Your Relationship with Time

Jesse Itzler:

I became very aware of my relationship with time. When we think of relationships, we think of our relationships with our mom or our dad or our kids, or this and that, but no one thinks of a relationship with time.

Now, I’m turning 50. The average American lives to be 78 years old. So, if I’m average, I hope I’m not, but that means I got 28 years of life left. If you reverse engineer that… Like, I just climbed Mount Washington. There were no 70-year-olds climbing Mount Washington. The actual years that you have left to be active and do the shit that we want to do, they shrink significantly as a percentage as you get older.

So once you get aware of your relationship with time, everything shifts. I had a fundamental shift when I came home, as it relates to my relationship with time. Who I want to spend it with and what I want to do. And I want to put more on my plate of the stuff that I love to do, with the people I love to do it with.

And I started getting a lot of clarity around that when I wasn’t getting bombarded with everything else. Like, I don’t spend any time alone. The only I spent alone is if I go for a run. Everything else is… I’m getting influenced by everybody else and everything else. So I’m losing my main superpower, my instinct.

I survive on instinct and gut, and I was losing that, because I was so distracted. So once I started to get that alone time… You don’t have to go to a monastery to do it, you just gotta, you know… Carving out a little bit of time for myself, every day. I started to think a lot clearer on how do I want to live, how do I want to reverse engineer the rest of my life.

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One Desire

Naval Ravikant:

So just don’t focus on more than one desire at a time. The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that, you’ll get it. But everything else, you got to let go.

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How You Interpret Your Reality

Naval Ravikant:

At the end of the day, I do think, even despite what I said earlier: life is really a single player game. It’s all going on in your head. You know, whatever you think, you believe, will very much shape your reality, both from what risks you take and what actions you perform, but also just your everyday experience of reality.

If you’re walking down the street and you’re judging everyone, you’re like, “I don’t like that person because their skin color, I don’t like that — Oh, she’s not attractive. That guy is fat. This person is a loser. Oh, who put this in my way.” You know, the more you judge, the more you’re going to separate yourself. And you’ll feel good for an instant because you’ll feel good about yourself. “I’m better than that.” But then you’re going to feel lonely. And then you’re just going to see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.

Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there’s no concept of right or wrong or good or bad, right? You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and sounds, and then you die. And how you choose to interpret, that is up to you. You do have that choice.

So this is what I meant, that happiness is a choice. If you believe it’s a choice, then you can start working on it. And I can’t tell you how to find it, because it’s your own conditionings that are making you unhappy. So you have to uncondition yourself. It’s just like, I can’t fix your eating habits for you. I can give you some general guidelines, but you got to go through the hard habit forming of how to eat right. But you have to believe it’s possible, and it is absolutely possible.

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Your Mind Bandwidth

Joe Rogan, in a conversation with Nikki Glaser:

JOE: The way I look at it, your mind, you have a certain amount of bandwidth.

This is why I don’t read Instagram comments or Twitter comments or YouTube comments. I don’t have time. If I read them, it’s an accident. But to seek them out and go—like, you have bandwidth. I don’t spend time wondering why I hate things or hating things or hating on someone or being jealous.

Let’s call it units. You have a 100 units of bandwidth in your mind. So that means there’s a 100 units you can spend on things you care about. Or, you can let your mind be occupied by some stupid Twitter feud that you’re in with some idiot that you don’t even know.

You could spend 30% of your mind bandwidth on this. And then you only have 70% for the things you love!

And then maybe you’re involved in some relationship with someone who’s an idiot, and you’re arguing back and forth—well, there’s another 30% gone!

Now you have 40% left.

You have 40% for the things you love, instead of 100%.

But if you only concentrate on the things you care about, that matter, that mean something to you, and learn how to do that—like you were talking about meditation…

NIKKI: Yeah.

JOE: It’s a form of meditation. You’re learning how to avoid the little road bumps and the ditches on the side of the road…

NIKKI: …that can suck your bandwidth.

JOE: That can suck your bandwidth!

NIKKI: You can give them just a little bit and go “Ok, no no no—”, or you could lean in.

JOE: Like how you were saying when you stopped drinking… all of a sudden, your career took off. You started doing well.

NIKKI: More bandwidth.

JOE: You had more bandwidth. And you had less problems. This problem that you had that was rotting you away, no longer existed!

So now all of a sudden it frees up your time, and you realize “Oh my god, there’s so many funny things that I could talk about, and I have so much energy, and I’m so healthy. I can just go on stage and have fun.”

And then, you’re killing it!

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Software Simulation

Interesting tidbit from the Joe Rogan podcast with Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:

Joe Rogan: Human memory is really flawed…

Scott Adams: Well, if you wanna go real deep real fast, you just gave me a good opening… I am a proponent of the “we are all a software simulation” view of reality. That would also explain why memories are so screwed up. The explanation would be that the past doesn’t exist – until you need it. In other words, the past writes itself on demand… because if we’re software, you wouldn’t have everything in the universe pre-programmed just in case you needed it – it would take up too much resources.

Source: Joe Rogan podcast, episode #874

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