play it out what if you just never do anything is like maybe some people just need to stop dreaming maybe they need to accept their current reality and actually enjoy it because there's a lot of people when they're 70 and 80 and they didn't do their dreams and if they went back like they didn't do anything but that whole time they were dissatisfied because they didn't try but what if they were just like I have a good life I have a wife who loves me I've got some kids I have a job that I you
know like I don't mind it pay the bills I mean if you go back 500 years it wasn't people are like man this is my passion he's like dude I'm just rowing rowing a boat across a ferry and that's what I do and that's what my dad did and his dad did like this is how we eat and so like we have these these um idealized versions of purpose that I think Instagram and all this stuff kind of make terrible but like I think there's a lot of honor and work period And I think a
lot of people uh fool themselves by thinking that what they do for some reason is not honorable and I think a lot of it is like the internal versus external scorecard of like I believe these things to be true about the universe or like the world but a lot of those are like what do I believe about myself which is like I can choose to do work in this way which then I can derive Joy from so like if I'm Shoveling [ __ ] I can choose to be like I will be the best [
__ ] shoveler because I believe that I will figure out how to do this more efficiently and I will you know I will I will get better and I'll have calluses on my hands and I'll have a better back and whatever um but I will do this well and I think you can find joy and work if you decide to do it well so on one hand if you are if if you are if your dream causes you so much pain then you will quit what you're doing and do it and if it doesn't cause
you enough pain that you're not pursuing it or that you don't like if you don't feel like you're in a cage right now then maybe you're not in a cage and maybe you just need to like the life you have and that's cool too 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 when it kind of goes over a billion dollars and um I bought a Powerball ticket with my girlfriend 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 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 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 I think about death all the time and that's that's what I think for me has given me a lot of uh freedom to take big shots because like at the end of the day I think that it's not going to matter no one's going to remember so if you are afraid of other people thinking about you just remember that 6 months after you die they're not going to
be and so it's like we have all these fears about other people but like most of them won't even show up to your funeral cuz they're going to be busy I work all the time I have no Hobbies besides working out if you can consider that a hobby like four times a week that's it I work all the time that's all I do and I work until I can't work meaning like my output per unit of time starts to drop precipitously and I know that I just need to take a break of some sort and
then I usually B some sort of Television cuz that's what for me Works some people are like I Garden that's not me Netflix I'm good you know what I mean or dark room in a movie theater rocking um comma and that's okay like why do I need to take their expectation of what they want like they're like that's not healthy I'm like Define healthy I do as much as I can of the thing that I want to do with every minute of my day why is that not healthy why do you want me to do
something that I would prefer to do less cuz I do what I do every other of the day because that's what I want to do almost like how dare you cast your expectation of your life onto me and to be fair the same degree they cannot work at all doesn't affect me like I'm a I'm a big big advocate for destroying should the word in general should is just like the expectation motor of like all our psyches you should go to school you should get a degree you should do this job you should marry her
you shouldn't stay up so late you shouldn't work so hard you shouldn't you should be more balanced you shouldn't be working out so much you're not working out like it's there's all these shoulds that other people tell us and it's like and you zoom out and then you see that it's a galaxy with a little dot of dust it's like should what there is no should do what you want to do at least that's how I see the world I'll give you my definition of Happiness which is doing what you like do with people you
like and doing that as much as you Poss people who move faster in life don't actually move faster they get more for every step many skills like 1+ 1 equals five when you put them together so let's say you have somebody who's really good at math in the beginning that of as a skill not super monetizable right okay well then you learn bookkeeping okay well now you had a proclivity for math but you learned something that um has value in the business World okay then you learn to you get your CPA now you become an
accountant okay more valuable um then you start studying around uh tax law and insurance and you're like oh significantly more valuable then you learn how to how Capital markets work and how debt markets work right and and you understand how mergers and Acquisitions work and all of a sudden you're a CFO and then you learn how to sell and promote a little bit and all of a sudden now you're a rain maker and so you still needed to be good at math but when you stack these other skills on top of it the original math
skill becomes significantly more Val Val when you have these skills on top but each one kind of requires the one before which is why one of the things I hate about kind of the entrepreneur World a little bit is like they'll learn something new and then poo poo the thing before it's like I'm not upset at the teacher who taught me arithmetic as I learned algebra one was necessary for the next and so um as entrepreneurs a lot of times it takes I think the self-awareness to say like where am I at on my skill
stacking Adventure right and each skill every skill you add to your skill tool belt makes the rest of your skills more valuable 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 fit 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 and 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 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 get presented with in the future because of things you've done in the past I think negative motivation is poo pooed too much like if you are angry use it if you are sad use it because like what else are you going to do with it
