Why I chose to disappoint my dad

Summary

• Invest in your own name as it stays with you throughout life; it can be an asset or a liability.
• Your life's decisions should not be driven by other people's expectations, including family.
• Mortality and the awareness of a finite life can provide clarity and drive important decision-making.
• Subjective well-being changes throughout life, often dipping in middle age and improving as we become more aware of mortality.
• Legacy may not last or be as impactful as one thinks when considering the long-term scope of history.
• Feeling trapped or fearing a chosen path can be a catalyst for change.
• Find the courage to diverge from the path others have set for you if it does not lead to personal happiness.
• Taking a bold step like starting a new career can be driven by fear but also a pursuit of self-discovery.
• Education and a stable job can be a safety net, but if it's not fulfilling, it's okay to seek alternative paths.
• Freedom and joy are critical in guiding career and life decisions; material success is not the only measure of achievement.
• Continuous learning and unlearning are part of growth; societal 'rules' are often self-imposed and can be changed.
• Focus on finding joy, which is internal, instead of happiness that often depends on external factors.
• It's easier to identify and move away from what you dislike than to immediately know what brings you joy.
• Inverting negative elements in your life can lead you towards a more positive direction.

Video

How To Take Action

A good way to invest in yourself is to think about your name as your lifelong brand. It can be an awesome asset or a big problem. Remember, building your name is a big deal because it's yours forever. You can change jobs, but your name is yours to keep shiny or let get rusty.

To make smart life choices, don't just do what others expect, like family or friends. It's important to stay true to what makes you happy. Think about how life is short and use that to make choices that matter to you. It’s kind of like taking off heavy backpack that’s not yours. You’ll feel lighter and can run your own race!

When you feel stuck or scared about the path you're on, it might be a sign that you gotta change things up. Be brave! Sometimes starting over, like getting a new job, is scary, but it can also help you learn lots about yourself.

Remember, it's okay to walk away from a safe job or schooling if it doesn’t make you smile. Your happiness is worth more than money or a fancy title. Keep learning new stuff, and don't be afraid to forget old rules that don't help you anymore.

If you're trying to figure out what makes you truly happy, start by dropping the things that make you unhappy. Think about what you don’t like, and then work your way to the good stuff. This can guide you towards a happier life. Flip those bad things upside down and find the joy that's right for you!

Just keep in mind, don't worry too much about what others think. Most people are busy thinking about their own stuff. Focus on your game. If you don’t know what brings you joy yet, it's cool! Start small, try new things, and you'll find it.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"You only get one name, so invest in it accordingly"

– Alex Hormozi

"Mortality has been the single biggest driver and the biggest decisions that I've made in my life"

– Alex Hormozi

"I think for most people, yes, and why is the legacy piece less important? Um, more so and I whenever I get into this topic, I think a lot of like some people get sensitive about it"

– Alex Hormozi

"In a long enough time horizon we're all screwed"

– Alex Hormozi

"There are no rules and it just took me a very long time to realize that"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

you only get one name so invest in it accordingly and i always thought about that i thought it was a really good line just like you only get one name like you can change your companies you can go bankrupt but like your name stays with you yeah and so that can either be an asset or it can be a liability well i usually ask my guest how did you get this job so i was a management consultant right out of college i did space cyber intelligence for the military which was sounds much cooler than it really was but i had a top secret clearance it sounded really good at dinner parties and just about only that um and you know one day i looked out for my balcony because i had a really nice place because i could afford it at the time um and i was like is this it and i was you know in my young 20s you know at that point i had done everything that i think i was supposed to do so i was you know i did well in school i you know was president of all the clubs you know graduated in three years got the good job um and i realized that it was i was living you know a life for me that my father wanted me to live and so that was kind of you know i went i i faltered back and forth for probably a period of six months um of really not wanting this to be my life but not wanting to let my dad down and so at some point the the thing that kind of pushed me over the edge was i can either you know die to myself or i can die to my father and at the end of the day you know i have to survive so i will if i if i make this decision and he no longer wants to be my dad then i can accept that wow was that extreme then yes say more about that are you an only child yeah so only child raised by a single father um middle eastern um he was born in iran and um you know i everything in my life up until that point was really just to make him proud so i it was very much a seeking approval seeking validation kind of drive at that point in my life and so the idea of disappointing him or not getting his approval felt like death and at that point i was actually contemplating not living you have watched some of my youtube stuff mortality has been the single biggest driver and the biggest decisions that i've made in my life and it has become a more routine process for decision making for me in general because i think it provides clarity and it provides context to most of the decisions we have which the vast majority of them don't matter which is helpful in and of themselves and then you know beyond that it helps me make the decisions that i think removes everyone else from the playbook because if you if you study subjective well-being and how people perceive how they're doing in their own lives it looks like a smiley face so seven-year-olds think they're killing life and then it drops dramatically between 20 and 30. and then there's still a little bit more of a dip right around 45 that's like when people are their true they hate life the most and then and then it kind of slowly get goes up to like 55 60 and then it shoots right back up again when people see that they're going to die and that life is short and that they can make the decisions without worrying about the ramifications of other people and some of the people they're worried about are also dead and so it was using that context for that biggest decision that's been duplicated many times in my life since then because if i have a good decision-making algorithm i try and reuse it as many times as i can let's unpack it for the audience a little bit so you know when we're seven we don't have a care in the world uh the artist or the whatever we want to be has not been beaten out of us yet uh no one's told us that we are not what we think we are we're still popping wheelies and climbing trees and falling out and that's okay and then you get to your 20s and 30s and the rubber hits the road a little bit and if you've made money i guess and if that's your sign of success then you're okay but if not you're kind of hosed then in your 40s i'm guessing uh you start to have more life experience 50s maybe you start caring less what people think and then um and then you fast forward all the way to maybe near death and then you really get to a point where you don't care what anyone says and you really boil it down to what's important and probably i'm guessing that's love relationships uh legacy and then you just like peace out i think for most people yes for me specifically the legacy piece less so um but i think for most people yes and why is the legacy piece less important um more so and i whenever i get into this topic i think a lot of like some people get sensitive about it and so i just like to put the disclaimer like this is not me judging your beliefs and me stating my beliefs is in no way yeah a judgment on anywhere else um but if you just look at expanding the time horizon over a much longer period of time if you look at it in ten thousand years or a hundred thousand years or a million years right the easy way to test this is to go backwards right which is do you know your great great great great great great grandfather probably not and then if you look at it from a how much has somebody achieved standpoint um i happen to be in an interesting situation where my great great grandfather was in the ruling class in iran and he had 400 children so he was literally you know like ruled and had a lot of wealth he had a lot of wives to create 400 children right and i actually still can't remember his name because my dad told me one time and i can't remember it and i've never seen any of the quote legacy that i'm sure he felt like he was leaving and so if that was that level of success and legacy and only four or five generations later i don't even remember the man's name nor do i have any piece of that legacy yeah it seems a little bit irrelevant when the revolution happened in iran we talk about legacy lands buildings houses bank accounts government says those are ours now that's it there's your legacy gone that's why i'm like and people were like i want to build a legacy i'm like u.s might not even be the superpower in 500 years your kids your kids might be in in bangladesh who knows india might be the hot spot 500. no one knows right and i think in a long enough time verizon we're all screwed and i think in some ways people find that incredibly disheartening but an equal opposite is you can't find it both disheartening and also not freeing because all of the decisions that we're making that are not for ourselves or what or are are subject to change that we feel pressure from whether that be society societal i'll put quotes there because that's a big word um or family friends expectations that we perceive other people to have of us if you can if you can just relinquish all of those chains i think it's incredibly freeing and um i choose to live that way that advice is good because it helps us live in the moment because you know even if you believe in something after that's still in the future yeah and there's a question mark because no one actually knows with you know with knowledge what happens or if something happens so you might as well live in the present make the best of it yeah an interesting one um that i thought through around that was um a lot of us not a lot of us all of us have 100 experience uh not being alive right before we were born we were not alive and so we know what that was like there was nothing um that we can recollect and so i would imagine that that's the closest experience that we can have to not being live yet again which to me is not that frightening yeah and it is freeing you're right because it's it's both uh humbling to know that you don't matter in the grand scheme of things but at the same time you matter infinitely if you just focus on the present and the the mark that you're going to leave here and now i i contemplated i had to die to my father died of myself and i realized that i i would rather die to him which pretty much ended up happening and so my fears were relatively justified he was not in support of the things that i wanted to do i ended up quitting that job sold everything i had packed my car went to california because that's what i thought the land of fitness opportunity was because that was the only thing i really enjoyed mentored under a guy for a few months to try and at least learn the ropes started my first facility slept on the floor for the first nine months which was a very terrible experience for me and time stamped the age for me now i was 23. so you graduated early you got that dream job and then you bailed yeah two years and that was really at the time and all of this kind of it was at the a splitting point where i had done two years and the kind of career path traditionally is like two to four years of management consulting and then you go back to an ivy league for your gmat and then from there you go into you know you can you can go do investment banking you can do private equity you can do you know some of the bigger white collar jobs but um it was i just didn't i didn't want more of what i had um and so i thought that i would have a better shot taking 200 000 in two years which is what the you know economic equivalent of what the degree was and starting something on my own i figured i would learn more in the first two years and with that money and maybe even have a business by the end of that period of time that made an equivalent amount of money compared to what i would have had as a job offer but how did you what signals did you get i mean you're saying like i wasn't feeling it but like where was your motivation because i see you as this hustler this go-get is all about gobbling up new opportunities it transcends beyond that now but like at first it sounds like you were just all about the go get but how did you know i mean at first i was driven by fear okay it was all fear fear of failure feel of disappointment fear of other people's judgment right what did your dad end up saying did he say good luck with you no he thought he was stupid though i was wasting my life yeah and wasted a degree that he'd spent money on and yeah wasted a good job opportunity that he had set up for me all these things right in his defense did he immigrate here yeah okay so in his defense 100 right and i just want to tell the audience so that they're not like but it's like you know if you have justified in saying that yeah if you escape from a country where there's trauma and impending danger then your son squanders an opportunity you might get a little anxious about that 100 i mean my dad came here with a thousand dollars you know a medical degree yeah and then built every didn't even speak english right i think what he did was harder than what i've done like i got to i got to stand on his shoulders okay you know in huawei i mean i speak english you know like just the basics like i speak english i went to a good school just all the support infrastructure known and unknown that was around me yeah to you know to be successful yeah i think it's healthy to recognize your privilege yeah but at the same time you know it came with lots of baggage too and so you had signals which were mainly fear-based yeah and i i mean the biggest thing that made the decision for me i would say i had the logical decision and then i had the emotional decision the emotional decision was um i could i don't want to do this this is not the life i want to lead um i am not happy doing this every day i would prefer to not be alive if this is what my life will be continuously if i would prefer to not be alive then that kind of opens up my decision calculus and what was it i'm trying to put my finger on what what was it that made you happy was it just the freedom to do what you want i didn't know what made me happy i knew it was not making me happy okay yeah so i think that's another important lesson too if i can just extract them you know i'm sure a lot of people watching they feel the same kind of family pressure um they want to be what other people expect them to be if you know if that's who you are and that's totally normal um but we should always remember the context in which that advice is given could be given through the lens of a certain lifestyle a certain time frame but like i think that's a thing whether you're young or middle age you're trying to figure out what you want to be when you grow up you're trying to have it all figured out yeah because we don't seems like we don't like uncertainty but i think your message if i'm hearing you is sometimes you have to try it on for size to see if it fits or not and you get it on you're like well i thought that dream job was going to be like perfect but turns out you know it's tight in the crotch you know it's like i i need something different mm-hmm and i think giving yourself permission to do that and it was a side to what you were saying about my dad like education saved his life like he was only able to leave the country because he was educated and so there's very deep roots there and i can appreciate that but for this context or for my life it just wasn't appropriate right and when we did come to terms later um the only time he's ever apologized to me in my life and said but to be fair in my time i would have been right oh absolutely and he would have been it's just not the same time yeah absolutely it wasn't that it was inappropriate it was just out of context and it didn't necessarily translate to this new life i love the saying you know in our 20s we're concerned about what everyone thinks about us in our 40s we don't care what anyone thinks about us and in our 60s we realized that no one was thinking about us to begin with right and i just i just feel like that's i mean who else have you thought about today besides yourself probably not i mean you have your kids which is an extension of yourself but you know i feel like yeah not a lot and so most people are like that and you know a lot of it like we have a lot more leeway than i think we give ourselves credit for and i think the more that i have now you know i'll say accomplished with quotes in in material success the more i am excited about the things that i can do and that was why the opening of the book was like there are no rules and it just took me a very long time to realize that and i continued to unlearn rules that i thought existed you know as i continue to you know go on this journey yeah i love that idea of unlearning i think we all just try and go back to being like we were when we were children just because when you're a child you're purely present right you're just present in the moment and i i don't like the word happy very much i prefer using joy because you can be you can mourn joyfully right because it's it's a it's a it's internal rather than happiness which i feel is more like happenstance it's more from external and so um you know what are the things that bring me joy were the things that i find you know to find joy in um and i think for anyone who's listening it's a much harder question to answer what are the things that bring me joy than answering the question what are the things i hate and it's easier to correct those first you're like well i hate my job and i hate my relationship and i hate the city okay those are all very changeable and a lot of times you get there by by inversion well if i wanted to destroy my life i wanted to have the worst life possible what would i do and then taking all those things that you would do to really destroy your life and make your life miserable and then reverse them it's a much easier way to solve the positive psychology equation in my opinion yeah i love that and i'm remembering this this picasso quote which is i think he said everyone is born an artist yeah right and then eventually we you know get convinced that we're not yeah and we have to really just strip away and get you know get back to basics