[0:00]It took me 30 years to realize what I'm about to tell you in the next few minutes. You can just never stop. And that seems like a really odd thing to say, but I think people frame their life as these objectives. And the problem with having objectives is that at some point you'll meet enough of them, and you'll think I've made it. I think what I've learned is that there are no objectives that are worthy enough for you to say, it's time to stop.
[0:32]As I keep going, I'm getting into my 50s. There are all these people that I really used to look up to who've just stopped. They're not in the arena anymore. And I just think it's insane. Why would they do that? Then you look at somebody like Buffett, and he goes and goes and goes and he's 95 and he's finally taking a half step back. Munger basically died doing the job. There are so many examples of those kinds of people and really what are they? They're not committed to a set of objectives. They're committed to learning, putting themselves at risk, surrounding themselves with people that know interesting things, and it's kept them sharp and it kept it's kept them vibrant. And I think as I get older that's really the most important goal. And if someone had told me that that was the goal, I would have made slightly different decisions. I would have optimized less for money. I would have made some very specific decisions very differently. I would have taken more risk, even more than I did when I was younger.
[1:25]If you're going to live a life without objectives and you're actually going to live a life of process. You have to create some really good boundary conditions. What is an example of one? You cannot have debt. Debt is one of these very simple and practical things that when and if you have it will cause you to stop. It can cause you to stop learning. It can cause you to stop taking risk. It'll cause you to seek objectives. The most obvious one being money. And all of those short-term optimizations have huge repercussions and consequences for the next 20 and 30 and 40 years of your life. Having no debt is critical and being able to have the discipline to not choose the things that cause you to be in debt. And what's hard especially for younger generations is you spent all of this time rotting your brain with worthless social media of all of these people who are essentially lying to you about their fake life. And too many people get tricked into that life being the actual life that those people have and then as a result, the life that you should be living. All of those things are oriented around money. All of them. There's never a person that really is celebrated for a lifelong commitment to process. Maybe Kobe Bryant, and unfortunately he's not with us anymore. Number two, you need to manage your life with humility. That's something that took me a really long time to learn as well. What does that mean? It means that you have to be extremely truthful about the way that things are today. Because it allows you to see how things are. It allows you to share the truth with other people. That allows them to actually find incredible solidarity with you. Three, you have to surround yourself with people that are younger than you. The way that they see the world is just completely different. Their biases are different. Their frameworks are different. And it's hard because a lot of the time, I believe that I've learned enough where I don't have to be told I'm wrong. But that's not true. In fact, the opposite is totally true. The more time I'm with younger people, the more I realize that everything I know is stuck in a moment in time and while it's relevant, it'll decay in relevance. And at some point, the way in which I think things should work will be completely and diametrically the opposite of how things will actually work. And so all these young people end up as an early warning system for the future, which is just another way of learning. So those are three practical things that that somebody can do to not riddle yourself with superficial dumb objectives that'll bog you down. I was littered with dumb objectives. I was a director, become a vice president. I was a vice president, become a senior vice president. I was a senior vice president, become a principal at a venture firm, then become a general partner. I was at Facebook. I was part of the management team. I wanted more equity. It's all these dumb objectives. And these dumb objectives took me away from the core 100% version of me. And it made it made me caricatures of myself. And it make it made me amplify small facets of myself to represent a much larger part of who I was. Not just to myself, but to the people around me. And I don't think that that's a successful way to live one's life. Again, I think the problem with what I'm telling you is it can only be learned over time. Now you can choose to listen to it because everybody else when they get to their late 40s, early 50s, will nod their head when they listen to what I have to say. Everybody in their 20s and 30s will be like, this is bullshit. This is not for me. So you have two choices, which is you're going to get there the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is just do these couple of simple things. The most important one is give yourself complete optionality, preserve optionality at all costs. I try to preserve optionality in business. I try to preserve optionality when I'm negotiating, find the space where there can be win-wins. It's a hugely powerful thing that's helped me. And what that does and how it manifests is it preserves relationships, it preserves other people's egos, it preserves other people's emotions. It forces me to be more subdued, to listen more, to talk less. And it turns out that there are so many opportunities for people to just blow themselves up and self-immolate by doing something stupid. And for me, that framework has helped me minimize that a lot. And then the second thing is just the more philosophical one, which is just to realize that if we are actually in a simulation, there's a there's a level of the game, which is actually about showing you that the secrets exist. And it gives you a chance and I feel like I find this now in my late 40s about to turn 50, that they're exposed to me. And I'm like, wow, this is an incredible thing. I didn't realize this when I was younger. And as much as somebody would have tried to tell me when I was younger, I ignored them. So I only offer it up as as, you know, most of you will ignore it too, but you're going to go through it.
[6:23]The most important relationship lesson I've learned is that it is really, really crucial to be married to somebody that 100% has your back. And the only way you get that is by being completely, completely honest. And that is really hard for a lot of people. I didn't know how to be honest. I shared most things, I didn't share all things. And that was sort of part of how I was taught just living in my family. But if you don't learn that lesson, it comes back to bite you in the ass. In relationships, it is so important to have your co-founder there beside you, your wife, my wife. And, you know, having gone through a divorce, which is almost like a death in the family, what I will tell you is what was missing. What was missing was just complete raw, unfiltered, unadulterated honesty. So that when things were good, we could celebrate that, but when things were bad, you could call it out and point to it and name it, and we didn't do that. Second time around, it's completely different and I think uh, it's been it's been a blessing to find that.
[7:33]If you're young and you're ambitious, the first and most important thing is, you have to be on Broadway. So depending on what it is that you want to do. If you're into politics, you need to be in Washington, D.C. Now, it may take you one or two turns to get there. Maybe you need to be in a state capital. That's fine, but start there, get to Washington. If you want to be in finance, you need to get to New York or London. If you want to be in crypto, you probably need to be in Abu Dhabi. And if you want to be in tech, simply put, you just need to be in Silicon Valley. There is no shortcut for any of these decisions. So that's number one, you have to be where the fish are. And then the second is, you should not be optimizing for compensation. This is why again, you need to live humbly. You need to optimize for opportunity. When an opportunity opens itself to work with people that are smarter than you, in a thing that feels like it could be a rocket ship, you just jump on and hold on. And when you don't do that and you put all this other nonsense in front of it, you will fail. And ultimately, you will look back and you will be miserable, but it's because you let all of this other stupid indirection get in the way. The number of young people I encounter who talk about all of these idiotic things like work life balance, I don't even understand what that means. When you're in a vibe state and in a flow state, what that means is that you are working in a way that gives you purpose and you're living your life in a way that gives you purpose, and you blend them together. That is what you want, where you're in a constant process where you are adding things to make your life better.
[9:08]There was this incredible experiment where they took these big jugs of water, and they would drop a mice into the water, and they would measure how long it took these mice to drown. And on average, let's say it was four, four and a half minutes. Then they ran the experiment, they would drop the mice in, and about 30 seconds before they thought the mice would drown, they would pluck it out. They would dry it off, they would comfort it, but then they would drop the mice back in. And then that same mouse was able to survive in that water for an average 60 hours. Now, what is the difference between the a mouse that drowns in four minutes and a mouse that survives 60 hours? Nobody knows except what we can speculate, which is it's the brain and it's the brain that is unlocking. And that's just in the mouse of levels of resilience and survival. That is what everybody deserves to find a place where they can go into the deep inner recesses of their mind and unlock levels that you didn't think you were capable of. Navy SEALs talk about it, athletes talk about it, but I can tell you in business, the great thing is, there is no shelf life to us feeling that. Because unlike a Navy SEAL or an athlete, where you have a physical shelf life of 10 or 15 years, you can be in this game forever. So you got to get to a place that will put you in a position where you can be one of those mice that treads water for 60 hours, because it will profoundly change you. In a way that you will not appreciate except until you've gone through it. And then you'll look at everybody else and you just won't understand why nobody else gets it.
[11:01]The most important thing around status is that it's completely manufactured and irrelevant. It is what people do to trick other people into wasting their precious time. And if you know that, one of the most powerful things that you can do is just to ignore all of the ways in which society tries to give you status. Because what it is actually doing is putting a small little hook into you that it can use to pull you back. Because if you start to buy into these things, these are things that are externally validated by somebody else. It is then somebody being able to hold some amount of judgment. It could be small, it could be large over you. And when you chase enough of these things, and you chase enough status, you will be completely beholden to people who do not have your best interest at heart. And I have learned this the hard way because there are all of these things that I've always wanted because I thought they were important. To be on this list, to be in that club, to be invited to this thing. But all of these things don't matter because they are completely contrived, and you contort yourself. And sometimes you'll even bend your expectations and your behaviors to be a part of it or to be acknowledged, and then you're just less of a person. Status is a completely manufactured, corrupting thing that society does to hold you back. And the more that you can divorce yourself from it, it's a superpower.
[12:26]After 30 years of building companies and working at them and investing in them, I've developed an enormous passion for constantly learning. That's why I put together my own research team and asked them to help me learn about all of the things that are current and going on in the world today. They put together these deep dives on all the important topics that I'm interested in.
[12:49]And I'm proud to say that I've compiled that research into a product that we call Learn with Me. If you want to read what I'm reading from my team of researchers, click the link in the description. I truly believe it'll give you valuable and actionable insights about our shifting world. Thanks for watching.
