do he's like you work out and I was like no he's
like why not I was like I don't
know how he's like I'll show you he's like you got the jeans and so that teacher Mr
Gibbons
um ended up working out with me every day in high school and showed me how to work
out and he probably saw on some
level that I was some angsty teenager that felt angry about whatever and I during
our workout sessions would be
like this guy said this to me like he you know you know or like this oh whatever
and I was like man I'm gonna come back at our 10-year reunion and I was like I'm
gonna show him I was like he's gonna
be working for me like blah blah right and he's like no he's not and I was like
what do you mean I was like let me just have my moment he's like no he's not he's
like and you're not going to do
that not if I have anything to say about it when you come back for that 10-year
reunion and I was like what do you mean he's like because if you come back at a
10-year reunion and say hey John like everything I have look at me now
he's like the guy's gonna laugh and be like you did all of this to try and prove me
wrong man I feel sorry for you
and when he said that when he actually played out what my like Revenge fantasy was
in real life I realized it looked it
looks stupid yeah I looked like the beta in the situation right and so he
was like the only thing that you can do is win so big that all of them constantly
compare
themselves to you and then you'll forget they exist and he's and that's when he
said he said
success is the only Revenge he's like it's not the best revenge he's like it's the
only one there's no other Revenge
because everything else is petty everything else does show that you were thinking
about these people all day long
which means they win by default he's like all you can do is think about your goal
and winning he's like and when you
win that's when you become so big that they shrink into irrelevance you cast a
shadow that no one even can see them
behind you this is the Nuance I think on on the previous point when we were talking
about the toxicity of that fuel long term you can see me light up yeah well I think
that when you think about
um the activation energy of using the things that you don't like well you have
to be careful that you're using them and that they're not using you still and a lot
of the time
I get this and in my mod juvenile moments I I see myself do this where
I'll know that there's a game that somebody else that I don't like cares about and
I'll imagine myself playing
that game to beat them so that I can stick it to them right purely for the
reason of sticking it to them let's say that there's someone that really cares
about being in shape and I'm not in as good shape as I have been in the past
and I know that with muscle memory if you give me 18 months and a good amount of
testosterone like the thing that they
care about I would be able to make them feel really bad about right okay so I would
hijack
my own Direction yeah purely to try and prove somebody else
wrong in a desperate and somehow believe that that's me taking control of my life
are you kidding me I'm allowing them to ventriloquize me yeah through pain that
they didn't even mean to give me yeah the woman in the black dress ah the
black pill equivalent right well like now it's like not even a distraction from
your main goal it's like
I'm gonna make a new goal just to wrong this person and then somehow make make up
the story that I'm in control of my
life when I'm I'm really just acting in complete reaction to this person and so in
so doing in beating them at their own
game they've already won by default yep because they got me to change the game I
was playing forget about who won it's
like dude you were over there and now you're over here I see this with a lot of
people I I think that it contributes
to a lot more of why and how people adopt societal Norms the the resentment
that they have it's it's not just other people want this thing therefore I
mimetically want to do this thing too it's I know that other people will
respect me and that my resentment will feel Justified and manifest if I win at it
and that's really compelling that's
like a motivational spit roasting coming in from both ends and it's it's really
really powerful and you need
to be careful I mean I think you know one of the really early blessings and
I'll be on it like this is where I think I was fortunate right like I I realized
when I was about
28 right um that I had been trying really hard to
beat I mean you'll notice a common theme with a lot of my stories but I have one
Central person that I was trying to prove for a very long time which was my
father um and we're on good terms by the way because I always get that question but
uh this was after I left and he
disapproved of my whole thing and for five years we didn't talk very much and so he
calls me up um to he says hey you're going to want
to sit down for this and I'm like okay what are you pregnant you know um
and so he says I'm sorry and and I was like for what and he was like for everything
right now mind you like it's
a middle eastern father born in Iran to a middle to a middle eastern father there
who was even more legit like when
where my father was born women weren't allowed to drive cars cars came with drivers
with them when you bought them
the driver came with the car we're like he was born in a very different world like
fathers don't apologize to Sons it
just it was it just wasn't that way and I have a little bit more a little bit more
awareness than I did then and I can
see that now but for me I was like now you apologize you know what I mean
um and so rather than take it for the Olive Branch that it was uh I said
I didn't care about your opinion five years ago when I left I was like I don't care
now
and he was like well we'll see how long your success lasts and so what could have
been a really nice exchange ended up becoming pretty pretty
ugly but the the main point there was that I wanted to in the beginning like make
as much as my father then it was
making more than my father and then it was make more than my father had ever made
in his entire life and once I had achieved that I realized that
as much as like it sounds terrible to say this but like I was trying to beat him at
his game
and and this is pretty alive in a lot of a lot of Asian culture same thing making
money is a big you know like when my dad
would introduce somebody be like this is so and so he makes this much a year like
it was just really clear like this is how much status someone has and so like
it was really deep for me um but it was only when I realized that I had won at his
game that I realized I
never even asked the question of like what game am I trying to win and I don't know
how many people are actually trying
to win at a game that they didn't even set the rules up for so many when
they're in it and that's why I say like I think I was fortunate that I you know I
hit a really tough goal because my dad
was is a successful man um relatively early on um
but that that for that exchange and then think like and then reflecting black and
feeling terrible about myself from like
saying what I said and then I was like I'm I did everything that I've done to this
point to beat him beat my father the man
who actually raised me who tried to make me the best man I can and when I think
when I really start thinking about it I'm like
I like who I am he raised me so doesn't that mean that he might have
been the perfect father and then that really messes me and so yeah so go ahead well
it's just it's
hard to think that the people you used to have contempt for or distaste or hatred
or
whatever shaped you in a way that you couldn't have been and I often think about
how
the things I'm most proud of in myself are the light side of something that I was
so embarrassed about that's so
ashamed about um you know being an outcast as a kid meant that uh I
love or I'm capable of being on my own Way Beyond how anybody else is yeah so
far beyond it I can work on my own in solitude
for an endless amount of time I can outwork anybody in solitude why because I spent
almost all of my time between the ages of 6 and 16 in my bedroom listening to
audio tapes right listening to audiobooks and like throwing like a tennis ball
against the wall or like
playing with my like Mighty Mouse from Mars or whatever they were called what was
it called Biker Mice
from Mars that was it um and that was what I did yeah so
but I I all of that discomfort and all of the challenges that I went through there
are the thing one of the things
that I'm so proud of myself for now Okay so what if I look back and I said well
all of the the um The Bullying that I went through and the
challenges of feeling alone and being on the outside of social groups meant that I
developed such attenuation and
attention and focus and an ability to distill down what's happening socially which
is why I became one of the best
club promoters in the UK for a decade and a half right because for all of my school
life I'd
been obsessing over how Alex wears his tie maybe that's why he has friends and I
don't have friends or the particular
brand of shoes that he's wearing or the like he carries his bag on that shoulder
and I call him carry mine on this
shoulder because I couldn't deconstruct why I didn't have friends and everybody
else did right okay so looking back
would I have rather had the friends right and had the brother or sister and not
developed this
skill I can't split test life so I don't know right but my life's ended up pretty
good
right and I'm happy with it so I need to not only look back at that stuff as
something not to hate but something to genuinely be thankful for and that is
frankly something I'm still working through
what yeah it goes It goes back to the first thing which is like the most traumatic
events that happen in our life
you know they happen for us not to us but when you expand the time Horizon like
those things and to be fair there are
people who do have really crappy things happen to them and then it destroys them
and then that's it and then they're just done and that's all it is not everyone
has like a moderate amount of childhood bullying and an only child with like
parents that care about them or whatever
like because you were a child coping with the world with the coping skills of a
child
I'm still largely that as an adult Infantry and so
um but I think that I mean the keep the at least for me you know my key takeaway
from both both of these kind of stories
is more that all of the all of the the negative things that happen on the micro
have the
opportunity if double down on to be huge wins in the macro and sometimes in ways
that just a
micro win would never have the ability to be doubled down on and become a capital w
in in the macro
this is probably one of the heaviest Hammer blows I think for today this next one
this is a real anger tweeting no
it's not it's an existential one you've already achieved goals you said would make
you happy yeah
You’ve Already Achieved Goals You Said Would Make You Happy
you've already achieved goals you said would make you happy
Alex's notes to self right [Laughter] um
because we all know the happiness formula which is um when this happens I'll be
happy right
when X I'll be happy or if x I'll be happy um and so we you know I've set up that
equation I'm sure I know you've never set up this equation for yourself in your
life but you know I've set that up and I think that just serves as as my my
biggest reminder um but it's also why I probably am a pretty existential nihilist
overall
um because I I've had so much evidence that none of those things quote brought me
joy but the things that we were
talking earlier about anticipation being kind of the hot button on Pleasure yep I
feel like the hot button on Joy for me
is what I'm doing right now so like I haven't done the event yet right I haven't I
haven't given the presentation
but when I'm in the Rocky cut scene of like of beating I'm not gonna say
beating the cow carcass I'll say that was like um I was trying to avoid certain
words
anyways um that when I'm when I'm when I'm putting that work in and doing the Reps
like that's when I'm actually my most in flow and enjoying myself the most and so
it's actually a lie that I've been telling myself that like once the presentation
goes well I'll feel good
because in some ways now I feel like when the presentation happens I'll be
disappointed because I won't get to do
this anymore I'll have to find something else to pick as a Target so that I can get
back into my Rocky cut scene and so
I think that that that has taken some time and I've gotten better at it I really do
think I've gotten a lot better at it
um at least recognizing because the more the more times I've I've had W's and then
realize that right afterwards I
felt nothing I had to think back of like what are the things that I enjoyed most in
my life and it's always in Pursuit and I'm like
well then why don't I set something really big really far so I can be in Pursuit
for the longest period of time possible and
that's where I think a lot of people from the outside you know they cast their
expectations of Life onto me and say I wouldn't live my life that way
you're always you're always working you're always doing these things but it's like
I'm actually always spending
my time in Pursuit because in Pursuit is my button for enjoyment well what about if
it wasn't achieving the thing at the end if the reason that you set yourself goals
is
exclusively to motivate yourself to enjoy the route toward those goals and I know
that it's not the destination it's
the journey it's kind of cliche and I think this is is slightly subtly different
which is that
it's actually about setting the destination without the destination you wouldn't do
the journey yeah like the
way that you set goals and then achieve them and the dopamine and the trigger that
you get
um I often think about the balance between like serotonin Chris and dopamine Chris
and I don't even know the
difference between that it's like am I feeling sort of lovey and present and and
and wanting to connect with people
or am I driving toward a thing because I have a goal that's in front of me and I'm
very sort of dopamine Chris yeah a
lot of the time um but I genuinely think that if you remind yourself these are the
golden
years yeah like this right now yeah this when you look back these will be the
golden years right
when I had my health I had my full mental capacity I had control of my bladder I
had all of the money that I
needed to do the things that I wanted to crush it with my friends to fly around
America and film these podcasts or to
launch this book that I spend all of this time on and you can even see it in the
micro you can even see it when you
look back on stuff that you've done in your day-to-day business or when you what
you did at University
what were the times that you enjoyed was it when success success came to you easily
or was it when you stayed up and ordered dominoes because you had that
project that needed to be in at six in the morning and you ran an all-nighter and
John slept under the the table and
and everybody ordered monsters and then the next morning we got it done what was
good about that was it when you
submitted it or was it the dominoes and the 3am sleep under the table because I'm
pretty sure it's that
I love this as a side note um
but one of the things that really motivates me or one of my most powerful
motivational frames is thinking about
the person that I want to become as the destination and thinking like I want to be
Bulletproof I want to be bulletproof in these ways I want to be bulletproof in my
marriage I
want to be bulletproof in my business Etc and I think about that man whoever I
want him to be like we said hell is when you look at who you could have been and
realize that you're not that person and then I think if I were to make that
man what would I put that man through to make him who he is
like it wouldn't be easy times it wouldn't be quick wins it wouldn't even be easy
wins
it would be the the toil and the struggle of achieving and reaching for things
that are right out of grasp that are right above my threshold and continuing to do
that to like lift the weight to
build the muscle to break it down and do it over and over again because like that's
what creates the character traits that are the man that I want to be and
so when I'm going through those like really harder times I like to think of like
looking in my mental mirror of like
I'm making you I'm not there yet but I'm making you and that has helped me get
through some
of the harder times and from a gratitude perspective my my most powerful frame for
gratitude
has been thinking about my 85 year old self waking up as my 30 year old self
and all of a sudden looking at Layla and be like man I remember when we were this
young and then looking out the window and being like man you know Vegas wasn't
even developed like there's no flying cars yet like man they were still used gas
like this is so cool and I get out
of bed and I'm like and my elbows don't hurt my knees don't hurt right because I'm
thinking about my 85 year old self
would think and you know we're talking about whatever but it it it allows me to
enjoy the mundane in a way that I know
that I would give everything that I had when I was 85 to enjoy again and it's just
it's a it's a Trippy frame but like
if you can think like what would 85 year old me would be like I'm just not my body
doesn't hurt you know what I mean
like I actually have energy like I can think clearly I don't have brain fog because
I'm 85 right and that has been
probably my single most powerful frame on feeling grateful and allowed me to feel
more present at times when I start
like when I start to feel like I'm going through the motions and just like clicking
in the routine and just like day after day after day and they feel
the same that's been my biggest slowdown where I can pull the reins and be like
just an in my mind you it lasts a few
minutes but when I think back on the days where I when I use that frame the part of
the day that I remember was just
a few minutes that I use it so I did this episode with Sam Harris a lot of people
have problems with Sam Harris I
found the time that I spent with him unbelievably enjoyable I sat opposite
him and a couple of times caught myself thinking I am having so much fun doing
this and he said this thing and I really wish that I'd ask them another question I
should email him about it um
I was talking about presence and and the importance of presence and you could use
it as a proxy for gratitude and he said
that really what you're aiming to do is find small moments in the day when
you just open up and realize what's happening yeah right like Conor McGregor won
the
featherweight title twice because he won the interim because Aldo was injured
right and then he won against Aldo and somebody asked him what are you going to do
differently
this time again before the Aldo fight that you didn't do against the in the Mendes
fight he says
this time I'm going to be present and there's this photo of him and he's stood yeah
like this at the weigh-in and
you've got this entire yeah stadium in front of him and he stood like that he said
the first time he did
it he couldn't remember it because he was just yeah drowning in the in in what was
next yeah and
what I really loved that Sam said and I think that you know you look at somebody
that's a
master meditator or you set yourself High bars for what it means to be mindful and
you realize that you can be present with a sip of a coffee okay I
can be present with this one sip of a coffee and then it like sand in your hands or
like trying to remember a dream
it just evaporates yeah right okay well what if your goal was just to try and
get five of those a day yeah what if that was it what if being mindful was
just five moments when you allow yourself to be where your feet are where your feet
are underneath you
and then what if you tried to just string like two of those together five times a
day like just this first Sip and
then as I put it down the view out of the window oh my God like that's two things
in one and then I can do that five times and it it if I'd asked him I
would have said really is the path to just increase the frequency of the times that
you are where your feet are underneath you
uh and one other cue that I love that I got from an embodiment coach is the
times when you see in your peripheral vision you're looking and the way that our
vision actually works your focused so heavily on what's directly in front
of you if there's ever a Time when you see what's out here you realize that it's
impossible to see
all of that and not be in the present moment because you naturally just opened
yourself up and I love that cue so
during the times when I'm doing things like that same episode I'm like the next
question and there's millions of people
watching and all this stuff and there's this guy in front of me and he's super
smart or whatever ah
this is cool just that one moment and that when I look back on that episode that's
what I enjoyed
that's what I enjoyed about it so I think that being where your feet are underneath
you and allowing yourself to open up and stringing those together
largely allows you to enjoy being whilst you're in the process
of becoming it's also interesting those moments
you can capture a moment independent from your surroundings because a lot of times
those moments you're not thinking
about the goal that you have the meeting that you have the the prep that you have
to do for some talk or some podcast or
whatever it is and a camera where I heard this but they were talking about
Gladiator the movie
and the film opens with this like little bird on a bow right with like the the
leaves and whatnot and then they zoom out from that little bird on the on the on
the bow and it's this disgusting war
scene right and so it's kind of like micro macro micro
um of how no matter how tough whatever the moment that you're going through is
if you can just take a picture of the corner of the room and look at the
beauty in that right of being present in that moment even if it's the suffering
right like you get punched and you're
spitting blood out but it's like this moment that you capture then all of a sudden
like everything Fades away and
you are present and so it can take this what would be a brutal war scene of death
and dismemberment and the thing
that makes it memorable is the zooming in on a detail yeah and so it's like if
we're going if you feel like you're going through through life too fast it's like
just look for a detail whenever I wanted to try and get myself
back into the present I used to have brain fog a lot in my 20s oh really and maybe
not brain fog maybe just the
clarity of my thoughts now is so much better than it used to but I don't know maybe
it was just the drugs I don't know um
but one of the things I used to I used to have this I still have this BMW sat on my
drive with a perforated steering wheel and I
remember that if I ran my thumbs across the steering wheel and I really felt the
perforation really felt it or I'd do it
with a leaf I'd pick a leaf up yeah and I'd really feel the sensation of the leaf I
couldn't think about anything
else you can only have one thought at one time you cannot think two things right
yeah you have a super computer inside of your head and it's got one
megabyte of ram yeah so just think the one thought we'll get back to talking to
Alex in one minute but first I need to
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that's surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom okay so this next one me and you
Nobody Will Hate on You for Doing Worse Than Them
text each other pretty frequently about we've seen this cool thing in someone's
repurposed like one of the things that we've done which is cool and it makes me
feel good that things that we've said or that you've said largely get repurposed um
this is something that hadn't
happened before which is you misquoted me foreign but improved the quote so this
was like
the human centipede of content creation and then I named it okay so this is
famous seesaw when you're on your way up everyone roots for you because you remind
them of their dreams when you're
at the top everyone tears you down because you remind them that they gave up on
them and you have one which is for anyone who
needs a reminder no one is going to hate on you for doing worse than them
and this is interesting because kind of like the challenges you face
in the beginning you don't have anything to say no to therefore the woman in the
red dress is easy to say no to or there are fewer
women yeah this is a challenge that nobody is going
to give you any sympathy for yeah it's a very unique category of challenge because
the total addressable market for
sympathy is basically zero because almost everybody is on their way up and very few
people are at the top
and the people that are at the top are seen as having a degree of privilege that
almost legitimates you twisting the
knife are you poking the finger this is how public figures can have normal
everyday people on Twitter say unspeakable like heinous things to them dehumanizing
things because they do not
see them as human right they don't see them as a person there isn't a person on the
other side of this there is it's they're a representation there are a
menagerie of of ideas therefore I can say whatever I want to them because
they're not they're not really a person but they are and the fact that
before there is any status associated with tearing you down no one is incentivized
to tear you down
and you haven't changed did the Lewis Capaldi documentary I've watched this twice
now no Lewis Capaldi is the
singer Scottish singer amazing dude really fascinating story suffering a lot with
mental health
make this first album and billions billions of streams World Tour phenomenal and
he's playing songs that
he wrote in 2017 and played in working men's pubs around Scotland the same songs go
to number one so not just that
he's become better he's the same guy yeah the same guy and maybe his Productions
improved maybe his recording
quality has improved he's got better mastering in his voices voice coaching's got a
bit better but he's largely the same person
he hasn't changed and he has this quote halfway through and it really spoke to me
and he said
Fame doesn't change you it just changes everybody around you yeah
and that's when you're on your way up everyone roots for you because you remind
them of
their dreams when you're at the top everyone tears you down because you remind them
that they give up on them that really yeah that spoke to me I
wrote an essay on this because I'm a psychopath yeah when I was a gym owner
so a lot of people don't know this but I got a writing scholarship in college like
I was a vice president of the
newspaper I was uh editor of the creative writing magazine so like I've been
writing for a long time I enjoy
writing um and I wrote this essay I said I think the title of it was
um everyone believes in the American dream until it comes true and I remember
because what had happened
was everybody when I when I was sleeping on the gym floor right like you know I was
the I was the underdog and everyone
you know my clients were all like oh good for you you know you're going after your
dream they'd see my blanket and my
pillow in the corner of the gym and they knew I was sleeping there and it was
evident you know I I lived there
um I didn't have a shower I didn't have a shower to go to the YMCA to go shower um
and that everybody was like Pro me
and then people come in they sign up like I'm gonna I'm gonna support you right and
then within nine months I had hired people and I had a manager and I
pulled up and I remember I walked in the lobby and all the same the same people
were like ah boss man's here oh you're not too good for us now right
and I remember being so Jarred by the experience and I was like
you guys rooted for me and I was like and now I I did what you said you were
rooting for me to do and that was when I realized that people want you to do well
but not better than them
and I was like I had gone from Underdog to the man
and I was like when does that happen and the litmus test of when it happens is
depends on who the person is because for
the person who was working at my gym who you know was was a janitor or a cleaner it
happened really quick right for the
people who were more successful uh it took longer and then you know the only people
at the end who would still for me
were the business owners who were doing way better than me right who were still
members of my gym and so that was a
really interesting experience that happened when I was 23 and that was the first
time I went from Underdog to the
person that someone would want to attack but I had a performance coach tell me this
he said
hatred isn't isn't something you avoid he said it is
a requisite for Success he said if you get no hate you are not successful
and for some reason that just like really stuck with me because then it just like
rather than it being this thing that I was trying to avoid it
actually became a leading indicator or an indicator that I was on the right path in
achieving things and so I think
that's why I mean I I don't I don't want two horns or anything um but in terms of
like
my ability to deal with the naysayers and things like that I feel like I'm pretty
good at it like it doesn't really
bug me very much um and I think in large part it was because of how it's framed at
least how
you know in this discussion how it was framed for me early on which is that no one
hates you from above
and even you know even when I think back about like the bullies and whatnot that
you had earlier like even in Middle
School like there were things that I had that were going for me that I couldn't
recognize because of course everything that comes easy to you are things that
they're easy to use you don't think that
they're you know new or interesting or cool and but like at the same time I was
like I'd Advanced a grade in multiple in multiple subjects I had you know Straight
A's I worked really hard I was
in shape right and I but I had these people who would hate but I you know you
internalize it but like now I can look
back and be like it's kind of like the the parents were like it's because she's
into you right no it might not be the
same that way but but just thinking about it as an indicator that the hate is
actually the light that
you're on the right path we spoke about this last time that
nothing is going to be worthwhile that doesn't come with an Associated amount
of discomfort therefore when you start to feel
friends around you and the people that you used to be able to speak a Common
Language with
start to push back and start to make the quips of oh not drinking tonight yeah oh
you must be too cool for us now I know it hurts I know it hurts
that is the lead indicator not even the lagging indicator that is the lead
indicator that you're doing the right
thing and a lot of people listen to this podcast I get messages from people like
hey man I'm a 22 year old rugby player
from the northwest of of the UK I live in Cumbria none of my friends uh understand
me I want to do personal
growth I don't want to live in the UK and when I listen to Modern wisdom I Fearless
alone and it it makes me tear up because I'm like like I
see me in that person I see me in that and
the it's so hard to reframe it the pushback you are getting is the
indicator that you are doing the right thing it is and if you can reframe
the distaste that you get from other people as the same as that
because they're projecting the things that they know they should be doing that you
are doing that they're not doing
and you remind them of that and so it's that it's even so even though the mountain
that you're climbing is
actually a smaller one than the one that you ultimately want to climb you're
actually at the top of their mountain and so they start tearing you down so
like that's where the the Underdog Story that we said the very beginning of this
with the quote which is like on the way up they root for you and then when
you're at the top they try and tear you down because you remind them of the dreams
that they couldn't accomplish right and so you quitting drinking are
you staying in to work on your side hustle or your project or the business that you
want to launch the podcast
that might be you might be at the top of their mountain and so they are tearing
you down because now you remind them that they haven't done it and it's purely a
projection of them onto you and has nothing to do with you and that
I hope that that Comforts someone because what you said I think is like if you're
going through that right now and
like and I promise you every single person who wants to do something with their
life and has done something with
their life has gone through the exact chapter that you're going through and it's
the lonely chapter it's the chapter
where you you're you don't fit in with your own friends but you don't have the
outcomes yet to fit into a new group of
friends and you're doing this thing you're consuming content on the internet you're
you're doing these free tutorials online to try and figure out how to set
up a podcast and where do I host this thing and then there and and you're going
through this and you're like am I is this even worth it because you have
no signs of success right but if there's anything that you can take away from what
we're saying right now is that
the sign of success is the hate that you get along the way and what you can't do
is bend the knee to their hate and fit back into the Conformity because it's
comfortable and it's warm because
like in The Matrix when Trinity opens the door when when Neo's about to go take the
red pill and he wants to get
out of the car she says Neo you've been down that road and you know exactly where
it leads and I know that's not
where you want to be and then he closes the door like right now this moment that
you're going
through is Trinity opening the door and being like you could go back but then you'd
have to remember exactly what the
reason was that you decided not to go out to begin with is because you listen to
this podcast and you consume this content you're like I can do
more than this like because you are starting to live in some of that how where you
look in the mirror and you're like I can do more and you start to see
the person that you could be and you're like this does start to feel like hell the
reason that it's uncomfortable and
the reason that I do have sympathy for the people that see this is
ignorance in some regards is bliss as soon as you begin to posit an ideal yeah you
then begin to compare yourself to
that ideal and the Gap in potential between you and the person that you could have
been begins to get more stuck
and even the slightest glimmer of wow I can I can read a book or follow a
course or listen to a podcast and then work really really hard on one thing and
change the thermodynamics of my mind
change the texture of my own existence day to day because I worked at a thing and
now I understand nutrition you know
I know Kung Fu like I I understand nutrition or I can I understand how to
sleep well okay as soon as you know that sleep is important and what you need to do
to do it every single night of bad
sleep that you have is on you yeah because before you had the excuse that you're
ignorant yeah and guess what
now you don't every worthwhile goal is worthwhile because it has a cost
associated with it and so the cost that you're going through is what makes the goal
worthwhile to begin with because if
what you are setting out to do were immediately available to you then it would mean
it would be immediately
available to everyone which means it wouldn't be worthwhile so the very fact that
it's difficult is why it is worth
doing and so like we can't resent the price tag of the shoes that we want to buy
we just have to make the decision whether or not we want to pay it there's another
real Hammer blow you
Hold Yourself to a Higher Standard Than Anyone Else Does
don't get very touchy feely with like you know I live in Austin now so I'm like in
in the Psychedelic Mecca of the
United States and people talk a lot about like trauma and and Improvement and stuff
like that self-love is holding yourself to a higher standard than anyone else does
that's really interesting to me I think it's believing in the 85 year
old version of you who's exactly who you want to be and then ruthlessly
looking at the discrepancy between the the pittance of a human that you are now
compared to that man or that woman and
then step by step breaking down the many differences and starting on the first one
and pulling the thread
I love the idea that in a truth true self-love a lot of the time is wrapped in
acceptance
and a degree of belonging I reject this entirely I just want to I just want to
throw it out there that doesn't surprise me the idea that self-love is holding
yourself to a
higher standard than anyone else does you believing in you
more than anybody else does is such a first principle's way of
looking at self-love Okay so I'm supposed to love myself I'm supposed
to support myself and be my biggest fan but I don't have the most belief in me
so I'm supposed to have self-love but I cap my own potential
I have so many thoughts so right off the bat even the concept of
fan was something that I I if I was if you're if I was talking to 2013 2012 Alex I
would have rejected that notion
not like the the concept of even being a fan of myself was so foreign to me it
wouldn't been real to me and so I'll
tell you what that Alex internalized which was that I didn't need to deserve
success but I could still have it if I did the things that created success and so
it felt like a cheat code where I was
like I can actually be a shitty person and horrible and suck at everything but if I
still work out and I still eat this
way I can still look this way even though I don't deserve it and that was like the
first it actually felt like I
was like if for anybody who hates themselves you can hear me um that was like my
first big shade my
first Solace my first foothold that I started getting on success was that I didn't
need to deserve it I could still
have it anyways and that was like very empowering for me the other thing that you
said about
acceptance so there's this big movement around self-acceptance and I want to say
that I
wholeheartedly reject it I
you accept outcomes and you accept circumstances you accept the fact that
you were dealt whatever hand you were dealt you accept that you're five eight you
accept that you're black you accept that you're a woman that's accepting you
trying to rebel against that is you trying to fight the universe and the universe
is going to win every time but in terms of you framing acceptance
as saying that I am comfortable with who I am and I cannot be better and I must be
satisfied
with that is the biggest embodiment a failure that I can imagine
is that it's almost it's almost it's almost egotistical to say that
there's a difference between saying I am good enough and I am good so you could say
I am good enough for my
current state based on the work that I've put into it but I could be better and so
like
you can accept that the work that you have done has created the outcome that you've
created but you do not need to
accept that the outcome that you've created is the end-all be-all and the last
outcome that you need to need to have and so for me like
the only version of acceptance that I have is that I accept that the version of
myself that I want
to be is is so far from who I am that I have this massive discrepancy that I
have to overcome and then just breaking that down one step at a time and thinking I
don't
I don't deserve to be that man but I can still do the things that can create it and
it also means
that I have to go through the circumstances that that would create that man which
means that if I have unbelievable Big Dreams and big goals
then I have to go through hard times it's like hate the hard times are a
requisite for success and so if you're going through hard times right now it means
that you're on the path to success
and it's not that you're on the wrong path it's the feeling of being on the right
path and one of the things that I talk with with the CEOs in our portfolio
company and I'm I'm going to bring it back one of our companies
they were struggling with growth big company and he was like I honestly the issue
that I have right now he's like I
I don't know how many locations I can open every month he's like based on the cash
flow that's coming in and out and I was like this is kind of like the
Morpheus free front but I was like I need you to freeze this moment I was like the
feeling that you have right now is that you are missing a finance
function is that they didn't have a good Finance leader and you're like why is this
relative to what we're talking about I'll bring it back which is that
if it's the first time you're going through it you can't recognize the science
because you don't have anything to compare it to and so hopefully
listening to this podcast and listening to other people not just you know not me
and Chris but like other people who are even even more successful whatever
they can at least tell you what it tastes like they can tell you what the room
looks like they can tell you what the temperature feels like they can tell
you what it feels like in their bodies so that when you are going through it you
can say okay I haven't been here before but this sounds like Albuquerque
this sounds like a missing finance and that's why having like and if you're in the
early on stages and and you're going
through the like you're going You're consuming the free content is less stuff it's
like use this because the most valuable thing you can get is the
context of what the experience feels like when you're going through it so someone
can describe to you their experience so that you can relate it to
your present and be like okay I'm on the right path yeah it's the feeling of
loneliness and uncertainty hang on what
if this what if this is a sign that I'm not supposed to be here what if this is a
sign that I'm doing it wrong right and
relinquishing that the if there was a big meta indicator that
you're doing the right thing doing what everyone isn't doing is already probably
the biggest the single biggest indicator that you're doing the right thing like
it's it's the if if I could wish nothing else on my child whenever I choose to have
them in the future is that they
have high agency which is that they are they make decisions independent from the
opinions of other people and when we hear words like authentic and original and
things like that it's because the
person starts at square one and says well what do I want and then they start
building from there I had a conversation with one of my one of my teammates
um who runs our my LinkedIn and he said you know Alex it's easy for you
it's always always a really great start great way to trigger really good please
tell me more why do you go on he said it's it's easy for you Alex to create
this personal brand he's like you have so many interesting things about you he's
like you dress a certain way you act a certain way and he said it's
different than everyone else does right and I said
I don't think that's true I think that everyone has a personal brand that is unique
and different but everyone
doesn't look that way because they conform to whatever what they think everyone
else wants them to look like
and so the fact that they are boring and they resent the fact that they're boring
is because they are living out
reflections of what what they think everyone else wants them to do and so all you
have to do is start at Square
zero and be like what do I want because I realized after I got out of gym launch
that I mean I dressed a certain way for
too much because I was the head of an entire community of gyms and it made sense
for me to dress that way because I needed to
I needed to look that part right but when I was at Ground Zero and I was like okay
what do I want and I thought about
it for a long time and I was like well what would 85 year old me wear I was like 85
year old me would wear probably
the most functional thing he could wear because he doesn't care what his shoes look
like he doesn't care what his shirt looks like he just wants to be
comfortable and so I just started trying all the things that I could possibly
imagine for shoes shorts hats whatever to find the thing that I was like you
know what this is the most comfortable and this allows me to do the most things in
the most rooms without changing and so
people then are like man that's so unique but it was actually just saying if I were
to or if everyone was gone
from existence what would I do what would my work be right how would I dress who
would I date that's a real one who
would I date if no one else told me what they thought about it maybe someone
different than you're dating right now and if the person that you would want to
date isn't the person you're dating right now and the person that you'd want to
date would never date you then maybe rather than dating these
mediocre mollies or mediocre mats you take the period of time you go on
the untrodden path you have people reject you and say oh you're not coming out
tonight you're going to the gym again right oh I can't eat with us right
she's on it she's on a diet again how long I'm gonna stick with this one right
because the thing is is that the stick
to it and muscle itself is something that you work on because if you start a diet
and you failed and you started working out and you failed if you just
make it longer every time before you fail you're still making progress and you're
still doing something that everyone else isn't doing yeah and that
is the biggest meta indicator that you possibly can is if because everyone sucks
like so many people are mediocre like half of the United States is in debt they
don't even have a DOT like they their their negative net worth
and so like just saying different than that like the bar isn't High we talked
about this dude go for it I know I know just go for it the bar has never been set
lower to separate yourself out from
the pack never being set lower and this is for you know the black pill internet
by the way it is supposed to be One Step Beyond The Red Pill to see that life and
dating largely for men is uh there's an uncomfortable reality that if you aren't
blessed with the right physical attractiveness status or money uh LSM looks LMS Lux
money status if you don't
have the right prerequisites you're basically doomed you're a genetic dead end and
eat
um is that a bad thing up according to them I so okay I'm gonna zoom out real quick
and then I I know I know we're gonna go on this yeah yeah so if we're looking at a
species right let's look at deer right
A lot of people have deer in their backyard right well what is natural is
that one buck inseminates 50 Doe and he competes with all the other deer
and the reason for that is because then it actually allows the quote Best genes to
proliferate now best is determined by
what actually continues continues on right perilously close to Eugenics here Alex
well I'm just talking about I'm
just talking about deer I'm just talking about deer if anyone I'm just talking
about deer I'm not saying this is what it should be but the the point that that
I wanted to make was not I think where everyone thinks I'm going with this which is
that a lot of the you know the black whatever
you just said right black pill um I would imagine are casting an expectation on the
universe that it
shouldn't be this way why not and this is exactly like the hater who says you're
not going to
amount to anything and the reason that it hurts is because you're like what if
they're right and then like staring at the mirror with
that question of like what if they're right what if I am out of shape what like
because the thing is is that like in order to be the top quote one percent
or even the top ten percent shoot up or even just above average right you just need
to not be overweight dude you need
to not be overweight right you need to be gainfully employed the bar is so low the
bar is so
unbelievably low uh I got this idea I got it I gotta teach you about uh the alpha
history fantasy right modern men
who are angry at a world they feel has rejected them mistakenly believe that they
would have somehow done better in medieval times they are adamant that the
chance of them being Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon
fodder peasant number one million three hundred and seventy three thousand
whose Favela was sacked and destroyed and it's this wistfulness for the past and
dude I get it like if you feel lost
and alone and like nobody understands you and like you've been forgotten and things
shouldn't be this way guess what
they've always been this way and right now the bar has never been set lower if
you have the opportunity to sit down and listen to me and Alex waffle on for three
and a half hours you have the
capacity the conscientiousness the wherewithal to be able to go out tomorrow and
take one thing
that you've hit from today this is this is something I wanted to get onto which
which I think is
How to Remember Everything You Learn
important which is oh sorry avoiding the mental masturbation you know we can do
this thing and and like
speed quotes Into The Ether and like a like an Uzi right just unloading
all of these different things and I think that a lot of people feel uh a general
overwhelm of indexing of
information and oh my God I'm learning all of this stuff and I don't feel like I'm
making any progress and I really wanted to try and cut through this at
some point in the conversation today as well which is Tim Ferriss has an idea
called the good sticks okay
I when I first started out on this journey of personal growth felt guilty because I
didn't have a perfectly
curated Evernote external brain with nested folders and all of my book
summaries and I was supposed to keep all of this thing and how am I going to
remember it and blah blah blah five and a bit years later
people come up to me and ask one of the most common questions to get asked is how
the do you remember all of the things that you remember
two things first off I don't remember anything that I don't care about and the
second thing massive amounts of exposure
those are the only two things that are going on I've done 670 podcasts in five
years
for hours and all of the reading I had to do beforehand and all of the listening I
had to do beforehand as well
and I didn't stress myself about what I had to remember so if you listen to this
three in a bit Hour podcast
and you go they talked they said a lot of words there Alex said a lot of words
Chris in a lot of words
what's the one thing that you couldn't stop thinking about and then maybe nothing
except like we failed
if there's one thing that you can't stop thinking about that story about the kid
from Cumbria that time when Alex had to
drive across the country that's the thing that is the thing and allowing yourself
to
naturally select whatever the most important learning is from the content that you
consume
is the best way to work out what what is going to resonate and it's the best way to
act on it as well if you can't stop
thinking about it when you go to bed tonight and you can't stop telling your
friends about it in the morning and you've clipped it from this podcast or
any other podcast or any other book or whatever whatever the thing is that you keep
sending photos of and you keep on reciting to people and you try and tell
your mum about and she doesn't cast that is the thing that you need to work on and
you don't
need to do if you take half a thing from this podcast or any other podcast that and
you work on it for a month
you have made so much progress and do you understand how blessed you are to
have this opportunity you could have been born in the Middle Ages before the
Gutenberg printing press when they
wouldn't even give you the Bible in the common language so that you had to go
through the priest to be able to have a relationship with God right now you can
search for whatever it is that you're dealing with find the greatest Minds on the
planet listen to them and then the
next day implement it and you move not only yourself but you move the world around
you
you get to nudge yourself and the rest of the world in a direction that you want to
go and you get to feel proud
about it and it's within your control you have never been more blessed
there's a there's a quote that I wanna I wanna hit here that I think would be
relevant to we were just talking about
with the people who are sad and alone and one of the one of the biggest
breakthroughs that I had from a from a
mental perspective was actually defining emotions for what they are operationally
so sadness
comes from a lack of options or rather a lack of perceived options and that's why
it feels like hopelessness because you
don't know what to do but when I realized that sadness meant that I didn't know
what to do it meant
that another way that I could Define sadness was ignorance and that is solvable and
so whenever I feel sad now
it's been my trigger to immediately think what do I not know what option do I not
see because the opposite of that is anxiety which is you have many options and you
have few priorities looks you have many paths that you could presume you just don't
know which one and so being able
to operationalize what these emotions felt like so if you feel sad it just means
that you need to go learn more and
that you can do and then all of a sudden the learning more becomes the option and
they don't need to feel sad anymore
and that was like one of the biggest breakthroughs from my like mental health or
whatever you want to call it mindset that Set Me Free and I've taken a lot of
effort to try and operationalize emotions so that I can either get out of them or
lean into them so like patience
for example right I'm only bringing this up because I think it might be relevant to
some people is that most goals are attainable if you expand
the time Horizon even enormous ones like you can do anything intense you could walk
to the Moon you could do there you go you can do anything and so for me I
am I would say a naturally impatient person like I tend to want things immediately
now and you know what you
probably are too but once I defined patience as figuring out what to do in the
meantime it
allowed me to control what I did because now like you and I are being patient for
your stock Investments right now as we're on this podcast we're being patient for
that because we're doing things in the meantime and so
whenever I felt impatient and wanted to change course I had to just redefine
what do I need to do today and if you are sad and impatient then it means that
right now you need to learn what the
option is that you need to go pursue and then that makes it very much under your
control and so step by step each of
these emotions over time I spent a lot of time trying to Define them out so that
they no longer control me and I know how to solve them and then and then
now it just becomes a faster and faster muscle oh I feel anxiety that means that I
have many options that I don't have priorities okay what's my priority and
then all of a sudden what used to take days of anxiety and feeling this you know
frog in my throat was just oh
I need to make a list of all the things that I'm looking at which one's the most
important ignore the rest and then
I'm good and what you say days takes minutes one of yours is
choosing the plan isn't hard doing the plan isn't hard sticking to the plan is
hard Charlie Munger said the money isn't made in the buy and it's
not made in the Cell It's Made in the weight and that that like I just feel like
that's such an elegant way of thinking about it it's like the hard part about the
plan is sticking to the plan like the plan wasn't bad your first plan was
good because it's easy to go say I'm gonna work out three days a week for the next
year
and it's a good plan a good plan it's a pretty good plan and the interesting thing
is that like
a mediocre plant that's stuck to always outperforms an amazing and perfect plan
that you never stick with to begin with
and I know this obviously from the Fitness world but applies to everything and so
like the stick to it muscle is
the one that you have to flex and that's why like if you're going through things
you have especially in the earlier days like I remember I used to start and stop
and start and stop and I try this thing I try that thing it's normal because you
haven't you haven't been reinforced
enough of sticking with something right but the thing is it's like you have to
stick it out long enough that you get that first carrot you get that first
cookie and then all of a sudden everything that you did to get there you're like oh
more of that will get me
more cookies and that's and then and then it just becomes the self-perpetuating
cycle then you get addicted to working and then you do a
launch to 500 000 people and you lock yourself in a closet six hours a day for two
years yeah that's exactly that
because I've been rewarded in the past because the first time I actually spent a
lot of time on a presentation and I felt good when I walked on stage
and didn't feel anxiety I was like oh I want this every time yeah and then I had
this the second thought which is the
much scarier thought which is now I have to do this every time this is the new Bob
this is the new bar I want to round
out something on that sort of black pill side which is
if you listen to this and you think must be nice or easy for you to say
I get it like I I get it and if you feel like there is something
that you can't get over some genetic societal cultural defect that means that
you do not have the same ceiling that you think that you should or that other
people appear to have I get it and the
question I would ask is what do you want like do you want sympathy because I will
happily give you sympathy I know what it feels like to be someone that has no
belief in themselves and that believes that you are fundamentally a loser and that
nothing is going to come to you and that you deserve for nothing to come to
you I understand what that feels like but what does that mindset get you like
fundamentally what does that mindset
give you okay so let's say let's say that you have been dealt as difficult of a
hand as possible and yeah
and to quote you to you I can promise you that there is someone who has had it
worse and has done it
better I put this clip out a while ago this like just random talking about a
morning
routine thing and it was pretty basic but it went Interstellar and the real
internet got a hold of it you know
like not your fans but like the real internet like it we've got the general public
and I got a hold of it the most
common comment was something along the lines of tell me you don't have kids without
telling me that you don't have
kids right which is must be easy for you to say I have a daughter to get in the get
up in the morning I'm like okay tell
me what that mindset gets you genuinely tell me what that mindset gets you it says
I'm in a situation which I cannot
get over and there are things in reality imposed on me which stopped me from doing
something there is somebody out
there who has three times as many kids as you and they still do it so what is it
that they've got like what is it that
they're doing have they got an unfair Advantage what is it tell me it's also if you
take down if you walk
down the natural logic of that statement who do you blame
if you're saying must be nice or tell me tell me that you don't have kids without
telling me that you don't have kids
then does that mean that you blame your child for all the things that you don't
have in life it's tough tough weight to put on a kid because I mean I would hope
that they
don't see that comment because then they'd be like wait mom dad like you didn't
live out your dreams because I
exist tough another one here a sequence
You Don’t Have to Feel Good About it, Just Keep Going
actually that I love you don't have to feel good about it you just have to keep
going the feeling will
pass but you will remain you are greater than your feelings going to bed late and
waking up early to work for a few days won't kill you you're not going to burn out
you're doing what it takes if you're
one of those people that push work-life balance just remember the people who like
working a lot don't care I've never
regretted trying harder at anything ever hard times last long but an epic story
feels like a lifetime nailed it yeah I just think
when I look at you in particular and I realize this during our second conversation
at the
start of this year the reason that people get confused about your
motivation and your workload is that they don't realize that the thing you do for
work is the thing that you do for fun that's a fundamental
misunderstanding that people have and because of that you're prepared to
work hard and working hard doesn't feel like wasted time
lots of people associate working hard with not making progress therefore working
feels like wasting
so the idea that working hard doesn't make progress is one of the biggest
forces that exists in humanity because at the end of the day whatever you amount to
isn't going to matter anyways
right and so if there is anything that's Eternal for us at least as individuals
it's going to be who we become in the
process and so one of my favorite quotes is the work works on you more than you
work on it
and so if you want to be the best in the world at something you do the work to
become the best in the world and the
work works on you and so I mean there's a there's a Biblical proverb I think it's
just like
um there is there is profit in all labor and that means that even if
the thing that you're working on right now doesn't amount to the outcome that you
expected that it would it doesn't
mean that you don't become better through doing it and so I'll give you a very real
example
so I spent five years building a chain of gyms so I had six locations and after
that I sold five of them I shut one down and then I transitioned to doing
turnarounds
in the transition between shutting my gyms down I got a big payday because I sold
my five gym big for me relative
I took all that money and I put it into the next thing the partner that I had in
that next thing ended up taking the
money and disappearing filing bankruptcy and sending it to his girlfriend in Sweden
I couldn't make this up so
there's no way I could get the money back and he had filed bankruptcy there's no
there's no course of action for a lawsuit
and so a lot of people would probably go through that mental situation and think
and I went through this was thinking I
just wasted the last five years like I literally started a chain built like put
everything into the second location put
everything in the Third location the fourth location it kept going right I kept
doubling down and then I get my big payday and I put it all all on black and
then it disappears with one spin of the roulette and so here I am and I'm like I
have nothing to show for the last five
years of work but then in the next 12 months I made more money than I had ever made
in my
entire life up to that point the five years I made I made the I made more
profit the next 12 months than I mean the last five years times like five and it
was because and this is only I
was only able to really realize this in retrospect which is why I'm sharing it
which is that
the thing that was the outcome of those five years was me and the skills and the
experiences that I possessed through
going through it and so whatever the next Mountain that you're trying to climb is
of course it's going to be higher but it's going to require you to
go through the smaller mountains to get to that point so because the more able you
are the more able you realize you
can become and you will get way bigger outcomes from the things that you have
like the path that led you here then then you then you think you can and so
that's why since that moment when I lost everything and then I was able to make
more in the next 12 months I realized
that no work is wasted because I am the output of the work not the outcome
and that was one of the biggest frame shifts for me in never thinking that work is
wasted because the more I work
the bigger my work ethic the more my work capacity increases and to give an
exercise example because I think it's
it's cool and interesting is that a lot of people talk about this concept of
overtrendic don't worry I'll bring it
back all right they talk about this concept of over training I remember I was
talking I had this a woman that Layla and I are friends
with very successful business owner had a boy toy with her and he was like aren't
you concerned about overtraining
and I was feeling a little pissy that day and I said bro once you start
looking like you work out you can worry about over training I was like until that
point you don't need to worry about over
training I was being a little bit mean but I think he he did remember it he did
change the way he trained and he did gain muscle afterwards so I felt okay
about it now the point of that little quip right was that
what I explained to him is that your ability to recover from working out itself is
trainable so when you do more
volume your ability to withstand volume your work capacity increases and so to
the same degree people are like I feel burnt out the thing is is that you either
die or you adapt that's it right
and in the Fitness World you either die get injured or adapt right and since you're
probably not going to die you really just need to make sure that you
don't get injured and if you don't get injured and you don't die you get better and
so that mental process in terms of
how I see work has been like the most self-fulfilling prophecy that I've had
because the more I work the better I get
it working the more productive I am per unit of time and so and then I get the
outcomes that happen eventually but the
point is and you've probably I mean I already know you know this but the outcomes
become so irrelevant
compared to the reward that you get in the meantime because the people who are
experts and this is from my my good
friend Dr Kashi people who are experts at any skill become experts because they
learn how to become rewarded from the
work itself and so like they don't actually have something that you don't it's just
that they measure success
differently foreign Yourself by your actions not by your
Judge Yourself By Your Actions Not Your Thoughts
thoughts I became significantly less disappointed in myself when I started judging
myself only on the actions I
took not the thoughts I had so patience is a virtue that I feel like I
haven't had and it's been something that I've spoken over myself for many years I
was like I'm an impatient person I want things fast Etc
when I realized that I should use the same lens that I judge other people on when I
judge myself which is someone
might say I'm a really honest guy but if I have no evidence that you're an honest
person or when I put you in a situation
where you could be honest and you're not I would say no you're not now that person
probably thinks of themselves as honest or to the same degree I'm a
really loyal guy but as soon as I put a 10 in front of you and you've got your your
girl at home you jump you're not that loyal you just haven't had the
opportunity to show that you're loyal and so for me my thoughts about what I
thought
I was were actually really negative but when I try to think okay well I can be
patient if I act patient even if I don't feel patient and then that allowed me to
start giving myself a stack of undeniable proof that I am who I wanted to be and I
don't
believe in binary traits meaning like he's patient or he's impatient or he's loyal
or he's disloyal it's the question is how loyal are you how honest are you
how patient are you and by switching the character traits that I wanted to have
into progressions or continuums allowed
me to make progress on them simply by giving myself more proof or one more Penny on
the scale that says I'm a
little bit more patient than I was I'm a little bit more patient I'm a little bit
more patient to the point where I have so many pennies on the scale that I can
say I think I am pretty patient even though every time I put a penny on the scale I
don't want to put a penny on the scale I want to get the thing to happen
today I want it to happen yesterday because why is it taking so long it didn't take
that long for this person that feels like I feel like I work
harder than them and I feel like I'm better than them why am I not doing that but I
put the penny on the scale well
ultimately what is patience is patience feeling patient or is patient doing the
thing that is patience so Sam Harris in
his first conversation with Joker willink about 10 years ago they talk about how
courage is an unfakable
emotion and it's such a good frame you're gonna love this so he said if you do the
thing in spite of
being fearful of doing the thing that is courage and if you don't do the thing even
though you felt like doing the
thing that is cowardice and I think that motivation and Patience are exactly the
same if you're patient despite not
feeling patient that is patience yes that is how it works and that was that
realization that you just said was the reason for that quote because it was me
realizing that I can actually have these traits even if I don't feel like I live
those traits and so that's why probably
at least for me when people are like whatever the trade is like he's so humble he's
so whatever like
you probably will never feel like you have the trade but you can still have the
trait based
on evidence rather than emotion and I think that frame of evidence has been I mean
if I had a North star of personal
development for myself it's been just give myself proof and I mean in so many
ways like the reason that I didn't I mean I'm going to go on attention but again
I'll bring it back I didn't talk about how to run gyms
until I had six gyms because I didn't feel like I was qualified enough to talk
about it and I only started talking
about gyms when so many people were like dude how do you run your jibs how do you
run your gyms and if I rewind even before that I didn't feel qualified to
talk about Fitness but I had a six-pack for a decade you know what I mean and I had
multiple State State records but I
still didn't feel qualified to talk about Fitness until everyone was like dude how
do you how you do this how do you strength train how do you how do you eat this way
whatever it is right and so
if you if you can give yourself evidence the world around you like Fame like your
evidence will change how people treat you independent of how you feel about it well
this is why the must be easy must
be nice is so flawed because what you're saying is I see the outcomes and I have
no idea of the difficulty of the inputs I have absolutely no idea what barriers you
need to get over you could be you
could find it 99 out of 100 difficult to be patient and yet you are must be nice
for you
you've got that patience Gene you go eat eat you have no idea how hard it is
for people to do the things that they do and the people that make it look easy in
some regards contribute to this
problem like I I and this is why I really love a massive fan of a lot of your work
and I think that one of the
reasons is that it's so honest and and self-effacing about the challenges and
about the steps that you have to get through and because the journey is relatively
well narratized and you can
you can track it step by step and you've created a kind of a cohesive timeline of
how all of this stuff worked there is a
point along specifically your journey but hopefully mine and other people's too
where people can inject themselves
and say oh I'm at that bit I'm the 15 year old that I'm at that bit
I resent my parents I've just lost all my money I I feel like I need to you know
like you have every different
problem that you can encounter in life is present in Alex's timeline and I think
that that's really important
I think this this is one of the I would say this is a criticism that I have about
some of the personal
development self-growth and a lot of the business advice as well
even the bad times are romanticized and they're not romantic like it
feels like hell it feels like to do the thing to fail to not feel like
anybody cares about you to not even know that there's going to be glory in
retrospect yeah
it feels despondent and destitute and sad and alone
and I get it and I think that the more visceral that we can make these stories the
better it is because I know that that's what would have resonated with me because I
would have gone that's an undeniable stack of proof that you were
where you said you were I'll tell you one that maybe will resonate with somebody in
the audience
so I remember when I decided to move so I moved to California to start a gym or
get into fitness and I got there and the guy who I said I was going to Mentor under
was like where are you staying and
I was like I don't know I just got here and he's like what do you mean you don't
know I was like I don't know I just I just showed up and so he went he said I
could sleep at his place that night the next morning went to the gym and he got on
chair and said hey who here is going to house this kid and
one guy came up to me was like I'll give you a room so I rented one room in a house
for 400 bucks a month
and then when I left that room to start sleeping at the gym which was an hour away
because I couldn't make the commute
so I saved 400 bucks a month I remember being actually kind of excited about it I
remember being like man this is an
essential story yeah this is this is my Rocky cut scene right the thing is that the
rocky cut scene lasts 30 seconds in
the movie but it can last five years in your life and when I was sleeping on the
gym floor
I'll give you a detail that that'll tell you that the stack of an entire
um was that I my first gym was underneath of a parking garage and so there's these
metal dividers in the
ceiling and so cars would drive over this and it's a Concrete box and so it sounded
like a gunshot like
and it would happen at all hours tonight and probably the most painful from an
emotional perspective experience that I
would have on a regular basis was that it was also abandoned enough parking a lot
that college kids kids my age would
go up and party on the roof and so like while they were partying literally above my
head and making noise that would
prevent me from sleeping I would be down below in an in a dark Warehouse in a city
that I knew no one
like I was from Baltimore I drove across the country I went to Huntington Beach I
literally knew no one and no one knew me
and so I'm sleeping there and then I realized that I can't really sleep at night
and so I'm I'm taking basically
I'm living on naps for the first six months of the gym and like homeless people are
sleeping in
my parking lot and I have to like go out and tell them to like go away and then I
get back lock the door and I go back on
the AstroTurf which is where I slept with a blanket and a pillow and I I bring this
up because like the visceral
feeling that you go through when you're going through the mound of period or the
eating what feels like a
marathon is that it's it becomes 30 second sound bite in my
story yeah but it was years and so like even at the same group of like man you're
such a natural salesman the first
job I ever got offered out of college was a sales job and I said I'm not a Salesman
I'm an academic oh and then as
soon as I opened my gym I was like oh how do I pay rent and someone walked in the
door and I was like please give me money uh I promise and I I had
no equipment in my gym because I couldn't afford any so it's an empty gym with just
Turf and I was like I promise
you I will get you amazing results and they're like are you gonna be here tomorrow
and I was like I sleep here I have to be here I promise I'll be here
it's impossible for me to not be here I can't live I can't leave right and so the
early people took pity on me when
they literally paid the for the first 29 members I signed up in the first two weeks
before the gym opened was from pity it wasn't from Charisma it was pure
pity I'll be real with you and it was the exact amount that I needed to pay rent
and I remember the first month of rent that I paid with this is actually
wild I only I only looked at this in retrospect I made exactly four thousand nine
hundred and seventy two dollars in my
first month of my gym my rent was four thousand nine hundred and seventy two
dollars and I remember working like a
dog to get that I'd never made money in my life like I never like really asked
anyone for money and all of a sudden I had to come up five thousand dollars in
a month and then at the end of the month I watched it go to zero and then I was
like I have to do it again
and that was when like the reality of the situation of like there was no Escape
there was no one who was going to
come to save me and there was I couldn't blame my dad I couldn't blame my mom I was
the one who had chosen this life
but the alternative was that I had to go back to my father of failure and have him
look and look me in the eyes and say
I told you and come here come here don't worry about it you know I told you this
this gym stuff this Fitness stuff this
starting room it's it's for later it's fine just go about hey you've got this
you've got this great degree you've got
just go to the go to the business school to do the thing and I knew exactly what
happened but would have happened after that
is that for the rest of my life he would have had absolute authority over
everything that I did and that felt like
death and so that was what I ran away from when I was in that moment like whenever
I felt like my back was against the wall and I didn't know what to do
and it felt like the Instagram reels of like the motivation weren't going to get me
through what I was going through because no one cared that I was sleeping
alone I let them know I'm sleeping on the floor and a month later when you're still
sleeping on the floor and everyone's like don't care like great
you're pursuing your dream right right early days but
despite that the must be easy Mantra is the easiest indicator that you have a
victim mindset because what it means is I can't achieve this thing because on some
level you say
it must be easy there's some level of desire that's there you're like I'd like to
achieve some aspect of this and then rather than feel the pain of saying that
I'm inadequate or I'm not taking action we cast our our inadequacy on some outside
object or some outside
circumstance and by doing that we remove all agency and all power that we have over
a lot our lives and for me I would
rather be somebody who has absolute power and have nothing to show for it than
somebody who has all the all the
the things to show for it but know that I'm life's
life being one protracted training montage is a really important lesson to
learn the fact that in the Rocky movie it is 90 seconds and then everything is
fixed and that can last for decades that can last for years and I think that
the lack of Glory the lack of certainty yeah
it makes it it turns it from worthwhile
Majesty into it's it's not even sufficiently
triumphant to be called sad like it's just like weak and pissy and
you have no idea if anything's gonna work but what's the alternative entropy is
going to come and get you so
what's the alternative like my Twitter bio says locally reversing entropy and I I
think that that really is what you
should try and do because it's going to come for you the lack of certainty is what
actually makes it
worth it and so here's my point let's think let's consider the alternative which is
that you are on the path and you are guaranteed to know that you're
going to get the outcome all of the mystery is gone there is no
excitement which is why they said you know in the ancient Romans are sorry the
ancient Greeks would say that the gods always envied The Mortals because their
life was so ephemeral they had so much chance that could happen to them right where
the gods always knew that they weren't going to die and it was
completely guaranteed and so what we do is we basically have this wish that if it
actually came true we would hate it
even more than our current circumstance if you knew that you were going to succeed
it wouldn't be worth doing to
begin with the fact that you are uncertain when you start is what makes it
worthwhile and the fallacy of being
in the pursuit is the worry or the concern that it won't amount to anything because
who you are becoming is the
thing that you are amounting to in real time every day this was something that Mark
Manson
Success Comes From Doing The Things Others Won’t Do
tweeted he put it in his newsletter actually and it made me think of a lesson that
I learned a long time ago
stop complaining about the results you didn't get from the work you didn't put in
the only way to become more
successful than most people is to be willing to do something most people aren't
willing to do
and this is that lean in mentality again take a look it sucks it's shitty you're
tired
everybody says that you're leaving your friends behind leaving your family behind
betraying your culture betraying
whatever expectation it is that they have on you you need to do something that most
people aren't willing to do because as
we've said the average American is obese in debt and divorced like is that really
oh brilliant fantastic I'm in the
center of the bell curve distribution here that's really congratulations and then
the other side
stop complaining about the results you didn't get from the work you didn't put in
okay so you didn't lose weight this
month did you follow your diet well I did for half the month okay so is it any
surprise that you didn't lose any weight houses your content creation game going
well I I you know I spent a lot of time
planning for the podcast that I'm going to release of for the Instagram that I'm
going to start or from the sub stack
that I'm going to begin writing on okay and what did you actually do it comes back
to like the work
doesn't care yeah Charlie Munger in one of his seminal speeches he talks about how
to guarantee
failure how to make sure that you are a failure and he inverts the the concept
of success it's like what could you do to make sure that you were a failure it's
like well you would definitely get involved in drugs drinking he says was
it leveraged liquor in women that's you know the Charlie is Charlie's big one right
but one of the ones that he has I think
he has seven in his in his in his speech is consistency he's like you have to make
sure that you're inconsistent he's like because if you are consistent and you have
none of the other attributes he's like it's
you still might be successful he's like it's it's very tough for people who are
consistent to not be successful and he
makes an especially pointed point about consistency because in my opinion it's one
of the most difficult of the virtues
for humans to do because we're so attracted to novelty and so like I mean I used to
deal with this with you
know people on their diets all the time I remember I ran gems and so someone would
come in and I would always ask a question so have you been following the
meal plan and then they would say yes and so then I started changing the way I
asked the question so I'd say out of the
21 meals that you were supposed to eat how many of the 21 did you have exactly the
way it was on the meal plan and then
they would be like oh I mean at least half and they would say it as though that was
a mark of success
and right now the meal plan could be your content plan it could be your it could be
your showing up to work on time
plan it could be the time that you want to put towards your side hustle doesn't
really matter but if there's one muscle that you can Flex
it's learning to do the same thing over and over again like one of the one of the
values that we had at gym launch is
do the boring work because boring is what makes you rich right it's it's it's it's
it's writing the follow-up sequence
to your to the purchase page that you don't feel like doing but you know you should
do it's running the split test
for the 10th time it's it's actually going through and prepping for 20 minutes
before you have the meeting
because it's amazing how much smarter you can appear with 20 minutes of preparation
like you can appear 50 IQ points smarter if you just prepare for meetings for 20
minutes I remember I did a Consulting
day which I've only done three in my entire life and when I showed up uh to the day
because I always want to make sure that everyone always gets more for me than I
than they give me um I had taken I don't know four hours
not a long time but a long time for I think some people but for me four hours is
nothing I count in hundreds so this
was irrelevant and so I took four hours and actually took the time and put it in to
do research on the individual so I looked
at every single page they had every landing page every offer every everything and I
had seven pages of
things that I thought would make them more money and so when I started I was like
this is what we're going to go through today and I'll walk you through line by line
and
you'll have this as a take behind so you can execute it with your team it's a
bigger company and the guy was shocked he was like
never my entire life as anyone had this preparation and that's what goes back to
like you need 20 podcasts to be in the top one percent the the bar for excellence
like I have this
timer that I have on my desk which it's it's the easiest purchase you can make I
think it was like seven bucks on Amazon it's a little twist kitchen timer it's
very easy and it's been probably my biggest Focus hack you know to date which is I
turn it when I want to start
working and part of it allows me to think how long I get better at predicting how
long it's gonna take me to do something so I think I think this
will take me 35 minutes so I turn the clock to 35 and I click on and I start
working on the thing and the moment my
phone rings or I look at slack or whatever I stop the timer and so you actually see
that your time on task is
usually significantly less than you think it is and I think that in my early days I
would spend a very
long time in front of a computer telling myself that I was working with very few
minutes actually on task and that's why
I think that most things are actually significantly easier than people think they
are they just don't know how to try hard because the harder that you try the
easier it gets and so it's like if you can just learn to love what trying hard
feels like
then all of a sudden it becomes unreasonable that you can't win so like for the
presentation that I'm giving I
explained a little bit earlier about what my process looks like if you were to say
what would it take for somebody to be unreasonably good that it would be
impossible for them to not be a top one percent salesman or a top one percent
content creator and he said what would that person need to do irrelevant from
outcome what would be the actions or evidence that they would have to do prior to
that thing that would make it unreasonable that they couldn't succeed
and then you do those things what happens is you realize that it's actually not
that hard because you put so much work into it and the bar from
other people working is so embarrassingly low that they then ask you how you did it
it
must be easy consistency
doesn't guarantee that you'll be successful but not being consistent will guarantee
that you won't reach success you have a productivity hack an easy productivity hack
instead of spending time getting in
The Ultimate Productivity System
the mood to work just start working confront the work people think they need
perfect conditions to start when in
reality starting is the perfect condition I'm married to that
I love that because if you think like I you know I obviously
am somebody who always wants to optimize how much work I do per unit of time and so
I I was you know there was definitely
times earlier in my life I was really romanticized by these like very extensive
morning routines and supplement rituals and like all this
stuff of mental masturbation around the work that needed to be done but when I
looked at two hours later and nothing had actually gotten done
the moment you begin working is when your output per unit of time goes up and so
that makes beginning the single
greatest hack that you can have for everything else that you do and work because
things when you start working
you start getting in the mood to work right like everything else is procrastinating
around the work that you think you should do but like I have
noticed for me at least I have these I have some big mental tasks you know what I
mean like big content piece or big thing that you need like you know it's
going to take real mental effort it takes me like five minutes of actually being in
it to then get a little bit of
a lay of the land to then get into it but I used to take hours to delay to
start the first five minutes and so my time compression of when I thought I should
start doing something and when I started doing it over time it's just
compressed to the point where it's like the moment I think that I need to start
doing it sometimes I just start it because then what happens I get this
open loop and so rather than complete work at like because a lot of people were
like I want to complete it at this really nice clean Point stop halfway
through the sentence because it'll drive you mad that's the zygonic effect in full
work do you know this story psygonic oh wow this is it's way more
than I do that's why you shut up that's what you're leveraging here so um the
zygonic effect was a study
originally done on servers in restaurants okay and they realized you've ever been
at a restaurant and a
server comes up and stands with the hands behind the back and go what would you
like tonight sir and you say I'll have the lobster roll and a glass of red
wine and a blah blah and you're like this motherfucker's not he hasn't got a pen or
a pad of paper he's crazy and
then they go off and what they realized was servers in restaurants were
unbelievably good at being able to
recall exactly what a table's order was while that table's order was still open so
uh guys in table 16 they want to swap
the peas out for a little bit of extra rice and they're doing this thing as soon as
the table was closed they
couldn't remember anything so this is an open loop closed loop system and it's
built into the brain
the brain abhors an open loop it's the same reason why Netflix Cliffhangers at the
end of every episode guaranteed that
you'll watch the next one because you can't bear the fact there's even novels in
the dark romance genre that make
guarantees that there won't be Cliffhangers they make they put it on the front or
the back of the book and
they say no Cliffhanger is guaranteed which is people have so much distaste for it
that
it's a selling point that you get the closure at the end of it and finishing
halfway through a sentence
reduces the activation energy required to begin that sentence the next day and it
keeps it in your mind too overnight
so I think yeah whether you've stumbled on it or whether you knew about it you've
managed to leverage a pretty
powerful piece of psychology though sick going back to the work thing uh another
one from you that I absolutely adore it just takes work shitloads and shitloads of
work every time I try and dress it up
or cut a corner I get brutally reminded the work just needs doing the work
doesn't care who you are it just cares that it gets done
I'm actually going to reverse quote David Goggins on this one but uh I love this
quote that he has
which he says there's no shortcuts for you David or there's no shortcuts for you
Goggins I heard him say that and I
just love that as a refrain which is that a lot of people look for a shortcut but
the idea that you say like they're
not for you you don't get to use them you are immune to shortcuts I just love it
because then it just
further shortcuts the path to the work that needs to get done and I wrote that
tweet on my I don't
know 11th run of this presentation that I'm doing because that's a recent one yeah
and so I was it was like 11 o'clock
at night and so right now I'm working triple shifts which is not common for me I
usually do two not three
um so for me a normal work day is like I wake up uh I start working at you know six
or seven and then I go until about
six ish so it's like 10 to 12 really concentrated of hours work and that I can do
six and a half days a week I
usually take Saturday afternoons off um and it's really just because at that point
I can't work anymore in My Brain
Stew and then I I get my one half day and then I'm good to go and I'm rearing to
kick on you know to work on Sundays
my triple shift is I get I go to dinner and I come back at 7 30 and then I work
from 7 30 until 11 30 or 1 or whatever
right and when I'm putting in triple shifts is when I know I'm like really gassing
it
um and that's that's what I'm like repeatedly doing 16 17 a day of actual
productive work and
I I hear the same thoughts that everyone does which is like it's not gonna matter
like it's fine you've like it's good
enough like I hate that like it it makes me sick to even say that right because the
thing that I like David Goggins
right he's got like there's no shortcuts for you I would say the one that I have
two that are like my internal ones one
that is probably the most common is I will do what is required and
this work needs doing and there's just no way around it and it's just it's just
looking at the face
of the work and it's like smiling back at me like no one else is going to do it
um and like I love that one like when we're recording content in the early days
we're doing like 100 shorts every time
we did it and it was direct to camera and it was the only time I could fit it in
with all the portfolio stuff that we're doing
and so I was it was always like I will do what's required and that's been a really
helpful refrain for me when I'm
confronted with especially when you know what needs to get done and the second one
is
but I'll know and so like even if it does go well and
even if everyone else says it's great but I'll know and it'll then rob me of all of
the joy
of all of those moments in that experience because I'll know that I could have done
better and the thing is
it's like to to quote myself from earlier like I've never regretted working harder
ever not once and some people like on your deathbed you're like no because I lived
every moment of my day doing what
I wanted to do and I remember I had a boss when I um my first boss after college
she said this thing I had had a particularly good weekend and she said
I'm pretty sure happiness is stringing as many of those days in a row as you
possibly can and although I hated the job that piece of advice has actually been
probably
what I has been my blueprint for how to live which is like my birthday looks the
same as my Tuesdays which looks the same as my Sundays you know what the original
name
pool for this podcast was this is the only time in history I've done branding my
entire adult life and with club
nights all you're doing is coming up with Brands Paradiso oh it's it's tropical
there'll
be a flamingo a skint oh it's a cheap night it's for people to get fingered in the
corner like it's we all I did was
branding right I was a branding guy I'm pretty good at copywriting all I did was
running the one time I've had divine inspiration
three in the morning wake up with the name was Modern wisdom the one time out of
every business every night every
brand I've ever come up with that was the one time but on the list of the others
mind mind and matter was one of
them the other one was a quote from Tim Ferriss it's called crushing a Tuesday and
he said that what you should aim for
in life is for your average Tuesday not the spectacular one-time private jet
with the friends to go for the whatever whatever not the UFC power slap launch
party staring at the back of Dan bilzerian's dirty mullet like
not that you want your average Tuesday to look the way that you want most of your
life to do
and when I think about the days that I look back on at the end of my day and think
like today was a good day invariably it's the same few things it's
I worked very hard on something that I felt was worth doing I worked out and I
spent time with
people that I enjoy being around if I do those three things I had a good
day and so that's been my you know Alex a simple blueprint for doing things and
I think the point that you were making earlier I think it's worth hitting on again
which is just that like most people's definition of work is a
negative one which is why they abhor it which is also why they misunderstand so
many people who quote I'll say quote here are successful or ahead of them or
whatever is that both people one person says the word work and the other person
hears the word pain
and so the first step to like becoming more successful is understanding the
language
that the people who are successful are using they're actually defining the word
differently and so
whatever that thing is that you actually enjoy doing where you lose track of time
when you're in it even if it's challenging but usually it is
challenging right like it's not easy because then it's boring right which is also
why the uncertainty thing is so key right to not knowing if it's gonna if
it's gonna work or not you are going to work though either way um is that the
people who are quote
addicted to work make it easy to be addicted to work because they do things worth
doing
and I think a lot of it is coming down to making sure that you take the few
precious seconds that we have to do the
few things that are worth doing for the rest of your life the more I listen to this
the better my
A Hack For Knowing Who You Should Take Advice From
life gets if they don't have what you want don't listen to what they say there's no
greater waste of time than
justifying your actions to people who have a life you don't want
that was a message to my younger self but um I remember I got it in well I won't I
won't call it out um let me see how I can say this the right
way um you know what I'll just say it I'll
whitewash the names so I was with a family member and we were all around the
kitchen table and starting the holidays
because I don't go home very much and they kind of started attacking me
um and they're like I would never live your life you're so unbalanced like
attacking and
I was like what are you saying and
she said I I just would never do that and I was
like all right well what part of my life is unbalanced I was like do you feel like
my health is unbalanced I was like do you feel like my marriage is
unbalanced I was like do you feel like my finances are unbalanced I was like what
part of my life do you feel like is
out of whack she was like you know I'm not as good as with words as you are and
that was the
and I was like okay so the fact that you can't make a logical argument I'm not
going to continue how that conversation went but
the the tldr of that was I really thought a lot about it and it came down to
I wouldn't live your life and my response to that is good don't
it's not your life it's mine live yours the way you want and I wouldn't live your
life either and so what ends up
happening is they become these statements these projections that are not actually
real now on some level maybe they were saying
that because there was Envy in that aspect of like wishing that was there you know
that they were living that life but in this particular instance I don't
think it was I think they genuinely were trying to help it was a family member and
they thought they were that I was being misguided this is an intervention
let me hold the talking pillow Alex we've all come together because we care about
you we really feel like we need to
have a conversation here it's it's exactly what it was and I got so angry
you so angry no and you know you can hear Layla like patting my back like it's I'm
like see you can feel the heat coming off of me it's like I'd go upstairs how dare
she you know but it really just
came down to like her just saying I don't want to live your life and I think
the answer to that question is good don't and I think that has been one of the
things that has diffused so many of
these like hateful comments where people dehumanize you or whatever and make you
into this idea that they reject it's
like you're right one of the things that uh I had a mentor told me to say is like
when you're in an art if somebody's like it's like you're you're a terrible
person blah blah blah you just say you're right and and then they have no they have
they
have nothing to say and then you just move on with your life and so like in that
way it's acceptance but of like
your your idea of who I am that you hate so
much I accept it I can live with that even but like we don't want to think what if
I haven't I don't believe that
but I can do that and I can end the conversation so I'm taking improv classes at
the moment because I'm doing
my first live shows in the UK and Ireland oh so this live talk uh thank you yeah uh
everything exists uh no solo
stood on stage for 90 minutes comedy
insights and stuff probably some that I've learned today uh anyway we released it
and every show sold out and
then got venue upgraded and then sold out again in less than 45 minutes across all
of the dates which was great but
then scary because I now had to speak to like three times as many people per night
for additional nights on top of
what I thought anyway I'm doing improv in improv there is one
rule and the rule is don't punk the game so uh we're doing some exercise where we
need to make silly noises as we pass this imaginary energy around and I need to go
like Boeing and send it back and
you need to go whoosh and pass it on and all this sort of the one thing that you're
not allowed to do
is not make one of the noises that's allowed yeah and I really think about punking
the
game an awful lot and you see it happen in podcasts you see it happen on TV you see
it happen and it can be both
destructive and constructive but it's always destructive to the people that are
trying to play the game and it can
sometimes be constructive to the person who is punking it so what you did is you
punked the game that
we are playing a game of tennis we are hitting the ball back and forth here I go I
hit the ball across the net and
oh where is it is it hit it back hit it hit it back to me yeah like this is the
game that we're playing and you didn't
move reciprocally back and forth you went orthogonally you went across on a
different axis and you're like I'm not
playing this anymore this is a different game I'm not bothered
there's not even words to describe what that means now the way that it can be
destructive is especially if you're
having let's say a meaningful conversation sometimes people who are uncomfortable
with getting into their emotions can use a variety of different things they can be
scathing they can be mocking they can
laugh you know because they don't want to sit with the discomfort of this
particular part of the conversation
that's punking the game in a way that I think is destructive both externally and
internally that was one that was
destructive externally it broke the game but it was constructive internally and it
is a way
refusing to play by the rules that somebody else has set in a game that you didn't
agree to is the best prophylactic
against stepping into a situation that you do not want and it's one of the
things that wealth affords and it's one of the things that freedom
affords and freedom is often Downstream from wealth remember George one of my
really good friends being on the show like five times George Mac you'll follow
him on Twitter he's phenomenal he was on Fox and Friends yesterday talking about
his cocaine phone and his kale phone like what the what world
is this yeah I remember before the first time that I moved away
to work I've been I've traveled a lot but it was always in between work I never
traveled to work
covet happens world gets shut down just after Halloween Boris tells all of
the UK we're going back into lockdown in three days time and all flights are
canceled so I messaged George and I was like
I'm not doing this I'm I let's go somewhere he wanted to go to
I can't I can't even remember some Island that has 300 000 people on it and I was
like why don't we do Dubai it's a
five hour flight the weather's great I know people it'll be fun it's not got 300
000 people on it it'll
be the zuba and I'll never forget what he replied to me with I got up and I paid
350 pounds for my covid fit to fly test before he was awake but he'd sent me a
message the night before and this is what compelled me to do he said what's the
point in having you Freedom if you never say you
and I was like I was so fired up reading that message and I was like yeah why have
I put all
of this work in why have I done all of these things if I don't ever Punk a game
that I didn't agree to be a part of
I think this is really big if we go all the way back to the earlier part of this
podcast when you have the friends who
are telling you oh um must be nice or you think you're better than us or oh so
we can't drink anymore that's when you be like yeah
then what well then we wouldn't be friends you're not going to be friends with them
eventually anyways I promise you anyone who says that so you're not
gonna be friends with if you want to ultimately become the person you want to
become they're only going to reject you harder and harder until eventually you have
nothing to share about and the only
thing that you'll talk about is the past which by the way one of the great leading
indicators of at least in my
opinion of a great way to know when to cut a friend is when they only talk about
your past and so punking the game and it's it's
one of those really uncomfortable things the first time you do it but then you get
more and more comfortable with it because they're like
I would never live your life and you're like I know
this relates to another one of yours don't trade your self-respect for someone
else's it's easy to lose theirs
and hard to get yours back yeah but I would know but you would know yeah
Why Cynicism Is A Loser’s Strategy
uh related to the sort of cynicism thing that we were talking about earlier on I
call it the cynicism safety blanket that sour grapes at an existential level um
you've been on my first million uh he casually drop this I don't think this I
don't think his episode's going to be out before this goes um but it's money and he
said the cynics get to be right
and the optimists get to be rich and from you I think the Winner's mindset sits in
the uncomfortable place
between two surface level contradictions extreme paranoia in the present and
unshakable faith in the future the
tension between the two makes someone hard to beat today and hard to outlast
tomorrow the cynics get to be right and
the optimists get to be rich one of the biggest fallacies of the
advice from people who are in your current situation is that they are right most of
the time when you bring a girl
home 99 times out of 100 when your parents say she's not the girl I don't like her
she won't last they're right every single time except for the one time it matters
and you end
up marrying the person right like when they say like you're not going to succeed
like this idea of yours it's not
going to last and they're right every single time except for the one time that
matters when you hit it big and so it's
one of those things where they are right more times but they are not more ripe
so good yeah I am I wonder whether it's a function of
all of our opinions being permanently etched in stone on social media that
it's very easy to seem smart to have a heterodox idea if you go against the
mainstream
because it's romantic oh I I I I had this alternative I I had this negative
I'm not I'm not like one of those sheep I'll I'll believe that things are going to
be worse than they are and then if it
turns out better guess what I say your expectations super low congratulations
you can thank me later you're like that is distilled down
British culture at its worst yeah is low expectations
low expectations delivered through
satirical cynicism yeah why are you doing that that's lame that's for losers
that's something that we wouldn't do you should stop doing the different thing tall
poppy you're the one that gets cut
down and it's all that it's like all it shows to
me now is a kind of group thing
almost like the worst kind of mental telepathy where everybody
believes the most unuseful thoughts that everybody else has yeah
at scale and all it does is lower the bar that you need to get up
I think it's that that you're right thing which is someone says that's lame that
sucks blah blah and you say like
you're right it does you just keep punking the game like when anyone comes to try
and like like
they're they're playing a different game than you so you shouldn't try and play by
their rules because they're going to
try and get you to play their game so that they can beat you at the game which is
the status game of that little circle but you're playing a much wider game
that includes more players and so even though locally you have these your your
incoming information that you're taking in is disproportionate with your people
that you're not actually playing against
and so it's basically just noise it's irrelevant because if you look on a long
enough time Horizon the likely that
you're act like I mean again I think about death a lot but the the idea that
when I die people will be dividing up my assets arguing over who gets what there's
going
to be a caterer at my funeral some people won't make it because
something came up and they got busy and then the few people that are there are
probably no one that I have in my
life right now and the fact that every single person that I have in my life might
not even make it to the funeral to
speak over me while I'm dead it's like why on Earth would I listen to them while
I'm alive like they can't even make it to probably
the single most important in you know personal day of someone's life is someone's
funeral right the one time you
can pay your last respect and they don't even do that and so it's like why would I
give any weight to what these people
are doing when they're not even going to be there on the day that matters most and
six months later they're not even remember who I was and anybody who's had
a death in their family recently knows that in the moment it's terrible for you and
then six months later life moves on
but the thing is is that we just never paint ourselves as the person who dies but
to me that's incredibly freeing
because then it's like if six months after I'm dead no one is going to say my name
no one is going to
remember what I did then No One's Gonna then it doesn't matter what I do today and
I think that some people see it as really hopeless
but I see it as very hopeful because it means we have absolute freedom and we can
do crazy like why have you money if you can't say you
yeah learning isn't a spectator sport it comes from doing which means if you're
Learning Isn’t a Spectator Sport
not doing the stuff you consume every day you're not learning you're just
procrastinating oh this is fine all
right so I'm going to Define some terms learning let me say this way
intelligence means rate of learning like that's what that's how remember I talk
about operationalizing words so rate of learning is intelligence so then you which
means it's a rate not a not an
attribute as an aside which then means you have to Define learning learning means
same condition new Behavior so if
I hold up a red card and then I slap you and then I'll hope a red card again and
then you duck you've learned if you wake
up every day and life shows you a red card and then you don't duck and you don't
change then you have learned
nothing and so if you go to a weekend and you go to a workshop and then the next
day you go back and you do the
exact same activities in the same conditions and you have no new Behavior it means
you learned
nothing it also means you're stupid because it means your rate of learning is slow
so if someone is intelligent I can show them the red card and on the first go they
change their behavior and so by
defining intelligence that way and defining learning that way it allowed me to
start thinking well I want to be
smart and this circumstance had this outcome last time and so the next time I
see this circumstance this red card I'm going to change my behavior and so when we
consume the information that you have
on this podcast or whatever it is there's probably a circumstance whether it's a
conversation that you're supposed to have but you aren't having it's a
decision that you need to make but you're putting off that's the red card it comes
up again and the question is whether you're going
to get slaps or you're going to duck and that's where you know whether you learned
or not and every time you get
shown the red card and you do the same exact thing you just prove to yourself that
your rate of learning is slower and
so for me I want to have that evidence that I learn quickly and for me that's why
like people see me as ruthless as
you said because I'm willing to cut relationships because if I think that I'm going
to eventually cut the relationship
then why would I not cut it today because I might as well start enjoying the
benefits of cutting that relationship as soon as humanly possible
Alexa MOSI ladies and gentlemen dude I love you to bits I genuinely do uh I I
Where to Find Alex
think the work that you put out the messages that you put out are very very needed
and yeah I could do this for days
we could run this back literally for days and days and days so uh this is going to
go out after your
big event where should people go to support you to learn more about the that you do
and and what have you got coming up well I've got my uh my next
book 100 million dollar leads uh the first book is 100 million dollar offers what's
interesting question what should I sell so a lot of people are like what
should I sell it tells you step by step everything you do like worksheets I have a
free course that goes with it you don't even have to opt in it's on my
site acquisition.com you can just start watching it um I think the Kindle for
offers is 1.99
like try to make I mean our mission is to make real business education accessible
for everyone
um 100 leads has been six hours a day 6 a.m to 12 uh 12 P.M every day for the last
two years so the first six hours of
every day has been dedicated to writing that book which is why I have 19 drafts
four four four full rewrites there's 106
hand-drawn images um that went in the book that I put in there um and I'm going to
be releasing it at
this event that Chris and I were talking about um so you're gonna be listening to
this after that event
um and so you can go on Amazon it'll be available there or you can look at
acquisition.com because they'll be a
course and things that you can go through free materials and that the the 100
million dollar leads answers the
question who do I sell it to and so you need leads right so you're like okay great
I have the thing I'm gonna sell
who how do I go get people to find out about it and so a lot of the things that I
have in the book are defining some of the terms that people hear a lot which
is like what is a lead what is advertising right advertising is the process of
making known and so if no one
knows about your stuff no one can buy it and so the reverse of that is everyone
knows about your stuff and that book will show you how to get everyone to
know about your stuff and the reason I made the event as big as I did was because I
used every advertising method in the book to advertise the book itself
so offers was an example of a grand slam offers how do you make something so good
everyone feels stupid saying no which is the sub headline of the book
and so offers in and of itself was a grand slam offer which is what I argue that
everyone should have it was a two dollar book that it comes with a course
it comes with worksheets all these things and 100 leads the way that I wanted to
exemplify and meta show
demonstrate that the concept of the book work today and will work tomorrow and will
work in 100 years is because humans
haven't changed and so the process of making known Remains the Same because our
hard wiring is the same so you don't
need to know the Instagram hack because my first ever advertisement was on Facebook
and I don't do anything on
Facebook now and it doesn't matter and as soon as YouTube and podcasts and all
those things die the principles remain the same despite
the platforms changing and so that is what I wrote each of these books because I
want them to be around in 100 years and that's why I spent so long on them
um but I'm very proud of the book and I think it's my best work to date Alex I
appreciate you thank you man
thank you oh hey if you enjoyed that episode with Alex homozy then press here for
the one
that we did six months ago which goes for a full another two hours go on
press it foreign