Do you ever think that people in past generations had more fulfilling lives? Not better, just more fulfilling. I believe we're living in the greatest period of history yet and, at the same time, believe we're the most lost we've ever been. Life is simpler the further back you go (and will only get more complicated). You grew up around maybe 100 people, with 4-5 careers to choose from, and 5-6 partners to settle down with. Now compare that to growing up today.
There are more jobs to choose, more partners to pick from, more places to live, more tv shows to watch, more vacations to have, more things to buy, more books to read, more music to listen to, more places to eat (I’ve already opened up the Uber Eats app once this week and was so overwhelmed by decisions I closed it), more hobbies to have, more people to “connect with” than ever before.
Up until now, most of my life has been characterized by indecision that leads to inaction and I don't think I'm alone. In fact, most of my best decisions and memories are ones of impulse. Ones where for once in my life I didn't overthink.
Being 25 and having no idea what's next is both exciting and anxiety inducing. I was reading this tweet from Sahil Bloom this morning that sparked the idea for this post.
You'll literally never know what you want to be when you grow up. The idea that you should know what you want to do with your life by the time you are 20 is one of the worst lies we are told. I spent years stressing out over my lack of a clearly defined path...
I'd always thought the titans of industry were ones who knew what they wanted and spent their lives getting it. That might be true sometimes, but I think the opposite happens more often than not. I don't have any data to back it up, but I can imagine a lot of people in their 40s and 50s didn't picture their current job to be what it currently is when they were in their 20s. Youtubers, producers, day-traders, Etsy sellers, web designers, and authors didn't sit down one day and decide to be those things. They made something for their friend or for themself and it took off from there. Many highly successful fiction novels started with someone writing a story for their child or for fun.
Naval has this quote in his Almanack,
"Then, there’s luck through persistence, hard work, hustle, and motion. This is when you’re running around creating opportunities. You’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lot to stir things up. It’s almost like mixing a petri dish or mixing a bunch of reagents and seeing what combines. You’re just generating enough force, hustle, and energy for luck to find you."
How do we generate force and stir things up? Action. Those people I listed in the previous paragraph put something out into the universe and it caused a reaction that snowballed into a career. People don’t go viral by watching or consuming. They get “lucky” from one of their thousands of previous actions. They “stir the petri dish”.
Going back to Sahil's tweet, he finishes the thought by saying:
"But then I realized that most hyper-successful people still have no idea what they want to do. They just have a bias for action that has allowed them to capitalize on opportunities and compound effectively over time. If you have a bias for action, you'll always be fine."
It's exactly what Naval is saying, if you bias toward action you'll always have opportunities and these will compound over a lifetime. Imagine how much different your life would look like if you default to take action instead of overthinking. How much more exciting would your life be if you did this? It would be like being a kid again. You want to go play in the mud you do it. You don't think about how much time it's going to take to get the mud out of your clothes. The day we started overthinking was the day we became adults.
These are the people I admire and enjoy being around, the people in motion. The people doing things, not to make a career or become famous, but merely to do them. Paradoxically, this is how you make a career or become famous. Constant compounded action. Life is for living, not just existing. Existing = consuming. Living = doing.
Now there's something to be said for being responsible. Your life can go downhill quick if you're irresponsibly impulsive. What I’m referring to are the decisions that won't matter in 10 years and that includes more than you might think.
Love this man. I've always tried to live by the idea of "Consume<Create" and this post is a great articulation of that thought. Keep it up!