40 Lessons I Know at 40 I Wish I Knew at 20 | Part 3

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Welcome to part three in this very special series. Since I turned officially old, last week was my 40th birthday and I am sharing 40 lessons that I’ve learned over these myriad years. And hopefully you can take them and implement them into your own life. If you haven’t already, I do recommend that you go back and start at the beginning of the series. So part one, part two, where we cover 20 of these, these ideas, these concepts that I’ve been chewing on since turning 40. And today we’re gonna kick it off with lessons 20 through 30. So let’s do it. Number 21 is you have all the time in the world, but none to waste.

I think it’s really important that we always have a finish line or a goal in mind that we’re moving towards, because without that, humans kind of go listless. And without having direction, without having purpose, we lose our sense of meaning. And that’s not a good place. I think that’s a place from which depression can easily sprout. So we always want to have goals in mind. We always want to have a destination, a finish line that we’re striving towards, but we never want to rush towards it. Never rush. Be patient in the journey.

Be impatient with the actions that you take in pursuit of the goal. Number 22, you can’t plan for serendipity. You can only make room for it. I was talking with my buddy Adam the other day. Adam is a professional runner. He, I think, won the national something in like 100k. So an ultra runner, and he’s talking about how he’s one of the best. Well, he didn’t say this.

I’m saying this is that he’s one of the best runners in that domain, and yet he has a very small social media following. And the reason for that is because he is so, in his own way, he’s afraid of what the judgments of other people will think about him. Right. And what I told him was, you need to think about your surface area of luck, which is that there’s two ways to graph out your impact on the world or your potential of realizing serendipity and luck. On the x axis, we want to map how good we are at a thing. Like how many times you do the thing. You could either be at zero and you’re a complete noob, you’ve never done a thing before, or you could be at ten. You could be, like, world champion, right on the y axis, we’re going to measure how many people know about what we do.

So for instance, you could be a world champion, but if nobody knows who you are, then maybe you’re only a one on the y axis. And so your total surface area of luck, if we were to graph this out, is ten on the x axis and one on the y axis. Right? Now, the reverse of this is somebody who talks a big game, and everybody knows what they do, but they’re not terribly good at it. This is the person who goes out and they buy the really fancy equipment so that everybody can see them, and they talk about it on social media all the time, but they’re not good at the thing. So, like a one in terms of their skill and how much they’ve done the thing, but they’re a ten. And how many people know about them? So they have an equal amount of surface area of luck as the world champion who nobody knows about. Think about that. That’s wild, right? Just by telling more people about what the.

The weekend warrior is doing, he has just as much opportunity come to him as the world champion that nobody knows about. Now, the middle ground of this is to be, like, a good athlete. Like a five on the chart in terms of your capacity, and a five in terms of how many people know about you. This is where most influencers come in. They’re not world champions. Most of, like, the people on social media that you follow that have, like, these massive followings. I think myself, is a fairly interesting example of this. I’m not a billionaire.

I’m not Elon Musk. I’m not a ten out of ten in terms of my skill as an entrepreneur. I’m probably a five or a six. I’m pretty good at it. I’ve built multiple eight figure companies. I’m doing pretty darn good, right? So I’m right there in the middle in terms of skills. I’m probably actually a little bit further along, maybe a seven or. Yeah, six or seven or eight on that scale.

But I also have told a lot of people about what I do. So I have social media presence, which puts me at a six or seven or eight. And so I have a massive surface area of luck to. All this is to say is that in life, you can’t plan for serendipity, but many of the things that are going to move you forward in the most monumental of ways, those big opportunities that come along in life and those, like once in a lifetime opportunities, those are typically the manifestation of your surface area of luck. And I have found in my own personal life that you don’t know when those lightning strike moments are going to come but when they do they’re game changing. And so you just want to optimize for how many lightning strikes that you have coming towards you in life. So you can’t plan for serendipity but you can make room for it. And the way that you do that is get really good at the thing that you do and tell more people about what you do.
That’s the way that you expand your surface area of luck, get around more people, talk to them, share what you do, add value, get really great at what you do and you’re gonna get start getting pretty damn lucky in life. All right, so number 23, 24 and 25 is there’s magic in motion and in nature. And if you combine both as much as possible, you’re gonna be doing pretty good. So number 23, there’s magic in motion. There’s a study that found people that get less than 6000 steps in a day have higher levels of anxiety, depression and different mood disorders just by getting an average of 6000 steps a day. People have this increase of dopamine and serotonin and all these good, these good neurochemicals that give us meaning and purpose in life. And so that’s like the technical when I’m saying there’s magic in motion is just get up and move more. Other studies have found that if you can do that moving while in nature you ignite these parts of your brain, the anterior cortex which is responsible for making grand like connections and creativity in your brain.
And so if we can take our motion and we can bring it to the outdoors, you’re going to be doing pretty good. So combine those two as much as you possibly can. Like as I’m getting older, I’m realizing that my mood and my happiness is directly correlated with how much time I spend outside in motion. The more motion, the more nature I get, the better I feel. All right, number 26, you can never ask the question, what if this were the last time? Too many times. That question what if this were the last time? Is very powerful because for everything that you do in life, there will come a last time. There’s a last time you will hug your dad. There’s the last time you will say I love you to your partner.
There will be a last time that you take a deep breath and you appreciate a sunrise. But the problem is we humans, we think we’re always going to get one more. We know we’re mortal beings, but we have to live our lives pretending as though we’re not. Otherwise it would cripple us into just sitting around doing nothing. But the truth is, there will come a last time. And the harsh reality is that there’s already things in your life right now that you have done for the last time. You don’t even know it. There’s a place that you visited that you once loved that you’ll never see again, you’ll never go there again.
There’s things you once did that you’ve been meaning to make time for, but you never will, and you will never do that activity again. There’s people in your life that you once loved. They once meant the world to you, and you want to keep in touch with them, you want to make them a part of your life, but they’re already gone from your life, never to return. And you don’t even know it yet. You don’t even know that you’ve had your last time with them. Because we keep thinking, I have one more time, one more day. There will be some opportunity in the future to go back to that place, to do that activity, to call that loved one to spend some time with them. And you don’t know that you’ve already had your last time.
And when you realize that, I think it changes how you show up in the moment so that you appreciate each instant that you have a little bit more. Because in a very real way, all we have is this present moment. Now, I say all this and it’s much easier to say it than to live it, and I know that. So good luck with it, but just keep it at the front of your mind and think. You can never ask yourself this question too often. The question is, what if this were my last time? What if this was the last podcast you’re listening to? What if this is the last time you’re driving to work? What if this is the last time you ever got to, you know, look out the windshield or sit on the treadmill and sweat? I don’t know what you’re currently doing to consume this podcast, but what if this was the last time? Just ask yourself that question. Reflect on how it makes you feel. Reflect on what it makes you want to do as a result of that.
Number 27, find a partner that you love being bored with. Everybody wants that big romantic love, the partner that they can travel to the end of the world and back with. And that’s a great thing. Like, no doubt, like it’s, you want to find somebody that will go to the ends of the earth and back with you. But those grand occasions, they’re fleeting. They’re fleeting moments in the symphony of life. They are the climactic instant when the cymbal crashes and the beat finally drops. And it’s wonderful and it’s fun.
But 99% of the song and life is in the quiet build. If you can’t find somebody that you like to quietly build with, then you’re never going to make it to the end of the song. So find somebody that you like being bored with, that you can do life and just sit in a room quietly with, because that is a lot of what life really is at the end of the day. Number 28. Boredom is the antidote to most of modern life’s issues. Foggy thinking, overwhelm, distraction, isolation. Also, there’s a lot of studies that show boredom boosts creativity. It increased problem solving capacity.

It increases our overall productivity. It’s really wild. There’s so many good things that come from boredom, and yet it’s so uncomfortable to be bored. By definition, it’s a state that makes us want to take action, to do something. The problem is we’re so easily lured into taking the wrong action, into a life of overstimulation with hyper caloric food, hyper caloric digital stimulations. Those things aren’t moving us towards our greatness. So make space for boredom. I think you’ll be better off for it.

Number 29, the comfort zone paradox. I believe that comfort is the enemy of greatness also. Interestingly, the greater you become, the larger your comfort zone gets. Which means as you become a greater version of yourself, it becomes increasingly difficult to find the edges of your capacity and to push into the unknown. And this, I think, is why so many people stagnate upon reaching certain baselines of success. It’s because their comfort zone outgrew their hunger. If you’re listening to this, I don’t know if you’re going to be one of those people, but I’ve experienced this in my own life as I have ascended to different levels. It’s very easy to go periods of complacency where I’m like, this is good enough.

It’s because my hunger is smaller than my comfort zone, and I needed to rekindle my hunger towards different goals, different reasons, different purposes for being here and playing this game, so that I could have a reason to continue expanding my comfort zone. That’s the why. That’s the why that motivates us. You gotta have a big enough why. And if you do, a man can endure anything. But, uh, without that why, you’re not gonna be able to motivate, to get up out of bed and do anything. So what is that thing that’s. That’s driving? You always have it in mind, but never be rushing towards it.

Remember, I think that was number 22 or something like that. Maybe 21. That might be in the previous episode. So if you’re listening to this for the first time, you haven’t listened to those other episodes. You’ve already missed that, that one. So go back and listen when you get a chance. All right, number 29. Wait, no, no, we’re done.

I think that was it. Cool. We’re done. For this episode. We’re at twelve minutes. And my goal with this podcast has always been to keep these episodes relatively short and consumable so that you can digest them on a walk or on your way to work or in the gym. And so let’s cut it here tomorrow, tune back in so we can do part four of these 40 lessons learned from turning 40. And let me know, in the meantime, what has been the most meaningful of the lessons? What just stood out to you as most impactful? Reach out to me on Instagram, the Anthony vacino.

Shoot me a DM. Let me know. I’d love to hear from you guys if you get a second. Do me a favor, just leave a review for this podcast on Apple or on Spotify or on YouTube, wherever you’re listening to this. It just helps the podcast continue to grow and to reach more entrepreneurs. And hopefully we can help an entire army of entrepreneurs to maximize their return on life. That’s the ultimate goal here. So thank you for being here.

We’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay happy, folks. My friend.