Most men live lives of quiet desperation. It’s one of my favourite quotes ever because
it’s true. You’re just in this world where you just can’t wait to just run away. But
I think one of the reasons why these people have this deep seated anger and resentment
is there’s a bunch of people out there that have these lives that are deeply unsatisfying
because I think there are so many people that are working all day long doing something that
is deeply unsatisfying and almost painful to them. Soul killing. You’re stuck in traffic
all day and then they’re stuck in a cubicle after that. They relish the time to take a
in the bathroom and look at their phone. I mean they literally do that. That’s a highlight
of someone’s day. They get in traffic on the way home. They get home after that they’re
watching television. I think if people have a regular day job if you can just find one
thing you do as a passion project and just keep building on it. Keep watering it. Keep
adding fertiliser. Keep giving it attention. Keep giving it focus and you can escape. You
can escape and you can be self serving. You can be okay. You’re gonna be okay. Look
man, making furniture feels good. If you could do that, you could cut those corners perfectly
and sand everything down nice and stain it. And then it’s done you get the satisfaction.
And you sell it to someone and that pays your bills. That is infinitely more satisfying
than being stuck in some cubicle working for someone you don’t wanna work for, having
to have these stupid office meetings, talking to people in Human Resources, sitting down
with your supervisor where they evaluate your job performance. You really need to be enthusiastic
about this company. This company is your future. You’re like me now. You know there’s a
lot of people out there that would way rather do something else and I hope they understand
they can. And people that are trapped in bad situations, one of the problems is, you feel
like this is your future and you can’t get out of that. There’s no hope. There’s
no light at the end of the tunnel. There’s no rainbow. And if you feel like that, that
alone can incredibly defining and limiting. But if you can look at, if you can look at
yourself objectively and say okay, I’m in credit card debt, I’m working in a job,
I don’t like what I’m doing. But I have some ideas. I need to feed those ideas. I
need to feed them, and water them, and I need to set aside a certain amount of time everyday,
to just try to make those things happen. You can do that. Everyone has a different personality,
they have different, different interests, different, different things that they would
be really satisfied pursuing. That’s not encouraged. What’s encouraged is go find
a job. What’s encouraged is go find some place, that you can shove yourself into, go
find a square hole, that you can stick your round peg, and just jam it in there and shave
down the top and the bottom, so you slide in with all these extra space on the sides
and feel like for the rest of your life. Because you need a job. Because you’re in debt.
Because you have credit cards. Because you have student loans. Because that’s what
everybody does and so you do it too. That’s what’s wrong. You have an apartment you
have to pay for. You have a car you leased. You have a wife you have to feed. You have
a child you have to raise. You have to. You have your mortgage. You have your this you
have your that. And that’s where it all comes from. Well the opportunity takes place
usually when you’re young and you don’t have any responsibility. That’s when you
have your options. Well your options are severely limited the more you gather responsibilities.
Like if I had to as a 51 year old father of three, married man, pays taxes, has a house
and a mortgage and a business, and all that jazz, if I had to quit everything now, and
struggle the way I struggled as a stand up comedian, it would never work. But, the only
way I could be this person now is if I took that chance when I was 21. When I was dead
broke and, had my cars repossessed and all that stuff. That’s the only way you ever
get where you wanna go. You have to take a path that’s dangerous, and most people wanna
take the safe path. And the safe path leaves you stuck in quiet desperation Almost every
time. It’s hell. But can people just make that change? Yes. You can. I believe they
can. But you have to plan it out. The way you can change is you have to put aside enough
money to give yourself a window, and then you have to have a plan, and then you have
to spend all your waking hours outside of whatever job you do, planning your escape,
and you have to come to the realisation, very clearly that you up. You got yourself stuck.
So whatever you’re doing, you have to do it like your life depends on it. If you’re
gonna try to be an author, and you’re working eight hours a day, plus commuting, plus family
responsibilities or whatever else you have, whatever time that you have, you have to attack
like you’re trying to save the world, you’re trying to save your life, you don’t wanna
drown. That one and a half hours a day that you have to write, you better be caffeinated
or motivated. You gotta go. You gotta get after it and you gotta have discipline. Most
people don’t have those things. Most people don’t understand what it’s like to really
go for something, and to know that the consequences of not doing that are horrific. There are
so many people, that would be so much happier making twenty seven thousand dollars less
a year, and the only thing they have to do, is sell their current home where they only
use eighteen percent of the home anyway, and buy a home that has two less bedrooms, so
they don’t have to have the job that is paying to maintain the lifestyle that they
have propped up for themselves, and their life would be disproportionately better. Because
there’s a lot more people living that. Like there’s many entrepreneurs today that should
be employees, there’s way more people, that basically build a life around how much they
are earning, get to a place where they hate what they’re doing to earn, have the opportunity
to still do something that earns twenty thousand less than they love, but they are golden handcuffed
by worrying about what car they drive, or where their house is, because they actually
care about other people’s opinions, and nobody has the gear to take a step backwards.
The inability to take a step back, to take four step forward in happiness, based on other
people’s opinions of watching you take a step back, blows my face off. When do you
quit your job and go in? When you can afford it. Happiness is so unbelievably addictive.
And it makes me so sad that so many of you created golden handcuffs for yourselves that
are not letting you leave your job, because you need to make a hundred thirty thousand
a year now, because you wanted seven hundred more square feet in your apartment, or you
wanted a BMW instead of a Toyota. And so you’re not happy, because you wanted two or three
things that means absolutely nothing. I promise you when you’ve tasted both, when you meet
people that have tasted both, I make a hundred eighty thousand a year, and I have stuff but
I’m not happy, and then I went making ninety four thousand a year but I’m doing what
I love and I’m super happy, and I have a little less stuff, it’s not even close to
a debate. So I implore all of you, to really dig deep down inside of yourselves and try
to figure out why you need that stuff. I’m gonna save you time. You’re trying to close
an insecurity gap. Let me give you another huge hint, everybody else sucks too, so do
you. Opportunity is abundant. We live in a world that has unlimited opportunity, especially
if you’re willing to look for it. Looking for it is predicated on the fact that you
put in the work. You put in the work because you that knew you were gonna go look for it.
So I believe in preparation, preparation, preparation, because I just believe that opportunity
is almost like oxygen. It’s everywhere, always, and some opportunities are bigger
than others, but preparation man, people don’t do, people convince themselves before they
start, that the world is unjust, or they can’t, or things are up, they complain, they dwell,
they say no before they say yes. Look if you say no it’s already over. Like literally
if you wake up and say it’s not gonna happen for me, it’s already over. You might as
well not try. If you’re twenty one and you have no expenses and you’re living at home,
you have to go high risk. As soon as you see any blood in the water, you go. If I’m twenty
one and I’m at home, and I have no expenses, and I’m making forty seven thousand euros,
pounds, dollars, doing something I don’t love, but I wanna be a film person, and the
first person pays me fifteen hundred dollars, or a dollar forever, and it works, and it
went well, and she the boss of this candy store says I’m gonna tell my friends about
you, I may jump right away. I don’t have any concerns. If I’m 42 years old and I
have 3 kids and a mortgage and I’m a hundred thousand dollars in debt, because I went to
college in America and it didn’t get me a good job, and I’m an accountant and I
make a hundred and thirty seven thousand a year which basically pays for my overhead,
roughly, because I bought a house bigger than I needed, I bought a car bigger than I needed,
this is cliché American. And somebody pays me fifteen hundred dollars and they are like
I’m gonna tell all my friends, I’m gonna give up Netflix and my video games and my
weekends, to eventually get that to sixty or seventy or eighty or ninety thousand a
year, before I say okay now I’m at ninety, one thirty seven, if I actually went all in,
I can close that gap on that fifty seven thousand, now I’m gonna make the jump, because I’ve
got three kids, a mortgage and debt. Every piece of my advice is circumstantial. Yesterday,
Aaron is twenty five and single, and living at home, tomorrow he meets Sheila, falls in
love, and you know a million things can happen. Sheila could be making a million dollars a
year. Different life. Sheila could be making no money, but he loves her so much and she
wants to buy handbags everyday and now he has a bigger you know financial problem. Sheila
wants to be his partner. He wants to buy handbags. It’s not cliche. It’s life. It’s contextual.
And that’s why the answer to your question is a million things. But you jump when you
can afford to drown. You jump when you can afford to drown. What I mean by that is when
you jump into the pool, you have to know that you’ve never swam before and you might drown.
And you have to be able to do that when you can. And at twenty one living at home, you
can. Because you can go back and get a job, you have no overhead. Right? But at 43 with
3 kids, you might not want to. And by the way, or you might. You might have such a supportive
spouse, sheila, Aaron is the stay home dad, sheila is making the one forty seven, sheila
talks to Aaron and says Aaron I’m going to die if I don’t jump. I’m 43 and if
I don’t jump now, I’m gonna be sixty two and regret it my whole life. So I’m gonna
jump, and if I fail, and the economy collapses and I can’t get a job, we may have to sell
this home, we may have to move in with our parents in Florida. But I have to do that,
and take the loss in front of everybody’s eyes, that we’re losers, and we’ve up,
because I know myself and I know if I don’t jump now, I’m gonna be miserable for forty
years that I was an accountant for my whole life. The reason I want everybody to live
the way I do which is do not care what other people think, once you go there, you’re
willing to jump. You’re willing to drown. You’re willing to move in with your eighty
year old parents and look like losers with your kids, because you just don’t care.
The reason people aren’t letting themselves get happy is because they value other people’s
opinions more than they value their happiness. They literally value their parents’, their
siblings’, their best friend’s and society’s opinion more than their own happiness. Like
you live your life, that you value other people’s opinions more than being happy.