My experience is with people that we're probably running at about 51% of our capacity.
Something - I mean you can think about this yourselves. I often ask undergraduates:
How many hours a day you waste, or how many hours a week you waste?
And the classic answer is something like 4 to 6 hours a day, you know inefficient studying,
watching things on YouTube that not only do you not want to watch -
That you don't even care about, that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done. That's probably four hours right there.
Now, and you think - That's 20-25 hours a week.
It's a hundred hours a month. That's two and a half full work weeks.
It's half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth,
$20 an hour, which is a radical underestimate,
it's probably more like $50 if you think about it in terms of deferred wages.
If you're wasting 20 hours a week...
you're wasting $50,000 a year, and you are doing that right now, and because you're young wasting $50,000
is a way bigger catastrophe
than it would be for me to waste it because I'm not gonna last nearly as long, and so if your life isn't everything it
could be, you could ask yourself. Well, what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you?
You'd be who knows how much more efficient? Ten times more efficient? 20 times more efficient?
That's the Pareto distribution. You have no idea how efficient efficient people get. It's off the charts!
Best thing you can do is teach people to write, because there's no difference between that and thinking and
one of the things that just blows me away about universities is that
No one ever tells students why they should write something
It's like well you have to do this assignment well, why are you writing? Well, you need the grade it's like no
You need to learn to think
Because thinking makes you act effectively in the world, thinking makes you win the battles you undertake and those could be battles for good things
If you can think and speak and write you are
Absolutely deadly
Nothing can get in your way
so that's why you learn to write, it's like
when I can't believe that people aren't just told that it's- it's- it's like
It's the most powerful weapon you can possibly provide someone with and I mean
I know lots of people who have been staggeringly successful and watched them throughout my life
I mean those people you don't want to have an argument with them.
They'll just slash you into pieces and then not in the malevolent way.
It's like if you're gonna make your point and they're gonna make their point you better have your points
Organized because otherwise you're gonna look like and be an absolute idiot
you are not going to get anywhere and if you can formulate your arguments coherently and make a
presentation, if you can speak to people, if you can lay out a proposal, god, people give you money, they give
you opportunities, you have influence
Make a schedule and stick to it. Okay. So what's the rule with the schedule? It's not a bloody prison
That's the first thing that people do wrong they say well, I don't like to have to follow a schedule
It's like well, what kind of schedule are you setting up.
Well, I should- I have to do this, then I have to do this, then I have to do this, you know
And then I just go play video games because who wants to do all these things that I have to do. It's like wrong
Set the schedule up
So that you have the day you want. That's the trick. It's like okay
I've got tomorrow, if I was gonna set it up so it was the best possible day I could have
Practically speaking, what would it look like?
well, then you schedule that and obviously there's a bit of responsibility that's good to go along with that because if you have any sense
One of the things that you're gonna insist upon is that at the end of the day
You're not in worse shape than you were then- then at the beginning of the day, right? Because that's a stupid day
If you have a bunch of those in a row, you just dig, you know
You dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself and it's like sorry, that's just not a good strategy. It's a bad strategy
so maybe
20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation
Or maybe it's more than that depending on how far behind you are. But even that you can- you can ask yourself, okay?
Well, I've got these responsibilities.
I have to schedule these things in, what's the right ratio of
responsibility to reward. And you can ask yourself that just like you'd negotiate with someone who is working for you
It's like okay, you gotta work tomorrow
Okay, so I want you to work tomorrow and you might say okay. Well, what are you gonna do for me
That makes it likely that I'll work for you? Well, you could ask yourself that you know, maybe you do an hour of
responsibility and then you play a video game for 15 minutes.
I don't know, whatever turns your crank man, but you know
You have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself
Like you're negotiating with someone that you care for, that you would like to be productive and have a good life
And- and that's how you make the schedule
It's like and then you look at the day and you think well if I had that day, that would be good
Great, you know and you- you're useless and horrible, so you'll probably only hit it with about seventy percent accuracy
But that beats the hell out of zero.
Right and if you hit it
Even with fifty percent accuracy another rule is well aim for fifty one percent the next week or 50 and a half
percent for God's sake or because
you're gonna hit that position where things start to loop back
positively and spiral you upward.
Well, and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because that's another thing people do all the time not
Only do they not do what they should to make things better
they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or
or homicidal or genocidal, or all of those things all
Bundled together in an absolutely pathological package. If people stopped really really trying just to make things worse
We have no idea how much better they would get just because of that
So there's this weird dynamic that's part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability
social judgment both of which are
are major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the
Responsibility that they know they should adopt. It
Isn't merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you're going to
Live out your own genuine being, it isn't only your fate. It's the fate of everyone that you're networked with
And so, you know you think well
There's nine billion, seven billion people in the world
We're going to peak at about nine billion, by the way
And then it'll decline rapidly but seven billion people in the world and who are you you're just one little dust mite
Among that seven billion and so it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do but that's simply not the case
It's the wrong model because you're at the center of a network. You're a node in a network
Of course, that's even more true
Now that we have social media you'll- you'll know
you'll know a
thousand people, at least, over the course of your life and they'll know a thousand people each and that puts you one person away from
a million and two persons away from a billion and
So that's how you're connected and the things you do they're like dropping a stone in a pond
The ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can't fully
comprehend and it means that the things that you do and that you don't do are far more important than you think and
So if you act that way
of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do and you might say well that's better than
living a meaningless existence. It's better for it to matter
But I mean if you really asked yourself would you be so sure? If you had the choice I can live with no
responsibility whatsoever, the price I pay is that nothing matters
Or I can reverse it and everything matters
But I have to take the responsibility that's associated with that. It's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path
Now when you say well nihilists suffer dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer
Yeah, but the advantage is they have no responsibility
So that's the payoff and I actually think that's the motivation. To say well, I can't help being nihilistic all my belief systems have collapsed
It's like yeah, maybe
maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out and
The price you pay is a meaningless suffering but
You can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr
So that's a pretty good deal all things considered especially when they are, when the alternative is to
bear your burden properly and to live
Forthrightly in the world. Well what Solzhenitsyn figured out and so many people in the twentieth century
it's not just him even though he's the best example is that if you live a pathological life you
Pathologize your society and if enough people do that, then it's hell
Really
really and
You can read the Gulag Archipelago
if you have the forti- fortitude to do that and you'll see exactly what hell is like and then you can decide if that's
a place you'd like to visit or even more importantly if it's a life, if it's a place you'd like to visit and
Take all your family and friends because that's what happened in the 20th century.
No one can live without a routine
You just, forget that, if you guys don't have a routine
I would recommend like you get one going because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine
You need to pick a time to get up. Whatever time you want
But pick one and stick to it because otherwise you dysregulate your circadian rhythms, and they regulate your mood
Plan a life you'd like to have and and you do that partly by
Referring to social norms, that's more or less
Rescuing your father from the belly of the whale but the way, other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself
About, as if you don't really know who you are because you know what
You're like, you won't do what you're told. You won't do what you tell yourself to do, you must have noticed that
It's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss and both of those work, you know, for you
You don't know what you want to do
And then when you tell yourself what to do, you don't do it anyway
So you should fire yourself and find someone else to beat but- but you know what
My point is, is that you have to understand that you're not your own servant
so to speak. You're someone that you have to negotiate with and that's- and
You're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to and
That's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much
So, you know, they're always like cracking the whip and then
Procrastinating and cracking the whip and then procrastinating. It's like god, it's so boring and such a pathetic way of spending your time. I
Think what you have to do and this is part of humility is you have to look around you within your sphere of influence
like the direct sphere of influence and fix the things that announce themselves as in need of repair, but
one of the main reasons that people don't get what they want is because they don't actually figure out what it is and
The probability that you're going to get what would be good for you
Let's say, which would even be better than what you want, right?
Because you know, you might be what- wrong about what you want, easily, but maybe you could get what would really be good for you
Well, why don't you? Well, because you don't try. You don't think, okay
here's what I would like if I could have it and- and I don't mean- I
Don't mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it, to deliver you goods for status or something like that
That isn't what I mean. I mean something like
Imagine that you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for and then you thought okay
I'm caring for this person. I would like things to go as well for them as possible
What would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case?
Well people don't do that. They don't sit down and think alright, you know, let's- let's figure it out. You've got a life, it's hard
obviously, it's like
Three years from now you can have what you need
You've got to be careful about it. You can't have everything, you can have what would be good for you
But you have to figure out what it is and then you have to aim at it
Well my experience with people has been is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them
And then they aim at it, then they get it and it's strange because they don't necess- it's a strange thing, it's not
quite that simple because, you know, you may
formulate an idea about what would be good for you
And then you take ten steps towards that and you find out that your formulation was a bit off and so you have to reformulate
Your goal, you know, so you're kind of going like this as
You move towards the goal
But a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever
set up the criteria for success and
so since success is a very narrow line and very unlikely, the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero and
So there's a proposition here and the proposition is if you actually want something
You can have it. Now
the question then would be well, what do you mean by actually want and
The answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way
To make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible and that's a sacrificial idea, right?
It's like you don't get everything, obviously you
Obviously, but maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask
but asking isn't a
Whim or- or today's wish it's like you have to be deadly serious about it. You have to think
Okay, like I'm taking stock of myself and if I was going to live properly in the world
And I was going to set myself up
Such that being would justify itself in my estimation and I don't mean as a harsh judge
Exactly what is it that I would aim at? Sit on your bed one day and ask yourself
What's- what remarkably stupid things am I doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life and
If you actually ask that question
But you have to want to know the answer right because that's actually what asking the question means
It doesn't mean just mouthing the words. It means you have to decide that you want to know
You'll figure that out so fast it'll make your hair curl.