9 Surprising Truths About What It Takes To Win - Shaan Puri

The economy is just smart people paying beautiful people to promote stuff to insecure people.

Like, once you see it, you kind of can't unsee it. But, you know, I don't know. I just kind of observed that one day that a lot of the way the world works is you have a small group of people who have some sort of idea or an agenda. And by the way, this is not always nefarious. They just might, maybe they believe that this product is really great or that this way of living is really great. But the way we transmit that to society is this weird food chain. It's like if aliens came and observed this ecosystem, how these animals work. It's like it seems like the sort of the smart ones seem to somehow bribe the beautiful, attractive ones with the big feathers, and then they're tapping into some fear in the general pop, in gen pop. And so, you know, then you go through life, you listen to some commercials, you watch some ads, you see what's going on, and you can kind of work backwards from that. And by the way, this is actually good business advice, too. And again, if your intentions are good, I think it's useful to use this advice,

which is, somebody said this, they were like, you know, you sell a mother safety. Like, you know, a mom's number one fear is like the well-being of their child. So, like if you're selling a mother, you know, something, you should sell in the safety of their children. If it's a woman, you might want to sell her beauty or, you know, youth. If you're selling a man, you want to sell them status. And so, like, you know, you've been a club promoter, you know, how do you get somebody to buy a table? How do you get somebody to buy a bottle that they know if you walk across the street, it's $50 and they have to buy it for 500 here because you're selling them status, power, importance. And so you kind of have to know what root insecurity someone has if you want to pull on their strongest lever.

Well, the world is sort of predatory, right? You go on Instagram, follow like Nature Is Metal, you go see what animals do to each other. I would say I think it is a bit foolish to see the world as you think it should be versus as it is. So I think by default you view the world as it is and then you get to decide with your agency if you want to shift it towards what you view as a better world, how you think it should operate more like. But you're not going to get very far if you don't understand human nature. If you don't understand what's going to make people move and what's going to make people behave in a certain way, I think there's a great marketer, Gary Halpert. I don't know if you ever seen this guy, but you can go watch his old school videos on YouTube. And anybody who wants to learn marketing, don't read the modern stuff, go read the guys who could sell things through direct mail, like, you know, postcard, and they would drive millions of dollars in sales. These guys understood something about human nature. And he said to a room of marketers, "Never has more money been lost than selling somebody what they should want versus what they do want." And so,

You have to meet people where they are. What do they want?

Half business advice, half just people advice, right?

Yeah, but I do think it's a false choice. So I think in many cases you can run into the scenario where option one sounds bad and option two sounds bad, and what people do is they waste all their time debating option one and two, whereas you got a very clear signal that all you need to do is make option three. Like you've correctly identified two poor options. Don't waste your time on those. That's a clear signal that you need to go create another one.

Tickle the brain stem in the right position.

Then you have this nonprofit kind of like save the world crusader who never understood what people actually wanted, could not craft a message that would resonate, didn't create products that people wanted to use, and got nowhere. Right? Okay. We don't want to do either one of those. What's the third option? And I think the third option is you marry an understanding of human psychology. Hey, people like stories. I should frame what I do in the form of a story. Hey, people really resonate when you tell them not the work that's going to be required, but the happy ending on the other side.

So you understand the human nature and then you use it towards a noble cause. To me, that's option three. And anybody who wastes their time on option one or two is like pissing their talents away, right? Like if you're noble, but you don't know how to reach people, you're pissing your talents away. If you know how to reach people, but you don't do anything noble, what are you doing? So like everybody should shoot for three. I think that's a general aspiration I think we can agree on.

ABC. Okay, this is a little framework that I think will help anybody who finds himself in a pattern where you want something and you know you're smart and you're hardworking, but you seem to overthink things. And I think overthinking is a disease. It's everywhere, it's highly transmissible also because one person's overthinking leads to another person's overthinking. So what's the cure for overthinking? And I think the cure for overthinking obviously is to simplify. How do you simplify at getting what you want in life? I call it ABC. So the common trap with most people when they want to do something is they say, "Okay, I need to know the first step, second step, third step. I need to know A, B, C, then I'll do D, then I'll do E, then I'll do F." By the time they get halfway through the alphabet, A, they're exhausted, and B, like doubt has compounded. It has multiplied. I had a little doubt about A times doubt about B times doubt about C. By the time you get to the end, you're just full of self-doubt and it's paralysis. [gasps] Here's the alternative. The alternative is you only need to know three letters in the alphabet. A, B, Z. A is where you're currently at. An honest reflection of reality. So if I'm... Let's say I want to get in great shape. Z is great shape. Z is me with my shirt off feeling confident and like enjoying looking at photos of myself and not feeling kind of like who the hell is that guy? Z is being able to run the race with my friends and not, you know, be the guy holding everybody back. Whatever your Z is. By the way, these are all personal anecdotes. So I know Z well. I speak from experience. But then you got to know A. Here's where I'm at. If you delude yourself about where you're at, you're not going to get very far either. You'll be in denial. And then all you got to know is B. What is the next incremental action that gets me towards Z. And then you repeat. Once you've done B, you got a new A and you got a new B. And Z stays the same. And you just go one foot in front of the other. The reason this works is the general advice of just take it one step at a time. What people do in their heads is they imagine all of the steps it's going to take when you tell them that, like, cool, I'll take one step at a time, but this one step doesn't get me there. I'm going to have to do all these things.

And instead if you just start to give yourself some labels ABC and if you had faith that that's true, like I believe it's true. You know, for example, my trainer always uses this analogy with me cuz he trains a lot of like, I don't know, successful Silicon Valley people types. And so, he notices patterns in that type of high achiever. And what he noticed was they're stress achievers. They do achieve, but they go, they stress the whole way. It's like zap the fun out of the whole process. It's like, what was the point of this whole thing if you kind of were stressed the entire way? You know, the journey is this long and the destination is this small. So like the vast majority of your experience was stress, brief relief, new goalpost, new stress. And so he wants to help people. He's a personal trainer for fitness, but he kind of notices these patterns. And so he said, what if you had confidence that Z would happen? Like, do you believe that Z could happen? Yeah, of course I believe it can happen. He goes, cool. Imagine walking to the corner store. So let's say you want some ice cream and the ice cream's at the corner store. Well, today you're at your house. You're not at the corner store. That's fine. What do you start doing? You start walking. And you know, I'm going to go this way. Take a right. Go straight for a little bit. Take a left at the straight street light. And then the corner store is there. So, you understand that you're not there today. You know where you want to be. You want the ice cream. But because you don't doubt you're going to get there, you just sort of focus on what's the next thing I need to do. And you don't worry about all the other stuff that you couldn't do now even if you wanted to. And what he said was like more things in life should feel like that. This analogy of like the whole walk to the corner store, I'm not stressed. I'm not worried about if it'll happen, when it'll happen, how it'll happen. All these extra questions that are not serving me on the walk. And so I found that analogy quite useful in pursuits that feel on the surface a lot more complicated than the corner store.

Okay, let's take what I do. So I have a podcast. I want to be the next big podcast. I want to have, okay, I got 30 million downloads this year. We need a hundred million next year, right? Like, whatever the goal is, some Z, some happy ending that I have my own beautiful studio and my dream guests are coming on, right? A relatable outcome that we both, you know, have pursued.

Well, what's my reality today? Today, these are the guests I reach. This is the type of show I have. This is my skill level. This is, you know, the amount of outreach that I'm doing. This is the amount of time I'm putting in to prepare. Cool. I can take an accurate view of reality and then I know what my happy ending is and it's very motivating. It pulls me towards it. I want that. And instead of beating myself up about not having it yet, I'm just going to label A, B, and Z. B, what's the next logical step? All right, 20 outreaches this week. What's the next logical step? I'm going to study Chris Williamson's intros because I think he's better at that than I am. What does he do? Oh, he doesn't do this long-winded thing. He just asks, he reads him a tweet. Oh, interesting. What does this other guy do? What does this guy do? And so you just start to focus on the parts that are in your control, the parts that generate progress. And progress equals happiness in my life. Like I just believe that to be true that any moment in life where I don't feel a sense of progress regardless of objectively how good my life is, but somebody else might say your life is amazing.

But the reason we don't feel that way is not because we're... It's because the human body is wired to feel happiness during progress. And it's just relative to wherever you're currently at. And so this is a kind of a formula for not just hitting your goals, but feeling good while you're hitting your goals, which is the trick.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is why the start of projects is so fun, partially because you don't know the pain to come. But a big part of it is because it's nonlinear. You get huge gains of momentum at the beginning, a huge acceleration from a cold start once you get going. And that feels really good.

All requests for advice are actually requests for permission. They don't want information. They want a short-term loan on courage. [laughter] Yeah, I think you probably get this a lot. People might ask for advice or in my position, I've spent a lot of my life asking people for advice. I was big on mentors and trying to get advice. And I realized that actually people don't want information. They don't want advice. They're shopping for permission. What do I mean by that? I don't know if you've ever noticed when you ask somebody for advice, you ask five people for advice. What are you really doing? Like, you're really looking for somebody to say the thing that you actually want. You're looking for somebody to confirm that you're on the right track or be like, "It's okay. Yeah, you should break up in that relationship or you should quit that job or you should do this thing." You are looking, it's like you parked in this place and you have your little parking thing. You just want somebody to validate your parking so badly. Just punch a hole through this. Tell me it's going to be okay. I just noticed this in people that very rarely is the thing that people actually want a useful new perspective to change their mind. I think more often than not, people want permission. And I don't mean that as a knock. I actually think it's a feature, not a bug, that actually what holds us back from having the things we want in life is courage. It's not intelligence. Like I think I have a tweet that I shared with you that's one of my favorite tweets which is that the world is not intelligence gated. The gates in your life don't require intelligence to break through. Like the world is courage gated. It's action gated. It's wisdom gated. Those are the true energy gated. Those are the real gates of life. We all know people who are not smarter than us but get far further ahead that have happier lives and better families and better marriages and all the things that we want in the good life. And it takes energy. It takes wisdom, choosing, you know, one path versus the other. It takes courage to go do it, to try to make a fool of yourself, to be a beginner. These are the things that it takes to actually have the things that you want. And so often what we need is not information. We just need permission to go for it. Permission to fail, permission to suck, permission to be alone, permission whatever it is, whatever the thing is in your life. And so it's actually worth asking yourself instead of asking others for advice. What permission am I seeking? If God came down from the heavens and said, "Son, it's okay. Yes, you can do that. No problem. You'll be all right. That's the way. It's the right thing to do." It's not that you're really so confused about should I go left, right, center, backwards, which way should I go? We often know in our heart which direction we're called to go towards and the reason we're not going is some version of fear. And so permission is giving yourself permission to go do it is usually the thing you need.

Well, that's the reason I share this is because once you're aware that that's the thing you want, you might realize, do I really need to go ask somebody for it or can I just give myself the permission? That doesn't mean it's not nice to be supported or get that from other people. I think we've all had moments in our lives where somebody believed more than we believed and we kind of took a short payday loan of courage from them, of their belief. Like I often ask successful people who was your first believer and they can answer like that. Oh, it was this guy, you know, he saw me. You know, I have a piano teacher right now, singing and piano teacher. And I hired him for the piano and then he's like, you want to sing? And I was like, I've wanted to sing my whole life, but no, I can't sing. He's like, who said you can't sing? I was like, nobody said I can't sing. I just can't sing. I could show you I can't sing. You want me to do that? Want me to prove that to you? And he's like, let's hear it. And I was like, oh, fork in the road. Do I really just shut this down or whatever? Let's give myself permission to look like a fool for this guy. If nothing else, to kind of rule myself out of the singing camp. So, let me prove to you how much I can't. Let me prove to... Yeah, I went in with that. So I do it and he's like, "Okay." He's like, "You could." He's like, "Yeah, there's things we could work on." He's like, "But I've made people sing who started off way worse than you." Really? I don't know if he could have told me a bag of lies, but it didn't matter. He went home and told... I found the worst singer that I've ever worked with. You wouldn't believe. And I've many times let doubt creep in along the way of the last two months. I'd be like, "Look, listen. You can just tell me if this is awful. We could just break up right now and just not do that. We can just go back to playing the piano and reading the sheet music." And so, he told me a story about his life. He's like, I grew up, he's a black guy, and he said, I grew up... I said, "But it's easy for you. You've always been singing." And he's like, come on. Are you going to do that? It's easy for you to say. And he goes, I was in... he goes, I didn't sing till I was in high school. I was like, what? He goes, yeah, actually I was afraid to sing. I thought I couldn't sing. And he's like, "Actually, I grew up in a... I'm a kid in this, you know, the city that I grew up in. Black guys like me, we play football. Singing, that's gay. You don't do that." And so he's like, "I got made fun of. I assumed I must be bad. Plus, I'm bad for even liking singing. Even worse than being bad at singing. So, I just shut it down." He's like, "Then I moved schools and I was in this empty room one day and the talent show auditions were going on and I liked the song so I started singing along but I was in the other room, practice room, like by the side just after school waiting for my ride and the choir teacher poked her head in and she was like, 'Was that you?' And he's like, 'Yeah.' And she listens to him and he's like, 'Would you tell me, would you be honest with me? Like can I sing?' And he sings and she's like, 'Who told you you can't sing?'" And then he, you know, now he's been on American Idol. He's done this incredible thing. And he needed that believer. He needed that choir teacher to poke her head in and give him permission. Yeah. You could do the thing you really want to do inside. I asked him. I go, "So did you always want to sing and then she gave you the thing?" And he goes, "It was killing me." He's like, "I didn't realize it. I just thought that's what life was." And then when I started doing it, I realized this like weight that was off me. Like he's like it was killing me actually that I wasn't doing the thing I was kind of called to do. And I think we would all... I mean, like how sad would it be if you go through life not doing what you're called to do because you're afraid. Of course there's nothing else. There's literally nothing else. That is the only reason you don't do things. Whatever you say, if you just ask why, why, why, afraid of failure, and then you ask why one more time. What happens if you fail? What's so bad about failure? [gasps] Underneath all that is a fear that I'm not enough. I won't be loved. Nobody says that part out loud, but it's the true part underneath the fear of failure. And then we stack all kinds of fancy words on top like, right, like stress is a fancy word for fear. What the fuck are you stressed about? What do you stress about? It's fear. Fear that, you know, if you have stress, it's a code word for fear. If you have anxiety, it's a code word for fear. It's just fancy. [laughter] Procrastination. It's a code word for fear. What are you waiting on? Why are you worried? Why are you afraid of doing it? Fear. Fear. And so, it's normal. Everybody has it.

It's interesting to think about courage. I had this conversation with Jocko that he says courage is not not feeling fear. Courage is feeling fear and then doing it in any case.

Yeah. You never say someone's courageous for taking the sip. Why? Cuz they weren't [laughter] there was nothing. They weren't at risk. There was nothing on the line. They didn't perceive they were at risk doing it. Now, let's say I had never had a sip of this before in my life. And you knew that. And you knew that I actually had this weird condition where I was afraid of this. You might be proud of me for taking that sip. It's the same action. But it's, you know, what's a person's internal state. And like I'm a dad and so you learn these truths even more and you feel like the pride when your kid wins in this way. Like my son would never go in to like we would like sign him up for all these classes like oh go try jiu-jitsu, go try tennis, go try basketball. But he's really scared to go in and I think it's common like kids you're with your parent walking up and it's like let go of my hand, go in. Here's a stranger and a bunch of kids that you know just that's not what he was used to. He was like born during COVID and stuff like that, you know. So he was always scared to do it and it frustrated the hell out of me. It's like and I think it's probably normal to do this where it's like ah I drove you here. We paid for this. You did this last time. I've been going in there the last three times with you making a fool of myself. It's not allowed. The teacher emailed us saying, "Can the parents please stay outside." He doesn't know any of this. He doesn't know what email is, [laughter] right? But I'm like, that's my internal state. Whereas his internal state is just like, I don't know what the hell's going on. I'm afraid to go in here. I'd rather stay with my parents.

And so one day I took a different approach. I was like, instead of getting frustrated with my son and being a shitty dad, let me... what does he need right now? Okay. What does he need? And I told him, I was like, "Look, I actually used to be afraid. I used to go to gymnastics class and cry all the time cuz my mom has told me that." I was like, "It's super common." And when I told him, I said, "Hey, like you know, do you feel scared? Sometimes I do. I feel it like right here." And he's like, "Yeah." And I'm like, "That's okay." And sometimes like today, sometimes the fear wins. Like we have courage here in our heart and then we got fear right here in our stomach and they fight and he likes Pokemon. He likes fighting. He likes any animals fighting. He likes anything fighting. So I'm like they fight and sometimes the fear wins, right? That happens. Sometimes Charizard beats Pikachu. That's what happens. Today maybe the fear won and we'll sit here outside. We'll watch this and we'll hang out and next time maybe courage can win. Maybe bravery can win. And so I say this to him. I still want him to go in right there. He just lets fear win and I was like, "Okay, whatever." Four weeks later, we go back to that class and he's three times in a row hasn't gotten in, but I'm like, "Okay, whatever. Still go." He goes in, I'm like, "Wow, that was amazing." He comes out like, "I'm so proud of you." And he just says, he goes, "I didn't want to let the fear win today." And I'm like, "Put me in the Dad Hall of Fame right now." [laughter] DID YOU... I TOLD HIM THAT A MONTH AGO. I FORGOT ABOUT IT. He remembered it. He brought it back. I'm writing a book, you know, like so that's how I felt. But when you see it in your kids, it's obviously just like a little tiny metaphor for like your own things, you know, in life. And now I'm like, am I letting the fear win here or am I... you know, I think we could all use a little bit of that.

The single thing holding most 20-year-olds back is their hometown. Life is like jiu-jitsu. Position before submission. Even a small seed can grow if put in the right soil.

Yeah, the most impactful thing I did in my life was I moved to San Francisco. I wanted to be a successful entrepreneur [gasps] and I was pretty dumb about a lot of things, but at least part of my kind of caveman way of thinking was go there, right? Like if they go there, I go there, right? Like if everybody smart is going there and that's where all the companies are built, maybe I should just go there and see what's up, what's in the water. And I think that moving is an extremely underrated thing that we like to attribute most of the kind of successes in our life to our personal attributes and decisions and all this stuff. And I was of our own making and we, you know, we think we're this beautiful flower and we forget about the soil. And the soil matters a lot, you know. There's a phrase in business which is that when a great founder meets a bad market, only one of them retains their reputation. It's the bad market. And so you would always, even if you think you're a great founder, you would always rather be in a great market. And same thing for life. Like you want to be in great soil. It is far easier to succeed in great soil. And we feel an attachment to the familiar, you know, where you grew up, your hometown, your friends, your family, your job, whatever it is that's keeping you where you happen to grow up. Like if you zoomed out and, you know, it was just like life just said, "Hey, choose the best place for you." Probably wouldn't choose, you know, this random spot in Kansas, you know, Kansas, but you're already there. And inertia is a very powerful force. You know, objects in motion. You will stay where you are. Even if it wasn't the right thing for you. And so I think this is kind of my advice to everyone in their 20s. It's like look, I don't know what you should do, but here's what I do know. Whatever you have an interest in, you should go move to the white hot center of wherever that is. Because you will be around other people who are very motivating to you. Proximity is power. Being near, very close, literally like living in the same house ideally with other people who have similar dreams and passions as you is going to do more for you than any book, than any podcast, than anything that you could do. It's the single greatest variable you can change in your life. And so I think there's probably a lot of people whose life would go very differently if they just moved. I remember when I moved to San Francisco and it's very shocking sort of realization. The first day I get there I don't have like a place to go. So I just go to this coffee shop. I sit in the coffee shop all day because I'm just like with my suitcase and the table next to me was like a cliche San Francisco thing was like founder, investor, founder's like peptides for dogs and like, you know, 30 minutes later it's like the next, you know, brain-dead idea after like terrible idea after terrible idea and the investor sitting there listening and I'm just listening. I'm like wow this is what a bizarre place and what I realized was in San Francisco it's very normal to be weird about ideas, about business, about your career. That night I went to an event and there's a guy who worked at JP Morgan Chase and he was at this like startup event and he was introducing himself shamefully. He was like, I work at JP Morgan which normally anywhere else it's a badge of prestige and he was like but I'm going to leave soon. He's like you immediately had to hedge. He was like I just my cousin asked me to be there and but I got my own idea. I got my own startup. It's low status to be at JP Morgan in San Francisco. It's high status to be working on peptides for dogs and to have a crazy idea that you're chasing. So simply by moving to a place where status is given for chasing a startup idea and status is revoked for working at big corp was so opposite to anything else I'd ever experienced where before I was the weird cat for not having a job, being unemployed and going to try to do it.

Well, I was in Australia before I went to San Francisco, but I moved around a lot. So Houston, Denver, Australia, those are the places I was at. And in all those places, normal was reversed. And so I think it's extremely underrated to move. I mean, you moved. Did you experience that or...

Am I a bad note?

Yeah. First of all, I got to give you slam poetry snaps for the piano chord analogy. I love that. I mean, that is so beautifully said. And I also think there's a seasonal component to it. Like maybe there's a season of your life... bingo.

Where that's the thing to pursue. Maybe there's going to be another season of your life where it actually is about a different set of values and priorities. And if you feel you're in that season or you feel called, answer the call. I think that's the summary of the whole thing: have the courage, give you permission to go answer the call. And often that can require moving, or moving can be a tremendous accelerant in answering that call.

Well, what I like about that is you're going to get your calories from something. So you're going to have fuel in the tank to do something. If you choose that the fuel is discipline, and you make — you know, Goggins makes that his identity, right? Some people make that identity. They take great pride in that, and so they know that way of winning, and they know that way of living, and they know that fuel. And other people use inspiration and motivation, and they can be pulled towards things and they follow that. And then you have obsession. These are all just calories, and just like in food, you can get protein and you can have some calories from clean sources. You can have calories from some sources that are going to have some side effects and some long-term consequences. You can have some things that are sustainable and some things that are not sustainable. And so you get to choose which fuels you're going to use, clean or dirty, right? Like sustainable or unsustainable. Which ones are you going to do? I like the framing of obsession there. I also always say this thing: inspiration is like an avocado. It's very perishable. It's going to go brown, you know, within a few days. And so once you trust yourself enough to follow it, even if you don't know where it leads, that is a muscle and a habit, it's a discipline, it's a way of living that you can just choose to do or not do, in the same way some people sit upright, some people slouch. And some people just say, look, I will follow something even if I don't know where it leads. The famous example of this is the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford. You know this one well or you haven't seen it? Shocking. Steve Jobs gives the commencement speech at Stanford and his message is — he tells the story of his life and he goes, you know, I came to this small college, not Stanford, you know, he went to — I forgot where he went, some small college. And he goes, you know, he was an orphan boy, right? He didn't grow up in a very type-A high-achiever thing, even though Steve Jobs achieved incredible things in his life. And his thing was he followed obsession. And so he goes, I got to college and I took a class in calligraphy that everybody else was like, 'What are you going to do with that? What's the point of that?' He's like, 'The point is I'm interested in it.' And so he goes and he takes it and he falls in love with calligraphy and fonts and scripts and he learns the difference between serif and non-serif. And so he learns all this, the beauty that is type. And guess what? When they build the Mac, he's the first — you know, Steve Jobs's gift is that he brought beauty and art into technology in a way that nobody else had really done before. He built beautiful, simple products. And so when the Mac launches, they were the only ones who took the care to launch with different fonts that you could choose that would look beautiful when you typed, that would change the way people felt when they did this. And it made the Macintosh more successful because they had that. And he goes, you can't connect the dots looking forward. Now I can say it's because I took that class and I learned all the things and then when I started Apple, I knew that and I knew the guy and I hired the guy. I couldn't have known that then. So you cannot connect the dots in life looking forwards, only backwards. Only in retrospect does it make sense how it all connected. So then if that's true, what do you do? You make every dot as bold as you can so that it's going to be easy to see and easy to connect to. You have a real vivid dot there that might connect in some future way. How do you get a vivid dot? It's when you do the things that are your genuine interest, your genuine obsession, and you do them full-heartedly despite not knowing if and when this might ever lead to anything. And I think that's a way of living that is hard for highly analytical people because we like windows, not doors. We like to see through the other side and know what's there.

Certainty. Yeah. I remember being at a dinner with a friend. We had this guy who was the youngest venture capitalist in San Francisco, and my friend, who's kind of like my mentor, was at dinner with us. And he goes, you know, the problem with you — he's telling the young guy — he goes, you only want to open windows, never doors. And the guy's like, what? He goes, like everything you say is only 'I'll do this because I know it'll lead to this.' Well, like a lot of life is doors. You don't know what's on the other side. You just got to go knock. Sometimes nobody answers. Sometimes it opens up. Sometimes it's not what you want on the other side. But you got to go do that enough times to create enough surface area of luck and enough things to happen where fortune will fall your way. And you're so worried about these — you're so focused on window opportunities that you are shortchanging your own success in life. And I was like, wow, that's — and so I started to notice that, like, where am I really gravitating towards windows, and what's a door that I might be able to go knock on or open, knowing that maybe there's nothing, maybe there's the boogeyman on the other side, I'm not sure, but if I do it enough, this will fall my way.

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This is a story I got obsessed with. Okay, so here's the interesting way that this came into my life. I recently sold a company, and as one does when you achieve what you want in life, you get lost and you don't know what to do. And so...