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Episode Transcript:

So 2023 was a pretty incredible year in terms of content creation for me. I wrote, I was calculating this just at the end of the year here, that I think I had published around 200,000 words last year. That’s across Twitter, LinkedIn, the newsletter. That’s a lot of words. For context, the average business book is 660 thousand words. And so we published about three and a half business books worth of content last year. A lot of that was probably not very good and not worth reading. However, just through the sheer quantity of volume of words, you’re bound to come across a couple of good ones every now and then.

That’s been my thesis, at least, and it’s an idea that helped me a lot in the beginning of my writing career. When I decided, man, this was like 1112 years ago, when I decided I wanted to be a science fiction author, one of the things I did was I went to the Google machine and I asked it. I was like, how many hours do I need to spend writing before I start to not suck at writing? And I had read recently at that point in my life, Malcolm Gladwell’s book called outliers, where he talked about the 10,000 hours, where to be a master at something, you had to do 10,000 hours of that activity. And that’s a concept that is a little loosey goosey. And there’s not really a lot of science to support that particular number, but it is helpful in setting a trajectory, I think, of saying, like, oh, that has an order of magnitude more than just, I need to put in 100 hours of work on a thing. 10,000 hours is a lot of work, but that doesn’t really correlate very well to writing, because writing is, you could spend 10 hours, but only have written 100 words. So, okay, 10,000 hours, but you’ve only written maybe 10,000 words. That’s not super helpful.

So, in writing, there’s this commonly held wisdom, which is that instead of 10,000 hours, you roughly need to put in about a million words. You need to write a million words of crappy words before you get to the good words. That’s what a lot of writers will talk about. So when I decided I wanted to be a writer all those years ago, I was like, oh, I need to write a million crappy words. And so I tried to get through those million words as quickly as possible by writing a ton. And that habit has just kind of stuck with me. And I think last year was probably the year that I’ve published more words, because those are just the words I wrote are published. I probably wrote a million words in the last year, and then one out of every five words gets published.
So it was a crazy year. All that’s to say is that of the words that I wrote last year, here are ten of the concepts that I found the most valuable for myself, because a lot of the process of writing is a process of self discovery, and then I share it with you guys, so hopefully we can learn and grow together. But largely, when I write, I’m writing for myself and to see what I think about a topic to learn and try to organize the chaotic jumble of thoughts going through my brain at any given moment and give it some kind of meaningful direction. And so these are the ten ideas that stuck out to me the most in the last year, where I was like, I learned a lot from that concept. So, number one is, when you start is a better predictor of success than where you start. It’s so easy. Look at the guy with the silver spoon in his mouth. The kids that are born rich and think that they have it so good, truthfully, they don’t have it as good as you think they do.

They suffer from so much mental health issue and so many feelings of, like, what’s the purpose of my life now? I’m not saying that those problems are worse than the people who are struggling in poverty to figure out what to eat tomorrow, right? I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying it’s not all butterflies and rainbows for those people who maybe they were born into a life of luxury, and now they have no clue. One, how to maintain that life when their parents finally pass on, and two, how to find meaning in that life. And so if you’re that person who was not born in that world, I certainly wasn’t. Instead of fixating on the fact that you’re starting behind the eight ball, fixate on when you start as a better predictor of success than where you start. And the best time to start is right now, the sooner the better, so that you can get compounding interest on your side. Because three decades from now, if you started today, you are three decades ahead of the person who waited three decades to start. And I don’t care who you are, where you start in the game, if you are a kid who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, if you never actually start learning and growing and pursuing your greatness, then you’re going to fall behind.
And so when you start is a better predictor of success than where you start, so might as well start now. Number two, you can’t win if you don’t start, and you can’t lose if you don’t quit. This one, I love this concept. It gets, I think, the most comments from people who are like, there’s plenty of games that you can lose if you don’t quit. And I’m like, yeah, I mean, you go to Vegas with this concept, you can’t win if you don’t start, and you can’t lose if you don’t quit. Don’t go to Vegas with that, because you can lose a whole lot. But in the game of life, in this macro sense, these infinite games that we’re trying to play, not the games that have a winner and a loser, but games where the only objective is to continue playing, that’s what entrepreneurship is. That’s what the game of life is.

It’s not to win the game of life and be done with it. It’s to continue playing it better and better and better at higher and higher levels. And when you do that, when you go into the game thinking of it that way, you play it very differently than when you’re just trying to get your nut so you can piece out right. Number three is story is the source code of the human experience. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because when I really tried to drill down and figure out what are the things that have made the biggest impact on my life in terms of skill sets, story kept coming to the top. The ability to communicate an idea persuasively with impact, with style. I think it’s the most important skill. And it’s why Steve Jobs said the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.

And that’s not just for business. Obviously, you can use storytelling and persuasive communication within your business. That’s great. However, storytelling goes even further than that, and it changes how you communicate with everybody in your life. But it goes even deeper than that, too. It changes how you communicate with yourself, the stories that you tell yourself about, who you are, what you’re capable of, and the world that, in a very real way, creates your reality. And so storytelling is the source code of the human experience. Number four, focus, not time, is your most valuable resource.

I’ve talked about this one so many times on this podcast that let’s not go into it any deeper here. That is probably my most quoted concept at this point. How about this one? If you’re like me, you spend most of your time focused on the gap between where you are right now and where you’re trying to get to. And unfortunately, that gap, it never really gets any smaller, because as you move forward, you continue pushing the goalpost back, and that’s just the nature of being a high performer, right? But if you’re not careful, this can lead to frustration and burnout, because you never actually achieve the goals, or you never achieve the goal and then allow yourself to stay at that place long enough and bask in the glory of your victory, that you just feel like you’re on the hedonic treadmill constantly and you’re just getting exhausted. And so something that’s helped me a lot is just to take a moment, and instead of reflecting on the gap between where I am and where I’m trying to get to, just take a moment, turn around, and reflect on where you are versus where you began. Because that gap, unlike the one where you’re constantly chasing what’s in front of you, the gap behind you is only ever getting larger as you continue growing further and further from the person you once were. And I find that there is a lifetime of gratitude to be found, and motivation as well, in that gap if you just allow yourself to take a moment to stop, turn around, and observe it.

Number six. There is a war being waged every single day for your attention. When they win, which is the marketers, the politicians, the media companies. When they succeed in separating you from your attention, they get paid. When you keep your attention focused on the things that you want in your life, you get paid. And that’s not just monetarily. Again, if you stay focused when you’re present with your children, your wife, your loved ones, whatever, you are getting paid in memories, and you’re getting paid in the currency that matters most. And so the key here is that you have to stay focused at all costs. Number seven, you can’t consume your way to fulfillment.

It can only be created. Therefore, we must consume less and create more. If there was one thing that I could get painted on the wall here, it would just be consume less, create more. I think in those four words is the equation that will lead to fulfillment. And fulfillment is, I think, the thing that we’re all seeking more so than achievement, right? Achievement is fleeting, but fulfillment, that’s something to strive for. Number nine, the risk of mediocrity is greater than the risk of failure. So much of our lives, we want to move towards our greatness, but we’re afraid of what others might think. We’re afraid of what might happen if we come up short because to strive for your greatness means that you will probably fail a lot in the process.

But in my experience, the people who are happiest are not the ones who have avoided failure. They’re the ones who, despite having failed, kept moving forward, kept growing, kept pursuing, kept progressing. And I think the reason for that is because mediocrity is not an award worth winning. It’s not a prize you want. As naval says, when play stupid games, win stupid prizes. The prize of mediocrity is about the dumbest prize I can imagine. It’s not one I wish for anybody at the end of their life to look back and think, I lived a mediocre life, so might as well go and make it great and risk the failure. That’s okay.

That’s okay. Because as number ten says, mistakes are the things we do that we wish we had done differently. Whereas regrets are the things we didn’t do but wish we had. Mistakes are far easier to live with than regrets. So my hope for you is that in 2024, this is the year you go and make more mistakes. You fail your way to greatness. I believe in you. I’m excited for you.

I think this is going to be amazing year. So let’s go make it so, and I will catch you back around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.

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