TL;DR
This was never meant for public consumption. I wrote it for my brother, and have only ever shared it with two people. My friend Zigi, who has encouraged me to share so many other things that I had sheleved, swore that this one deserved to be on this blog: and so in listening to him, I put it here. I always think of the fact that it took the convincing of C.S. Lewis for J.R.R Tolkein to publish The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. We need friends in our lives that protect us from our inner voices, and I am grateful to Zigi for being such a friend to me. I hope you find this helpful.
I was going to work today and I was thinking about certain things. These are the hard years, and they are hard for everyone; you are not particularly disadvantaged, and the universe does not hate you.
Chances that you will outsmart the huge pool of people like you that are still looking to land that dream opportunity and get a head start are small. When you think of the country in which you are born, the opportunities that are immediately open to you and other constraints, the chances are really slim. Yet it is still worth competing, you never know, you might be one of a few who ride the rare wave to realizing the slim chances. Beating the competition by being super smart and hardworking is a sure but difficult strategy to pull out.
There is one strategy that can complement the one above and greatly increase your chances of winning. That is staying in the game. By all means, stay in the game! And you stay in the game by staying healthy and by learning forever. The reason why staying in the game works is that competition is toughest at the bottom, and time and only a meaningful amount of effort can move you from the bottom of the pyramid to the top. Think of it, almost no big company will pick a CEO that is 30 years old, but many companies will pick a CEO that is 50 years old. Yet at the same time, before many people reach the age of 50, they have given up on playing the game and become comfortable; they have accepted their “fate”. More people are ruled out by illness, by falling prey to their passions, and all other things that come with age. Come to think of it, what if by the age of 50, you are still sharp and able to play the game? Now there are way less people competing for the same things with you, and having stayed in the game can suddenly become an advantage.
To stay in the game, you have to stay holistically healthy. Simple. Just watch what you eat, watch the information you consume, the principles that guide your life, and don’t say like most people that you only live once. If you take two 25 year old people, one who works out and one who doesn’t, they will most likely look the same. But for two 60 year old people, chances are very high that the one who has been working out since 25 looks very different in a good way. Good things done today don’t necessarily make sense immediately, but they eventually do. Always remember that in life you know your losers before your winners, and only time tells.
To stay in the game, you also have to feed your mind. The structure of a formal education has deceived us to think that education happens within four walls. That is the greatest lie in the world! When we all finish school, we can be hired for very similar positions and our performance will most likely be similar. But the person who ends up becoming CEO, is no longer just counting on a degree they got 15 years ago. They differentiated themselves by learning away from the pack.
These things are hard. And made harder by the fact that we need to work in some way to sustain ourselves, and sometimes we don’t find good environments that allow us the structure to stay in the game in the way we imagine.
One way to solve this is to be boring! Be Boring! Be the one who works at a boring job that does not leave you dead at night but just pays the bills, that way you can work on your dreams in the night; be the one who doesn’t go to the parties, who seems to not have a life; be the one who obsesses over details and processes, because at the highest levels, only the people with the best systems win.
I heard someone asking one of my friends why they read the news and other boring things. I agree with them, it looks like doing a lot now, at this age. But think of age 50. The person who has been doing that for 30 years is performing at a level that will beat the imagination of someone who is about to start. And while it is at age 50 that it matters, you cannot start at age 50.
Stay in the game, and play the long game. We are like a bunch of gold miners, each with a shovel. At the top, everyone starts with a sharp shovel, but there are too many of us at the start and there is no gold. Dig as hard as you can, the joint challenges of wadding off other diggers and the little likelihood that gold is at the top make the chances if making a fortune very slim. But time and fate collectively lower all of us, deeper into the earth, and while some abandon ship and leave the mine, the likelihood of striking a fortune increases with time. If you leave the mine, it is clearly over for you. And if you stay in the mine, but never eat to regain strength or sharpen your shovel, then when we finally get to gold, you will be unable to dig. Yet staying in the mine has no guarantee that we will find gold; so you have to love being in the mine, and love it so much that if gold never comes, you must have had fun digging, eating, and sharpening your shovel.
Stay in the game!