"Rejecting Mediocrity: Embracing High Standards in Pursuit of Dreams"

> - **The journey toward success is often fraught with challenges and sacrifices.**  
> - **High standards may be viewed negatively by others, but they are often essential for achieving greatness.**  
> - **Pursuing a passion does not guarantee happiness; true fulfillment comes from hard work and perseverance.**  
> - **Understanding that feeling uncertain and lost is part of the growth process can lead to true personal development.**  
> - **Authenticity in actions, words, and intentions can create deeper connections and a more meaningful life.**  

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What did you call this? The podcasting booty call? We come together for a very intense 3 hours; don't see each other for six months until I text you again and say, "What you doing?" It's exactly that. 

All right, so we're going to go through some of the best lessons I've learned from you over the last couple of months.

**First one:** "Control freak" is a word people with low standards use to describe people with high standards. You're not a control freak; you just want it done right the first time. You're not anxious—you care.

Do not expect mediocre people to support world-class goals. 

I think most people feel really lonely when you want something that doesn't currently exist, and so some people call that a dream; some people call that goals. Whatever it is, you're trying to pull something from your mind into reality, and you want it done a certain way. If it's not done that way, it's not what you imagined.

People on the outside will throw stones and call you names that they think will change your behavior and get you to stop. The more I have been the person trying to pull things into reality, the more I've tried to weather and build defenses against those things. 

So when those stones get hurled at you by being called a control freak or by saying you micromanage things or that you have incredibly high standards, the answer is yes—because I want it done right the first time. Either way, we're going—if you have enough will, it's going to get done the way that I want it done, regardless. 

And it'll be less painful if we just do it right the first time because we will still have to do it. You may have to do it three or four more times, but eventually you'll just succumb to the fact that we're going to do it this way. 

I think all of the great things that have happened for humanity have been from one man or woman who had an idea and just wouldn't let people shake it from them. The standard of "right" isn't actually that insane when you think about it; it's just right, done without error. 

I'm trying to think of a really good example for this, but like the level of detail! I mean, it's the difference between a book that gets 10 or 100 five-star reviews and a book that gets 100,000 five-star reviews. Everybody wants a silver bullet, but most of the things that make great products are 100 golden BBs. 

So that’s one of the things we have: there's no silver bullet, only hundreds of golden BBs. There's just hundreds of tiny little improvements. 

It's like: how can we look at the... can we improve the way it ships? What about the weight? What about the color scheme? How does it sit on the shelves? How are people going to look at it in this market versus this market? 

How does this name appear on hats and shirts and on sites? What's the RGB? You know, whatever the color scheme is here versus there—it's just a thousand details that someone who does not care will not put the work in to look into because they're trying to check a box rather than make something that people will love.

I heard this from—shoot, I can't remember where it was from—but basically that the best art is art where the artist makes it for themselves, and where you see commercial work is where a bunch of people are trying to make something for an audience. 

So, they're trying to like rinse and recycle stuff that actually solves no one's problems because no one is actually the audience. Whereas when you make it for yourself, there's thousands of people just like you who will have the same depth of understanding of it. 

But it feels selfish in the moment to make something for yourself, but when you make it for yourself, you actually make it for everyone. 

Well, you can be reliably informed that there's some non-insignificant minority of people who also think like you, who also have the same problems as you, who also have the same fears as you.

I'm going through two projects at the moment—one being a book and the other being Nutonic, that is new—and that means that there's lots more of these small things that are actually quite big things. 

But I was telling you before we started about the fact there's a hyphen, and there's a hyphen missing between one piece of copy and another piece of copy, but it's printed on a million cans. Think for—[__], sake! 

But being concerned about being seen as someone who has too high standards is something that for quite a while I felt ashamed about. 

Yeah, because you feel like a bother—you feel like you're being necessarily... It's not even detail-oriented, it's picky, cumbersome, yeah, yes, yes, laborious. 

I realized probably last year. It took me until last year to realize that not succumbing to stopping doing that is probably one of the only reasons why I've had any success. 

I mean, I think, for anyone who's listening, if you have that, I consider it a gift. It makes sense for the majority of people to be opposed to that because you do make more work for everyone else, but the product of that work is so much better. 

If you want the work that you have to last and to be meaningful and make an impact, it comes from 100 golden BBs of 100 particularities, of 100 peculiarities that you are picky about because the whole thing needs to work. 

What happens is if you have a big project, lots of people have to get involved, but there still needs to be one vision. Otherwise, it looks like a Frankenstein where everyone just checks a box of something they did in the past. They just copied and pasted it over, and then it doesn't resonate with anyone because, again, they just did it for everyone rather than for the artist. 

Using that as a frame has given me permission to be me in an unreasonable world. And like I told... I told this last time I was on; but when I did the book launch, I practiced that presentation three times a day, every day for 30 days. So I did 100 run-throughs—full-length run-throughs. First, where I did it out loud and recorded it—the second time where I would watch the recording and edit in real-time—and then do it again, and I did that every single day. 

And so then when I came live and had half a million people or whatever it came out, it went flawlessly. But people were like, "Man, you're such a natural at this." It's like, well, I did it a hundred times. 

And sometimes people even hear '100' and it's just a big number, but when you do 100 repetitions of something, the first five times you're like, "Wow, I'm so much better!" but then the difference between five and the next 95 times is what goes from being great to being a masterpiece. 

And it's that next 95 that I think is what makes people world-class. And that's where everyone falls off. 

There's this pull I think from people who don't have high standards to people who do have high standards to drag them back. It's this like moving back toward the mean. 

Yeah, it's killing the only competitive advantage that you had. Couldn't agree more, it's conforming. Right? It's like people want you to do what they find comfortable. And most things that are like—most companies deteriorate when the founder leaves. 

And it happens slowly because you go from 100 golden BBs to 99 golden BBs, and it doesn't look that different. And then there's 98 golden BBs; and they're like, "I don't know." And then two years later, three years later, you're like, "I don't know, it doesn't have the same magic as it was."

And that's because the art behind it isn't there because it's not unified anymore. It's not congruent anymore; it's 100 departments making decisions with people copying and pasting things for an audience that doesn't exist, rather than one person who's trying to be satisfied for an ideal that they are trying with all their might to live up to. 

I suppose this is one of the important reasons to have a singular figure that is the hub, and all of the spokes come off it because they're the only person that gets to see absolutely everything. Typically, that would be the founder. 

In a podcast, that would be a host. In a solo music band, that would be the lead singer or the songwriter or whatever. They get to see everything. 

For instance, we’ve done some episodes before where it's been the night before, and I've been not happy with the color grade because the way that something displays on mobile is slightly different than the way that it displays in Premier Pro, and it’s slightly different than the way that it displays in the 6K photographer’s curved screen. 

I’m like, "Guys, it's like, it’s not up to scratch." Well, we’re not going to be able to get it in time for the export. We're not going to be able to get it in time to get it uploaded. And then there's checks that go through on YouTube like, "Well, it needs to happen." 

Like, just make find a way to make this happen! And yeah, that impulse of just actually seeing it as something that you should lean into. 

Okay, well, it's not. And if you set the standard and if everybody else gets up to that standard, what it shows is that the people who continually push up against that and don’t meet that standard, they’re just not built for this particular company. 

They’re built for someone else that makes a mediocre product, but they're not built for you, who's making a world-class product. 

And I really want to jam down someone's throat right now the whole, like, "Don't be a perfectionist." Like, "Your product—it's just another word for procrastination." I actually think that's complete [__]. 

I think that's my quote: "Being a perfectionist is procrastination masquerading as quality control." 

Yes! Okay! So then, I'm going to put a sub-footnote on it that I think will add context which is that most people who claim to be perfectionists are not perfectionists; they’re actually procrastinating because they’re not doing anything. 

And so it just is a socially acceptable label because the real perfectionists feel this sickness where they want to itch their skin off until the thing's done, but they are trying to get it done. 

Whereas the perfectionist—the procrastinator uses that to say, "Like, I’m not sure, I’m just getting it right." But like the person who's an actual perfectionist wants to finish and is working every hour of every day on the thing and seeing progress towards it. 

Because if you don't know how your thing is getting better, you’re not a perfectionist; you're just ignorant. 

They’re also moving toward the goal every single step of the way as opposed to just sitting back. This whole huge list of things that are not doing the thing, planning to do the thing, isn't doing the thing. Thinking about the thing isn’t doing the thing. 

Getting angry at people on the internet that have already done the thing is doing the thing!

And there are also people who are perfectionists within the thing that matters most who are prepared to see things that are ancillary to that. 

For instance, you’re not absolutely a perfectionist with the short-form content that goes out on your Instagram. It’s like—this is sawdust, as you call it—this is just extra, right? It's for, it’s freebie stuff. 

If we have one in 100 videos that have got a typo or the hyphen’s missing or something like, "All right." But if we're talking about the school announcement release—if there's a [__] typo in that, or if in the video one of the links is broken, or even if one of the links is slightly pixelated—yeah, that's something that I can have a problem with. 

So picking your battles as a perfectionist, I think, actually—we’re someone with high standards—is super important because you can’t have that degree of high standards at absolutely everything. 

Because if you don’t pick your battles, you’re not going to make sufficient movement at the velocity you need to actually make progress. So find the areas that are the highest contribution. Don’t compromise on those.

And it's funny you say that because the way that I immediately reframed that was that perfectionism is around volume. It's like that is what we will— that is what we are optimizing towards. 

And then we can’t because if we look at—if we knew how people responded ahead of time to content then we would make things differently than we do. 

But I probably, like you, am often surprised, pleasantly, and sometimes unpleasantly by the stuff that just grabs hold and then just goes, you know, viral as hell in content.

And so I think part of that is making up for our own ignorance by increasing volume, and at least (so) that would be like my reframe on the perfectionism there is like we know that if we make 10 pieces of content it is more likely that we will have more people see it than if we try really hard at one. 

So we make 10 because the net benefit of the 10 is great.

IDEA has a fantastic on this where he talks about perfectionism allows people to sit back and not produce work at a rate required to work out what actually works.

Have you heard the story of the pottery class? Oh, I feel like the—oh, right—well, this feels like total modern wisdom. Is this where someone comes in behind and then holds the thing in front? 

So there's a teacher and he's got two classes that he teaches, and one class he says the only assignment for this whole semester is that you come back with a perfect clay pot; that's it. The other class he says, "Your objective is to make the most total quantity of clay pots," and you’ll be measured by how many pots you make.

And at the end of the quarter, the pots that came from the team that had to just make sheer volume not only did they make more pots, but the quality of all of their pots was better compared to the teams that only had to make one.

And it just underlines the biggest lesson that I've learned in my life, which is that volume negates luck. You can try to be lucky and pick the one perfect thing and try and make it, but if you don't want to try and be lucky, you can just do so much [__] work that you will brute force your way to figuring it out.

Like if you do 1,000 podcasts, you'll be pretty [__] good at podcasts, right? But if you try to say, "Okay, you’re brand new, and all you have to do is make one perfect podcast," the problem is that you don't have the perspective for which to make a judgment to say what is good because you have zero data to base anything off of; and so you're basing your idea of a perfect podcast on something that you've literally never done before.

And so doing the volume gives you the perspective to then have the best podcast at number 1,000 or 10. One, anyway, I just thought you'd love the Clay Pot. I know that story, but I thought it was photography.

Oh, okay, so anyway but no, I again, I don't disagree. And it's finding the thing that is to try and make this tactical: what is the thing that you don't need to focus on volume today? The goal is not to try and fit 10 podcasts into one set; it's to make this one as good as possible.

But if it's shorts or reels or tweets or something, it’s lower leverage, it’s lower input—just get it out there!

All right, next one: Here's how to get older without getting better: keep relearning the same lesson. If you keep making the same mistake over and over, the mistake isn’t the problem you want.

So, I define learning by the same condition, new behavior. And so when you go to a video game and you battle through the level and you battle the boss, if you keep doing the same thing to the boss and you keep losing, then you have not learned because you're in the same condition and the same behavior.

And so I often say that like for anyone who's listening to this podcast, if the goal is to get better and you’re like, "Man, I really want to learn something from this podcast." If you listen to this podcast and then you're in the same exact conditions as you were before and then you do not change your behavior, you learned nothing.

Using that definition has at least allowed me to change my behavior faster, which then goes into rate of learning, which I define as intelligence. 

So a lot of people are like, "Man, he’s so smart," but he just doesn't—it’s like, "Well, then if he doesn't change his behavior and he’s in the same conditions, he’s a dummy; he’s not that smart." 

And so if you are trying to battle the same boss over and over again and you don't change what you're doing and the boss keeps beating you, then it's not the game's problem; it's your problem. You are the problem.

And I think that—it’s like if you continue—I’ve talked about this obviously, I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs—but I usually do this when I have a crowd.

I'm just like, "Hey, raise your hand if you work all the hours of the day." A lot—you know, most of the crowd raised their hand. I say, "Okay, who here has been stuck at the same revenue level for six months or more?" 

And then I say, "Keep the hands up." Honestly, most of the time the same hands are raised. And I say, "You’re doing the wrong [__]." 

If you put all your inputs and the outputs haven’t changed, then you have the same condition and the same behavior, and so you have learned nothing. 

That has always just been my reframe. And so over time, if you're moving up in entrepreneurship, you're moving up in your career, your behavior should change because it means you've learned.

Exposure to information isn’t learning. 

Great TDR, it's true.

And it's the same with memory. It’s literally the way that memory works. The best way to work out how the human memory system works is repeated recall, not repeated exposure. 

You have to drag it out of memory and use it, not just see it a million times. And this is kind of the same thing with the lesson: you can listen to any of the podcasts that exist on the Internet or the ones that we’ve done or the ones that you love or whatever, and if you don't apply anything, it's a waste of time. 

And this is the best solution for this: Tim Ferriss has the good [__] sticks. 

Look, what's the thing from the podcast or the book or the audiobook or the whatever that you read or listened to that you can't stop thinking about, that you go to bed and you think about it, that you took a screenshot or a screen recording and sent it in the group chat, that you like texted your mom about it at 3 in the morning? 

"Oh, this really explains the way that I felt in school or the way that I felt when such and such broke up with me," or whatever—that's the thing. That’s the thing to focus on.

But a lot of the time, the me problem with mental masturbation is that the amount of information you can intake versus the amount of change that you can deploy is asymmetric. 

Yeah.

When I was getting started on my entrepreneurial journey, I would say this like pre-this—I was when I was an entrepreneur—I hadn't quit my job yet. I started reading all these self-help books and I remember reading—it was probably like my 10th book in a row—and I realized that the words in that book contradicted the second self-help book that I—you know, one was like, "It's all about goals," the other one's like, "It's all about taking steps or whatever it is," right?

And I all of a sudden was like, "You know, my life is the same." I've read all these books, but I literally live in the exact same condo in Baltimore doing the same job—like nothing has changed. 

And so I just made the commitment that whatever the next book that I was going to read, I would just not read another book until I'd done everything in that book. 

And I—that's when I quit my job and I did a whole bunch of other things, and I’ve actually more or less stuck with that in terms of like when I read books or even listen to podcasts. I usually do it with an intention to get something out of it, and I usually have notes up. 

And so that's so my intake on information because I get asked a lot—I’m sure you do—like, I actually don't read that much. 

I definitely don't read non-fiction; I read like fantasy—Red Rising, baby!—that's right. 

But it's because usually I get overwhelmed with the amount of things I would have to do and so I'm like, 'I don't need more information.' I'm like, "I could read a chapter and be like, ‘All right, that's it. I like, it'll take me two weeks to do this.'" 

And so then, like the rest of the time is doing that. And so how do you ensure that the things that you're reading are giving you good advice? 

Because if you didn’t move on before you took two weeks to go and do the thing but the thing was dog [__], you’ve spent two weeks going backward.

So I would probably—I would make the argument that I wouldn’t have gone backwards because I would have gained the experience and so I would have more context to know what the second thing was going to be. 

And that's just kind of like the trial by fire, learning through iteration. And I think I tend to do more of that sort of win-all, learn philosophy. 

Yeah, and I would say that like there are entrepreneurs who are definitely like super, super duper planners, and there are entrepreneurs who are more like, "Let’s just move and break [__] and we’ll figure it out." 

I tend to be really this on the micro in terms of like, "Move [__] and break. You know, like, we'll figure it out as we go." 

And I just tend to be a planner only in the big, like very grand, like what do I really want to do in ten years? But the majority of the time it’s like let's see and just we’ll learn. 

I've learned so much—so much of the content that I have comes from just [__] up in business and people were like, "This is such an original concept." 

I was like, "Ooho—how do I do that again?" And so, like it was always through iteration. 

And I’ve read all these books but there's a difference between knowing how—or sorry, knowing that—and knowing how. Like, knowing that maybe this works maybe, but once you do, it's a different type of learning where at least for me, it's about this way.

If you could read—you could read a hundred books on sales—but when you take your first cold call, all of that goes out the window because you actually have to sell. 

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This is related to something I wrote last week: Don’t be so worried about people who imitate your work; they only know the what but not the why. If you stopped being creative, so would they. A photocopier isn’t an artist, even if it can recreate the Mona Lisa. 

I love that because you think like you're the source in that situation, and so everyone is there for like a subset of you, and they require you to live; you don’t require them. 

And the equal opposite is: I think we should be more fearful of when everyone stops copying you. The day that no one copies you is far, far more frightening than the day everyone's copying you. 

Yeah, Jimmy Carr refers to China as a cover band. You know, it’s like they’re the cover band of The Beatles, and he says, "You know, they’re good and in many ways they’re able to produce things at more scale and so on and so forth, but they’re not driving the innovation forward." 

Yeah, in that same way, the idea of getting upset about people copying is just ridiculous. Like, yeah, that’s all I got. 

I understand why it’s painful, right? If someone’s gone through, okay, let’s test and test and test and test and test, and then finally find a particular formula that works, and then 10 people downstream get the benefit of this hard laborious effort, late-night grind and iteration, and they just got to be like, "Oh, that thing, yeah.” 

So I think that they’ll be able to copy what they can see, but they won’t be able to copy what they can’t see, which is understanding why each of those pieces are in place. And when something changes in the future, they won’t be able to iterate from there because they don’t know why it was there in the first place.

I’ve obviously dealt with this in a business context where real dollars are at stake. In the gym world, you know Gym Launch, for those who don’t know, I had a big licensing company. We had 5,000 locations. And anyways, so we had basically business processes that we would you know iterate and figure out why this worked. 

And then I had—I used to keep a list of names and then I just—it got too long and tiresome to keep the names of all the people who tried to take my stuff and then sell it as their own. 

I say their names every night before I go to bed. "You think I don’t remember you? I remember all of you." 

And so none of them, 10 years later, are still around, and none of them even came to a tenth of the size of Gym Launch. 

And that’s because it wasn’t theirs. Like the person that I would be far more afraid of is somebody who comes out with a significantly better system than what we had to help gyms make more money and help their clients more. 

But, like to this day, Gym Launch is still the category king in that industry. And so it’s like just—and that’s because we put—and we were talking about this earlier; everything is R&D for us.

And so we actually were the only licensing company that had an R&D department, and we would test—we call them plays—but we test plays every 14 days. 

And so we’d spend $50,000 or $100,000 on just a test; we’d be like, "All right, let’s test this new marketing campaign," or we’d say, "Hey, let’s test this new high-ticket sales process." 

Or, "Hey, what if we tried to sell memberships via chat? Let’s just give it a shot—let’s see what happens." 

And honestly, 70% of the time it didn’t work as well as the control. And what we would do is we’d present it to clients and say, "Hey guys, guess what? We just spent $50,000 on that. You don’t have to spend money on it; look at the results of this sale membership." 

The thing is, is that most people are actually really happy to hear that it didn’t work because it felt like they were scratching it—like oh, great! I don’t have to do that one. Like someone did that test for me.

So anyways, all that to say, unless you have that trail of bodies behind you that led you to figure out this one thing, when there is a kink in the system because some external condition changes—which it always will—they then don’t know which means you’re always still going to be ahead.

That’s very interesting, yeah—because if you understand the physics of the system, if you understand the dynamics of why you’re doing the thing you’re doing—which are case-specific, we can shift things—mean, if something changes, you can respond.

But it goes back to people with high standards; you have to presume that you win in the weeds. You have to presume that you win in the weeds, and if you do, and if you’re continuing to be this close to it, yeah, as soon as things change, you go, "That’s interesting. Why has that happened?"

And that then allows you to continue to iterate, and you see it because you’re in the weeds, right? Somebody who’s all the way zoomed out is just like, "Yeah, copy-paste that," and they’re late because they have to see that it’s working, see that it’s working consistently. 

So they’re already three, six months behind, then they start trying to figure out how to implement it, and then they start implementing it, and then what they don’t see is the things that made the conditions that made it work to begin with. 

So like if you just assume that you’re always in the lead, then it means then sure, second through tenth place will always copy number one, but to the victory go the spoils. 

And so you, like no one gives a [__] who’s fourth place at the Olympics. 

Reminder that if you want to be exceptional, you're going to be different from everyone else. That's what makes you exceptional; you can't fit in and also be exceptional. Both have discomfort—when you fit in, you have internal conflict because you're not being 100% you. 

When you're exceptional, you have external conflict because everyone sees you as different; pick one. When your friends start to say you've changed, remember it's because they don't know how to say you've grown.

I define words a lot because it helps me kind of make sense of the world, and exceptionals is like an obvious one, right? We use the word exceptional like you are not like everyone else. 

But even saying it like that, you are not like everyone else, and so if someone says you're not like everyone else, then you can just reframe that as like, "I'm exceptional, and that's not a bad thing." 

And most—and I don't—actually think that most people have, like this might be counter to most people's beliefs, but I think most people have the potential to be exceptional because most people are peculiar in their own way. They just stifle that because they want to be accepted by most people, but in so doing never accomplish what they want to do because they conform. 

So like if there are probably a lot of things about the world or even your world around you, you're like, "This never made sense to me," but then you do it anyway. 

And I think that a lot of innovation and a lot of what makes people exceptional is thinking that thought or seeing that thing and being like, "Huh, I don’t think I'm going to follow that rule anymore." 

Like, why do I need to shower twice a day? Huh? Like, I don't know; why do I need to wear different clothing? Huh? 

Like, there are just a lot of these social norms that people, you know, usually passed down to us, or they’re, you know, bred into us in high school and college and things like that.

But it’s like you see a guy who, you know, wears a cowboy hat and dressed a certain way, and he basically wants to say, "I am this; I am this archetype of person." 

But if cowboy boots are as comfortable for you as New Balances are, and you know that, and you still wear cowboy boots, I would call you a fraud. 

Because like that is like, it’s a micro rebellion against yourself. It’s like there is—and like I look at old people a lot because usually they don’t give a [__] anymore; they’ve just given up. 

And there was a survey they did where the number one reason that old people like don’t have as much drama and they’re happier is they said they literally don’t have time for it.

Like literally they don’t have time for it. And I found that so interesting, and I was like, "Well, if I’m going to eventually be that way when I’m 80, I might as well just start being that way now." 

And so they usually wear like really comfortable footwear and like they keep their surroundings like whatever weird peculiarities they have—they just accept them. 

And so I think a lot of, like if life is a long journey of self-acceptance, I think the earlier you can accept your own peculiarities as just part of you, rather than trying to justify them or mold to the archetype that you think is acceptable within your social circle. 

At least for me, like there’s this period of discomfort when you change anything because everyone around you wants you to fit within the label that they are comfortable with. 

But they also have the anchor of what you were before.

Yeah, exactly. And so they try and like—people don’t like that, and so they’re like, "No, no, I like you in this box, so just say—uh, I know you’re having a little thing right now; don’t worry." Just—and they just wanted to shove you back into it. 

And there’s a lot of uncomfortable conversations that you have to have where it becomes really socially awkward. 

And so, like I said one the other day about like going home for the holidays, and the reason I don’t like doing it is because often I have to confront a lot of people that I haven’t seen in a long time and they’ll speak to me in a way that I don't like. 

And before that, I would roll it off like, "Whatever, no big deal," but I don’t accept that. Didn’t you torpedo a family holiday a couple of years ago? 

Many, yeah. I think, but that’s the—when your friends start to say you’ve changed, it’s because they don’t know how to say you’ve grown; and because they see so few people who have, it makes sense that they don’t have that. 

So I see that as a lack of skill not malice. Like it’s not that they’re bad people, they just don’t even know it because so few people do change. So few people do grow. 

Have you seen this image—it’s a person whose heart and head are flowers; it’s kind of a 2D drawing; it’s a bit of a sketch, and they say this person with the kind of smaller flower head and heart says, "You’ve changed." 

And the person on the other side with this huge blooming thing says, "I should hope so." 

Yeah, I haven't seen it, but I see it in my head. Yeah, it’s brilliant. One of my friends George Mack told me this five years ago, I think. 

I'm astounded by how many people want to be spectacular in life but also want to be normal. By being normal, you are by definition aiming for average; normal people get normal results; exceptional people get exceptional results. 

You literally can’t do what everyone else does and expect to not get what everyone else has got. By doing what everyone else does, you guarantee average results. 

Okay, so this comes down to everything that like business—I mean, obviously, I come from the business and investing world. Like if everyone is jumping onto crypto, like by the time you have all the information to make a perfect decision, it’s too late. 

And by the time you have consensus where everyone’s like, "That’s a good investment,” it probably isn’t because it’s already been mispriced because it’s already like—it’s already inflated. 

It's above what its intrinsic value is. And so like good investors fundamentally can think for themselves. 

And it’s such an easy thing to say and such a hard thing to do, and so it’s being able to say if I shut myself in a room and I had to come up with a value for something and just use my own mind to come up with what I think this is worth. 

It’s that answer that you get in a room in isolation with no internet connection that you believe in that number more than every single other person’s. 

And most people can’t do that. But like that ability—and then what happens though is if you really have to believe in that rather than everyone else’s, you double-check your math.

Because if it is different than everyone else's, you have the opportunity—that is what opportunity, right? It’s like you have the potential to make a shitload of money or lose a ton of money because you didn’t check your math.

And so the more I’ve been reinforced for thinking independently—and in the beginning it’s on small things, and then you just continue to reinforce that cycle of, "Huh, I came to this conclusion on my own; it seems different than everyone else's, but I think my thing makes sense, so I'm going to do that."

How would you advise someone to overcome that regression to the mean, that pull to not make waves, to not be heterodox or non-typical when it comes to their decision-making? 

Because it’s hard. You’re talking about this internal conflict versus external conflict. How do you make the internal conflict more important than the external conflict? 

For me, I was more miserable trying to make everyone else happy than I am with everyone else unhappy with me. And so I think like from the social group I had before I quit my job, before we going all the way like Ground Zero to today, I talk to no one from that time in my life compared to today, and I was absolutely miserable and unhappy and unfulfilled. 

And I would say that the majority of those people probably don't like me today because I changed. I didn’t do what I was supposed to do; he thinks he’s so fancy now, etc., etc., and I think I'm just okay with that. 

And so I think coming to terms with the idea that I could be absolutely rejected by everyone I know, but like me—I was more okay with that because the alternative was I didn’t want to live anymore.

And so obviously, there are degrees and there are continuums and there are stages of where people are at with that. 

But as that being the track to its logical extreme, would I rather live for them than live for me? I would rather be hated by everyone and like myself. 

There’s a degree of honesty is the right word, but it's also too simple—like being completely 100% truthful with yourself. 

If that's the way that this is why, if I told you about the motocross rallycross thing that me and my housemate love—okay, so you know like Colin McRae—these guys that drive four-wheel—there's the dude in the co-pilot seat, and it’s five left bends—all that [__].

Those guys that go to go and watch this are in the middle of some [__] wood in Asia, right? In Scotland, and it’s pissing wet and it’s November and they've got a pawn show on, and they get to drive for however long to get to this display.

You can even see thinking about it; the hairs on my arms are standing up. This is how [__] dope it is. 

So these guys are there, and they see some dude in overcast rain freezing cold soaking wet go and then they turn to all of their boys and they’re like watching someone who loves anything with that much purity. 

Yeah, that fires me up! It fires me—like we love watching—we don’t watch it for what the cars are doing; we watch it for what it does to the spectators. 

And that degree of just unencumbered passion—not being apologetic—like they probably—they're probably wearing comfy [__]; they’re not wearing cowboy boots. 

You know what I mean? No one—they look like a large condom in this prawn show! Do they care? Right? 

They don’t care, and that’s purity. That’s truthfulness. 

And really, like what are you hoping to be able to look back on your life or for people to say after you’re gone? If you don’t do that, "He was such a good guy, and he never rocked the boat." 

Yeah, he was such a good guy, and he always conformed to our expectations. He was such a good guy, and he was so predictable. 

People think—and I did throughout a lot of my 20s—I thought that what people wanted from me was someone that they could easily predict. 

But I realized when I thought about the people that I loved in my life, I didn’t love them because of how predictable they were. 

Yeah, I loved them because of how unapologetically themselves they were. 

Mhm, I have a friend who nearly ended a relationship that he’s still with—who’s the love of his life, who’s probably going to end up marrying—because he refused to not sleep on the floor for six months as part of a, uh, Alex Becker’s doing it at the moment—like he’s like sleeping on the floor; seems to be a pretty dialed idea, and she’s like, "I'm not sleeping on the floor!" 

Well, I am, so they didn’t sleep together for like a long time, and that’s—that’s those are the people that you love, and those are the people that you can because they pay such a high price to do that. 

Yeah, you can be very reliable at presuming that they mean what they’re saying. Mhm, because if they didn’t really mean what they were saying, they would conform—they would take an easier path.

I love all of that.

My—I was trying to kind of consolidate it for myself and the listeners. For me, it comes down to truly valuing your opinion of yourself more than other people's opinion of you. 

And it's just—it’s an easy thing to say, and it’s incredibly hard to do because that means that if you disagree with everyone else in the room, there’s this meme that I love. I don’t know if you’ve seen it—there’s this little cartoon of this one little guy, and then there’s like an ocean of people that way, and it just says, "Yes, you’re all wrong.” 

And I just like—I feel like that meme. 

My Jor cashi, my brother and editor in the books—the battle against nihilism and toward truth—we send that meme back and forth to one another when we’re like, "Yes, everyone is wrong about this!”

And I think it’s just being willing to like—but the only way you can believe in a thing or an idea or even yourself is because you have the evidence behind you that supports that your belief isn’t full of [__]. 

So that when you’re in that room and you come up with that one number and you say, "I think everyone’s wrong. I think this is actually what it’s worth," you’re not just making it up to say you believe something different; you actually have proof and evidence that you’re not full of [__].

And I think that’s the work is like—I did a—I looked into a lot of the stuff on the floor sleeping; I think it checked out. I’m going to do it like everyone else is wrong. 

I have no idea if that makes sense or what but it feels like I think everyone else is wrong. And everyone’s like, "You’re an idiot," and you’re like, "I think you're wrong, and that's okay." 

You know what I—and it’s justmost people can’t do that; just the idea of being weird is too much. 

Like just like—did you ever see—did you ever, um, this is quite old now; it’s at least a decade old, I think. It's called 50 Days of Rejection or 100 Days of Rejection. 

I love it already. 

So it’s a series of experiments that you do every day for 100 days; there’s a different one each day. 

And one of them is ask for a free coffee when you go to Starbucks—oh, I love it! —Just say, “Hey, can I have this for free?” 

Yeah, and I don’t know whether it escalates over time, but there’s like weird stuff, things that you do to people in public—things that—blah, blah, blah—and it’s trying to overcome that—like it sort of—it’s in your throat, you know, when you feel that, and your cheeks get flush, and everything kind of gets hot and embarrassed around here. 

Yeah, it’s that embarrassment; it’s that shame; it’s that what if they think yeah, what? Yeah, what if they think what? 

Yeah, so yeah, I—I think someone should redo that; it’s like a decade old now, but someone should redo—I think 100 Days of Rejection would be a great YouTube idea—to do 100 Days of Rejection or whatever it is. 

All right, next one. 

Next one, I just want to like—I promise you if you can actually go through 100 Days of Rejection, your life will change because you will realize that at the end of the 100 days you’re still alive and nothing changed but it’s—I’m going to die. 

That’s the fear. The fear is I’m going to ask for the coffee, and they’re going to say no, and then everyone’s going to laugh at me, and then I’m going to be alone, and then I’m going to be unshackled and then I’ll be dead. 

Yeah, it’s catastrophized to death—we all do it. 

And so I mean, obviously, I come from a sales background, so getting people to say no to me is something that I’m now. 

If you’ve asked drunken Newcastle girls where they're going tonight, darling, for a decade and a half on the street trying to give out wristbands for a free entry to a club night no one wants to go to, you get good at rejection as well. 

That's what I think. 

I honestly think that everyone is always going to campaign for the thing that they did right. You’re always going to say something along the lines of, "I think people can learn a lot from sales." 

And I’m always going to say, "I think people can learn a lot from being in club promo." 

But like, honestly, dude, the insight that you get into human nature from doing that—from seeing what do people object to and why do they object in that way—is something. 

And what happens if someone gets physical with you because you've tried to do—and you go, "Oh well, I wasn’t in the wrong," so de-escalating there should actually be quite easy, and I can have faith that everyone’s going to see me as the right guy even if somebody else took objection with what I was doing. 

So yeah, long story short, become a club promoter. 

All right, next up. 

Next one, there’s a big difference between becoming known and becoming respected. Don’t let an algorithm convince you otherwise. 

I mean, I think this is probably super pertinent for people in our position, but I’ll go from the internet perspective and we can circle back to IRL. I mean, a lot of people will make content obviously; I make stuff for me too, like talk about artists making things for themselves. Like most of my tweets are just like notes to self. 

But like if I ever feel like I have to sacrifice who I am or the values that I believe in in order to like get more views or something like that, I see it happen more times than not. 

Because the algorithm and the views and the likes become kind of a proxy for conforming in their own way. Like, Everyone likes this type of thing, do more of that. 

And that makes me feel very like dance monkey, dance, and I think there’s few things that kill my soul more than that. So I would rather, you know, I would rather the algorithm shut me off tomorrow, and I continue to make stuff that I find interesting that 10 people find interesting that is actually the same stuff as me than just have these viral hits and feel like I’ve completely lost my soul.

And I do think, as a side note, that if you do the first one where your intention step maybe helps find the 10 people who are really interested in your thing, you probably will create more of the viral hits.

But when you solve for the other way, I think you accomplish neither. 

I have this theory that more creators fall out of favor because they become cringe than because they become irrelevant. 

I love that; yeah, I love that. 

I think it’s true; I think if you think about the thing that you do, almost anything that anybody is creating is public-facing. 

Because if it wasn't public-facing, it would just be a hobby. Doing your painting because you love painting is a hobby; doing your painting to try and sell it is something that you do as a business or as a public project. The flywheel is so vicious in the positive direction and even more vicious in the negative direction if it becomes cancerous or uncool or untrendy or catastrophic or cringe to be seen to be watching or listening to or consuming the thing that you make.

You are permanently going to be swimming upstream, and it is only going to get worse, which is why you look at Shane Gillis, who is a really great example of this at the moment. He’s someone who is great at his craft, has a big platform, moved to Austin, got all of the multipliers in place, but he isn’t cringe.

And because he’s not cringe—if you've watched Beautiful Dogs, his Netflix special, it’s not uncool. 

It's like there’s this idea in publishing I’ve been doing my research ahead of the book, there’s this idea in publishing called the subway test, right? Would someone be prepared to have the full dust jacket version of your book out on the subway? 

And if your book is like, "Stop erectile dysfunction now; the erection problem," right? Like [__] no more flatulence today or something—if that’s your book, it’s going to be very difficult. 

Or if it’s written by somebody where it’s like, "Oh, really? Don’t want to do that." So this is the point where there are tons and tons and tons of people on the planet who have huge platforms that nobody respects. 

I’ve seen even within my seven-year career of doing this the arc of people trade integrity for exposure and not be able to buy it back, yeah, because there is no return policy on your integrity, on your reputation. 

And those people would give anything to be back in the cool kids club. 

I mean, this is like— I love this entire train. I was thinking like what creates—what is timelessly not cringe, right? Like, so if cringe is the ultimate, like, what we don’t want, then like what is forever not cringe? 

And the only thing that I can really think of is just true authenticity, which is an overused word—but again, easy to say, hard to do. 

I think what is forever cringe, on the equal opposite side, is pandering. 

Like whenever you’re seen as someone who’s only doing stuff for others’ opinion, approval, likes, whatever, especially double cringe when it’s for your own personal gain. 

And so if the equal opposite of that—of something that is to my personal detriment—is truly something that I believe in, then honestly doesn’t matter what it is because there are some people that probably believe things that I don’t believe, but I genuinely think based on what I see that they genuinely believe it.

And they don't really stand to gain much for believing it, so there’s no cringe there. It’s just like that fan, that man [__] believes that. 

And I think that some of the characters in our current—you know, piosphere and things like that—like many people—say the word Trump and you have half the—you know people who hate you and the other half that love you.

It’s like I think most people agree that he believes what he says. Now whether you believe the content of what he's saying is a different story. 

But like I don’t think many people have called him as somebody who’s like, "I think he doesn’t really think that about himself." 

Like no, I think he really does! 

I'm just going to push the edges because that’s where you have to explore the fringe. Look at someone like Kanye, who’s been borderline cancelled for—I mean multiple times, right? 

But like why is Kanye "quote un-cancelled"? Because he hasn't been! Like really! If he came out tomorrow with a hit album, I’ll bet you it would [__] sell, because I think that, at least for me, from what I see, I think he does what he believes.

And people might be like, "He’s mentally unstable." There’s all these other—but like no one thinks he’s being fake.

And I think that if that becomes the North Star of like, “Hey, I just never want to become cringe,” then it’s just never be fake.

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I think that avoiding cringe and aligning authenticity as best you can is a permanent battle because you are not inside of a vacuum, and you see other people doing things—and there is temptation. 

And you need to respond to the audience's feedback in some regard, or else you’re just going to be making something that nobody [__] cares about but you. 

But you also need to not compromise too much. One of your old ones related to this: People are attracted to authenticity. But it's hard to define.

For me, here's my best attempt. True alignment of what you think, what you say, and what you do. The hardest part is realizing that our thoughts are [__] and that we have to fix them instead of faking them. 

I wholeheartedly agree. 

You said it, man. Yeah, that's de on. Well, I've got a really cool idea—Herostratic Fame. Many people would rather be hated than unknown.

In ancient Greece, Herostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis purely so that he would be remembered. Nowadays, we have nuisance influencers who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for clout—Herostratic Fame! 

Yeah, that’s like—you gain the world but you lose your soul kind of. 

I mean, I’m also the last person to judge. And so like if that’s what you want, then by all means. I don't think it’s what people want. I think that they think it’s what they want.

I’ve been playing with this idea or this name; one of the concepts that the book will be focused on is intentionalism. 

And essentialism by Greg Mccuan is one of my favorite books, and I figured it would be a nice hat nod doing what you mean to do. And wanting what you want to want is so [__] hard to do and so rare because we're built to conform.

So I think one of my life goals—and I can summarize it in a question, but is to be fearless, and it’s—I mean equal opposite, courage is another word—but I love this question, which is: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? 

And I just—I love thinking about that when I'm—when I’m thinking about big life decisions—like, what would I do if I weren’t afraid? 

And it’s usually like the big one—the bigger thing that I really want to do but I’m afraid to do it. It’s like, that’s what I should do. 

And to your point about the five things that you told your team—the one that we have is originally something that we called "One of One." 

Which is: Make only things that we can make. Like you’ll never see a Coca-Cola business breakdown from Alex Orosi because anyone can do a Coca-Cola business breakdown. 

That’s not “one of one” content. But if I say, "I doubled the sales of this company by implementing these four things," no one else can say that because no one else did it, right? 

And so it’s "one of one." And so as the book launch—and whatnot came—we took "one of one" and it became this big massive thing and it stopped being about like what can only do things that only we can do. 

It was about doing things that we didn’t even know we could do yet, which became "one of zero." And that's why that became the brand that I'm going to continue to wear for the next few years and build that association. 

But I think that that kind of encapsulates my personal life goal, which is: What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And what would I do if I didn’t—if I knew I couldn't fail? 

And the idea that I will never wish for fewer epic stories at the end of my life, and I’ve never regretted failures; I’ve always regretted things that I didn’t try. 

And so just along those lines of trying to create more bias internally towards action rather than inaction and normalizing consequences of failure, as we said earlier, win or learn. 

And I think that little frame, believe it or not, for anyone who’s like on the teetering edge of like what should I do— that thing when I was debating quitting my job—which is still the hardest decision I’ve made to to this day, still of the many that I’ve made—was I figured that if I didn’t make the entrepreneurship thing work, I would have a hell of a story for business school. 

And that was actually like the reasoned argument that I gave myself for being willing to quit was that I think that with my experience, I’ll still be able to get a job, and I’ll have a really cool story of entrepreneurship that I could use to apply to get into business school and then eventually get a job later. 

And so most times we catastrophize any failure to death, right? Which is like, I’m going to—I’m going to fail; I’m going to lose all my money; I’m going to be homeless; no one wants to talk to me; I’m going to die! 

But like if you if you play it out to natural steps—like okay, I lose everything—what do I do? I would probably have a couch or floor that someone would lend me, ‘cause at least socially, I haven’t been— I haven’t [__] everyone I know and so I have that. 

It’s like okay, so I would have some capacity to do that. Okay, is there anything that I could do in the meantime in order to make money? 

Well sure, I could drive Uber and strip, and I’ve already you know, I’ve told this story before, but for me, that was genuinely my plan because I knew that I could probably make $70,000 or $80,000 a year driving Uber; I could probably make $150,000 stripping—maybe $200 stripping at the gay bars—the guys pay better. 

And then—I’ve got $280,000 a year; I could live on the floor and then I could restart again. And so that’s because I don’t have a lot of shame with that kind of stuff; that’s not like—that doesn’t matter to me. 

But I think playing out the fear Leela says this, and I love it—but that fear is a mile wide and an inch deep. 

And so it looks like this ocean that you’re going to step into and drown, but as soon as you step into it, you realize it’s not that deep at all, and you can keep walking through it. 

And I just love that visual because a lot of times when it’s like we have this anxiety around this big decision we have to make, if you actually take the step and realize that it’s not death, you’re not going to drown immediately; there’s plenty of other steps you can take from there even if you get a little wet. 

Did I tell you my story about a friend who went through a cancellation and was worried he was a coward? 

Oh, like a public cancellation thing? 

Okay, so I went for dinner quite a while ago now with this guy that I was pretty interested in, and he knew what I did, and we went—sort of bumped into each other—and “What are you doing?”—“Let’s go for dinner.” 

And I knew about the situation that he’d been through, but he didn’t know that I knew, so I was like, "Tell me—like, there’s no pressure." 

And he was able to be unencumbered and basically went through like a tough cancellation where kind of the whole world came down to bear on him. 

And he was telling me this story—I was in a very interesting time and I was like being very reflective—and he said, "My whole life I’d been worried that I was a coward; was terrified that I was a coward. But I’d never been through a situation where I’d had to bring absolutely everything to bear on my life, and I’m a hard man. 

And I like to hang around with hard men and I like to shoot guns and do jiu-jitsu and be around Navy Seals and stuff like that, but I always had this fear in the back of my mind that I might secretly be a coward.” 

And then he said, "The cancellation thing happened, and it wasn’t a very difficult one; it was a rep max; it wasn’t a really hard CrossFit workout; it was something outside of his control." 

He used this term that I love, and he said, "I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door, and I always wondered what would happen if I had to really, really wrangle everything. 

If the whole world came crashing down on me, and I wanted to work out whether or not I was a coward." 

And he said, "Thank God, he kicked the door in and came through!" 

But I just love that; I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door. 

Two things on that: So I think if we're consulting some of the points we were making earlier—the but I’ll know refrain—I think that a lot of the personal excellence comes down to making the but I’ll know more important than the but everyone what will everyone else think?

Because the I think the true test of whether you’re a "quote" perfectionist or not is if everyone else in the room says it’s exceptional, and then you say, "But I’ll know it’s not because I don’t think it’s exceptional." 

Yet you still break what everyone else believes is beautiful, so that you can make the thing that you make it the way you want it to make or make it the way you want it to be. 

I think that is probably like the truest test of whether or not you really do value your own opinion over those of other people's and if you really want to be true to quote the art—whatever your art is—I'm using it as a generic term. 

Could be the career, or even like the financial projection that you’re supposed to do at your company; like there is a way you could do it and do it absolutely [__] excellent—and there’s a way you could do it that you could phone it in and probably not get in trouble. 

But the things that you’d know, and then you’d be the type of person who always phones it in, and that to me is disgusting. And that would make me disgusted with me, and I think that’s why so many people do hate them, because they do settle and they do make these things, and they do know and still ignore it. 

And so they ignore the man in the other room who’s clearing his throat and they shut the door and they lock it, and they never let that guy in, and so they look like everyone else.

They act like everyone else, and they get what everyone else gets. 

America was built on the backs of men who smoked cigarettes, drove without seat belts, and had bacon for breakfast. If you miss your biohacking routine this morning, you’re going to be okay. 

There’s a time for leverage, but there’s also a time for violence, which is just brute force. People get really obsessed with optimal, which is getting the most bang for your buck, but there’s also maximizing, which is just getting the most bucks. 

You lose more life trying to optimize everything than just living it. The stress of trying to be perfect is killing you more quickly than your imperfections. 

I think that's an ode to being willing to take huge amounts of imperfect action towards one goal and being willing to sacrifice other things for an extended period of time despite the fact that others say they’re making a sacrifice.

Like when we enter seasons—I call it—you know the season of no— which is where you have—I have extended durations where I say no to almost everything, and most people say, "That’s unbalanced," and they view that as though it’s a bad thing. 

They’re like, "That’s so unbalanced," you’re like, "Yes, that’s the point." 

Because if I had a balanced outcome, then I won’t have the outsized return on this one thing. 

And so again, there are so many of these little insults that people will throw at you, like "You’re unbalanced—you changed," that they intend as insults but if you actually don’t take your society programmed response and say, "Oh, they mean to insult me," but if you actually think about what they’re saying, they’re saying something that’s true. 

And then we just need to be okay with that truth because that was the choice we made to begin with. 

And so I think about that a lot—how many things do people tell me that they intend to insult me with that I can take as a compliment?

Didn’t someone bump into Layla walking down the street? Yeah, it was—it happened so recently. 

So yeah, we’re walking in the street; someone bumps into her, and we don’t always walk like side by side because there’s lots of people, so we split up sometimes. 

Anyway, she comes back to me, and she was like, "Guess what this guy just said?" 

And I was like, "What?" And she was like, "He called me a skinny [__]," and I was like, "What?" 

But she seemed so happy, and I was like—and I just kind of shook my head, like, "Tell me more—explain!" 

She was like, "I mean, he said I was skinny!" And I was like, "This is the—this is the perfect example of him hurling an insult and her choosing not to be insulted."

Yeah, thanks! I really—do you really mean it? 

It, it—it’s like—I wonder how many times we’ve been insulted even like in my younger days where someone said something to me that like, if I had my current brain, I could have been like—

You really mean it! Thanks, man! 

And yeah, like so unbalanced. I mean, remember I took that as such an insult for such a long period of time. Now, part of that was because when I was being brought up, balance was like one of the big frames of my household was like "You have to be balanced," which really just meant you have to be awesome at everything.

But balance was the word, so being unbalanced was a term that was used as an insult. And so for so many years, I wanted to be balanced. 

But then I was like, "Well, nothing great was ever achieved by people who tried to be great at all things." So I was like, "Okay, I’m just not going to— I might not have a great relationship for a long period of time." 

I mean, there’s a lot of people who don’t know this, but in the early days of our relationship, even when we were married, I told Lila, I said, "The business comes before our marriage." 

A lot of people don’t know that. And I was like, "Well, and to me, it made sense. It was like most people break up over money; the business makes money, so the business feeds us, and then we will be okay." 

That was kind of my thinking around it, and we eventually flipped that, said like if we're good, the business will be fine. 

But it took three years to get there. 

But all that to say, I think having periods of imbalance—and maybe to be fair if we—if I hadn’t had that priority at that time, maybe much wouldn’t have been what it became. 

And so I can’t look back and say like I should have done it different because it’s really easy to say that now, but like I might not be here to say that if I had been that way. 

Oliver Burkeman has got this great frame where he talks about choosing in advance what you’re going to suck at. 

Oh, yeah, it’s in 4,000 weeks. 

And if you are a type A go-getter person who has what I call the curse of competence, your options in life are restricted more by what you choose than what you can do. 

Mhm, you will feel disquiet when something that you used to be great at begins to slip because you focused your attention elsewhere. 

You used to be in really great shape; you said that one of your goals this year was to get a raise or to be able to buy your first house or to find a partner or to do whatever. 

Hey, guess what? If you're spending four or five nights a week going to places where you can maybe date or going out on dates or doing whatever, you’re probably not going to have as much time to dedicate to the gym if you want to get that or be able to save for your first house or whatever. 

You're going to have to work later, which maybe means that your friends are going to drop off. If you pick whatever the thing is, there is a price that you begin to pay. 

And this cycle began for me so frequently toward the back end of my 20s, where I would dedicate myself to a thing, then something else would begin to slip. So I would then go, "Oh, I'll just—I’ll just give a little bit. I’ll just give a little bit to that." 

And it’s not an additive system; it’s multiplicative. It’s not 2 + 3; it’s 2 * 3. 

And that means that the more that you attend to the thing that you say that you’re going to do, the more the gains accrue to you. 

And then you can still pivot back, but you need to periodize things. And this is a frame that I wish—even now—it's still something that I struggle with realizing that "now" isn’t forever. 

The thing that you're doing right now doesn't need to be forever. If you’re coming out the back of the searching for the partner thing, and you’re like, "Hey, guess what? I gained 15 [__]." 

All right, well, dedicate yourself for the next six months to going to the gym. But this isn’t the rest of your life, right? 

And once that thing's done, oh, well, guess what? I’m back to 12% body fat! I feel great about myself. What’s next? 

It’s not forever; it’s just for now. 

Yes, we have a frame that we actually use a lot. 

I've always thought about these things from a business context, but they end up retroactively applying to life. 

But when we’re making big strategic decisions, we say, "Which problems would we prefer?" 

So rather than talking about like the gains and what’s the upside, if we have like, you know, let’s say we’re going to make a big investment in software for this company or we're going to make a big huge—a new service line or we’re going to just decide to develop a physical product, right? 

I mean I know you—you’re like—built off of a big decision like this yourself. It’s like, "Okay, let’s imagine what the problems are going to be if we if we decide to do this new service category." 

Well, some people are going to complain that they’re not getting results from this thing. 

We’re going to have a ton of—we might have some negative reviews in the short term that we’re going to have to deal with; like let’s look at what happens when one of our favorite customers tells us to [__] off. 

Like what—let's really sit in what each of these problems is and then when we spell out all of the problems and we don’t even think about the upside, we say, "Which of these problems do we prefer, and which are we more equipped to deal with?" 

Sometimes we have really amazing innovation and in my opinion, like really solid decision-making that comes afterwards that minimizes kind of the post-decision regret because we also know what negatives would have come with the path unchosen, because most times, like our regrets come from the path unchosen because we imagine it only with the upside.

I think there’s a book where a girl lives many different versions of her life and, "Midnight Library?" Yes.

And the thing is that there’s these pieces of her life that she imagines are going to be amazing, but then she realizes her best friend’s dead or all of a sudden she’s pregnant, and you’re like, "Whoa! What happened?" 

We don’t take into account on the paths not taken the things that we would have lost along the way.

And so I think really good decision-making and also regret minimization is that when you make the decision, you think about the downsides too, and you remember what those downsides are. 

And for me, that has been one of my strongest frames for like I didn’t decide to do that. Oh yeah, those were a lot—I’m glad those are problems I’m very happy I don’t have to deal with now.

In other news, this episode is brought to you by Nomatic. You might have seen that I recently was on the road for a full 28 days using just hand luggage because hold luggage is a scob meant to keep you poor and late. 

Most everything is down to this backpack and the carry-on that I was using. This is their travel pack; their 20L travel pack, and honestly, it is the best backpack that I’ve ever found. 

It would take way longer than I've got to explain all of the different pieces of tech that are inside