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May 22, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams

20:32

Episode 989 Scott Adams: I Tell You How to Find Meaning For Your Life

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	Kevin, good to see you.
	Come on in. Everybody, gather around.
	This might be the biggest day of your life.
	I say might.
	I don't know what the odds are, but it might, right?
	There are a lot of you here. For some of you, it's going to be the best day of your life.
	It just follows. Well, today you're going to learn the meaning of life for yourself.
	People may have different meanings.
	But while we're waiting for people to stream in here so they can get the full goodness, first, some updates.
	Have you seen that the news has turned pure LoserThink?
	One of the chapters in my book, LoserThink, is mocking people who say that something good should have happened sooner.
	Because everything good should have happened sooner.
	And that's going to be the story of the coronavirus.
	So it looks like the Democrats are going to settle on this specific chapter of LoserThink.
	It's funny that I have an actual chapter.
	A chapter in a book called LoserThink.
	And the Democratic strategy is to embrace it.
	They probably don't know it's a chapter in a book called LoserThink.
	I don't think it would matter if they knew.
	But, yeah, so they're going to say, if it had been done sooner, it would have been better.
	Do you know what we all know?
	If it had been done sooner, it would have been better, no matter what it is.
	It doesn't matter what it is.
	It would have been better if it had been done sooner.
	I mentioned earlier today that what the world needs is an app that lets you do really quick three-second videos that you splice together automatically to make a lesson.
	Because lessons come in tiny little chunks.
	Whether you're telling somebody how to change a spark plug or anything.
	Just little chunks. It turns out that there is one called Ario.
	A-R-I-O. And I guess it's an app for training.
	It looks like a big corporate kind of enterprise kind of an app.
	So it's a pretty serious app.
	I don't know if it works for individuals.
	But at least for companies that are looking to Quickly train people up.
	You know, somebody in the field can just, apparently, just take it out and say, blah, blah, blah, blah, put in some text and words and video, and suddenly you've got an instant tutorial.
	So, that's fun.
	Did you hear that Don Jr.
	mentioned on Twitter, That he's going to be joining the locals platform where I have moved much of my stuff.
	So that's a big deal.
	It's not every day that Don Jr.
	joins a social media platform.
	And of course, a big part of the reason is that it's not subject to anybody's algorithm.
	I'm going to give you one great thought, followed by another great thought, and then I'm going to close it with another thought that's great, and then I'm going to give you the meaning of life.
	Are you ready? One that'll make your head explode, one that'll just make you feel good, and another one that makes you feel good.
	Here's the one that'll make your head explode.
	Joel Pollack tweeted this.
	I told him it might be his best tweet because this will just blow your mind.
	I love it when somebody takes something you've been looking at forever and then just turns it around and you go, oh, I didn't know that was on the other side of that thing I've been looking at forever.
	And look what he did here.
	So this is Joel Pollack.
	He says, if real Donald Trump had shut down the country two weeks earlier, and remember that's what everybody's jabbering about, should have been earlier if it had only been two weeks earlier, blah, blah, blah.
	So what would have happened?
	So as Joel says, if Trump had shut down the country two weeks earlier, South Carolina and Super Tuesday would never have happened.
	Bernie Sanders would have been the Democratic nominee for president.
	And the media would be screaming about how Trump had interfered in the 2020 election.
	Right? Isn't that like the smartest thing you've heard today?
	I swear, sometimes if you just watch the regular...
	Broadcast news, you're just getting dumber as you watch it.
	But how come nobody thought to actually play back the tape?
	Why was it Joel, who was like the first person who thought of this, like, well, if you want to go back two weeks, let's rewind the tape.
	Let's take a look.
	If that's what you want, let's go take a look at what that looks like.
	That was a really clever insight.
	Alright, Joel's got a new book coming out.
	I'm going to talk to him about that when we schedule that too, so that'll be fun.
	So this is a quote from Naval Ravikant.
	And it's just a smart little true statement.
	Very optimistic. And it goes like this.
	Technology destroys jobs and replaces them with opportunities.
	Ah, I like that.
	Because if you don't have a job, a job's a pretty good thing.
	But if you do have a job, what's even better is your own thing.
	So technology, it might take your job, but it also makes it possible for you to do your own thing.
	And I think a lot of people figured that out during the coronavirus.
	So Naval, that was the exact perfect message for the times.
	So look for your opportunity.
	There's plenty out there.
	And the President has promised, and before we do our micro lesson on the meaning of life, the President has promised more good news coming in the coming weeks, and fairly soon, about therapeutics and vaccines.
	Do you remember when the president was saying, I think we'll have a vaccine by...
	I forget what he said, but everybody said, well, that's crazy.
	You're not going to have a vaccine by September, October.
	That's kind of crazy. And I think Fauci was saying, that's more of a 12-month, 18-month situation.
	But I think the president's thinking, and of course I can't read his mind, so I'm going to make an assumption here, I think the assumption is that he just trusted American ingenuity, and he trusted that in the context of an emergency, that Americans would just do what needed to be done, because we always do.
	It's actually a pretty good bet.
	And I was, you sort of philosophically, I'm completely with the President on that point, that however fast you think something can get done, we're going to beat that.
	And we'll probably beat it by a lot, because it's the top priority, and we're pretty good at this stuff.
	So I'll just give you that little bit of optimism.
	I think you're going to see Mostly good news.
	Of course, the deaths are going to continue, and that's the tragedy.
	But on top of that, you're going to see an increasing amount of good news coming out, and it's going to feel good.
	Alright. So, how many of you would like to have a little lesson on the meaning of life?
	And so it will begin right now.
	Alright, this is your micro-lesson.
	On the meaning of life.
	Now this is going to be an individual meaning, not a meaning that applies to everyone.
	Because you can take care of yourself in terms of the meaning that you find out of life.
	There's not much you can do for other people.
	They have to figure it out themselves.
	So this is your personal journey and how to find meaning in your life.
	And it's a too whiteboard situation.
	That's how good it is.
	That's a lot of goodness. I don't know if you can take it.
	So here's the basic idea, the starting point, and then we'll get to some more detail on the other side.
	If you were to live an ideal life that was compatible with your biological self, what would it look like?
	And here is my contention, that you will have the sensation of And for all practical purposes, you'll have meaning in your life if you stay on this line, which is the line of selfishness.
	And the idea here is that you're born a baby, and there's nothing you can do about it.
	You didn't ask to be born, and if somebody asked you to help out, you couldn't do it if you wanted to.
	You are 100% selfish baby.
	Now, as you get older, if you're doing things right, maybe when you're a teen, you can start to help out a little bit.
	You're a little less selfish. Maybe by the time you're a parent, you don't have to actually biologically have children, but you're an adult and you find yourself giving back as much as you're getting.
	You're giving back a lot.
	Could be to your family, could be to anybody, your company, whatever.
	Eventually, Once you've got everything that you need and you've taken care of the people who are around you, you enter some kind of a, I'll call it a mentor mode, where you're sort of a senior member of the tribe, you know, you're a tribal elder essentially, and you're just trying to be helpful.
	And then the last thing you do, at least in our culture, The last thing you do the moment your life is extinguished is you give away everything you have.
	So all of your material possessions just go away at the moment of death.
	So this is a purely unselfish moment because you're literally dead.
	So you start 100% selfish and you try to stay on the line to get to the point where you can be so unselfish That you die perfectly.
	A perfect death is you've given everything.
	There's nothing left to give.
	If you do that, or even if you feel you're on the line to do that, so for example, you're just in school.
	Are you doing the right thing if you're a teenager and you're just doing well in school and paying attention?
	Yes. Very rarely do young kids ask about the meaning of life.
	Because they're actually biologically doing exactly what they need to be doing.
	So if you find yourself compatible with your biological nature for that point of life, you will feel meaning.
	If you're learning and then giving as much as you're getting and then eventually becoming more purely unselfish, you will feel meaning in your life.
	Now, how do you do this, though?
	That's the hard part, right?
	How can you be sure That you can take care of yourself well enough, which is really the key.
	If you don't take care of yourself first, you're not going to be in any kind of position to be helpful.
	So you have to be selfish in the beginning until you've acquired enough safety, knowledge, financial assets, network, family, whatever, to be safe yourself.
	And then you can start branching out.
	This is the basic belief behind this.
	Is that we evolved to take care of ourselves first, because that's what survival would require.
	But secondarily, as soon as we take care of ourselves, we broaden that to the family, the people close to you, your tribe, and then, of course, civilization.
	So, how can you be helpful?
	And make sure you're staying on that line.
	Well, let's say you wanted to be And author of this simulation, if you're new to this, I like to call our reality a simulation because it feels like it.
	You don't have to believe it's a simulation for any of these purposes.
	It's just fun. So when I talk about authoring the simulation, what I'm talking about is not necessarily changing base reality.
	Because we don't have any access to base reality.
	Even if it changed, we might not know the difference.
	Because we did not evolve to be able to know reality.
	We evolved to live in these little worlds that we manufacture ourselves.
	So to the extent that you can manufacture your own world, you become the author of the simulation you're working in, you're living in and working.
	Now, The process for doing that, I'm going to give you the general outline, but then each of these items you'd have to work on individually.
	So this would be how to understand your world the best in a way that helps you get to that great line where you're becoming more useful all the time.
	So I broke it into three categories, but before you can even get serious on this, you need to understand the beginning point.
	That these are filters, not necessarily reality.
	And what I mean by that is, imagine if you would, you go to the grocery store, and I like to use this example.
	You're standing in a grocery store, and next to you is somebody with a different religion.
	And on top of that, they also believe everything that the opposite political party from you, whichever that is, they believe the opposite.
	Are they living the same reality that you are?
	Probably not. They might be worried that the leader is going to do something horrible, and you're not.
	So you live in a world where there's no risk for all practical purposes.
	That's what you experience as your reality.
	Again, independent from any base reality.
	It's just what you experience as your reality.
	Once you understand that we're all walking around in these manufactured realities, it frees you to author your own reality.
	If you feel you're a victim of reality and it's just, well, I'm just the output.
	I'm not the input.
	I'm not the variables.
	I'm just what got squirted at the end.
	If that's your view of life, that's exactly how your life will go.
	If you believe that it's you who manufactures this filter on reality and then can live in it, you could turn yourself into, let's say, a Buddhist.
	If that was compatible with your thinking.
	And you could live in that world, sort of a Buddhist reality.
	You could become a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent.
	You can author your own reality.
	Now, does that alone help you be more successful, live better, be healthier, have better relationships?
	Well, not by itself.
	You need some technique.
	Here are the things which I recommend That you understand are your priorities.
	If you have not developed people skills, the odds that you will be successful enough to eventually give back and therefore have meaning in your life, because you're learning and getting more powerful all the time, in order to do anything useful in life that gets to the mentor stage anyway, that really is a well-lived life, you're going to have to master people skills.
	I just listed some example ones here.
	So everything from working on your shyness, which you can work on.
	It's a technique. I've talked about that before.
	Your networking, your conversation, your public speaking, learning how to criticize people without hurting their feelings, how to manage them, etc.
	So it's a long list, but you know what it is.
	If you're not actually working on that list, meaning you're not reading a book on something on this list, you're not taking a class, you're not practicing something, Then you're not quite getting ready to be an author.
	You're still in sort of taking it as it comes mode.
	I've talked too much about the talent stack, but it's so powerful that if you're not developing your skills that layer well together, in your case, it's not the same skills for everybody.
	It's just whatever is the combination that makes you powerful and unique and valuable in the market.
	If you don't have a skill stack, And some people skills, you're just not going to be successful.
	I mean, you could. It's possible that people without people skills can be successful, but it's less likely.
	Which gets us to the last thing.
	You should understand the math of life.
	I'll call it the odds, but it's really sort of the math of life.
	If you understand the math of life, You have basically a strategy.
	I don't like to use the word strategy, so I prefer to say, do you know the odds?
	Do you know that if you do this thing, you'll have better odds than this thing?
	Here are just some examples of it.
	I talk about how It's very typical in the business world to try ten different things before one of them works.
	If you didn't know that, you'd give up after three.
	But if you knew it was almost sort of built into the texture of civilization, I don't know why, but it's a good rule of thumb that you probably try ten things and one of them is likely to catch on.
	You try three things, well, your odds are less.
	So understanding that about the world is important.
	You should understand that if you sell your time, there's a cap on how much you can make.
	Even if you're a lawyer, there's a cap.
	So maybe you should start your own business if you want an uncapped potential.
	The math of talent stacking is that just because you have, let's say, 10 talents and you add one, you don't go up just 10% in power.
	You might double in power.
	So once you understand the The multiplicative, you know, geometric benefit of adding skills, you have a strategy just built into your normal thinking.
	Understand about diversification, especially if you're investing.
	Don't put all your eggs in one basket, as they say.
	And follow the energy to go where there's the most luck, most stuff happening.
	If you go wherever there's the most stuff happening, the most people, you have more chances for luck.
	That is the outline for finding meaning in your life.
	Now, of course, the details of how you fill out your various categories and stacks here will be personal, and maybe you're all on your own path.
	But the idea is that if you're following that path from completely selfish to completely unselfish, you will have an internal feeling Of meaning.
	And that feeling will be just you being compatible with your most basic biological self.
	Because you were born to take care of yourself first.
	So if you're doing that, especially when you're young, you'll feel like you're doing exactly what you ought to be.
	And kids do.
	Kids generally feel like they're doing exactly what they should be doing.
	Learning, playing, growing.
	So just keep on that path and...
	You'll feel that feeling of completion and a feeling of meaning.
	So that's all for tonight.

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