40 Lessons I Know at 40 I Wish I Knew at 20 | Part 2

Welcome back, all you beautiful people. I am continuing where we left off in yesterday’s episode, which is 40 lessons that I’ve learned, having turned 40 last week. I’m old. I’m over the hill. It’s game over. If you haven’t already, I recommend you go and you start by listening to that first episode, part one. But we’re going through 40 lessons learned, and I think we’re on lesson eleven now. So let’s kick it off.

Let’s get right into it. Number eleven. You cannot consume your way to fulfillment. It can only be created. So consume less. Create more. If you do that, you’ll never be left wanting. The problem is, so much of our lives are designed in a way to keep us in a trap of consumption.

Our Internet habits, our social media, our phone, our Netflix, our food. Everything is so hyper caloric and stimulating in an attempt to keep us in perpetual consumption. But so much of life that is beautiful and wonderful comes as a result of creating. Creating something that only you could have created. And even if it’s not great, even it’s not something that goes and changes the world, that changes you. The process of creating is never wasted. So consume less. Create more.

Number 13. Number twelve. I’m not sure what number we’re on. So what? Stick with me. Actually, this is number 1213. And 14. It’s a three, four. Be useful.

Try hard. Never give up. Let me repeat those. Be useful, try hard, never give up. I think one of the highest goals any of us can seek in life is not happiness. It is to be useful. I think we’re here and we find and realize our highest levels of enjoyment and fulfillment when we are in service to other people. You can only be useful in service to other people.

And if you wake up and you struggling, if you’re in a dark place, go be useful to somebody. Go serve somebody. You can’t worry about your issues, your anxiety, your problems when you’re serving somebody else. Number two is to try hard. Here. And this, I think, number 13. Try hard. Life is gonna be hard one way or the other.

If you make it hard by intention, you do things. You push yourself outside of your comfort zone. You go do things that expand your capacity. Then your capacity for doing hard things expands. And the number of things that the universe can throw at you that would sidetrack you or derail you become smaller and smaller, because your potential, your ability to cope, is so much higher. And as a result, you have more capacity to be useful within the world. So try hard, do hard things and never give up. Never give up.

Because in the games worth winning in this life, you can’t win if you don’t start and you can’t lose if you don’t quit. Those games that are worth winning. Those games of relationships, of personal fulfillment, of pursuing your greatness, games of business, you can’t win these games unless you get into it, but you can’t lose unless you quit. And you get an infinite number of swings at bat, you can’t strike out. So just keep swinging that bat and keep going. Don’t give up. Number 13. You don’t have to love it.

Do it anyways. I hate writing, but I love having written. I hate working out, but I love having worked out. I hate eating healthy, but I love having eaten healthy. You don’t have to love the process, do it anyways. I believe that discipline, you know, it doesn’t matter if you love what you do, but it’s the only thing that matters if you don’t. A lot of the things in life that are going to move you towards your greatness, the things that are truly good for you, they’re going to be things that aren’t fun in the moment. They’re hard.
And hard things aren’t things that you’re going to seek out in a lot of cases, by with intention. Most people, they choose to just be complacent, to sit and be comfortable or content. And those people will be the sad souls that sit in the stands and never know the glory of victory or defeat, as Theodore Roosevelt said in his man in the arena speech. So cultivate discipline. It’s one of the most important things that any of us can do in this life, because motivation, it’s waning. It’s fleeting. Discipline. Discipline’s forever.
Number 14, do less but better. And I’m constantly reminded that very little of what we do on a day to day basis, it actually matters. Very little of it. It’s very easy to think of ourselves. This chair is like really squeaky. So if you guys can hear that, I apologize. Very little of what we do on a day to day basis actually matters. We like to think we’re much more important and that our to do lists are so critical.
But if you were really to pare away the things that were meaningfully moving the ball forward, you’d realize there’s actually very, very few things that do that. And as a consequence, we fill our lives with things that just don’t matter. And that’s troublesome because then we feel overwhelmed, we feel pressure, we feel like we’re not moving forward fast enough, right? Because there’s so much on the to do list. At the end of each day, we think, oh, I didn’t accomplish enough. But if you realize that very little of what we do matters and that success is never about how much we do, but by what we do, then you start to work on doing less but better. And this is one of the guiding principles of my life that served me incredibly well. Number 15, you will never feel ready. So might as well start now.
You won’t. It’s true. You will never feel ready to start that business, to leave the w two, to ask the girl out, to do whatever, to start the new diet, to go work out like, you will never feel ready. You will always have an excuse to procrastinate, to put it off. So you might as well just do it now. The dragon’s not going to get any easier or any smaller. Number 16, when you start matters more than where you start. It’s very easy to look at people and that have the silver spoon in their mouth that were born into opportunity and think, oh, they have it so great and that I’m never going to be able to catch up to them.
And I don’t know where you came from, maybe, you know, you’re coming from a third world country and you started off with very, very little opportunity. In my experience, it matters less where you start on the road to success. It matters more when you start because we’re all on our own personal journey. There is no objective measure. There is no gate at the top of the fence or at the top of the hill that we get to. And then you won the game. Right. So it’s not as though somebody who has a head start is actually winning because they’re running a different race entirely.
Right. They might be starting further ahead than you in an objective way, financially, let’s say, but their race is entirely different and that’s their starting point. And for them, the game that they have to figure out how to win is how do I move towards my greatness? It’s the same one that you have to play. And so it matters less where you start in life than when you start. And it might as well be right now because going back to number 15, you will never feel ready, but you might as well start now. Number 17, obstacle or opportunity is nothing more than a matter of perspective. If you choose to interpret the stress and the strife in your life as a negative thing, it will be a negative thing. There’s really interesting research around this that shows our perception of stress, whether stress is good for us or bad for us, will manifest itself in positive or negative ways.
So if you think stress is bad for you, studies find that those people live long, shorter lives. If you believe stress is not necessarily a bad thing, then it doesn’t have any adverse effects on your longevity. It’s your perception of the stress that is detrimental or empowering. If you view stress or pressure as a privilege, as Billie Jean, the tennis player, once said, that’s a great book. By the way, pressure is a privilege. That’s her biography. If you view it as a privilege, then you look at your life and those things that are causing so much stress as an opportunity to step into your greatness. It’s part of the story that is you.
No hero. We don’t admire the hero in the story that didn’t have to overcome obstacles, right? The greater the obstacle they had to overcome, the more we admire them. And it’s no different in the story that is your life. You want difficulty. Now, I’m not saying it’s fun, but you can’t step into your greatest self without difficulty, without obstacle. And that is why the obstacle is the way. Number 18. Everything in life has a cost.

Inaction tends to be the most expensive, not wrong action. A lot of people are so afraid of making a mistake that they just sit on their hands and do nothing. The truth is, not doing anything is the only thing that guarantees a result. Nothing. Get in the game. Take action. Because actions can be corrected. Sitting and doing nothing produces nothing.

Number 19. Nobody is remembered for the things they didn’t do. I’ve talked to a fair number of old people about what they regret in life. And one of the things I’ve come to observe is that people tend to regret the things that they didn’t do in life, not the things that they did do and wish they had done differently. It’s the missed opportunity. They didn’t ask the girl out. They didn’t start the business. They didn’t take the road trip.

The things people tend to regret at the end of their game is what they didn’t do. Not the wrong actions, not the mistakes that they made along the way. I find that to be very empowering to remember. Remember, I’m going to get to the end of this race and I’m not going to regret having done something poorly. I’m probably going to regret not having tried. Number 20, with all that said, talking about old age and the idea of not being remembered for the things that you don’t create, truth is you should forget legacy and focus on trying to make an impact. Right now, that’s all you have anyway. And the truth is, legacy is this weird concept that we get all up in our heads about wanting to build generational wealth so we could pass it on to our kids and, like, make their lives better than our own.

But the truth is, people are going to forget about you relatively quickly after you die. It’s just the reality of the situation. There’s going to be a day, you know, you die, and the people closest to you, they’re going to miss you, and they’re going to be very sad for a period of time. But then probably six months, nine months later, there’s going to come a day where your children don’t even think about you. That day, for whatever reason, they’re just so wrapped up into their own lives, it doesn’t even cross their mind that you’re not there anymore. And there comes a day when the last human on earth will remember who you were and you’ll just be a digital memory with your YouTube videos and your articles and your books and whatnot. Like you’re just nothing more than a name in history. Nobody actually knew you.

So the idea of legacy is a little bit, I think, of a fool’s errand. It’s a goal not worth pursuing. Instead, make an impact. Now, you can do that. You can make people’s lives better. You can be in service to others right now. And I think that’s the highest thing that any of us can, can do with this current moment we have on this planet. It’s just to try and make an impact on the lives of those around us now.

All right, I don’t want this episode to run too long, so we’re going to do part three tomorrow, so tune in for that. And I’m interested in what you think so far. Of the 20 lessons that we’ve covered, which have been the most interesting or the most impactful for you, which ones are causing you to chew more deeply? Chew longer on the meat, let’s say. Let me know in the comments. Shoot me a DM if you’d like. I’m on Instagram theanthonyvasino. I try to respond to as many comments and DM’s that I get. Shoot me a message.

I’d love to hear from you guys about what you’re finding impactful here and we’ll catch you in tomorrow’s episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.