Chasing Success vs True Fulfilment - Nat Eliason

some of the best parts of life I think are things that you cannot appreciate or understand until you experience them I call these like known costs with unknowable Benefits I wish I focused Less on work I wish I spent more time with my family you basically never here I wish I had had fewer kids I wish I had spent more time on work I wish I had spent less time with my partner you have to deliberately try to overcome your short-term bias if everybody on an executive team agrees with a decision you shouldn't do it because it means that you haven't fully explored the risks or the possible downsides you need to like cancel the meeting everybody go off for a day or two think about what you're missing there and then come back and try to present what the like Devil's Advocate is for it oh by the way before we get into this episode I would love to tell you a little bit about life notes now Life notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers and it contains my notes from life so notes from books that I've read podcasts I'm listening to conversations I'm having and experiences I'm having in work and in life and around once a week I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers so if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning almost in real time as I'm learning it you might like to subscribe there is a link down in the show notes or in the video description nowon welcome to the podcast how you doing I'm doing great thanks for having me on um so you have a book coming out soon crypto confidential which is very exciting uh but I don't really talk much about crypto stuff but I really love your General Life advis stuff and I've been following you on the internet since like I don't know 2017 or something absurd like that since your SEO days um for people who might not be familiar with your story can we get a quick like backstory and how did you end up writing a book about crypto yeah totally so when I you know when I was in college I wasn't much of a student I really didn't like classes or learning that way and I wasn't particularly excited about the job prospects that were common for people with like my kind of background it was a lot of people going into Consulting banking uh some people going into programming but a lot of you know go to New York and worked at a a big firm and I tried doing an internship that hated it and during the internship decided this just wasn't for me and so I started literally hiding in the back corner of the office I like moved all my desk stuff over there and I would come in a little bit early I would bang out all of my work for the day in two hours and then I would spend the rest of the day reading books about Entre R preneurship and like taking notes of them and everything and this was back in 2013 so I was just sitting back there in the corner I had the Kindle app installed on my work computer which they never minded thankfully and I was just I mean I was mainlining business books right like started with 4our work week and ah gosh what were all the other ones you know IM mutable laws of marketing kind of like that whole that whole era and I I was reading all of them and I thought okay I want to start a startup I need to get good at something related to startups I should figure out how to do internet marketing and like content marketing because I was at least a decent writer I was doing a Philosophy degree so I had some of those chops so I I started my first blog back then and then I tried to do a startup and that didn't work but I kept blogging along the way I went you know I went and I worked for a company for a little bit kept blogging along the way I went and did The Nomad thing for a bit had some like passive from an app i' built kept blogging along the way and I just kind of like kept blogging and you know eventually that turned into getting really good at SEO which you mentioned I kind of like figured out how to really work Google during that 2017 2018 to 2021 period I was really really good at it and so I I built a a whole marketing agency around helping other businesses do that and I was working on that from 2017 through 2020 and at the start of 2020 I mean everybody knows a lot of stuff went to [ __ ] and it was we hit like our Peak Revenue month in February lockdowns start the market crashes everything happens in March and we lose more than half of our clients in the span of a month and we have payrolls we have health care we have all these costs and now we're losing money and I had to just go into total overdrive to save the business right it was like the last thing I wanted to do was have to lay off everybody when there were people's you know mortgages and Healthcare and like all of these things riding on it so managed to get it all back on track but then by the end of the year I was completely burned out totally wrecked I was kind of tired of doing SEO because I've been doing it since 2014 at that point and it this sounds bad but it was almost like too easy like I knew what to do I knew that if I started a new site in this Niche and followed all the steps and made the content it was going to rank it wasn't a fun game anymore and I was just I was burned out on the agency side too so promoted our coo to CEO she she started running the business I stepped out and then I was kind of left to this question of what do I do now and part of me really wanted to just focus on writing back then I've always loved writing that's the thing that I'd always stuck with despite picking up all these other interests along the way but I couldn't make the money work at that point I didn't have my agency salary anymore I had some income from my blog but not enough to pay for me you know my lifestyle we had a kid coming you know some of these other costs and so I said okay I got to figure out something else first and the first thing I actually did is I tried to get into YouTube which is how I found you and then I was watching your uh skillshare video videos and in one of your skillshare videos you were reading one of my articles which is when I reached out to you and that's when we connected I was like dude this course is incredible like thank you for making this uh but a few months into YouTube I realized that wasn't the thing for me got started getting into programming and then all this crypto stuff was taking off crypto was just going bananas and I started to get more and more in my head like hey maybe I can go make a bunch of money really quickly doing crypto things and then I can come back back to the writing and that led to a whole bunch of shenanigans over the next year and a half and eventually into getting a book deal to talk about that period so I it kind of ended up working because now I am just full-time focused on writing okay that's there's so many different eras I want to go into um I have been a fan of your blog since you I said since like 2017 and you've recently switched it over to substack and I have here your uh 40 lessons from 30 years which you wrote uh last year um now I've just turned 30 as well about a month ago and so I've been thinking about these like thank you I've been thinking about these life lessons and and all of this sort of stuff and I think you're like probably one year older than me and so I'd love it if we can riff Riff on some of these life lessons yeah let's do it nice so um the first one it's never the right time anytime you catch yourself saying oh it'll be a better time later you're probably just scared or unclear on what to do there is never a right time for the big things in life having kids changing jobs breaking up up getting engaged married moving in together and to know it's never an amount of money either how did you how did you land on that realization that's a good question it it's definitely something that had been floating in my head for a period you know so so my wife and I have kind of a funny story for how we ended up together we started dating in college and but we started dating when I was in my senior spring and she was still a sophomore so it kind of had this deadline built into it it was you know I'm going to graduate and then we're going to kind of cut things off and then we didn't and then we were on again off again on again off again and in my head I felt like you I was you know I was too young to like fully commit to a relationship I needed to go do this digital Nomad thing I needed to build a business I needed to make a bunch of money and then I could you know find a partner and I think that's a common story a lot of men tell themselves especially but I I got to this point where I was like you know this doesn't feel like really serving me you know constantly running off and trying to explore these things and we kept kind of coming back to each other and so we said well let's you know let's stop being in this yes or no State and let's just really make a a big decision here and what we did which I really recommend to anybody in an earlier stage of our relationship is we said we're going to go backpack through a we're going to live in hoses and be just you know basically no no alone time nothing we're just like stuck together for weeks and we'll either break up on that trip or if we make it through the trip we'll move in together and we we agreed on that before we left we were very clear like we don't want to do this Onan aagan nonsense anymore we need to create like a clear go or no go situation and so we left for the trip neither of us knew which way it was going to go I I would have we would have kind of believed either but a week and a half into it we were both like yeah this is it like we're we're fully committing to this and we got back from the trip we moved in together in New York we got a dog for months later we moved to Austin six months after that got married a year after that had a kid two years after that we did all of these things earlier I think that a lot of people like in our demographic just because we kept realizing we kept asking this question of like if not now when like what actually specifically has to change where we would feel ready and we kind of realized that we would always be able to invent a reason not to get a dog not to move in together not to get married not to have a kid and so we may as well just do it now because every previous time that we had said okay let's just do it like we're never going to feel ready let's just go it had worked out great and we'd been super happy with the decision and that that kind of has just been such a big reoccurring theme in my life that I've noticed over and over and over again is I would want to do something or be thinking about doing something I would start saying oh no I have to like make this other thing happen first realize that that's just fear that's just procrastination that's some personal blocker and if I say no actually we should just do it it pretty much always works out great and ends up being incredibly rewarding there's another idea embedded in that that I want to Riff on too if you don't mind which is there are really some of the best parts of life I think are things that you cannot appreciate or understand until you experience them so I I I blank or I I I call these like known costs with unknowable benefits so a lot of a lot of the best improvements to your life have these known costs but you don't know how great the benefits are going to be like getting married is a great one right where a lot or just you know committing to a partner is a great one where it has all of these incredible benefits and it's just such a wonderful thing to have in your life once you do it but until you do it you only you often only think of the costs like oh you know I'm not going to have full control of my schedule anymore I'm you know not going to be able to date other people I'm going to have to prioritize somebody else along with myself right and those might seem shallow but they they're they're known cost but you don't know how great it can be on the the other side it's the same thing with kids right you you know that there's going to be a period of not getting great sleep your schedule is going to be affected it's going to be harder to stay in touch with certain friends and then you see people complaining about having kids on on Twitter and Instagram and everywhere else so you know all of these costs but you don't know how amazing all these other little things are and so I actually feel like it's a useful heuristic that if you if there's something that a lot of people seem to get a a quiet satisfaction from but then and there are some you know relatively meaningful costs associated with it it's probably worth paying that price because there are probably all these other benefits that you just can't totally understand I mean exercise is another great one right carving out time in your calendar to go for a run getting sweaty doing the actual running or whatever those are all very knowable costs but you don't know how great you might feel in 3 months 6 months a year of working out consistently and you might discover that oh my gosh I feel so much better that it's so worth investing that time every day love that air on the side of too early over too late so I mean the the first thing that can be hard to remember is that we're going to die right because we just we like to not think about that because if you think about it too hard your your brain basically breaks unless you have very very Dee rooted Faith right and then you know you can you can maybe manage it better um or just very deep spirituality but even even in that situation it can be hard to think about the the finiteness of life and so it's very easy to just put things off and do them later and some things you can put off for quite a while without as big of a cost right like writing a book is a good one you know people write books in their 60s and 70s so if you put it off by two or three years it's not going to be the end of the world but the the thing that inspired that idea the better too early than too late was actually again around having children I don't want to make this like everything is about having kids but I I had this tweet that went viral that I said where I said a lot of people try to focus on their career before having kids but that's actually a big mistake because you really only have until call it your late 30s to you know I mean really until your early 30s to easily have children until your late 30s to like have children and once you get into your 40s it gets pretty hard so once you graduate from college assuming you're 22 23 you have about 18 years to you know date enough people to figure out what kind of partner you want find someone date them get engaged marry them be together for a while and then start having kids and so if you want three or four kids even if they're a year apart that that alone is going to take four or five years if they're 18 months or two years apart now we're talking like eight to 10 years and so if you try to just focus on building your career into your early mid-30s and and then think about that you've lost most of the time to do that thing and that's I mean that's a that's a really rough thing to talk about and like I don't want it to come off like I'm shaming anyone for making that decision because I'm not I you know everybody has different situations but if you don't really think about that time cost it's pretty easy to keep saying I'll think about this next year I'll do this next year I want to focus on my business or my work whatever right now but the truth is you can do almost any kind of work into your 60s and 70s if you're healthy and active and whatever and if you delay advancing your career by 10 years it's probably not going to be the end of the world you're still going to have a lot of time for that career but if you delay finding a partner having kids by 10 years you might miss most of that opportunity entirely so it's often better to do some of these things earlier than later and and this kind of applies to entrepreneurship too because if you have any inklings of doing something entrepreneurial that could be starting a YouTube channel that could be building a lifestyle business that could be you know making a space rocket company whatever right like if you do that in your early 20s when you have like basically no cost of living and no other obligations it is so much easier to actually focus on that to have the energy the time and whatnot to give it that go then than if you say well I'm going to work for a consulting firm for 5 or 10 years and then I'll try to do the startup it's like no no no no no it's going to be way harder to do it after because one you're going to be used to consulting or banking or Tech job whatever money so you're not going to want to live on 50K a year anymore and two you you don't have that same like energy and lifestyle like lowcost living that you had earlier so it's way better to do a lot of the big things in life too early and risk having to like figure something out than it is to put it off to later and then discover that oh like there is no later like I actually can't do this thing now some people might might listen to your first point around the kids think and say well you know that your 20s really are the time where you've got to grind on your career as well because like if you don't grind on your career straight out of college or straight out of University you're going to fall behind no one wants to hire people in their 30s or 40s or 50s so like I kind of need to use my 20s to grind on my career and also to have kids like what's up with that yeah I mean that that's that's a real concern too it it is definitely harder to you know get started on a career in your 30s especially in some of these industries like if you want to go to medical school kind of have to do that right out of college right like you'd know better than I do people like go back to medical school in their 30s probably not very often but it you you do have a choice of how hard you want to grind on it right so you have a choice of I could do the 12-hour days and try to be the absolute number one person at this job and Advance as quickly as possible or I can do the eight to nine hour days for now dedicate the rest of that time to finding my partner figuring out that part of my life and then once I have those other things that I have a shorter fuse for like on track and have started to figure them out then I'll actually have a lot more freedom to really grind on my career and really put more of my energy there it's actually been surprisingly easier for me to be fully committed to writing and my work now that I you know have a wonderful wife where we can share responsibilities I have children who give me this incredible sense of purpose for why I'm doing these things and it's not an uncommon story if you talk to people who have kids they'll often say I thought this was going to make me less productive and it did give me less time but it made that time so much more impactful because I am constantly you know I was a I was a productivity guy like not not like you right I I wasn't like that in it but I was a you know I pretty I considered myself a pretty high output guy like I knew how to be productive and I am still constantly asking myself like what the hell was I doing with all my time before the these thing again it's like these known cost unknowable benefits you might think that grinding on your career and invest in it is going to get harder once you settle down but in a lot of ways it actually gets easier yeah one of the one of the big things I took away from when we met in person um last year was there was something you said around you know I think I asked you like not you're like 30 and you've you're already married with two kids that's kind of soon isn't it for like a Austin living Tech bro and you said something to the effect of um you know more people tend to if if if you ask most people they tend to say they they tend not to regret the number of kids they have if anything the regret is like I wish I'd had more kids yeah wish had more time with my kids yeah that kind of thing and so like how did that lead you to decide to have kids super early this is kind of it goes back to the same thing where you can you can read these interviews that are done with people who are dying and these you know they pop up on Twitter all the time there are books that talk about this and across the board a lot of them say the exact same things I wish I focused Less on work I wish I spent more time with my family I wish I had more time with my kids I wish I had more kids you basically never hear I wish I had had fewer kids I wish I had spent more time on work I wish I had spent less time with my partner and so there you have to deliberately try to overcome your short-term bias right because your short-term bias is that those things are scary they're going to be hard I need to you know I I want to like enjoy my fun party phase whatever in my 20s and like that that stuff is fun and I I had plenty of that too but I just kept hearing those stories and coet and I my wife would talk about it and we would say it seems so obvious that when we're in our 70s 80s the thing that we are going to Value most is time with our family and if that if that family is bigger and if the kids are older and we can be like running around visiting them and everything when we had our first kid I was 20 28 and cette was 25 so she'll graduate college when coet is 46 and I'm 4849 like that's pretty cool that's still really young we can be just going all over you know if she has kids at the same age that we did we'll be in uh we'll be in our like early 50s we'll still be like you know I could them you know I could run with them like I could do all of these things and we started imagining that future more and more and we realized that oh we would actually much rather have that future than have a couple extra years of partying and being like a young fun married couple and we're still a young fun married couple like we still we still get to party we still you know hang out with friends you know we we had you guys over for dinner and like the kids were just asleep upstairs and we hung out for like three three and a half hours and you know had some wine and dinner and it was awesome and like you still get to do all of those things so that was the other part is we we went into it deliberately choosing to sacrifice some of that for this other future and then found out that we didn't end up having to sacrifice that much of the current life that we enjoyed at all that's great I've um I've shared that conversation that we had with a bunch of friends and uh a friend of mine yesterday was saying that he has been thinking about that conversation that I reported to him and now he and his wife have decided that they're going to have kids sooner than they were orig planning to they're like 26 or something and they're like oh we might as well start now rather than wait until arbitrarily where I don't know 30 32 33 before before getting started with that yeah yeah I mean it's just it's been so so like wonderful and there been so many other benefits we didn't expect and I will say this if you're the kind of person who is listening to us talk right now you are probably an unusually capable parent or potential parent right and you probably have the financial resources to make it work better than you think you do and you have to remember that the people who are just like happily enjoying time with their kids are probably not posting about it online it's the people who have a bunch of other stuff going on in their life where they're kind of fundamentally unhappy people who are the ones online complaining and if you're not a fundamentally unhappy person who's complaining about stuff all the time you're probably not going to be an unhappy complainy parent either like you're going to figure it out like if you're here listening to us talk right now you're somebody who knows how to figure out challenges in your life and so yes there are going to be challenges around sleep and negotiating responsibilities and all these things but you're going to figure it out and then you're going to get all these other incredible benefits too and honestly it's it's a hell of a lot easier to deal with like the sleep and some of the other challenges when you're in your 20s than when you're in your late 30s or 40s that there's this other this like mini version of it that I've heard that I really like which is the reason it's so easy to pull all nighters and run on Fumes in college and med school is because that's when your body is supposed to be dealing with a toddler right you're you're you're you're literally like biologically designed to be able to run on less sleep during that period and to be in a more chaotic environment because like your body knows that like maybe you should you should have kids at this age and a lot of these things just end up being I don't want you know it's parenting's not easy but if you are the type of person who is listening to us talk it will be easier for you than you expect that's nice great um standing social events talk to me about standing social events what's up with that dude this is this is in my opinion the biggest hack for seeing your friends more often because everybody's busy everybody has you know they they have their their alone time that they want they have their work they have their life maintenance and scheduling with people is a big annoyance in general texting a friend and saying hey let's get dinner you know what's your next week look like oh next week is busy like how about the week after like can you do Thursday yeah but I have to come at 6 okay well uh we could do five you know it's just like doing that constantly just to see your friends is a huge impediment to spending time together and so what what cette and I tried to do really intentionally is create as many standing social events in our calendar as possible so one that we did for years was a Thursday morning swim in Barton Springs so Barton Springs is this wonderful cold natural spring pool in Austin it's basically right in downtown and every Thursday morning at 7:45 we would meet up with a bunch of friends there we would hop in the pool tread water talk hang out for a bit and then all go get coffee and breakfast together and by 9:00 a.m. we'd all spent an hour hour and 15 together we'd gotten a little bit of exercise in we'd gotten some coffee and on a given week there might be six people there there might be 12 people there it it fluctuated based on who could come that week but you always knew that if you showed up at that time you were going to see some friends and that was awesome we kept that going basically every Thursday morning for four years and the people who came you know fluctuated over time and even when our first kid was born we just brought her and she just sat in her stroller by the side of the pool and we gave her a snack or a toy to play with while we we slam and she was right there if she cried we could hop out and take care of her it was like it wasn't a big deal and we were just always getting to see friends on Thursday and now we have a bunch other of these like we always go to the Farmers Market at the exact same time on Sunday and so all of our a lot of our friends know that and a lot of them show up at the same time too and we either shop together or the ones with kids we go play on the playground with our kids together and we know we're going to see each other there's a coffee shop that we always go to at about 9:00 am on Saturday morning and we always see friends there there are certain like common spots that we hang out at and so we can just text the group or text a bunch of individual people quickly saying hey we're going here at this time today and people will almost always come through and that way you're never constantly like trying to plan things with people you just know that there are these events in the calendar when people can see each other and you can just toss invites out into the ether and just see who shows up and by very deliberately doing that we get to see friends at least four or five days of the week if not every day of the week between the things that we do plan and things that we don't plan and more than half of that requires no effort because they're just standing events and being very open to you know people bringing their friends as well is great because then you're naturally meeting new people you're naturally growing the friend group and it becomes this wonderful way for people new to Austin in particular to suddenly find a friend group of their own because Austin you know especially in 21 and 22 everybody was moving here and so these new people would just show up at Barton Springs with their friend who they knew when they moved here and then we would get to know them and now suddenly we have new friends too it's a really really cool way to meet people and to continue to connect with the people that you already want to spend time with this episode of Deep dive is very kindly sponsored by wab which stands for you need a budget now for many people money is a cause of guilt and anxiety you're never entirely sure where all your money goes and you're left feeling guilty about purchases big or small money is often associated with restriction fear and uncertainty but your money is an extension of you in many ways and it's obviously not ideal to feel so bad about it now wab is an app that's helping millions of people change their mindset around money it's built on four simple habits which could transform the way you think about money these habits are firstly give every dollar a job two embrace your 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and AI I've been using brilliant for The Last 5 Years and the thing I love most about brilliant is that they really focus on learning by doing in a very interactive sense rather than just consuming the content they've got a first principle's approach to learning that helps you build understanding from the ground up rather than just absorbing information without really knowing how to apply it Brilliance lessons are crafted by an award-winning team of teachers and researchers and professionals from MIT Caltech Microsoft Google and a bunch of other fancy places and the courses on brilliant really help you build your critical thinking skills through problem solving not just memorizing things so while you're building real knowledge on specific topics you're also becoming a better thinker now I personally think that learning something new every day is one of the most important fun and energizing things that you can do each day and Brilliant makes daily learning super easy with their curated lessons they've also recently launched some lessons on large language models which is the technology that powers things like chat GPT and so given the rise of AI tools more recently if you understand how they work that can help you get an idea of how to use them to get your best output uh which can be super helpful for whatever industry you happen to work in anyway if that sounds up your street and you would like to try out everything brilliant has to offer then head over to brilliant.org deepdive and that will give you a 30-day free trial and also 20% off the annual premium subscription so thank you brilliant for sponsoring this episode and let's get back to the conversation what's your take on like the dunar number of like three close friends versus like 10 close friends like is there not a risk that if you're seeing too many of these people you're having like too many like superficial relationships with friends like yeah how do you how do you think about that maybe I guess I don't think about it too much because I I think that that number is constantly in flux the people that I'm closest with I'm going to be texting all the time anyway and it's nice and it's there's nothing wrong with having friends who you mostly talk at these events where you see each other every three or six months and that's actually really nice and I mean I'm somebody who's like not on Instagram very much I have an Instagram but it's basically just for posting so I sort of don't know what's going on in most of my friends life most of the time which makes it extra fun we hang out because then I get to find out we have like a lot of stuff to talk about and so I've never felt overwhelmed by that there was a there was one point that cette and I hit where we said we're doing too much we're trying to be too social and we need to dial it back because it was getting in the way of family time but it took a while to get to that point and when it got to that point it was because we were having people over for dinner or going to people's for dinner every single night of the week plus doing multiple Hangouts with people or groups on Saturday and Sunday so there was just no alone time there was no family time and we said okay this is a little bit too much let's limit it to like three nights a week with friends and two nights just us and and that was great too so I think it's just something you naturally figure out and you find balance for but I think that this is another like known cost un knowable benefit I think a lot of people who think they prefer to be at home alone more you would actually really enjoy it if you had standing social things with friends where you get to hang out and have dinner or you know just hang out in a park for a little bit you just have to kind of get over the activation energy to do it and it's scary to invite people to things but most people are waiting around hoping to get invited to something you just have to be the one who initiates it and if you can get over that little hump you get this incredible reward of getting to spend so much more time with your friends and have these very rich in-person relationships yeah yeah I kind of have a rule that I often say to myself which is that uh everyone is friendly but you have to go first Ah that's so great that's such a great way to put it yeah yeah I find that whenever I feel that like oh that sense of oh no it's it's weird to be the one to organize the thing I'm like nope everyone is friendly everyone's waiting around to be invited to stuff I can be the one to initiate the organization or I can ask my assistant to or whatever the thing whatever the situation might be and and once you get in that mindset the other mindset you really need to develop is that if people you invite to things are not reciprocating if they're not inviting you to things that's okay it it's not it's not a quid pro Crow relationship because a lot of people just don't organize things right and they they don't take that initiative and that's fine right every friend group needs somebody to organize things and so it may as well be you and you just can't expect everyone else to do it as well because if you do then you're you might get like bitter and annoyed and oh why aren't they invited me to things it's like no no no no it it's this it doesn't have to be balanced like you just keep inviting people to things you become the organizer and it it leads to a really really RI social life should I learn how to cook yes or can I get by by just ordering takeaway when I have people around because at the moment I get by by ordering takeaway when I have people around and I dabbled with I think i' read some blogs of yours and I dabbled with cooking like last year and occasionally I'd have friends over and we'd all like chop the veg together and that was kind of fun but then I sort of got out of the habit and then I was like H restaurant go for a walk in the park with a little sandwich like takeway it's all the same sort of thing but I know you're a big advocate for cooking yeah I mean I'll I'll I'll give the caveat that if you live in London or New York City or downtown Chicago or something it might be harder to do this but you know we live in Austin and we live a little bit outside of downtown so we have a relatively large kitchen living room a nice dining area and so for us it's more fun to be able to uh cook for our friends when they come over and you know we're we're also a little bit uh particular about ingredients and sourcing and things and so it's nice to be able to control everything that's going into the food and cooking so I I think this is less of a problem for people who are maybe not like white Americans but like a lot of white Americans think that when you cook a meal you have to cook like a protein and a vegetable and a side and you have to make a dessert and it becomes this like huge thing in your mind but there are all of these incredible recipes where you basically just throw a bunch of [ __ ] in a pan and make some rice or have some bread or some tortillas and it's delicious it takes like 20 minutes it's going to be better than what you order from takeout and you're going to have that satisfaction of you know actually having made it yourself and it means a lot I think to people too when you can actually cook something for them and so cette and I just started looking for these recipes and we started finding more and more of them and we actually have a a physical recipe box which I I also highly recommend where whenever we find a recipe that we really love we actually write it out so that whenever we're making dinner whenever we're buying groceries for the week whenever we're hosting people we can just open it up we can pick one of these 20 recipes that we use a lot and we know it's going to be delicious we know how to do it and we know it's going to be pretty quick and painless so you just want to find like that way to optimize it you don't need to throw a dinner party it doesn't need to be this huge Affair having an awesome rice bowl with you know a napkin and a drink is great and delicious and so I think optimizing around that is really really the way to do it and I will say that like trying to get the guests to help with the cooking often doesn't go as well unless they're also really big into cooking usually better to get a lot of it prepped before they get there and then throw it in the pan once they're there to finish it off and then serve everyone um although if you get if you have friends who also really love cooking that is super fun too we we I had a friend who miles Snider he's miles Cooks I think on Twitter he's got this 8020 cooking class and he shares all these incredible recipes on his blog and when he was in Austin he would come over all the time with a couple other friends and we would all cook dinner together and that was super super fun too but you've got to make sure that it's with other people who really like to do that because not everyone does nice um this one's interesting trust your negative gut not your positive gut yeah so we definitely have this like lizard brain Hardware running behind our you know smart rational brain and that part of our brain is really really good at detecting bad vibes and you'll have this experience where you'll consider working with someone you you might start you know talking to someone you might be like buying something and this little there'll this little feeling in your brain that goes n you shouldn't do this you shouldn't work with this person you shouldn't trust this person I you should always listen to that and it will be wrong some amount of the time but it will be right A lot of the time and if you try to reason your way out of it you'll often come up with reasons to you know work with this person any way like oh it's going to be a lot of money like oh they connect me to a lot of people and it might be great at first but one two three months later you'll realize that you were right you should have trusted that instinct like that instinct is very very powerful and worth listening to but on the flip side there might be a situation where some opportunity pops up you're just like to the Moon about it this is so exciting oh my God such an incredible opportunity whatever and you're just euphoric over it and that's a good opportunity to kind of pause and reflect and to say you know why am I so euphoric about this what what do I think this is going to get me what what future am I imagining that might be a bit of an illusion because you can also get too excited about things and you might not always want to trust that instinct because can get you into like short-term thinking it can make you ignore certain risks and downsides uh a team version of this I've heard that I really like is that if everybody on an executive team agrees with a decision you shouldn't do it because it means that you haven't fully explored the risks or the possible downsides you need to like cancel the meeting everybody go off for a day or two think about what you're missing there and then come back and try to present what the like Devil's Advocate is for it because if you can't present compelling argument why you shouldn't do something then you might be getting caught in some some story that has these hidden risks that you haven't fully thought through so you got to be a little bit more careful about that side love that um you've got a post titled when the money's just too damn good why did you write that post and what is it what do they talk about so I wrote that as I was winding down my focus on crypto and getting back into writing and there's you know there's this wonderful book called turning pro by stepen pressfield most most people are probably more familiar with the war of Art and turning pro is the sequel and in turning pro pressfield talks about okay you understand that you have this resistance inside of you to do your creative work now you want to go pro in your creative work how do you turn pro and one of the big challenges the big obstacles that he talks about in that book is Shadow careers careers that you take on because you're a little bit afraid to do the big B thing but the shadow career gives you some other wonderful benefit that blinds you to the true cost which is that you're not actually going after your calling and for me what I really realized from being in crypto was that it was making me unhappy it was hurting my relationships it was hurting my health it was not fulfilling work but I was making a lot of money and if I had kept at it I could have made a lot more money I could have you know retired my kids probably you know if I had really just kept on that path the potential riches could have been insane and I I got to this decision point where it was okay I either go all in on this become a full crypto influencer try to join a VC firm really really double down so that when crypto comes back in 24 25 whatever I'm in this incredible position to make the most of it or I say this is actually where I have to quit because the desire for money is is just completely blinding me to what I started doing all of this to do which was to write and that story actually started way earlier it started in 2017 where I was living in you know this little studio in Manhattan with coet and I was going to Starbucks every day and I was really trying to make writing work and I wrote some great blog posts in that period but I literally did not have the money to just focus on that we were you know hangman had rent we had other food costs and all that stuff I wasn't making much and so I said okay I have to put this aside because I have to go make money doing something else and that's when the SEO agency started but somewhere along the way I forgot that I started doing all this other work just to be able to afford to get back to writing and so I hit this peak in crypto and I didn't have the outcome that I thought I was going to have most of the money that I thought I made went away but I did make enough where I could just focus on writing for four five six years and spend some of that down to pay for my lifestyle in the meantime and I just kind of had this wake up moment where I realized if I don't do this now if I don't get off the money train now it's just going to totally take over and I don't know when I'm going to come back to this and so it's there it it sucks to try something and have it fail but sometimes it sucks more to try the wrong thing and have it succeed because success at the wrong thing is its own curse because you're getting this social validation oh my God you're so good at this oh you're so smart you're succeeding you're you're winning at this game you're making all this money and you start thinking like oh this is what I should be doing and money is like the most corruptible tool for getting you stuck on the shadow career and so sometimes yeah you have to say you know what the money is distracting me from the thing I actually want to do and I got to get back to that and you've got to be really aware of how that can happen when you yeah when you succeed at the wrong thing yeah for me I think one one thing I really took away from reading that was that I I realized that there were so many instances in my life where the primary reason why I did a thing was for the money yes and I'm now very suspicious when that's the case like if the primary reason is for the money I think twice and then three times and then four times like wait a minute and I I run the the thought experiment of like let's say I had 100 million in the bank would I still choose to do the thing and if the answer is no then I'm like okay do I really really need the money I kind of don't so it's like it's usually not a good idea to say yes to the thing and I'm slowly getting better at like calibrating that absolutely it's a hard question to ask too but I had the same realization I was like okay I did the agency because I needed money and I legitimately needed it like I needed to pay my bills but then when I started doing the crypto stuff we could have pulled our spending way back and I could have gone all in on writing it was kind of an in between an in between point but now is at this point where I was literally just doing things for the money and the crypto money had just ruined my relationship with money it had corrupted my brain so thoroughly that I'd sort of become this person I didn't recognize anymore and it really really scared me and it was really really hard and so I I had to get very serious about like not only am I going to quit this and focus on writing but I am going to force myself to not do anything else besides the writing that could make money in the meantime unless I sell all of my crypto though unless I am truly out of that like piggy bank and I actually have to go get a normal job whatever to you know support my family I will not do anything else besides focus on the writing for making money and that's a really scary thing because making money from writing is a long slow process if you pull it off and most people don't it's it's kind of a crazy career to go after but I felt like I had an opport I felt like I could get good enough at it and I just have to like you said I have to keep reminding myself these shiny objects pop up all along the way when the AI tools started coming out I was like oh my God I could make a right with AI course and I could probably make you know six figures maybe seven figures selling this like awesome course on writing with chat and Claude and God it was hard to say no to but I had to like I knew that I had to do it if I wanted to really focus on this because if I went down that path for another two years and then woke up in two years not made any progress on the writing I would really really be kicking myself what do you mean the experiences in crypto corrupted your brain when it came to money so you know that this is all in the book but at the beginning at the beginning I'm like just trying to replace my agency salary I'm just trying to make like 150 200k or something enough to focus on the writing for a year to give me that piggy bank at the peak of the story I have over $10 million in like paper crypto gains and at no point when my you know that money wasn't like in my bank account I couldn't like pull you know there's a lot of problems with seeing that number when it was at that number I wasn't thinking awesome I'm done I can like take this I can take out what I can I can quit I can get back to the things I want to do I'm thinking this is going to 100 million I'm thinking like I'm done this is just going to keep going up and I was I was literally rolling over in bed every morning hitting a button and getting like 10 20 $30,000 like liquid that I could have pulled out to my bank account but I wasn't I was reinvesting it in crypto I was putting it back into the market I was making more in a week than I had hoped to make for a whole year and I wasn't taking it out I just kept doubling down with most of it and I I had a couple of really scary things happened where I literally almost lost all of it and it was this cra wake of like oh like what happened to me like who is this like why am I leaving all this on the table I literally like a newborn and I'm not pulling the money out for for her and for our family like what is going on and that was just such an insane wake up to realize that I'd gotten into that space and that I I needed to fix something and I mean that's literally why I like don't let myself look at almost anything crypto related now because I know that I'm an addict I know that I'm a gambler like I will get sucked back into it if I let myself and part of my self-preservation is I I have to keep that distance from it to not let those demons back into my head anymore the the big blessing I think is that having had that experience relatively young if I come into some you know really significant amount of money in the future again uh which I hope I do I'm going to have a lot more respect for it I'm not not going to be deluded into thinking that you know this infinite money printer is going to keep going on forever I'm not going to keep leaving all of it on the table and that's actually kind of a common story too if you listen to like entrepreneurs and stuff who have an early win and then they they might end up losing all of it because they double down they go to the next thing they they use their secondary sale to like pay off the the taxes on their stock options and then their company ends up going to zero and they they don't end up getting anything out of it right like it's not an uncommon story and everybody thinks it won't happen to them they think that oh you know if if if I see this huge number in my crypto wallet I'll pull it out I'm smarter than that you're not like it'll it'll get you too most likely and so I it it was it was at least useful in that sense to give me that story to keep in my mind of myself that like this this could happen to you again so you have to be really really careful about it nice um what what are your thoughts on living in a lower cost of living place and I ask cuz like we're thinking of maybe we're thinking of leaving the UK and maybe going to Hong Kong or maybe going to Malaysia to qual lumur now one of those has like a 5x lower cost of living than the other one and I'm trying to think like how how much of a difference will cost of living make to my life realistically do you have any any any thoughts on that I think it's an incredible tool when you need to use it to get started so when I started working for myself doing this entrepreneur lifestyle business blogger journey I I did the far Work Week thing I literally went to Buenos Iris and I lived there for five months uh I rented a small bedroom in SF for a few months I I got my cost of living as low as I possibly could and I I kind of needed to do it because that was the only way I could focus on some of the work that I wanted to focus on at that point and I wasn't making very much money but if you can afford to live in a major city I do think that moving to a low cost of living area is kind of a bad choice just because you get so much by living in a big city you get access to more interesting people um you can you know travel to see other people a little bit easier you get a lot of like Safety and Security you probably have um you know better like facilities and other accommodations and it's kind of like the it's kind of like optimizing for taxes right it's like sure you could move to Puerto Rico in the US and like not pay income tax but paying taxes to live in New York City or Chicago or Austin you you still have to pay federal income tax is like worth it to be around all of those people and I really feel like the energy that you're around is really important and being around people who are very driven to like do big great things with their life is very infectious and very powerful and it's harder to find those people in areas where people are going to try to like minimize their cost of living as much as possible uh I also think you know it makes a big difference if you have like kids right like if if if you want to do the low cost of living thing like yeah do it when you don't have kids because once you to think about preschools and elementary schools and stuff like it's going to be harder to find one that you really like in in Bali or somewhere or like they're not going to get exposure to a big diversity of people and like the the diversity of people you get access to I think is a big deal too because like it whatever this this is going to offend some people but I'll say it like my my idea of hell is like living in one of those regions of Bali only surrounded by other people trying to do like Drop Shipping or influencer businesses because then you just have no Variety in the people that you're talking to right and I think that would be really hard as well so wonderful tool when you need it to get your stuff off the ground but once you don't I I I kind of see it as like a way to bootstrap your entrepreneurial career it's like once you don't need it it's really nice to be around very motivated people in a big metro area one of the things a lot of people seem to do in the US is you know they might be in a New York or an SF or an Austin or something and then at the point where they have kids they're like hey I'm going to move to I don't know North Carolina or something where there's more like family values and it's like you know the the nice house in the suburbs with the white picker fans and the whole shebang there more of a I don't know if this is just a romanticized view of certain areas of the US but more of a hey we're all going to get together and have a barbecue on the weekend kind of vibe yeah yeah we you know we've thought about it and it is very appealing there's a lot that you get with that I mean if you're willing to go 30 minutes outside of Austin your money goes three times further in terms of what house you can get right like you can have a bigger yard you can have the white Thicket fence you can you know have space for everybody and you know that that's very appealing and a lot of people do it too to be near family because they want help with from their family for raising kids and you know or they just want the space and especially with remote work like you can live in those areas and probably still do a lot of the same job and coet and I talked about it a lot and it is very appealing and where we eventually settle is that you know where we are in Austin we're not downtown but we're 10 minutes away from it we have a yard it's a small yard but it's a yard we have space for everybody in the house and we're kind of like in between we're definitely not in the suburbs we're not down town and we get a bit of The Best of Both Worlds where we are right now and we're very very fortunate that we can afford to do that you know that's the big caveat is that we can afford to live in our house with up to four kids and not really have to change anything and I mean that's an incredibly privileged position to be in the other conversation that we've had though is that if something changed so let's say the crypto confidential completely fails I can't get another book deal and it's going to be three four five years before the writing career can start to pay for like you know and coet works too she's a realtor but like you know we kind of rely on both of our incomes if and you know if for some reason know crypto goes to zero and I don't have that piggy bank if like all of these really bad things happen where we could no longer really afford to live in the part of town that we're in and have as many kids as we want to have we would much rather move out of an area we like to somewhere less expensive and have the family we want than stay in the busier area and have a smaller family and I think that's an important that's like an important conversation to have right like what's more important to you is it being near the action or is it having the family and being willing to adjust your life around that and you know we it's conversation that you have to have and that's kind of where we we settled and we would love to be able to have like you know there's a couple other neighborhoods in Austin that are as close to downtown but where you can get the like big white picket fence house but it's you know 35 million it's crazy expensive and like I would love to have one of those houses I definitely can't afford it right now um but you know if that happened that would be great too but we're not like riding on that happening we'd much rather be like Cozier and more Compact and be where we are around so many of our friends then have to like give some of that up prematurely yeah nice um one thing another one of your blog posts that I really liked many years ago was I think you were talking about how you were living the 4-Hour week work week lifestyle and there was this void yeah um there the chapter in 4 Hour Work literally called filling the void um yeah what's your what what's your take on this cuz I guess a lot of people who watch my stuff aspire to the whole Financial Freedom thing where they're like oh if only I had the business that I that made passive income I'd be able to do whatever I want dot dot dot dot dot dot and it's like well when you ask like well what do you want it's like I don't know just being able to not do things I don't want to have to do it's like okay but then what do you want to do it's like it becomes quite confronting in a way what was your experience with that well and it's such a funny thing because I feel like everybody misses that chapter the first time they read the book they just focus on the how do I make a bunch of passive income and then if they get it basically everybody realizes that they're just not very happy in that life it's fun for like 3 six 12 months you do the traveling you do the you know taking whatever random classes you want playing with your hobbies and then you feel kind of empty inside and you realize that meaningful work is a core part of human fulfillment and what I realized you know first back then was that just doing these things to get some passive income so that I could quit doing them was really a losing proposition because doing a bunch of work that you don't really want to do so that you don't have to do work that you don't want to do is kind of this like silly tradeoff if you have the option to make it and it it that was the first time when I was like okay I should try to actually work on something long term right something that I could actually keep working on year after year after year after year after year and enjoy working on it because that's where you're actually going to get this long-term happiness and the thing that nobody in the passive income World wants to tell you is that there's really no such thing as passive income because the minute you let it go passive it starts dying it starts just slow going down and it will trickle away other people will come in and eat your lunch your work will get stale your products will get stale you'll get beaten out on Amazon or for your courses or for your SEO or whatever and in two years you're going to be back where you started before you built a thing so you better use those two years to get somewhere interesting because if you think that you can just gallivant around living this funded lifestyle forever you're actually going to be worse off than where you started at the end of it because not only will you be to square one without the passive income you'll have now lost two three four years of your life so where I think the the passive income for Hour Work Week lifestyle business stuff is very useful is a way to bootstrap working on something bigger so if you know that you want to be a writer or a painter or a YouTuber or any of these careers with a long startup time to pay your bills doing the lifestyle business first to fund you for two years while you get that going is is actually pretty smart I mean same thing with a startup right if you can do the lifestyle business to give you some Runway to actually work on a startup so that you don't have to take money right away and don't have to dilute yourself that's an incredibly good use case but trying to fill the void with experiences and Novelty does get old really really quickly and you have to be ready for that and I don't tell people not to do it I don't tell them not to chase it because nobody believes you when you say that right they're like like yeah you got tired of it but I won't like I love traveling I love going to new restaurants I love doing these things and it's like yeah you love them because they're a break from the work that you don't enjoy doing and because they're occasional things when that's your whole life you're going to get bored really quickly but you have to go experience it to realize that that's the case but then once you have that little inkling don't feel guilty about it accept it say cool I checked this box and now I have this run way to go do this big thing that I was scared of doing before but I now have the means to do and go do that thing nice yeah that's great um finite and infinite games you talk about this book I think in one of your YouTube videos from back in the day I talk about it everywhere this one my favorite book about it everywhere yeah I've I've never read the book but like what what should I understand or what should listeners understand about the idea of finite versus infinite games it so it's a wonderful book it's very short it's weird and philosophical uh but also very tactical in its own way and the core thesis of the book is that everything that you do in life is a kind of game right so this conversation that we're having for your podcast for your YouTube is a a game of sorts and there are two ways to think of games a finite game has a closed boundary it has a winner and loser it has clear rules uh and you there there's a way to like succeed or fail there's an end to it all these things right like a football game is itself a finite game because there will be a winner or loser at the end of it if I came into this conversation with a finite game mentality of I need to like win this conversation I'd be very focused on like you know slipping crypto confidential into everything that I talk about on yeah exactly like buy the book right like you know if if you buy by the end of this podcast you're going to get 10 know whatever right like it would you'd be milking it for all that it's worth um but if you take a more infinite game approach to something like this your only goal is to basically like have fun the the the reason you play an infinite game is to keep the game going it's to continue to extend the boundaries and the realm of play and if you're thinking about it that way where it's not transactional it's not a winner or loser you behave very differently because the only thing that I'm focused on right now is like having a fun conversation with you and if the book comes up great if it doesn't I also don't care because like we're friends we've known each other on the internet for years like we're just having a good time and like hopefully it's valuable to people too which means that we're going to have a lot more conversations over the course of our life like this this game that we are playing together of being you know internet creators book writers whatever can continue to expand infinitely as we continue to support each other over the course of our hopefully very very long careers and you can think of so many things in your life this way right like even even the the sports analogy right if you're constantly focused on winning this tennis match then your your emotion your identity and everything is tied to the outcome of each match but if the game that you're playing is getting better at tennis then whether you win or lose the individual game you're still winning at the infinite game of getting better and better or if your infinite game is just that I love to hit the ball right there's this wonderful jokovic interview where he's like my advantage is that I just love hitting the ball and that's why he's like one of the best tennis players in the world and if you can think about it that way then you're less attached to shortterm outcomes and you end up like winning more of these little finite games along the way because you're not attached to their individual outcomes and so he he ties this into so many things he ties it into relationships right like you know the the best way to uh uh to to find a partner to have a successful date is to not be trying to make it a successful date right is to like just be yourself and be interested in them and like have a conversation and not be you know checking the watch and wondering if you're going to get to go home with them and like trying to you know get something out of it right uh if you're you know if you're if you're working on YouTube videos right like playing the infinite game of trying to make each video a little bit better is going to pay off a lot more in the long run than being being obsessed over every single video hurting hitting like a very specific metric you know me as a writer like I hope that this book does good I want it to do good but I'm in this for the rest of my life at this point and so I know that by focusing so much more of my energy on making the best book possible instead of on milking as many sales from it as possible that's going to set me up for many many great books in the future and over a long term that's going to compound it to more and more in interesting things so that book is just so good at showing you all of the parts of your life where you could be thinking on this more infinite Horizon instead of constantly being attached to winning whatever little thing you're in in that moment oh that's nice all right that's a good sales pitch I'm gonna read the book um yeah it's great um yeah I've been I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of of my own stuff and I had a great chat with someone at a wedding a couple of weeks ago and she was a tenured professor at like UCL teaching cool computer science or something and you know 10 year professors don't make very much money maybe I don't know 40 50k or something like that but they get to do whatever they want and she's like yeah I can basically do whatever I want the university pays me basically forever for the rest of my life to just do whatever I want do interesting things and teach a class every now and then yeah and it kind of got me thinking oh that's a very infinite gamey type career where the goal is to just sort of keep on doing the thing yeah there's all the sort of incentives to publish and stuff in Academia but once you're attended Professor it's like you're you're pretty set and it kind of got me thinking that like me making YouTube videos you doing your writing it's like in this Creator world we are all tenur professors just not by an institution but by the you know thousand true fans that we have who will pay for our stuff or whatever the thing might be yeah and if I think of it in that way it's like if a university were to offered me a full-time tenure professorship where I can do whatever I want and teach a class every now and then and pay me 50K I'd be like wo that's incredible but for some reason I feel like I need to make way more than 50k in this 10e professor being a YouTuber or being a podcast or whatever like what's up with that it it it's really true and it kind of goes back to the the shadow career versus the the true calling from the the turning pro discussion it's like your your true calling is going to be an infinite game for you because you're not attached to these other things that you need to satisfy you when you're stuck in a shadow career or a shadow calling and so that is actually a really great way to figure it out is like you know if I could I do this every day for 30 years and be happy even if I don't have a big Financial outcome from it right like could it be something where it's just worth doing for the sake of it and not purely for some Financial outcome like these questions are really really helpful for realizing what that kind of work might be for you yeah that was a great uh quote I came across from Alan Watts um from one of his like audio clips which is you know people often go go up to him and ask him or back when he was alive like you know what should I do with my career and his answer is always like well what's the thing you would do if money were No Object yeah why' you go and do that and people are always like whoa I can't possibly do that because I need to qu I I need to make the money but I think increasingly yeah obviously you know there is some level of you know intelligence and like uh strategy that sort of goes into this but broadly if you find the thing that you would do if you weren't worried about making money you could probably in this in this era do yeah and I think that the the like 4our work week passive income lifestyle business and even some of the Creator economy stuff has like sold this lie that you can make a ton of money really really quickly and like then you can go maybe do the thing later or that like if you pursue one of these careers you can you know that money really really fast right and a few people definitely do right like we know a bunch of people who have had that kind of success and they have hit those numbers but the vast majority of people don't the only people who do are the ones who in many cases are in it for the like infinite game aspect of it they they didn't start doing it because they wanted it to make a lot of money really quickly and the reality is that in the vast majority of work and in careers it takes a long time to get good enough to make good money in it and if you're always in this mindset of I should be making like six figures from this thing in a year or two you're never going to put in the work and the time that you need to actually get good enough to actually make the amount of money that you want to make you have to let that myth go so that you can spend the time necessary to actually get good at the thing and then the money is going to follow in almost any domain you're going to find a way to make the money from it you just have to be willing to like put in the time and get good instead of always looking for like a quick hack to the top nice um talk to me about your brief stint with being a YouTuber Tik tocker instagrammer like influencer type person and like what was the Arc of that yeah this is kind of a funny one so I you know I started playing with YouTube back in 2020 I thought maybe I wanted to do it then ultimately decided not to and then I started working on the book in 2022 and by the end of 22 I had a first draft but I basically thought it was [ __ ] I didn't think it was good at all and I was really feeling rough about it especially because one I've been working in crypto where there there's just constant stimulation you're making and losing money you're placing bets you're you're getting winnings you're responding to messages all the time plus I was like a blogger and you know I was very active on Twitter and so anytime I wrote something I got immediate feedback on it right like my my whole DOP mean system was fried from all that period where I expected to get quick wins for anything I worked on and then I switched to working on this book and there are no quick wins right like you're you're writing it alone for months and months and months and like editing it and tweaking it you're not getting to publish anything along the way the only bit of satisfaction I had was my little spreadsheet where I tracked every writing session and I could look at that and I could say okay I did something today even though nobody else in the world knows that I did anything this week that was really hard it was a really really hard adjustment and so and I didn't cope with it very well so when I finished the first draft of the book I I what I told myself was book talk is becoming a big thing I should go build a book talk so that when the book comes out I'll have that audience to promote the book to I think what was really going on was that I didn't feel good about myself and I needed to make a number go up to like tell myself that I was smart and capable and I I wanted to just go like hack on something and so while the first draft was sitting I started doing all these book talk videos and I I me just like went bananas I got to like 50k on Tik Tok in six weeks and then 100K on Instagram in two or three months and it just kept going and these videos kept going viral and I was getting like millions of views it was like oh my God this is so cool and then I said okay like I I need to do something more with this because you can't make that much money like just talking about books on Instagram and Tik Tok so like now I can get into YouTube and I'm going to do long YouTube videos about the books and I'm going to do the podcast I'm going to do all all these things I'm going to be like the big book influencer and like this is going to be great and it continued through that year while I kept working on the book and then it got to Thanksgiving and at this point I had finished crypto confidential I had turned it in I was working on my sci-fi novel and over Thanksgiving I had a very constrained schedule because my family was in town preschool was off I only had a couple hour hours of Day hours a day to work and I spent all of that time making YouTube videos and at the end of the week I realized like wait a second that's not my most important work the most important work is writing like why am I not writing to do this other thing and it was just the shadow career all over again it was like the crypto stuff all over again I was like wait I got sucked into a different thing trying to make like a short-term number go up trying to get like short-term Fame whatever because I wasn't feeling good about the long-term thing but actually the longterm thing is pretty good now like the book is great I'm very proud of it I don't I shouldn't be putting all my energy here because it's actually getting in the way of me having success in the thing that I care about and so I basically just quit I was like it was like crypto I was like I literally just can't let myself do this because I will get sucked in it will distract me from the writing the the getting to publish every every day is like making me feel good but I should be feeling good about writing every day and so I basically abandoned it and what I did in instead which I think was actually kind of smart I'm glad I did was when when the first draft of the Sci-Fi novel was sitting I built an app where I could track my writing sessions and like have other people follow me and I could follow them and we could comment on each other's writing so that we could all like feel good about working on long-term writing instead of needing to like publish something for the algorithm every day and that's actually been super helpful I was surprised by what a difference that made with like feeling good about working kind of in the dark every day it's like if I could at least put a little post up on prolifics saying like hey I wrote today then that was reward enough and I didn't feel as pulled to like pick up some other project to get some short-term wins nice is that now uh public like people use it's on the App Store now so oh sick yeah yeah and uh my you know my my rule with that is it's like only when I have free time side project I I don't want it to turn into a big business big company or anything um but you know I really enjoy hacking on it when I need a break from writing it's something it's a tool that I use every day and so even if nobody else ever uses this thing it was kind of a win to make it and if other people do great like that's awesome I'd love to have more people in there where I can like cheer them on for working on their writing projects nice mate i' I've literally started a new writing project as of like two days ago so I'm G to start using prolific like literally right now oh amazing thank you is this the new book uh this is potentially the new book yeah I'm sort of like Tinker tinkering away with with with some ideas thinking maybe self-publish or hybrid rather than traditional cuz I don't want the pressure again anytime soon I like the idea of every now then doing like a big book with a publisher maybe but then like in between doing like shorter shorter books a bit more Vib just doing it because I want to do it because I think it might hopefully be helpful rather than trying to play The Prestige game which is what I was doing with with the with the first book if I'm if I'm being honest I think that's a great way to do it you know and the doing doing the viby thing that feels more true to you might end up doing better too like it wouldn't shock me there's a good line I got I I was talking to our mutual friend David Pell about this last night um and he he recount he he heard of this story where Jerry Seinfeld was at a party and and ran into David lman yeah and he goes to David Letterman and he's like hey bro you know I've got this new film like I don't know what to dude do you have any advice and David lman says um the biggest advice would be fail at doing something you really want to do or what's that effect fail at something you really want to do I like that or aim to fail at making the movie you really want to make which is kind of nice cuz like aim to fail it's like oh okay well I'm aiming to fail anyway so everything above that is like success and making the movie I really want to make it's like for me it's like aim to be not commercially successful by writing a book that you really want to write and I think ironically as as you say that's probably going to make it reasonably commercially successful yeah almost certainly iect almost certainly um nice so now you're living the life of a dad to two kids and a full-time writer how what does your like workday routine look like amongst the kids stuff how do you like balance the stuff yeah it's it's actually nice because it provides so much structure to the day so all what I like to do so I'm I'm I'm in promotion mode for the book coming out so this period is a little different but when I'm in writing mode I'll try to get up at like 6ish and I'll look at what I wrote the day before I'll look at my outline I might read a book on writing or read a fiction book that I'm trying to emulate the style of and but I won't do any writing and then I'll just start you know I'll prep lunch for school and I'll make some breakfast for myself have some coffee get the kids up get get our older daughter off to preschool and then at 9: we have a nanny who comes and she watches our our younger daughter during the day so from about 9:30 to 4:30 I'm on in work mode and I'll usually go to a CA at 9:30 and do my writing or actually I've been coming I've been doing in the office more because I've got a treadmill desk now which I I really like writing on and so I'll I'll come here and I'll I'll write from like 9:30 to 12 but really my rule is that I have to get 2500 new words down when I'm in drafting mode so if I get that that done by 11 awesome like I'm free if it takes until 1 then it takes until 1 but I don't let myself eat or do anything else open any other windows on my computer have any meetings literally anything until those words are done and if I'm in editing phase I just double it so get through a 5,000-word chunk of the book for editing and that's like my those are my daily reps it's like I've got to get that done before I can do anything else but when I'm in when I'm in actual just like creation mode I then try to leave the afternoon as open as possible I I take as few meetings as humanly possible on the phone I'm always happy to like meet up with somebody for lunch but I might go to the gym go for a walk uh play with the creative project do something unrelated to that but always with a little less stimulation than I want so if I'm if I'm going for a walk or going to the gym I won't listen to music I won't listen to a podcast or have anything like that because that's when like a lot of the real work happens it's when the ideas pop up and so I'll just have my notebook or I'll take voice notes on my phone and catch anything that comes up along the way and then pick our older daughter up from preschool at 4:35 have dinner uh hang out with them until they go to bed and then from like 7 until 9:30 uh I go sit I just hang out maybe watch an episode or something read and it's a really nice routine that sounds highly highly idilic yeah it's it's Mak me excited to have kids it's great yeah and like you know I'm I'm I'm really never working in the morning I'm never working late at night like again this period is weird because I'm going on podcasts and reaching out to people and all of that um but when I'm in that routine it's great I mean the the only downside of it is that it is so predictable that the days kind of blend together a little bit but that's why it's nice to have you know little social things and stuff during the work day occasionally to to break it up and you you also get the great ideas for their work just chatting with friends about random things too yeah all right so you've written this book crypto confidential um what will if someone's gotten to the end of this video podcast um what will they get from reading the book they'll have a lot of fun it it reads like uh it reads like a thriller and that was very intentional I it's not a crypto 101 what is bitcoin what is eth book it is a fun fast-paced firstperson journey of working in the middle of the insanity during the last crypto cycle both on the degenerate gambling side and on the actually like programming and Building Things side because I was in I was in both worlds and you know that was really intentional I spent a lot more time studying fiction than studying non-fiction because this is kind of a dry topic you know crypto and like I don't think most people want to read a crypto 101 book but I wanted to write something that could teach people a little bit about crypto but where they would wouldn't feel like they were doing any work to read it I wanted it to be like a beach read like a James Patterson or a Stephen King or whatever where people can just fly through it and that was really really what I optimized it around so it's like sure you could try to run the same Playbook next cycle and you know try to make a bunch of money in crypto there's that knowledge in there too um or you might realize that you really don't want to be in that world and you're just going to like hold Bitcoin and eth and like not look at it like you you get an education along the way but the main thing you get is just like a really fun story like you're just going to have a good time reading it uh and so that's really the pitch more than anything else love that I think that's a great place to have this thank you so much for taking the time thanks for having me on all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really helps other people disc discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full HD or 4k on YouTube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching uh do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time bye-bye

Make money with the skills you already have: https://go.aliabdaal.com/lbapoddesc Subscribe to LifeNotes 👉 https://go.aliabdaal.com/lifenotes_deepdive Sponsored by YNAB - visit http://www.ynab.com/abdaal Sponsored by Brilliant - visit https://brilliant.org/DeepDive/ for a 30-day free trial and 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription If you want to start or grow a channel, check out my Part-Time YouTuber Academy here 👉 https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0b_PCX0 I’ve built a brand new community for like-minded people called Productivity Lab. We’ll have online classes, workshops, and coaching to help you double your productivity. You can find out more here 👉 https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0b_Pdb0 📚 Check Out My New York Times Bestselling Book Feel-Good Productivity! 👉 https://go.feelgoodproductivity.com/podcast 📧 Sign up for LifeNotes - my weekly newsletter where I share actionable productivity tips, practical life advice, and high-quality insights from across the web directly to your inbox. 👉 https://go.aliabdaal.com/lifenotes/podcast In today’s episode, I sit down with Nat Eliason to discuss known costs with unknowable benefits, overcoming short-term bias, and the importance of timing in life decisions. We explore the concept of finite versus infinite games, focusing on long-term fulfilment over short-term gains. Nat also shares insights into his daily writing routine and his book, *Crypto Confidential*, which offers an engaging look into the crypto world. Enjoy 🙂 00:00 Known Costs with Unknowable Benefits 07:11 Overcoming Short-Term Bias 13:25 The Timing of Life Decisions 25:13 The Value of Standing Social Events 38:22 Trusting Your Negative Gut 41:11 The Allure of Money 42:07 The Dangers of Being Driven by Money 43:54 Choosing Long-Term Fulfillment over Short-Term Wins 50:35 Balancing Work and Passion in a Daily Routine 01:01:55 The Power of Infinite Games 01:17:54 Crypto Confidential: A Thrilling and Educational Journey 🔗 CONNECT WITH NAT 🐦 X ( Twitter ) - https://x.com/nateliason 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/nat_eliason/ 💻 Website - https://www.nateliason.com/ 👥 Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nateliason/ 🔗 CONNECT WITH ALI 🎥 YouTube Channel - https://youtube.com/@UCoOae5nYA7VqaXzerajD0lg 🐦 X ( Twitter ) - https://twitter.com/aliabdaal 📸 Instagram - https://instagram.com/aliabdaal 💻 Website - https://aliabdaal.com/ 👥 Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ali-abdaal/ 📄SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT Visit the website for the transcript and highlights from the conversation - https://aliabdaal.com/podcast/ 🎙️ ABOUT THE PODCAST Deep Dive is the podcast that delves into the minds of entrepreneurs, creators and other inspiring people to uncover the philosophies, strategies and tools that help us live happier, healthier and more productive lives.Want to start your own podcast? We use Transistor! https://go.aliabdaal.com/transistor 🎧 LISTEN FOR FREE Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/deep-dive-with-ali-abdaal/id1587142091 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7gZkflCpck1rTixj8M7yHt RSS: https://feeds.transistor.fm/deep-div 🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we’d love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :) https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/deep-dive-with-ali-abdaal/ 👋 GET IN TOUCH You can also Tweet @aliabdaal with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you’ve learnt from the episodes and we can thank you personally for tuning in 🙏 PS: Some of the links in this description are affiliate links that I get a kickback from 😜