Stop Delaying: Overcoming Distractions for a Better Future

• Hard work is vital for personal and professional success, often overlooked in favor of easier paths.
• Distractions can be more harmful to your success than competition.
• Establishing a positive reinforcement cycle can motivate you to act.
• Achieving high personal standards often requires immense hard work and continuous effort.
• Embracing uncertainty can lead to innovative problem-solving and personal growth.

Here we are again. Hard things are hard. That's why they're hard. Another episode: the biggest risk to your future isn't your competition; it's the distractions you insist on keeping in your life rather than doing the things you know you should be doing but aren't. People delay doing things they don't like for longer than it takes to do them.

There have been so many times in my life where I knew I needed to do something, and then I filled all this extra time not doing that thing. The moment I did it, I was like, "Wow, that took way less time than I thought it was going to take." Not only that, it took way less time than it took me to delay getting to this point. If I had only started with just doing what I was supposed to do, I could have done four or five other things that I was also supposed to do by this exact same point.

Thinking about it from that perspective, I've tried to elate as much time between when I think I should do this thing and beginning to do it. I think you get this positive reinforcement cycle that occurs every time you start. I call it “pulling the thread.” It's like I just need to start pulling the thread, and then suddenly what feels really unknown becomes very tangible. I'm like, "Oh, I understand the six problems I have to solve to do this big thing." But now I know the problems, and then it feels like I can wrap my arms around it.

You can start taking it one bite at a time. The same thing works in reverse as well: when you put something off, it makes putting it off more "mañana, mañana, mañana." I used to define power by the distance between thoughts and reality, meaning if you think about somebody who's omnipotent—so if God or the God figure would be omnipotent as He thinks things are—there's zero space between thoughts and reality.

If we want to be more Godlike in our lives, the distance that we can shrink between wanting to do something or thinking something should be done and it being done is a direct indication of our personal power in our lives. That has helped me think, "Don't be a powerless [ __ ]." Just shrink the gap. I think that's why a lot of my personal hacks—of waking up and trying to shrink the time between when I wake up and when I start working—are effective.

You don't need to take 30 minutes getting ready to start working; you can just start working. As soon as you get into it, you start pulling the thread, and you're like, "Oh, here it is." All of the time I was getting ready to work, I was just using up my best brain power on things that truly don't move the needle at all.

I've come to call that the productivity rain dance. You sort of do this weird sacred ritual beforehand. There are certain things that you can do that will make success, productivity, or focus more likely and better; this doesn't mean that you should disregard them. Over-reliance on them makes for a very fragile, unrobust way to get into working. I'd delineate the difference between preparation and routine.

If I'm preparing for a presentation, for example, I might assemble my notes, read some stuff about the audience ahead of time, or learn more about whoever's doing the event. I see that as preparation for the thing, which I still see as work. Some people say, "Oh, see you have a morning routine." I was like, "No, no, no. I don't need to stand on one foot, do 17 cold plunges, and write six affirmations because none of those things are directly related to the work that I'm going to do."

Preparation is just a stage of the work. If I need to prepare to work, that's fine as long as it's related to the work that I'm going to be doing.

We spoke about this yesterday: the difference between focusing on inputs and focusing on outcomes. If you optimize for outcomes, the inputs are always optimized. If you optimize for inputs, you go, "What did I actually get done at the end of the day?" The person who does the productivity rain dance often takes ages, and everyone’s done this. Everyone's got a blank piece of paper in front of them, and they end up washing dishes that they never use.

The weirdest tasks become alluring because of that focus on outcomes. We brought this up because I had a whole thing that I wanted to talk about. I’m a big proponent of something I call the "Rule of 100," which I'm not the one who invented. It's basically 100 primary actions.

I talk about this within the context of advertising: you make 100 minutes of content, do 100 outreach if you're doing outbound, or spend $100 a day on ads. If you’ve already spent the money on ads, then you’re doing $1, 100 minutes a day of writing ad copy, looking at other people's ads, looking for hooks, and trying to create more advertisements for your business.

The rule of 100 for most people takes about 4 hours a day. That's pure inputs, not outputs. I’ve already taken the time to define what those inputs are that create the outputs. But later on in the book, "$100 million leads," I talk about the rule of 100 on steroids, which I learned from a guy who owned 13 or 14 really successful gyms. He called it "open to goal." He said that his managers work open to goal.

I was like, “What does that mean?” It means they work until they hit their goal. Sometimes, that means they hit their goal by noon and they can cut out for the day, or it means they have to go from 5 a.m. until midnight that night because that’s how long it took them to hit the goal.

I’ve seen this across a lot of high achievers across domains. Like, I’ll keep shooting free throws until I hit 100 free throws. I will run until something happens. I will practice my presentation until I do zero mess-ups, right, or whatever that output is that you want for quality or quantity. You first have to figure out what the input is that closely correlates or tracks with the output you want, and then jam as much as you possibly can into inputs.

If I said, “Hey! Go get me 10 customers,” someone would freeze because it’s like, “What do I do?” Normally, people skew like behaviors skew, so it’s all over the place, it’s scattered, it’s shotgun spray, and then they eventually figure out one thing that works.

Once you hit that, you just jam that button as hard as you possibly can. I think I’ve been disproportionately successful in different domains of my life by ruthlessly focusing on one input. Even when I was a kid playing video games, if I found a spawn point for zombies right before the end of the level, I would just sit there for like eight hours and wait for them to pop up so I could slice them again, get my little diamonds, and level up my avatar.

I play the game of business the exact same way. Andy Grove says there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little, and that’s the lack of correlation between inputs and outcomes. The vast majority of business owners work a fair amount; they just work on the wrong stuff, and they do it the wrong way. They get so little for their effort that they wonder, when they are at home empty-handed in bed, "Why isn't this working when I am working?"

But if you define work, at least the way I do, which is output, in order to get output it’s volume times leverage. How many times you do the thing times how much you get for each time you do it—meaning do you work smart or do you work hard? You do both—you do as many reps as you can, and you do it with as much leverage as possible.

If I make 100 phone calls, the leverage that I can have there would be how skilled I am. If I make 100 calls, I might get 10 times more. I worked more; I had more output than somebody who has less skill. But the only way you get skilled is by doing more inputs, by working more. It’s this virtuous cycle of doing more, getting better, and then you get more for what you do.

The magic you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding all the time. Every single time there is, we’re not making progress in this way, what is the highest pain task that’s in front of me that I’ve put off the most? It’s always that one; it always is.

You know, after you spend enough time thinking about work and deconstructing the way that you piece your day and your life together, you sometimes believe that the answer is still out there. What you actually realize is that you’ve already learned it. It’s that quote or that insight or that book. It’s one of the first books you read because all of the big insights from productivity and personal development are the lowest hanging fruit. They’re the ones that are repeated across the most books because they’re the most reliable, scalable, and robust.

It’s like I don’t need to be looking out there for most of the new insights—they’re just [ __ ] that I’ve already learned. We need to be reminded more than we need to be taught.

One of my favorites is “bad things don’t come in threes.” Bad things happen; people don’t know how to cope, and they allow one bad thing to snowball into more bad stuff. It sucks! The only thing worse is letting one bad thing ruin many good things.

Let me share a thought. You know, there was one on the list of things that had gone more viral. I think it happens more when you’re younger, but up until recently, you know, girlfriend breaks up with you; you go into work and sulk because you’re distracted; you don’t put in the same level of effort; you’re not enthusiastic; and then all of a sudden, your work suffers, and you get put on a PIP or you get fired.

Now you’re fired and you don’t have a girlfriend. Then you start gaining weight; you stop going to the gym, and all of a sudden, you’re like, “Man, bad things happen in threes.” It’s like, “No, bad things happen all the time,” and they only become interrelated if you let them affect your behavior.

I think the equal opposite of that is thinking, “Okay, this bad thing occurred. What can I do to decrease the likelihood that something else bad occurs in the meantime?” I think about that a lot, which is how, like, if you think about from the power perspective of okay something bad happens, how much will that affect my behavior?

Well, the person who is indestructible would have something terrible happen, and then nothing would change.

I love that, or they get better, exactly, yeah! That’s anti-fragility, right? The Sword of Gryffindor only drinks in that which makes it stronger. Ah, Harry Potter reference—you weren’t expecting that!

People don’t know how to cope, especially with bad stuff. That does explain why you end up with this huge, weird spiral, a tiny little avalanche pebble at the top and then this exaggerated reaction downstream. People don’t know how to manage their emotions.

I think, at least for me, the more I’ve tried to create space between how I feel and what I do, the more consistent my outcomes have been.

What do you mean?

So if I need to create content and I’m not feeling it or I’m feeling tired or things like that, the more times I give into that excuse or that feeling, then the more superstitious I become about doing it in the future. A lot of times, if I can start when I am tired or when something is painful and then still execute about the same as before, I look at game tape or I look at video or look at the content from those sessions, for example.

I see that I remember feeling terrible during the session, but can’t really see anything, and I think the more times you get that loop going, the more you can separate how you feel and what is required. The more times you do what is required to get what you want, the more times you get what you want.

I spoke to Huberman last year. I think it’s called the anterior midcingulate cortex—it’s an area of the brain. If I’ve got that right? Yes, bro, the best advert for neonic ever!

Basically, there is an area of the brain that tracks when you do something you don’t want to do, and you strengthen the connections in it by doing things that you don’t want to do, especially when you really don’t want to do them.

This is the exact sort of intuition you've got that some people would call resilience or willpower or whatever, but there’s a neurologically represented idea in the brain. These connections get stronger.

So I think it’s funny—gym bros will need a gym analogy to be able to believe that their brain changes—but it’s useful to think, “Hey, you’re hypertrophying this area of your brain.”

I snapped an Achilles! I had to do a very particular series of rehab movements to grow it back. This is just the same.

Agreed.

Successful people—this could be similar to what you were talking about—bad things don’t come in threes. Successful people see opportunity in every failure; normal people see failure in every opportunity. Both are right; only one gets rich!

So this has been something I’ve been thinking about a lot: the shittiness of stuff. When you’re growing in business, it’s painful. When you’re stagnating in business or you’re plateauing and don’t know what to do, it’s very painful. When you’re declining and also don’t know what to do, it’s very painful.

So that means that all conditions of reality are painful. If pain is a prerequisite for reality, then it means it’s just a signal that we are alive.

Thinking about that, rather than pain being a problem, it is a signal that I’m breathing. Then it becomes irrelevant. How do you ensure that you’re not suffering unnecessarily?

I probably have relatively contrarian views on this, but just even the judgment on pain—I relatively reject it. Just like pain is good, pain is bad.

In the gym, to give a gym example, they found that the pain that you experience when you’re going to work out and there’s a difference between massive joint pain and like, “Oh, I just snapped a muscle,” and feeling bad, but feeling bad has zero correlation to your performance in the gym.

I remember reading about that, like for the Olympic weight team. They talked about that, and I was like, “Oh, if it has no correlation, then it’s almost irrelevant,” and I can just keep living my life.

So I think the ultimate version of the resilience that you referenced earlier is rather than, you know, in the beginning, you’re like, “I feel bad,” and then you think that that should weigh on the decision of whether you do the thing you’re supposed to do—and then you start realizing that you can do the thing, even though you don’t feel good about it, and you hypertrophy that.

But the ultimate version of the hypertrophy, when the muscle becomes a tendon or just becomes fused, is when you don’t even consider how you feel—it’s just not a thought. You just keep, you just do it.

That’s that movement from sort of type two to type one thinking, you know, from being very conscious and effortful to it being just a reaction. I get up and I start to write, right?

And you don’t use up any willpower because it’s just what you do. Rory Sutherland, that we were talking about yesterday, in his TED Talk, and he’s the only guy that I’ve heard swear in a TED Talk.

He gave me this idea where he’s kind of related that sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. The problem is when you’re not smoking and staring out of the window, you’re an antisocial, friendless idiot. If you stand there and stare out of the window with a cigarette, you’re a [ __ ] philosopher.

The power of reframing things cannot be overstated. It’s significantly easier to find a way to reframe your experiences as enjoyable while you improve them rather than waiting for them to be done before you give yourself license to be happy.

So a friend of mine, she’s a very successful therapist. She always asks her patients when they come to her and say something terrible happened. She says, “What would it take for this to be amazing?”

For example, a lady comes and says, “We’re getting a divorce,” and she says, “So what would it take for this to be amazing?” This completely shifts the reality of like, "Okay, how could this be an amazing thing that could happen to me?"

This is relevant for me shifting gears because we just had a big tryout inside our company for a presentation slot that we have at an event. We had a bunch of the leaders in the company.

It was like the Hunger Games; we put a cash prize up there and it was a fight to the death pitch! We did, no actually we put a big cash prize out there.

I thought about this because, you know, I speak a fair amount, and I don’t get a lot of nerves in general. My most basic one is that if you’re still feeling anxiety, which many of them were like, “Hey, I’m so nervous,” or, “Hey, I have a lot of anxiety before going up.”

I thought about it, and champions just interpret anxiety as excitement. If you’re excited to go up, then you’re like, “I’m amped!” versus “I’m stressed.” But it feels the same! The way you frame it totally changes how you feel when you step on stage.

But my two cents is if you are feeling lots of anxiety, it means you need to practice more. That just comes for everything, whether it’s having a meeting, giving a presentation, writing an email, or doing a book; if you feel nervous before you release it, then you probably didn’t work on it enough.

The reality is that most people, to get not anxious about whatever they’re doing, you have to do it so many times that by the last time you’re doing it, you’re bored of it. Like, you don’t even want to see the thing again.

When you’re sick of it is the point where you’ll have no adrenal response to the stimulus because you’ve seen it so many times that you could do it in your sleep. Then when you get up, you’re like, “Oh my God, let’s just do this because I can breathe through it.”

What’s the gap between your expectation of what is going to happen and the requirement that you need to perform? This is where I need to be, and this is how I think I’m going to perform.

I saw this firsthand when I did the live tour last year. I think I did 17 shows in 28 days, three continents—right, like a proper tour, a real proper, proper tour thing. I did four work-in-progress shows and then that run all around the UK, Ireland, Dubai, Canada, US, Canada again, and US again.

I could see, because it was around every other day for a month, every time I stepped out on stage, even though I’d done the prep and spent all this time and tried to say, “I’m not nervous; I’m excited,” still that degraded over time.

By the end of it, this is why comedians, when they end up doing really big tours—one of my friends did a 300-day tour of the same show—he said, “I no longer felt like a comedian. I was a performer!”

He’s not stepping out on stage—he’s so dialed and routinized in what he’s doing that he’s bored while he does it. That’s how you look at Joe Rogan; he just did Netflix live to God knows how many millions of people.

The metropolitan area of San Antonio’s internet probably went down for him to be able to get that connection moving. How could he do that with all of these people watching?

Roger has gone through those sets—he has seen it at the Vulcan Gas Company downtown in Austin, and he’s seen it at the mother ship in different iterations for coming up on three years now, and his last special was six years ago.

That guy has said those sentences and waited for those times and got those laughs and understood the inflections and the little pauses he needed to do maybe 300 times on that one set. There’s no more degrees up for him.

The only thing that could go wrong is a real quirk mistake that’s kind of, to be honest, out of your control if you misspeak a word while you’re paying attention; that’s not your fault.

That’s how people have unbelievable performance ability. It’s just a case of stepping there, one degree of competence at a time.

If we think of confidence as the percentage likelihood of what we think will happen will happen as a predictive metric, in order to be more confident, we want to have more proof that what we think will happen will happen.

So it would be reasonable to say that you’re confident that it will go the way you want because it’s gone the way you’ve wanted so many times in a row before.

I’ve realized I’ve never thought of this before. The fact that the word “confidence” is in how we describe it from a psychological perspective and confidence is in the interval level you have numerically is the same [ __ ] word.

That’s so funny! Operationalizing—how do you become confident? Do it enough times that you feel like it’s unlikely what you think should happen won’t happen.

My model of the world is accurate: I’m confident when I go up to girls. Well, you start going to girls and you start tanking, and then one out of 10 times it goes well, and then you do it another 10 times and two out of 10 times it goes well, and then four out of 10 times, and then eight out of 10 times.

All of a sudden, you’re confident because you have a high degree of predictive power when you say it will go this way.

That’s such a good reframing of confidence, and the best part is you get to use the same word. You can boil it down to inputs: you just have to do more.

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This is my favorite one, I think, from you over the last few months: you once wanted the life you have, and if you don’t like the life you have, you probably won’t like the one you want but don’t have either.

This one I think about all the time because I think about the life that I have now, and I know that I wanted this life. But I obviously do a lot of thinking about this type of stuff.

The equal opposite of that is that when I was poor, I was pretty happy; I was okay with being poor. Now that I am rich—I’ll put quotes on that—degree-wise, it’s about the same.

So then it just goes down to, well then, the richness had nothing to do with the level of contentedness, which means that my wants in past, present, and future all go into the bucket of irrelevant in terms of their ability to affect my perception of reality in the present.

In thinking about that, it makes my wants have less stake today. A lot of anxiety that I think a lot of people have around things that haven’t happened yet, either good or bad, like, “I hope this speech goes well” or “I hope I get this job promotion,” but the reality is that once you get the job promotion you wanted, it resettles.

The negative version of this, and you’ve probably seen this, is when handicapped people get handicapped. So they have a terrible accident, they get paralyzed, or they lose a leg or whatever—there’s a dip in their subjective well-being, but after 3 to 6 months, it typically stabilizes—which means that if I didn’t get paralyzed, or even if I did get paralyzed, I’d be just about as content as I am right now.

It’s like whatever is about to happen probably isn’t as bad as that. So that’s the worst-case scenario—nothing. Good things aren’t as good as you think they are; bad things aren’t as bad as you think they are.

Yeah, life is life! Well, it’s the—you’ve already achieved goals that you said would make you happy.

Again, it’s the other side of this: the fact that we take for granted things that only in recent memory we would have begged to have had the opportunity to have and now we’re flippant about them—the new car that you thought about and you researched for 18 months.

Then you finally got it, and you just curbed the tires yesterday, and you go, “All right, whatever.” You realize you spent all this time thinking about the house you’re going to move into, the marriage you were going to do, the holiday you were going to take.

I told you about this last time: Morgan Howells steps out onto this huge balcony, a big buildup with his kids and his wife, and his first thought was, “Wow, it would be so good if we could come back here next year.”

That was like during the process of experiencing the thing; he was thinking about the next thing, and he caught himself and thought, “Okay, this means that success isn’t a goal, a journey, or a destination, when you get it wrong it’s a horizon.

Every single step that you take towards it, it runs one step further away.” So during my year off that I took during the sale, I couldn’t really work on the business because you don’t want to change anything major when you’re going through a sale.

But I didn’t know why—I was going to be owning this business soon, so I basically just had to do nothing because I also had to demonstrate that the team could do it without me, so that’s still a sellable asset.

I just sat there for a year. That’s when a lot of my thoughts caught up, from when I had started years earlier, and that was when I refined my theory of living for me, which is that hard work is the goal.

It’s not like work hard so that X because as soon as you have a “so that,” then the X is the thing. But if the goal is to work as hard as you possibly can, then the only real output we have is who we become along the way.

In reframing that, it’s something that I can win or measure myself against every day, in real time throughout the day. Which is how hard am I working? Because that is the goal.

Even I say this just for audio, but everything else takes care of itself; it still puts everything else as the goal.

It’s just being vaguer, but if you just say, “The only point is working hard,” then I know that whatever I’m going to get is stuff that I will become accustomed to.

I guess the opposite of the hedonic treadmill is your resilience piece; my ability to work hard itself is growth.

So I just need to keep my rate of perceived exertion at 8 or 9 or 10 because I know that when I look back on my life, the days that I loved the most were days when I had nothing left in the tank.

There’s this thing that Jesse Itzler has, and I love it. I hate him for having it so [ __ ] good, but he taught his kids—they have a little zero means that there’s nothing left in the tank.

When they finish a race or do whatever, it’s like, “Did you leave anything in the tank?” I thought about that, and the best days of my life were those when I had nothing left in the tank.

So then the goal becomes to empty the tank, not where I drive, but just to drive the car as hard as I can. In the beginning, it's just straightaways. I'm just seeing how high I can rev the engine, but as I become more advanced, it’s like, "All right well now we've got turns and elevation."

Is it turns and elevation without guardrails? Because we have risk. So when I think about how hard I want to work, the interesting thing about that is that the only person who can judge you on your success is you because you're the only one who knows how much is left in the tank.

The better you get—and you can resonate with this—you start winning externally. That's when people are like, "It felt so empty." It’s because they didn’t actually work as hard as they could have. They just worked hard enough to beat everyone else.

That discrepancy between how hard you could have worked to work your hardest versus what was required in order to win, to me, that’s the opportunity that shifts towards the work being the goal unlocks for you.

I work harder now than I did when I was poor. I think it’s because I’ve learned to enjoy it.

How do you ensure that the hard work focus doesn’t detach you from outcomes and inputs?

This seems like there’s a little bit of tension with what we started talking about in the beginning.

Direction over speed is the first one, but we’re now talking about maximizing for speed. How do we balance direction and speed?

With the question, if the outcome that we’re trying to have is being present, then the outcome actually is irrelevant because it’s about how much you empty the tank.

If we’re talking about the signs of achievement, then the outcome does matter, obviously. So balancing both of those things, which is that if I want to accomplish all my goals, then I need to make sure that my inputs are tied as closely as humanly possible to the outcome.

If I want to be satisfied, it doesn’t matter at all. So I think it’s marrying those two ideas, where the perfect world in my opinion would be you work as hard as you can because you thought ahead of time about what is the input that has the closest correlation with the outcome that I want. Then you put your blinders on and you start digging.

We don’t rise to the standards we have when others are watching; we fall to the standards we have when no one is watching. The only work that really matters is the work that no one sees. It shows you who you really are rather than who you say you are.

There’s this line that I heard David Goggins say on Rogan, and I can’t remember who he was saying it to or what he said in response to, but he just said, “I’m David Goggins.” I remember him saying it and I thought to myself, "You want to be able to say that in the mirror to yourself and not laugh at yourself."

The only way that I can do that is knowing that when no one’s watching, I work harder than when they are watching. Thinking about it like that has given me this persistent and ever-present scorecard or third party that’s like, "No one’s watching, which means now you have to work because otherwise you’re full of [ __ ]."

It’s this continuous reinforcing cycle of the me and other me holding the whip behind me to see how much I can take. With each of the whips I take, I learn that I can take it and continue to trudge on. So as long as you keep going, you bear witness to yourself of what you are capable of, and I find that incredibly satisfying in the trenches of misery when you have to go through it.

You’re not full of [ __ ]; you’re still here. It means that you’re not full of [ __ ]. What it comes down to is—I think I told you this story about when I was with Sam last year in LA. Sam Ennis used to make content on the internet. Now he’s very much an operator rather than a front-facing, which is funny to think about Sam the creator as opposed to Sam the operator.

I asked why he’d stopped making content, and he said, “Because I felt like I had to start living up to in private the things which I was saying in public.” He was beginning to feel the discordance between the two, you know, he was making changes personally, but he created a brand publicly.

If you can get to the stage where the public version of you is the best version of you and the private you has to live up to that best version of you, then you get to do this sort of self-reinforcing cycle. That’s kind of the virtuous version of that, which I guess is similar to what you’re talking about here.

What we’re teasing at is authenticity. A lot of people feel like imposters because what they think, what they say, and what they do are completely different. But from an operational perspective, because that’s how I like to define a lot of words, what do I have to do to be that? What do I have to do to be authentic?

You can describe someone as authentic by saying how you would behave if there was no possibility of punishment. If you could not be punished at all, that behavior is who you are authentically. So, in my opinion, our degrees of freedom are predicated on how much, to what extent we act as though we could not be punished.

If what we want to do and what we do have no possibility of punishment, that is what we are when we are our true selves. Jimmy Carr talks about how nobody throws a Coke can out of the window with kids in the back. That means you’re a [ __ ] monster.

You probably know the positives about authenticity; 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 the next two.

I think that the hardest jump is doing and saying what you think when someone’s like, “Hey, what do you think about this?” and you’re like, “I wasn’t paying attention at all.” It’s like, “Oh wow, okay.”

If you become the personal truth of not lying to yourself, and then you start saying those things, then you start not lying to other people. If you can decrease the friction between what you really think and what you say, it starts to create some virtuous cycle outside of you that starts to orient your behavior so that you actually start doing what you really think.

I have integrity, but in the truest sense. It's one of my personal goals, but it’s jarring to people when you’re just honest and like really honest. Like, “Hey, do you want to go to this Sarah’s birthday party?” “No.” And they’re like, “What do you mean? You busy?” “No, I’m not busy, but I don’t want to go.”

People have a hard time just saying no to things and I would encourage you, if you’re listening to this, to try saying no to things. Try actually telling the truth when you don’t want to do something because we have so many social niceties that we say, “Oh, I’m really busy,” or “It’s a really bad time right now,” or whatever.

I had somebody the other day; I was with a friend, and he didn’t notice that I did this, so sometimes it’s nice to have someone from the outside. Somebody came up to me when we were looking at a real estate property, and someone knew I was going to be there, so that guy showed up unannounced or whatever.

He was like, “Hey man, can we do a podcast?” I was like, “Um, I’m just in town, and I’m going to hang out with Lila for the next few days. Not really trying to do that.” He asked again, and he was like, “Hey, 20 minutes, let’s just rock one out.”

I was like, “Well, let me show you my calendar,” and I pulled up my calendar, and it was all empty. I said, “See, there’s nothing on it,” and I was like, “I just want to keep it that way.”

I didn’t think anything of it, but apparently, he left, and my friend just starts crying laughing, just thinking how hilarious. He starts laughing and says, “I can’t believe you said that! That was so boss-blah.” I was like, “What is he talking about?”

He’s like, “You just showed him your calendar, that you had nothing, and you were still like, ‘You’re still not going to get any of my time.’” I didn’t perceive any of this extra narrative that he added to it.

But I think just being able to say no to stuff when people ask you for it, because people ask you for stuff all the time, and it’s these little nibs—these little tiny things. “Hey, can you do this?” Or, “Hey, can we show up to this thing?” Or, “Hey, you’re supposed to?”

Or, “Hey, your aunt did that one thing for you, so therefore you owe her.” I’m saying, “I don’t subject myself to those rules.”

I had a New Year’s resolution, which I do believe in making resolutions—like, why not, if you stick with them? One of my more recent ones was, “There are no such things as social obligations, only consequences.”

So you have no social obligations; you have social consequences. You have to go, “I don’t have to go. If I don’t go, then what will happen as a result?” It decreases the likelihood they will invite me again, which is great because then I won’t have to say no again.

A lot of people don’t play out what happens if. It’s like, “Oh, more of the thing that I would prefer, which is not getting invited to these stupid weddings or not getting invited to these—you know, bris, whatever they call it.” You know, I don’t bris—whatever the thing is!

You probably know what the word I’m trying to say.

What you’re talking about?

Yeah! Kids getting circumcised, or I think you go watch a viewing. Gallery—common thing?

Yeah, I think whatever, doesn’t matter.

All right, the point being: if you say no and are honest about why you said no, people will be jarred. But then you get this muscle. When we’re talking about that muscle of being authentic, which is just saying what you really think.

I think when you do that, you unlock a certain level of confidence in yourself.

You’re like, "Oh, I didn’t die!" Oh, actually, what I would prefer to have happened happened as a result of that.

Oh, you know what? It’s Friday night, and I’m going to get a good night’s sleep because I do have a clear day tomorrow, and I’m going to work my face off, and I didn’t have to go to Sarah’s thing.

To me, that’s like—over time, I think I just do more and more of that, and it feels better and better and better.

It’s funny that your friends saw that as a flex, that it was—but I can see why, and I think I would!

Oh my God, dude! You totally owned him with that thing! Like, you showed off the fact that you’ve got nothing. But really, if we’re all being honest, if we didn’t want to do it, that is the truth.

The only reason that it feels like a flex is that it’s such a left turn from the social mores that people typically go through.

I said this to you yesterday: Dan Bilzerian’s superpower is his frictionless transition from what he wants to what he says. Say what you want about Dan, but he’s lived very unapologetically.

What are the things that you can get downsteam from that? I mean, maybe you don’t like his values or his principles. Maybe you think he’s a bad guy. Or maybe you think he’s worth more or less money than he actually is—all of these things.

But what you can’t say is that you don’t trust the things that he does are not the things that he wants to do. And that commands a level of respect that absolutely; and it should command a level of respect.

I actually think that when you live that way, people trust you more because their ability to predict your behavior. 100%. If I can’t trust your no, how can I trust your yes?

I think when people see you say no and then later say yes, your yes means a lot more, of course. Because it’s the same thing Peterson talks about: that a rabbit can’t be good; it just has no choice but to be otherwise.

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If you want revenge for the bad things that have happened in your life, start with the version of you that hasn’t lived up to your potential.

I think a lot of us have the battle of the other self: that we’re the lesser version of ourself that we’re trying to kill every single day. A lot of times, we have this desire to point the blame finger externally.

But wherever you point the finger of blame, power follows. Whoever I blame for the life I have is the person who I give all the power over my existence and over my circumstances.

So it hurts, but if you turn the finger inward and you start saying, “Huh! I don’t like my life. The person that I need to punish or get back at is the real person who got me here, which is me!”

You may be right that other people did certain things or you got dealt a bad hand. It also doesn’t matter because the only thing you can control is the actions that you take, and the only person who’s in control of that is you.

So the revenge porn is thinking about what the version of you who got you here did, and then acting in the exact opposite of that as many times as you possibly can.

The pain that you feel by rejecting the thing that you used to do that got you into this bad circumstance—that’s the real revenge.

It’s kind of like the stoic fork—the dichotomy of control—but it’s just taking all of that and just lumping it all on you.

It’s, you know what I mean? This is kind of the push-back against victimhood culture. It is the fault of the politics, or the ecom, or the state of the dollar, or the patriarchy, or it’s whatever.

He goes, “Hey, look! You will get 100x your returns placing your efforts to try and change those things on you as opposed to on the world.”

I think basically the best way to move through the world is to see your entire surroundings as immutable and you as mutable. You’re the only mutable thing in the entire world. You’re the only anything that can change: everybody else, people, opinions, places, economy, politicians, policies—all of that. None of that’s going to change. You can change, that’s it.

Then, maybe some of the other stuff does, and that would be great!

It’s a really interesting concept.

So do we accept the world and change ourselves, or do we change the world and accept ourselves?

So it’s a really interesting dichotomy when you ask the question because on one hand, both of those sound right. You’re like, “I should accept myself and change the world.” But on the other hand you’re like, “Wait! No, I should accept the world and change myself.”

So, yeah, because they’re both—piy, Pym, PA—right?

All of it comes down to: when you change yourself, you will change the world because you will change how you see it.

I think as well, when it comes to accepting yourself, do you want to accept a version of you that you shouldn’t accept? One that you’re not proud of, one that doesn’t live up to their word, one whose thoughts, actions, and intentions aren’t aligned?

You go, “Well, I mean, I can, but I don’t particularly feel good about that.” That feels like a higher version of me, the potential version of me that I want to live up to. I’m sort of derailing them—that this isn’t really the tri to them that it should be.

That’s why the self-acceptance movement, that’s why people feel icky about it. People feel icky about the self-acceptance movement because they know that people are accepting a version of themselves that is falling short from what it could be.

I would say that they’re not accepting themselves in saying that they accept themselves.

So if I say, “Is there a version of yourself that is better than you are right now?” most people, hopefully, would say yes!

It’s great to accept that person.

When we talk about authenticity, accepting yourself is accepting the ideal that we can live up to. That is what we accept, not the shitty version of that that we are today.

I think that marries both sides of the argument. Jimmy Carr broke my brain with this one: “Everyone is jealous of what you’ve got. No one is jealous of how you got it.”

I love that quote! My God, people see the trophies but not the training ground.

Everyone wants the view, but no one wants the climb. I love it! But the people who win love the climb, and the real mountain has no peak.

So if you want to think about this, pushing back, there seems to me that a lot of the time, you’re head down. The pleasure comes from the climb, not the view for you.

Again, maybe sort of non-typically constructed from a psychological perspective— that was nice, that was diplomatic.

So what would you say?

And this is something that I think with these episodes that we do— I often want to try and get you to push a little bit more, to adapt your ideas and your insights for people who may have a little bit more of that emotionality that comes through to try and sort of soften this up.

I understand that people need more degrees of freedom than me, typically. I understand that people probably can’t get themselves to the level of work that I can.

So do you ever sort of play with that idea of, “Okay, what does a little bit of viewing taking in look like whilst we’re climbing?”

I think a lot of the discontent comes from the judgment people have about what they should or should not do along the way. So they take my description as prescription for what they should do, and it couldn’t be further from the truth.

If you want to take a break at every two steps and take in the view, do it. If you feel like it! I just happen to enjoy how much I can see that I can do; that’s what I enjoy.

I feel like I am most present when I work. I’m not going to go into “work-life balance” because we already know where that conversation goes.

People have a harder time accepting that someone can just work all the time and truly love it. I define that by, “There’s nothing else I would rather do at any time.”

For me, I feel free in my life, and freedom is reinforcing for all species—dogs, cows, fish, humans—freedom is one of the most positively reinforcing things that people have.

Everyone wants freedom; everybody wants to be able to say, “F you!"

But once you say that, you have to do something. Because you can’t just stand there saying “F you” over and over again for hours for the rest of your life. You start to do something and that thing that you choose to do after you say “thank you” is what you want to do.

That’s an interesting point. So there are certain things that you have to do to get to the point where you don’t have to do the things you don’t want to do.

And when you’re liberated, there is a whole new challenge now because it’s a completely blank map where you have to actually define that.

That’s one of the things I know about working for yourself—there’s a lot of derogation about 9-to-5 and university education and the typical track and stuff.

I think you should be very cautious about criticizing people that have more normal salaried 9-to-5 jobs. Because I look at most of my friends, and they can’t not take their work home with them.

For certain psychological makeups, who’s more free? The person that actually gets to shut their work laptop at 5 p.m.? In France, they’ve got this new policy now where you can’t email staff after I think it’s maybe 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. at night in certain businesses to try and sort of enforce this work-life balance and stuff.

So for certain people, you’re shaking your head. What’s your problem?

My first thought was, “Well, France just took the irrelevant economy and just made it less relevant.”

And secondarily, the person who made that rule is someone who fundamentally doesn’t understand human behavior.

So if they were to pass that rule for me, then what they did is they made my life worse.

This is a story that I love: when Elon took over Twitter, it’s one of my favorites over the last couple of years.

Elon buys Twitter, and he finds out that 80% of staff base just drink smoothies and go on hot girl walks all day and he fires them.

Yeah, he says, “This team—the team with the Asian dudes—this is the team that’s going to run Twitter now.”

He put a job posting out there and said, “I want people who want to work harder than they ever have on the most difficult problems in the world.”

He got tons of [ __ ] for it, and they said, “This is a regressive policy for the industry. This is taking people back to sending kids up to chimneys,” and so on and so forth.

It’s just a complete failure of theory of mind that there are people out there for whom that is the job.

“I want to work harder than I ever have on the most difficult problems in the world at an intensity that would kill most people”—because that’s where I derive pleasure and satisfaction from.

That’s the best situation that I could hope for and trying to take your model of, “Well yeah, but what about my maternity leave?”

“Yeah, but what about, you know, jeans Fridays?”

“And yeah, but what about, you know, hot girl walks?”

All of that is something people don’t want. Adding those in gets in the way of the thing that they do want.

I think a lot of the confusion around people who are wanting to work harder than they are or don’t like that I work hard or that you work hard think that they take this statement as a judgment or criticism on how they live their life.

It’s because on the other side of that fine line, you’re like, “Okay, I’m now free! I have a blank slate!”

If I do something or you do something that they deem painful for them now or something they don’t enjoy, they then say you are suffering. That is bad!

Both of those things I reject wholeheartedly. First, you don’t know that I’m suffering because you have no idea what’s going on inside of me.

Come on. Also, what does your judgment mean at all to me?

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The point is that you have a lot to gain and nothing to lose! It’s the reality of everything I do with that is when you choose to start being more authentic.

You might feel all sorts of judgments from other people, but that’s not about you; that’s their stuff.

When I say, “This is the fun part of your life,” it could be your reality, but it’s work for you, and for every reaction that you get from someone else is not yours to own perpetually.

It’s just a good idea to look for the opportunity in it! The best time to begin was yesterday; the next best time is now. Take action and own your choices today!