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And then what?

The case for slowing down

The fastest way to guarantee misery is to desire the goal but not be willing to live the lifestyle required to achieve it.

Adding "author" to your LinkedIn and speaking on podcasts and on stages is great.

But you also have to love sitting alone in a room at 5am staring at a blank page, rewriting the same paragraph for the fourth time, and deleting 10,000 words that never make the final cut.

Everyone loves the finish line. But the marathon is won in the middle.

A recipe for happiness and achievement:

Take your work seriously and yourself unseriously.

Growing up, we’re told to want these grandiose things.

The money, the power, the status, the fame.
But what they don’t tell you is the cost and the pain.

Of shedding old layers of who you once were.
Of shedding the friendships you thought were secure.

But the higher you climb, the faster you’ll find…

That success means nothing without those you left behind.

J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world. This was his main advice to younger entrepreneurs:

“You’re too focused on speculating and trading. The best entrepreneurs don’t want to trade, they want to own. They know all the real money is in the long term. Most people are too impatient and incompetent to understand that. An example he uses in the book: a young man buys an oil lease on Monday for $4,000. He sells it to Getty on Tuesday for $8,000. The young man is bragging about doubling his money in 24 hours. Getty makes $800,000 on that lease over the next decade.”

Source: Founders Podcast

A lesson on staying in the game:

Every week, a father would hold out a dime in one hand and a quarter in the other and tell his youngest son to pick one. Every week, the boy picked the dime.

His older brother pulled him aside one day and said, "You know a quarter is worth more than a dime, right? You're losing money every time."

The younger brother smiled and said, "Yeah, I know. But the moment I choose the quarter is the moment Dad stops playing the game."

And Then What?

I'm in the middle of writing my second book. And I have this urge to just be done with it. To get it out into the world. To hit publish and share it and move on to whatever comes next.

But then I catch myself and ask the question that I think more of us need to ask:

And then what?

Because I know the answer… I'd start working on the next book. And after that, the next one. And somewhere in between I'd find new goals and new milestones and new mountains to climb, and I would climb them, and I would reach the top, and I would look around for about thirty seconds before scanning the horizon for the next peak.

And look, I'm not saying that to complain; I think my ambition has fueled me to achieve a lot of really cool things at an early age. But I think the thing that not enough people talk about is the dark side of ambition, the other side of the coin. How ambition can beget ambition, and it can be hard to find what “enough” looks like for you.

When I was at home, working late into the night, my mom would stop by my room to check on me and say, "Make sure you enjoy what you're doing because you can never get the time back." I used to brush her off and say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." But she's right, and I think I'm only starting to understand how right she is.

One of my favorite quotes is from the comedian Jimmy Carr. He says, "If more money wouldn't change how you spend your time, then you're already rich."

I love it because it exposes one of the bigger fallacies people walk around with, this idea that more money would make them happier.

If I had twenty million dollars in my bank account, the honest answer is that my life wouldn't look that different from what it does right now. Maybe I'd work a little less. Play more pickup basketball. Learn the piano. But the core of my days? I'd still wake up early. I'd still write. I'd still read and work out and walk and eat meals with friends and spend my evenings with family.

So what am I actually chasing?

I think a lot of us are running toward something we already have. We just can't see it because we're moving too fast.

There's a parable I keep coming back to…

An American investment banker is standing at the pier of a small coastal village in Mexico when a fisherman pulls in with a few beautiful yellowfin tuna. The banker compliments him and asks how long it took to catch them.

"Only a little while," the fisherman says.

So the banker asks why he doesn't stay out longer and catch more fish. The fisherman shrugs. He has enough to support his family. He sleeps late, fishes a little, plays with his children, takes naps with his wife, and strolls into the village each evening to sip wine and play guitar with his friends.

The banker, a Harvard MBA, tells him he's thinking too small. Fish more. Buy a bigger boat. Then a fleet. Open a cannery. Move to Mexico City, then LA, then New York. Build an empire. In fifteen to twenty years, you could go public, sell your shares, and make millions.

The fisherman asks, "And then what?"

The banker grins. "Then you'd retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village. Sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take naps with your wife, and sip wine with your friends in the evening."

I think about this parable a lot because I see so much of myself in the banker. I have spent years operating under the assumption that the future version of my life will be better than the current one. That if I just work a little harder, get a little further ahead, stack a few more wins, then I'll arrive at some place where I can finally relax and enjoy things.

But that place doesn't exist. Or rather, it does exist, and I might already be standing in it.

Here's a reflection I had recently…

The source of so much of our misery is this perpetual dissatisfaction with the present. This quiet belief that the future will be better than right now. That we're always one more achievement away from feeling the way we want to feel.

And because the future never actually arrives (it just becomes the present, which we're already dissatisfied with), we end up spending our whole lives in transit. Always on the way somewhere. Never actually there.

We spend our youth, our time, and our energy to make money so that when we're old we can spend our money to buy back our time and youth and energy.

Think about how insane that is.

We trade the thing we want for the thing we think will get us the thing we want.

And then there's nostalgia, which is the same trap pointed in the other direction.

Nostalgia is the misconception that the past was better than it actually was. We gloss over the hard parts. We put on rose-colored glasses and only remember the highlights. We look back at college or high school or some earlier chapter of our lives and think, "Those were the days," forgetting that when we were living those days we were probably wishing we were somewhere else too.

The past wasn't better. The future won't be better. The only thing that's real is right now. The work you're doing today. The people you're sitting with right now. The book you're reading, the walk you're taking, the conversation you're having.

Kurt Vonnegut said it better than I ever could: "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

I think true wealth is not the big milestones. It's not the launch days or the viral moments or the fancy vacations. True wealth is what your average Tuesday looks like. It's daily wealth. It's the stuff that doesn't make it onto social media because it's too ordinary to post about.

We rush through the 99% to get to the 1%, not realizing that the 99% IS our life.

Life is just time, and what you do with it.

And if you're truly working on something you believe is your life's work, why would you want to rush through it? Why would you want to fast-forward past the part where you're actually building the thing, just so you can get to the part where it's done? That’s like playing your favorite song on 2x speed.

So I'm trying something new. I'm trying to slow down. Not in a way where I stop being ambitious or stop caring about my work. But in a way where I stop treating every day like a stepping stone to somewhere better.

Because I think I might be living in the good old days right now. And I don't want to realize that only in hindsight.

Until next week,