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One of my favorite ideas is from the poet Christopher Morley who said, he said it many different ways, different times.
He said, the only success in life is to live it in your own way.
And I love that because it's so true.
Independence, autonomy, just doing whatever you want to do is one thing.
But I think more important is almost what he didn't say, but implied, which is that your way might be different from my way and different from somebody else's way.
There is no one way.
You just have to find your way and do it.
The ultimate success metric, I think, for anything in life is just whether you get what you want out of life, whether you got what you aspired to get.
That's how can it get more simple than that?
But it is so much harder than it sounds because it is way easier and more common to try to copy somebody who wants something that you don't.
I'm going to tell you a little story of something I've seen happen to two writers.
I've seen this happen twice and it made me sad each time you take an incredibly talented young writer who has a big blog following.
They join a big media company, a big newspaper where they quickly fizzled into irrelevance.
Each time it was the same story of what happened here.
When the writer was young and independent, they could write with their own voice and their own style and their own flair.
They could run with their own intuition about what was worth writing about and what wasn't.
They were artists, which is what made them great.
They were independent.
They did things their own way.
And then they joined a big media company.
And that media company basically said, that's not how we do things here.
Here is our way. Here is our style book that you must follow to a tee.
And by the way, meet your new editor.
He's going to tell you what to write and when to write it.
And they became employees.
They used to be artists.
Now they're employees.
And that was their downfall.
It just didn't work.
It is not uncommon for writers to fall for the strap.
One of my ideas for writing is that writing for yourself is fun and it shows.
But writing for other people is work and that shows too.
And what's so interesting is that these were big media companies, successful media companies, they knew what they were doing.
They knew what kind of writing worked and what their readers wanted.
These are not idiots, of course, but at the same time, of course, it didn't work out for that young writer because what was right for the company was wrong for the writer.
And a talented person can very quickly become mediocre when you force them to be someone who they aren't.
I'm going to say that again, because I think it's so important.
A talented person can quickly become mediocre when you force them to be someone who they aren't.
That is so true, no matter what your profession is, no matter what you're doing or what your aspirations are.
This happened to me a couple of years ago.
I don't think I've ever told this story, but when I had the early idea for my first book, The Psychology of Money, I spoke with an agent and he was really nice.
He was a great guy.
He was a successful agent and I told him the idea and he said, well, I don't think that's going to work.
The idea that you just said is not going to work.
It's not a good book, but we can we can try something different.
Let's come up with a different idea.
And I said, I'm not interested in another idea.
I'm going to go write this book.
And he said, well, no, no, you've got to change this and this.
And I didn't say this to him, but I wanted to say, I'm not asking for your permission on whether I can write this book.
I'm telling you, I'm going to.
It's the book that I want to write.
And with due respect, I don't care that you don't like it.
It's what I want to do.
That's what makes me happy.
You see this in so many different fields where it's like, you don't need permission to do it your own way.
Your way might be the very best way to do it.
Many years ago, this is now a famous anecdote.
It's one of my favorites.
Jerry Seinfeld did an interview with Harvard business review and they asked them in the interview, they said, look, Jerry, you and Larry David, who was a show's co -producer do everything in the show.
You write every line.
You direct it. Jerry acts in it.
And the interviewer said, couldn't McKinsey, the big management consulting firm, couldn't McKinsey have helped you find a better model?
And Jerry, Jerry responded, who's McKinsey?
The interviewer said, it's a consulting firm.
Jerry said, are they funny?
The interviewer said, no.
And then Jerry said, this is what's so great.
He said, then I don't need them.
If you're efficient, you're doing it the wrong way.
The right way is the hard way.
The show Seinfeld was successful because I micromanaged it.
Every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting.
That's my way of life.
And I think what he's saying there is like he did it his way because that was what worked best for him.
He doesn't need a group of other people to say, why don't you try it this way?
Why don't you do it that way?
So many times in life, you can just do it your own way.
I think that's also why people love art.
You see a painting by Pablo Picasso and you know, he didn't read a manual of someone telling him how to do that.
He just did it himself.
It was his own work.
You listen to the Beatles.
Of course they had inspiration from others, but nobody told them what to write or how to write it.
That was just, it's all theirs.
They did it their own way.
I think people love experiencing.
They love seeing people work independently doing it their own way.
And they also love doing it themselves.
And I think even if you're not an entrepreneur or a writer or an artist, it doesn't matter what your career is.
There is so much to learn from that.
It is so common to on one hand recognize how much variety there is among people who have different personalities, different backgrounds, different goals, different skills, but then on the other hand, it is so intuitive to ask.
What's the best way to do this thing?
As if there could possibly be one universal answer for vastly different people.
One area where this impacts people is of course, with money, where I think more damage is caused not by dumb financial plans, but by very reasonable ones that just are not right for you.
So how you invest your money might cause me to lose sleep and how I invest my money might prevent you from looking at yourself in the mirror tomorrow because you're not taking enough risk, maybe isn't that, isn't that fine?
Isn't that just okay to accept that we're different, isn't it far better to just accept that we're different rather than arguing over which one of us is more right or wrong and wouldn't it be dangerous if you became persuaded to invest like me, even if it's wrong for your personality and your skillset.
Of course, it's so obvious or take how we spend money.
You know, let's say you like to spend your money like this and I like to spend my money like that.
Who cares? It gets dangerous when you assume that if someone else is spending their money differently, they either must be doing it better than you or they're doing it wrong and that's actually a very common reaction either of those two because it's easy to interpret someone spending money differently
than you as an attack on what you've chosen to spend money on yourself.
And so much of this makes sense when you view it through the lens of people's experiences and their challenges and their personalities and their family dynamics impacting how they view the world.
So a lawyer who works a hundred hours a week and hates their job may have an urge to spend their money frivolously in an attempt to compensate for the, the misery of how their paycheck was earned.
You know, they're stressed at work.
They've given up so much.
They're like, I'm going to make this worth it.
I'm going to live a very extravagant life to compensate for that.
On that point, never have I seen money burn a hole in somebody's pockets faster than a young investment banker receiving their first annual bonus.
Because it's like they've done 12 months of, you know, working till three AM.
And then they have this urge to prove to themselves that it was worth it.
Offsetting what they sacrificed.
It's like somebody held underwater for a minute.
When they come back up, they do not take a calm breath when they service, they gasp.
And so much of spending in today's economy is, is gasping because of the experience that that person has had either in their current life or their past life.
And sometimes when you disagree with how people are spending their money, they're being too frivolous, they're, they're being too frugal, whatever it might be.
You have to understand that very often it's just because they've had a different life and they're doing it their way.
And you should just do it your way.
So the important part in all of this is that most debates about what's worth spending money on are just people with different lives and different desires.
Just talking over each other, how much you should spend or why other people spend the way they do.
It starts to make sense when you accept that people who have had different lives than you want different things and you might.
And look, with all this, it is possible to be humble and learn from other people, learn from what they've done right, what they've done wrong, while also recognizing that the best strategy for you is the one that is closest aligned with your unique personality and your unique goals and your unique skills.
And a few things happened when you actually do that.
The first, and I think this is so important, no matter what your job is or what you do or what your goals are, the idea is that you do your best work and you have the most fun when you are not burdened by the fear that someone else thinks you're doing it wrong.
It's like, it's like the bumper sticker like, dance like nobody's watching, right?
That applies to so many things in life.
You have the most fun and you do the best when you just don't care what anyone else thinks of what you're doing.
And you're not burdened by anyone else's priorities or their deadlines or how they think you should do it.
You're really living in this like humble bubble.
Let's use that phrase more often, a humble bubble of, look, I want to learn from you and I'm very interested in your story.
And of course, I don't want to do anything that's going to hurt you or offend you.
I want to be respectful of your decisions always, but I also want to live my life in a little bit of a bubble where I'm just like, I do this because it makes me happy.
And if you think that's crazy, well, that's, that's your own fault.
You're not going to burden me with that idea.
There's a thing that I love a couple of years ago when Michael Lewis, of course, one of the, one of the great nonfiction writers of our time, he first published his first book, Liars Poker in 1989.
And of course that was a mega hit kind of made him a successful author.
But his next book did not come for 10 years.
He later talked about this hiatus, why he took 10 years off to write his next book and what he did with his time in the meantime.
And he said, quote, I just thought that writers can get themselves in this mindset where they feel they have to write another book.
The publishers write on you afterwards and they're ready to get you going again.
And I always just felt that the book is going to be better.
If I start all over again, start completely fresh, as if I've never written another book before and give myself at least the option of not writing books.
So he's like, look, the rest of the world and the publishers want him to go write another book.
And he's like, no, no, no.
Like I'm not doing this for you.
I'm doing it for me.
I'll write an idea when it comes.
I'm doing this on my own terms.
I don't care what everyone else says.
The second idea here that's important when you're just living your life your own way and doing things your own way is that you measure how well you're doing against your personal benchmarks.
You're not measuring yourself against your peers or the market benchmark or what your neighbors are doing or like, oh, I'm doing this well, but he's doing much better.
She's doing much better.
You're all just saying like, what's your internal benchmark?
You have your own goals.
And that's all you're measuring yourself against, which can do two things.
It can push you to your full potential and it can prevent you from chasing somebody else's potential.
Both of those things are great when you're just measuring how well you're doing against your internal benchmarks.
And the last thing that happens, the third thing that happens when you do things your own way is that you have a much better shot of getting what you actually want out of life to live your life in your own way, which, again, is the ultimate success metric.
And I think it's all that really matters.
That's it for this episode.
We'll see you again next time.
