15:08Dean Graziosi · Essay
Why Smart People Stay Stuck (And How To Break the Pattern)
A 15-minute Dean Graziosi stage talk about drifting — the quiet, undramatic way most people lose their dreams.
April 19thThe argument in one line.
Difficulty is not a signal to stop but evidence you are on the right path, because almost no one else will follow you through it.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You are in the early stages of building something and spending a lot of time wondering whether the pain is normal.
- You have a clear goal but keep trading your time away to other people's priorities.
- You feel behind relative to peers who seem to have it together and you are questioning your timeline.
- You want a framework for reframing regret rather than just being told to avoid it.
- You struggle to stay in a good mood during long stretches where nothing is visibly working.
SKIP IF…
- You are looking for tactical business strategy -- this is entirely mindset and philosophy.
- You dislike first-person entrepreneurship narratives; the speaker references his own journey throughout.
The full version, fast.
The central move is flipping the meaning of difficulty: instead of treating hardship as a warning, treat it as competitive evidence that the harder the path, the fewer people will stay on it. From there the argument works outward: time is the only asset beginners actually have so giving it to others is irrational; results are always six to twelve months delayed so current suffering should be read as future proof; regret is a cognitive trap that ignores the real cost of the road not taken; and mood can be practiced independent of circumstance, making it the highest-leverage skill anyone can develop.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00guestAlex Hormozi
00:00hostChris Williamson
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:40
01 · Learning to try
Mastering effort in one domain transfers across all domains.
01:40 – 03:40
02 · Actions vs aspirations
Reframe difficulty from warning sign to competitive filter.
03:40 – 06:20
03 · Time as the only currency
In early stages, time is the only asset. Giving it away yields nothing.
06:20 – 10:00
04 · Delayed feedback and permission to suck
Results lag input by six to twelve months. Visualization bridges the gap.
10:00 – 13:20
05 · Optimism and the endurance question
Humans endure well when they know there is an end. In entrepreneurship, you cannot see the end. You fight anyway.
13:20 – 16:40
06 · Conformity kills exceptionalism
Most people are peculiar and stifle it to be accepted. Innovation comes from breaking the rule that never made sense.
16:40 – 21:00
07 · Regret and the price of everything
Deathbed regrets want both paths without paying for either. Accepting that every domain requires a trade minimizes regret.
21:00 – 24:00
08 · Memory and the good old days
Punishment fades; reward sticks. You will remember the good times disproportionately, but only if you stop lamenting the present.
24:00 – 27:00
09 · Inversion and clarity of desire
List what would destroy the business; do the opposite. Figuring out what you want is 99 percent of success.
27:00 – 30:24
10 · Mood as a skill and winning the day
Being in a good mood absent reasons is trainable. Micro-progress compounds. One permanent impact may justify everything.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Learning to try in one domain makes effort itself transferable to every domain after it.
- Successful people do not know how to stop. That is not a flaw; it is the mechanism.
- Your current results are the product of work done six to twelve months ago, not today.
- An empty calendar slot claimed by whoever asks first is a calendar that belongs entirely to other people.
- The harder the path, the fewer people follow, which means difficulty is a competitive moat, not a red flag.
- Accepting that you suck right now is the literal first step, because you cannot fix what you will not admit.
- Deathbed regrets are logically incoherent: they want the other path without acknowledging what that path would have cost.
- Punishment fades with time; reward sticks. Your brain will disproportionately remember the good times.
- Charlie Munger's inversion: ask how you would destroy the business, then do the opposite.
- Figuring out what you want is 99 percent of success. Once clear, execution becomes mechanical.
- People support you at the beginning of the race and at the finish. The middle is navigated alone.
- The best diagnostic for a real friend is how they react when you win.
- People who never take shots are right more often than you. But they cannot be so right one time that it makes everything else irrelevant.
- The highest skill is being in a good mood absent external triggers.
- Progress is sometimes the win. Maintaining in some seasons is winning.
- How little of a thing needs to happen to make your day? Recalibrating that scale downward is the practice.
What actually separates the exceptional from the aspirational.
WHAT TO LEARN
The gap between people who achieve what they want and people who merely describe it is not talent or luck -- it is a practiced relationship with difficulty, time, and the interpretation of evidence.
01Learning to try
- Learning to try in one domain -- genuinely, repeatedly, taking feedback and not stopping -- makes effort itself a transferable skill that shortens the learning curve in every domain after it.
02Actions vs aspirations
- Difficulty is not a warning sign -- it is a filter. The harder the path, the fewer people sustain it, which means your suffering is simultaneously your competitive advantage.
03Time as the only currency
- An empty calendar slot claimed by whoever asks first is a calendar that belongs entirely to other people. Time is the only asset in early stages; giving it away compounds against you.
04Delayed feedback and permission to suck
- Your current results are a product of work done six to twelve months ago, not today. Evaluating yourself by present outcomes while your inputs are recent is how people quit too early.
07Regret and the price of everything
- Deathbed regret is a logical error: it wants the outcome of the other path without accounting for what that path would have cost. Every domain of real success requires a trade from another.
08Memory and the good old days
- Memory is biased toward reward. Punishment fades; good moments stick. The present, however hard, will look better from a distance -- but only if you are not already living in a lament about it.
09Inversion and clarity of desire
- Figuring out what you want is the 99%. Once clear on the target, everything that is not that target becomes what you are willing to pay. Clarity of desire is the actual decision.
- People support you at the start of the race and at the finish. The middle -- the longest stretch -- is navigated alone. Expecting support during that phase will disappoint; not expecting it will not.
10Mood as a skill and winning the day
- Mood can be practiced independent of circumstance. If you can be in a bad mood for no reason, you can be in a good mood for no reason. The second version is treated as impossible. It is not.
- Micro-progress is the tactic when the problem is too large to finish in a day. Thirty days of small movement is visible; ninety is substantial. Progress itself becomes the win.
Terms worth knowing.
- Inversion
- A problem-solving approach attributed to Charlie Munger: instead of asking how to achieve a goal, ask how you would completely destroy it, then do the opposite.
- Deathbed regret trap
- The cognitive error of wishing you had taken a different path without accounting for what that path would actually have cost, effectively wanting both outcomes simultaneously.
- Delayed feedback loop
- The lag between when effort is applied and when results become visible, often six to twelve months in business or skill-building contexts.
Things they pointed at.
15:05conceptCharlie Munger inversion principle
22:07channelMorgan Housel
28:04conceptBill Ackman progress tactic
Lines you could clip.
01:19
“Lazy people do not know how to start. Weak people do not know how to finish. Successful people do not know how to stop.”
01:46
“If it is hard, good. It means no one else will do it. More for you.”
07:03
“Giving yourself permission to be an exception so that you can become exceptional.”
20:59
“People only root for others at two times. First when they are at the beginning of the race. Second when they finish. Neither is when you need it. So you have to master the middle.”
18:34
“The single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about.”
28:04
“Sometimes progress is the W. Maintaining in some seasons is winning.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 01:40denseSkill transfer through deliberate effort
01:40 – 03:40denseHardship as competitive moat
03:40 – 06:20denseTime ownership and early-stage strategy
06:20 – 10:00denseDelayed feedback and self-belief
10:00 – 16:40steadyEndurance under uncertainty
16:40 – 24:00denseRegret, tradeoffs, and time cycles
24:00 – 27:00denseClarity of desire and permission to pivot
27:00 – 30:24denseMood as a trainable skill
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metaphoranalogy
00:00I think once you've actually learned how to try, really try one thing for an extended period of time every single day and taking all of your discretionary effort and your money and your time and your resources and put it towards just doing that thing.
00:20Number one, realize how few things you can really do well because of the amount of time that it takes. The second thing is you realize how easy it is to beat everyone else because of how few of them actually do that. And learning how to try becomes a generalizable skill across domains.
00:38So when you do learn how to play the saxophone and if you wanna pick up tennis, you think about how many sessions you did to fix your fix your fingers and Mhmm. You know, play play a more advanced a more advanced thing over and over again.
00:51And then when you when you realize that the domains are similar in terms of skill achievement, uh, you're like, oh, this is the same thing.
01:03And then when you go like, oh, I need to make content now. It's like, oh, it's the same as hitting 500 forehands and 500 backhands and I make 500 tweets and 400 posts. And if I do it for an extended period of time and I take the feedback and I don't stop, I'll probably beat most people.
01:19Lazy people don't know how to start. Weak people don't know how to finish. Successful people don't know how to stop.
01:25People demand success but refuse to work weekends. People want opportunity but won't talk to strangers.
01:31People claim ambition but sleep in every day. We are the result of our actions not our aspirations.
01:37Everything worth doing is hard and the more worth doing it is, the harder it is. The greater the payoff, the greater the hardship.
01:46If it's hard, good. It means no one else will do it. More for you.
01:53I think a lot of personal growth is training yourself on how you respond to hard. Because in the early days, hard was, oh, stop.
02:03This isn't good. I should I should This is a warning sign. This is a red flag.
02:06I should slow down or I should stop, you know, I should pivot. But the more I think about it as a competitive landscape as I'm clear on what this path is supposed to look like and these rocks and these dragons are things that I'm gonna have to slay along the way to get the princess or get the treasure.
02:24I get happier about the harder it is because I know that no one else will follow. And I think if you can if you can shift from this is hard to no one else will be able to do this, then it it's it flips from being this thing that you're like, oh poor me to oh poor everyone else who's gonna have to fucking try.
02:45If you see that you have an empty calendar, most people assume that if someone asks you for that time, it's therefore theirs. And it's only not theirs when someone else has claimed it, which means that your time only belongs to other people.
03:06And then you're surprised by the fact that your investment of time has yielded nothing for you when you've given the only and most valuable asset that you have to everyone else who often give a very poor return on it for you. And so in the beginning, if you don't have money, the only thing you have is time.
03:26And so that is the only thing that you it's the only currency you can spend to improve yourself or get closer to your goals. And so if that's the one currency you have, then why on earth would you give it away?
03:38The life that I'm living today is a result of the work that I did six and twelve months ago. And so if you were look at my calendar six and twelve months ago, then you might extrapolate out to what I'm doing today. But just like people want the immediate reward, they also see their current condition as a result of the behavior they're doing today.
03:56It's not at all. Like this is where I think the the benefit of quote visualization comes into play.
04:02I don't see it as much as a benefit for like, oh, I have to imagine this thing to happen, but I think it's more powerful to think I'm doing this thing today and I'm imagining it happening. So it's an approximation of the feedback loop that you want to have and so it helps you substitute and get through the period where nothing's actually happening.
04:18And so it's this continuous reinforcing cycle of the to see how much I can take.
04:28But with each lash of the whip that I take, learning that I can take it and continue to trudge on. And so as long as you keep going, you bear witness to yourself of what you are capable of.
04:42And I find that incredibly satisfying in the trenches of misery when you have to go through it.
04:50But it means like not full of shit. I'm still here. It means that you're not full of shit.
04:54A requisite for success is a problem. And so reframing what I used to consider a problem as a as a point of evidence that I am on the path that I originally chose.
05:06What's interesting is that when you start defining your own success that way, um, it actually starts to feel under your own control. It's not about what everyone else will think because when I'm on stage making that presentation, the only person whose voice I'll hear is mine. And I will know if I have done everything in my control to be prepared.
05:23I think a hopeful message that anyone can think about who's about who's in that hard period or in that start period is that, it won't get harder.
05:34Like this is the hardest part. And so if you can just make it through this, everything else is downhill.
05:41It's not that the things that you're the dragons are gonna slay aren't gonna get bigger, they are. But you become so much more equipped to slay them back and you have so many more allies. You have people in the stands cheering for you.
05:51You have the audience. You have all of these other things that are behind you. But in the beginning, it's just you with a stick against a bear.
05:59And arguably, that fight is a harder fight to win than beating a dragon when you have a nuclear bomb and six nations behind you. And so it's not even like the the size of the hardship, it's just also the resources and how few of them you have and how so much of the beginning is literally burning the one thing you have which is time.
06:17Because you have no leverage. You don't have the money to pay other people to help you. You don't have the resources to go like get someone to to no one can learn it for you.
06:26It's like there's a lot of the things that that we care about a lot like no one can work out for you. Doesn't matter how much money you have. No one can learn skills for you.
06:34And so in the early days, like it feels so painful because you're like, you look around to see who can help you and then you're like, it's me again. I think it's just giving yourself permission to suck. It's giving yourself permission to be unhappy.
06:46It's giving yourself permission to not achieve while you do for a long period of time. It's giving yourself permission to lose friends.
06:53It's giving yourself permission to do things that's different than people in your social circle or your age group are doing. Giving yourself permission to be an exception so that you can become exceptional.
07:05Going through the shit which is honestly the boring stuff that no one wants to do for an extended period of time. Accepting that you suck and that it is okay because the first step is accepting that you suck so that you can do the second step which is doing something about it.
07:21But if you if you are the goal, then the actions you take every day are reinforcing who you believe yourself to be. That's where the confidence comes from.
07:30The world belongs to optimists because if you're going to do anything big, have to believe that it can happen. Otherwise, it never will. I think that most of us can look back on our lives to ten years ago and think about the problems that we were dealing with then and think about how much of a pittance and how small those problems were compared to the problems that we deal with today.
07:53And so I then think, okay, well if I feel that way about the problems that I had ten years ago, then ten years from now Alex will look back at the problems that I'm dealing with today and feel the same way. And so if he feels that way then about the problems that I have now, then the only difference is the perspective that he has that I don't have.
08:12And maybe these aren't problems at all, maybe these are just facts of life and I need to habituate to them. What's interesting about humans is that our ability to endure is very robust if we know that we'll make it out.
08:27And so if I were to say, hey, I need you to hold your breath, but I don't tell you how long.
08:35Twenty seconds in, you might be thinking this is stupid. When is he gonna stop? Is he gonna wait for me to pass out?
08:40And all these stupid thoughts go into your mind. But if I say, I need you to hold your breath for three minutes. Your lungs might burn, but you can see that there's this end that's coming.
08:52The difficulty with personal development and entrepreneurship is that you don't know when the end is coming, but you still need to fight like the second mouse who gets out, gets dried off and gets put back in. And the only certainty that I can give you is that it's the same thing that every other mouse, every other person who got through that period went through, and you won't die.
09:16Best case you win, worst case it won't matter. The vast majority of successful people have one thing in common which is they're consistent. And consistency, you cannot see in a snapshot.
09:26You can't see consistency in a sound bite. You can't see consistency in a reel. And so consistency is one of those things I think you talked about an unlearnable lessons.
09:33I think they are difficult to learn without large amounts of exposure. And I think those are the types of lessons that become unlearnables that you need large amounts of exposure in order to encapsulate the lesson itself. I think most people have the potential to be exceptional and I because most people are peculiar in their own way.
09:52They 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. And so there's probably a lot of things about the world or even your world around you that you're like, this never made sense to me.
10:07But then you do it anyways. And I I think that a lot of innovation and a lot of what makes people exceptional is feeling, you know, thinking that thought or seeing that thing and then being like, I don't think I'm gonna follow that rule anymore.
10:20I'm putting a huge amount of my discretionary effort into this because it's my belief that right now what will what will prevent me from achieving my ultimate goals because that that motherfucker's not gone, is running out of steam because I don't need to do this.
10:36Like, I don't need to work this hard. I have to, I prefer to, make the ride more enjoyable.
10:45Realize it never mattered to begin with. What's that?
10:49If you want it all, life will give you nothing. We're willing to sacrifice everything that we have for the thing that we want and then once we get the thing that we want, we want back the things that we sacrificed which really just goes to the heart of the human condition which is we want it all and we're not willing to make trades.
11:08And so one of the reasons that I've actually, I would say largely tossed out the deathbed regrets of most people is that what they do typically is they will have the bias of wanting the other path they could have taken without considering the cost of that path.
11:24So they say, hey, I was really successful and I did all these things, but, you know, I I would give it all up today to have my family. It's like, yeah, but you didn't because you actually chose the path that you're on and you weren't willing to do that.
11:37But what you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone.
11:42And so I've had a, you know, a few moments of clarity over the last, you know, year or so, but we want everything without the cost, and everything has a price.
11:53And you will never be able to get the sufficient price tag paid on everything to achieve a monarch of success in any domain unless you are willing to trade from another.
12:05And I think that that has significantly minimized my regret.
12:12We give up our twenties for our thirties. We give up our thirties for our forties. Our forties for our fifties.
12:17And we trade everything we achieved in our thirties forties and fifties to get back to our twenties.
12:21We give up the thing we have
12:25most of for the thing that we have least of. And we give up the thing that we want for the thing that's supposed to get it. I I I will become happy when I'm sufficiently successful and I will sacrifice my happiness in pursuit of success so that I can become sufficiently successful so I can finally be happy.
12:39We spend our twenties wanting to be richer and older and have a family then we start that in our thirties and we gain more wealth and do the family thing and then we get back to get to our forties and we've got more responsibilities, we've accumulated all of this stuff and then we think, god, if only I could go back to my twenties.
12:53But you were fucking miserable in your twenties. You hated it. You had no idea whether you were going to be successful.
12:59You were constantly concerned about money. You were desperately needing validation from all of these people around you. You permanently in dissatisfaction about this stuff.
13:06We already know how the movie ends when we go back and say we wanna relive it.
13:10And you can't relive it in the same context because uncertainty is the largest part of the story.
13:16Perhaps golden years can only happen in our memory. Nobody believes that we're living through a golden era right now. We're we never think we're in the good old days,
13:24but the good old days are always now. I have spent a huge amount of mental resources accepting suffering and not saying that there's something wrong with something bad.
13:38Like a huge amount of mental resources gone to this because I've been better and faster at correcting the loop of like, oh, I am not happy with this particular thing and therefore
13:48there is something wrong. Yeah. So it affects the story that I tell myself to fix the thing.
13:52And that's been
13:54super helpful with the addition of everything that I remember will always be better than it was. And the nice thing is that there's tons of science that backs us up Mhmm.
14:04Which is that we learn, uh, through reward and punishment. Punishment fades with time.
14:11No matter how bad it was. Like, you get drunk, you get hungover, you say I'll never drink again, seven days later you're out drinking again. Why?
14:18The punishment of the hangover fades quickly. You are with somebody for a while, you're like this is just crazy or this guy is crazy and then you break up and then all of a sudden what do you remember? The good times.
14:28Because reward sticks. And in some ways, there's a little bit of a hopeful message there, which is that when you look back on your life, you will disproportionately remember the good times, but it only becomes a problem if you lament the present, which is the only thing you've ever actually lived in.
14:45When I think about a business and I wanna grow it, for example, I would think, okay, what are all the things that can destroy this business? And this is Charlie Munger, this isn't me. Um, but basically, he says, invert, always invert.
14:56And Einstein said that too. And it's because, like, you get to use this this way stronger horsepower engine of, how do I grow my business? That's you could obviously think that way.
15:06But the alternative would be, how would I absolutely destroy this business in the fewest possible moves? And then when you list out those moves, you're like, cool. Now let's do the opposite of that.
15:14Yeah. And that has been, um, honestly, a lot of the some of the sources of my greatest kind of creative moments have come from these apparently obvious things that would kill us. Well, what if we did the even more obvious thing and did the opposite of what would destroy us?
15:28And it's worked better than I deserve.
15:31Figure out what you want. Ignore the opinions of others. Do so much work it would be unreasonable that you fail.
15:38Realize it never mattered to begin with. Help others once you get there. You've already achieved the things you said would make you successful.
15:47Yeah. The first five steps there is my is basically my my master life plan.
15:53I had a pretty terrible first out of college experience of work. But from that I learned some of the most important life lessons that I still take to this day. And, uh, that boss particularly said one thing to me one day.
16:06She said, figuring out what you want is 99% of it. She said, once you know what you want, getting it's the easy part.
16:13And I I kind of adopted that as a world view. Because it's like once you're really clear, like this is what I want, then everything that's not that is what I'm willing to give up to get it. Now, that thing can change.
16:28And I think that's the part that people miss. And I think we should all have permission to change what we want in any given moment. And not having basically sunk life by us of like, I put ten years into this thing and that's okay and that's what I needed to do at that time And today, I'm willing to I'm gonna change everything.
16:47It's been super helpful for me to not think of my changes as permanent.
16:54Because it's been it's allowed me to make such dramatic changes in my in my life or my business much faster than I think most people have been willing to because there's this this weight of forever on top of everything. Like, I can do this for today and tomorrow, if it still works, I will do it for tomorrow.
17:13And if five days from now or twenty five days from now, if I work this way, I then say, you know what? I need a day.
17:19People are like, oh, he's burned out. It's like, I took a day because that's what I needed that day. And I think giving myself permission to have that freedom has allowed me to take significantly faster action because who am I apologizing to?
17:36One of my themes this year has been focusing on moments and on both the positive and the negative. And so, like, when we think back on if I think back on last year, right, I don't remember probably 95% of the year.
17:48Like, I, you know, I did the same things, and so it's like it just didn't get recorded, like nothing notable happened. And so really, like, when we think about a year, we really just recall a handful of moments, and that's it. And those moments in time are usually very short.
18:00And so I've been trying to think about the bad, you know, seasons as well, maybe it wasn't a bad season. Maybe I had five bad days or really five bad moments that I then thought about for the entire season and turned what would have otherwise been five minutes times five into an entirely bad year.
18:23It's like, okay, well if we can do that in the negative, can we do in the positive? Which is, you know, obviously the thing to to exercise. I thought about that as like if I were if I were to boil everything down, um, of all the skills that you can learn, if everything we do eventually becomes irrelevant, then the single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about.
18:45Most people don't question someone who's in a bad mood. Like, I'm just in a bad mood. So it's like, well, if you can be in a bad mood for no reason, it's like you might as well be in a good mood for no reason, because that one at least serves you.
18:55And so I've been trying to exercise like, because there's on one degree, there's like, let's count things to be grateful for. On the other side, it's like, do I have to have things to be grateful for in order to be in a good mood?
19:06Like, why is trying to find things a requirement of being in that mood? Like, can I not find things and still choose to be in a good mood?
19:14Because I've certainly not had things to be in a bad mood about and been in a bad mood. And so I've been trying to flex that, which is like, sure, we can find things to be ready for and when those things pop up. Yes.
19:22And of course, it's a, you know, it's a practice, you get better at it. But what if I can just be in a good mood? And so I've just tried to try to break that that relationship between the two because then it makes it contingent on something that I can find.
19:34To take this to the absolute extreme, grateful? Why should I be happy?
19:39Why do I demand of my life that I must be happy during it? I think it comes down to I used the word control before. Basically, you can predict, it means you can control.
19:49But if you can predict what's going to happen, it means that you know what the variables are and can influence those variables which we can influence the outcome. We have a set of behaviors or skills that will increase the likelihood of goal achievement, whatever that goal is. Mhmm.
19:59Being spiritual, being a good husband, whatever it is. These behaviors will do that. To increase the likelihood of me doing these behaviors, then I have to have more good stuff less bad stuff.
20:09I will I will down that hill. Beyond that, what is anything that happened prior to this matter at all in so far as it only works if I could use that same variable and then use it again to change my behavior yet again to be conducive to the goal.
20:25Expectation of life is that it's going to be until I make the billion dollars, until I get married to the love of my life, until I get these things, you're just holding your happiness hostage until something great happens. What if something small could be something great? People only root for others at two times.
20:42First Mhmm. When they're at the beginning of the race. Second, when they finish.
20:46Neither is when you need it. So you have to master the middle. The boring exhausting soul crushing middle.
20:51That's where the winning happens on your own. People will only cheer for you as long as you can't beat them at the game they value most.
20:59Friendly reminder that every person who doubts you is right until they aren't. It's a bug not a feature. You know, at the very very beginning people say, know, I'm really excited for you that you're trying this thing out.
21:09Right? And I noticed that everyone was very happy for me to try because I temporarily decreased my status, actually being worse than them during that period of time. And then as soon as I achieved a level of success, which I then realized that their happiness for me was proportional to where they were on the ladder relative to me.
21:26And so as soon as I passed some people, then they stopped being happy and then they start, you know, saying bad things. Right? And the people who were still always ahead were still like, keep it up, it up.
21:35And there's still people who have been that way my whole life and I just wonder, if and when I pass them, will they flip? I don't know.
21:41But also to the same degree, it was the it was after you start the race, when you're in the thick of it, because you'll quickly pass the people who've done nothing. But then you have this long period of time where you don't catch up to the people who've been doing it for a long time.
21:54And that's the part where it's very lonely, because you don't have your initial your initial posse, you have to leave them at some point. But then you don't get to the new group that's, you know, way ahead and actually has some some proof behind them that you can actually like sit at the table. And so like today, I have if I were to do something, I have tons of support.
22:13But I don't really need the support now. I need I I needed it in the middle. Right?
22:18In the many years that like, no one knew who Alex Ramosy was. And that's that's that's the hard part.
22:24And I think it's it's the story that Morgan Hassell tells, which is that you just don't know how it's gonna finish. And that's what makes it hard, it's the uncertainty of like, what if I give up everything that I've done in my life for nothing?
22:35And then all of a sudden, if I knew that, then I wouldn't be willing to make this trade. But in retrospect, when you do have the thing, you're like, of course I was like, I knew that this was gonna happen, I'd do I would happily make the trade.
22:46Yeah. You don't know. And so you're just putting the money down and they're rolling it but you get to find out if you hit black five fucking years from now.
22:55It's why dealing with uncertainty is such a matter skill and it's one that I To be honest it's one that I really suck at. I'm I'm very very not good at dealing with uncertainty.
23:04My required line of assurance in order for me to commit to a decision is incredibly high which is why I basically never failed at anything that I've done.
23:16Mhmm. All of the stuff that I've done a string of incredibly slow but very reliable successes Mhmm. Is just because my required number of sort of justification points is very high.
23:28And you know in retrospect it might look like it was a risk. It's like dude I I took so long to fucking make this decision. On the the friend point it's a painful realization that the small number of good friends want you to win in case you take them with you and the large number of bad friends are scared of you winning in case you leave them behind.
23:50The best way to know who a real friend is is how they react when you win. And when that happens, you'll realize how few real friends you really have.
23:59Mhmm. Many people were like, sure. Like, good luck with that.
24:03But I knew that they just weren't really rooting for me. They were rooting for me to fail. They were rooting for me the wrong way.
24:08One of my rules is you should only take advice from people whose dreams for your life are bigger than yours are, which is a very small number of people.
24:17Sometimes it's your parents. Sometimes your parents really do have bigger dreams for you than you do. The people who are closest to you in the beginning, if they're like true like actual friends, then you recognize that because they actually want you to win and that's amazing.
24:30A lot of people don't have that. And so what I have felt at least for me was that when you're a little ahead is where the friction is.
24:40When you blow them out of the water and there's no question, like it's it's beyond reproach, they will do one of two things. They will either be really happy for you or they'll change the game that they're beating you at. That's great, but I'm in better shape.
24:54That's great, but my marriage is better. Right? Like or whatever, you know, whatever game that they choose to play.
24:58People who doubt you will be right most of the time, and this further increases your uncertainty about the path that you're choosing to take.
25:09But on a long enough time horizon, most people who don't bet are guaranteed to lose. And so they get to win at being right more times than you get to win at being right.
25:25But what that equation doesn't take into consideration is intensity, which is can I be so right one time that it makes all of the times that I was wrong irrelevant? And in the nature of life, the answer is yes.
25:40Almost a resounding yes for just about every domain. Like, everyone can say that every person you've ever dated has sucked and they could predict that you're going to break up until you find the person that you're going to marry. And in that moment, who fucking cares about the other 90 people that you went on dates with?
25:54Or that everybody said was a bad idea or that you have a bad picker or you don't have a good taste. It's like, well, you're not marrying them.
26:01I date in a way that's different than than you would prefer. Great. But I did end up finding this thing.
26:06Uh, the, you know, the first thing that I ever did was, you know, an online an online fitness thing and it kinda worked. And then I did my first gym and it kinda worked.
26:15And then I started all these other other side side projects. I got distracted and I didn't know. And the downside risk is significantly smaller and more frequent.
26:25It's both. You're more likely to lose and it's more likely to happen more times. It's just that upside is uncapped.
26:32And so And I think about this one a lot. So there's the story of the guy Do you know the guy who, uh, wrote Jingle Bells?
26:38No.
26:39So I didn't even know that that was I thought it was like happy birthday. Thought it was just gifted to humanity when when we started. So there's this guy.
26:45He's a he's a It's He has the most tragic life you can imagine. Just like did nothing but failed was a failed everything and his entire life was nothing.
26:55He just happened to write this small thing called Jingle Bells and it has become, you know, the number one song in Christmas time like maybe globally. And I think about that life where it's like, if I filled everything, but then I have one thing that actually makes a permanent impact?
27:11I was like, would I trade that life for Aristotle's good life? Where I amount to nothing, but the whole time was good. And this is just one of my eternal battles where I think with myself that I have no answer for to be clear.
27:21But when I'm when I'm thinking through the periods where things suck, I'm like, well, maybe maybe I'll get a jingle bells out of this. Mhmm. And maybe it'll just take twenty years longer than I thought.
27:34So not taking the shot is like saying, life, I don't wanna scratch off this lottery ticket, but the lottery ticket's free. Yep. Why would you not scratch it off and try it?
27:44Whatever reasons that we usually give ourselves in the beginning for why we can't achieve something, you can almost always find not only just someone, but someone who's achieved world class levels of success with worse conditions than you currently have. Which then means it's absolutely possible, and then the only thing that it takes to get there is work.
28:04Sometimes progress is the w. Like maintaining in some seasons is winning.
28:11This has been my my big focus right now, um, and I'm not the first person to say this, but just winning the day. And Bill Ackman had this hard season where he was getting divorced. He just lost $4,000,000,000 and he was not him today.
28:23He was earlier on his career. So, I mean, it was just the worst and was just a terrible slog. And he said one of the difficult parts about that period is that there was no one thing that was like, oh, I can tackle this today.
28:34Like, you're you're not gonna finish the divorce today. You're not gonna undo the $4,000,000,000 loss today. And so it's like when you have these larger, complex negative things that do scale.
28:45It's like how do you how do you how do you navigate through that? And for anyone who's listening right now, it's like maybe it's the bad breakup, maybe it's the or maybe you're getting divorced. Right?
28:53Or maybe it's like the business isn't working the way you want. It's like an there's like 10 things that you have to fix. And so he had this very tactical advice which I liked a lot, which is he just tried to make progress and that was it.
29:05And he said, know, in a day, it's almost it's almost negligible. Right? But at thirty days, you're like, okay, I moved this.
29:11And at 90, you're like, wow.
29:16Does this mean that our mood is still being dictated by circumstance? Yes. I'll be honest.
29:20Yes. It does. But I think many of us have this ideal.
29:24We'd love to be in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. But I had this one great podcast today. I'm gonna make that thing the thing that's making this a great day.
29:34And then if I can make that great day, then maybe it could be a great week. And then trying to expand those basically, let those good moments eat up the season in actively trying to minimize all the down things and super super focus on those moments and be like, cool. I had that good moment.
29:51That's my day. Days made. And I'm trying to even say that more.
29:57Basically, I've had to recalibrate my entire scale to how little of a thing can happen that makes my day. How little of a thing can happen that makes my week.
30:05How little of thing can make my month. How crazy would it be if a year from now I say, that was a great year.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
What does it actually mean to try? Not the version people describe at the end of the story, but the version that happens in the dark, before any proof exists. That question is what the speaker spends thirty minutes answering, and the answer is not what most motivation content delivers.
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