Do you even want to be successful?

What stops you from getting on the Forbes billionaire list within the next 10 years?

Why are people that we look up to usually screwed up, with bad familial relationships, with depressive episodes, with diseases, in some way or the other?

The answer to both questions may be related.

Naval Ravikant wrote once:

“One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.”

Here’s the question: you may be chasing success but if you actually think about it, do you even WANT success?

This question is relevant because the information for HOW to do something is all out there. It’s not a mystery.

To reach a level of success that would impress people is not rocket science, and it’s been done millions of times.

When I actually thought about it, I realized that if I wanted a $10k/mo solo-business (currently my idea of success) I would have to

sacrifice my weekend in the summer, after surviving a Boston winter
spend less time with my girlfriend
spend less time cooking, something I enjoy
read less and work more
be chronically online on my computer for a few months
interact with short-form content to market my software

However, this clashes with how I rank my values:

Health
Relationships
Wealth

There are more values than this, such as family, purpose, fun, faith, but these are the ones I picked.

My values are a reflection of what I want my life to look currently and in the future.

For instance, I would rather have just 1 friend and a minimum wage job if I have my health and no cancer when I’m 60.

Happiness is the north-star.

My value definitions allow me to be happy in the current moment, while I make sure I can remain happy in the future too.

I mean, even if I had all the money in the world but no loved ones or my health, it wouldn’t be worth it to me.

Let’s think from first principles:

To maintain my health, I need to

have time to exercise
have time to cook the right meals and eat them on time
sleep on time

And to maintain my relationship, I need

To spend most of Saturday with my girlfriend/friends
Two hours a day, every day, to spend with my girlfriend

If I don’t do these things the quality of my life definitely drops. I feel it almost immediately.

Why don’t I sacrifice these things in the short term?

Few reasons:

It’s too difficult for me to fix bad health, much easier to maintain it
Bad health makes it harder for me to work
Short term is fake. If I push something off to tomorrow it’s never going to happen. Then, I get into a routine and only two years later I realize what I’ve done and regret it.
Relationships can be lost. It’s an irreversible decision (a one-way door).

Now that I write this out, I realize that I want to be both Alex Hormozi (excellent in business) and Bryan Johnson (excellent in health) at the same time. And I’m not sure if that’s possible.

For reference, Alex Hormozi chugs a 32oz carton of egg-whites mixed with low-sugar Hershey’s chocolate syrup to get 100g of protein.

I’ve spoken about the issue of taking advice from people you wouldn’t swap lives with in this article here.

However, the problem goes deeper.

I recently read a quote from Morgan Housel’s Same as Ever:

“People love the visionary genius side of Musk, but want it to come without the side that operates in his distorted I-don’t-care-about-your-customs version of reality. But I don’t think those two things can be separated. They’re the risk-reward trade-offs of the same personality trait.”

What he’s saying is, extreme outcomes usually require an extreme personality trait, and that trait leaks into other domains.

His primarily argument is that it’s all a package.

You either have the whole thing or you don’t.

You can’t be TRULY optimization hungry and not optimize everything about your life including your diet, how brief your emails are (to the point of removing niceties), and how little you stop to smell the flowers.

If you read the previous article, I suggest that you should learn from people’s frameworks and models of thought and not how they actually live their life.

However, this can only get you so far.

I think you can realistically get to the $10M net worth level without being extreme. Anything past that requires you to be extreme and make sacrifices others wouldn’t make.

The $10M number here isn’t just a dollar value - it’s more of a metric of how many people you affect. There’s only a limited number of people’s lives you can touch while living a balanced life.

It’s a Faustian bargain (“deal with the devil”) to sacrifice your health, relationships, and often your morals to get ahead.

Remember the scene in The Social Network when Zuckerberg ousted Eduardo Saverin (Zuck’s close friend and initial financier) in the early days of Facebook?

That’s a classic Silicon Valley Faustian bargain. Zuck traded friendship and loyalty for absolute control of Facebook.

It payed off. The world is fundamentally different because of Zuckerbeg.

Steve Jobs sacrificed his family, denied paternity of his first daughter, denied stock to (and even pushed out) foundational early collaborators.

Yet he IS a genius, and changed the world in a way no one else could have.

Elon Musk has paid an immense personal cost to do what he’s done. It destroyed his marriages, limited time with his children, and prevented any personal peace or stability.

And yet once again, Elon Musk IS a genius - whatever you may think of him - and he too is changing the world in a ways no one else can.

People that we often look up to and learn from are not average. They do things that, to an outsider, might seem weird and screwed up - like they’re not enjoying life.

Every day, people tell Bryan Johnson, the multimillionaire that optimizes everything about his life for the single purpose of longevity, to “live a little.”

To this, he says

I am not opposed to pleasure. I am opposed to the counterfeit. I say no to the dying ritual so that I can say yes to the full offering of consciousness: a vibrant physiological state, cognitive clarity, and deep emotional coloring. Vitality is mastery, not abuse dressed up as freedom.

The reward is a clearer lens, the ability to see what is currently invisible. High resolution consciousness allows for depths of thought, creativity, and experiential variance that are far harder to reach when the brain and body are chronically inflamed, degraded, and sedated. I want to expand the boundaries of the human experience.

‘On offer in this new future are things that no human has ever tasted before. I’m not deprived by the lack of participating in the rituals, I’m pointing to a joy that the human mind has not yet imagined.

I don’t intend to live a little. I intend to live more than any human who has yet lived and invite you to join me.

Read the full tweet here.

I find it super cool that he’s on the mission, and that he has a good rebuttal.

Back to the original question: you may be chasing success but if you actually think about it, do you even WANT success?

I think it depends on whether you’ve thought through the bargain you’re about to make, and are not blindsided. If you’re willing to make the sacrifice and pay the cost, go ahead. The world NEEDS people like you and you will be rewarded.

The fundamental sacrifice is this: you can only choose to be extreme in one part of your life, not all of them. Because of this, you won’t be reaching your “full potential” across your entire life. One part of it will definitely lack.

For instance, Warren Buffet’s potential as an investor was nearly fully realized, but his potential as a present father—not as much.

The question is, which axis are you choosing to be extreme on and which are you accepting as the cost?

If you truly want to be rocket-ship successful and not just fast-car successful, you may be wanting too many things simultaneously and not ranking their priority.

If you want to build a serious career and still be deeply present with people you love and stay healthy and travel and keep up creative work, which are all reasonable things, you want to be fast-car successful.

Everything you want competes for the same time and cognitive resources.

Therefore, to get an extreme outcome you must pick an axis, and accept the losses that come from the other parts of your life.

And then defend that priority from the constant social pressure to be balanced.

You may be the most intense, driven person in the world—but if it’s pointed in six different directions, none of them compound enough for you to see results.

The decision to be a fast-car or a rocket-ship is up to you, as long as you know what you’re signing up for!

@armaanagrawal_