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Chapter 1: What is the true cost of living an ambitious life?
I have a hard time celebrating my achievements because in my mind it was my obligation to achieve it.
The dilemma of the high achiever. I know you don't struggle with this at all, right? I know this truly. Game recognizes game, as they say. Yes, yes. All from a place of deep wounds and the desire to be adequate and enough. Yeah. I have a hard time celebrating my achievements and wins because it was in my mind. In my mind, it was my obligation to achieve them. And not only that,
I think the group of people we hang out with, you hang out with, I hang out with, makes the exceptional seem extremely normal. I was having a conversation the other day with a friend who both of us had long runs. And I was running 16, he was running 20. And there was a time a couple of years ago where you couldn't have paid me thousands of dollars to do anything but drive 16 miles.
And the fact of the matter is the average person thinks that's crazy. And there was a time where I was extremely proud of that. I remember running my first 10 miles. I remember where I was. I remember what I was doing. It was sunny. We were in Atlanta on the Beltline. And I remember when it hit 10 and I hit stop on the Apple Watch and I went, holy shit.
i just ran 10 miles and then now it's just it's just a normal and the carrot keeps moving for the high achievers so i think the battle has now become learning to be content in the things that we achieve you know this would this was a goal of mine sitting down with you and being on this podcast i've listened to it for years and it's incredible to be in it with you right now it's truly an honor because you can interview anybody in the world and yet here i sit
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Chapter 2: How do high achievers struggle with celebrating success?
And so what is the line between sitting in the pride and the humility and the graciousness and gratitude of the achievement and then moving the needle? I think you alluded to this in an episode you did a while ago talking about how you forgot to celebrate the wins along the way, which led to an inevitable case of burnout. Mm-hmm.
And when we were here at the podcast, at the four-way podcast the other day with Sean and George, we talked about the importance of romanticizing every single thing in your life. So that way when the big achievement comes, it doesn't feel like an obligation. It feels like a victory and you can truly sit in it before you move on to the next thing.
It's strange. I think people that have high standards assume that they should always win. They should always succeed. And that turns success from a cause for celebration into the minimum level of acceptable performance. Success simply becomes what's expected of you and anything less than success would be a failure. And yeah, it's the habituation that we see.
Hedonic adaptation, people talk about it for you buy a new car and it's all exciting and then pretty quickly you get used to it. You move into a new house and you're thinking about it for so long and you were looking on Zoopla and Rightmove and you were comparing it and this is what we're... And then it's just the place that you put your shoes at the end of the day after a while.
But a much more sort of pernicious place for this is in personal growth. It's in your own capacity. So previously, your old PR that you celebrated at the time is now a warm-up set. And the same thing goes for the status that you have and your precision with the way that you do your art form, the...
speed at which you can complete a particular task, whether you're a salesperson or you manage a retail store or you write a blog or whatever, you want to permanently be pushing the limits. And as you raise the bar, that means that you will always feel like you suck because your standards continually outstrip your ability to deliver them.
And that's good in some ways because it keeps forcing you to progress, but it does mean that you live in this gap. You don't live in the gain, the comparison between where you were and where you are. You live in the gap between where you are and where you want to be. That's not where you could be because sometimes you can want to be further than where you could be.
And I told you that story about Alexander the Great, which is how we read the quote of Alexander saying, and Alexander wept for he saw there were no more worlds to conquer, as his ambition being able to outstrip reality's ability to challenge him. Oh, he was bigger than the world and he reached the edge of it and couldn't keep going, but would have done. But that's not the actual quote.
The actual quote is him realizing that there are infinite worlds and he hasn't even yet become the Lord of one. So he's crying at how puny and minuscule his accomplishments are. And I think that that's actually much closer to how we all feel. Like who has ever reached the edge of their ambition? Their ambition continues to outstrip it. You're right. If you raise your standards, you...
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of hedonic adaptation on personal growth?
That's how I view this. There was a time where I remember hearing, I alluded to it earlier, But hearing you talk about hitting the subscriber milestones for the podcast and just going, okay, onto the next one, or the greatest you had was maybe a dinner that you went through with, but you continued to dangle the carrot and you got burned out.
And I remember thinking a million followers on TikTok is going to feel different. And then it happened. And then I just didn't, it was okay. I'm going to go eat dinner now. I just don't know what to do with this. And so it's, it's a fun milestone. It's fun to celebrate, but yeah. It's not what our identity is within. And I think that's what a lot of people are looking for.
They're looking for the opportunity, the ability to feel whole, to feel adequate, to feel enough, important, and significant. That's what a lot of people are looking for, significance. Seen, belonging, mattering.
Seen, heard, and understood. If you can't talk about it, you aren't healed from it. What's that mean to you?
You're only as healed from something as your ability to share it. It means everything to me. So my dad passed away January 19th of 2025, and it was a long, arduous, painful process. Moved home after a long breakup, lived with that person, came home to reset, thought I'd just get to spend some time with the parents before I moved to Florida, and then my dad's not quite right.
I hadn't seen him in about a month, so he was regressing quickly, and I could tell he didn't look right. And what I didn't know what happened would be over the next seven months, his health slowly regressing with no real answers as to what was wrong with him, which was really the crazy part. We didn't know what was killing my dad, which is a really weird place to be because it was the epitome
Of helpless. There was nothing the doctors could do, I could do, and maybe we'll dive deeper into the story later, but I remember not even being able to answer the question, how's your dad doing, without that pain or that tightness in my chest and my throat coming up. I couldn't even say, he's fine, he's not doing well. I couldn't share anything about it.
And 36 hours before he passed, I went and gave a presentation and I battled it, but he insisted that I go give this talk at a conference in Dallas and fly right back home. because I was afraid he'd pass while I was gone. And he said, what are you worried? I'm gonna die? And I said, yeah. And he said, so what? We said everything we need to say, go live your life. I'll be mad if you don't do this.
And I did it and he hung on. But I remember there's a part in that presentation where I talk about conviction and how important health is and how that's one of my core messages in my content is you can have a laundry list of problems until you have a health problem and then there's only one problem. And I lived it.
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Chapter 4: How can we redefine our relationship with fear and ambition?
I appreciate the relationship I had more, and I did a ton when he was alive. But more than I ever could now that he's gone. Because I remember I had Peter Krohn on my podcast and we had a conversation around my dad and he started sort of coaching me through it. And he noticed I kept saying, I lost my dad. And he said, I want you to stop saying that. You didn't lose anything.
You found a relationship that was wonderful enough to feel this much pain for, which means at one point there was great joy. And so what I learned from that is that I'm incredibly blessed to have a man that if at the end of my life I'm half the human being he was, I'll be proud. Half the dad, half the husband, half the person, I'll be proud.
I learned what really matters, because at the time my internet career was starting to really take off, but all I really cared about was my dad getting better. And I heard a sermon from the guy that the church I go to in Atlanta, 2819, Pastor Philip Anthony Mitchell talks about when the church was really starting to grow. And I didn't know this. This was the craziest part.
I picked a sermon during their period of rest in December from two years ago. And he's talking about the tension between what you want and what God's will for your life is, the tension between that and how painful that can be. And his dad was dying at the time that 2819, which is now the fastest growing church in the world, was really starting to explode.
And all he wanted was his dad to be better. He didn't care about the success. He was so grounded in his real life that he was almost detached from whatever was to come next with the success of the church. And now it's this incredible, life-changing, impactful thing for millions of people across the world. And so it taught me
to stay grounded, no matter how crazy or cool the achievements of this career get. And they are incredible. And I am overwhelmed with gratitude that because people chose to watch my videos on the internet, I get to sit down with you. That's the coolest thing in the world, man. I live in a video game and I'm just trying to steward it properly. I'm trying to steward the blessing properly.
So I'd say... The biggest lesson is that I realized that every hard thing we go through makes us more of who we're meant to be. And I think who God designed us to be. I referenced that scripture to you the other day, James chapter one, verse two through four.
It says, count it all joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds, because you know, the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance run its course so that you may be complete and lacking nothing.
I am more myself, I feel more myself and more rooted in my sense of identity, who I am and what I feel God's called me to do than I ever was before I went through that with my old man. And that's why I think we should count it all joy.
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Chapter 5: How can I overcome the fear of perception?
I can overcome the fear of perception. Or if I can conquer the fear of perception. The goal is not to overcome the fear of perception, it's to stay tapped in with inspiration. Because you're inspired until you hit the wall. You know, the content was flowing for me and I was super inspired in creating a bunch and then the first wall was boom, canceled because I said something polarizing.
This was, like I said, a year plus ago. I made a fat joke that was pretty off color, but it was funny. And that was where it first crept in. Big creators started saying crazy stuff about me that wasn't true. And then I got blocked from inspiration. I didn't know what to create because I was worried what they will think of me with what came next.
And so if the goal is not to overcome the fear of perception, but to stay tapped into inspiration, then that shifts it from a fight to more of a dance. Everybody wants to maximize their potential, but I don't think that's the game. I think you don't want to maximize your potential. You want to know deeply the parts of you that don't want you to do that.
Because when I decided to do seminars last year, there was a part of me that went, what if nobody shows up? Maybe a fear you had selling tickets across the world, maybe not. But that fear crept in.
Chapter 6: What role does inspiration play in overcoming fear?
And so then the job is not, oh, let me just bury that. The job is then let me go explore that part of me that thinks nobody will show up so I can get to, as I said earlier, is this true? Why is that kid in me so afraid that nobody will come to my birthday party? That's the adult equivalent of the speaking tour I did last year.
And so through deeply understanding and knowing the parts of us that don't want us to maximize our potential, it is only in doing that that the fear of perception falls away. But there's nowhere to get. That's the game, dude. That's the game. There's nowhere to get. It's an exponential curve. It never touches zero. For every new level, there's a new devil. I love that quote.
And when you went from your first episode on your couch in the UK to top 50 to top 25 to now eight, there's a fear that creeps in at every point, something that you have to work through. But I think the secret is knowing deeply the part of you that says you don't deserve that. You can't have that. And instead of saying that's wrong, familiarize yourself with it. And then you can process it.
And that's the difference between unprocessing your emotion and being run by your emotion. Because the two decisions you make if you listen to the narrative, I'm not enough versus observe it and understand it and move through it are wildly different decisions. So that's what the fear of perception is to me.
It's the goal to stay tapped into the inspiration of what I believe the messages that God is placing on my heart are. And that's why my content is so diverse. One day I'll make a video about grief and what I learned from the death of my father.
And the next day it's the fucking review of the Coke flavored Oreo or the Oreo flavored Coke Zero, my most viral video ever, classically, which is hilarious. There's no, it was just inspiration. It was following the inspiration. And in doing that, I've built a business out of it. But conventional rules would tell me, well, you're not sticking to the framework and the structures and the virality.
It's all bullshit. So the goal is to stay tapped in to inspiration by dancing with that fear of perception.
There's an interesting line between scarcity and abundance. So George Mack is just the most abundance mindset person that I've ever met. He really is. This is one of my fucking favorite George stories. I think he must be on his 30th pair of AirPods now. And he's kept them all in his Bluetooth history. I hope he has Apple stock. Probably.
And you can see George's AirPods 1, 2, 3, 4, all the way up to 30. But because they're all linked to his Find My...
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Chapter 7: How does loneliness relate to personal growth?
There's one pair that's in the United Nations building in downtown New York City. There's one left AirPod, I think, that's in Kandahar or something. So he's lost them around the world. Some of them have been in the ocean. Others of them have been picked up by people where he's left them. And he left them in Dean's the other night.
Oh, my God. When we were at dinner?
Yes.
Oh my gosh.
Left them at Dean's. And he can see, he tracks them every so often because he can do the find my, he just plays a sound out of the AirPods. So the fucking UN building will be beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And it's just him fucking with the dude in Kandahar. He's just like fucking with him because he knows that he's got a glass air pod. It's so good.
But he's just got this abundance mindset, man. And I don't think anyone's done a full treatment on the difference between scarcity and abundance mindset. Not enough to really... obvious meme, I guess, if you've been in the personal development world for a while. I haven't seen it fully sort of break through.
And the idea that glass half full versus half empty is a pretty sort of cliche way to think about it. just assuming that it's okay, things will get better. I can take the risk. I can spend the money. I can treat myself. I can give myself time off. I can permit myself to attempt this thing that I don't know whether or not it's going to go well. Just assume that things are going to go well.
And it's a particular type of advice for a particular type of person that maybe many, perhaps even most people actually need the opposite advice.
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Chapter 8: What are the key elements to achieving success?
They need to be told to pump the brakes on their risk tolerance. There is a big subset of people, I'm going to guess, at the very least like me, perhaps like you, who need the opposite piece of advice. I needed to read Die With Zero by Bill Perkins, because otherwise I would have just been scrimping and saving. There's a difference between misers and spenders.
And unfortunately, I fell into the camp of I'd never had money. So I thought, well, now I've got it, I should hold onto it. What if it goes away? Well, that means that you never get to arrive at a place where you arrive. And yeah, abundance mindset is a wonderful salve to the uncertainty and the fear that I think a lot of us feel.
Your episode shift, are we allowed to talk about the new style of content that's coming out? It'll be before this one, so yeah. Okay. The four-way episode that we had, we had a lovely four-way the other day. It was fantastic.
It's important to have an Indian man in there for diversity.
Yeah, of course. It was great. Yes, he taught us a lot about breastfeeding. It was an interesting conversation. Go listen to that one. But that's a great example, right? You could have said, well, this isn't what my audience expects of me. This isn't what got me to top eight in the world. I can't do a four-way podcast of me and my boys bullshitting. Mm-hmm. I've been the interview guy.
I've been the solo guy giving advice. But to me, I viewed what you did as an act of authenticity and trusting that diversifying is actually the exact thing you should do because you haven't done it up to this point.
And the more frictionless, less buttoned up, you know, pop a button and let your hair down approach to this like us just talking and joking and some of the crazy stuff that happened in that episode is exactly what people want to see from you because it makes you so relational. So I view creators through this lens as well.
There's this guy who said he uses his content as a direct exposure therapy to people pleasing. He posts whatever he wants. He says, I don't, I wish I knew his name so I could give him credit. I post whatever I want. I'm not really overly mindful of what my audience wants. And I have a wide variety of topics that I speak on. He's an authority in some places. He's very human and goofy in others.
And he talks about his story in other facets of content. So there's three pillars I think that exist. There's informational, aspirational, and relational. Informational is the authority figure content. I'm teaching you something. And then relational is the Open Tabs podcast, if that's what you decide to call it. Did you decide on a name?
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