watch this if you want to find your purpose in life

like why does life need to be meaningful it doesn't I mean a lot of Olympians have huge depression after they get a gold because now what like of course if doesn't make you happy you suck at it on the dayto day like what is that that make you feel happy well right off the bat I don't optimize for subjective well-being I do that more for the audience I that's never been a goal of mine um I think when I was 19 or 20 I said happiness and I've pretty much stuck with that um there's two

two concepts I'll I'll I'll bring up on this so one is people who want to be happy treat it like I want to eat so good I'm never hungry again or I want to sleep so well I never need to sleep again but I think happiness is is much more like that than it is this this achievement thing that you like check a box off it doesn't really work that way secondly I think that all the people that I know who obsess about happiness are the least happy people outwardly sure but they're the ones who

are like committing suicide I I worry about that because that it's a goal that by having it as a goal it automatically sits outside of you which means there's space between you and the goal which means you're not actually happy my goal is to be happy which means you aren't right now so I have made meaning which is ironic because I don't find things inherently meaningful but I have F I have found meaningful work as I deem meaningful um to be the thing that I derive the most Joy from and so I have it broken

down to a more tactical level which is what days have I enjoyed and looked back on and been proud of myself for that day and over probably a three or four year period I just looked at the good days and the bad days and I looked at what the good days had in common and looked at what the bad days had in common I've just over time minimized the things that happen on the bad days and maximized the things happen on the good days even even to Big Investments like I am much happier when I

work out like rather not even much happier when to workout when I look back on my day this was a good day almost always has a workout in it and usually with people I like and so workouts take probably longer for me than most people because I'm not the uh I'm in and out in 45 minutes and I you know you know did my my morning routine and I can do send out 40 emails from whatever it's every everyone's different but for me I work out for like two hours it's because I like to and

so I do it and I do it with people that I like and so I'm willing to invest the time because like what's the point anyways like why make all the money to what enjoy it like I enjoy doing that so I do that every day um I like writing so I write for you know four to six hours a day um and those probably the two biggest activities that I do and if I can write with somebody that I like then I I do something I like with people I like and I think that

that's probably been the the S the single simplest formula is doing things you like with people you like and trying to maximize as much time as I can on the on that bucket and then everything else I try and minimize is overhead or Outsource most people are like why am I not happy they also see a problem with them not happy they have it as an expectation of the world and the universe that they should be happy right and to the same degree people have an expectation that life should be should be meaningful like why

does life need to be meaningful why does the universe need to make you happy it doesn't you can choose that but it's just like not a requirement and so they think there's something wrong with it when in reality like you're alive and you might procreate you might not but like that's the only reason that you're here right oh man there you go broke my wedding ring it's a sign name I don't know silicon it's like my third one I break him every like two years as a side note this is incredible oh cool really good

oh okay whatever you took take that again on smells like commitment I I so like if I if I boil it down like happiness is is fleeting because you get hungry again you get sleepy again um meaning you can only really tell at the end like did I do something that that contributed but on the day-to-day perspective I can know that what I'm doing is useful and if what you're doing is not useful then I think that that's harder and I also think I also think think that men and women are different here so we

use like H happy I hate the term in general but like I think men and women want different things out of life and I think we we bucket them together it's also the same degree like why um therapy with men um doesn't work necessarily the same we have to have a different approach like people think men need more love and I just don't think that's true I think we want more respect and like you get respect from being useful and so I I I make that the goal like no one casts aside a man who

is useful and being useful is an attractive trait like if you see someone who's really good at something it's hard like for you like women like that is a it's a contributing member of society they do stuff like that help other people we want them here like you get status from that and so that means that skill Mastery in a very real way can help you attract the meate you want which is why I indexed a ton of my life around getting better at stuff so like and also from a stress perspective people are like

I remember I see sometimes these podcasts from from successful entrepreneurs and and they're like man I'm still worried I could lose it all tomorrow I don't have that like I'm genuinely not afraid of losing it all tomorrow because I have lost it before and I got it back and the thing it's like if you have a like if you were lucky cuz there are guys who get lucky and if you are lucky then absolutely should be worried about it because if you do lose it you don't know how to get it back but if you

have skills then like I know that I can go to any business and help grow it like it and that's valuable that's useful and so even reframing the word value as usefulness is probably also an easier way to do it for people to kind of like comprehend but I think if you make that the goal it also takes it away from you so the reason I hate so there's a I would say a friend is um well I have a friend who who's who's single and struggles because he's not happy successful but not happy and

so he obsesses on happiness and I was like do you know that when you obsess on happiness all you do is think about you all day it's all you're doing you're just thinking about you all day and like how useless and so the nice thing with being useful is that in order to be useful you have to be useful to other people like no one can be useful on their own you have to be useful to other people so there's a service element but there's also a self-improvement element which is to be useful to other

people you need to improve yourself and so that's why I think being useful is has been probably my day-to-day goal of what I need to do and that serve me well um not saying anyone should or should they can do whatever they want but for me that's helped me it for sure offers Clarity they've done brain scans people with depression and the areas of the brain that are responsible for like self-reflection and rumination are like overly active yeah they think about themselves too much um I mean this is Tony Robbins quote he said if you

stay in your head you're dead um and because it Rhymes it's true and so but the uh but for real though like when I when I was 19 the reason I said happiness was like I realized that I was in this cycle this Loop of trying to like everything you analyze of like does this make me happy does this pizza make me happy does this class make me happy I mean I quit Premed because I thought biology didn't make me happy now I'm very glad that I did cuz I like business lot more now but

like that was the reason I did it I studied really hard I did well but I was like this doesn't make me happy like of course it doesn't make you happy you suck at it you're you're learning something you're going to suck for a very long time it's only when all these skills go together that you'll be good at something and you'll actually be useful to Society of course you learning the chromosomes doesn't do anything but it's because of what it shows shows a school that you're willing to put up with so that you might

be useful to society in the particular skill set um and so yeah I think being useful is far better goal and this is this is me just shouting out specifically to men um if you could just just try it try try this on for a month if you're if you're happy do whatever the you well really just do what everyone either way but if what you're working isn't working for you or what you're doing isn't working for you um I would I would try this on for size one say that you're going to stop trying

to be happy just give up on it just like just stop thinking about it like I'm not you know what I'm actually okay with being unhappy I'm fine with it I'm I'm still here like it doesn't mean anything okay and so then you can take action despite your lack of happiness and think okay how can I be useful to other people and I think if you do that you'll actually start focusing on the tasks and on people outside of yourself and you'll be amazed at how much better you feel overall and what happened to me

when I went into my happiness thing is that I stopped thinking about happiness altogether and then like years later I was like you know what CU I was so used cuz like I wanted to label myself that way and be okay with it people would ask me like hey XYZ I'd be like Oh I'm not a happy person I would just like say that up front that way I didn't have to and I remember catching myself um probably like 5 years later and I was like huh I say that I was like but I actually

really do like my life a lot so I stopped saying I'm not a happy person cuz like I actually kind of do like my life um but I feel like I only got to liking my life by being willing to not like what I was doing for a long period of time it's like also what time frame are you thinking about totally like most of the things that feel good for you are what is it feel good or bad for you in the long run but also like things that feel bad are probably good in

the long run I actually um I I only disagree because it's so vague cuz like I think people just only think of the things that quote feel good but there's tons of things that feel good that are not bad for you like sex feels good it's not bad for you you know like it's just we immediately jump to like cigarettes booze you know whatever but it's really anything in excess is bad for you like if so much sex that you don't go to work you don't eat it's bad for you you know what I mean

if you like even cigarettes like if you have one cigarette or week doesn't do anything for you probably you smoke more than that just walking outside you know what I mean for a week in terms of just you know CO2 from Cars so it's it's always you know it's always in the dose yeah is the is maybe the usefulness of that people want a binary when it's really Continuum what do you mean by that people say oh I like it therefore they want a simple rule but like life has way more continuums than binaries like

good and bad like first off Define good Define bad second off like like like it or not how much you know to what degree how often like what is good like whatever I mean a really fun one is that I think um so Dr cashy and I've talked about this but like there was this whole thing on drinking a glass of wine every day reserve a trol is one of the key ingredients it's like anti-cancer fighting whatever um but if you look at like centenarians people live over 100 a disproportionate amount of them smoke and

so I find that interesting because I think that genetically means that that person probably has some sort of protection against lung based carcinogens which then means they get all the benefits of cigarettes and none of the downsides and so they're able to basically benefit from all the stress reducing components of nicotine and smoking but then just don't get cancer and so I would argue that like drinking a glass of wine every night has less to do with the reservatrol and more more to do with the stress reduction on a continuous basis so anyways so like

the BL like the Blue Zone research right like where those people live MH there that's that's diet stuff more so more diet stuff yeah it's more diet stuff where do people smoke a lot everywhere but [Laughter] here yeah we started it spread it everywhere else and then said it wasn't cool anymore and everyone else is like what the China's like yo we still smoke nicotine men make good times I have a question for you do you feel like you have a better descriptor of the subjective experience you're having when you're in quote unquote like the

Flow State like when you're writing sure you wouldn't say you're happy but I know you I know you like writing yeah yeah I enjoy writing well I think I think one thing is is the idea of learning how to enjoy a challenge so I think like I think a lot of people can get there quickly like a lot of people play video games because Okay so video games are designed to increase in difficulty proportional to people's willingness to um basically they extend inter interment reinforcement so your first level is always easy and they extend it

a little bit more they extend a little more and eventually believe it or not you'll have learned the behavior such that they can push it out so far they never need to reward you again which is why people stay in abusive relationships like in the beginning it's good oh I up oh everything's good again and then I up more and then it's good again and then I up more and then it's good again and then eventually it's never good again but but they got reinforced on enough um spaces each time that they stay in it

and so I think the difference between a video game and life is that that interval isn't set and so you're not necessarily going to have a quick win at level one because it's more like you basically get none until you're at level like 20 and then all of a sudden it all comes and so that's I think that's the difficult part and so I think being willing I think athletes do particularly well um like college athletes do really well transitioning because they've learned a meta skill which is that you're going to suck for a long

time at something before you become a master at it and most people don't have the ability don't have any experience mastering anything in life early on and so they have to learn how to work and so I think um I think learning to work is the most useful thing that you can do I mean I think for me I love finding input output equations that like success of some kind so it's like if you're giving public speaking I'm going to give this example because it's perfect so um Caleb who's on my team um had said

right you know years ago when we met uh like I'm not I don't really like public speaking I don't like presenting I don't like any of that stuff I was like cool and I think he said some the degree of like I don't like it or I'm bad at it whatever and he did a presentation for the team and it was good um and then uh he had a bunch of things that he wanted to do better on the next one now uh between those time periods I had done the book launch and so he

had seen me prepare for my presentation and so I did it a 100 times over 30 days so I did it three times a day before I gave the book launch and you know when there was 500,000 people or whatever that were at the launch um when we had 500,000 people registered for the launch and I was about to step on stage um the team that was doing it all said we've done we do this every day and I've never seen anyone so like relaxed and it wasn't a front it was because I had done

it so many times and so fast forward Cale had another presentation he had to give and this time he prepared three times as long so he did instead of 10 hours of prep he did 30 hours of prep and instead of having 80 slides he had 330 slides and the presentation went way better and he noted that he wasn't nervous at all going into the second presentation compared to the first presentation and so he messaged me afterward said I shoot um it wasn't that I was bad at speaking I was just lazy and I think

that a lot of people mistakenly think they're bad at things they haven't even learned how to try and I do think learning how to try is also domain specific and so like Caleb's an exceptional video editor and media uh strategist and and great with building the team and those skills but those had been skills that he knew how to work hard at but this was a completely different skill and so it's like writing like I have a lot of entrepreneur friends who who are writing books now now they don't know that I come from background

of writing I got a full writing scholarship uh to toughs University which is a good school um I got a personal letter from their writing seller like we love all your stuff we want you to be here I ended up going to VB but like I was the vice editor of the newspaper I was an Editor in Chief of literary magazine when I was in high school like I like writing and so I know what hard what hard work looks like in writing which is just editing and editing and editing and editing which is basically

like doing the speech again and doing the speech again and doing the speech again and it's the same as ping pong which is 500 backhands 500 forehands it's it's just it's just repetition right um and so right now if you're doing work or you feel like you're not as good at something you have to figure out what the input output equation is you have to figure out like what's the thing that I have to do a lot of because every skills like this is that there's a period where you have to do a lot of

something and if you don't know what it is then you're not going to get better sales is like I have to do 100 calls a day I have to do you know I have to do 10 10 conversations a day whatever it is you do that every single day and you do that for a year you get pretty good um and so you have to learn what that input output equation is so that you can push as if it's me I once I know it then I just Jam as much input as I possibly can

into that thing and then that's where the whole the whole quote that you know went viral was um confidence doesn't come from shouting affirmations in the Mirror by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are outw workk yourself doubt and so like you become Confident by giving yourself the stack of evidence the hundred times I went over the presentation I felt confident going into that because I had a stack of proof that I'd already done it perfectly the last 20 times in a row that I'd done it so why

would 21 be different and if you've had a thousand sales calls on your thousand first if people are watching they're like man you sound so confident you're like it's just how it is it's not like I'm confident I just know I know what's going to happen next and so I prefer to think about it as like do it so many times you get bored of doing it and like that's when you'll look confident to everyone on the outside because you'll have no emotional affect to the outcome because you'll have recognized the patterns so many times

that there's nothing that's going to surprise you and I think that most people just don't know how how to work that hard like there is no way that anyone will know how hard I've worked on the books like just imagine that there's a reason that they're all you know alltime bestsellers for each of the categories they're in and still they're like it's cuz you're following it's like no you know why I know that look at every other person who has a following and their books don't sell even though they have a big following they launch

it and then they stop selling why because the book sucked they had a ghost writer they voiced it in whatever and they they make their whatever 5 million bucks or whatever it is they publish the second edit instead of the yeah I mean they they like they literally they they think the book is finished when it has reached the number of pages that creates a book like I can write a book in two weeks if I was just trying to write a certain number of pages but like I've I've usually written five times the amount

of pages as what actually comes out in the final draft and I've Rewritten end to end the whole thing not once or twice but like 10 times end to end but you know what happens when you do that you get really good at knowing what is what is important what isn't and you also give yourself way more outside life exposures that trigger new thoughts over that period of time that remind you of things that can make it better and so it's kind of like a um like when you paint it's like it's like putting coats

of paint and letting it dry and so I kind of see editing drafts as like another coat of paint and then you think you're like you know what I just saw that like I was I was walk I went to a new area today and I saw this new new yellow I wonder if I could throw that in if you had immediately shipped it you wouldn't have had the opportunity to see the yellow thing because time didn't transpire during the creation of the thing and so I think there's a reason that books that take 10

years to write look and read like they took 10 years to write there's just a depth to the Quality do you then now to bring this back kind of to like the happiness or whatever we I find happiness in figuring out what my input output equation is and doing it as much as humanly possible do you then engineer your environment to reinforce yourself to do more inputs absolutely how do you do that you want to make it easy EAS as possible to work as hard as you can and so everything that is not that input

output equation is interference and so like relationships like I mean I said this before but everything that you are not willing to sacrifice to be the best the person who's best in the world is willing to and already has sacrificed and so I'm not saying good or bad do whatever you want but if you want to be number one and a lot of people say I want to be the best it's like Nate don't you want to be better and you can be really good you can be really good and not sacrifice plenty of things

but if you want to be the best then you just have to assume that the best person in the world has the genetic predisposition has all the environmental environmental cues aligned with their ultimate goal and is willing to give up everything that is not achieving that goal and if you're not in that boat then you're not going to be the best people just like saying because makes it feel good but it's false um and so in terms of aligning the environment if you know the input out equation so for me it's writing right now is

the season that I'm in because writing kind of is the is the pillar of everything else we do content wise internal Communications the books everything comes from me taking time to write because I'm I organize my thoughts better that way and i' because I've become skilled at writing so it's the best way it's the most succinct way that I can communicate and so um there's a reason that the first 6 hours of my day when I'm freshest most well rested I have no meetings and I have only one thing that I do which is right

there's nothing else and so if you know what the input out equation is find the time the four to six hours a day every day that you can do that and then allow nothing to interfere with it and that's it like nothing interferes with it and if you do that for 5 Years it'll be really good and you'll be useful and you'll feel good about it because the thing is at a certain point the work itself becomes reinforcing like when editors edit and then they make a change and then and The Story Goes or the

video goes the way they want it to it's like boom that was reinforcing and if I like work really hard on a paragraph and I could just shrink it to one sentence I'm like yeah and that might take that literally might take two hours to just keep beating it down until I get it to like the one most distinct thing um but that's satisfying and so the beginning you suck and you do the Reps so that you learn the skills so that eventually you do the work itself because the work itself is rewarding but that

takes time to get to yeah it's like you are at this point writing the third book and it's like my fourth book overall yes and and getting those sentences is the is the win the little win which also makes it easier because then you're not waiting for the 6,000 am wonder if you could talk a little bit to that well yeah I mean in the beginning you start the the start the journey because you have this big ultimate payoff you want to have but that's way too far out to actually wait like you have to

be an exceptional person who's who's been reinforced in the past for waiting for a very long period of time that's why I say the athletes thing is kind of interesting because they've had to wait a long period of time and so they have to practice for a long period before they get the thing um but typically they get enough reinforcers early on that that the act itself becomes reinforcing and that's that's that's what Mastery is is you transition from having some sort of external motivator to external I believe all motivators are external but from the

work itself being intrinsically rewarding versus having it carrot of some kind that's been artificially put there like status or an award or number one or a ranking um and Masters can Masters enjoy the work more than novices do so it's actually easier for Masters do you find ironically that hard work has felt less hard these days or is it still hard work because you're pushing it it's still hard it's different in terms of the hard the I would say the hard thing that I have now is that my level of quality the standard that I

have is only mine like I know that I could probably put out the first draft and it would probably be a bestseller it's just that I would know that it could have been better and that would eat me alive and so the hard part is still maintain so it's actually the hard part for me now is that I maintain my standard as the number one standard that I optimize for and if the world so chooses to also like it great but it also divorces me somewhat from the outcome because if it were just about getting

the bestselling book then I would publish it on the first shot because at this point I do have enough skill that probably would be a bestseller on its own but I also think there's a difference between being a bestseller for a season and being best seller for a 100 years and so I'm trying to write these books to be best sellers when I'm dead so they're still useful how do you know when you've met that far like how do you know when a sentence is like when there's nothing else I can do to it to

make it better and you sleep on it and then you wake up the next day you look at it again there's nothing else I can do to it to make it better same thing for the presentation there's nothing else I can do to make this better I can't practice it more because even at a certain point when you if you get past a certain point of practicing you start you start knowing it almost too well that you start cutting corn because you're like it it gets too natural like I actually I borderline over prepared for

the gmats um I like peaked I CU I I I took tests every week and my math score sorry my English score peaked before my math score did so my math score peaked at the test but my English score I had done it so many times you're like shoot and I've done you you recognize so many patterns that you're like man which pattern is this one cuz like I'm so good at all of them I have to remember like it it it um you Peak right and so there is a point you where it's not

even diminishing returns you actually start getting worse um at least in my opinion or at least in my experience and so uh if you if you if you regress something down to its simplest form and then I just cut the sentence in half I lose material I lose stuff that would that needs to be there and so you get it as simple as possible but no simple uh you talked about if someone comes to you and you're like what would you do if you had six more hours on that you FP back on oh yeah

yeah so a really a really fun thought exercise for somebody who just like all of this is like wow that's so much work I'm not really prepared for that well I'll walk you through what it looks like in a micro example so if the video editor comes to me and says hey do you like this clip and I say yeah I do like the clip if you had another two hours to work on it what would you do and they're like well if I had another two hours I'd do this this and this I'm like

okay go do that come back they come back and I'm like do you think it's better and they say yeah they show it to me I'm like it is better okay now if you had another two hours what would you do they're like well I do this this and this I'm like okay cool they go they come back same conversation like okay if you had a week what would you do well then they're like well shoot I would I'd probably scrap this whole style overall and I make a totally new framework for how I'd approach

the video um and I'd want to come at it from this angle altogether it would just take you know a lot more work but I think it would still make a better outcome it's like okay so that idea just do it on five years and so everybody just wants to get it done rather than get it right and getting it right is where all the money is I bet you asked yourself like what would you do if you had 50 years to work on acquisition 100% I do have 50 years and I do what I'm

doing yeah and not not trying to chase the quick reinforcement so that sure well it's the quick external Loop but I mean like at a certain point you you start you start to develop Master even around pursuing goals so like I have I've had enough past like this is book three from the $1 million series every month I get thousands of reviews and DMS and people who say their lives change from the first two books the hard part was book one when I have none of that for a year and a half but once that

one's out leads I'm like well I'm getting reinforcement every day from my writing and so I write and so now I have two books worth of that and once the third book's there'll be three books worth of that so maintaining that gets easier and easier just cuz I have regular enforcement for writing not not necessarily this book but writing in general and so that then means I can I can generalize past good experiences onto how I act and work now that's why like you become you become an expert at pursuing goals because you have pursued

goals in the past I just use writing as an example but I've pursued goals in the past and sticking it out has had big payoffs and so when I feel like I'm sticking it out again I'm reminded of the past times I've stuck it out and it's been worth it the hard part is for the people who haven't stuck anything out because they've never they've never seen it work and so the first one's always the hard one it's like you just have to have faith on some level you just have to believe that it'll work

out and the the thing that carries you over the bridge in the short term is that you are getting better and if you can just focus on that then even if the the crowd doesn't cheer when you give your presentation or you don't sell books or whatever it is you'll know and so it's funny because I look back at the presentation that I gave five years ago and I really am embarrassed but I'm not embarrassed at the effort I put in then because the effort I put in then I really did think it was really

good I just didn't know what good could be because I also gave myself 20 hours rather than 200 hours and so if I only had 20 hours maybe that is the best I can do and maybe today that's still the best I could do I just give myself way more time but the problem with giving yourself way more time once you see how much good good can be is that you realize how few projects you can do right which is why you just have to be that's why like the biggest guys in biggest business Titans

in the world talk so much about Focus because it's not it's not that like focus is the thing it's just that it takes so much time to do something right that you can't do more than one thing so it might be almost part of that like if I know we keep saying the word happiness but like happiness equation to have less things that you're trying to optimize for in in your set of things that you're working on your life if you want to be exceptional at something it means you have to put a lot of

input into it and you can't be exceptional at very many things because of how many inputs you have and how limited they are so if time is an input we all have the same amount of time and if it takes a huge amount of that time to get good at one thing then if you take that as the Assumption we're basing this on then there's just not many things you can get very good at and so then it takes some level of selection to be like what thing do I want to get good at how

does the one of zero brand fit into this and how did you conceptualize well the one of zero brand is very much aligned with this um I should have my nose strip on I took it off this morning um you just pasted it on um the whole idea was you know it's so funny I saw I saw the background of my gym it said um that picture that I posted of like one of my first video content uh yeah it said it said the back of the wall I made this I made this quote up

that I painted it you can see how ugly the paint is in the back wall it says um strength doesn't come from what strength doesn't come from doing doing what you think you can but doing what you think you can't is what I think it says which I don't agree with the word strength it should be growth but anyways I like the idea and so I think that one of zero is very much like that which is you know one of one is doing something that only you can do one of zero is doing something

that you've never done before and that ideally no one else could do and so it's an amount of work that most people just don't comprehend and it's really hard to even describe it because like I can say I spent 6 hours a day for 18 months on this one project and people will nod their heads but spend six hours on one thing once and then then do it 500 times and then like you'll start to see like the soul crushing amount of effort that it takes to stick with it um now I've been able to

extend how long I work on projects because just like the abusive husband thing or the abusive spouse thing like in the beginning you can have a short project you get a win I can work a little longer the next time I can work a little longer longer the next time books really good books are one of the hardest projects to do because you get almost zero reinforcement it's very punishing for most of the time um until quote the end but the process itself there is some some sort of joy in being the type of person

who is able to endure that because I I have I have a lot of entrepreneur friends who are like oh I just finished my book I'm going to write a book just like you did I was like no you won't no you won't cuz you know they're not willing to put in no they like it worked well for him I'll do that too his book was so good I'll write one too doesn't work that way they've never even written anything so they're starting at like where I was when I was 15 and I would say

the same aggree it's probably like people who look at Mr Beast now are like oh I'll just go make a YouTube videos like he started with 13 and he's been spending more than six hours a day trying to make videos since then and so there's just like so much depth of knowledge that you can get that just takes time but the thing is is from the happiness perspective I find a lot of joy and excellence and I think that work well done provides dividends forever so if we were to think about like subjective well-being or

like purpose or meaning or utility or usefulness any of those whatever one you want to optimize for like I am proud of the first book I wrote I'm proud of the second book I wrote I'm proud of the third book I wrote and I'm proud of the book that I'm writing right now and when I look back on them every time I see them and I see people benefit from them I get a reward for a one-time input even though it was a year for the rest of my life I will get rewarded for that

effort and so it just encourages me more and more to do things the right way and I think people who build exceptional products think about products the same way which is like it has to be right it just has to it's the it's it's all the 100 details it's not the big idea it's the 100 details that make the difference between like the Mr Beast videos versus other people who try to be like Mr Beast it's the 100 details that make his videos better yeah it's not like one caption yeah it's not just the thumbnail

right like it's not that it's a hundred things I've heard you uh say the word Joy a couple times and um I'm wondering if you have a distinction between happiness and joy and if that's a helpful thing to explain um I see Joy a lot as just being present in the moment because I think you can joyfully mourn like if someone's you know died I think you can there's there's you can find Joy um in in a Morning Experience if you're consoling someone else how is that I think it's just being present and being okay

with experiencing life so I I mean I that's how I see Joy now I haven't defined it and I'll probably spend more time defining the words but um I just see it as being present like I am I experience Joy when I am present like I'm enjoying those I feel very present right now as soon as you give up the goal of happiness or even meaning then it stops being this thing that's outside of you and so it allows you to be present in the moment and do what you want to do or do what

you need to do and so if you always have this thing that you're measuring against one there's always a Delta between where you are and where it is but I think often times it'll optimize for the wrong path and I think happiness for most people is pleasure seeking so it they call it happiness but it's really Hedonism and most I don't like to appeal to religion but in terms of old ideologies most people have found and I'm sure there is some science that I don't know um that people who pursue hedonistic Lifestyles tend to be

the most empty um and the least fulfilled and so I think people have just swapped the word happy or hen Hedonism for happiness and they think they wouldn't want to say that but if you look at the actual activities they're pursuing they're almost purely pleasure seeking what makes an activity only pleasure seeking for something that will build long-term good well I think it's just time time scale it's short-term longterm like something that most pleasure-based activities are um their pleasure now at the sacrifice of goal or something later to be fair I don't think there's anything

wrong with that I'm just saying like know what we're optimizing for is that why that um that line that I think we talked about once of uh desire is a contract yourself yeah so um there was this big philosophy website and then Naval quoted that site um and it was a desire is a contract we make with ourselves to be unhappy until we get what we want um and I mean I fundamentally agree whenever you want something it means you don't have it and you basically create deprivation within yourself to motivate Behavior so if you

see motivation is the equal opposite of deprivation like you're horniest when you haven't for a while you are hungriest when you haven't eaten for a while you're you have a huge motivation to sleep when you're exhausted right and so if we want something we create deprivation within ourselves to motivate ourselves to get it but by creating deprivation we basically create um now he calls it unhappiness but I don't know if I necessarily agree with that as the I think we just we create deprivation because would you still say there is a gap between what you

have and what you want sure yeah like you want something that you don't have but I mean I think um the the way to skirt that is in is wanting a challenge and so if you just genuinely want to fight bigger and bigger bosses then the fact that you get the gold at the end becomes like if anything the gold at the end is like irrelevant you just want to find the next boss and most of the Champions that are out there that I've seen you'll have the Michael Jordans the I mean a lot of

Olympians have huge depression after they get a gold because now what and so it really and I think you can see how people how people react to Victory tells you what motivated them or rather what they were deprived of so if the goal was to be exceptional then that person hits the gold see as sees it as a foregone conclusion and is just excited to move on to the next thing if they made their entire life about getting the gold then they have no idea what to do because they were married to the outcome not

the process and again I I think that you can win either way I absolutely think you can win either way but it definitely changes how long you can play yeah it's like for the right thing that Gap actually becomes uh an enjoyable process intrinsically well it's not it's not even the Gap it's just that if you want the challenge then you basically create goals to create challenges you don't create goals to achieve goals you you set new goal post just so that you can have the the trial and so like someone's like what happens when

you hit a billion I was like I'll make it 10 and when I 10 I'll hit 100 like it like it it doesn't matter cuz I'll die and I'll give it all away anyways it's relevant but it's just like I want to I want to be better and the only way to be better is to do the work that I know I should do and so that way every day I'm doing the work and at least for me that has worked do whatever you want that has worked for me because I feel like some people

talk about that like moving the goalpost things and the negative of like oh people reach one thing and then but I guess if you take it from the frame of these are just more challenges that I'll enjoy from then it's not a problem with the go I don't think it's a problem I mean if you beat level one boss then what you you the game moves you up you play harder monsters and then you try and beat level two boss it's it's it's this whole fallacy around being done it's this whole idea that we can

finish we can work so hard we never have to work again we can so good we never have to again we can eat so big we never have to eat again we can sleep so well we never have to sleep again it's just a fallacy it's not true and people lose their lives trying to find that one meal or that one or that one you know uh sleep or that one goal that'll satisfy them for good and it never does I think a story that would really contextualize this for the audience is like that period

when you were getting ready to sell gym launch that you just sound like you felt a little lower oh yeah so I um so when I was selling gym launch there was basically a year where I couldn't really work um mostly because if I worked in the business then it would look like I was a key man to the business and if I and I didn't know if we were going to sell so I didn't want to start another company so I basically just had to like subsist I could even start new Endeavors or initiatives

within the company so I just had to do nothing basically and so for me it was the most depressed I've been if you look at some of the videos during that that time period a lot of them are me being pretty sad and being like what the is life about but it's just that for me um like you know again I'm not religious but I do find it interesting that the first thing God gave adam in the Bible before giving him a wife was giving a job work tend to the Garden before he gave him

a wife and I find that really interesting I don't like religious religion aside um we're built to work and so for me especially I'm built to work and so if I'm working I'm good and like the the days that I enjoy the most are the days that I work the longest and so I just try and remove everything that stops me from doing that you said something about hell the other day or heaven heaven the idea of Heaven potentially being kind of like a hell like not not anything oh it sounds horrible well I mean

if the idea like I think most people Envision most people Envision heaven like the one meal that's going to be so good they're never going to eat again they're going to be so elated to just be singing with the angels it's like yeah but play it out like then what like okay got it we sang with the angels at from 9 to 10 and then from you know then I had the Feast you know what I mean from 10 to 11 but I got to keep my my idealized body my my I don't know Christian

needs for idealized body glorified um physical form I got to keep that the whole time it's like okay well now it's noon now what do I do well dogs are all there cuz all dogs go to heaven great good to know but if your wife dies and it's like you have three wives up there you're like but I mean technically we were at different time so it's like what do how do we do with that whatever God's figured it out but um again I think it's just this fallacy of work life balance like I think

Heaven is literally just an extrapolation of work life balance as a concept which is I will just be able to do life and no work but the first thing God does in the Bible is give someone work and so I think so many people would be helped out if they just stopped labeling it as a bad thing and started seeing it as the way to get what they want and then eventually to make it the thing they want because the and this is like a little bit of an app sha idea so it takes a

little bit more processing part to conceptualize this but there's goals and then there's working to hit the goals and then there's the idea of love the process but there's the UN the subscript of so that you can hit the goal but in my opinion it's just work not so that you can it's just work and it's like what do you mean it means like working is the goal like working as hard as you can and learning how hard you can work and how well you can work and how right you can make things and how

well you can do them like pushing that expanding my capacity to work not so that I can like expanding my capacity work so that I can work more like if you can do that then you have the self-fulfilling Loop and then you also become completely divorced from the outcomes which ironic Al when you do work that way you do have outsized outcomes compared to everybody else but you do it because you work so hard because you're addicted to working and you like that game and the goals just happen as a consequence but I don't even

like saying the goals just happen as a consequence because it still gives the idea to The Listener or The Watcher right now that that's the point and it's not because even if your goal is to be the richest man in the world okay let's say that's your goal for how long every richest man in the world is Rich for the richest man in the world for they touch the top and then boom something changes the economy whatever it is and then another richest man of the world comes up like who was the richest man 20

years ago actually 30 years ago a bunch of Japanese guys and then Japan's economy crashed no one even knows their guys names and so it's like making the goal even as audacious as those guys goals were right and let's say you're number two but even let's say you're number one for how long and so that's why I I think that the work is the goal not so that you can just the work is the goal and learning how hard you can work and being proud of yourself for how much harder you work today than you

did yesterday you have a tweet that like perfectly ties us together you hit the goals that you said you wanted to to be happy a long time ago yeah is that kind of what you mean here um actually well it's it's um you've already hit goals that you said would make you happy and I might have put years ago or something like that in there but it's just fun like years ago you set goals that today you've hit and you said you would be happy and yet you're not and so it's because the concept of

setting these goals presumed like the ultimate unhappiness equation is uh if I get X I'll be happy right like we all know that one um because that's the the the guarantee of it not not happening because it automatically the entirety of your existence is outside of yourself and then the moment you hit it then what you set another one then it's outside of yourself right um and so if if the goal doesn't change your entire life then you can basically be achieving it every day if the goal is to work as hard as you can

every day you can work as hard as you can you can be in the state that you're Desiring if the goal is the state yeah the goal is the state of being that you have when you work exceptionally hard when you do hard work worth doing and you know if you left in the tank and I love I think this is Jesse iler says this but I I I really love it there's a handful of like saying that I've gotten from other owners that I really love I'll give you three right now I'm side questing

but just deal with it one is um Michael Dell says play nice but win I just love that the second one is uh Andy forel has 100 to zero which I really really like which is basically like society when you're up you know in football let's say you're up 30 to nothing and it's halftime society says put in your put in your backups put in your third strings like take it easy and play and he's like no that 100 to zero step on their throat and kill everyone and I like that from a from a

perspective of of like don't let off the gas like just because they lost doesn't mean that you now have to dilute yourself to lower yourself to their standard and so it's like yeah so what if like it takes this much to win I don't care if it takes this much to win I want to be here because if if you then change how you play because everybody else isn't as good you lower yourself you don't raise them up that Society trying to make it appear as though people are better than they are and I I'm

a big fan of like they should know they lost 100 to zero they should know how much room they have to improve and also to the same degree I should know how much further ahead I am um and the goal shouldn't even be to win mhm I'm going to keep playing the way I play if we happen to finish at 100 to Z we happen to finish at 100 to Z but I'm not going to let off because that's who I am um and the third one was uh Jesse ller has this thing where he

has with his kids which I really like was um after they do a marathon because he's really big in Endurance Sports and so his kids are too and so whenever they finish a lot of them pulled up a zero which I really like and it means nothing left in the tank he said I just want you I don't care if you win he's like I just want you to have nothing left and I I think about that as like the goal so the goal is to have nothing left and I think that on the micro

level and on the macro level like if every day like my favorite days are the days that I get into bed and I'm exhausted but proud of the work that I've done I've have nothing left I've left it all on the field and so like that's the goal the other stuff Society chooses to measure Me by but when I measured myself that way it distracted me and I didn't enjoy my life um but just living that day as many times in a row as I can until I die is my plan and at the end

on the macro they want to hold this up and be like I got nothing left I'm used up but until then I will continue to try and be useful and so that I like I like all three of those statements and they to me kind of embody a lot of the the values of one of zero which is not just doing only what you can do but doing things that you didn't you could yet let's say someone wants to take this Frame of infinite games but but their thing isn't work like you have someone like

Mother Teresa who's like I just want to dude i' love exate this yeah yeah so okay so Alex what if my goal isn't work the goal is always work it's just what you're working on and so whether you're like I want to have the best marriage then cool it takes work if the goal is to have the best kids then parenting is that not it's work if the goal is to have the best physique it's work if the goal is to have the best career it's work if the goal is to just be the ultimate

version of you it's work in all those Arenas and being mindful of what you want to optimize for um in terms of how many hours you want to allocate to each and so like most people live lives I mean I'm going to use Rogan's quote from somebody else but of quiet desperation because they're hoping to find a way around work but work is the way it's the only way because everything else if it didn't require work then you'd already have it breathing doesn't really require work most people do it there's plenty of things that we

just don't think about because we have them automatically and so everything that you don't automatically have you have to expend effort to get and so everyone just wants a way to get things without working which I understand don't get me wrong but the thing is is that I remember actually this is a weird thought so I remember when I was graduating college I had this um there was like it was like a billion dollar uh Powerball like I it was like you know one of when it kind of goes over a billion dollars and um

I bought a Powerball ticket with my girlfri just as like a like a fun joke not like I didn't I was like hoping to win and what's weird is that I remember remember as the drawing was happening I I actually had this huge fear that I win because if I would win then it would mean that I would never get a shot to prove myself that I that I could have done it because literally from that point on if you win nothing you do matters like I could never prove that I had any metal whatsoever

like everyone would always say it was cuz you went the Powerball D and I think the big reason that I didn't become a physician was because my dad has a successful practice and I knew that if I became a physician it didn't matter how good of a physician I was it would always be because people would say it was because of him now that was then I cared a lot about what people saying I probably still do um less though but still on some degree um but that was and so just to give I guess

the audience an insight into like how I think about things if it's valuable for you like if you are afraid of winning the lottery because it won't give you a chance to prove to yourself who you want to be or who you want to become then I think you're on the right path I love the inverse of that which is that everything that's right now which is heart is the opposite of the lottery is the biggest blessing yeah and if we were to take this in the equal op perspective of if winning the lottery is

the ultimate way to not win because you never get the opportunity to prove yourself not necessarily prove to other people but prove to yourself and so maybe said differently the reason the the Powerball ter me it's like I wouldn't be able to prove to me independent of what other people said but like I would never know if I could do it because I had a billion dollars behind me and so every hardship that you encounter if you reframe it as the story that you will someday tell to yourself of the person that you have become

based on the dragons you've slain and the obstacles you've overcome then I think that makes those obstacles a unique opportunity for self-improvement because we can be grateful for these things I think um I think Joo has a has a whole bit on this where whenever something bad happens he says good and I think it's a great trained response because if something bad happens my train response isn't good it's I will tell the story someday and so I think if you have that frame then everything serves you because if something good happens cool if something that

happens it'll be a story that I will someday tell because it assumes that you will live through it and it assumes that you will eventually figure it out and so then you can't lose as long as you don't quit if you're cool talking about this are these some of the conversations you have with your wiser self yeah I haven't actually had a ton of Solomon conversations recently because I haven't had a lot of um so because of the wonderful therapist that Solomon is I I don't have to stick to a schedule and so I would

say that like there are times yeah so so there's a lot of research that suggests that we are better at giving advice than we are adhering to it and so they've done like as simple example is they gave two whitewash scenarios of somebody and told the reader to give advice to the person who's in the whitewash scenarios the thing is is that the person in the whitewash scenarios was them and they don't adhere to the advice adhere to the advice that they give and so they did this to just demonstrate that people one don't listen

to to their own advice and two that the advice that people give tends to be better than what they do and they postulate that the reason for that is because you be you can be uh non-emotional and detached giving advice to somebody else you can be more rational about the advice whereas when you're in it you have more emotions you make less rational decisions and so extrapolating that out for me I have a lot of relatively complex business dealings that happen on a regular basis most of my stressors anxieties come from decisions that I have

to to make with incomplete information and so if I were to have a therapist I would probably spend a huge amount of time trying to catch them up on all the relative information and then I would hope that they somehow have the business Acumen to help me navigate these decisions which they probably wouldn't and then even if they did I would have to hope that their incentive was aligned with mine which theirs as billable hours not me making that most money and so there's just a lot of problems I think with the traditional model and

so at least for me and so I was like okay well how can I get somebody who has completely aligned incentives who has all the same information as me um who can give me good advice and so the person who meets all of those qualifications is future may and it's like well yeah wouldn't it be nice to talk to that person well what's interesting is if you if you if you switch your hat around and you're like okay I'm I'm now future me I'm going to give advice to younger May um it's a wild ride

but the dialogue is super powerful because you don't sugar coat it for you and you don't need to waste time prefacing and say like hey take this away like you don't have to get you just be like it's such direct communication um and the advice that I would get is often advice that I give and I give really good business advice only I only say that measured based on the company's growth that we have um and so taking that advice oftentimes I too need to be more patient often times I too need to keep doing

what has been working oftentimes I too need to wait until we have enough day to make the next call um and I have to give time time and so now some therapist could say this to me and I'd be like what the do you know how's your business going right obviously not that well you're talking to me for an hourly rate whatever not that there's anything wrong with that but I'm just saying that their goals for business and their level of aptitude for business is probably not the same as mine and so it'd be really

hard for me to even put it weight on their opinion but future me is much smarter and wiser than I am of course and so I do weigh their decisions and so the other piece is that I don't have to have a generic it's 60 Minutes like why does why does a therapy session need to be 60 Minutes it should be as long as it needs to be or as short as it needs to be to solve the problem and so I've had times that it's been 7even minutes I've had times when it's been 90

I've had times when it's uh three times in one week and I've had times where I don't I don't have to have a quote session with Solomon for a month and so it's usually when I'm at big decision points where I have more frequent communication to try and like figure out an issue or a problem but once once I'm kind of on a path I usually stay on that Groove for basically as long as I can and so um over the last two years I had a lot more big directional decisions that I needed to

make with kind of the media stuff that we do and then also the investments in acquisition doccom but a lot of the early thesis that we had we have enough data now that I could make decisions on them and I have made decisions on them and so now it's just about sticking to the plan so what did that process look like you have a like Google doc and then you Alterna yeah I just literally pull up a Google doc I set a date so that I have all my conversations in one Doc and um I

just hit enter so it's just me him me him he asks a question I answer like um and it sounds silly to do this but do it once and you'll realize that it's it's weird it it work works for me at least have you Lo ever looked back on like what was the first you remember the first time you did y I do I do I do we had a we had an unfortunate event that uh that that had happened that had not gone the way that IID wanted it to and um I describe these

types of scenarios as you're a you're a rare baseball card collector and you have an incredibly rare card um like super super valuable and then your 2-year-old when you're away gets in into the box and destroys it what do you do do you hit the kid they don't even know like what do you do you get upset at your wife like what do you do you just got to take it there's no there's no there's no action you just take it and so I had I had one of those incidences from a business perspective um

and so I just talked to Solomon about it and he was like you just take it he's like and you get to tell that story someday about the skin that you have and the things you've gone through and then the next hard time something happens you'll be able to compare to that and be like well wasn't as bad as that right and then you take measure take measures to prevent the next card do the best you can yeah but even when I thought about that because in that particular situation it was like okay what information

you know should I have had or um this is actually a really common one this happens in investing but like um people were like I shouldn't have made that investment or I should have bought Bitcoin in 2013 well should you have because the thing is is that if you have that decision-making framework then it means that you would have invested in a hundred other things at that same time period which means that you might like that decision-making calculus probably would have led you to ruin more than the one time that it worked and so in

order for me to learn from the experience I have to think about what what do I change about my decision-making framework to prevent something like that happening in the future and if there wasn't anything that could really happen in the decision-making framework then sometimes you just get kicked in the nuts sometimes your kid just takes the Babe Ruth thing and Treads it and there's nothing you can do about it yeah and to Loop it back a little bit it's like if the goal was for you to enjoy the process of you know even acquiring that

card in the first place the card collection yeah yeah the collection isn't really the go M yeah I mean you're going to die doesn't matter but yeah I mean I I'm the same way because I I collect gym equipment like I love gym equipment and I'll give it different example um I had a house in Austin and we had this big really nice infinity pool that had like this nice view and somebody came over and was like Hey be honest with me how many times do you even use this pool and I was like I

use it five times a day and he was like what and I was like every time I walk past it I look at it and I like it it's just like somebody saying like Alex why don't you do more functional training with your body I was like my function is to look jacked I use it every second of every day what are you talking about and so it's like and this is probably a good kind of decision fallacy to look at because a lot of people will criticize your decisions because they use their way of

valuing the decision and assume it's the same way you value a decision and so to the gym equipment thing I have a lot of gym equipment and I enjoy spending time in my gym like I like walking in there I like everything the way it is I like the pieces I remember how I got them I remember the workouts I've done on them I'm reminded of the people I did those sessions with when I did a brutal whatever and so it's just a really positive they're all basically totems of positive reinforcements so kind of like

the card collection like people go through their card collection people go through their car collection because it reminds them of all the positive things that have happened um more so than they collect it because they want to sell it someday like I'm not going to sell the gym equipment why would I I like it I use it but I think I think it follows along the same thing as like um I enjoy obsessing about it I enjoy getting everything right I enjoy the pieces I enjoy the layout and like I spend way too much time

on it if I only was optimizing for money which I'm not I mean it's a component but it's not the only thing I actually love hearing you talk about journalism because I think it's like an interesting look you know anytime you hear someone talk about something they love it's like a really great Insight what do you like like I hear you talk about strength curves yeah I feel like we'll do that with the equipment because it'll make more sense there yeah yeah but I think I think the I think at least for me like everybody

I think most people I'll say this way regardless of culture all cultures respect excellence and Excellence comes from Nuance of understanding and so people look at bodybuilders for example and they see them one stage and they're like oh my God that's so gross and it's because they don't have any level of appreciation for the many things that go into that not just the effort but even from a product perspective they're like wow look at how look at his delts compared to his biceps look at where his muscle bellies tie in look at um look at

his lat but look how small he was able to keep his waist while also building such a big back look at his vascularity compared to somebody else who might be more you know grainy whatever and so they usually even have the language to describe what they're seeing and so it's like me trying different wines it just tastes like wine you know what I mean but for a kosur they actually get to enjoy wine so much more because they have so many more ways to enjoy it like Eskimos have seven words for snow and we only

have one because they have more experience with snow so they have a deeper understanding of it and so I think most people respect excellence and Excellence only comes from depth it comes from exposing yourself to the same thing for many many many many periods of time so that you can pick up those little nuances of you know what actually if I move my my my wrist this way when I do this one I get that little bit at the end and if I if I change my my chair angle I actually get this other really

cool piece and you know what if I put my thing on my you know if I put my dumbbells on my legs first before I put them over my head I actually get a different you know stimulus or whatever it is um and like that just comes from reps which is why there's a really great I mean in the iron game there's a great culture of passing down these little nuan es and that's kind of like all apprenticeships even though it's not a work for a job well I guess for the top bodybuilders it is

but for most people it's not a job but there's a there's a craft to it and I think just being a student of the Craft um is the goal you think we've lost some of that craftsmanship yeah [Laughter] 100% yeah I mean I mean we've it's just the crafts have changed you know I mean like developer wasn't a craft you know before um I mean shoot making media wasn't a craft uh you know quote being an influencer making content wasn't a craft like these are all crafts there's just new crafts that replaced old crafts um

but Excellence is always respected across cultures and across times like if we go into the future and there's some new thing that I've ever heard of but I find out that this guy's exceptional at it I will respect him for the effort and so like chunked down one or chunked up one um I believe that effort is the universal currency of respect and so this is also for the guys who are out there um who want to be more respected you will always get respect for work Chinese Mexican black white asian gay straight whatever you

work your ass off people will respect you for it now the problem comes when you think you're working your ass off but you really aren't working that hard and that's where the disconnect is it's be like I work so hard but it's kind of like the um like the 10 hours of prep for a presentation versus 30 it's like you think you're working hard until you see what hard looks like and then you're like I wasn't even working nearly as hard but I see that as encouraging because it means that so many people have so

much underutilized potential because they just haven't even learned how to work I remember when I did my um I did a legal internship in France so I had to do translating legal documents from French to English um horrible honestly just terrible work and um uh yeah I was because I thought because people were like you're good at writing you're persuasive you should be a lawyer and I was like sure I'll try that so I went to a called ARA um and I did I did my summer internship there my junior year and there was this

uh partner at the basically the it was corporate law but it was equivalent of a partner um who was there and she walked by my office and she like I think she might have talked to me one other time like just to like welcome me to the office and this was the only other time she ever spoke to me and so she uh she like did one of these like PE peaked her head into my hole or whatever they where they kept me to like translate documents and uh she was like you know how's it

coming or whatever and I was like I was like man I was like I'm just I'm just working really hard on this and just trying to was like just I'm just working really hard and she just like looked at me and she just laughed and I was like what the what and she was like you don't even know how to work and I I just remember thinking that and then and then she just walked away and um and I I I went to the guy who was like two years above me I was like I

was basically trying you know you'd get his job as like the lowest level I was like his peon right and I was like what the and uh he's like yeah like she like they work so many more hours than we do and like have so much higher Stakes than we do he's like you're just translating documents dude like if you get something wrong it's on them not on you and I remember thinking about that because like I thought I was working really hard but they had to go review everything to make sure I didn't mess

up and especially in a in a in a job like law where you usually have billable hours like you literally in order to get paid you have to spend time like it's just like it just it's just so clearly connected that those people just kill themselves in terms of the amount of work that they they put out and now that I'm at my at my position now I 100% C gr like I didn't know how to work like I was like the idea that I could work like she was like you don't even know how

to work yet and um and it was only later that I had a different guy was like you'll learn when you get older they're like it just T it takes time to learn the skill of effort and so I really genuinely believe that succeeding isn't hard learning how to try is hard once you learn how to try if you just try at anything compared to other people you'll win because everyone the bar is so low to win nowadays even like and I I'll give the you know the objective stats for guys it's like if you're

the average guy you're $1,000 in debt you're overweight and like that's the average and so like if you're just not in debt and not overweight you're already above average like that's it like that's the that's the bar it's just because no one knows how to try and no one knows how to like suck for a little bit and you only have to suck for a little bit once because then you learn that sucking for a little bit has a payoff and then you can just extrapolate that you know over and over again but you just

have to make it through the first one but no one's willing to do that cuz they care so much about what everyone else thinks and they feel like they should immediately be good because that's what social media tells them when you're working there's kind of like billable hours and not it's like there's work that actually counts and there's work that's kind of just like work and the ability to distinguish between that probably matters a lot M um I mean I measur myself on output based on how much of the work that I do is correct

and done and so I can usually see if my rate of work has slowed down um because I've been doing this for a long enough period of time that I can tell when my you know if I'm making slides for a presentation that it's like my rate of work starts to really drop or my quality of work starts to drop or from writing my quality or my speed starts to drop so like I know when that happens sometimes it takes longer to get there sometimes it takes less time um I think that does take some

time I think in the beginning though you should expect junk work as in like junk volume where this is a hard one but you have to get over it is that while you're still learning it let's say you reached your point of Maximum like production at you know hour five and then you still have like another five hours of work I would say do the extra hours of work because you won't know what that limit is until you get there and if the next five hours will work when you come back the next day you

look at it with fresh eyes and you say like this isn't good enough I wouldn't see it as a loss I would see that your ability to see that it wasn't good enough you would only be able to do if you had already done the 5 hours of junk work and that still got you further ahead than if you hadn't done it at all and so even if I delete everything I still have everything in my head so like for example we've made videos before where we'll do the entire video and at the very end

we're like I feel like we could just do that one again and make it better and then we do it again and it is way better so it's not the first video was a waste it was the first video set up the second video or the first and second set up the third and so Leeds had 19 drafts like the 18th set up the 19 18 and it's not that the first 18 were waste it was just that they were steps and so it's just that I mean I'll go biblical on you again um but

uh I can't remember the proverb but it says uh in all work there is profit uh which I like the more rhetorical way of saying like uh the work works on you more than you work on it which is that you always benefit from work in all work there is profit in all work there is benefit and because like the five hours extra that you do editing and then you realize the next day it's not that that wasn't profitable for you it's not that you didn't benefit from it you benefited from it and then once

you benefit from it that comes back out again and the work benefits and so I used to say this when I was um growing business earlier I said either the business grows or I grow or both but like one of them is happening because if the business is growing great I might not be growing at all maybe I am but the business is growing for sure the business stops growing it's getting hard so I start growing and then once I grow enough the business starts growing again and so like growth is always happening it's just

where you're measuring it right so let's say someone's been following this video it's like step one they they broke the belief that they need to be happy it's useful you know step two find intrinsic value in in the process of improving step three but how like for you was it going into environments where you learned you saw people being useful you saw people working how could someone do that if they're young and everything comes down to F figuring out what the input output equation is if you don't know the input output equation of getting good

at your skill you will be lost until you find it and so like if you want to be a good coder it's $10,000 of coding if you want to be a good editor it's $10,000 editing you want to be a good salesman it's $10,000 hours on the phone if you want to be like it just is and so for me as soon as I figure that out then I just want to start chipping away at it as fast as I can and so if it's like I can do 10,000 hours over 10 years or I

can do it over four years you know it's funny because people see a 200,000 hour work year but there's like there's so many more hours than that like it's ridiculous there's so many more hours than 2,000 hours like there's 104 days of the year that are weekends and if you add in federal holidays and two weeks of paid vacation you have 129 days a year out of 365 and of the of the remaining days that you quote work you work eight of the 24 so like there's so many more hours that you can that you

can do stuff and get better than people give themselves credit for and so it's just about see I was like I was I'm used to add my little tick for where my ring is um find the input output equation and then dump as much as you possibly can into the input side and get rid of everything that interferes with it which also means the people in your life who interfere with you doing the input out of equation um the environmental cues so as in like if you like I work in as as closely as I

can in no windows no sound that's how I work I don't want any distraction some people work better with whatever I have a hard time believing that maybe they enjoy working more I doubt they work better some people are like I listen to music when I work there's just a ton of research that shows that that's just like empirically you work less well like you just don't now uh instrumental that doesn't have words words maybe but like you're using horsepower listening to words period and so I want all horsepower like even if you're bouncing on

your chair like you're using brain power and so I want to use nothing I want to use 100% of my power on the task at hand and that's it and and that means that if I have also stressors outside of my life people who are bothering me not just like you know people literally interrupting me but just problems it's like I want to resolve those so that I can put all my attention here because if I'm trying to type it I'm thinking about you know this snafu I had with somebody deal with the snafu and

then you'll be able to work more clearly what if someone doesn't know what they want to apply the input into yet like they don't know that it's writing they don't know that it's yeah um I think that it would behoove you so like everything's so okay it's the fallacy of the perfect pick so people think when they're starting out one that they should find something they're passionate about um two that the first thing they pick is the last thing they're going to do for the rest of their life and I think both of those are

false so we'll start with the first one so the fallacy of finding your purpose or finding your passion excuse me is that you're going to love something so much that you immediately fall in love with it some people do the vast majority don't and real real I liked Fitness but as soon as I started my gym which I thought was quote pursuing my passion my life stopped being about Fitness it was about business and then I had to learn that and I sucked at it and so like even the idea that I'm just going to

do my passion isn't even the reality of quote doing your passion because doing my passion became work and I started hiring trainers and getting systematizing onboarding and getting them trained up so they wouldn't suck on the floor because I had to do other things and all of a sudden I made my quote passion into work as other people Define work um and so you create passion you don't find it um and you create it by being willing to suck for a very long period of time until you get good and then when you get good

at stuff you tend to like it one the second fallacy was that you whatever you is the perfect pick is that you're going to pick the perfect thing the first time life is long people change career directories more now than ever before and so I prefer the process of approximation which is can I just get directional and then iterate and so it's like okay do you like words or do you like numbers people are like I like numbers okay all these careers probably not for you great one directional change all right and then within there

it's like okay do I Like Money numbers or do I like data numbers or do I like computer numbers it's like okay I like data numbers great so now now we're already in like a zillion career paths in this direction but the thing is is that if you then start getting good at becoming a data analyst for an oil company and then you decide that you want to Pivot into into media buying there's going to be a lot of generalizable skills there because it was all about data and you did have to learn a lot

of stuff and what I will say is that you get these unique carryovers that only you will have and so so Steve Jobs tells a story about how he took calligraphy right and it seemed useless at the time and then fast forward when they had the Mac they started having different fonts and they only have different fonts because Steve Jobs that one time took calligraphy and so the lessons you learn on the first thing you do don't become apparent sometimes until the third fourth or fifth thing you do but that third fourth or fifth thing

you do the fact that you did that first thing gives you unique Advantage compared to everyone else who didn't and so following the tried andr path there's nothing wrong with that but there's also nothing wrong with learning like there is never a downside to learning more skills period because you are able to create more unique solutions to problems that you get presented with in the future because of things you've done in the past and so I'm sure that like right now there's not a lot of really jacked investors there AR but I'll bet you that

there are things that I have taken from my bodybuilding and powerlifting past that I can see more uniquely than some of them can and I know more about Fitness industry Investments than probably they do both from a consumer and from an owner I know like I still get calls from many many like multi-billion dollar portfolio owners they're like hey we're about to invest in this chain of gyms what do you think and I've swayed multi-billions of dollars of decisions being like I think they're a dog I think they're going to go down and here's why

and they're like we didn't see that in the data I'm like yeah but if you were in you'd know that and so but I wouldn't if I was just another data analyst they'd never call me and so the idea of the perfect pit perfect pick is just a fallacy so pick a direction it's just closer or further this is closer okay cool getting warm think think about getting warm getting hot rather than this is it and so then you can start approximating and the work that you did on a warm before it gets hot isn't

wasted because you have a new lens that other people who just went straight there won't have even if it takes you longer because again life's super long Andrew churn and Peggy churn who started Express they're they're Deca billionaires now they started their first location at 40 years ago but he's 75 now so he wasn't like young he was 35 start first location first right like and they're richer than most people are or will ever be and so like if it takes you 10 years or 20 years um it's fine but I'll also bet you that

they now I have to learn this from them but I'll bet you they did things before panda press that had nothing to do with running Chinese chicken shops right but those skills still translated over I was a Management Consultant at space cyber and intelligence for the military before starting a gym how does that translate well I learned a Consulting process and the learning of Consulting process is learning how to solve problems and so I use that with my gyms because the Consulting process you go to experts and you ask them what they do so I

started interviewing all these gym owners because they were willing to talk about their gyms and I would drive out there every weekend because I had time and I would just spend time with the gym and I'd be like how do you onboard people what do your contracts look like what terms do you use how do you do with cancellations how do you do with turn how do you do with the cin cards and I would ask all of them and every once in a while some be like oh I do that that's good I'll take

that one down I'll steal that from me and I would just do that over and over and over again but I got that from Consulting other gym owners didn't apply Consulting for him because they weren't Consultants first so if I had maybe started straight into gym ownership right out of college rather than taking two years to be a consultant I might not have gone as far so like what felt like a complete waste of time when I was in it which it did might have been the thing that made me succeed in the next thing

and so even if you're in it right now the only thing that I can say is that you want to try as hard as you can and get as many skills as you can in that field even if you don't think you're going to use it later and I'll wrap this with this um if you guys haven't seen it it's it's a worthwhile movie it's something called um Slum Dog Millionaire so the premise of the movie is this kid in the slums in India um it basically just tells his story of just like trials and

tribulations he just says bad luck after bad luck after bad luck the whole movie and then by chance at the end of the movie he gets on their equivalent of uh Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and so I think it's like 12 questions or something it's 12 or 20 I don't remember questions that they ask and by Chance the haphazard crazy bad situations that this guy is in his whole life amount to him winning and and answering each of the questions correctly and so a lot of times we just need to expand the time

Rison and realize that we might be playing our own Slum Dog Millionaire movie it's just that we're in like the third we're we're learning the answer to the third question right now even though we're just getting kicked in the nuts and so I think if you have that frame and remember that the worst thing that can ever happen is that you die and you're going to die no matter what it lowers the stakes a little bit dude D Man