"We're At The Beginning Of A Revolution"

Why we've become so anxious

• Why do people get stuck in overthinking? Jimmy: "Let's have a think about it" — that's like trying to sniff our way out of a cocaine problem.
• Anxiety is thought without control; your thoughts are wild. A flow state is control without thought. Find something you enjoy doing that puts you in that kind of flow state.
• There's no heaven and no perfection. Nature's answer is to embrace the chaos — you can't control what happens, only how you react to it.

Is optionality making us miserable?

• Not having to impress other people is the superpower; that's the thing that really makes a difference to the quality of your life. If you know what you want, you don't have to impress anyone, and that simplifies life a lot.
• Limitations are very freeing. Once you decide what you're going to do, what you're going to work on, and who you're going to be with, life gets very simple — you stop thinking about how to live and start thinking about living.
• If you don't know where you're going, no wind is favorable. — Marcus Aurelius
• There's too much optionality, and if you never cash in those options, what's the point? — Alex Hormozi
• You are what you do, not what you say you'll do. Unfortunately, talking about the thing and doing the thing fight for the same resources.
• Jimmy: Don't tell me about your priorities, show me last week's diary — that's what you actually did.

Why broken promises keep costing you

• You made this deal with yourself a long time ago. You can't quite remember it, but there's this latent distrust in you doing what you said you were going to do, and no one else knows about it. It's just you and your relationship with you. After a while you begin to resent the part of yourself that makes plans, because you don't think it's going to come to fruition.
• Your goals will be beaten by your systems every time. Everyone has great goals and big ambitions. But what are you going to do tomorrow? What's the small thing you can break off and do today?

The power of unshakeable self-confidence

• Who could you be in the absence of your concerns? — Peter Crone
• You can do anything you want. You only have to face the consequences. You have freedom of speech, but not freedom from consequences.

Jimmy's relationship with gratitude

• Disposition is more important than position. Where you are in the world doesn't matter; your disposition is everything — and the only thing that seems to shift position is a sense of gratitude.
• Celebration is gratitude in action.
• Problems are a feature, not a bug; a problem just means something needs your attention.
• People have a crazy notion that if they stop and think about it, one day their problems will be over — they'll have dealt with everything and it's done. Life doesn't work that way; you just get more complex problems.
• Boredom is unappreciated serenity.

How comedy shows expand conversations

• I have a hard time celebrating my achievements because in my mind it was my obligation to achieve it. — Michael Smokes
• Your best friend is the person you have the least filter with.
• People are desperate for authenticity, but they're allergic to sincerity. People love the idea of someone just being themselves and speaking their truth — but when you see a father break down crying because his wife left him, a lot of the internet has an allergic response to that.
• If you're going to do anything that's even vaguely out there, you've got to turn off the comment section. Other people's opinion of me is none of my business.

Stop waiting for the perfect conditions

• Favorable conditions never come. There are always plenty of rivals to our work; we are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs.
• If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable.

Are we living in the good old days?

• Strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men.
• Jimmy thinks we're currently in the hard times.

Address the problems while they're small

• You can't save souls in an empty church. — David Ogilvy
• Suicide doesn't work. People commit suicide because they want to get rid of the pain, but you can't get rid of the pain; all you can ever hope to do is redistribute it to the people who loved you.
• If you want a calmer life, address small problems while they're still small. The cost of dealing with an issue rarely gets cheaper with time. Procrastination turns uncomfortable things into unavoidable things. — Blake Burge
• Simpler version: if it doesn't fit, eventually it'll hurt wearing it.
• A cursed fact of the world is that the most important life lessons you learn are the hardest to communicate to others, because they always sound like cliches. — Nabeel Qureshi

Let your obsession become your advantage

• Competence is such an important thing for people; getting incremental improvements over time brings an awful lot of satisfaction.
• The fewer fucks you give, the more you become acclimatized to not giving a fuck — which means you give fewer over time, which means you can be braver and more experimental, taking bigger swings with a bigger skill set underneath. But if people are welded in place by their fear of criticism, skepticism, or cynicism, they don't get started.
• There are two most important days: the day you're born, and the day you find out why.
• Finding out why is: what could you commit to? Find the thing you enjoy that you can't stop thinking about. What's play to you and work for them? That's where your edge is.