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April 22, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:20
WHAT IT MEANS TO SUCCEED!
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I think sometimes education is a very difficult puzzle to fit into your life.
It's not always going to fit well.
The education puzzle and the life puzzle, they don't always fit well with each other.
So maybe you can give us some intuition on success and how you did it.
So, yeah, success is...
One of these words is a little tough to define.
I don't mean to start off sounding like Bill Clinton.
It depends what is, is.
But success is a little hard to define.
And I've now had both successes and failures in a variety of fields.
I originally studied to be an actor.
I didn't hugely like it.
I felt I had too many of my own words to spend my life mouthing other people's words.
And then I was in academia for a while.
I did a graduate degree.
And I was like, something's not quite right about this.
Plus, there were a lot of socialists and communists.
So I was constantly getting into fights with everyone.
And I'm like, I don't really want that.
So I always loved computers.
I started learning how to program computers when I was 11.
I got a little bit of an inheritance from my grandmother.
8K. 8K of memory.
Shockingly, shockingly complex.
I learned how to program, so I ended up co-founding a software company, and that I was successful in.
That is a company that's still running, and we grew it, and we sold the company, and then for the last 15 years, I've been doing this philosophy show, which is now the largest, most popular philosophy show in the world.
700 million downloads.
You know all of the Stats, so definitely successful.
It's the biggest philosophy conversation the world has ever seen.
And the question is, okay, so kind of the clue as to what I succeeded at and what I failed at has to do with love.
And it's funny because we always think of success in terms of status or money or whatever, material goods or whatever.
But fundamentally, success...
Is about what you love.
Because if you don't love it, you can't do all of the crazy work that you need to do to succeed.
You know, when I was co-founding the software company, I spent a year not getting paid at all, working 60, 70, 80 hours a week.
I would never do that if I didn't love what it is that I do.
Now, the love has to do with what it is that you're doing, but it also has to do with the people you're doing it with and the people you're doing it for.
So for me, I grew to genuinely love the people I hired, the people I worked with.
And I genuinely loved the customers and I genuinely loved what we were doing because what we were doing was I was building and selling software for big corporations to reduce the amount of air pollution and ground pollution and water pollution.
Now, that's kind of an easy thing to love.
It can be something else.
Like let's say you're building some game for a phone or a tablet.
You have to love the fact that you're giving 20 minutes of sheer silly fun to people on their tablet, right?
I was just playing.
I'm playing this game Doom Eternal, the new version of Doom, and it's gruesome, ghastly fun, right?
And so the people who make the game, they have to be like, more skulls, more lower intestines, more...
Demons that you put their eyeballs down their throat and they explode.
They just have to love that ridiculous exploding carnage that characterizes the game.
The chainsaw should go from this angle, not this angle, because it's more gory and you see more spine.
The horror movie director has to love the goosebumps that he's going to give to his audience.
If you love that, what you do, you love the people you're doing it with, and you love your customers...
You can't fail, fundamentally, because you'll outlast everyone else.
If you love it 100% and someone only loves it 50%, you won't do twice as well.
You'll do 10 times as well.
And so finding that passion...
I mean, your teacher or your professor here has given you the skills that you need.
That's fantastic. You know, without the skills, you can't do it.
But if you have the skills without the passion, without the love, without the commitment...
To make the world a better place.
How is it you're gonna make money in the world?
You're gonna make money out of people's gratitude.
Out of people's gratitude for what it is that you're doing.
So they have to love you in a way to give you the money.
You have to love a particular kind of fish, and you also have to like the fishmonger.
Because, you know, there's tons of fishmongers out there, people who sell fish.
They have to love coming to you.
Why? Because you give them a smile, you give them a story, you give them something that makes their day a little bit better.
I mean, I learned this even when I was a waiter in my teens.
I made good tips because I would tell a little joke.
I would ask people how they're doing.
If they were regulars, I'd ask them how their week was.
Now, that wasn't all fake.
I really like people as a whole, so I'm always curious about people's experience.
But people would ask to come and sit in my section and all of that.
I do these call-in shows in philosophy where people can call in with any problem and I don't think I've ever said no to anyone who has a problem and we'll see if philosophy can help them because I love philosophy for itself but mostly for what it can do to make people's lives So find something that brings a light to the world and brings joy to people's hearts or relieves their suffering or distracts them from their suffering, which is fine too, right?
I mean, the guy who invented Novocain did more good than most philosophers in history because then you can get your teeth drilled without screaming out.
Like one of the demons in Doom Eternal, I think you can put it that way.
So success to me is you have to be patient to find what really moves you, to find what really motivates you.
And that can take a while.
And there's nothing wrong with getting a bunch of jobs and playing around and just playing with ideas and meeting the people because success is not...
It's never a solo thing.
It's never just you.
If it's just you, you're just home doing nothing, right?
It has to be you plus the customer, you plus the people that you work with, and you plus this idea that you love for the good that it can do in the world, for the benefits it can bring to the world.
The guy who goes and fishes...
He's not just handing you a fish that's not very inspiring.
He's feeding families.
You know, he's bringing smiles to the face of children who love the fish that he's making.
Like that old story about, you could think of this, of course, a guy building a Buddhist temple.
There's two guys building a Buddhist temple, right?
And they're putting bricks on top and someone comes by and says to the first guy, what are you doing?
He's like, oh, I'm just putting brick on brick.
I'm just sweating here and waiting for five o'clock so I can go home.
And he's going to make his bricks and he's going to spend his life Having no fundamental connection to what he's doing, like a robot, like a machine.
Now you go to the second guy and he says, I'm building a shelter, a place of worship for people to contemplate how to become better in this world.
Who's more motivated? Who's going to do a better job?
Who's going to have a happier and more satisfying life?
And who do you want to hire?
Because remember, every piece of success requires somebody wanting to hire you.
I don't just mean a manager or an employer.
Your customers are also hiring you to do whatever it is that you do.
They are hiring you.
To do whatever it is that you do.
And if you have that passion, if you have that belief, if you have that certainty that this is the best way for you to spend your short and precious time in this world exercising your considerable talents to their best ability, you will draw people to you, good people to work with, good customers.
Who will respect and value what it is that you do.
And that to me is success.
And people who get the money or who get the fame without that love, they're not successful to me at all.
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