Throwback: Legacy Is A Lie You Tell Yourself | Ep 580
episodePreviously titled “Throwback: Legacy Is A Lie You Tell Yourself | Ep 883” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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Why is the idea of legacy unsettling?
No one will remember you. And that's a statement that bothers a lot of people. And if that does bug you, then you probably should look away from the rest of this. And my team was going back and forth on even posting this because they're like, dude, there's so many people that are going to disagree with this. And I'm okay with that. And this is not me in any way saying that my beliefs should be your beliefs or that your beliefs are wrong. I am simply explaining my beliefs. And the reason I'm doing that is because I think one of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship is managing emotions and managing anxiety and managing stress so that you can make higher quality decisions. And high quality decisions are one of those things that compound over a long period of time because we make hundreds and hundreds of decisions every single day, every single week for our business. And it's many small micros that can go all the way up 1% better every day compounded for 365 days is 37x what you started. And 10% or 0.1% worse goes down to zero at the end of the year.
And so managing my mental state has been a continuous learning experience for me. And the set of beliefs that sits at the core of that is what I would consider Optimistic nihilism. And to be clear here, there's a lot of people who feel like nihilism is a really negative thing. And that's because they ascribe some sort of meaning to the word, but it really is just that you don't think that things have inherent meaning. It doesn't mean that there isn't any meaning in the world. It doesn't mean that there is a global meaning that we all have to agree to. As a result of that, there are downstream implications that affect my behavior. and I think have positioned me to be less stressed about things that come up and as a result, make better business decisions. And so this is why I show this. And if only some of these things make sense for you, awesome. None of it makes sense for you, awesome. If it all makes sense for you, Awesome.
So the big picture for me was a lot of people take a lot of work and stress a lot about what other people think about them. And I'm not going to say that I'm here like I don't care what anyone else thinks. That's not true at all. I think I use these frameworks to try and remind myself that other people's opinions don't matter as much as I think they do. And for me, reminding myself that I'm insignificant and in the long and eventual universal scale am irrelevant allows me to look at my failures and laugh a little bit. And so rather than say, oh my God, this is the end of the world, it's really on a 500 million year time horizon, I am a being that exists for a blip of time and then will disappear from existence.
And one of the things I was telling a friend of mine, as he was telling me all the things that were stressing him out, said, you know, if you zoom out far enough, you can't even see the earth. And he started laughing and we both started laughing together because it's like, we like to exaggerate these things in our mind because that's what our brain's trained to do. It's what keeps us alive is making things seem into problems. They've actually tested this is that like, you will still always find the same number of problems. Whether they're rich people problems or they're poor people problems, they are still problems nonetheless. And so at least realizing that allows me to not judge the fact that I have problems as it being bad.
Because if I don't believe things have inherent meaning, then it means that I can control the meaning I ascribe to things. And so for example, let's say that I get into a car accident, right? That would be for most people a bad experience. Now, how you look at that can depend. It could be like, okay, well, there's a law of large numbers. I've been alive for this many days. It's probable that I'm going to get in one of these accidents. On the flip side, you could also think, hey, you know, How amazing, I got to experience this part of the human experience. I got to check that off the list of things that I got to survive, right? Like crazy to think about something like that, but like, what else are you gonna do?
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Chapters
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