(tapping music)
- Self awareness
and the ability to actually give without expectation
are the two bricks of happiness.
Which has allowed me to go fast.
When you're stable, you can go fast
because you're not worried about judgement.
That lack of fear is what gives an entrepreneur
an advantage.
That lack of fear is
what lets somebody live life in happiness.
- We're in Jakarta, in Indonesia.
A nice 24 hour flight for D Rock and I.
Uh, gonna go hit the stage.
Couple hours of meetings afterwards.
And then right back on the plane for 24 hours, so,
we'll see what we can do.
(upbeat music)
- You know, I don't, I think a lot of people should
build around their interests and their hobbies
and businesses because I think it's a more, a better life
to be happy and make $200,000 a year or $55,000 or $5,000
and be happy than to make a million and be miserable.
I really believe that.
It's not sustainable.
Unhappiness is not sustainable.
But there's a lot of ways to do it.
I'll give you an example.
If you love football, soccer, football, right?
Okay, so that's your passion. Right?
Now when you think about a business, when you go back to
the market, do you build 433 on a huge instrument page?
Do you build a direct consumer soccer ball business?
Do you buy football jerseys and resell them on
Facebook Marketplace?
Do you see where I'm going?
So I feel like there's a way to do both and my opinion is
if you love football, then you're gonna be willing to be
up at 11 o'clock at night DM-ing and trying to sell
football jerseys, whereas, if you're trying to do
cryptocurrency cause you think there's money there,
you're not interested, you're there for the money.
- Gonna create some context of my journey and just the
opportunities for so many of the people.
There's a huge mix of entrepreneurs, employees,
home takers, so I'm gonna try to go wide and then
talk about the mindset and the practicality around
how you create a level of happiness and fulfillment
through entrepreneurship in a 2019 environment.
- [Announcer] Gary Vee!
(upbeat music)
- When I was a little kid, in Edison, New Jersey,
when grandparents came over, I would go play with
the grandparents a lot. A lot.
Maybe it's because I lost three of my four grandparents
as a kid and the number one thing I learned in the
first twenty years of my life, spending more time
with old people than most kids, is the biggest thing
I fear is regret.
Regret is scary.
Resentment is very scary.
The biggest reason I push kids to do what they want,
versus what their parents want is because I'd rather
them and their parents have five or six or seven years
of bad than eighty.
Because it gets very ugly when you're sixty and they're
eighty and you've lived your life based on what they wanted
and now you resent them, it gets real ugly, real fast.
I would rather you have the pain
for the next five or six years of fighting
and then have one of two things happen which I think
both are amazing.
Number one, you were right.
You were right and you are an amazing fashion designer
not an engineer and you built a real company and
your parents are gonna be very very proud.
Or, you were wrong.
You suck at fashion design.
Nobody liked it.
But at least for yourself, you never have to live the
rest of your life asking yourself what if.
You win both ways.
You live in a culture, I know, I watch.
You live in a culture with a lot of expectations.
You live in a culture where parents treat their kids
as a property that indicates who they are.
So does most of the world.
This is not a southeast Asia thing.
This is not a Indonesia thing.
This is a world thing.
Parents are insecure too.
And they like their kids closing their gap.
We have to start talking about this.
Lemme give a very big secret to all the kids here
who are living their lives for their parents.
Or based on their parents' judgment.
There's a very big secret that parents never tell you.
If you go the other direction of where they want you to go,
and you become really successful, they are really proud
and may pretend they never pushed you in the
other direction.
(audience laughs)
- Don't let this energy go away.
One fucking life - live it.
Please, live it.
Go work.
Thank you!
(audience cheers)
(crowd noise)
(inspiring music)
- Could you hear me?
And this is what happens when you actually put out
content from this place and this place.
Do the right thing, it's always the right thing. Always.
(crowd noise)
(piano music)
- Really good. Energy was amazing.
Super young crowd.
At one point in the keynote you see me ask how many
people are under 40 - there's like eleven.
Just spoke a lot about mindset.
Just try to eliminate excuses.
Money and time is not an excuse any more.
It's 2019, the Internet lives.
This is now a mindset game.
People aren't doing because of very silly mental roadblocks.
I'm trying to eliminate those roadblocks.
I'm trying to eliminate them.
- People should live by themselves. I mean, not listening
to other people's opinions, especially their parents.
- Yes.
- Sometimes it's very hard in Indonesia and do you have any,
can you elaborate more on not listening to your parents?
(sighs)
- It's not that I want to be disrespectful to parents
or things of that nature.
It's just that, you know, ultimately, at the end of the day,
one day you're gonna realize that your life is yours
and there's a lot of people important to you that
surround it, but ultimately it's yours.
And I just think it's actually practical to be selfish
and on the offense in your youth.
Most people in their youth think it's time to grow up,
but they're 18, 22, 25, 29 years old, so I think the
social pressure is normally from parents or other friends
starting to make money or have success hurts people.
Yet I think that rushing into relationships, jobs,
you know, is not a smart strategy, so I'm talking about it.
And I'm hoping that people are listening because I do
think that it's very hard to tune out your parents.
I have empathy for that.
However, it doesn't make it wrong.
Just cause it's hard, you know, to me, to be very frank,
the harder something is, the more likely it's fantastic.
So I really meant what I said on stage, which I haven't
articulated that way often which is, I'd rather people
struggle with their parents in their 20s and 30s so that
they can have a great relationship with them in their
40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.
Versus always having a problem with your parents.
And once you start living your life based on
what your parents' expectations are, or anybody else's,
you've begun the process of not being happy.
That is just the truth.
Who's happy doing something that they don't wanna
be doing?
Nobody.
You may be content.
You may deal with it.
But you're not happy.
I think where parents make a huge mistake is parents attack.
You're gonna be this.
You're gonna be a doctor.
You're gonna be a lawyer.
Instead of sitting back in the beginning and watching
and saying ooh, you should be a painter. You love to paint.
Most parents attack, my mom, and I'm like this in
business too, we're like, we're boxers who let the,
it's like good martial arts, you let
the other person's force, got it?
So the way, what she did was, she, she fostered it
by not forcing me to be something I wasn't and
giving me opportunities to be who I was.
I'll give you a good example.
My mom would punish me when I got bad grades.
- Okay.
- She would punish me.
I would get punished.
But if there was a big baseball card show, even if
I was punished, she'd let me go.
No TV, no playing with friends, but a big baseball card show
she'd let me go cause she knew that's where I was
building my future.
- Um, can we do a podcast intro for the keynote?
- Yep.
So I went to Jakarta for ten hours and delivered this
keynote.
It was really interesting.
D Rock and I were just talking.
I did a couple interviews which I'm sure created
some good content and one of the things I observed
and D Rock confirmed which means it's true,
is I've never stayed the course and didn't pander to
such a lively audience.
There was so much energy, so much youthful energy
here in Jakarta that normally I would have gone
super cursed out, super Chris Rock, you know.
Kevin Hart style and just made jokes, but it was
interesting. I really stayed the course on my message.
I hope you pick up on that message on today's podcast.
Please enjoy.
(guitar music)
- Right now is the greatest, most fruitful,
most optimistic time in the history of the world.
It is.
- How's that?
- The data is black and white.
Health has never been better.
Medicine. Genocide. War.
Like, the media landscape and social media and
traditional media has been incredibly effective
in focusing on the negative.
But the truth in the macro is go talk to every
grandparent of every millennial and ask them
if the world is better today than it was when
they were growing up.
Like, there's a lot of good and so I think couple things
is where I'm going with that.
I think a lot, a lot more people could be a lot happier
if they lived more humble.
If they could just eliminate judgment of other people.
(laughs)
- I'm really passionate about that.
I've been, I've become outrageously passionate about
keeping up with the Joneses, as we call it in America.
Like, insecurity.
It kills.
You just start doing things that you can't afford.
- You're surrounded by all these awesome people.
- Yeah, so. Couple things.
It first starts with the fact that you're putting
other people on a pedestal.
You know, it's very easy to get into a sad place
if you're surrounded by these awesome people and you're
just mediocre.
I just don't believe that.
I just don't think, first of all, I don't think that
anybody is awesome or sucks from this standpoint.
If somebody's good at something, it also means they're
not good at something else.
And I think most people dwell on what they're not good at
and they praise on what people are good at
and then reverse on themselves.
Whereas like I'm the reverse.
I think, like, I think I'm great at certain things,
I focus on that.
I'm aware that I suck at a lot of things,
but I don't put other people's strengths on a pedestal
and most importantly, I don't, I hate that people
beat themselves up about their shortcomings, but then
don't recognize in other people and give them a pass
because they're pretty or smart or funny or have a
lot of followers.
Do you know what I mean?
I think it's, I really believe the biggest driver
that I never had, which is why it's so obvious to me
and why I talk about it a lot, is the judgment of
other people.
Of where you should be at this point in your life.
All these 57 year old parents that are telling their
23 year old kids where they should be in life
aren't where they should be at 57.
And so then they're trying to make their kids,
a lot of times they come from a good place,
they don't want their kids to make the same mistakes,
but their kids are living in a different world.
Now this is the part where probably D Rock ends with a bunch
of like footage of the airplane, like,
beautiful cloud.
Land in New York.
Some Lil Keed.
And away we go.
(rap music)