The Unending Journey: Living a Life of Process

Embrace the Unending Journey

It took me 30 years to realize a profound truth: you can never truly stop. Many people frame their lives around achieving specific objectives, but this approach has a critical flaw.

The problem with objectives is that once you meet enough of them, you might believe you've 'made it' and then stop. However, there are no objectives worthy enough to signal an end to your growth.

Process Over Objectives

I've observed many highly respected individuals who, in their later years, simply stopped engaging. They left the arena. Yet, figures like Warren Buffett continue to learn and contribute well into their nineties.

What distinguishes these individuals? They are not committed to a set of objectives. Instead, they are committed to:

• Continuous learning
• Taking calculated risks
• Surrounding themselves with interesting people

This commitment keeps them sharp and vibrant, and it's the most important goal as I get older.

If I Knew Then What I Know Now

Had I understood this philosophy earlier, I would have made different choices. I would have:

• Optimized less for money
• Taken more risk, even more than I did when I was younger
• Made very specific decisions differently

Living a life of process, rather than objectives, requires establishing some crucial boundary conditions.

Boundary Condition 1: Eliminate Debt

One of the most practical and simple boundary conditions is to have no debt. Debt is a powerful force that can cause you to stop:

• It can stop you from learning.
• It can stop you from taking risks.
• It forces you to seek short-term objectives, primarily money.

These short-term optimizations have huge repercussions for the next 20, 30, or 40 years of your life. Maintaining the discipline to avoid debt is absolutely critical.

Avoid the Social Media Trap

Especially for younger generations, it's easy to waste time on social media, consuming content from people who often present a fake life. This can trick you into believing that their curated existence is the life you should be living.

Much of this content is oriented around money and superficial aspirations, pulling you away from a lifelong commitment to process.

Boundary Condition 2: Manage with Humility

Learning humility took me a long time, but it's essential. It means being extremely truthful about the current reality of things. This truthfulness allows you to:

• Clearly see how things truly are.
• Share the truth with others, fostering incredible solidarity.

Boundary Condition 3: Surround Yourself with Younger People

Actively seek out and engage with people younger than you. Their perspectives are invaluable because:

• Their biases are different.
• Their frameworks for understanding the world are different.

They act as an early warning system for the future, helping you realize that your own knowledge, while relevant, will decay in its applicability. This continuous exposure to new ideas is another powerful way of learning.

The Pitfalls of 'Dumb Objectives'

I was once riddled with 'dumb objectives' myself: chasing titles like director, vice president, senior vice president, or seeking more equity. These superficial goals:

• Took me away from my core, authentic self.
• Made me a caricature, amplifying small facets of my personality to represent a larger part of who I was, both to myself and others.

This is not a successful way to live. While this wisdom often comes with age, you have the choice to listen now, or learn the hard way.

The Most Important Simple Thing: Preserve Optionality

One simple yet profoundly powerful principle is to give yourself complete optionality. Preserve it at all costs, whether in business negotiations or personal interactions.

This framework:

• Preserves relationships.
• Preserves other people's egos and emotions.
• Forces you to be more subdued, to listen more and talk less.

It helps minimize self-inflicted mistakes and allows for more win-win scenarios.

Relationship Truth: Unfiltered Honesty

The most crucial relationship lesson I've learned is the importance of being married to someone who 100% has your back. The only way to achieve this is through complete, raw, unfiltered, unadulterated honesty.

In my own experience, a lack of this honesty was missing in a past relationship. It prevented true celebration in good times and honest confrontation in bad times. Cultivating this level of truthfulness is a profound blessing.

Career Tip 1: Be on Broadway (Go Where the Fish Are)

For young, ambitious individuals, the first and most important step is to be where the action is:

• Politics: Washington D.C. (or state capital as a stepping stone)
• Finance: New York or London
• Crypto: Abu Dhabi
• Tech: Silicon Valley

There are no shortcuts; you must immerse yourself in the epicenter of your chosen field.

Career Tip 2: Optimize for Opportunity, Not Compensation

Instead of chasing the highest salary, optimize for opportunity. Live humbly and seek roles where you can work with people smarter than you, in ventures that feel like a 'rocket ship.'

When such an opportunity arises, jump on and hold on. Prioritizing other 'nonsense' like an extreme focus on 'work-life balance' (which I believe means blending purpose and work) will lead to failure and future misery. Focus on a constant process of adding things to make your life better.

The Resilience Experiment: Unlocking Your Potential

An incredible experiment involved dropping mice into water. Initially, they drowned in about 4 minutes. In a rerun, mice were plucked out before drowning, comforted, then dropped back in. The same mice survived for an average of 60 hours.

The difference lies in the brain's ability to unlock incredible levels of resilience and survival. This potential exists within everyone. Unlike athletes or Navy Seals who have a physical shelf life, in business, you can be in this 'game' forever, continuously unlocking new levels of capability.

Status is a Manufactured Illusion

Understand this critical truth: status is completely manufactured and irrelevant. It's a trick society uses to make people waste their precious time.

Knowing this, one of the most powerful things you can do is to ignore all the ways society tries to grant you status. When you buy into externally validated achievements (being on a list, in a club, invited to an event), you allow society to put a hook into you, holding you back.

Chasing status makes you beholden to people who do not have your best interests at heart. It's a corrupting force that diminishes who you are. Divorcing yourself from it is a superpower.

Continuously Learn and Grow

After 30 years of building, working at, and investing in companies, my greatest passion is for constantly learning. This commitment drives me to continuously research and understand the world.

Embrace this unending journey of growth, apply these principles, and unlock the profound changes that come from living a life of process, not just objectives.