Make Room For What You Were Gonna Do Anyway
As our screens and inboxes are flooded with countless people's opinions all day, every day, there's an increasing belief that someone has figured out the right way to do something, and therefore it must be the way that you do that thing as well. For example, just this week, I've been told
- What morning routine I need to be successful.
- What scheduling tips it takes to be a billionaire.
- The correct emailing cadence to close the deal 100% of the time.
- How to build this newsletter faster.
- How to get 100,000 followers on Instagram.
- Why I'm destined to be a best selling author.
While the person sharing those ideas might have done those things, I think with a little investigation, they're likely overselling it, and a lot of those things were things that they were just predisposed to do. It just happened that their zone of genius was very useful for the trends of the past few years.
But whenever a treasure map is for sale, the treasure is no longer there.
The only treasure that will always be there and will always be worth searching for is the treasure of finding success your way. No one else in the world can beat you to it. And that success lies in knowing yourself so well that you find being yourself to be the competitive advantage that no ones else has.
We all have things that we uniquely do without thinking about it to much. There are things that we were going to do anyway that become our secret sauce!
I've been able to build my Gentlemen's Dinner community because I wanted to host more and challenge myself to elevate my culinary skills. I was going to eat and drink with friends anyway, so it was a very natural thing that required me to just do what I was going to do anyway, on purpose.
Something that I would never do is pitch my startup ideas while on a run.
But Nihal Mehta, one of my favorite VCs in NYC, was gonna do that anyway, and now Pitch and Run NYC happens twice a week, 52 weeks a year, rain or shine. If you've got an idea and want to pitch VCs, and you can have a conversation while running, then you can find them on the West Side Highway 104 times a year.
In a world where everything can be known has been recorded and shared, all of the ideas out there will be shared by their originator as truth. And for them, it is truth. It is their lived experience that the thing they are sharing worked. And while sometimes you can imagine it working for you, view it more as inspiration and a data point for you to find what works best for you and for your success story.
I am a morning person and love nothing more than to have a couple hours before anyone else is awake to read and write and let the morning take me where I need it to go.
I am not a night owl. I don't do great work after dinner.
I know that doing work outside of the 9 to 5 window is required from time to time when it is time to be out of balance to achieve an outsized return - but I know that that that for me is going to be an early morning sprint, not an all-nighter.
I was gonna wake up early anyway.
As Matt Kahn said, " Despite how open, peaceful, and loving we attempt to be, we can only meet others as deeply as we have met yourselves."
My friend and former member of the Navy SEALs, Curt Cronin calls this our "Thor's Hammer" - the thing that is light for you but heavy for others. What can you pick up with ease in service of others and a shared future that surprises others?
What were you gonna do anyway that gives you an excuse to invite one other person to join you? What if that became your secret weapon? What if we were all living from a place of individual greatness in service of others because we all knew what superpower was ours to share with the world?
I'll keep doing my part to make that future and hope you will join me.
My Soundtrack For The Past Week
Podcast That Rocked My Galaxy
Amazing episode with Luis Elizondo, the former head of AATIP, the U.S. Defense Department’s program for investigating UFOs (now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP), about why he and so many other scientists, researchers, and people working in military intelligence claim that we are in contact with non-human superintelligence and how the government has been hiding it for nearly a century.
Snipet From The Podcast
(TL;DR - We know nothing about our universe and would do well to keep an open mind about what we think we do know.)
"...the fact that 15 a photon of light is really at the universal speed limit of 186,000 miles per second. That is the speed of light. Now, what does that mean? Well, that means a photon of light can travel around the earth, the entire earth, seven and a half times in one second, right? So that's very fast. But when you're talking about the universal scale, you're right, the vastness is almost incomprehensible to the human mind.
And so what do I mean by that? If you talk to scientists now, a lot of them will say that the universal horizon, where the farthest we can see light is roughly 13.9 billion light years in any direction. So we kind of sit in the middle and we can look all around us and see 13.9 billion light years. Now, if light travels seven and a half times around the earth in a second, imagine how far it can go in a year. And now imagine how far it can go in 13.9 billion years.
Now that is only 10% of the actual size of the universe that scientists now believe exists. So that means from end to end, you're now talking about a universe that's roughly 100 billion light years across, possibly even much bigger. So as huge and vast as that is, and let's put that on the backdrop of grains of sand, there are more stars in the observable universe, right? This 13.9 billion years horizon than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in all the world. So think about it. It is an enormously huge size.
Now, as crazy and hard as that is to conceptualize the vastness of our universe if you compare a single hydrogen atom, Avogadro's number one times 10 to the negative with a bunch of zeros, that atom is roughly the same order of scale and magnitude to us as we are to the universe. Meaning there is an entire cosmos, there's an entire universe in scale inside every human being as there is outside. And we kind of sit roughly right in the middle of that scale, that universal scale between sizes.
And we as humans can only interact with one order of magnitude up or down, roughly. Otherwise, the universe is simply too big or it's too small. We just can't interact with it. Another piece of this issue here is not just the scale of the universe, but it's also the way we interpret data. We have five fundamental senses as humans that we use to interpret nature. And that is, if you can't touch it, taste it, hear it, smell it, et cetera, it's beyond our ability to sense. And yet, this simple little device here we call a cell phone, if you were to have cell phone vision, you would see an entire different reality around you. You would see in WiFi, you would see in GPS, you'd see in G5. It'd be like us looking at a night sky where I live in Wyoming with a naked eye and marveling how beautiful it is. Now, look at that same portion of the sky with the radio telescope. You will see an entirely different reality around you. You'll see in the infrared spectrum, you'll see in the microwave, and in the ultraviolet spectrum, and that will allow you to see nebula and things that the human eye can't pick up.
So, by those two definitions, the scale of the universe and our limitations in perception, we only perceive .0000001% of reality.
So is it possible when people say, "Well, these things are from outer space. How can they get here?" Maybe they're not from outer space. Maybe they're from here all along. They've been here all along. Maybe they're from underwater. Maybe they've been here, and we're now at the point where, technologically, we can interact with them. Now people say, "Oh, that's hogwash."
But is it really? Because I went to school and I learned the reality that if you look at homo sapiens-sapiens as a modern species, a lot of scientists will speculate that we've been around for the last 100 to 200,000 years in modern form. So that's homo sapiens-sapiens.
It's only been the last 2000 years, thanks to the Greeks, that introduced the notion that there are only two types of life forms on this planet. And either you are a plant, or you are an animal, and that's it. And it wasn't until the Renaissance in the days of enlightenment that we realized there's this other dominant life form that's been on this planet all along that's neither plant nor animal, and that is the world of fungus. And so we pat ourselves on the shoulder and say, "Oh, that's great." And it wasn't for the last 120 years.
Now, think about this. If you look at a 24-hour clock of 200,000 years and say that's 24 hours on a clock, it's only been in the last three seconds of our existence towards midnight that we actually discovered the true dominant life form on this planet, the true kingdom of life that has dominant. In fact, it's been here longer than anybody else and anything else. If you get all the biomass from every plant and all the biomass from every animal and all the biomass of every fungus and add it all together, it still does not add up to the biomass of this hidden, true alpha life form on this planet. And that wasn't until we could curve glass, look through a little metal tube, and famously shout, "Little beasties, little beasties," did we realize and discover the world of microorganisms that live inside of every single one of us. They live on the skin of the ISS Space Station. They live miles underneath the Arctic ice, and we just discovered the true life form on this planet just now.
So is it possible these things have always been here? Is it possible things can be from underwater? Is it possible things are from outer space? Is it possibly things can be interdimensional? All these are potential options that I've always told people all options have to stay on the table until they're no longer on the table. And so we have to stop thinking in a very linear form. I think my suggestion is people say, "Well, they're from outer space." Well, could be. It could be from outer space, inner space, or frankly, the space in between.
We don't know yet. And I think that's important to keep an open mind."
