21 Lessons For All The Young Hustlers Out There
The Amplified Impact Podcast
June 9th, 2023
Today, I’ve got some real talk for all you young and hungry hustlers out there.
It’s incredible to see the sheer number of hustlers in today’s world, way more than I remember back when I was in my twenties.
Back then, I was just a regular guy, not really paying attention to hustle culture or how people were building extraordinary lives.
But now, in my thirties, I’ve been immersing myself in this world, and it’s mind-blowing to witness the energy and ambition of young people today.
You know, age is just a number, and we’re all as young as we feel. So this message I’m about to share applies to anyone…whether you’re 21 or 58.
Personally, I feel young at heart, even as I approach my 39th birthday. Trust me, when you hit 82, 39 sounds pretty darn great.
But let’s get to the real meat of this episode.
Here are 21 things you need to know if you want to maximize your return on life.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Opportunity or obstacle is all a matter of perspective…using the difficulty of that activity as a proxy, as a heuristic for determining, is it worth pursuing.'”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
What’s up, everybody? Uh, as always, really jazzed to have you here. I’m going to dive into 1 of my most popular tweets of all time. Um, it’s 1 that I wrote 2 ish years ago and I repurposed it every now and then because, um, I think the message is timeless and I think it’s valuable and based off of engagement and reactions that people have had, they seem to find it valuable too. So let’s unpack it here. This 1 is called, to all the young and hungry, let’s try this again, To all the young and hungry hustlers out there, and damn if there aren’t a lot more of you than I remember when I was young, if you want to maximize your return on life, then here’s 21 things you need to know. So right off the bat, real quickly, guys, the it’s really interesting to see how many young hustlers there are these days. It’s amazing. I remember when I was like 20 to 30 years old, I was, I guess, in my own little silo in school, I wasn’t like a high achiever by any means.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:57]:
And so I wasn’t really paying attention to hustle culture, I guess, or like what people were doing to like build like great things with their life. And so this is new to me. It’s new now for me in the last decade and through all of my 30s to be paying attention more to this world. And it’s just really cool to see how many young people there are. And the truth is, like, I saved this for the very end of the tweet, but I’m just going to give you the punchline here. You know, age is just a number. And so we’re all young at heart, or I mean, you’re as young as you feel. And so this message that we’re going to be talking about here, it applies whether you’re 21 or you’re 58.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:32]:
And so, and I feel young. Truthfully, I feel as young as I ever have. And I’m almost, I’m turning 39 in like a week. So, and I think in the grand scheme of things, like when you can be 82 years old, like yeah, 39 sounds pretty great. But when I was 20, 25, 39 felt really old. It seemed really old. And now that I’m here, it’s like, no, that’s nothing. So just wanted to share that.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:58]:
That’s not even 1 of these takeaways. Anyways, the first takeaway, first thing that you should know is that opportunity or obstacle is all a matter of perspective. So whether or not you see something standing in your way and stopping you from getting to your goal, or you look at that obstacle and you say, that’s the reason why other people won’t make it to that destination, and therefore that is what makes that destination worth going to. Like I think difficulty is a good compass when it comes, especially to building a business, but when it comes to doing anything in life, using the difficulty of that activity as a proxy, as a heuristic for determining is it worth pursuing. And the harder something is to pursue, I think the more value there is in pursuing it. So opportunity or obstacle, it’s all a matter of perspective. Number 2, you have so much time. So much time, whether you’re 21 or 52, 68, it doesn’t matter.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:50]:
You still have so much time left in the tank. And with that in mind, patience is a superpower. You have a lot of time. So play the game on the time horizon of decades, not days, not hours. And realize that truism, I think Bill Gates said, that we overestimate what we can do in a year and we underestimate what we can do in a decade. When you expand the time horizon to that of decades, you start to realize you have a lot of time to play with. So if you’re 72 and the average age life expectancy is 85, well you still have 15 years. That’s a decade and a half.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:25]:
That’s a lot of time to do a lot of work and get a lot of amazing stuff done. But the problem is we tend to look at our life in year increments. And the year is a fine metric, it’s a fine time period, but it’s too short to make meaningful progress towards the really hard big things in life. And so when we measure on too short a timeline, we often go, oh, we’re not making progress like I thought I should. And so expand the time. You have more than you realize. Number 3, consume less, create more. I firmly believe fulfillment cannot be consumed.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:59]:
You can’t eat a bag of Doritos and feel fulfilled. You can’t consume Netflix and feel fulfilled. The only thing that leads to fulfillment is the act of creation. Creating something with your life, with your time, your energy, trading the energy that you burn to bring into life something that could never have been without your efforts. I think that’s where true fulfillment is. And so if you’re ever feeling lonely, you’re feeling despondent, you’re feeling like you’re not tapped into your greatness, it’s probably because you’re consuming too much and not creating enough. So flip that dichotomy, spend more time creating, and I think you will find that fulfillment that you seek. Number 4, start investing now.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:40]:
The earlier that you start investing, both financially, but also in your relationships and your skills, the better. Why? Because compounding interest only ever works in your favor as time goes on, right? So you’re gonna let time do the heavy lifting and the longer that you let time do its thing, whether that’s your skills, your relationships, or your money, the better. So start investing in those things now. The 3 most important investments you can make in yourself, your network, and your community, in that order. Invest in yourself and from there you can invest into your network and from there you can invest into your community. That’s been a pretty good game plan for myself at least All right. Number 6 discipline is a muscle and it beats motivation every single time We’ve talked about this extensively on so many episodes, but it’s important to understand Motivation is a finite thing. It’s fleeting and it’s not a very powerful weapon against procrastination, against distraction, because motivation is a biological reaction to your chemistry.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:45]:
And when that dopamine burst eventually subsides, if you do not have discipline to replace it, then you will not continue making meaningful progress towards your goal. You will only ever be the person who’s really good at getting to like 20% done and then just abandoning the project. And you know the people who do this. Like they just have a, they have a cemetery of ideas behind them that will never come to fruition because they lack the discipline to see the thing through. Number 7, creativity makes you irreplaceable. There was a study done of IBM CEOs, or like it was done by IBM of CEOs, they polled like a thousand CEOs and asked them, what’s the most important skill in the modern workforce? The answer was creativity. And I agree with this, honestly. I think it’s a great answer, I think it is the answer.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:31]:
Creativity in this instance is the ability to take 2 or more pieces of disconnected information and connect them in a new, meaningful, novel way. So the ability to take ideas, information from different fields and industries and just Domains and then be able to create something new out of that that’s meaningful and useful that is creativity and it is a it will make you a replaceable because AI can’t do that the AI cannot be You cannot be spontaneously creative always needs to be prompted Number 9, you know number 8 curiosity is a better measure of future success than intelligence, hard work or genetics. Curiosity and this is this is true to me, I believe when I have, we’ve been hiring, you know, dozens of people over the years, hundreds of people at this point. And 1 of the recurring traits that I see amongst the most successful is not their work ethic. It’s not their intelligence. It’s not the charisma. It’s their curiosity. It’s their desire to know more about the world around them and that insatiable need to go and find the answer.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:31]:
Those people, they will be successful in life because that curiosity drives them forward. And when you combine that curiosity with creativity, like curiosity is the fuel that fuels your creativity, right, like it’s, you’re putting more information and data points into the tank for which your creativity can then jumble them up and recombine them in new novel ways. So creativity and curiosity, they go hand in hand. Number 9, experience is the name we give our mistakes. Fail fast, fail forward. Think about this, like, failure and success are just 2 sides of the same coin. You cannot have that coin in your pocket without having both sides of that. If you want to be successful, you have to accept that it comes with failure.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:17]:
And truthfully, that’s just how we get to success, like through the failures. I’m a big fan of the idea that we fail our way to success. So don’t be afraid of that. Instead, lean into it and try to fail as fast as you possibly can because through that failure comes learning, comes iteration, comes improvement, and ideally, on a long enough time frame, comes success. Number 10, everything in this life has a cost. Inaction tends to be the most expensive. Think about that. Everything in this life has a cost.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:46]:
Not taking action tends to be the most expensive. And I’ve seen this again and again and again in so many different domains in my own life and it holds true. The people who have a bias towards action are the ones who inevitably experience more success in life. They don’t sit around hemming and hawing and planning and pontificating. They get the idea, they take action because they know that the failure that they’re gonna make is going to help fuel their learning, get them to success faster, that there is no money, that There’s no amount of money that they could spend that is more valuable than the time they are wasting by not taking action. The time they are wasting is more valuable than the money they could spend to get there or anything else, any other resource they could spend to get there. Number 11, learn to tell a story. I think storytelling is 1 of the most underrated superpowers in the world.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:39]:
And it’s interesting because it’s how we communicate. Throughout time immemorial, as our ancestors were painting their first pictographs of bison on the on the cave walls. They’re telling a story. They’re communicating something of meaning of value that they want to carry on and live on beyond them and Even if you don’t have grandiose visions of being a storyteller of like this person who’s telling these stories are going to live on for eons. You still want to connect meaningfully with other humans and the way that you do that is through story. So learn to tell a story. Learn to tell damn good stories. It will open so many doors for you.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:16]:
It’s ridiculous. Number 12, study psychology. And this is tied into storytelling, but really, your life is spent in company of other people. We are a tribal species, and you’re gonna be in relationships, whether that’s with significant others and a work environment or whatever, like strangers on the street. You’re gonna be interacting with other people. So you should really understand the software that is running these people. You know, some people are on Android, some people are on iOS. Like, understanding the underlying software, that is the psychology that’s driving these squishy machines, like, that is, that’s understanding how the game is played right there.
Anthony Vicino [00:11:00]:
That’s understanding the motivations, the beliefs, the biases that other people have. And through that, you gain a better understanding of both yourself, but a more accurate representation of the world around you. And I think the people who are most successful in life are the ones who have the most clear and accurate picture of reality, and then act in accordance with that. And so psychology is a key function of that. All right, number 13, writing is thought made physical. So practice it every single day. The way I like to think about this is thoughts are just dots on a piece of paper. Writing is taking those dots and connecting them to create a picture of a cat or whatever.
Anthony Vicino [00:11:40]:
Writing is the most powerful form of thinking and it is a irreplaceable skill and it’s absolutely criminal that our school systems do such a bad job of teaching how to write, but more importantly, why it’s so important to write. Nobody ever talked to me about this when I was young. Nobody told me why it was so important to be writing every single day. I never understood it. And as a result, I had this weird relationship with writing when I was younger because I thought it was just really unfun. It was uncomfortable. It was hard. And that’s the truth of thinking.
Anthony Vicino [00:12:10]:
Thinking is hard, but it’s critical. It’s critical because It is, again, thought made physical. It’s amazing. It truly is amazing. I get gushy when I think about writing. Anyways, number 14, good decisions. Let me try this again. Good decision making cannot be taught.
Anthony Vicino [00:12:28]:
It can only be developed. So Practice it. I’ve done a lot of content recently about decision making. I’m putting together a training on how to make good decisions. We are creating the decision making journal or the decision journal, which will be launched later this year. If those are things that you wanna learn more about, shoot me an email, anthony at anthonyviceno.com or go to beyondtheapex.com. We’re gonna be launching a community here shortly where we’re gonna take all these trainings, all these school courses and materials that we’ve been putting out over the years, we’re gonna bring them all into 1 place and then you can take those trainings there. So if you’re interested in learning more about how to make a good decision, that’s where you’re gonna wanna go, beyondtheapex.com.
Anthony Vicino [00:13:04]:
Now, that might not have been launched yet, depending on when this podcast goes live, it’s gonna be here in the next couple of weeks in June of 2023, so just as context. Okay, number 15, everybody has something to teach you, and it’s your job to figure out what that something is. And I believe this is true, that regardless of where you are in life, if you’re a movie, movie, movie successful and just talking to the guy on the street, like washing windows on cars, like that guy has something to teach you. And to think that you’re better than him and that you know everything or have nothing to learn from that human is the height of hubris. Every human on this planet has something to teach you and I think it’s your responsibility to figure out what that is, to ask the appropriate questions, to dig deeper, try to find what everybody has to give you. And when you take those lessons, you start to stack them up, I think that creates the most accurate perspective or vision of what reality actually is. And again, it goes back to what I just said a couple minutes ago about how successful people are the ones who see reality the most clearly and act in accordance with it. And so go get as many perspectives, go learn from people as many as you can.
Anthony Vicino [00:14:09]:
All right, number 16, level up your network, level up your life, 100%. You are the average of the 5 people that you spend the most time with if you’re hanging out with 5 alcoholics You’re gonna be number 6 hang out with 5 millionaires You’re gonna be number 6 and this is true for whatever you want to be in life The easiest way to become fit and healthy is to surround yourself with fit healthy people who that is the standard they hold themselves to and they will hold you to that standard. Next thing you know, because that becomes your new norm, because that’s your standard, you become healthy. So level up your network, level up your life. Number 17, get a mentor. Now not a mentor, I think people have a weird perspective on what they think a mentor is, and they think it has to be like this very formal relationship. I got a lot of people emailing me or DMing and saying, hey, will you be my mentor? Will you mentor me? That’s not really what I think about when I have a mentor. I don’t have a mentor that I go to.
Anthony Vicino [00:15:02]:
I don’t have a person in my life that I’m like, that’s my mentor. I have people that have mentored me that I have learned from that have helped progress me from where I was to where I am. But those relationships tend to be very informal. They tend to be fleeting and impassive. Like my dad is a mentor, but it’s never been a formal relationship. 1 of my former business partners was a mentor. When I think of mentors, actually, the greatest source for mentorship is books, reading biographies in particular, or the books that people have taken the time to write. So Sam Walton, he, you know, the founder of Walmart, he wrote a book, Made in America, and then he’s just saying, here’s all of my lessons, all my teachings.
Anthony Vicino [00:15:39]:
And that’s no different than if you were to sit down at lunch with him and just say, Sam, teach me everything you know, and he starts talking, right? But it’s in a book. And so we look at that and a lot of people don’t realize like that is mentorship You can be mentored by any of the greats that have come in the past that have written a book or have had a book Written by them. So if you’re not tapping into that you are wasting you are wasting a golden opportunity Number 18 travel more if the world is big you are tiny and again successful people are the ones who see reality the most accurately than live in alignment with it, and you, from where you are standing right now in your backyard, can only see so much. So get out there and see more of it. See some of the amazing, beautiful people and what they have to teach you out there. Number 19, listen more. We spend way too much time talking. We have 1 mouth, 2 ears, and again, people have something to teach you if you will just open up and listen and be okay with the silence.
Anthony Vicino [00:16:29]:
Be okay humbling yourself and being the student. Number 20, read more. I think I just kind of talked about that 1 too. Truthfully, like reading is another form of thinking. And I’m not talking about listening to Audible. I think there’s a big distinction. Somebody, I was speaking at an event last week and we got on the topic of reading and somebody said, Oh, I love reading. I listen to all these books on audible and I was like, I don’t think it’s quite the same.
Anthony Vicino [00:16:52]:
You’re getting the information, but you’re not engaging with it in the same way. And the reason is listening is a passive activity, but reading, putting your eyeballs on the page is very, very active. If you can’t zone out, you can’t drift off, the information’s not gonna get into you unless you attend to each and every single letter and word on the page. And I think that struggle makes the information that much more deep and meaningful. So I think reading is like a superpower. Don’t try to make it easier. Don’t tell me that you’re a bad reader, that you suck at it, that you get sleepy, that you get distracted. That’s the point.
Anthony Vicino [00:17:28]:
That’s why it’s so important. It’s because it is so damn hard as we talked about earlier use Difficulty as a proxy for the direction in which you should go in life and number 21 Love more there was a famous study Over the last I can’t remember how long it was as a longitudinal study over like 50 60 years where they took these people from when they were teenagers or young children all the way until they were like 80 and died, so maybe longer than 50 years, I don’t know. And they looked at all these confluence of events and their relationships and their jobs and money and all of the health and said like, are there variables, what are the variables that lead to happiness? And at the end of it all, they found, it all just boils down to 1 thing, and it’s the very first line of the study, and it’s 1 of the greatest first lines of the study that I can think of. And I’m gonna butcher it, but it’s something like this. Happiness is love. Full stop. So love more and if you want to love, if you want to receive more, if you want to feel more love, it starts by giving more love. Truly.
Anthony Vicino [00:18:31]:
It’s like the perpetual energy machine. If you want to feel more of it, just give more of it and it will return to you. So, in conclusion, the last thing I want to leave you with is 1 of the first things I brought you with, brought to you, weird, is age is just a number. So these are 21 lessons I wish I had known when I was 21, but they’re 21 lessons that I still hold dear to my heart right now as I’m turning 39 here in the next week or so. And I hope I keep learning more from them as I progress. But whether you’re 22, you’re 48, you’re 73, there are lessons to be learned here. And you are only as old as you feel. We go back to the early 1, the thing is number 3, you have more time than you realize.
Anthony Vicino [00:19:14]:
So Be patient, but don’t waste it. And with that, I will leave you my dear friend. I’ll see you back around these parts tomorrow. I can’t wait. Until then though, stay hyper-focused.
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