The Secret Formula for an Amazing Life

So here is the secret to an amazing life. Do hard things with people you love and that brings the world value for decades. Forget everything else and just focus on that. Let’s break this down. Let’s break down the five different parts of this equation, which is to do hard things with people you love, and that brings the world value for decades. Forget everything else. So number one, do hard things. What does it mean to do hard things? I get this question somebody asked me the other day.

What do you consider to be a hard thing? And the truth is, this is going to be different for everybody. What you consider hard is different than what I consider hard because we have different tendencies, different natural proclivities, different skill sets. And so it doesn’t necessarily do any good to compare your hard to somebody else’s hard. Not only that, but your definition of hard is going to evolve and change over time as your capacity to do hard things and increases. So I don’t think there’s a ton of value inherently in asking somebody else, what do you find hard for the sake of trying to figure out yours. But for me, an example of something that I find very hard is sitting down and focusing on creating something. I find it much easier to default into consumption mode and much easier to watch videos like my dopamine seeking missile of a brain just wants to be entertained. And so I find it very easy to go down rabbit holes.

Sitting down and creating, whether that’s through writing or through creating a video like this is very difficult for me to muster that energy. So that is something that I would consider to be a hard thing. The second part of this conversation, this equation, is to do hard things with people you love. I think this is maybe the most important part, is that life is too short to spend it with people you dislike. And that’s not just talking about your loved ones and talking about the people that you surround yourself with on a daily basis, like your employees and your your spouse. Like those things are obvious. Those are more obvious. But here’s one that you maybe haven’t considered as an entrepreneur is that you are going to spend a lot of time in service of your customers.
And if you don’t like your customers, then why serve them? It’s just going to eat at you and you’re not going to show up to the fullest of your ability. And I share this because it can be very hard to admit to yourself, I don’t like my customers. That could be a result of the product that you’re selling, the type of customer that you’re targeting. I found myself in this trap many years ago. We were selling a product. Not going to talk about it. Like, I don’t want to get into the details of it, but we had a customer base that when I really stopped to think about it, I was like, I don’t like serving them a more timely example with my content these days. And what I’m building is I walk a very fine line when I talk about wealth and winning the money game because it attracts a certain type of person very often that wants to get rich quick, that they want to win the status game.
They’re lazy. They like the idea of thinking about being rich and they like the idea of spending money on programs, but they’re never going to actually change their activities. I hate those types of customers. I hate serving them. I know I can make a lot of money creating products and selling it to them, but I want so badly to never be associated, to never spend my time around those people. I get DM’s from these people all the time. And it’s very hard sometimes to know who is in that category where it’s like that person is just, they like the idea of being rich and being wealthy, but they never gonna do the work versus the people who, you know, they do want to win the money game and they are willing to do the work. But I get so many comments and it’s hard to, like, sometimes figure out who’s who.
But I feel it in my heart when I’m talking to them. I’m like, oh, I just, I can tell that you want this for different reasons than why I want to give this. And so I have to find, I have to walk this very fine line with the content and be able to turn people away that I don’t want to associate with. I don’t want them to be my, my customers. So do hard things with people you love. The third part that brings the world value. We are, you know, we are a communal species, humans. We’re, you know, we came up on the savannah and tribes and if there is anything about legacy, it’s, it’s, it’s the result of the people and the lives that we influence while we’re here and the ideas that they carry forth with them, the things that we make them feel.
So everything in life really, that ultimately has value, has value because it’s in relation to another person in most instances. And so if you want to live a very successful, fulfilling life, maybe fulfilling is like the best metric here to really look at the way to be fulfilled. I think is to help fill other people’s cups. There’s something about filling other people’s cups that helps fill your own. Now I’m not saying that you pour your cup out to empty, like we’ve talked about this before on the pod, is that we want to make sure that we’re filling up our own cup to overflow, and from that overflow, fill others. But by making a focus on filling other people’s cups, I think that is what leads to just a general improvement of the world’s situation. And I think that’s a, that’s a good thing to aspire to. And if you want to have an amazing life, if you want to be successful, you should focus more on what you’re doing to make the world better, to bring value to the people around you.
And as a consequence, you will reap the benefits of that as well. So we do hard things with people that we love and that brings the world value, and we do it for decades. And this is maybe the most important part of this whole equation, is that you need to be prepared to play this game of life for a really long time. It is very fleeting and very fragile and might end tomorrow. But you’re never going to do anything worth, truly worth doing. Never accomplish anything truly great that’s worthy of your greatness and of your time and your expended energy. If you’re only going to do it for a couple of days, couple weeks, couple months, anything worth doing is worth doing well. And to do anything well, it requires a lot of time.
And so expanding your time horizon upon which you judge yourself and you’re willing to play this game, I think, is the easiest way to ensure that you eventually do win the game. Because if you have an infinite timeframe that you’re willing to play the game on, it’s really hard to bet against you ever not winning. Right? Like eventually you will succeed, but if you only give yourself a month, then yeah, your chances of success are practically zero depending on the activity and like, what you’re trying to accomplish. If it’s something great and truly meaningful, I’d put that at a pretty much a 0% likelihood of being accomplished in only a month. So do hard things with people you love. That brings the world value for decades. Expand the time horizon in which you measure things. The last part of this is just to forget everything else.
There are so many different competing priorities that we have in our lives. The word priority used to mean the one thing, the singular most important thing. You can’t have multiple most important things and yet we have multiple priorities. People say this all the time. And as a result of having multiple priorities, you’re often diluting the results that you can achieve across any of those domains. And that’s fine. It’s not bad to have a well balanced life, but if you want to achieve anything truly great, and I think we all definitely have this desire to do something with our lives that really means something. You can only do so much.
You can’t. You can do anything that you want, but you can’t do everything. And so focus on is in many ways an act of courage because you have to be willing to cut off and blind yourself to all the other potential paths in life. And that can be very scary. It can be very risky as well. Because what if you chose the wrong path as the only way to know what you could actually fully accomplish, though, is to commit entirely to that singular path and to walk it and say, I’m not going to get distracted. I’m not going to let these things pull me off my path. So that is my little recipe for an amazing life.

Do hard things with people you love that brings the world value for decades and forget everything else. Do that and I think you’ll be doing all right. So I hope this brings you some value. As always, thanks for being here, guys and gals. We’ll catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.