Jim VandeHei

You control you.

That became my mantra, and that became my map for life.

You control your reactions.

The best advice I ever got was five words.

Do the next right thing.

I want you to spend the next 10 minutes being absurdly self-indulgent, which is advice I would almost never otherwise give people.

I want you to not think about the things you can't control.

AI, politics, your parents, your social media feed, your Tinder alerts.

By locking in on you for the next 600 seconds, I'm very confident that you're going to walk away with what I think is the single best hack for longevity, purpose, and living the type of lives that we want to live.

First, who is this middle-aged dude preaching a gospel of self-indulgence?

Well, the 20-year-old version of me, I'm very confident, was a much less impressive version of you.

Three years into college, I had a 1.491 grade point average that I was dragging around.

I was smoking a pack of Camel Lights a day.

I was drinking prolifically.

At night, I was delivering pizzas in my diesel VW Rabbit.

I was remarkably unhealthy, and I was remarkably unremarkable.

Within a decade, I'm interviewing presidents, I'm covering the White House for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

Soon after, I'm starting and running companies, first Politico, then Axios.

So what the hell happened?

And in those dark times and in now some very good times, I've really tried to become a student of what does it take to be successful and what makes great people great, what brings them real success.