‘You can only kick with one foot at a time, Otherwise you fall on your arse.’
You can only pick one thing that you want out of life, and if you pick the wrong thing, you’ll never be successful.
…Joel Salatin said, ‘the worst thing in life is to get older and realize you got good at the wrong thing.’
You would think that the title is about multi-tasking. But it isn’t. It is a life that is un-integrated.
So what is an integrated life?
A life is like a symphonic orchestra.
Most people’s life sounds like the tuning the instruments phase of the orchestra: cacophony. Bad noise.
Only when the conductor shows up, raps his baton against the music sheets, silence, and music starts. All instruments read the same music sheets, all keep their eyes on the conductor… Integration happens.
An integrated life.
Yeah-yeah Sophie, but what is the music sheet? What should you organize your life around so you can live the integrated and therefore enjoyable life?
Here is an email by Tai Lopez in the footnotes
Most important thing you could ever learn.
If I could go back in time and learn one thing, it’s this:
You can only pick one thing that you want out of life, and if you pick the wrong thing, you’ll never be successful.
My mentor, Joel Salatin said, ‘the worst thing in life is to get older and realize you got good at the wrong thing.’
I see people that are very wealthy, but I don’t admire them. I live here in Beverly Hills, and there are billionaires all up and down the street, but I wouldn’t trade lives with a single one of them. I call it the exchange test. Would you trade lives? The reason I wouldn’t trade lives with almost anybody I meet, is not because they’re not smart, it’s not because they’re not good people…
…it’s because they’re optimizing for the wrong thing.
So if you say, ‘I want to be an entrepreneur.’ That’s not something you should optimize for. That’s ridiculous. You have one life, and if you optimize for being an entrepreneur, what about your health? What about love? What about happiness?
I know miserable entrepreneurs that are fat and out of shape, I don’t want to be them. I know a dude, a friend of an entrepreneur friend, and this guy’s a billionaire, but he’s so fat he can’t get out of bed. He has two billion dollars and a private 747 jet, but he can’t get out of his own bed. So would I want to be him? No. He optimized for the wrong thing. He optimized to make two billion dollars, but he forgot about his health. Why would you want two billion dollars if you don’t have health?
Why would you give your health up to gain money?
There’s a saying that when people are young, they lose their health to get wealth, and when they’re old, they use their wealth to get back their health. It’s circular logic. People are stupid. If I could go back in time, I’d realize most people are lost. Literally, most people are lost.
One of the people who’s not lost is Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was healthy, strong and helped change the world. He made gyms cool. Gyms come from Arnold Schwarzenegger, he made that shit hot. All these gyms all over America? That’s from Arnold f***in’ Schwarzenegger. Now other people worked on it, but not like him.
He motivated people and became a self made millionaire before 30. He even became an actor. I was actually in his kitchen not too long ago, just talking and smokin’ cigars. He might not be, you know, academy award winning, but he’s a good actor. He’s got the good life. You’ve got to have health, wealth, love and happiness. If you optimize for anything that doesn’t involve all four of them, you’re making the biggest mistake in the world.
Entrepreneur people always say ‘I want become an entrepreneur.’
No you don’t, being an entrepreneur is a means to an end. You don’t want to live your life lifting weights. It’s a means to an end, to put on muscle and increase your metabolism. You don’t live a life to lift weights.
Entrepreneurism, capitalism, democracy, they’re all a means to the end – and there’s only one end, and that’s a good life. Now everyone will define good life a tad bit differently. For some people good life means you travel a lot, but there are some common factors that all people must have. You must be relatively lean with your body fat. I’ll make this real blunt. You cannot be overweight. I don’t care what anybody tells you. What will a smart scientist tell you? You have to be lean. You don’t have to be anorexic, but you have to be lean.
You have to optimize the right things in order to get the good life…
…and have your hormones churning at the right pace to be happy. Your happiness is predicated on your hormonal balance. If you get too much estrogen, testosterone, cortisol, estradiol, these things mess with you. The simplest predictor of you having screwed up hormones are things like body fat. I’m not saying everyone needs to look like a runway model, that’s not even what you need to optimize for.
Let somebody else make two billion, and get so fat that they lay in a bed for the rest of their life, let them do it. That ain’t your concern. You can mention it, lend a helping hand, try to guide him back, but like Allan Nation told me: ‘don’t try to teach a pig to fly.’ You can’t do it, and it bothers the pig. Most people aren’t going listen to this advice. It’s too good of advice. People are going get lost.
I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 16.
I’m qualified to tell you this. I have started many, many successful companies. Now there’s some entrepreneurs more successful than me, but I only judge them by the good life scale. Very few entrepreneurs that I meet have the good life. It’s not even me being judgmental, if I ask them, ‘do you like your life?’ They’re like, ‘oh, I’m burned out, I’m dead, it’s takin’ longer than I thought.’ So keep your health and make money a little slower.
In some ways, love, happiness and social life are even more important than health.
If I had a choice between being overweight, and having a lot of good people around me, I would choose to have good people around me. Social skills are very important, but it’s not just how to win friends and influence people, it’s how to win friends and influence the right people.
Let’s be honest here, if you’ve been on planet earth for more than 10 or 15 years, you are highly aware of the fact that most people do not have your best interests at heart. If you talk to an evolutionary psychologist, we’re optimized to have about 150 friends, family, relatives, and acquaintances that will have our back. That’s it!
It’s a very famous number, you can google it. A famous sociologist came up with that number. The reason is because you can keep track of 150 relationships and each of their relationships to the other 150 people. So your brain is actually tracking 10,000 combinations. No school will tell you this. No professor will tell you this. If at the end of your life you look back, and think to yourself ‘I had a good life,’ you won.
If you’ve deoptimized your financial life, you won’t have the good life.
It’s all a balance. There are genetic factors that tell you what career you should choose. Most people pick the wrong career, because nobody told them. There’s parents out there telling their kids to become dentist so they’ll make more money, when the kid’s artistic. No! No no no. If you have kids, and they’re genuinely talented artists, let them be an artist. Parents interests are not always aligned with their children.
You don’t believe me? Read Evolutionary Psychology by Dr. David Buss. Parents will often pick favorites, they’ll want to live out their fantasies through you. Being a poor artist is better than a wealthy dentist that hates going to work. Now, the good news for parents is, you can become an artist and still make a good living using modern entrepreneurial skills and social media skills. You might not be the next Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, but i f you’re doing what you love and what you’re good at, who cares?
What does it profit a man to have all the money in the world, but eat shitty food?
First thing I did when I made money is eat better food. That’s the most primal need of humans. Buy a better mattress. f*** it, let your business be slower. People are actually out there telling you, to grind harder and sleep on a f***in’ floor for years. It’s ridiculous. There’s a balance.
You can be frugal, but don’t sacrifice your health. All you people eating ramen for five years…you’re fools. I don’t care if you become the next Steve Jobs or not. If you let your health deteriorate, and you become the next Steve Jobs, who cares if you’re dead? Nobody will care, you’ll be forgotten. Even if you’re not forgotten, who cares? You ain’t alive.
If you’re reading this, and you’re age 18, make sure you optimize for the day, that’s what I do. People say, ‘what do you do?’ I say, ‘optimize my day.’ Each day. I don’t project out seven years from now. I might plan for seven years out, but you don’t optimize for seven years out.
You optimize for the moment. I’m not the dumbest person in the world, I’m not the smartest. I’ve been in MENSA since I was six years old. I can hold my own intellectually. Disprove my theory. Show me why you should, when you’re 19, make your life shit so that hopefully your life will be better at 40. Prove it, why?
If you’re 19, why would you not optimize for 19?
Then once you hit 20, you optimize for 20. Again, you should still plan for the future, and a wise person saves money for the future, but not at the expense of today. All that common sense stuff still applies within the worldview and the frame that I’m giving you.
I am not saying do cocaine, I’m not saying you only live once. I’m saying you optimize for the moment, but in optimizing for the moment, you also predict that you’ll probably be alive tomorrow. So if you do too much cocaine, you’re not optimizing for the good life, because cocaine will increase your chance of, you know, f***in’ dying tomorrow.
It’s a balancing act of long and short term. Most entrepreneurs are very long term in their thinking. I’ve fallen in this trap, I’m as guilty as anybody. I’m telling you what I learned the hard way. I was lucky enough to find smart mentors so I didn’t learn as hard of a way as I could have.
Optimize for right now, go do something.
Go do something that brings you the good life. There’s no perfect formula in an imperfect world, but there are the four pillars: health, wealth, love, and happiness. Health is pretty simple in the modern world, you have to stay lean and relatively muscular. As a guy, your BMI (body mass index) should be around 24 to 25. For girls, it’s a little bit lower. You can look it up and calculate it.
There’s some variance for body types, but for the most part, you have to have a little waist. If you’re a guy your waist shouldn’t be more than about 32 inches. If you’re a woman, it’s even smaller, and that’s not so that you can appear beautiful, forget that. I’m not talkin’ about societal norms, I’m talking about physiological norms. You have to do it if you want the good life. If you aren’t doing it, then you need to put tremendous power into doing it. Even if your career is pushed back and you make less money.
I have a better life than almost any entrepreneur I meet.
I’m not saying that to brag, I’m saying that to inspire you. If you follow smart principles, you will get a reward. You can have a much better life than me. I’m not perfect, but I’m focused. I can tell you with all certainty, the good life is the only noble target to seek. Not only will it improve your life, but it’ll help society, because as you make your life optimized, you rub off on other people.
When you only seek money, you’re going create a world where everybody is only optimized for maximum profit. It’s not good for society. That’s where mega corporations come from. People are optimizing to make the most money, but nobody’s thinking about the real quality of life.
My mentor Joel Salatin has the good life.
He’s got money, health, wealth, love and happiness. He changed the world and he enjoys the moment. He has beautiful farms, married his high school sweetheart and they’re still happily married with kids. That’s what you want. Don’t believe the bullshit. It’s easy to make a social media video that makes other shit look glamorous, but at the end of the day, we haven’t even talked about happiness. Do you wake up feeling energized?
I’m not poo pooing people who make money.
I make a lot more money than the average person. I’m just saying, it’s not the goal. It’s a tool I use to get the real goal. I like what makes me happy. I use money as an instrument to get that good life, and I try to bring a lot of other people into that good life too.
I don’t care how much money you make, it doesn’t impress me at all. You know what impresses me? Someone who is in good shape physically, is financially independent and has good people around them. That’s what matters.
I’m showing you what I wish somebody had showed me. Nobody teaches this shit in school. You learn about isosceles triangles, and f***ing retarded stuff. You should burn down most of the education system in most countries of the world. There’s great teachers, and there’s people with good hearts, but it’s the blind leading the blind.
We haven’t even gotten to happiness. You can objectively measure happiness.
What your cortisol level’s like. You can do a saliva test. You spit in a vial four times in a day. It’ll show you your cortisol. Most people are in stage one, two, or three cortisol exhaustion. Once adrenals are exhausted, that’s the gatekeepers of your immune system, so it’ll mess with your health. People are very stressed. People don’t know how to meditate. Most people are full of anxiety, and fearfulness. A tremendous amount of the population is now on pharmaceutical drugs. Some people need to be on it, but most don’t.
It makes me sick that I have to say this talk. It truly does.
There are so many smart people in the world, but nobody is using their intelligence for the most important thing. Why the hell are we on planet earth? What should you do on a day to day basis? I’m telling you, these are the real keys. Everything else is bullshit. Really. Find what you like and find the people you like to do it with.
Get lean, get strong, get fit. I’m not talkin’ about beauty. I’m talkin’ about health. A doctor can tell you, if you are 80 pounds overweight, you are not optimizing your health. I’m not making fun of you, I’m encouraging you. Fix it. It’s all fixable. As long as you have breath, you can fix shit. Everybody here should have hope.
You follow this, you’ll be good, and if people tell you otherwise, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Simple as that. People will tell you to take the job that takes the most money. If you have two jobs that you like equally, then sure take the one that gives you the most money, but never pick the wrong career over money.
I’ve chased after money. I’ve tested, I’m a mad scientist. Most anything you can think of, I’ve probably tested it, and this is the culmination of those years of advice, right here, in one email. For free. Sometimes people go, ‘you don’t give anything away for free.’ I just gave you the best damn thing for free right here, it’s all you need.
It’s not enough to read this though, you gotta go do it.
Optimize for today. Before you go to bed, optimize. Sometimes it’s simple stuff. For example, I started going to movies. I like movies, I like going with some friends. It’s a good place to chill out and relax. It makes me feel happier.
So I go to movies a lot.
I have friends that’ll be like, ‘well you’ll make more money if you don’t.’ I’m like shit, I already got enough money. I’m sitting in an 18,000 square foot house right now. I’ve got a brand new custom made Rolls, a Lamborghini, a 450A Spider and a bunch of other shit. I’m not saying I’m the smartest person, or the wisest person, but on this subject, I am qualified.
That’s it man, there you go.
The life manifesto. I gotta go to bed, it’s a lot of ranting.
Stay Strong,
Tai
–>pdf
–>machine audio
Its truth value is 50%.
I also put it into a pdf, converted it into audio. Why? Because of this change… the change this caused to Tai raised his vibration to 200… and if you can get it, if you can grok it, if you can follow the principle he espouses, he recommends, then you’ll raise your vibration too.
Because what he is telling you is how to pick the sheet-music so your life, your orchestra, turn out beautiful music… for you.
Now, he doesn’t say, but, of course, the individual musicians need to be good at their instruments. But once the individual musician knows what the music is about, their motivation to become good doubles, triples, grows tenfold.
Without knowing what is the organizing principle of your life, the sheet music, you live a disjointed life…
- You have work and fun as two separate and competing parts of your life
- You have sensual pleasure and being healthy at two extremes of your life
- You have beauty, riches, and enjoying life at two extremes of your life
You are not happy. Cannot be. Your life is a mess and the fixes and tweaks you put in are ineffectual… because unless you make changes on the seed level, nothing actually makes a difference.
I used to be sick… and had no reason to get well, to change my diet, to change my habits.
Then I did a Landmark Education seminar ‘Beyond Fitness’ and I saw that all my dreams to make a difference in the word are mute, will never be able to happen, unless I make a commitment to be able to work till 120 (that is a Jewish number).
So I re-organized my life. This was 20 years ago. It’s taken me this long to be almost perfectly well… I am at 80% now.
I maybe look my age, but I definitely don’t act my age. I see a lot of people my age, and they are not up to anything…
Your most important todo is to get well.
Changing habits is tough and takes a long time to get it right, to adhere to it, to stick with it, to become a new person who doesn’t cheat.
Invent a context for your life and put health inside that context.
Then look at your work… and put that inside that same context. You may want to change what you do for money… but before you change, become too big for your current work. It develops capacities, the skill to put all power into all action, to do what you do with integrity, inside an empowering context.
If you switch to something more attractive to you, you’ll likely fail… 98% probability.
I now have two interns. They, somehow, got that to get to their work/livelihood destination, one must do zig-zagging, or they will get trapped.
No one talks about that, because everyone is only interested in the end result… But I read some of the book Principles by Ray Dalio, and he generously shares his zig-zags.
And I read Sam Walton’s autobiography… and he zig-zagged.
And I feel that Bill Gates zig-zagged, Steve Jobs zig-zagged, and I definitely zig-zagged.
Most likely there isn’t a straight line path to what will make you most fulfilled and what you are most suitable for.
Architecture taught me a lot I need today. Magazine publishing taught me a lot of what I need today. Being a massage therapist (what I did during my brain damage years) taught me a lot of what I need today, most specifically being able to be with undivided attention with a person. Being a webmaster taught me skills without which I would not be able to do my ‘job’ today. So there you have it. My zig-zag path.
Life is like a river where you need to turn a corner to see what is coming next. And there is no jumping. I don’t mean you can’t jump, but it will always be a dead end jump…
