Weniger Angst vor den eigenen Zielen haben

0:00There's no perfect way to live your 20s. You either live them up and become an under-skilled 30-year-old or you work them up and become an under-lived 30-year-old. You just have to figure out which you'd rather be, accept the trade-offs, and know that there are no do-overs. Endure three. If you consider work life, then you get to do both.

0:27That one ruffled a lot of feathers. >> [laughter] >> Well, it's because people look back on their 20s and realize that they are one or the other. All right, I'm going to lean into this. I I am okay. I had a conversation with my team about this and I said, "I am okay being a beacon of relentless hard work. I'm okay being the guy who says, 'Fuck your mental health.'" I'm okay with it. Because I've given it a lot of thought. I think that there is the other side is wildly over-represented.

1:02And I'm willing to sit on the logical extreme because I think it will help more people. And there are more people that I have met in my life who are dissatisfied by their live-it-up 20s than dissatisfied by their work-it-up 20s. Because most of the time in your 20s, you have no idea what you want. But knowing what you need to do to work and move ahead is fairly straightforward.

1:28And so you can take the known and make progress on the one that you have high confidence that you can make progress on. And then along the way, gain perspective on what are the things that are actually important to you in your life. And you may find out often that there are far fewer of those things than you really originally thought. Because what you thought live-em-up in your 20s was was actually your mom and your two homies who are both mediocre and you don't care about their opinion now when you're 30 anyways. But what a waste of a life it would have been to quote live up your mom's dream or your friends' dreams to then only get to your 30s and realize you didn't live it up and you also didn't work it up. And now you have neither.

2:15I think a lot about you know, the first day that I sat down at university, my first ever seminar, I sat next to my what would be future business partner for 15 years. So, I'm skint. I say to him, "I'd spent all of my money partying during freshers' week, the first week. I'd spent my entire maintenance loan, which was supposed to be food and everything else for the rest of the term until [ __ ] Christmas, and it's September the 29th."

2:41>> It's a big week. It I It was a good week. Um which I could not survive now. And I think uh I think back to sort of the the time that I spent and the endless hours. Like I'm not kidding. And I don't talk I don't reflect that much on the the club promoter stuff, maybe to my detriment. I should do it more. Uh I've spent between 5 and 10,000 hours stood on the front door of nightclubs.

3:12I've spent at least 3,000 hours stood on the front door of the same nightclub only on Saturdays. Right? I didn't miss 202 Saturdays in a row. I took four-day holidays from Sunday to Thursday so that I could come back to come and do this thing. And I look back on my 20s and I think, you know, was that how much was living, how much was accumulating skills? And the grass is always greener with this because in hindsight, you think, "Well, you know, you imagine that you could have gone back and still accumulated all of the insights and the skills that you really value in yourself. That would have still happened, but that you would have got to maybe have more variety or you would have maybe the fun or the whatever the thing." And uh when I look for me, with my constitution, at what I value most in myself, almost all of those things have been accumulated by having a 20s and now a 30s that has been dedicated to work-it-up, not to live-it-up, to four-day holidays in between those things. Now, remembering that now is not forever, I think is really important.

4:21Again, you're on the outlier right-hand end of the distribution for work. Most people are going to pull themselves back across in terms of balance between work and play. But you can periodize what you're doing right now. You can accumulate all of that work, all of that experience, all of that explore time to work out actually I I don't like doing admin stuff. It turns out I'm really great at creative or I really don't like traveling. It turns out I'm really great at routine. All of those things. There's like a buy-in. You remember CrossFit? You do the You do a buy-in thing. You go to a 1-mile run and then it's this workout. You have to do that buy-in. Let's say everyone has to do that buy-in. Doing that buy-in when you're 25 is way easier than doing that buy-in when you're 40, right? I finally work out who I am in the world. Because you start to accumulate all of these better directional assistances. You're moving in a more directionally accurate way earlier, which means that you make more progress over the long term. So, in retrospect, I'm glad that I did work-it-up 20s and I'm glad that I did work-it-up 30s as well.

5:23So, I'll say two two things that are might be helpful. Um One is you are familiar with my stance if you're listening to this on work-life balance, but maybe as a as a concession for you, your work-life balance obsession may just be too narrowly focused on the present and not extended into seasons. And so you can have work-life balance where I work for 3 years and then I have a more chill year. And I think that most people think about work life in terms of their split of the day rather than their split of the year or the decade. So, I think that you can have a much better outcome on both sides if you were to split it up on a longer time horizon.

6:10So good. I mean, everybody knows what it's like to go through it every January, intense period of diet. Five, I [ __ ] it at Christmas again. Too much chocolate, too much too much dinner. And you go, "Okay, well, what are you going to do? I'm going to work hard. I'm going to focus on my diet and my training for a while and then I'm going to hold those gains for a period. Or I'm going to build a business. Okay, my health's probably going to take a hit for a little while. Or I just got out of a relationship. I need to go dating. All right, well, I'm probably not going to be able to spend so much time at work or maybe I'm going to be sleeping later, so my my fitness is going to knock off a little bit.

6:45All of these things happen for periods of time. And yeah, remembering that now isn't forever is And that's such a great frame. Like a hyperbolic discounting, an inability to be able to imagine that this is not the way that it's always going to be. And that's good. For good things and for bad things, this isn't the way it's always going to be. So, I better enjoy this win. This isn't the way it's always going to be. So, I better not get too disheartened by this loss.

7:12You will come But that's the hit the beautiful thing about the sort of uh hedonic renormalizing. They go, "Good things aren't as good as you think they are. Bad things aren't as bad as you think they are." So, if you if you use that extended frame as a way to approach different types of goals. I'll I'll I'll break a a very standard one, which is that people measure the amount of calories that they need to eat per day. But very few people measure the amount of calories they need to eat per week. And so people will blow the day and say, "Well, screw it. I messed up today. I might as well have a pizza on top of it because I had chocolate and I went off my diet or whatever." But if you have a weekly outlook even, then all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, well, I can have a pizza tonight. I'll just like skip most of my food tomorrow besides protein. Or I'll have a wedding weekend and know that this whole week I'm going to be light." And so I have, you know, 13,000 calories for the next 7 days that I can work my way through, which gives me a tremendous amount of flexibility.

8:06Mhm. And the thing is is that the further you extend the time horizon, the more flexible you can be with your achievement of it as long as you only get the few things that matter most. And so it allows you to focus and prioritize on those few things that move the needle rather than be overly obsessive on such a small narrow window of time that is irrelevant anyways. So, there's a there's a coordination problem that happens when you try to balance too quickly. When you try to have a little bit of fun and a little bit of play and a little bit of fun and a little bit of play, whether it's task switching, whether it's just sort of the cognitive effort of your personality. Like your identity is I'm gym guy for 3 months. Hooray. I'm work guy for 3 months. Hooray. But when it's I'm gym guy this morning, I'm work guy this afternoon, it's tough. It's tough to do that. So, yeah, kind of the same as you get diseconomies of scale as a business grows because there's more interconnectedness and communication between each person, the more yous there are going on inside. So, this is an argument for sort of aggressive periodizing. I'm a hyper-proponent of one single narrow focus.

9:11I'll define two more terms since the audience didn't ask for it. Sadness is a perceived lack of options. It's why it feels like hopelessness because you don't know what to do. You don't know what options are available. You see none, which is why it feels like there's no way out. Anxiety is many options but no priorities, which is why you feel scattered. They can't decide. They feel very different, but fundamentally, those are the difference in the conditions that make people feel like they're anxious or they feel like they're sad.

9:43And so when we're working through what you were just talking about with, "Okay, I want to be gym guy and I also want to be work guy." We have many options but a lack of priorities. And so we have anxiety over the fact that we're not making progress on any of them because we have not been able to say, "This comes first." And so, if you think about what priority means, it means prior. It comes before everything else. And what I think a lot of people have a hard time doing is being okay with saying no and saying, "Okay, I will allow myself to just not get fatter rather than get fitter during this period." And what's interesting about most skills is that the amount of effort that it takes to maintain a skill versus the amount of effort it takes to grow a skill is like 1/10 the amount of effort.

10:33And so, this is where the effort arbitrage is so important in terms of allocation. And so, if you do a four out of 10 on 10 things, you will make progress on none. You will make the same amount of progress that you could have made if you just did one out of 10, which is none. You just don't regress. But, the extra three points that you save on the nine, you could put on one other item and have a 10 out of 10 or a 13 out of 10 in effort. And then, after every periodized chunk of time, have a big W or win that you can look back on and say, "I did that and therefore I am."

11:07And so, I think that that's how you step up the mountain of progress when you're trying to work on many different skills, quote, at the same time. It's just that the at the same time is over a year, not over a day. George told me told me this while we were on mushrooms in Nashville. [ __ ] brilliant. So, I'm there watching >> [laughter] >> Got to Got to get people in the door. Yeah.

11:31I'm there 4th of July and George turned to me and he said, "General ambition gives you anxiety. Specific ambition gives you direction." There is nothing more anxiety-inducing than I want to be better and I don't know what at and I don't know how. Like, just think about that for a second. Sort of embodied that I I it it's sort of a chasing, it's a lean in, and it's it's tight and sort of your shoulders are up and there's a ringing in your ears. And you have no idea. It's like a threat. You've heard a noise in the forest and you have no idea where it's come from.

12:04Specific ambition gives you direction. And I think the concept of specific versus general ambition ladders up to bundle turns. I want this big thing, but I haven't broken that thing down into what I can actually do. Once you get specific into the actions, you don't have a lot of anxiety because you can see what is required in order to get it. And so, to circle the loop back on sadness, which is cuz some people who are listening to this may be sad, so this is for you.

12:29To get out of sadness, and I've been sad many times in my life, the thing that's helped me get out of it is realizing that a perceived lack of options is what causes sadness, not a lack of options. A perceived lack of options, which means that all I have to do is figure out what I need to do. And figuring it out becomes the option. And so then, I have clarity on the one thing that I need to do to pull myself out of this moment of sadness, which is, "Oh, I just have to figure out what to do." And that is how I get, at least for me, have gotten out of my sadder periods.

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