YOU are on the wrong life path, here’s why and what I’ve learned about myself

I’m writing a bit about life advice because I’ve spoken with some college students trying to network with me and learn what they should do with career stuff. I think people either aren’t fully candid with me which is fair, they want to present a nice picture of themselves. But that doesn’t let me give them the best advice unfortunately because people aren’t honest about their true passions or what they love. I think my takeaway from talking from these younger students and some of my own self reflection is this: these young people are directionless and following the crowd with regards to their career / livelihood or are incredibly misguided.

Why? Well I’ll give you a very simple heuristic. Ask yourself, in 10 years, would you rather be super rich and on a yacht or would you rather be working for someone else? Everyone will say they wanna be the rich guy on the yacht. Now ask yourself, what are you doing to get there? 99% of people will say something along the lines of “I’m trying to get a good job that pays a lot” or “uhhhh I don’t know, I’ll figure it out later”. If either of those are your answer, then you’re on the wrong life path. You’re doing what 99% of people are doing, yet your goal is to be in a place where only 1% of people are. Obviously that’s not going to work.

The most common response to this I expect to hear is something along the lines of “those guys just got lucky, it’s out of my control”, “the system is rigged, the American dream is a lie”, “there’s no way I could do that”. This is a complete load of bullshit and actually, it doesn’t even matter if you think that those guys were just lucky or if they were super skillful. The question you must ask yourself is “do I want to live my life having not pursued my dream?”. Even if you think that being a billionaire or getting super successful is out of reach, don’t you at least want to try? If your honest answer to that question is no, then stop reading here and go scroll tiktok or something. But if your answer is yes, then hopefully it is obvious to you that you should do something to pursue your dream.

That’s basically all there is to life, if you have a dream, then act and do things to pursue your dream. People spend so much effort on preparing for their careers or studying for tests when at the end of the day, their dream is to be a billionaire on a yacht and no amount of interview prep or test studying will get you there. Isn’t that so stupid? I understand it because I was young and misguided too, but seriously it’s stupid to be prepping for investment banking interviews and then also hope to not end up where all of the guys who did investment banking end up (because 99% of them don’t end up as billionaires with yachts, maybe you’ll get a sizable amount of money but your time won’t be your own, and a lot of those guys are truly miserable).

To get super rich and successful, you have to own something and it has to get really big. So work on something in your free time that you are passionate about and are also conscious of it having the potential to be worth a lot. I’m super passionate about the markets, so that’s what I’m working on. But for you, that might be different and you need to figure that out.

I’m not saying to ditch the normal path entirely, it’s a very nice fallback and in fact, you probably need to be on it because you likely won’t make billion dollar business on your first try or even first 100 tries. But that’s ok, failure is inherent to life and the real world and you need to accept that it’s ok to fail. Failing just teaches you more and gets you closer to your goal, even if it doesn’t feel like it gets you that much closer. My point is that you just can’t commit yourself fully to the normal path and then expect an extraordinary outcome and no one really thinks about that or acts on that.

To summarize, this is how I think you should live your life:

1 Act and do things that get you closer towards your dream

2 Know what your actual dream is, don’t waste time on things that don’t get you closer to your dream

3 Every day you don’t pursue your dream pushes your dream back by a day

4 Live life with agency, have confidence in yourself and don’t overthink things. You should just do shit, then see how it turns out and figure out what to do next. Don’t worry about failure because it’s inevitable, just worry about the next small step you can take towards your dream. The analogy I’d use is that you’re in a nearly pitch black room trying to find the exit. There are many different ways to get to the exit, but it’s impossible to foresee the whole path. So to get to the exit, you basically need to stumble around in the dark and figure it out. All you can see are the small steps you can take directly in front of you and you should take those steps!

5 It is easy to get lost or lose motivation, in fact this is also inevitable as we are all human. The way to avoid this is discipline/habit. Work on your dream every day, then you don’t have to think about it. It won’t even be a worry or concern, you will just pursue it.

6 The best time to do things is always now. Don’t wait a week, a month, and especially don’t wait a year. Do it now!!