This is my favourite episode because I talk about where I truly believe success comes from: tried-and-true human values such as patience, accountability, self-esteem, or moderation.
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The key takeaways:
- There is no quick fix. There is only long-term thinking deployed every day through good behaviour.
- Focus on acquiring traits that optimise for trust and long-term thinking, such as patience, accountability etc.
- As a principle: look into nature and history, and whatever traits and patterns you see as working there, they are highly likely to apply to humans, and you included.
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But why? Why would values such as patience bring you success? The short answer is because they follow the laws of nature. Let me explain to you why.
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Look at these values (patience, kindness, moderation, accountability); do you notice something they have in common? They are character-building traits, and they ask for change deep inside you. There is no quick way of acquiring these human values, but they get built over the long-term. You can't buy self-esteem.
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Why would these values be the actual foundation of success? First, let's understand what brought success to empires, societies and individuals across history. And we can summarise this to two key ingredients: trust and long-term thinking.
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Why trust? History shows that society is built on trust. Credit, the possibility of borrowing money, is the real manifestation of trust. A bank lends you money with the promise that you will return them. If you don't return the money, the bank can trust the justice system that you will go to prison. So it's a chain of trust, which makes society possible.
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Why long-term thinking? Empires, wealth and everything which stood the time was made by long-term thinkers, who didn't sacrifice the future for the present.
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Coming back to our question, why would these values be the actual foundation of success? Because they optimise for trust and long-term thinking by "suppressing the animal within you". What's this animal? It's the irrational you, the you who doesn't do what he should do: the you who doesn't wake up on time, who overeats, who procrastinates, who doesn't go to the gym. It's the animal within you, that doesn't do what he should do, because it requires effort.
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What are the characteristics of this animal? Greed, laziness, fear, quick money, insecurity, hunger to be understood, conflict. To understand why these characteristics are wrong, let's take them one by one and notice two things. Firstly, they destroy trust - which is the foundation of the current society and economic system. Secondly, they make you take short-term decisions at the expense of the long-term ones. Take fear - makes you take the easy route; laziness - postpone for tomorrow; greed - you use your credit card today, and your future self will pay; quick money - you make short-term decisions, basing your future on luck; insecurity - you fear of taking leaps; conflict - you eliminate people's trust in you.
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This is the key: success comes from the exact reverse of these traits; fear - courage, greed - moderation, quick money - patience, insecurity - self-esteem, victims - accountability, hunger to be understood - active listening, conflict - peaceful resolution.
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Did you notice something about these values? They optimise for the exact two things that we said to bring success: trust and long-term thinking. I hope by now, it's clear that to have success, you must acquire deep character traits to optimise for trust and long-term thinking.
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If it's so obvious, why don't people do this? Because it's hard and it's not quick. People wish good things come quick, fast. My friend, you can't skip stages in the process of eliminating fear, building self-esteem or accountability.
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Now, the next question is, why can't you skip steps and get "accountability" tomorrow? And this is the most beautiful explanation I found. It's against the laws of nature. Humans are part of nature, we are animals, and in natural processes, you can't skip stages, there is no shortcut. Taking a shortcut in nature is like saying that you want a high crop yield in the autumn, but you will skip watering the fields in the summer. Surely you can sometimes speed things, such as using fertilisers, but you can't skip them.
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Wait, can't you "break the rules of the system"? No. Breaking the rules works only in artificial systems and not is natural ones. In school, which is an artificial social system you can learn for the exam the day before, but you will not build knowledge in the long term.
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Let me ask you a question. Don't you think that what worked to built empires for thousands of years will bring you success? Look at the foundation of every religion and philosophical movement which stood the time (such as stoicism): they are based on these character-building values. Read Meditations by Marc Aurelius, the Roman emperor, and you will read about exactly what I'm talking.