40 Lessons I Know at 40 I Wish I Knew at 20 | Part 4

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Welcome to part four. In this four part series where I share 40 lessons learned. Having officially crested the hill of life, now I’m on the backward slope of my mortality. I’ve officially turned 40, and it is all dark days from here. But because I’m officially an old man, I’m coming from the hilltop to share with you some lessons I’ve learned along the way. Now that I’m officially considered wise. Okay, I’m not wise. I’m not even all that old.

But that was actually number. Lesson number one is that 40 is just a number, in that I feel so much better than I would have expected. But if you’re just tuning in, I do recommend you go back to the beginning of the series. Listen to them in chronological order. Each day or each one of those episodes, we dive into ten more of the lessons. Now we are on the last ten, so let’s get to it. Number 30, is that what you do often matters less than simply doing something. Surprisingly, you don’t always have to take the right action.

Just taking a action can yield much better results than sitting on your hands. And this is a weird truth, is that so little of what we do in life matters. Very few of the actions that we take will move the ball in a meaningful way. And you don’t always know what those things are going to be. And so to optimize for progression, for opportunity, it’s more important that you just are doing stuff. This is what we call hustle luck. The more things that you do, the more that you stir the pot and you put into Petri dish, the more likely you are to have something sprout out. The only thing that guarantees no result is to do nothing.

And this one’s just really wild to me is that the people who get pretty far in life and in business in particular, are the ones that aren’t sitting around, like, trying to plan everything to perfection and do, like, the exact right thing. But in the beginning, they’re just. They’re doing something. Just doing something is, like, 90% of the battle. And it’s really wild to say that, because on the other hand, we need to talk about prioritization and doing the things that are essential and, like, doing less but better. But, like, in the beginning and honestly, like, pretty late in the journey, too, like, just doing something is what matters. Just taking an action. The universe responds to action, not through.

Not to intentions or plans or feelings, right? Number 31. You would care less what others think if you knew just how quickly they forget we let so much of the opinions of others dictate the actions we do or do not take in our life. I don’t believe this is one of the previous lessons is that we’re not afraid of failure. We’re afraid of the judgments of others about our failures. And you would care a whole lot less about what they think about you if you just realize they’re not actually thinking about you right now. They’re probably not thinking about you. The person that you’re afraid that will judge you if you take that action, if you go for your dreams, you put yourself out there, you’re afraid they’re going to judge you and laugh at you. But the truth is, they’re not even thinking about you right now.

And the worst thing is you’re not even. You’re not pursuing your dream at this instant. So they’re not thinking about you and you’re not moving towards your greatness. It’s like I just double whammy. You suck. So stop caring so much about what others think. Recognize they’re probably not thinking about you as much as you think. And if they are, so what? Who cares? At the end of the day, you cannot let the people who are not on the stadium, who are not on the floor in the arena fighting the battles, let their opinions dictate or judge you.

Booze, don’t block. Dunks. Get in the game. Go dunk that ball. Number 32. Proximity is either power or poison, so choose your friends wisely. This ties into the previous lesson here, is that you’ve heard you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with. We talk about this all the time.

If you’re surrounding yourself with five alcoholics, you’re going to become the six. If you hang out with five millionaires, you’re probably going to become the six. Recognize everybody in your life is either pushing you forward towards your best self or they’re pulling you back. And I know that’s a really brutal way of looking at the people in your life and, like, objectifying them, but that’s. That’s the frame that you need to look at and say, are you. Is this person helping me move forward or are they holding me back? Are they making the game harder on me? I’m not saying you need to cut those people out of your life that are not pulling you towards your greatness. Maybe you just make less time for them. Because in a real way, your network is your legacy.
Like, it will become your destiny. The people that you see around you, the lives that they’re living, you’re just a reflection of that. So be very, very careful about who you let in. Number 33. When in doubt, give it more time. Going to the gym for six weeks isn’t going to change your life. Eating healthy for six weeks, it’s not going to change your life. Waking up at 05:00 a.m.
for six weeks, it’s not going to change your life. Great things, all great things, they take time. Expecting it to be quicker only makes it take longer. So when you’re in doubt about whether or not you’re on the right path, give it more time. Just give it more time. Number 34, you can’t slay the dragons you refuse to acknowledge. If you’re unhappy with your body, stare at yourself in the mirror for five minutes every day. If you’re unhappy with your finances, stare at your bank account for five minutes every single day.
You can’t slay dragons you refuse to look at. And I know this from personal experience. When I was just beginning on my financial journey, I was so stressed out about money all the time. And looking at the bank account filled me with dread because I never knew if it was going to be overdrafted, if it was going to show red, if I was going to be getting it with fees, or if I actually had money in there. And so it became easier just to ignore and pretend like it didn’t matter. But it did matter, because that dragon slowly grew until it was $80,000 of debt, and that then was a dragon I could no longer ignore. And he came to eat me, and I had to fight him. And that battle was so much harder because I refused to look at him when he was still just a tiny baby dragon.
You can’t slay the dragons you refuse to acknowledge. Number 35, you don’t need more time. You need more focus. Everybody likes to say that time is your most valuable asset, but we know that that’s not true because time is just a construct of the human consciousness. It is a way that we create meaning out of the chronology of our life. But the reality is there is no objective measure of time. Your perception of it is different than mine. And theory of relativity says, like, the speed at which we’re moving influences the perception of time, right? So it’s this subjective construct.
The thing that you have, the thing that you get compensated for, the thing that has value in this life, is your focus. It is what you do with your time, and that is a result of your focus. And how much focus you have is a result of how much energy you as a biological entity have in order to expand in the direction of your goals. So the thing that we need to maximize for is our energy. And then how we target or focus that energy is a thing that’s ultimately going to dictate our results in life. So it’s not that you lack time, you lack focus. Number 36, inaction is the only thing that produces guaranteed results. I know so many people who are waiting on the sidelines for some kind of guaranteed result before they’ll commit.
They’re like, I need to know with perfect clarity that this is going to work before I try. But the thing is, the only thing that guarantees a result is doing nothing. It’s not a result you want. Number 37. Cheap dopamine is the most expensive dopamine of all. Scrolling, social media, endlessly porn, hypercaloric foods, cheap dopamine. These things that make us feel so good in the moment, they’re so easy to get. Those are actually the most expensive forms of dopamine at all, because they come at the expense of your dreams.
They come at the expense of who you could be, that. That greatest version of yourself that you could become. Choose the dopamine that you earn as a result of doing hard things. The best, purest form of dopamine, but it’s also very, very, very hard to come by. You got to earn it. Number 38, you are the only person standing in your way in this beautiful day and age that we live in, with Internet, with access to billions of humans just fingertips away, like, there’s so much opportunity that we all have in our lives that our parents, our grandparents didn’t have. And the only thing standing in the way of you realizing that opportunity and realizing your potential, it’s you. The only person who.

Who’s stopping you is you. You have to ask yourself, why are you standing in your own way? Why are you sabotaging yourself? That’s a hard question to answer. It’s not one that has one simple answer. And you will continually get in your way as you play the game higher and higher. And you need to learn how to continually juke or outmaneuver your worst self, because the biological you, it wants to keep you safe and complacent and keep you in safe and secure in this bubble of protection and security. But the modern you, the version of you that wants to become your greatest version, does not want that. And so you have these two conflicting selves. And whoever wins that battle on any given day will dictate whether or not you move towards your greatness or whether you sit on the couch eating cheetos, watching Netflix all day.

But at the end of the day, it’s you. You are the person that’s standing in your own way. Number 39. The problem with opportunity is that it only ever looks like opportunity in the rearview mirror, never the windshield. And that’s why we so often miss opportunities, is because when they’re coming at you, when you have the opportunity to take an action, it doesn’t look like opportunity. It looks like a risk. And it’s not until you’ve passed the opportunity and you’re looking out through the rearview mirror that you realize that was the opportunity. This is where hindsight is.

2020. You didn’t invest in Apple in 1982 because it looked risky. Now we can look back and say, that was an opportunity of a lifetime. But we didn’t. At the time. It didn’t look like opportunity. It looked like risk. I don’t know what to tell you about this, other than being aware of the fact that opportunity never looks like opportunity in the moment is the key to recognizing it, in optimizing and hopefully attracting it to you.

Now, this is the hardest lesson of all. It’s number 40. It’s the most important one. And I hope that you’ve made it through all 40 of these so that you understand this one simple truth. I have no clue what I’m talking about. It’s been 40 years. I’ve learned a whole lot. I’ve grown a lot.

And the more I grow, the more I learn, the more I realize I have so much further to go. I have so much more to learn. And these things that I feel so certain about now, in this moment, will probably prove to be wrong in another 40 years. And so I hope you subscribe. I hope you tune in so that you get notified in 40 years from now when I turn 80 and I share 80 life lessons, and I completely debunk everything that I’ve shared with you here. But in the meantime, I hope that these 40 lessons bring you a little bit of value, bring you a little bit of nourishment that you can use in your own life. But I want to just say, I am so grateful for the opportunity to bring you value for this game that you and I are playing together, this conversation that we’re having. And it is a conversation despite the fact that I’m the only one talking right now.

I want you to engage. Reach out. Find me on Instagram, find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever. Shoot me a comment, leave me a DM, whatever. I try to respond to as many as I can. Engage with me and let me know what has been valuable for you. Well, and that’s going to do it for me. Guys and gals, I appreciate you being here.

Truly looking forward to the next 40 years with you. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.