Shane Parrish

What advice do you have for somebody living paycheck to paycheck?

You've been incredibly successful and sold over 10 million books.

What drives you today?

But if you look back 30 years ago and you could see what you've accomplished today, the financial success, the status success that you've had, you've blown away any goal that you would have had.

Why keep going?

What can money do for us and what can it do for us?

It's kind of like oxygen in a way, I guess, right?

When you have it, you never think about it.

But the minute you're lacking it, it's all you can think about.

I remember talking to Daniel Common about this, and he had a distinction between happiness and satisfaction.

And the distinction was happiness is an emotion.

Most people think they want to be happy, but it turns out that most people want to be satisfied.

And satisfaction was more based on the story that you can tell about your life.

So it actually had to do with

how much money you had, how much status you had, how many promotions you had.

You were able to tell yourself the story that I did.

I sacrificed all these things, maybe my relationship with my partner, in order to achieve them.

That makes sense sort of evolutionarily because you think about it, evolution cares about survival of the species, not the happiness of the individual.

I remember when I was 17 and I overheard a conversation with my parents and their financial advisor that the military had provided.

So both my parents worked for the military full time and they were trying to decide whether to fix the roof or fix the car and they couldn't afford to do both.