Four Lessons On Why Today Is Everything
Summary
This week I’m sharing four simple stories which I believe have helped me in my life and I hope they can inspire you too.
One small decision today can have an outsized impact on your future
Every successful person has talent, work ethic and luck - don't mistake success for accident
Find something you're pathologically obsessed with - it's your Values, Strengths and Passions combined
Spend today giving your future self gifts - and use inversion to figure out what those are
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Create a butterfly effect
Kyoto and Hiroshima: We visited these two places last year - the result of one man’s holiday could not be more stark.
Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of War visited Kyoto in the 1920s and fell in love with the beautiful city. When he and his war council were deciding which Japanese cities to drop the atomic bomb on he pushed against the historic city being bombed, leaving both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to their fate. One holiday led to the deaths of a different 200,000 people and destroyed generations after that never had the chance to exist.
Your future doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is not predetermined. It is created by millions of tiny interactions that are happening right now in the present. A decision you make today will impact your future. If you don’t study, exercise or take risks, you will have a materially different future to the alternative in which you spent your days lying around and playing it safe. Someone you meet today could change the course of your life. Changing your life is just the first order effect, the second, third and eventually the butterfly effect can be on a scale that is hard to imagine.
Every successful person has worked just as hard as you
No one has ever looked at Margot Robbie and thought, “God, I bet she really worked hard to get to the top.” People are so blinded by her 10/10 looks that they can’t possibly imagine hard work coming into the equation.
- Jimmy Carr speaking on the DOAC.
We all know how insanely hard we’ve worked to get to where we are - but, when it comes to other people, we often say, “oh, look how talented she is, look how beautiful she is, look how smart she is.”
The holy triumvirate = talent + luck + work ethic. Nobody ever achieved anything without all three.
This is more true for people who appear to have bags of natural talent. However, for every person that has made it with bags of talent, you can find a million examples of people with bags of talent who didn’t make it. For every Margot Robbie, David Beckham, Taylor Swift, Robert Oppenheimer, there are a thousand equally talented people who never made it.
Natural talent (beauty, footballing, singing, intellect) are part of the equation, but the triumvirate is completed with:
Work ethic: consistently overcoming setbacks to get to where you want to be through intrinsic motivation.
Luck: being in the right place at the right time.
Success cannot work without any of those three - Beckham was lucky that his parents loved football - without it, would he be where he is today? If Oppenheimer was born with a low IQ, no amount of work ethic and luck could’ve got him to create the atom bomb.
When you assume someone’s success is accidental, you rob yourself of the chance to learn from them and you throw away your own agency to have success in your own life.
Find something that looks pathological
I learnt a lot and got so much inspiration from Jimmy Carr for this week’s blog. See below for the link to the episode.
On the podcast I mentioned above, Jimmy Carr shared how he writes jokes for ten hours a day to feed his 250 tour dates per year. Whilst other comedians are stressing about their agent and worrying about selling tickets, Jimmy’s advice is simple: “be funnier”. How do you get funnier? Write jokes for ten hours a day.
Most people would consider someone writing jokes for ten hours a day to be pathologically insane. However, if you want to reach the top of your game, pathological is exactly the sweet spot you want to be in. Because it means that what looks like hard work to other people is just Tuesday to you. Other people try to swim in the waters of your life and feel like they’re swimming upstream, not you though - you’re floating with the current.
I believe the basic ingredients for finding something that you can be pathologically obsessed with are:
Values: you are going to have to battle to get to where you want to go, so it better be for something you believe in.
Strengths: play to your talents by finding work that feels like you’re doing front crawl whilst everyone else is doing breaststroke.
Passions: if you love something but aren’t very good at it, that’s called a hobby. If you’re good at something but don’t love it, that’s called unfulfilment. Find something that you’re good at, you love doing and one day the world will need it.
Spend today giving your future self gifts
An area that Jimmy Carr talked about a lot was this idea that we should spend our lives doing things that our tomorrow self would be grateful for. He’s very specific that it is about pleasing yourself tomorrow, not in ten years. Ten years is such an abstract concept with a multitude of possibilities. Tomorrow is so close and easy to imagine. Parents find this concept very easy to understand - all your kids want right now is chocolate, iPhones and TV. If you give into their cravings, you’ll have unhealthy, lazy kids. Forcing them to study, eat broccoli and go on a walk is giving them a gift in the future.
The quieter partner of Warren Buffett - Charlie Munger is famed for his intellect. Read his Almanack, links below.
If you struggle to think what tomorrow's self needs, take a trick out of Charlie Munger’s book, in particular his inversion theory. He first used this theory when he was an airforce weather forecaster. He described how most people would sit there thinking, “how can I keep these pilots safe?” The problem is, the possibilities are truly endless. It would be like asking yourself, how can I be healthier?
Instead, he asked, “what would I have to do to kill these airforce pilots?” He arrived at just two points, (1) icy planes and (2) running out of gas. Therefore, the only things he ever thought about when keeping his pilots safe were, (1) avoid icy weather, and (2) when diverting planes around bad weather, make sure they are always within range of another airport.
It’s so simple that it’s brilliant.
So, when you want to think about what gifts you want tomorrow, ask yourself, “what do I really not want?” If you don’t want to be hungover and tired - give yourself the gift of not drinking and going to bed on time.
The present matters more than we think
At Wildest Dream, we are all about living with more purpose and meaning - we created a business for it after all. These lessons pave a good route towards that life. Your future isn't being written in ten years' time. It's being written right now, in every small decision you either make or avoid.
Deepen Your Curiosity
This is a fantastic episode of Jimmy Carr on the DOAC. We often think of comedians as carefree, a bit relaxed and easygoing - this will change your mind. He was so incredibly prepared, well read and he talks about such a range of topics, from men’s mental health to living with purpose. If you want a slightly funnier episode, watch him on Katherine Ryan’s podcast.
Charlie Munger on his bag of tricks - one of them being his inversion theory. If you like the video, I’d highly recommend reading his full book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack.
