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Here are brutally honest truths
that will give you an unfair advantage.
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I'm Alex Samosi,
the founder of Acquisition.
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Com.
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It's a portfolio of companies
that generate hundreds of millions of
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dollars in revenue per year in aggregate.
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A lot of my success in business
has come from finding
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and exploiting unfair advantages.
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Hopefully, this video
helps you do the same.
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Let's start with number one,
pain is the price of progress.
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The fastest growth periods
are often the most miserable.
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If you want to progress, get used to pain.
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If you think about what actually occurs
when you grow, you stretch
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past your point of comfort.
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Even if you're growing a muscle, you
stretch, you break it down, it's painful.
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If you have growing pains, like as a kid,
it's like you grew too fast and your
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joints are in a lot of pain.
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If you're a company and you expand,
this is technically supposed to be good
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stuff, but it doesn't
make it any less painful.
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Elite athletes don't get
stronger during easy workouts.
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If we want progress, we must accept
the price of pain that's attached to it.
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You cannot both want progress
and live an easy life.
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These two things conflict.
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Number two, happy but not satisfied.
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Let me explain this.
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You're allowed to be happy before you
hit your goal, just not satisfied.
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There's a very big difference between
being content with your life,
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content with your work, and complacent,
meaning you're not going
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to take any more action.
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There's this great Haitian proverb, which
is, behind mountains are more mountains.
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It's like after every peak,
you can just see more peaks ahead of you.
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The work works on you
more than you work on it.
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For me, I remember I had a year that I
basically went in retirement trying
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to figure out what I wanted to do.
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The thesis that I came out with was
that hard work is the goal.
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The fact that there's something
that happens as a result of hard work
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is really just a secondary effect.
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It's a consequence.
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But the goal is the work itself.
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I had a friend this morning who messaged
me and they're like,
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Why do you still work?
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I was like, Because it's
the thing that I enjoy doing most.
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When I looked back on my life,
when I didn't work,
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I was bored and felt depressed.
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When I do work, I am stressed But I do
have moments that I really enjoy as well.
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I took this as a a foundational truth
for me, not for everyone,
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that there is misery on both sides, so I
might as well be productive and useful.
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The only way to be productive and useful
is to be happy about the process but not
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satisfied so you can continue
to provide value to the world.
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Now, number three, ignore critiques.
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Now, this is probably easy to say,
hard to do.
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Let me break this down a little bit more.
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So friendly reminder that most people are
fat, poor, pansies,
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don't listen to them when they try
to deter you from doing
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whatever it takes to succeed.
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So the average person will
always try to keep you average.
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It makes sense
that if you want to be extraordinary,
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you will do things that an ordinary
person would see as extra.
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A lot of people, and this is the really
hard part that I had to come to terms
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with, is that a lot of people
want to see you fail because it justifies
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the risk that they chose not to take.
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We always have to think about listening
to the people who are closest
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to our goals, not closest to us.
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If you want a more violent version
of this, your critics
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are going to eventually die,
and their opinion isn't going to matter
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then, which means it probably
also doesn't matter now.
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So might as well do what
you wanted to do originally.
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Number four,
selective product Productivity.
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Productivity comes from all
the things that you choose not to do.
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I'm going to define two more terms
for you because I think it's important.
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I see commitment as
the elimination of alternatives.
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If I get married,
then I eliminate all alternatives
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to the person that I'm married to.
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That is commitment,
which is very similar to focus.
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Focus, if you think of the hypothetical
extreme of focus, is that somebody
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does literally nothing but one thing.
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They don't eat, they don't sleep,
they would eventually die,
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but they would be 100% focused
during the time that they were alive.
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Obviously, we have to put
a couple of things in.
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You have to eat food, you have to sleep.
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But the most focused person does
the fewest things outside
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of the thing they're focused on.
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Focus is about the number
of things that you say no to.
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Having this framework work is,
in my opinion,
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more powerful for productivity
than just about anything else.
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People are always trying to figure out
productivity hacks,
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but they want to add things to their lives
to become more productive,
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which is completely counter
to what focus even means.
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It's getting rid of everything that's
not the thing is how you focus.
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Now, part of that also
means environmentally.
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If you have a window that you look outside
of, and you've got people who walk past
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your office,
and people can knock on the door,
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or you've got Slack notifications,
of course, you're not focused because
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all of those things are not the work.
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I'm going to give you an analogy here.
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Imagine there's a wall
that you have to get over.
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You have to get a critical
mass to get above this wall.
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And so you start putting up these ladders
against the wall to try
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and climb over the wall.
This should make some sense.
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But as you try to build up the little
rungs of the ladder,
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so you put four rungs up.
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Well, you're not going to get the critical
mass required to get over the pump
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to actually get the success you want.
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But the idea, the fallacy is that, Oh,
I'll just do all three or four of these
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four of these things
and I'll see which one works.
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When the reality is that any of them work,
but none of them will work
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unless you work on one.
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We have to take these four rungs
that we're able to build
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and say, You know what?
We're not going to do that.
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We're going to put that rung here
because I'm going to take that time.
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Then I'm putting from I got
a second opportunity to put it here.
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I'm going to take this
rung and put it right here.
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Then I'm going to take this rung,
and what do you know?
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I can get over this hump on top,
and I can get to the other side
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of the wall, which, of course,
is where all the money and all
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the happiness and all
the girls with beautiful hair.
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Look at this beautiful hair.
This beautiful hair.
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Now, she looks like a bug.
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Anyways.
Hold on a minute.
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There you go.
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What's crazy is that this literally
happens at all levels of business.
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People who are starting out,
trying to start five things, people
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who are at their second or fifth year.
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I talked to a guy last night who has
a really good business,
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really good margin, 50% margins,
has great revenue retention.
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He was in cybersecurity.
People stay with him.
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People pay.
He has no problem getting customers.
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He has no problem delivering them.
I was like, What's the problem?
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He's like, Me.
He said, I just I get bored.
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He's like, I just want
to start more things.
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I'm like, Yeah, you got to stop that.
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The thing is, think about how
much more successful you'd be.
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So zoom all the way out.
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Think of somebody who gets better every
single year and works
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on the same project for 20 years.
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You'd be like, My God,
that guy's probably really fucking good.
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What's interesting about this is that it
doesn't matter what project
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the person works on.
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You do 20 years of reps and you do
nothing else, you're going to be good.
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If you know that That's a fact.
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That's a certainty that you're going
to be good with 20 years of practice.
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Then the objective is to just get 20 years
of practice in one
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thing and stick with it.
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So your plans aren't working
because the plans are wrong.
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The plans aren't working because
you're not working on the plan.
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The hard part about the plan is not
creating the plan or
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even following the plan.
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It's sticking with the plan.
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That's the hard part.
All right.
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Number five, fear versus regret.
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Change is scary, but so is regret.
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The life you live depends
on the one you fear most.
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The more successful version
of yourself also has fear.
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It's that your fear of regret is
greater than your fear of rejection.
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Think about that for a second.
I'm going to say it one more time.
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Your fear of regret must supersede,
must be bigger, must be greater
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than your fear of rejection.
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I remember when I quit my management
consulting job, which took me six months.
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I'm not saying this from a pedestal.
It took me six months.
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I decided I wanted to quit.
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It took me six Six months
before I actually quit.
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By the way, you can measure how powerful
someone is by the distance between when
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they make a decision
and what happens in reality.
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If you want to feel impotent,
then take as long as you possibly can
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between when you make a decision
and when you act on that decision.
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Now, for me, it was six months.
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All I did was I called
my friends up every night.
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I was like, I'm going to quit my job.
I'm going to start a business.
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We talk every night,
literally every night,
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and I would be pacing in my condo like,
I'm going to do it.
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I wouldn't do it.
I was too afraid.
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I was too much of a scaredy cat.
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But the thing that got me
over the hump was this.
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Number one,
I knew that when I looked back on my life,
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if I never took the jump,
I would have been ashamed of myself,
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and I would have felt like I was a pansy.
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I was like, I can't die a panse.
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I have to be able to make a jump.
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Number two, I played out plan B,
which is, okay, let's say
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I actually completely fail.
What happens?
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I was like, Well,
I'm not really going to be homeless.
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I know enough people that I can get food.
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I was like, okay, so I'll
probably just couch surf.
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I'd have a little bit of shame.
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But at the end of the day,
what would I really do?
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Well, I could always apply to get the job
that I I had back,
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or I could just go to another place
with an experience or a story that would
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set me up for something cooler later.
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All of a sudden, I was like, Wait,
so my plan B is that I just have a cool
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experience that I could talk about at a
job interview or to go to business school?
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Okay, that doesn't
actually sound that bad.
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There was this huge amorphous fear.
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But I've just noticed in my life
that fear only exists in the vague.
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It doesn't exist in the specific.
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If you're afraid of something, try
and break it into pieces and spell it out.
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Play out the next two or three steps.
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Because all of a sudden,
if you're in the developed Western world,
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the downside risk is not really real.
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The only real downside risk is
the opinions of other people who will say
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that you failed, who you
don't care about anyways.
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But you think you're going to die,
but you're not.
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You're just going to learn some stuff,
and you'll be like, Oh, maybe next time
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I'm not going to make that mistake.
That's it.
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I say this, and it's easy for me to say,
but it took me six months
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to figure this out.
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But I do remember my final straw was
the realization that I had at the time,
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no girlfriend, no kids,
and I had no real financial
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responsibilities besides eating
and having a place to live.
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I said, If I can't make the decision now
because it feels too risky,
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I will never be able to make the decision.
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Because if other people rely on me...
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Now, some you, and you're like, Well,
Alex, I've got people who rely on me.
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Yeah, I would say that it makes it harder.
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And what now?
Harder and so what?
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But for me, that was the thing
that got me over the hook.
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It was like, If I.
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