How to live an asymmetric life

if you're ambitious you've heard a thousand tips on how to live a happier better life forget all of them i grew up in a blue collar family and today i know lots of different billionaires i've met thousands of successful founders and i've hired hundreds of people and across all of those lives i've spotted patterns in the people who are most happy but instead of giving you another list on how to live well i'm going to invert it here are five guaranteed ways to live a miserable life do the opposite you might actually live a good one i feel like i could rude the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's definitely number one you don't have a best friend if you wanna be miserable tons and tons of acquaintances will do just fine one of my favorite philosophers to read about is aristotle and he broke friendships into three different types the first is utility and these are friends where you get something out of them for example money favors connections basically once the usefulness ends so does the friendship this is sort of like coworkers the second is pleasure and these are friends that exist just for fun you get together you par you have a good time and then once that ends you're done it's basically like when you are three years old and you play with another friend once the play date is over the friendship is over and finally virtue these are the rarest and most valuable these are people who you admire and they admire you back and they make each other feel better and you stick with them no matter what in modern terms they're your best friends if you wanna have a great life focus on that last category the good news according to aristotle is that you only need one to three best friends i've got three it's jack ramon and neville if you ever seen that movie the town where ben a he goes into his buddy's room and he says i need your help we're gonna hurt someone and i can't tell you what it is and you can never ever ask about it and then the guy responds with sounds good whose car we gonna take that's for ramon i've got one of those friends a grown man calling another grown man his best friends and me telling them i love them make fun of me all you want but knowing that these guys have my back and have my best interest in mind it makes me sleep like a baby now i wanna show you a study that proves by point so for the last eighty five years harvard has been running the study which is now the longest study of adult life ever done and they tracked hundreds of people from youth all the way to old age the atlantic they put together a fifteen thousand word article all about this study it's a wonderful article but i'm gonna save you the time and tell you exactly what the results were after decades of data the number one predictor of long term health and happiness it was not money it wasn't fame it wasn't power it wasn't even exercised it was the quality of close relationships they found that what protects you is having a few people even just one one person who you can count on through thick or thin in other words a b f baby step number two for living a miserable life don't decide spend tons of time planning and thinking and very little time doing miserable people are indecisive and if you wanna join them don't commit to anything stay in a research mode forever careers where you live who you wanna date just keep on shopping let me tell you a story about dan gilbert dan gilbert is a psychologist who's the goat on studying happiness he's got this amazing book called stumbling on happiness so my favorite part from his book is an experiment where he went to a college campus and he selected two groups of students now both groups he let them come and select a piece of artwork that they could hang in their dorm room except here's the difference group one they were allowed to come in a week later and swap out their art if they were unhappy with their original pick group two was locked in whatever they picked they had to keep now here's the results group one the group that was allowed to change out their art if they were unhappy with them they were less and less happy with the art that they picked over time because they kept wondering did they choose wrong group two the ones that had to be locked in to the ones that they originally picked they actually got happier when they measured them over time or over the trailing handful of months they convince themselves that they love the piece of art that they picked and the takeaway is once we're locked into a decision the brain makes peace with the decision it literally manufactures happiness happy people take more action while other miserable people wait for the right decision let's say it takes someone six months to make a business plan and the same amount of time that that person is planning you could have started six months prior and run hundreds of experiments and in that time figured out what does and doesn't work now if you're like a lot of people and you are in this indecisive bucket i've got good news for you nearly all decisions are reversible now let me tell you a quick story when i was about twenty one years old i left school i left college a little bit early and i moved from tennessee to san francisco because i wanted to get into startups and i was incredibly afraid i didn't wanna fail but also i didn't wanna be homeless and i didn't have a lot of money but i saved up around two thousand dollars which at the time was more than enough money to buy a plane ticket home back to my hometown at saint louis and i remember calling my mom and i said if this doesn't work am i allowed to move back home for six or twelve months is that okay and she said yes and in my head i just thought in the worst case scenario is taken care of and anything that i achieve above that i'm happy so i shouldn't doubt this decision because the worst case the downside it's protected against i'm okay and i accept that now how do you make different decisions reversible well i think if you were to sit down and figure out what can i do to test or try something you can figure out a lot of ways that you can do that so for example when i was deciding which neighborhood or which city i wanted to live in it was pretty easy to just go and rent an airbnb in different neighborhoods a week at a time and although this did at the time cost a lot of money it was significantly cheaper than just going and buying a home or renting an apartment and regretting that decision and having to be stuck with the long term consequences so most decisions are reversible and it's your job to figure out how you tip toe and try before you buy which is true in a lot of different situations now in order though to make this all work most decisions which we're gonna talk about later need to be time bound so if you're deciding where you're gonna live where you're gonna work who you wanna marry i think it's a lot easier in life to say i have six months to decide this and at the end of the six months at the end of this month i am making a decision no matter what because more often than not making a decision and acting will lead you to be a lot happier than spending months and months just thinking now if you guys want a a really embarrassing story when i was younger and it involves moving to san francisco still from from tennessee i read this book by dale carnegie it was called how to stop worrying and start living and he had this amazing quote it was in inaction breeds out and fear so get out and get busy now that was sort of my live laugh love moment and so we'll put a screenshot on on youtube but i've got a tattoo on my feet that says act now cheesy kinda lame of course it is but very effective step number three and how to be miserable don't set goals and certainly do not track progress a book that changed my life was titan which is the biography of john rockefeller john rockefeller he was a ty in the early nineteen hundreds and he was the richest man to ever live he was two times richer than elon musk is today now one of my favorite stories from the book is when john was sixteen years old he said i want to be rich and according to john his first step in becoming rich was tracking all of his expenses and his salary and he had a book called ledger a where he wrote down every expense and wrote down every bit of income i stole that idea from him and when i was around twenty three twenty four years old i wanted to try to save up to fifty thousand dollars and so in order to do that i had to reduce my monthly expenses to two thousand dollars and when i did that i spent about six months tracking every single cent every time i spent anything any dollar any cent i wrote it down manually and just doing that just doing that tracking thing it became so much easier to reduce my expenses to two thousand and to track them so i'll give you another example if you wanna lose weight starting today if you track all of your calories and weight yourself every single day if you only do those two things you will one hundred percent start to lose weight but if you really want to improve you have to pair tracking with goals so many people come to sean and i to ask for business advice and the first thing that i say to them when they're asking a question is like wait hang on just really quick where do you wanna be in five and ten years do you wanna sell your company do you wanna make it huge with tons of employees do you just want a little lifestyle business do wanna make five hundred thousand dollars year you wanna make two million dollars a year do you wanna sell the company to make a hundred million dollars imagine going to a trainer and being like hey make me fit it'd be impossible the trainer needs to know do you wanna have all this muscle like arnold source nigga do wanna be lean do you wanna be able to run a fast five k you wanna get great at swimming or cycling because you have to have a goal in mind in order to determine where you want to go and what actions you're gonna take on a daily basis now when it comes to goal setting i don't think people really do it well a real goal is smart which stands for specific measurable achievable relevant and time bound let me give an example when i was younger about twenty three years old i had a goal to make twenty million dollars liquid by the age of thirty that meant i had seven years to build a business that could get to around fifteen million in revenue which i could then sell for around thirty million dollars and walk away with twenty million bucks after tax and that's where the idea for the hustle came from the newsletter business that i started and i broke this down into small chunks that made it very approachable and i felt very achievable and so my goal for the first year of my newsletter business was to grow the subscriber base by three percent every single week because i knew that if i did that and i have the audience advertisers would then come and so every week it was just a question of did i grow subscribers by three percent or not what am i gonna do on monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday i'm gonna do anything that it takes to grow that subscriber base by three percent that forced me to focus and it meant no side hustle no different business ideas and just meant work on that one thing for sixty hours and by the way it worked i ended up selling i it was thirty one not thirty but the goal in my opinion it doesn't really matter if you hit it it just matters that you have the goal and you break it down into chunks that you can act on every single day and then that goal is specific and time bound because having a place a destination to go to it makes life so much easier because distractions are incredibly loud and miserable people they listen to those distractions and goals help you keep on track now the last thing about goals here's how i think of i track my fitness quarterly i track my spending monthly i track the things that i'm learning every month i track my income annually my net worth every five years and my company i try to look at it over the decade the reason i chose those intervals is because achieving anything great it takes a lot longer than you think and also i need a little bit of dopamine hits and so having a dopamine hit every month where i can look at my spending and know am doing good or am doing bad that helps me keep going that gives me progress fitness goals you can see progress typically on a fitness related thing every three months and tracking it that way it gives me motivation to keep on going but it also allows me enough time to achieve something pretty interesting now i wanna tell you guys a story my wife and i we do something very nerdy so every single month on our calendar we have one actually this tuesday at eight thirty pm we have a meeting where we call it our monthly recap meeting and it started earlier like nine years ago when we were just getting our careers going and we were only about a year and a half into dating and we have combined finances where we would do a recap on our income and our expenses and we basically would ask ourselves back then the same questions that we ask ourselves today which is are we happy with how we are spending money is there any experiences or services that we want to acquire to make our lives better i'll give you an example when we were younger it was like hey you know i'm spending a lot of time cleaning the house a hundred and fifty dollars is all we would have to spend in order to have a cleaner and that could save me many many many hours let's try that this month and see if that makes us any happier and those are basically the same conversations that we have known maybe some of the numbers might be a little bit bigger but honestly they're really not the majority of decisions that we make during those monthly meetings are pretty small and it's kind of fun to see what changes our happiness the month after alright a few episodes ago i talked about something and i got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper to explain and that's what i'm about to do so i told you guys how i used chat gb as a life coach or a thought partner and what i did was i uploaded all types of amazing information so i uploaded my personal finances my net worth my goals different books that i like issues going on in my personal life and businesses i uploaded so much information and so the output is that i have this gp that i can ask questions that i'm having issues within in my life like how should i respond to this email what's the right decision knowing that you know my goals for the future things like that and so i worked with hubspot to put together a step by step process showing the audience showing you the software that i use to make this the information that i had chat ask me all this stuff so it's super easy for you to use and like i said i use this like ten or twenty times a day it's literally changed my life and so if you want that it's free there's a link below just click it enter your email and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about twenty minutes and i'll show you how i use it again ten to twenty ten a today alright so check it out the link is below in the description back to the episode step number four for being miserable switching from thing to thing every quarter or every year mastery and compounding it's for suckers starting from scratch will be a lot easier this is actually the number one most common miserable traits i see amongst ambitious people who have a ton of promise they don't stick to things for long enough to see the eventual payoff and i've thought about this a lot and i think the reason why you or anyone else tends to switch from thing to thing is because anything worth doing it basically requires you to pay a known cost today for an unknown payoff in the future and it's that uncertainty plus a lack of discipline that makes people switch from thing to thing because the pain of focus it shows up daily in time in energy and in money but the reward doesn't come for months or sometimes years and that uncertainty is very painful and it makes people quit but if you're ambitious you need to know that the path to winning this is how it feels you lose sleep you second guess yourself and you wonder if you're wasting years of your life you put in hours and you burn so much energy and the score board still basically says zero and it says that sometimes for years but this is the price that people pay if they wanna win and the worst part is that no one is going to be able to tell you if the thing that you're doing is going to work the only way forward is to keep paying that cost while the end payout is still unknown i wanna tell you a quick story last week i was with the founder of eight sleep it's this guy named mateo eight sleep is a company that makes these really smart mattresses that does hundreds of millions in revenue and it's worth billions of dollars the entire talk that he did it was about how his company failed and nearly died five different times the most recent one being like a couple years ago now imagine if you switch projects after failure number two switching just because something is hard and uncertain that's a trap the times i've grown most in life are the times when i felt like i wanted to quit most or i wanted to go and start something new we've had a guy in this podcast named palmer lucky who's a billionaire he invented dia and he has another company worth tens of billions of dollars he has this amazing quote at some point in business and in life and in romance you have to commit to a path a lot of my peers they keep all of their options open so they end up jumping from thing to thing if you don't commit you're gonna fail you have to say this is the path that i'm on for better or worse and i'm gonna double down on it my last company the hustle the year we sold i was thirty one years old and we were gonna do about eighteen million dollars in revenue i frankly didn't have a lot of peers i didn't know a lot of people who were ambitious like me and this met that i was making decisions that could cost me maybe five ten even more millions of dollars worth the money i was making them all by myself this all changed however when i got a group of peers and that's by the way how this podcast sort of started sean was in my group and we met every month it sort of became a personal board of directors and it frankly changed my life and that's why i started my company hampton join hampton dot com the entire idea is that we make horror groups just like this just like the one that i had of other entrepreneurs who have been there done that and we give you guys a time and a place to sit down and have these very honest confidential conversations where we can share business ideas you could talk about hiring you could talk about all these decisions that you typically have to make all by yourself the biggest risk in my opinion is not failing you're you're gonna be fine your business is probably gonna work it's that in ten years you look back and you think damn i blew it i blew this opportunity because i was making decisions by myself i was making decisions out of fear and i did not grow i did not maximize the opportunity i'm telling you it can save you ten years of headache and of heartache and you could make better decisions so much faster and the best part is that with hampton these core groups that we make we make them in real life in your city we're in atlanta austin boston chicago dallas denver london la miami new york s f toronto and vancouver so if you're running an internet company that does at least three million dollars year in revenue or you've raised at least three million dollars in funding or you've sold the for at least ten million dollars go to join hampton dot com this is my company sam from m i review every single person who applies so again join hampton dot com step number five is gonna make a lot of you guys angry i know the comments on youtube are gonna be full i know a lot of people go to tweet at me you're gonna be pissed off but step number five it's don't buy index funds and instead invest all of your money picking individual stocks the reason i have a thing about finances on here is because a lot of you listening to m you're here because you wanna make money you're here because you wanna get rich i think there's basically only four ways to get really rich one is to get lucky by marrying someone winning the lottery or joining a rockets ship start up two is to get into sales those guys make unlimited amounts of money three is starting a small business which this podcast lot about and four which is probably the most practical and straightforward way is to have a good salary live below your means and invest all of your extra money into index funds but if you're listening to m you like action you like doing stuff that was the whole point of the first couple steps of how not to be miserable was about acting but when it comes to getting rich one of the best ways to get rich is to have patience and not to actually do a ton of acting if you invested only six thousand dollars a year into the s and p five hundred by retirement you'd have over a million dollars now most of you listening you make over six figures and so you can probably actually get there a lot faster but here's the trap that a lot of you guys listening this happens a lot to young man this happened to me when i was younger it's thinking that you are smarter than the market and you're in a rush now let me tell you some facts so over the last ten years ninety seven percent of active stock fund managers so basically people who pick stocks on a daily basis they under performed the index these are people whose job or relies on making money off of stocks they're harvard mba they are just these nerds that's there at bloomberg terminals all day they've got thousands of employees they have teams of analysts and they still can't beat the index funds and i've done this before and i get why people do this so my dumb story is at the bottom of the market during covid i sold all of my positions because i thought the market was done and then it ripped right back up and i have lost a fortune because of that mistake and that's when a smart friend told me afterwards he said something actually changed my life it's it's a very cliche thing but he said it's not about timing the market it's about time in the market over the past twenty years if you were to stay in the market stay invested the whole time you've would have made roughly ten percent a year which is pretty good that means that your money doubles every seven years however if you miss the best ten days your returns halved to about five percent and if you miss the best twenty days so the best twenty days out of three thousand and six hundred and fifty days your gains would be almost exactly zero picking those twenty days picking those right stocks it's very hard it's nearly impossible very few people do it and if you're listening to this you probably aren't in that category and you probably should not do it if you wanna be happy i sold my company in two thousand twenty one and i put almost all of my money into a very basic vanguard index fund and over the past five years it's now worth seventy one percent more and i've done nothing now we've lived in a great economy and markets have been ripping but the fact is is that since the beginning of the stock market it has grown consistently over a long period of time between nine and ten percent a year now a lot of people are gonna get mad because they like buying stocks it does feel good i get it it feels great and if you are in that category you should buy very few a very small amount of stocks and that should be part of your entertainment budget so if you wanna make a lot of money in your sleep and not do a lot of work and have very little stress invest in index funds and if you really wanna get rich try and start a business that can be a risky thing but picking individual stocks amongst most everyone i know who does it it almost always ends poorly so just buy the index so if someone's looking over your shoulder right now and they see what you're watching or they see that you're listening to something and they ask i want you to tell them i just listened to something that told me the five simple steps to live a miserable life now if you wanna tell them to have a good life here's a recap step number one have a best friend have someone who you love to death and you know that they have your best interest in mind step number two decide spend more time acting and doing and less time planning step number three set goals and track progress regularly step number four do not switch from thing to thing every quarter or every year mastery and compounding it works and step five get rich and one straightforward way on doing that is to invest in index funds do not go and think that you are a stock picking genius it's nearly impossible alright that's it my friends go to youtube if you're not already there and let me know what you think about this in the comments i'll talk to you guys soon i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back this episode is brought to you by hubspot media they have a cool new podcast that's for ai called the next wave it's by matt wolf and nathan lands and they're basically talking about all the do tools that are coming out how the landscape is changing what's going on with ai tech so if you wanna be up to date on ai tech it's a cool podcast you could check out listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcast