https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To8jcTDwcxc

1 00:00:00.000 --\> 00:01:00.000 my dad always told me that you only get
one name so invest in it accordingly and i always thought about that i
thought it was a really good line just like you only get one name like
you can change your companies you can go bankrupt but like your name
stays with you yeah and so that can either be an asset or it can be a
liability well i usually ask my guest how did you get this job so i was
a management consultant right out of college i did space cyber
intelligence for the military which was sounds much cooler than it
really was but i had a top secret clearance it sounded really good at
dinner parties and just about only that um and you know one day i looked
out for my balcony because i had a really nice place because i could
afford it at the time um and i was like is this it and i was you know in
my young 20s you know at that point i had done everything that i think i
was supposed to do so i was you know i did well in school i you know was
president of all the clubs you know graduated in three years got the
good job um and i realized that it was i was living you know a life for
me that my father wanted me to live and so

2 00:01:00.000 --\> 00:02:00.000 that was kind of you know i went i i
faltered back and forth for probably a period of six months um of really
not wanting this to be my life but not wanting to let my dad down and so
at some point the the thing that kind of pushed me over the edge was i
can either you know die to myself or i can die to my father and at the
end of the day you know i have to survive so i will if i if i make this
decision and he no longer wants to be my dad then i can accept that wow
was that extreme then yes say more about that are you an only child yeah
so only child raised by a single father um middle eastern um he was born
in iran and um you know i everything in my life up until that point was
really just to make him proud so i it was very much a seeking approval
seeking validation kind of drive at that point in my life and so the
idea of disappointing him or not getting his approval felt like death
and at that point i was actually contemplating not living you have
watched some of my youtube stuff mortality has been the single biggest
driver and the biggest decisions that i've made in my life and it has
become a

3 00:02:00.000 --\> 00:03:00.000 more routine process for decision
making for me in general because i think it provides clarity and it
provides context to most of the decisions we have which the vast
majority of them don't matter which is helpful in and of themselves and
then you know beyond that it helps me make the decisions that i think
removes everyone else from the playbook because if you if you study
subjective well-being and how people perceive how they're doing in their
own lives it looks like a smiley face so seven-year-olds think they're
killing life and then it drops dramatically between 20 and 30. and then
there's still a little bit more of a dip right around 45 that's like
when people are their true they hate life the most and then and then it
kind of slowly get goes up to like 55 60 and then it shoots right back
up again when people see that they're going to die and that life is
short and that they can make the decisions without worrying about the
ramifications of other people and some of the people they're worried
about are also dead and so it was using that context for that biggest
decision that's been duplicated many times in my life since then because
if i have a good decision-making algorithm i try and reuse it as many
times as i can let's

4 00:03:00.000 --\> 00:04:00.000 unpack it for the audience a little bit
so you know when we're seven we don't have a care in the world uh the
artist or the whatever we want to be has not been beaten out of us yet
uh no one's told us that we are not what we think we are we're still
popping wheelies and climbing trees and falling out and that's okay and
then you get to your 20s and 30s and the rubber hits the road a little
bit and if you've made money i guess and if that's your sign of success
then you're okay but if not you're kind of hosed then in your 40s i'm
guessing uh you start to have more life experience 50s maybe you start
caring less what people think and then um and then you fast forward all
the way to maybe near death and then you really get to a point where you
don't care what anyone says and you really boil it down to what's
important and probably i'm guessing that's love relationships uh legacy
and then you just like peace out i think for most people yes for me
specifically the legacy piece

5 00:04:00.000 --\> 00:05:00.000 less so um but i think for most people
yes and why is the legacy piece less important um more so and i whenever
i get into this topic i think a lot of like some people get sensitive
about it and so i just like to put the disclaimer like this is not me
judging your beliefs and me stating my beliefs is in no way yeah a
judgment on anywhere else um but if you just look at expanding the time
horizon over a much longer period of time if you look at it in ten
thousand years or a hundred thousand years or a million years right the
easy way to test this is to go backwards right which is do you know your
great great great great great great grandfather probably not and then if
you look at it from a how much has somebody achieved standpoint um i
happen to be in an interesting situation where my great great
grandfather was in the ruling class in iran and he had 400 children so
he was literally you know like ruled and had a lot of wealth he had a
lot of wives to create 400 children right and i actually still can't
remember his name because my dad told me one time and i can't remember
it and i've never seen any of the quote legacy that i'm sure he felt
like he was leaving and so if that was

6 00:05:00.000 --\> 00:06:00.000 that level of success and legacy and
only four or five generations later i don't even remember the man's name
nor do i have any piece of that legacy yeah it seems a little bit
irrelevant when the revolution happened in iran we talk about legacy
lands buildings houses bank accounts government says those are ours now
that's it there's your legacy gone that's why i'm like and people were
like i want to build a legacy i'm like u.s might not even be the
superpower in 500 years your kids your kids might be in in bangladesh
who knows india might be the hot spot 500. no one knows right and i
think in a long enough time verizon we're all screwed and i think in
some ways people find that incredibly disheartening but an equal
opposite is you can't find it both disheartening and also not freeing
because all of the decisions that we're making that are not for
ourselves or what or are are subject to change that we feel pressure
from whether that be society societal i'll put quotes there because
that's a big word um or family friends expectations

7 00:06:00.000 --\> 00:07:00.000 that we perceive other people to have
of us if you can if you can just relinquish all of those chains i think
it's incredibly freeing and um i choose to live that way that advice is
good because it helps us live in the moment because you know even if you
believe in something after that's still in the future yeah and there's a
question mark because no one actually knows with you know with knowledge
what happens or if something happens so you might as well live in the
present make the best of it yeah an interesting one um that i thought
through around that was um a lot of us not a lot of us all of us have
100 experience uh not being alive right before we were born we were not
alive and so we know what that was like there was nothing um that we can
recollect and so i would imagine that that's the closest experience that
we can have to not being live yet again which to me is not that
frightening yeah and it is freeing you're right because it's it's both
uh humbling to know that you don't matter in the grand scheme of things
but at the same time you matter

8 00:07:00.000 --\> 00:08:00.000 infinitely if you just focus on the
present and the the mark that you're going to leave here and now i i
contemplated i had to die to my father died of myself and i realized
that i i would rather die to him which pretty much ended up happening
and so my fears were relatively justified he was not in support of the
things that i wanted to do i ended up quitting that job sold everything
i had packed my car went to california because that's what i thought the
land of fitness opportunity was because that was the only thing i really
enjoyed mentored under a guy for a few months to try and at least learn
the ropes started my first facility slept on the floor for the first
nine months which was a very terrible experience for me and time stamped
the age for me now i was 23. so you graduated early you got that dream
job and then you bailed yeah two years and that was really at the time
and all of this kind of it was at the a splitting point where i had done
two years and the kind of career path traditionally is like two to four
years of management consulting and then you go back to an ivy league for
your gmat and then from there you go into you know you can you can go do
investment banking you can do private equity you can do you

9 00:08:00.000 --\> 00:09:00.000 know some of the bigger white collar
jobs but um it was i just didn't i didn't want more of what i had um and
so i thought that i would have a better shot taking 200 000 in two years
which is what the you know economic equivalent of what the degree was
and starting something on my own i figured i would learn more in the
first two years and with that money and maybe even have a business by
the end of that period of time that made an equivalent amount of money
compared to what i would have had as a job offer but how did you what
signals did you get i mean you're saying like i wasn't feeling it but
like where was your motivation because i see you as this hustler this
go-get is all about gobbling up new opportunities it transcends beyond
that now but like at first it sounds like you were just all about the go
get but how did you know i mean at first i was driven by fear okay it
was all fear fear of failure feel of disappointment fear of other
people's judgment right what did your dad end up saying did he say good
luck with you no he thought he was stupid though i was wasting my life
yeah and wasted a degree that he'd spent

10 00:09:00.000 --\> 00:10:00.000 money on and yeah wasted a good job
opportunity that he had set up for me all these things right in his
defense did he immigrate here yeah okay so in his defense 100 right and
i just want to tell the audience so that they're not like but it's like
you know if you have justified in saying that yeah if you escape from a
country where there's trauma and impending danger then your son
squanders an opportunity you might get a little anxious about that 100 i
mean my dad came here with a thousand dollars you know a medical degree
yeah and then built every didn't even speak english right i think what
he did was harder than what i've done like i got to i got to stand on
his shoulders okay you know in huawei i mean i speak english you know
like just the basics like i speak english i went to a good school just
all the support infrastructure known and unknown that was around me yeah
to you know to be successful yeah i think it's healthy to recognize your
privilege yeah but at the same time you know it came with lots of
baggage too

11 00:10:00.000 --\> 00:11:00.000 and so you had signals which were
mainly fear-based yeah and i i mean the biggest thing that made the
decision for me i would say i had the logical decision and then i had
the emotional decision the emotional decision was um i could i don't
want to do this this is not the life i want to lead um i am not happy
doing this every day i would prefer to not be alive if this is what my
life will be continuously if i would prefer to not be alive then that
kind of opens up my decision calculus and what was it i'm trying to put
my finger on what what was it that made you happy was it just the
freedom to do what you want i didn't know what made me happy i knew it
was not making me happy okay yeah so i think that's another important
lesson too if i can just extract them you know i'm sure a lot of people
watching they feel the same kind of family pressure um they want to be
what other people expect them to be if you know if that's who you are
and that's totally normal um but we should always remember the context
in which that advice is given could be given through the lens of a
certain lifestyle a certain time frame but like i think that's a thing

12 00:11:00.000 --\> 00:12:00.000 whether you're young or middle age
you're trying to figure out what you want to be when you grow up you're
trying to have it all figured out yeah because we don't seems like we
don't like uncertainty but i think your message if i'm hearing you is
sometimes you have to try it on for size to see if it fits or not and
you get it on you're like well i thought that dream job was going to be
like perfect but turns out you know it's tight in the crotch you know
it's like i i need something different mm-hmm and i think giving
yourself permission to do that and it was a side to what you were saying
about my dad like education saved his life like he was only able to
leave the country because he was educated and so there's very deep roots
there and i can appreciate that but for this context or for my life it
just wasn't appropriate right and when we did come to terms later um the
only time he's ever apologized to me in my life and said but to be fair
in my time i would have been right oh absolutely and he would have been
it's just not the same time yeah absolutely it wasn't that it was

13 00:12:00.000 --\> 00:13:00.000 inappropriate it was just out of
context and it didn't necessarily translate to this new life i love the
saying you know in our 20s we're concerned about what everyone thinks
about us in our 40s we don't care what anyone thinks about us and in our
60s we realized that no one was thinking about us to begin with right
and i just i just feel like that's i mean who else have you thought
about today besides yourself probably not i mean you have your kids
which is an extension of yourself but you know i feel like yeah not a
lot and so most people are like that and you know a lot of it like we
have a lot more leeway than i think we give ourselves credit for and i
think the more that i have now you know i'll say accomplished with
quotes in in material success the more i am excited about the things
that i can do and that was why the opening of the book was like there
are no rules and it just took me a very long time to realize that and i
continued to unlearn rules that i thought existed you know as i continue
to you know go on this journey yeah i love that idea of unlearning i
think we all just try and go back to being like we were when we were
children just because when you're a child you're purely present right
you're just present in the moment and i i don't

14 00:13:00.000 --\> 00:14:00.000 like the word happy very much i prefer
using joy because you can be you can mourn joyfully right because it's
it's a it's a it's internal rather than happiness which i feel is more
like happenstance it's more from external and so um you know what are
the things that bring me joy were the things that i find you know to
find joy in um and i think for anyone who's listening it's a much harder
question to answer what are the things that bring me joy than answering
the question what are the things i hate and it's easier to correct those
first you're like well i hate my job and i hate my relationship and i
hate the city okay those are all very changeable and a lot of times you
get there by by inversion well if i wanted to destroy my life i wanted
to have the worst life possible what would i do and then taking all
those things that you would do to really destroy your life and make your
life miserable and then reverse them it's a much easier way to solve the
positive psychology equation in my opinion yeah i love that and i'm
remembering this this picasso quote which is i think he said everyone is
born an artist yeah right and then eventually we

15 00:14:00.000 --\> 00:15:00.000 you know get convinced that we're not
yeah and we have to really just strip away and get you know get back to
basics
