"How Do You Deal With the Fear of Death?"

0:00You often talk about the 85-year-old version of yourself and framing decisions around death. What is your subjective perception about your own death? Does viewing yourself as just an organism running behavioral loops eliminate the fear of dying? Or do you still wrestle with the unknown that comes after you die? I can't sleep most nights because of this. Um I'm going to give you a wonderful piece of advice, um which is if a thought does not serve you, it is probably not worth continuing to think it. Real. Because if you really do believe that we are just uh you know, chimpanzees that have evolved and are in behavioral loops in an infinite universe, then you having this little thought that ruins your day over and over again, there's no meaning behind it. Why bother?

0:37And I think that that sounds overly simplistic and it's also still true. Um And so do I see myself as somebody who is who does things that they've been reinforced for doing? Absolutely. Um does that eliminate the fear of dying? Uh fear of dying? Maybe. Preference for staying alive? No. Uh I would strongly prefer to stay alive. Um and the beauty of death is that once you are dead, you don't know you're dead.

1:06And so it's only the fear of death that bothers us, not death itself. Kind of interesting. And so um do I still wrestle with the unknown that comes after you die? Not at all. I really don't. I don't give it any thought. Um and I'll give you my and many people will disagree with me on this and I want to be very be very clear. I agree with whatever position you have. Go for it. Love this for you, whatever you believe. That said, what has helped me through this basically not wrestling with this is that for the entirety of the universe's existence, I have been not alive. In another words, I have been dead.

1:40And so I've been dead for almost all time that has existed except for the last 37 years. And so I imagine what will happen after I die is the same thing that happened before I was alive, which is that there was nothing. And so it didn't really bother me very much before I was alive that I was not alive. And I suspect that it will not bother me very much after I'm dead and also not alive. And so in that in in in seeing the world that way, it has freed me in a lot of ways to just like not have a lot of stress about it. Um for some people that helps. For other people, it doesn't. If you're the type of person that it helps, think that way. If it doesn't help you, then for for the love of everything, think another way. But that has helped me um because I think like our brains are designed to keep us alive, not to help us maximize our potential, not to help us be happy, not to help us, you know, be more useful. They only are there to keep us alive and help us pass on our genes. That's it.

2:33And so there's a lot of other things that we're not designed to do. And so we have to fight tooth and nail to orient the way that we see the world uh in a way that serves us. And I think there's a lot of ways to do that. This is just the way that I have. If you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the 100 million dollar scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all of the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it.

3:21And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisitions.com/roadmap, plug in your business information and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct in the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.