How has increased wealth affected your fulfillment, and what are the pros and cons of success from a personal psychological perspective?
More wealth makes it hard to tell if people like you for yourself or just your money; you test with stupid jokes to see their reaction. Many cozy up for the flashy bling, even if you're not flashy yourself. You're not more fulfilled than when you were sleeping in garages and making no money—fulfillment comes from working on stuff you care about, which you did then and do now. Your impact has grown, but your personal fulfillment hasn't, leaving you to wonder what that means for your craving for impact. When broke you could follow curiosity freely; now you constantly weigh financial effectiveness, which can lead to hard days.
I do make a significant amount of money—around $300,000 per month—mainly from the school games (third-party revenue) and another community. I earn far more talking about the stuff than actually doing it, which is typical for an information product: leverage comes from teaching others, allowing them to achieve 100x results while I earn proportionally. What do I do with the money? I don't have guilty pleasures like cars; I invest it. I have friends aiming for tens or hundreds of millions in the S&P 500, but that's never been my primary motivator. When I was broke, an extra $10,000 a year would have dramatically improved my quality of life; now, extra millions don't materially affect it unless you have extreme comfort needs. I'm thankful my family immigrated from Eastern Europe around the fall of communism; they lived frugally, teaching me that a fulfilling life doesn't require a lot of money. Though I now make what most would consider a lot of money, I still find life enjoyable and fulfilling without needing wealth.
Do I feel happy or fulfilled with lots of money? Well, it's not necessarily the money that is making me feel happy or fulfilled, but yeah, I do feel happy and I do feel fulfilled. Part of me feels like it's just age — I've really matured and realized that you gain success on multiple axes of life, not just your finances. When I was young, I thought success was a catch-all term for how much money you made and whether you had enough money not to have to worry about looking at the pricing on the menu all the time like I used to. But I've come to realize that there are a lot of people far more successful than me on many of these axes. There are people out there that I dog on financially — it's not even close — who would probably have to make money for 10 years to make as much as I've made in a single month. Yet the abundance and diversity of relationships and experiences that they've had put me to shame. I'm like a baby compared to them. There are people out there that I crush financially, if you think about it as a great race — which many people do — but what is success really anyway? It's just some term used to be like 'I'm more successful and less successful.' Ontologically it doesn't really make sense. I dog on some of these people financially — their earnings are $20,000 or $30,000 a year for Christ's sake, and I make that in a couple of days. And then they're physical specimens — they've spent all this time and energy working on their bodies and sometimes their minds, and they're sharp as a razor, and I have nothing compared to that. So really, all financial success is just one small part of the more rounded spokes of a wheel. In order to be successful more broadly and holistically — which gets at what most people think the term success means but usually don't use in day-to-day parlance — I think you need to be great at everything. So I feel like I'm working towards that. 'Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal,' as coined by... it wasn't Hemingway. Anyway, I'll get back to you on that. Success is the progressive realization of me figuring out who quoted that. Anyway, hopefully that makes sense.
I agree. You know why? Because I think most of them would look at that question from Muhammad earlier and say, "You want to be rich, right? Well, I'll help you become rich." The reality is people can't help you become rich. You help yourself become rich — whether it's through the content that you consume or a domino effect on the brain that you get out of watching my content. You at the end of the day are responsible for your own richness. Nobody will just say, "Okay, here's a billion dollars, congrats." Even if somebody did that to you, despite the fact that you'd probably be materially rich, you would not be rich in all of the other ways that matter. So I think it just takes somebody telling you, "Hey man, you really got to sit down and examine your life, because a life unexamined is one not worth living."
Life is great, but success brings downsides: family loves it, yet many people now see me only as a money source and want me for boards or deals. I dislike talking about wealth constantly, but it’s needed for social proof. My goal isn’t happiness—it’s fulfillment, the deeper sense of welfare the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia. I avoid frivolous spending and focus on meaningful work rather than fleeting pleasures.