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What I want to talk about today might seem like it only applies to very successful people, very rich and famous people or very rich and famous companies.
What I want you to keep in mind when you're listening to this is that the topic of today might apply the most to very rich and successful people, famous people, but it definitely applies to ordinary people as well.
And even if you think the topic of cyclicality does not apply to your career and your life, it definitely applies to the economy that you live in and work in.
So this topic, the idea that everything is cyclical, I think really applies to everybody.
A few years ago, French geologists discovered that a Himalayan mountain suffered a massive landslide 800 years ago.
Now, massive here might be an understatement because the slide that they discover moved enough earth to bury Manhattan as high as the Empire State Building.
The mountain is called Onapruna 4, and it used to be 800 years ago, one of the top five tallest mountains in the world.
But today, after the slide that they've now discovered, shaved a third of a mile off the top of the mountain, it is merely just a big, almost unmentionable mountain.
Now, here's what's interesting.
The amazing thing is that this slide that they discovered was not caused by a glacier gnawing away at the mountain, which is usually what keeps mountain height in check.
But Onapruna 4, the reason it had this massive collapse and slide was that it just got too big.
As anyone who has built a sandcastle knows, there comes a point when the whole thing just comes crashing down on its own accord, crushed by the weight of its own vertical greed.
And that's what happened here.
Everything in life is cyclical.
And the thing that is so easy to miss about cyclicality is that it doesn't require an outside force to push it in the other direction.
The mere act of getting big is enough to make you smaller without being pushed around by anyone or anything from the outside.
So many mistakes in life come when you think that risk is something that is only caused by an external force when in fact the weight of your own success is enough to pull you down without any outside help.
This applies to so many things in life.
You can find examples of this happening everywhere.
It is 1944 book, Why Don't We Learn From History?
B .H. Liddell Hart writes about why after every major war in history, the people involved in that war say, that was so awful, we will never do that again.
Only, of course, to find themselves back on the battlefield a few years or maybe a few decades later.
And Hart writes, quote, We learned from history that complete victory has never been completed by the result that the victors always anticipate, a good and lasting peace.
For victory has always sown the seeds of a fresh war, because victory breeds among the vanquished a desire for vindication and vengeance, and because victory raises fresh rivals.
Look, that was a lot to take in.
Let me repeat one of these lines here that you just said.
Victory has always sown the seeds of a fresh war.
That is such a strange concept, but it's so obviously true.
In his book, Evil, Roy Baummeister writes, quote, The first world war had always been so much more horrible than anything Europeans had ever remembered or imagined that it produced a lasting and profound psychological impact.
The winners concluded that there must be no more wars.
The losers concluded that there had to be another war to set things right.
So much sacrifice could not be allowed to be in vain.
So it's like you go through this thing like the first world war and everyone says, look, we can't do that again.
It was so awful. But actually the people who lost that war were like, no, we have to do it again to have a rematch to set it straight.
Right? So it was like the bigger the war, the more sacrifice there was, the higher the odds that there was going to be another one.
So World War One led to World War Two, which led to the Cold War, which led to Russia invading Ukraine on and on forever.
It's this endless chain and the stakes are obviously much lower.
But I think a similar thing happens in companies and economies where the bigger and more successful you become, the harder it is to maintain your success over time.
So what were the big winning companies of the last century?
Well, it was General Motors, General Electric, IBM, Nokia, Citigroup, Kodak.
It is not hard to come up with a list of previous giants that crumpled under their own weight and either don't exist or are shells of their former selves now.
And for each, it is fair to say that past success directly led to future failure because of their sense of entitlement, because of jealousy among other competitors, because of bureaucratic bloat that they accumulated over time.
So now keep that in mind and think about this bit that I'm about to read you from an article that came out last year about today's untouchable winning dominant giant, Amazon.
The article reads, quote, at Amazon, it is always supposed to be day one, the dawn of a new era where the customer comes first and bold bets are backed.
Not surprisingly, that's gotten harder to maintain now that it's a tech and retail goliath.
Employees have complained about red tape, bloat, and bureaucracy.
Facing a new financial reality, CEO Andy Jassy is exercising discipline when it comes to Amazon's bets.
The company is facing intense external pressure.
It is tough to be a trillion dollar revolutionary.
Now, look, Amazon is, I think will continue to be for some time, an absolutely incredible company, but it's true.
If you are a student of history, how many of these companies struggle under the weight of their own success?
Literally, the fact that they are big and successful is the force that will drive them down.
What is the lesson there as a big successful company?
Is it be careful what you wish for?
Make sure you always stay on your toes, watch behind your back.
Yes, of course, those are good lessons, but the biggest lesson is simply that everything in life is cyclical.
Calm times plant the seeds of crazy times, bad times.
Growth plants the seeds of decline.
Success plants the seeds of loss.
Everything is cyclical.
And so we just talked about the national level with wars, we talked about the company level with individual companies, but of course, all of this applies at the individual level to people like you and me.
Robert Greene, the great author writes, quote, never be so foolish as to believe that you are stirring up admiration by flaunting the qualities that raise you above others.
By making others aware of their inferior position, you are only stirring up unhappy admiration or envy.
There is nothing more intoxicating than victory and nothing more dangerous.
So of course, he's saying if you are going out on social media and saying, look how great I am, look how successful I am, look how beautiful my family is, you think people are admiring that, but very often they're just stirring up envy.
You're just signaling to other people that maybe your life is better to them, that you're happier than them, does that actually doing you any good?
And so when that success or that wonderful family is genuine, does that actually cause people to look at you in a bad way and therefore your success becomes cyclical and it's going to draw you down when others become envious of you?
It's such a tricky thing that the more successful you become, the easier it is for people to resent you for your success.
And even when somebody says, oh, I'm so happy for you and they're genuine about it, your success or maybe it's a work promotion or a raise you just got puts their own career into sharper context, inflating their expectations and potentially leaving them feeling worse off about themselves.
So much of whether people like you or not is just how you make them feel about themselves when you interact with them.
And if you're constantly talking about how successful you are, you're doing the opposite.
You're making them feel worse about themselves.
And that dwindling support can come back to bite when those who used to be eager to help you at one point are now less enthusiastic to help you in the future because they are envious of you.
The rapper Drake put this so well.
He said, people like you more when you are working towards something, not when you have it.
Then, of course, there's the connection between money and ambition.
William Vanderbilt once said that having a lot of money is as a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.
The more money you have, the less ambitious you become.
Not true for everybody, but it's true for a lot of people.
Happiness can be another cyclical thing.
I love this detail and I'm about to read from the tire King Harvey Firestone.
This is a autobiography written about 100 years ago.
He was wondering about the simple life that he had before becoming rich and famous.
And he wrote, quote, sometimes it seems that it might be better to go back to those simpler days that one might get more out of a less complex life, but it cannot be done.
One changes with prosperity.
We all think we would like to lead a simple life and that we find that we have picked up a thousand little habits, which we are quite unconscious of because they're part of our very being and these habits are not in the simple life.
There is no going back except as a broken man.
What a line that last one is.
There is no going back to the simple life except as a broken man.
So he's saying, look, now that when he was rich and famous, he would daydream nostalgically about what it was like to have a simple life in a simple little cottage with his family.
But there is no going back to that simple life except as a broken man.
So the success, the money, the fame that he had at one point in his life, it may have been making him less happy than he was when he was living a very simple life.
And so maybe that's the cycle that ordinary people go through.
You start with a dream and then you accomplish that dream.
And then what was previously considered a dream becomes a new baseline of reality.
And then the gaze of your ambition moves to the next dream.
It goes from inadequacy to hard work to elation, back to inadequacy to hard work to elation.
Everything is cyclical.
To some extent, I think these cycles are inescapable.
It's just part of how the world works.
That's especially true for the economy and the stock market and other social trends.
So much of long -term success relies on accepting and preparing for cyclicality versus assuming that it can be prevented.
At the individual level though, I think cyclicality can be managed around the edges a little bit.
My friend Shane Parrish once described the difference between passive and active stability.
He said, a rock is passively stable.
It'll keep its current form without any intervention.
Marriage, on the other hand, is not passively stable.
It can be stable over time but it requires constant work and compromise and maintenance to keep it intact.
Most things in your life are, at best, actively stable.
Left alone, they will follow nature's natural path of cyclicality.
But if there's constant intervention and management, managing your expectations, managing your reputation, managing how you advertise yourself and who you surround yourself with, then you have at least a shot of keeping something good going for the longest period of time.
That's it for this week.
Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.
