You're Not Successful

My brother is a very unique line of business—he is a broker for dental practices. An old dentist retires, and a young dentist wants to buy the practice, and he handles the transaction. It’s an interesting job, and boy, does he have some stories about crazy fucking dentists.

Early in his career, he worked for a large dental brokerage firm, and went on an outing with all his co-workers out in the woods. They were hiking, kayaking, stuff like that. Summertime, with the heat and the bugs. At the time, my brother was a workout fanatic. Lifting weights, running, doing triathlons, he really was an elite athlete—and could have been on the cover of a fitness magazine. Just an absolute stud.

So my brother was getting into a kayak with his shirt off, wearing only a lifejacket, with his bulging, rippling arms sticking out the side of the flotation device. The head honcho of the brokerage firm stares at him for a minute, and then pronounces:

“You’re not successful.”

My brother took it a bit personally. What?  I’m not successful? But it was true—at the time, he wasn’t successful at all. In fact, he was so poor, he couldn’t pay attention. Because he was spending all his time in the gym, and not working. And it was clear just by looking at him that he was spending all his time in the gym, and not working.

We all have 24 hours in the day, and the most important decision we will make on a daily basis is how to use those 24 hours. If you want to spend 8 hours a day working out, that’s 8 hours a day you’re not going to spend working. I make an entirely different tradeoff. I spend 16 hours a day working, and zero hours in the gym. Just by looking at me, you could tell my priorities—I look like a blob of chewed bubblegum. You might not be able to tell how I spend my time, but you would know that I’m not in the gym, and I’m doing something else instead.

Did Jeff Bezos have any hobbies?  Well, he certainly does now. But when he was building Amazon, was he going to the gym? Was he painting? Was he playing the oboe? Probably none of those things. He was spending every waking hour turning Amazon into what it is today. And so he looked like a dweeb. Now that he has de facto retired from Amazon, he is paying a bit more attention to his personal appearance, if it wasn’t obvious.

There was a time in my life when I was spending a lot of time in the gym, and yet I was still working and going to grad school, because I was suffering from bipolar mania, and I was sleeping 2 hours a night. That is one way to do it. I do not recommend sleeping 2 hours a night. Let’s just say that there are 24 hours in the day and you are asleep for 8 of them. What do you do with the other 16?

One thing I’ve noticed about successful people is that they are very judicious with their time. If you’re like me, losing your wallet is the worst thing in the world—not because of the $200 cash that was in the wallet, but because of all the time you have to spending replacing the wallet, the credit cards, and—fuck—getting a new driver’s license at the DMV. Who has time for that shit? Well, go to the DMV and see the types of people who are hanging out there. They have all the time in the world.

They used to have this thing called Wall Street Olympics (I forget the exact name) where finance workers participated in a decathlon of sorts to see who was the best athlete. It’s the back office guys who win this year after year. It’s because they have the time in the day, and also the headspace, to have an entire life outside of work. Pro tip: never get into a fantasy baseball league with back office guys. They have nothing better to do than to vulture up relief pitchers off the waiver wire.

Well, you can spend your free time playing fantasy baseball (which is a fun diversion) or you can spend your free time trying to figure out ways to make it to the trading desk. Look—Jeff Bezos probably didn’t have a hobby. Not everyone would choose that life for themselves. I am a big proponent of having hobbies. I have a hobby. But I spend 99% of my time working and 1% of my time on my hobby. If you are spending 50% of your time on your hobby, you’re not going to be as professionally successful.

A lot of people don’t realize this, but what they fail to understand is the concept of trade-offs. If you spend time on A, you are going to have less time for B. It all depends on what is important to you. One thing that people get wrong all the time is spending time with family. I’m a dad, I’m a family man, I’m going to spend time with my kids. Great!  It is important to be a good father. But the trade-off is that you will not be as professionally successful. What is that line from Alec Baldwin from Glengarry Glen Ross?  “Good father?  Fuck you!  Go home and play with your kids.” I think what my man Alec is referring to here is the concept of trade-offs. If you’re spending time on A, it means you have less time for B.

What I encourage you to do is to open up Microsoft Excel and chart out where you spend your time, every hour of every day, over the course of a week. If you spend 15 minutes sitting on the couch staring off into space, chart that, too. You would be amazed at where the time goes. Cocktail party with the neighbors?  There goes three hours. Kid’s lacrosse game standing out in the cold?  There goes three hours. People tell me that they don’t have time to do all the things they want to do. Oh, there’s time. Trust me, there’s time. It’s just a matter of priorities.

Now, I’m a little weird—I have the luxury of saying all this because I don’t have kids and I have a wife who is professionally successful and has her own career, so every day is a tabula rasa. If I want to spend 16 hours writing newsletters, writing op-ed pieces, recording podcasts, and going to school, I can do that. People ask me, how do you have time for all this shit? Easy—I just don’t spend time on peewee bullshit. And I have no kids. I don’t have magic beans. I’m writing this on the plane, when I could be sitting here playing pocket pool for four hours. No time is wasted.

There is a saying that if you want to get something done, give it to the busiest person. In my experience, the people who are the best at staying connected and getting back to you are the people with unbelievable amounts of responsibility. I have known a handful of billionaires in my career, and they are infinitely more responsive than the mid-lever banker with a couple of kids. And I think there’s a strong correlation between conscientiousness and success, but that is a topic for another newsletter, perhaps.

Go fuck yourself all the way to the moon,

Jared

Music recommendation: Robert Babicz – Dark Flower (Joris Voorn Manolia Remix). Probably one of my top three tracks of all time.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Feel free to forward to as many people as you like.