15 Lessons From 2023 - Jordan Peterson, Alex Hormozi & Elon Musk

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. It is an end of 2023 review. It's the best lessons that I've learned over the last 12 months. I did one of these a year ago, and it went down really well, and I really enjoyed the process, so I figured I'd do it again. If you want to do an end of year review, I have a free template which you can actually go and do right now. You can download it and it'll help to structure your end of 2023 review and give you plans for 2024, and you can go and get that at chriswillx.com/review. It's completely free, you can just copy it and fill it in and use your notes app of choice. Chriswillx.com/review. All right, let's get into it. First one is, "You should just be yourself, not because it will make you more likable," it won't, "but because it's only by being yourself that you'll find people who like you for who you really are rather than someone you're pretending to be." That's from Gwenda Bogle. And this was one of the biggest realizations of my 20s. The, the advantage of doing this thing where you sort of push off who you really are is that no criticism will ever fully land, because you're one degree removed from the person who's being criticized. But the disadvantage is that you're also removed from the person who's being complimented, and if you're only playing a role, you never fully feel connected to the successes that you have in your life. Any accolades or warmth that you receive won't resonate properly in your heart, because it's not you who's receiving it. It's the character that you're pretending to be. Aubrey Marcus said, "The persona is incapable of receiving love. It can only receive praise." And this is how you can feel alone in a crowd and hollow in victory. If you haven't shown your true self to the people around you, you are inevitably going to feel disconnected from them, and the people who would have fallen in love with the true you will pass you by, because that person is never presented. The persona subsumes the person. This isn't the people around yous fault either. Like, you need to take responsibility for this. There are reasons to fear truly showing up, but they pale in insignificance compared to the reasons to hide away. Like, even if all that you want is success, your highest point of unique contribution involves you fully embracing you. Forget the actualizing yourself forward and offering the world something which no one else can. Naval Ravikant says, "No one can beat you at being you." The absolute best that you can hope for, if you're playing a role, is to be the second-best in the world at being someone else. I did this research for a, a TEDx Talk that I did a couple of years ago around Salvador Dali. So Dali's parents gave birth to a child about nine months before Dali was born, who was also called Salvador, and they were adamant that he was the reincarnation of their lost child. So like, that was how he entered to the world, which m- might explain kind of why he was a bit crazy later on in life. Uh, when he was a child, he used to throw himself down the stairs. He was a masochist, he used to enjoy throwing himself down the stairs. He once gave a, a speech, a keynote speech at a university and he had to be wrenched out of a deep sea diving suit that he'd put himself into mid-talk, because he was suffocating. Uh, the woman that he ended up marrying, he married this lady who was a, got this lady away from a marriage, he was in one, so was she, they both separated, came together, and he literally thought that she was his muse, that she was, like, divine. He immediately bought her a castle and then sent her formal letters of request in order for him to be able to go and visit her in the castle that he'd bought her. So just super eccentric guy, but the point is, that is part and parcel of Salvador Dali. If he hadn't done all of those other things, the world would've been fundamentally less, because as brilliant as they were, Michelangelo didn't do Dali, and da Vinci didn't do Dali. So had Salvador been anything short of his absolute unapologetic showing up self to the world, the world would've been fundamentally less. He would've been a pale imitation of something or someone else. So yeah, that insight from Gwenda around, "You should just be yourself, not because it'll make you more likable, but because you'll actually find people who like you for who you are rather than someone you're pretending to be," there's like 10 different reasons to do that. But I also understand that it's scary, and if you don't have confidence that who you are when you fully expose yourself is someone that's likable, it means that, well, you don't wanna do it. But again, like, having people fall in love with some fake version of you doesn't seem like it would be very fulfilling either. Next one. "It's one thing to get what you want, but it's another thing to want what's worth getting." That's from Shane Parrish. And this is just, like, a really great insight that the danger of not spending time working out what you want to want can cause you, no matter how hard you work, to move in the wrong direction. Your life, as far as I can see it, should be lived by design, not by default. This guy Kyle Eschenroeder explains it so well. He said, uh, "Blindly following your desires makes you a slave to your impulses, a slave to the assumptions of those around you, the advertisements you're exposed to, and the confused chemical signals of your body. If we don't pause and ask ourselves what we want to want, we will spend our lives focused on unhealthy aims defined for us by others and the worst parts of ourselves. We will pass these bad assumptions about life onto our children and loved ones. We will reinforce these boring, desperate defaults in everything and everyone we encounter. To achieve freedom, we must be able to think for ourselves. If we don't cut to the core and program our wants, then our best case scenario is to be a rich, famous, or successful slave. If we never peer into our programming, then we may end up being the cleverest rat in the room, but that's hardly worth celebrating."In short, your default factory settings are shit. Don't follow them. People who will never actually... The- the- the people who do this are never going to fully actualize their potential, either for happiness or for success. There's this quote from Seneca where he says, "They do not what they intended, but what they happen to run across." So you can imagine, it's the difference between being a- a cork bobbing around in the ocean, which moves, but it doesn't move under its own steam or with its own desire and its own direction, and being a boat, which actually forces itself through the environment toward a direction that it's chosen. So if you think about it that your desires define your own path of least resistance, what you want is to be able to arrive at a place where the things that you want are the things that you want to want, and that's why desires are important. Through deliberate training, that at first feels tedious, you can eventually arrive at that place where what you want is what you want to want, and that's where the life should be lived by design, not default things comes in because your default factory settings send you off into, like, such strange suboptimized areas of life. Like, whatever the current societal norms are or the way that you've dealt with past trauma or what your parents made you think that you were supposed to like, all of those things aren't things that you necessarily want to want. They could be. You need to get a, like... Stress test this and work out whether or not it is. So yes, life should be lived by design, not default. It's one thing to get what you want, but it's another thing to want what's worth getting. Next one, toxic compassion. So this is one of my favorites. By the way, everyone gave me shit the last time that I was doing a solo episode because I was drinking. Just FYI, I drink on the normal episodes as well. I'm talking for an hour, I need some sort of moisture and- and hydration in my face. Difference is, I can usually mute the mic and do it while the other person's talking when it's a- a two-way episode. So forgive me that I need to be hydrated, but someone accused me of not having any dri... It was, it's obvious that there's nothing in the can. It's like, why would you be lifting this to my face if there wasn't anything in it? Anyway, uh, I will be drinking throughout the solo episodes. I apologize. I'll try and drink quietly. There we are. Toxic compassion. (laughs) Toxic compassion is this really... I love it. I- I... It's one of the coolest ideas that I've come up with this year, and I was looking for a name for this phenomenon that I'd seen for so long, and I cycled through, what was it? Like, the shallow pond of empathy, uh, uh, fucking, like, Satan, like the inverse of Satan's love. I was like, all sorts of weird and wonderful other words, and then, uh, s- toxic compassion just came to me and I thought, "That's it." So toxic compassion is the prioritization of short-term emotional comfort over everything else, over truth, reality, actual long-term outcomes, flourishing, everything. It optimizes for looking good rather than doing good, and this is seen in much of popular culture as the desirable, fair, empathetic thing to do, and it's everywhere. People would rather claim that body fat has no bearing on health and mortality outcomes to avoid making overweight people feel upset, even if this causes them to literally die sooner or have a worse quality of life over the long run. Parents would rather allow children to play computer games or watch screens and access social media every night instead of dealing with the discomfort of taking it away from them, even if it ruins their brain development, social skills, and self-esteem. People would rather say that children growing up in single-parent households suffer no worse outcomes than those from two-parent homes, even if this misleads parents, children, and teachers about why kids behave the way that they do. Campaigners would sooner shout, "Defund the police," as a response to what they perceive as the unfair treatment of criminals, even if this results in more crimes being committed against people from minority backgrounds due to the abandonment of police officers from those very areas. Elon Musk recently responded to some criticism about his political alignment and contribution to climate change, and skepticism of it, I think, and then he identified how big of a shift Tesla had caused in the electric vehicle market and the downstream impact of that on the environment. He said he's done more for the climate than any other human in history, and this quote from him is, "What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil." The important trade-off with all of those examples, including Elon's, is between appearing good and actually doing good, so telling people what they want to hear, giving them immediate gratification, and avoiding saying anything that could cause distress prioritizes the former, of looking good, over the latter, of doing good. And the net effect is usually wildly negative. It's- it's like a toddler who wants to eat ice cream every night. Sure, that might be what they want in the moment, but it's going to be wildly unhealthy over the long term. And I asked Jordan Peterson about this on our last episode, and he said, "That's exactly what the Oedipal situation is. It's the prioritization of short-term emotional comfort over long-term thriving. It's going to hurt now, but the long-term consequences are positive. If you give up your children to the world, you will keep them." And this prospect of appearing bad while doing good is obviously not very enticing. Like, (laughs) you get all of the negatives upfront of not appearing like somebody that cares and is empathetic, even though, yeah, sure enough, down the line people will benefit from it, but you're gonna be lambasted and criticized and- and- and seem like someone who doesn't care in the moment. And the opposite of this is performative empathy, saying whatever is required to look good.... even if you don't actually care. And on the internet, the gap between words and actions has never been bigger. You can be the least virtuous, the meanest, most dishonest human on Earth, but if you say the right things, if your thumbs literally hit the right buttons on a screen, you look like a saint. And no one ever stress-tests the words coming out of your mouth. So, it means that appearing good actually becomes more important than doing good. So this, the incentive of performative empathy kind of creates the basis for toxic compassion as, as a trend. You know, posting about mistreated groups is more incentivized than actually helping mistreated groups. All of the people who have put a flag in their bio but have never actually donated to a charity. And this isn't me saying that you can't do good whilst also talking about it. It's that many, maybe even most of the people who proselytize about how virtuous and caring they are and about how it's everyone else who is evil and uncaring and the enemy, are allowing their morality to stand on the shoulders of limited scrutiny. Peterson said, "It's like, 'Look how good I am.'" Well, if the "look at" comes before the "how good I am," it really wreaks havoc with the claim. I, I, I think the, the big lesson here is just beware the people who prioritize saying good things, because they might not actually be doing good things. This balance between what is it that you're saying, how does it look, and what are you doing, what are the outcomes, I just see it everywhere. And this idea of toxic compassion I think is, it's useful. It's a useful frame. And (sighs) I don't know. Everyone kind of has this in the back of their mind. There's a degree of skepticism and scrutiny about anyone that says something good online. But we all know that there are huge, huge swaths of people who are probably not that nice, probably not that caring, probably don't really give a shit about whatever the topic or movement is that they're getting behind or are supposed to be a, a, a front-runner for. Lizzo, Lizzo's supposed to be this paragon of virtue and supporting these girls and giving them a platform. Behind the scenes, she's body-shaming her dancers. She's forcing them to go on fasts when she isn't making them eat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam strippers. Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Fallon, you know, allegedly, allegedly, all of these people that out front are these sort of cutesy, nicey-nicey people and behind the scenes, the staff that have worked with them who know them best say that they're tyrants. Super mean. So yeah, I just think, uh, there's not really a way around this. I'd be interested to try and f- think of a way around this because, what are you supposed to do? It's easier to see someone's words than it is their deeds. Deeds can be faked as well. And there's always going to be an incentive for people to (laughs) just say the right thing. Again, s- say a- a- an increasingly complex or, um, convincing set of mouth, face, thumb noises so that you believe whatever it is. But yeah, I, I thought toxic compassion, one of the probably top five memes that's, that's come out of this year. All right, next one. This is Elon as well, and this was on, uh, Lex's show. Such a good insight. You know, you look at Elon as somebody who is, um, probably quite admired by lots of people on the internet. W- wealth, status, influence, all the rest of it. And Lex asked how he was doing and sort of what it's like to be him. And Elon replied, "My mind is a storm. I don't think most people would want to be me. They may think they would want to be me, but they don't. They don't know. They don't understand." And this is why jealousy is a stupid emotion. In fact, envy is one of the s- it's the only one of the seven deadly sins which doesn't actually feel good. Think about that. So Naval says about jealousy, "I realized that all of these people I was jealous of, I couldn't just cherry-pick and choose little aspects of their life. I couldn't say, 'I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality.' You have to be that person. Do you actually want to be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you're not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100% swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous." It seems obvious, but it's so counterintuitive to how we all relate to the people that we admire. We look at humans that we are jealous of as ubiquitous successes, this sort of brilliant collage worthy of life-wide admiration and envy, and we presume that we could add the elements of their life which we love like taking clothes off a rail. But that's not how life works. The outfit that you are imagining trying on is head to toe, not pick and choose. It's a onesie, right, not an à la carte wardrobe. The price that you would need to pay to be the per- the person or the people that you admire is often one that you wouldn't foot the bill for. And this is what we're seeing with Elon as well, that this dude who's, you know, created potentially one of the coolest, most innovative cars in history with the Cybertruck that just got released a couple of weeks ago, and he's on stage doing, like, weird (laughs) robot dances in Japan, sending rockets to Mars, uh, uh, trying to make humanity a multi-planetary species. Like, you look at him and you think, "Well, he must" ... if he doesn't have it sorted, if he's not the guy, who is? One of the wealthiest people on the planet, m- w- he bought Twitter just basically for fun. Well, he's saying, "My mind is a storm. People think they would want to be me, but they don't. They don't know. They don't understand." Like, that is the ground truth reality of his life. And yeah, I just think, again, for reminding us that people who outwardly have lots of things going for them inwardly can be suffering and have completely unadmirable, uh, undesirable internal states. In fact, perhaps the people who are most desirable externally may correlate with being the least desirable internally. It gives us a couple of things. First off-It can give us a little bit of empathy that success outwardly doesn't fix all problems internally, and it helps us to stop accusing things of being first-world problems a lot. And secondly, it helps us realize that just because someone does have lots of things outwardly that we might desire, that doesn't mean that we should actually be in any way envious of them, or that they're a particularly good person. Doesn't mean that they're good just because they're successful. Speaking of that, there was this, I've quoted it a lot this year so sorry if you've heard this one before, but the documentary following Lewis Capaldi around as he's going through this big change in scrutiny and status and fame, does his first album which goes super well, and then he's got to make the second one, and he develops a nervous tic. I think it's Tourette's. He sort of starts doing this a lot, and it's not good. You know, I've seen videos of him in front of however many tens of thousands of people at Glastonbury unable to sing because of how nervous he is, and I think this was only this summer. So the documentary tries to finish on (laughs) like a- an uplifting arc where he's like, "And I went and did some yoga and breath work and now my fucking mental health is under control," but it's not. It's not under control. This guy is still, as one of the most successful breakout artists of the last five years, this dude is still failing on the biggest stages that there are to fail on. You know, like Glastonbury, it doesn't get much bigger. Maybe it was like Leeds Festival or Reading or something instead, but this guy is struggling, really, really struggling. And he's got this line in the documentary where he turns to the camera and he says, "Fame doesn't change you, it just changes everyone around you." And again, like I- I have niche fame. I have micro- micro-influencer niche fame. But there is something disconcerting, and it's hard, dude, it's so hard to talk about this. I spoke about this at one of the live Q&As. It's really difficult to talk about this on the internet without being accused of being full of yourself, or- or having a massive ego, or thinking that you're more important than you are, or complaining about first-world problems. "Don't you know about how hard people are the people who've got it? You just get to dick about on a ca- on a camera and a microphone and have all of this stuff." I get it, all of those things I get it, but if you genuinely are interested in finding out what it feels like to go from completely as normal person as possible to still unbelievably normal person with micro-influencer niche fame, like I'm telling you that this is how it feels, or at least this is how it feels to me, which is it's disconcerting. Like it's- it's very nice and it's flattering, but imagine that you woke up tomorrow and everybody immediately started treating you differently, and you didn't understand why because you see yourself as the same person, and maybe even the things that you do are the same. Nothing's changed. Lewis Capaldi singing the same songs that he was singing when he was 17, 18 years old in working men's pubs around Scotland. Those were the same songs that he then belted out across a global tour, billions and billions of streams. Fame doesn't change you, it just changes everyone around you. You haven't even changed a thing that you're doing, and everybody else refers to you and responds to you and reacts to you in a different way. That is the reality, at least from where I am at the moment, that's like part of the reality of changing status in some regards. That like it's beautiful and flattering, but like disconcerting as well 'cause everyone is, you just see yourself as the same person, and maybe people, maybe it's just that you become more confident. Maybe it's got nothing to do with the position that you're in now, but yeah, that's like, that's something that I'm kind of battling with at the moment, trying to work out what it means and how to deal with it and stuff, so yeah. Anyway, enough online solo therapy between me and the camera. Next one, Jimmy Carr. So, uh, Jimmy and me become friends this year and he just has this really wonderful idea about the difference between trajectory and position and how important trajectory is, how much more important it is than your position. So if you are number two in the world but last year you were number one, that is way worse than sitting at number 150 but being on this huge upward slope from being number 300 12 months ago. So number one to number two, number, uh, 150 from number 300, and there's a few reasons for this I think. So recency bias, if your value is increasing right now then it means that you have to be popular at the moment, and by looking at recent trajectory you are selecting for only the people who are trendy right now, which a lot of the time is all that we can remember. We can also romanticize where someone will be in future if they're currently hot stuff. You think about how high this person might climb. Maybe- maybe they'll get to the top. Maybe they'll go beyond the top. Humans struggle to realize that everything is temporary, including growth and decline. Instead, it's easier to label people as heroes and losers based on what we know of them right now so that we don't have to predict a messy future. I was talking to this, uh, to Ryan Long about this, who's a massive fan of Jimmy, and Ryan said there's an old saying that there's three types of people on a ladder, one at the bottom, one at the middle, and one at the top. Which one is the best to be? The one that's still climbing. Interesting, right? This, I don't think it works just for status, but it works for possessions and achievements and wealth and sex and everything else, and it's not just how we see other people, it's also how we see ourselves, where we know when we're moving up or down, when life is getting better or getting worse. We have this internal like altimeter. Is that what it is, an altitude meter? We have one of those. We know where we were before in all of these different domains, status, money, possessions, achievements, education, competence, confidence, and we know we- we can predict whether things are going up or down. What was that, Will Smith in his biography, gaining status is amazing, being f- uh, becoming famous is amazing...... being famous is a mixed bag and losing fame is horrible. (laughs) Like, there's just this sort of hodgepodge of lots of different things. Andrew Tate, you know, uh, one of my favorite insights that I think I've learned over the last couple of years, "Having things isn't fun. Getting things is fun." There's something, I feel like it's a Kendrick Lamar line as well, that people don't love you when you've got something, they love you when you're on the way to go- to- to getting something. And another way to look at it is any accomplishment is just a new higher bar for you to get over in future. So let's say, in our own work, that we do an episode that hits a million plays in the first day. Amazing. That's a very exciting new record that we can feel proud of. Almost immediately, wow, that also means that every video in future is now going to feel unimpressive until we hit 1.1 million or more. And in this way, rapid increases in status are more a curse than a blessing. And this theory got co-signed by Dan Bilzerian, so you know it's legit. Even though we might want our goals and accomplishments to arrive immediately, maybe a smarter strategy is to actually stretch out the achievement of our dreams. We shouldn't wish for overnight success, because we would then need to be able to beat it pretty soon, or else we're going to feel like we're declining. Instead, slow, consistent progress is a much more reliable way to maintain satisfaction. So I came up with this idea of slow success strategy as a way of making sure that you're going in the right direction of- of- of- of elongating out that journey a little bit more. So, let's say that, um, you got a pay rise and you were able to afford your dream car or one of your dream cars, but you're jumping from maybe having to update your car in a very long time. You have the opportunity, instead of going from total shitbox to the ultimate car that you've ever wanted, you have the opportunity to chunk that up. Maybe you could go halfway and take a bunch of satisfaction from that. Because once you've got the dream car, what is there after that? Once you've got the dream house, once you've been on the holiday that you've always wanted to go on, if you have the opportunity of maybe making a couple of small jumps in between that aren't the massive leap to the very top, I think that you can stretch out that sense of progression. And, you know, it's one of the reasons why you- you literally should pray to never win the lottery in some regards. It would be the most amazing and most terrible day of your life, because how are you gonna have a better day than that given the fact that trajectory is more important than position? I- I absolutely think that this is true. Trajectory is more important than position. And given that, what you want is to always continue... You wanna just have this very nice sort of slow, steady ramp up, and then you can just flatten out toward the end of your life. What you don't want is to have this huge spike up and then be like, "All right, where do I go? I'm just floating in the stratosphere. Where do I go from here?" And this relates to another lesson that I learned from Adam Mastriano, where he explains what happens when people sacrifice their happiness and their passions in order to achieve success. Just such a cool, uh, a- analogy he uses here. He says, "This is an extra special type of tragedy, a tragedy that unfolds while everyone cheers. Strangling your passions in exchange for an elite life is like being on the Titanic after the iceberg, water up to your chin, with everybody telling you that you're so lucky to be on the greatest steamship of all time. And the Titanic is indeed sh- so huge and wonderful that you can't help but agree, but you're also feeling a bit cold and wet at the moment, and you're not sure why." Strangling your passions in exchange for an elite life. I love that insight. Like, what's the point in success if the road to get there is paved with nails and you don't care about the place that you arrive at in the end? Don't forget, having things isn't fun. Getting things is fun. But once you have them, it's not that fun. The journey is the destination. And if you strangle your passions in ex- in return for an elite life, remembering that when you get to the very top, not only have you got nowhere to go from there, or, a- as you start to get to the top, the bar of increasing your trajectory becomes harder and harder. If you are miserable, you're sacrificing the thing that you want, which is happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, which is success. And that is the bar stool being turned upside down. It's very dangerous. Then, I've been on tour with James, which has been good. I've had so much fun, and I've learned an awful lot. And I'm trying to not harp on about it, because I know it must be boring. Like, I sometimes don't like it about... someone goes on some formative experience, and all that they talk about for the next year is this like one trip to fucking Peru. So I'm trying not to be, like, the tour guy. But it has been very formative. It's been very strange to watch, you know, like, a few thousand people over the space of a couple of weeks come out and see you live. But while I was watching James, one of my favorite lessons that I took from him is this idea about imagine how good you'd be at something you loved if you're winning at something that you hate. So, committing to decisions that you feel drawn toward making often makes you feel nervous, right? It's an existential pull toward a new dir- a life direction, changing a job or leaving a relationship or moving to a new city. It's hard. It's often hard to let go of the fear around what this new situation might have in store. But his justification is that you absolutely can. Because if you're not happy right now, you're not risking anything in any case. What's the worst that could happen? You leave a job that you hate to take a chance on one that you love, fail, and still have the one that you hate there to go back to. That's still a success. In fact, it's more than a success because you closed the loop that you had in your mind that was ramping up anxiety costs for ages and ages in the back of your mind, and you don't need to worry about it anymore. And this is the difference in life between playing to win and playing to not lose.A more difficult decision is if your life is okay, but not perfect. And this is the region beta problem, right? You don't hate your job or your relationship or your city, but they're not fulfilling you as you thought you would. How do you know when to give up the good for the great? How would you even know what good and great are? How would you know when you're deceiving yourself into thinking that the grass is greener, and in fact, the problem is your perspective on the situation, not the situation itself? That is messy, but if you've got something where... (laughs) Johnny, from Johnny and Youssef Propane Fitness, used to sing to himself on his way to his old accounting job, singing, "I don't want to go to work. I don't want to go to work. I don't want to go to work," just over and over again. And his missus one day turned to him and was like, "I'm not sure, I'm not sure that you're fully fulfilled." He said, "Oh, you think?" Like, he'd created an entire song about- uh, not a good song, but he'd created a song, and he was singing a song to himself about not wanting to go to work. If that's you, what are you giving up? And if you're being successful, if you're being effective at something that you do not enjoy, how great could you be if you were fired up and you couldn't wait to hit the- the alarm on a morning so that you could get out and go and do it? So, yeah, if you're succeeding at something that you hate, imagine how amazing you'd be at something that you loved. And then Philip Larkin had this idea, this is from Douglas Murray, who told me about it. He said, uh, "I felt like I'd been shunted to the side of my own life. Oftentimes, there's a thing we must do, something we're called or compelled to do, and yet, we can ignore this sense and proceed in a different direction. Not take the risk, not try the thing, or make the change. This is how we shunt ourselves to the side of our own lives, by ignoring the things we feel called to do in place of things our fears rationalize that we should do instead." We can protect ourselves from failing publicly by ensuring that we fail privately. Even though it doesn't seem it in the face of a big, scary decision, the pain of regret hurts much worse than the pain of failure. So you need to get out of your own way as best you can here. And that idea of being shunted to the side of your own life, like you should have... You were meant to live a different life, and you weren't, there's- I can't remember who it was, I think it was maybe George Mack who was telling me about how, "Imagine that you met God at the pearly gates, and he said, 'You, you did all right. You did, you did okay. Why don't you just come with me and I can show you what you were supposed to do? This is the life that you were supposed to live, and it was you taking the chances, it was you having the conviction to follow your, your courage and to go after the things that you truly wanted. It was you playing to win, not playing to l- to not lose.'" And that would be pain, and that's the same, you know, the true hell is when the person you are meets the person you could have been. Like, perhaps that would be true hell. Uh, but yeah, there's this Robert Sapolsky thing as well, which kind of relates to that, um, journey destination idea, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Huberman posted a screenshot of it on his Instagram a couple of weeks ago, and I, I just can't stop thinking about it. "Dopamine is not about the pursuit of happiness. It is about the happiness of pursuit." So much of life and enjoyment is about the anticipation of things coming. In fact, the anticipation is often actually more enjoyable than the experience. Tim Ferriss used to book these (laughs) vacations years in advance so that he would stretch out that anticipation for so long, basically like free holiday before your holiday as he was excited and thinking about it. It puts a new perspective on, it's not the journey, it's the destination, because there actually is no destination. Each arrival at a destination simply marks the beginning of another journey toward the next destination. Morgan Housel told me that when he went on holiday, after months of planning, you know, he's got all of these kids and organizing, and he writes for Collaborative Fund, and he's got a fund, and he's like this big guy, and he's an author, and he's got all of this shit that he needs to sort. And he finally arrives and he steps out onto the balcony, and he's there on the first night, and he looks out at the sun setting or whatever, and his first thought was, "Wow, we should totally come back here next year. It would be great if we came back here next year." So literally during the supposed enjoyment of the destination, Morgan was captured by the allure of the next journey. And (laughs) it's hilarious but tragic, like, the dangerous thing about anticipation is it can cause us to look over the shoulder of the present moment to always see what's coming next so that we never actually experience what's happening right now. And this has been one of the most common questions that we've had at the Q&A. You know, I, I don't want to leave growth and- and achievements and experiences and life on the table. I want to feel like I left it all on the field of play and I- I maximized my time and all the rest of it, but I want my mind and my sort of spirit to be where my feet are. I want to be able to take pride and pleasure and gratitude and happiness and peace in the things that I'm doing whilst continuing to try and achieve. Like, how do I, (laughs) how do I find this balance? And it's been- it's been really tough. I- I, this is something that I struggle with as well, looking over the shoulder of the present moment to see what's coming next always peers in my mind when something great's happening and I'm always thinking about, already thinking about whatever's gonna happen next. One of the solutions I think that you can do is to celebrate micro wins as much as possible, lots of little way markers as you move along. You know, lots of tiny little destinations put along the journey. Any excuse, I think, to celebrate a victory, celebrate a win, celebrate some new record or- or- or just a degree of satisfaction. It doesn't need to be a big celebration, but I- I really think that that's one good way of chunking up long destinations into shorter journeys. Um, James Smith was talking about how...... his clients a lot of the time will say, "I wanna lose 10 kilos." And he goes, "Well, hang on, why don't we lose one kilo and then lose another kilo and then lose another kilo?" That seems like a way that you could celebrate the win, presuming you don't celebrate it with a massive, like, 3,500 calorie cake. That seems like a much more enjoyable way to go about this. But, yeah, I think so much of, so much of what I've been thinking about this year and, and what it seems like from the live shows and the questions and the Q&As that you guys have too, is this balance between becoming and being, between growth and presence, between wanting to achieve as much as possible and wanting to be gr- grateful for the things that we've already accomplished. Like, this balance is, is a, a tough one, and if anyone's got the cheat code, please send it in. Next one. Self-worth and why it's so tricky to get right is, again, another challenge, because you're built to care about the opinions of the people that are around you, and fully dispensing with this impulse is a super difficult task. But turning down the volume is not only achievable but I think also crucial. Outsourcing your sense of self-worth to the crowd is unbelievably dangerous. Not only will you begin to change how you act to fit in with the expectations of everyone else that they have of you, you sometimes lose who you really are in the process. And again, this is kind of like that first one that if you're only playing a role, you're going to basically be marionetted by your interpretation of what the people around you want to see. That's super dangerous. The- Gwendol Bogle's got this beautiful idea where he says, "They exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves. This caricature quickly becomes the influencer's distinct brand, and all subsequent attempts by the influencer to remain on-brand and fulfill audience expectations require them to act like the caricature. As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point, the persona has eclipsed the person and the audience has captured the influencer. This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be, and with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it's worth remembering that when you become who your audience expects at the expense of who you are, the affection you receive is not intended for you but for the character you're playing, a character you'll eventually tire of. And so be warned, being someone often means being fake, and if you chase the approval of others, you may in the end lose the approval of yourself." Schopenhauer said, "Other places' heads are a wretched place to be the home of a man's true happiness." And this outsourcing of self-worth to the crowd, this manipulation of who you are, honestly, of showing up in a way that's performative so that other people will like you or you think that they will, means that the best you can hope for is for people to fall in love with a projection, and ultimately what may end up happening is that you now need to play up to a role which you do not, you do not resonate with, which i- it is not you. And if you start to deviate from that, even if you're not a content creator, that deviation is going to feel disingenuous even though it is you moving toward (laughs) a more genuine version of you. So it's like audience capture is just so evidently perverse and easy to slip into for exactly those reasons. Next one. I came up with some, I thought it was a cool idea, uh, the four levels of fang- saying "fuck you." So people talk about, uh, fuck you money, and that was kind of the first level. It's a meme but it's also the truth. There's an amount of wealth that you can achieve when typical restrictions and conventions don't really apply to you anymore. You don't need to suck up to the gatekeepers, you don't need to do things that you don't want to do, and in extreme situations you kind of don't even need to follow the law because you can pay people off or buy expensive solicitors and lawyers and stuff. And then fuck you freedom is kind of downstream from fuck you money but can also be created aside from it by cultivating a lack of resilience on other groups. There are no restrictions on where you can travel to and when and for how long, you don't need to show up to work on time or work at all. If you're sufficiently well-structured you don't really even need to care about the state of the economy or the power grid (laughs) or the wider world or whatever. Um, this is your classic Austin guy that buys a ranch somewhere in Bastrop or Bee Cave or whatever, uh, and they now live outside of town and they don't really even need to worry about anything. They d- the, the, uh, a siloed little nation out in the middle of nowhere. And then another level that I think you can get to, again, all of these kind of exist independently, it's not like they're stacked on top of each other, uh, which is significantly cheaper and more accessible and more common and maybe even more powerful which was the fuck you family. So, a lot of fathers that I've spoken to have told me about how their priorities were completely changed upon starting a family, and all of the previous status games that they used to play seem quite petty because the admiration and the gamesmanship that they used to play in order to impress people in power or those with status seemed juvenile and shallow in retrospect. And much of their anxiety about whether different people liked them or thought they were cool or whatever evaporated, and the only person that they really needed to care about impressing was the one five feet asleep above them in their house and maybe the person that was next to them in their bed. To their kids...They were the coolest, richest, strongest, most heroic person on the planet. And this gives dads, it seems, a very powerful kind of liberation, and it seems to me that much of what young men get up to are surrogate activities until they finally become a father. And this isn't to say that all fathers have become, like, placid, soy boy hippies, or that having kids neuters your ambition, but it definitely seems to open up a new realm where dads care far less about the flotsam and jetsam that used to occupy their lives. But then I heard a story this weekend about a fourth type of saying "fuck you," which is "fuck you" fame. And this is, I guess, whereas the- the family and the freedom and, to some degree, the money pulls you outside of the existing, uh, hierarchy and the existing game, this is winning the existing game so well that you are no longer at the mercy of it. And that is- (laughs) the example that was used was, uh, Rachel McAdams doesn't have social media. So you're so ubiquitous, you're so well-known that your fame carries itself, and you don't need to any longer play the fame game. And Rachel McAdams not having social media- embarrassingly, apparently Rachel McAdams doesn't have social media because of how well-known she was, and I had to question, "Who's Rachel McAdams?" and then realized that someone had done a song about her. I think it was Dave on that or whatever it's called. Uh, Little Bobby? I've ruined that. Whatever the- whatever that fucking, uh, sitcom is that's been going around that's got Andrew Santino in it that's pretty funny. That. They did a song about Rachel McAdams in there, I think. But other than that, I didn't know who she was. Famous actress. Doesn't have social media. She's played the fame game to a degree where she's so high she's now outside of it, and she doesn't need to, which perhaps is why I didn't know who she was. I wanted, for a little while, to find a justification for a Hormozy quote that I loved, which was, "We're not afraid of failing. We're afraid of what other people will say about us if we fail." And that- it seems to make sense. It seems honest and truthful to me, and it seems accurate. Failing when you're on your own doesn't matter. No one really cares. If you trip over when you're in the house, apart from the pain, there isn't any embarrassment. But if you tripped over while you were onstage in front of 500 people, there would be. Okay. So failure is inherently to do with other people's judgments of us, not intrinsically what that thing is itself. Like, if you were playing a game of keepy-uppies against the wall, you might be frustrated if you dropped the ball or whatever, but it's not the same. It's nowhere near the same as if other people are watching you or scrutinizing you or, you know, trying to criticize you or whatever. And then Rob Henderson brought this idea up, which is, "Why do you feel shame when others falsely accuse you of misconduct? Your heart rate elevates, your cheeks flush, your body temperature feels like it's rising, even though you didn't do anything wrong. The reason is that social devaluation by others is sufficient to elicit the emotion of shame, even when there is no wrongdoing. The true trigger of shame is negative perceptions by others, not by the self." And that actually has a source for it. So I really love that idea. The fact that being accused of something that you didn't do, apart from the indignation, right, and the unfairness of it, the fact that you think, "No, I didn't, I didn't. This is- this is- this isn't true. This isn't honest." On top of that, why do you have the response? If it was about the thing that you did and not the judgments of other people around you, this shouldn't matter. And yet it obviously does. "We're not afraid of failing. We're afraid of what other people will say about us if we fail." Next one. Neediness. The definition of neediness. This is Mark Manson, who, again, I keep forgetting about. I, like- he's so obvious as a person in self-development that a lot of the time, I, like, overlooked, for a good chunk of- a good while, like, overlooked a lot of the insights that he had because you said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, Mark Manson," or whatever. You're trying to look for whoever the new diamond in the rough is. But Mark's just got so many amazing insights, and this one about the definition of neediness actually comes from his first book, Models, which is, like, from 2014, I think. It was a pickup artist book, kind of, like ethical pickup artistry. "Neediness occurs when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than what you think of yourself. Any time you alter your words or behavior to fit someone else's needs rather than your own, that is needy. Any time you lie about your interests, hobbies, or background, that is needy. Any time you pursue a goal to impress others rather than fulfill yourself, that is needy. Whereas most people focus on what behavior is attractive or unattractive, what determines neediness, and therefore attractiveness, is the why behind your behavior. You can say the coolest thing or do what everyone else does, but if you do it for the wrong reason, it will come off as needy and desperate, and turn people off." Turning people off is definitely not optimal, but there's an even bigger price to be paid here, which is your own self-worth. Like, imagine a world in which you're unanimously adored by millions but you hate yourself. Are you happy? Is it worth it? Probably not. Now imagine a world in which you're disliked by everybody but you love yourself. Not optimal, but I would propose that self-love you would ultimately be happier, because in some Taoist roundabout way, the reason we want validation from others is to give us a good enough reason to validate ourselves. And if you compromise yourself in order to gain favor with other people, you'll know. Even if you think you're not keeping score, your subconscious is. And this sacrifice of the thing that we want for the thing which is supposed to get it, sacrifice the thing we want, self-worth, for the thing which is supposed to get it, validation, means that we need to prioritize ourselves. And Mark's contention in Models, basically the entirety of Models, is- a piece of advice for male dating is neediness is the attraction killer....therefore, you cannot prioritize other people's opinions of yourself ahead of your own. Any time you alter your words or your behavior to s- fit someone else's needs rather than your own, that's needy. So, I think there's a lot in there and neediness is not really spoken about much. It's interesting 'cause it's like, it was a formative, powerful book and it sold pretty well, and there's lots in it, but the modern world of dating doesn't really talk about neediness. They talk... It's been transmuted into, uh, attachment theory, right? Oh, that person's got avoidant attachment, or that person's got anxious attachment, or that person's got secure attachment. So, I don't know, sometimes... (laughs) I remember I went back home and I was talking about, like, trying to reverse engineer some evolutionary psychology insight and, you know, about, uh, the ability for men to detach their emotions from, uh, having sex and women f- struggling with it and all the rest of it. And I, you know, come up with this big, long, like, high-faluting idea about it and then my mate went, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, like, you know, birds catch feels." I was like, "Birds catch feels, yeah." Like, that- that's what it was. So, the same thing with the neediness. I wonder how much has been layered on top of a fundamental, uh, law, which is neediness is unattractive, especially from men, but also from women. That if you see someone who is overly pliable and overly responsive and doesn't seem like they've got much else going on, it seems like... It's an- an immediate indicator of low value, and that's not something that you want to have to deal with. So, yeah, I wonder, uh, how many ideas are us just repurposing shit that, uh, we all already knew, and maybe there's like a colloquial term that probably actually even makes more sense. All right, one more. Alex Hormozi. Um, when we did our episode at the start of this year, the first one we did, he... We used a clip from it at the very start and it kind of made a bit of bother, because we put it (laughs) ... We put it on Instagram and, taken out of context, people were quite unhappy. And he posted basically kind of a- a- a press release, a rebuttal against it. And I really liked this, so this is what it is in full. "If you had disadvantages, I agree with you. You are right. It's harder to be successful if X happened to you. Replace X with gender, race, birth deformity, different language, different country, abuse, et cetera. The main point of the longer conversation is that despite the advantage, you only have one choice. What are you going to do about it? Number one, take action anyway and become proof to other people, like you, your people, also born into or abused into this tragedy that you were, that they too can overcome it. Number two, blame and complain. And to be clear, do whatever you want. I support your choice, but only one of those decisions will make you better. And I wish I could say this without getting attacked, but you know who wins by you not being successful? Whoever or whatever you blame, and fuck them or fuck that. You can lead a rebellion of one and blame one thing that you can control, which is you. In your mind, redefine the word blame as give power to. And when you do that, there's only one person you're gonna wanna give more power to, and that's you. For everyone who's had shitty circumstances, I'm on your side, your long-term side, the side that wants you to win, so do it anyways with all the disadvantages and still tell them to shove it, and win. I want to be clear again, if you had tough shit happen to you, it sucks and it's not your fault, but now what? Where do we go? My two cents, win anyways and prove that you can win even when the chips are stacked against you and you're dealt a lousy hand. Because we can't get dealt a new hand, we gotta play the cards we got rather than hoping the dealer rules in our favor. So again, what do you do with your shitty hand? The only thing possible, you play it the best you can." And this is a nice reframe. It's a lovely reframe against the cynicism, sort of black pill external validation or extrinsic locus of control, external locus of control thing that's been going on, which I don't like. I don't like it. It's... I understand that there are lots of immutable truths about the world and that there is a whole distribution of people who have advantages and disadvantages all the way along it. But ultimately, despondency kind of just puts you at the mercy of whatever's happening to you, and that doesn't seem particularly heroic and I don't think that you're going to look back on it and consider that it was a life well lived. Again, like Alex says, like you're free to do what you want. You are free to make whatever decision or choice or approach to completing life that it is that you want to go through, but I think you're going to look back with a lot more satisfaction and pride. And you'll overcome the bitterness and the envy that you have of whatever the thing or the people or the situation or the movement or the incident was that caused you to feel negative in the first place, because you're going to know that despite the shitty hand that you were dealt, you continued to overcome it. And, you know, that- that seems like a more heroic way to- to look at it. Trying to think about kind of what the- what the meta-theme of this year has been, uh, at least based on the lessons that we've gone through today, and seems like there's some stuff around performing, not performing, uh, trying to just be yourself, um, finding a place that you have something that's reliable and honest and- and- and- and truthful for you to...... go to in hard times, right? That you want people to accept you for who you are, that you want to show up in a way that people genuinely feel like they have a connection with you, and so that you're not just doing this, like, performance, so that you're not just this dancing monkey. I guess, the performative empathy, toxic compassion thing, a lot of what that's talking about is kind of the, uh, outward equivalent of the same. As opposed to you wanting validation, it's you just wanting to appear good when it comes to the social group overall. Um, but yeah, I... Look, guys, I... This year has been crazy. Like, I can't believe the changes and the growth and all the rest of the stuff that's happened this year, and I'm trying to, like, not lose my head along the way, which is... Some days it's easier than others, uh, and I'm trying to be open and honest about what I'm going through. If it was me and I was a fan of this show and someone was going through a kind of formative learning experience about changes in life, I would want to know. So, I'm trying to avoid accusations of being full of myself or considering myself more important than I am, or getting in the way of these interesting guests that come on, but I'm also trying to open up about what the experience is like of going from very unassured person, very unconfident person, to person who does a bit of self-work and builds a little bit of confidence, but still has, you know, good chunks of need for validation and, and, and fear and people-pleasing tendencies all the way along. And then that just gets projected and magnified out across, you know, a few million people, like 40 million people, 50 million people a month. It's an interesting challenge, but I appreciate you all for being here. I appreciate every single person that's tuned in forever, but especially the ones that have joined this year. There was this Spotify stat that said 84% of the Modern Wisdom audience joined us in 2023. So, uh, for the 16% of you, uh, 17% of you or whatever the- that joined before that, thank you for sticking about. And for the ones that have joined this year, thank you as well. I hope that you have a good Christmas. I hope you have a good New Year. I'll see you soon.