Am I working for my business or is my business working for me? I thought as a business owner, you can do whatever you want. I'm like, damn.

We were told, Hey, don't worry about student loans. You'll make it up over time.

And it was a fucking lie. They get a lot of fulfillment out of running their business, but it's not particularly enjoyable. Go all in.

One thing, zero or nothing. And I've never agreed with that.

Tim Ferrace says, Batching is good. So I was like, All right, batch all these videos. I looked at my calendar and it just filled me with dread.

Money is the new meaning. Absolutely not.

I can, in fact, do whatever I want. If you ever get a sense that what you're doing is draining your energy, that will negatively compound over the long term. The most purposeful thing I ever did in my life.

I'm Cody Sanchez, and this is the Big Deal podcast. For those who don't just want to be rich, but be free, and are actually willing to do the things that it takes to get there. I run a portfolio of boring businesses that do nine figures in a media company called Contrarian Thinking. Okay, this week, I am going deep into one thing, which is, should you tell your boss to pound sand and quit the job you hate, or should you keep doing it and why? I think you're going to like this episode. We got both sides of the equation hammering out their opinions on it. There's not just one right answer, but we're going to give you the answer we think by the end of this podcast. Contrarian idea. Let's start with an idea you might hate. What's her idea this week, Rachel?

So you tweeted that college is overrated and overpriced. It costs $24,000 to graduate from Harvard, and it costs $0 to learn. Marketing on YouTube, finance reports and breakdowns on Twitter, stock analysis via newsletters, expert experience on podcasts. Let the sheep pay $250,000 while we earn. And I will say I love college. I thought it was worth every penny. I did go on the GI Bill, so I didn't pay. However, I had a great time. Every penny of zero pence. Every penny of zero dollars was worth my time. It was great. So I'm interested to hear your thoughts. First off, when you are saying this, are you talking about an MBA? Are you I'm talking about undergrad. I did not get my MBA from Penn State. I just got my undergrad degree.

I'm talking about undergrad degrees. This is actually the numbers that it would cost for somebody to go to Harvard for a four-year undergrad degree. And I mean, the trigger in words, let the sheep pay $240,000. Everybody says you go to school, why? For the network. They actually are pretty convinced these days that people don't go to school for the education that you get anymore. That it's like a fancy version of finishing school, basically. And then you meet a bunch of other people, and hopefully one of those people knows a guy who's a guy who knows a guy who gets you a job. And that job is higher paying than other people because your college was better than theirs. And so I think there's a couple of things happening right now. One, I think jobs are just more valuable MBAs that pay you. And the real question you have to ask yourself is, where could I get $240,000 worth of value? Or how could I learn $240,000 worth instead of having to pay for it? I personally made millions before I ever even went to go work for myself. This was all me working for somebody else for many, many years.

And I think actually a lot of people don't get that right. And so we were thinking about it today. And I feel like we've started to shit on the idea of having a job is a bad thing. And you can't be the owner of your future if you work for somebody else. And being a founder is some founder porn that everybody needs to have. And I actually don't think that's the case. But let's maybe answer a few questions from people because I know we had some questions. Should you go get your MBA? Should you go work for yourself? Or should you go work for somebody else? Were there any that you thought we should answer?

There was one, I believe it was over on your Instagram, and it was from somebody named Jan. And he said, Hey, Cody, I'm a final year economics student with a pretty good knowledge on finance and accounting. What do you recommend to do? Focusing on the internship programs to get a real job experience in finance, like banking, or studying for a CCA and CFA exams to make my future path better. Or maybe focusing on grades for a master degree. So what do you think, Cody? Also, I want to be a billionaire. You gave me an inspiration on YouTube. Don't ignore my comment, please, Cody. All right.

I'll ignore the demand on YouTube. I appreciate you guys following. If you don't follow us on YouTube, you should. Actually, that channel is sick. We put a bunch of time into those videos. All right. First, let's look at college. So should you go get an MBA or really even go to college these days? I thought this graph was fascinating. Basically, this is called the relative value of higher education. And what you see here, fancy words, but the diminishing financial return of higher education. What that means, you see a blue line that's skyrocketing up since when is this? 64 were. And a red line that's staying static. The blue line has the costs for higher education going up to $95,000 or above, or if you're at Harvard, multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then the red line is the amount that people earn after getting their bachelor's degree from a higher education institute. And that red line has stayed from, let's call it 40, 35,000 to about 45,000. So we've had astronomical growth in the cost of higher education and flatlining growth in the return of higher education. So if you take all of the emotional aspects out of it and the fact that it's super fun to party with your friends and do keg stands on the weekends, what you realize is that the numbers don't lie.

The numbers tell you that over time, college has become less valuable if what you care about is making more money after school, which is what they say college will help you do. And so if you want to go to college just to have fun, that's awesome. But realize that college doesn't seem to actually increase your earnings potential over time. In fact, if you look at the numbers, you see a bunch of trade school graduates earning more than graduates from undergrad colleges in general. And I can say this firsthand, we have of plumbing companies and landscaping companies and boring blue collar service businesses where the guys make way more than the average marketing degree. And so I think we were lied to as a generation. I think this generation feels it. We were told, Hey, just get good grades, get into a good college, don't worry about student loans. You'll make it up over time, then go get a good job and you're going to be okay. And it was a fucking lie. And the truth of the matter is that we should have looked at the numbers. And the numbers say that We are making other people rich, namely institutions and their investors.

And we are by no means better off as a generation from having the highest level of student debt of all time and the highest level of education of all time. And increasingly, higher education does not now always lead to higher income. Let me tell you what I really think about it. That's what I really think about it. I do think we could have a whole segment on here. If you guys want to give us some comments in the reviews, I read every single one of them and tell Plus, if you want to see, should I get an MBA versus should I not? Should I go to college versus should I not? We could have two people fight with their ideas on that. Okay, now let's get to the next part. So basically, rule number one, I don't think you should go to MBA unless you got a GI bill like Rachel, or unless you were like me, where my company paid for it, shout out State Street at the time, I wouldn't go do it. I did not have to pay for my really fancy degree, and that's the only reason I did it. Now, do you quit your job?

So let's say you say, okay, Why I'm in undergrad. Do I say, Fuck the part-time job I have, fuck the full-time job I have, and I'm going to quit it, and I'm going to go and do something else? Well, there's actually a really fascinating study here that we found the other day that basically tracks 5,000 individuals who either stayed or left their job while doing a startup and said, Which one succeed more? The people who stay at the company while they build their next thing or the people who leave the company and go build their next thing 100% of the time? Now, my gut originally might say, and many people say on Twitter, go all in. One thing, zero or nothing. Sleep on the couch if you have to. And I've never agreed with that. I have always started my own thing while I've been at a corporate job. Not a startup. Startups are hard. We can get to that later. But the numbers tell us that you are more likely to succeed by 33 % if you stay at your job and build your side thing than if you just go and build your side thing, because that income is lifeblood.

And the thing that will kill you more than anything else is running out of cash. I guess my last point because he said that he wants to be a billionaire, right? Was like, there's what is it? Like a 0.0006 % chance of building a billion dollar company. It's really small. And in tandem with that, if you look at historicals, it will take you anywhere from 40 to 50 months if you're part of that 0.0006 %. Which means that if you have another founder that's averaging over multiple years, about a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year until you build this huge company and you get an exit of a couple of hundred million because you're going to have to raise money on the side. Now, what's more likely than that is you actually have more like a 67 % chance of absolutely losing everything. Every single dollar it not working whatsoever. That's just what the math says. And so if the only reason why you want to build a billion dollar company is for cash, or you want to go do a startup is for cash, I think you're nuts because most people fail, and that is not the easiest way to win to despite what you see all over the Internet.

In fact, my dad has this line that I thought was so good, which is you're not really in the game if you haven't sat with your head in your hands in the dark in your living room, unsure about what to do next. That's the game of entrepreneurship. It is a game of uncertainty, missed payroll, people suing you, people hating your product, employees leaving you, you having fraud committed against you, people stealing from you. It's a miserable sport that some of the masacists, like myself just can't stop doing it. And so you have to make sure you actually want to be in the game. There's huge benefits, a massive upside, but only after it has taken its piece of skin, and its piece of skin is really, really big. So make sure you actually want to do the thing. Because I think we were going to talk, Rachel, about one of my pet peeves for people who talk some talk they shouldn't, right?

Somebody did send you a message, and it was interesting. So they said, We would love to invite you to our exclusive workshop for founders on how to scale their startups to $1 billion plus with remote talent and VAs from emerging countries. So there was a lot of interesting things that I know happened after this. Can you break that down and explain it for us?

Yeah. So I won't shout out the company too much because docs in. But basically this company is saying, Hey, here's how to grow a billion dollars using virtual assistance. No surprise. What do you think they do? Obviously, they sell virtual assisting services. Tiny little hiccup, I checked just for shits and giggles because I thought, has somebody actually built a billion dollar company using remote work? It's like one of the key figures. I looked at the company, of course, nobody has actually done that. Then they highlight this other startup that is not nothing. It's worth 50 million bucks, but 50 million is categorically not a billion dollars. And what I realize is how many people talk about the thing that they haven't actually done. And it's a perfect example of why I think people say, I want to be a billionaire. When you understand understand mathematically. The incredibly low likelihood that any of us, myself included, have of being a billionaire, you can actually understand the game that you're playing. And it's, in my opinion, like setting yourself up for failure in the beginning when you say that the only thing that I want to do is build a billion-dollar company.

You need to ask yourself, why is that reasonable? And what is it actually going to take to do it? Most people fuck up their lives and don't achieve what they want because they write big goals and they don't say what they're willing to sacrifice to get those goals. The difference between somebody who hits goals and somebody who doesn't hit goals is that they sacrifice to hit them, whereas most people manifest and mirror talk and project into the universe the nonsense that they want out of life. And the universe only really cares about what you're willing to give it in return with what it will give you back. So sacrifice is actually the entire name of the game. And I think we were talking about this idea about, should you work miserable jobs or not? And I I believe, actually, that if you want to make more money, you have to expect many years of doing the things you hate before you get to the years of doing the things that you love. I read this article that was like, nine out of 10 people are willing to take less money for more meaning and work.

And originally, I was like, That's good. That's great. And then I realized, But does meaning just mean to them that they want to do something that they like all the time? I think that's what that actually means to most people. It's not that they're willing to to do something really hard to earn and make more and be compensated more for the time that they spend on a subject, it's that they're searching for this touchy-feeling meaning thing when it really just means their ability to tolerate pain. And HBR, I think, said that money is the new meaning. Absolutely not. I wish that was the case. I wish that most of our generation did the thing because they felt like that is what they should spend their life in pursuit of. But I don't think we're a generation of Mother Teresa's. I think we're a generation that wants to take a little bit less pain because we came out of the 2008 financial crisis. We have social media in our ear nonstop. We feel more distracted and distraught than ever. And we don't want to buckle down and do the short term work that leads to the long term gains.

And that, I think, is a tragedy. I think it was an article that we were looking at that broke down a couple of different jobs. So the data says that we can link this in the show notes, too, so you know where it is, that 62% of high-earning individuals work more than 50 hours a week. 62%, 35 work more than 60 hours a week, and 10% work more than 80 hours a week. If you add in a typical one hour commute, and a 60 hour work week translates into leaving the house at 7:00 AM and not getting home until 9:00 PM, five days a week. Why do I say this? Because I think it's unreasonable for us to look at the stuff that we grew up on, like I really respect the man a lot, but four hour work week and think that we can make millions or tens of millions of dollars. That's not really very reasonable. Hard work leads to massive success. Massive success does not just come from being more effective and efficient. You have to pair the two, especially in the beginning, where you don't know the difference between what you should be working on and what you are working on.

Basically, this article then goes through and has a bunch of different case studies. Like a guy who works at a commercial bank, he works 120 hours a week, stays late at the office. But he's one of the top 6% of earners in America. And I remember that because I did that same thing at Golden Sacks, right? Worked nonstop. We worked for so long that one of my colleagues there at the firm, Eduardo, actually passed out one day in the middle of the street. Like, not what we want to strive for anymore. And I don't think that degree is necessary. But I do think it leads you astray when people tell you that you don't have to work hard to achieve the things that you want. You absolutely will. The beautiful part is learning compounds so that hard work that you do in the beginning will be miserable. You will be categorically miserable. It will be hard. You will want to quit. Other people will tell you you should for multiple years until at some point You start hitting a point where the work starts to flip and all of the learning you took for those years compounds into you earning.

But it takes those years of pain to have that eventual gain. The last thing I think we should do here. Okay, so here's It's my take. If you want to make more money, work harder until you know how to work smarter, at which point you should then work harder and smarter until eventually you can just work smarter. But you can skip none of those steps. And I think you should expect some pain. But we have a friend of mine who's going to come on here. His name is Ali Abdel. He's a former doctor, super hardworking, YouTuber, entrepreneur, podcaster. He's had to work super hard to get where he is today. But he actually believes totally different than I do. He thinks that you do not have to work super hard to get what you want while being miserable. And he thinks that, in fact, you should enjoy your work throughout your life. And I've seen it firsthand. He's a very happy dude, and I think he does enjoy what he does for a living. And so he's going to give the contradicting opinion on what does it mean to work and have success, and do you have to be miserable for a period to get it?

He's going to disagree with me, basically. And note, for the record, this is what you should do with ideas. The whole idea of idea fight is I come on here and I tell you all the reasons why I think hard work actually leads to outside success, the numbers behind it. And then somebody like Ollie comes on and says, No, it doesn't. Here's the reason why, and here are the numbers behind it. And then you get to decide what's the truth between the two? That is lost in our society today, and that is what we are trying to bring back. Because Lord knows we don't need more one-sided arguments from people on the Internet. It'd be It's nice if we were okay being wrong some of the time.

And here we go.

Ali, last time we saw each other, we were talking about struggle. You were basically like, I don't know, do we have to struggle so hard? And you had some interesting frameworks. I wanted to dive in. What do you think? Do you think you have to struggle in business to be successful?

Yeah, this is the thing that I've been reading a lot about and trying to really understand this, because one narrative is that the whole Elon Musk says that starting a business is like chewing glass and it's like you've got to work through this pain and this grind. And there's this period of time where a lot of entrepreneurs would say that they get a lot of fulfillment out of running their business, but it's not particularly enjoyable. There's a lot of stuff you have to do that you don't particularly feel like. But the other side of the coin is, I used to have a normal day job. I used to work as a doctor, and I started my business as a way of getting freedom from that. I didn't want to have someone telling me what to do. I wanted to do the things I wanted to do and not the things I didn't want to do. And so for me, starting Following the business, the point of it was to buy my freedom from these obligations and to, in a way, buy my freedom from the grind. I'd say struggle is different to grind. Being a doctor very much felt like a grind.

I think struggle can be a good thing if what comes out of it is positive. But I've been thinking a lot about how do we build businesses that also feel good rather than build businesses where we're grinding really hard for the sake of some big outcome. Because generally, when you speak to people with a lot of money, they're like, Oh, well, It stops buying happiness beyond a certain point. If we look at regrets of the dying, they all say, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. A question I like to ask myself is, am I working for my business or is my business working for me? Usually, the more I'm struggling, the more I'm working for my business. And the less I'm struggling, and the more chill I am with it, the more my business is working for me.

Interesting. What do you think the difference in definition is between struggle and grind?

I think struggle is quite value value neutral. You can struggle while you're at the gym. You can struggle in, I don't know, to make a breakthrough in your relationship, but it's a good thing. If you're doing an ayahuasca trip, you're struggling, but it's for the sake of something valuable, whereas grind has those connotations of meaninglessness around it, where the thing that you're struggling for is not, in fact, the thing you want to be struggling for. Parents will often say that raising kids is a struggle, but they wouldn't say raising kids is a grind. But you would say that going to a boring corporate job is a grind rather than a struggle. I think it's about what the end goal is and how purposeful it feels and how meaningful it feels.

Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense. It's almost like if you think about struggle, you talked about going to the gym, you can have struggle, which creates more muscle mass over time, as opposed to a grind. If you grind away on a piece of stone, it wears away. So it could also be physically the difference between the two, something that could build as opposed to something that could wear down. That's nice.

That's the way I'm thinking about it.

I like that a lot.

Okay, so you have You've felt really poignantly, I think, grind, which is med school in a lot of ways.

You've also maybe felt grind that could be the content creation wheel that people don't talk about. How do you determine when you're in that phase and how do you get out of it? Because I think sometimes we get complacent and we stay in the grind.

Yeah. For me, there's a very clear alarm bell, and that's when I look at my calendar and I get that feeling of, That feeling is the absolute early warning sign that burnout is approaching or it's starting to feel more like a grind and less like a struggle for some positive outcome. For example, this week, I was meant to be filming 15 videos for my YouTube channel because Tim Ferrace says batching is good. I was like, All right, Tim, let's batch all these videos. I looked at my calendar and it just filled me with dread. Whereas when I look at my calendar and see something like this, I'm like, Yeah, that sounds fun. Or if I look on my calendar and see a block of time for writing or a block of time filming that's unscheduled, I think, Oh, that could be fun. I identify that sign of that feeling of what's on my calendar. Now there's usually two things I can do at that point. One thing is to try and make the thing more enjoyable. That's a big premise of my upcoming book, feel good productivity. We're more productive and more creative and less stressed when we can find a way to enjoy the things that we're doing.

Let's say I had to, for example, film these videos or go to work. At that point, I don't really have a choice. In my day job, I didn't have a choice whether I could go into work. I just had to. So at that point, I have to just try and find ways to make the process of doing it more enjoyable and energizing. But if I do have autonomy over what I'm doing, like I do now that I have a business, then I really sit down and ask myself, Why am I Are you doing this? Have I got that feeling about filming these videos? Because it's going to be struggle, it's going to be hard work for the sake of something valuable, in which case, okay, I'll push through. But do I have that feeling about filming these videos? Because the reason I'm doing the why behind it feels meaningless. That is where I have to do a lot of journaling to be like, Wait a minute, why am I doing this? What's the point? What's the goal? Is this aligned with my values? And all those sorts of questions which really help.

Yeah, it's really important because I think forever, our first conversation, I was like, The thing is, you have to grind.

Everybody struggles.

I'm an investment banker. I did it for years. Get over yourself, basically. I do think that's a very American way of thinking and one that I subscribe to for a long time. I do think there's a component of it that young people benefit from. It's almost like a softening of your edges. If we go back to wearing down, it's like you have a lot of edges when you're young, and you haven't been fully formed. You need to create the David, Michelangelo creating the David out of the Stone. And so you need to be ground down. But at some point, when you know who you are, I think then you get stuck in mimetic desire, other people's wants and needs. How do you recalibrate when you have those moments where your calendar looks awful or you hate what you're doing? A lot of times, it means you have to make a big change. What do you do?

For me personally, I'm a business owner, and so a big part of it is recognizing that I can, in fact, do whatever I want. There's a great quote I came across the other day, which is that your life begins when you realize you can do whatever you want. For example, when I see stuff on my calendar, I'll occasionally speak to a friend about this and I'll be like, Yeah, the calendar is looking pretty busy. I feel pretty stressed. They'd be a bit I'm surprised because most of my friends are not business owners. They'd be like, Wait a minute. I thought as a business owner, you can do whatever you want. I'm like, Damn, that's a good point. It's almost like I have to remind myself or be reminded that actually the calendar is within my control. Recently, I had a family health emergency where I had to leave the country for a while. In that context, I just canceled everything on the calendar, and everyone was cool with it, obviously. I was in this new country dealing with this emergency with nothing on the calendar. I realized, wow, if a health emergency comes up or something serious, of course I can drop everything and just do it.

Similarly, my mom was involved with this emergency and she's still working as a doctor. Even she was able to drop everything because even in the workplace, if you have an emergency come up, you can just drop everything. That made me realize, wait a minute. I've been thinking of my business as something I have to do, and if something is in the calendar, it has to be done. But actually, shit happens in life. Your dog might get ill, a family member might ill, you might have to do something, in which case business is way less important. That's been a really good sense of perspective for me to realize that actually everything on the calendar is negotiable, and fundamentally, anyone can broadly do what they want, even if they're not a business owner, you just have to deal with the trade offs that come with it.

Yeah. You have a couple of ideas that I love and I want to play around with. I was talking with a bunch of people the other day. I did this little psilocybin journey. We talked about it beforehand. And one of the guys who administers it basically was talking about leisure in historical context. And today, he was like, If you made it back in the day, what did you do? You became like a woman of leisure or like a man of leisure. And you basically sat around all day, did whatever you want, you did no work, and that was like a sign of status. Fast forward to today, let's call it 100 years later, a sign of status is actually, I'm so busy, I don't have time, I have so many responsibilities. So within, let's call it one or two generations, we've actually completely flipped how we even view what success looks like. And if you can completely view what success looks in two lifetimes, that means it's all negotiable. And so hard for young Cody to understand, probably hard for young Ali to understand, too. But now you have this framework I really liked, which is the feel good business.

I like it for a couple of reasons.

One, you're not saying it's a lifestyle business. It could be a feel good, huge business, and it could also be a feel good, tiny business or job. Can you explain what that is versus traditional types of businesses?

Yeah.

Usually in a traditional type... Well, I guess I guess there's three types of businesses. There's traditional businesses, there's, let's say, a high-growth startup, and then there's, shall we call it a feel-good business? A traditional business would be something like, I don't know, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, these big-ass companies, big corporations, loads and loads of employees. No one really aspires to have that business, at least from the people I speak to. Then we have the high growth startup, which is generally venture capital-funded. The aim is growth, and so you've got to be aiming to 2X or 3X your business every year. There's this drive for growth because you've got investors who are on the line and you don't want to let your team down, you don't want to let your investors down. It's quite high stress. Most people running high growth startups do not chill out. They don't have much time for leisure and contemplation, working 80 hours Our Weeks are seen as totally normal in those worlds. But then on the other side of the coin, you have what I call a feel good business, which is like a lifestyle business, but with a few tweaks. For me, a feel good business is a business that exists to enrich your life more so than it does to enrich the life of your investors.

Because in a feel good business, generally it's bootstrapped. Generally, the founder is the 100% owner. A feel good business is a tool for making money, having fun, and helping people. Fundamentally, I think those three things are the reason why we do anything. We want to make money, we want to have fun, and we want to help people. It's just with a feel good business, we are trying to keep in mind the fact that our personal fulfillment is the main thing. For example, I've got these 10 Commandments of the Feel Good business. One of them is that we look forward to Mondays. If you get to a point where you're not looking forward to a Monday, where you've got the Sunday scaries, whatever you call it, that's a sign that, hang on, maybe we need a little bit of realignment. One of the principles is that the thing that the business is doing is a thing that you find inherently enjoyable. For example, I know a lot of people will say, I don't care about what the business does, just that I have a business. I could be selling donuts or printing T-shirts or selling B2B enterprise software.

But If it's a business, that's the thing that people enjoy. But with a feel good business, the thing you're doing actually matters. For me, I'm trying to build a feel good business. I really enjoy making YouTube videos about educational topics. I love reading, writing, learning, and teaching. That's what I would do even if I didn't need to make money, even if I won the lottery. I've got a friend who's trying to build a feel good business around music theory and music coaching because he just loves playing the guitar, loves playing the piano, wants to build an education business around that. So part of the feel good business is, is the thing that the business is doing is actually something you enjoy? And a question to figure that out is, if I won the lottery, would I continue doing this or would I say, screw it, and try and do something else?

Interesting. I was talking to somebody the other day, and they were saying that You can either find the joy in what you're doing, to your point, or you can find your joy. And so you have two options. Both can have a positive outcome with you having a joyful life, but you have to be really thoughtful about which way you're going. And so I think that they feel good in business is interesting because these days, most of us think about what will work, not what we want to work. And so especially when you're starting out, you're just like, I want a business, and I want to be a CEO, and I want to be a founder, and I want that title. And you're not actually thinking, flash forward five or 10 years, do I like the person that I see that is in my current state that I hope to be in? So that's really interesting. Another question I wanted to ask you is, When you work, do you feel like you have to have purpose beyond joy in it? Is joy enough of a purpose in your work?

It is for the short term, but not for the long term. I get a lot of joy out of watching, out of playing video games, for example. But it doesn't feel that meaningful or purposeful or fulfilling, even though it's joyful. I get a lot of joy out of, I don't know, just playing squash with some friends or something like that. But again, it doesn't feel very purposeful because I think purpose comes from working towards a goal that is bigger than ourselves. The most purposeful thing I ever did in my life was I directed the pantomime that we put on in my hospital many years ago. This was getting all the medical students together, this big ensemble production of 100 people, and we're doing this parody of Cinderella with medical stuff and changing song lyrics to make them medical and things like that. That was It was so fulfilling. It was weird because it was taking up so much time while we were all in medical school and super busy. But it was a group of us. We were working together for this bigger cause because it was a production we were doing together. It was for charity.

I remember being so energized by that, even though it was hard work. I have never done anything that's been more fulfilling than that. I think this is why people enjoy these acting productions and musicals and things, because you're bringing people together and you're working towards a bigger goal. When I feel joy in my work, it's when with my team and it feels as if what we're doing is focused on service rather than focused on the selfish components. I think early on in my business journey, after I read the four-hour work week, I decided that the goal for me was financial independence. Now, as you know, once you hit financial independence, you're like, Okay, well, what do I do now? Tim Ferrace calls it the dark void of purpose. When money is the target for so long, once you hit the target, you're like, It's too easy for money to continue to be the target. But whenever I feel the most fulfilled and purposeful in my work, it's when I orient my thinking towards service. Before filming a video, there's three things I'd like to think about. I think this actually could apply to a lot of other businesses as well.

I think It's going to sound a bit woo- woo, but mind, heart, and soul. The heart of a video, for example, is what's the actual point? What's really the thing I'm trying to get across? What's the heart of this video? The mind behind the video is like, Okay, how do I optimize title and thumbnail and how do I make it good from a cognitive perspective? Then soul is, how do I bring myself into this? How do I bring my own personality so that this message can resonate more authentically? When I think about those things, it helps take my mind away from, I have to film a video to hit a sponsor deadline because it's going to make me money. And more to words, I love the idea of filming this video because I think it can genuinely add value to someone's life.

Oh, that's lovely. Well, maybe that explains why so many of your videos, even though they're hyper tactical in a world where people want to be educated, they want graphics flowing at them, they want explosions, you still have incredible views with videos that are very straightforward. They're simple. You're not running around giving people money or cars. You're actually just talking to them about the small things in life that can turn into the big things. But you do feel that when you watch that video. You feel the Ollie come across, I think.

I'm glad. One big thing I think about as well is with the whole MrBeastification of YouTube, explosions and stuff happening on screen, a big part of what I think about is, what's the YouTube channel and what's the business I actually want to have? Do I want a YouTube channel where in order to make a video, I have to go on the street and interview people? Not really. Do I want a YouTube channel where every time I make a video, it has to be this enormous Netflix production value thing with a script and I'm just reading from a teleprompter? Not really. The YouTube channel I want to have is a YouTube channel where I can learn something, I can maybe read a book, and I can sit down and hit record with a few notes written down, and I can speak from the heart. That's the YouTube channel I want. And so the temptation is always there to be like, Oh, but this video could get more views if I made more explosions happen or if I really scripted it out. But I've tried those. It's not felt good. It's not hit the... The whole thing of the feel good business, feel good productivity.

And one thing that Tim Ferrera said in a recent interview, which I really loved, because he's been doing this for 15 years, he said that when it comes to this creator world, if you ever get a sense that what you're doing is draining your energy, that will negatively compound over the long term and will make you absolutely miserable. And I so vibed with that because that's the whole message behind my book as well. Try and find ways to make whatever you're doing energizing and enjoyable. And for me, it's not that energizing to add explosions on screen. It's not that energizing to be a teleprompter reader. But it's so energizing to learn something, write down a few bullet points, and speak from the heart. And if that's the constraint that I create for my business and my YouTube channel, I can then optimize profit around that constraint. Whereas if what I was chasing was views, I might be I don't know, I just bought a private island, and today we're going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah maximizing profit within the constraints of the life that I want. I was speaking to James Clear about this, the famous author of Atomic Habits.

I love speaking to people who are very, very successful and also seem very happy and balanced family life and everything. He's got kids and he doesn't do that much stuff. His book is selling stupidly large amounts of copies. I asked him, what has he seen? Who are the successful authors who are the happiest? He said, The secret is basically Draw a box around the day-to-day life that you want. Within that box, sure, maximize profit. But if anything falls outside of that box, you have to say no to the thing. He only does one speaking gig a month, even though he could do loads and make loads of money. He doesn't make an online course, even though he probably could. He doesn't have an app, even though he could. Because for him, the box around his life is, I want to be able to wake up when I want. I want to be able to take my kids to school. I want to have a few hours of writing. I want to pick him up from school and hang out with the family in the evening. I love that. He's defined his constraints, and he's maximizing profit within those constraints.

Yeah, it's interesting. The other day, I like an exercise of writing out my perfect day. And what I realized, it's very small. It's tiny things. It's a walk with a dog, a really good cup of coffee in the morning. At least one interesting conversation, because I think a lot of times, creators, you can be really individualistic just in your little hole creating. But really not more than one conversation. I think that's a really good exercise, writing out what does your box even look like. In investing, we have something called the deal box, which tells you what businesses you want to buy. I think it's probably the same thing for what businesses you want to build. If you don't know what you're looking for, then you'll just take whatever comes your way. And so it's really smart. Okay, I have two more for you. This sounds a little woo-woo maybe to people, follow your energy, follow your flow, but you're also a doctor, and you have a very scientific and straightforward mind, and you have a book full of not just your feelings on this, but also some data behind it. What does the world say about this?

Is it true that if you follow where your energy goes, you can actually be more productive? What have you found in your studies?

This was a huge part of the research component of the book, trying to figure out… Intuitively, I had this feeling that when I feel good about my work, I'm more productive at it. But that goes against the whole discipline narrative. You got to do shit that you don't want to do even when you don't feel like it. There's that quote from Muhammad Ali where he says, I suffered every day for 10 years, but it was worth it to live life as a champion, or something like that. I always thought of that quote. I was like, I don't want to suffer for 10 years to live life as a champion. Maybe some people do, but I feel like in In the modern world, a lot of us realize that suffering for 10 years for the sake of some outcome on the other end, you'll regret the 10 years of suffering. I went on a huge rabbit hole of research around this. This is a researcher called Barbara Fredrickson, who in 2001 came up with this theory called the broaden and build theory. Basically, the idea is that positive emotions, feeling good, ultimately drive productivity and creativity, and they reduce your stress.

The theory behind this is if we think back to caveman times, imagine positive feelings and negative feelings. When you have negative emotions, that's like, Oh, shit, a tiger is about to eat me. I'm about to get ostracized from my group. Everything closes down. You become very, very focused on that threat, and you can't really think outside the box. You're just focused on, How the fuck do I get away from this tiger? That's what negative emotions do to us. They spike our adrenaline and cortisol levels. They increase our heart rate. They increase our breathing rate. They have this... It's like when people get angry in a conversation with their partner, you feel You start seeing red and you feel that agitation. Now, if we take a breath and we think positive emotions, what do positive emotions mean? Positive emotions mean you're safe. It means you're in a connected environment. It means you feel like you have a bit of control over what's happening in your life. It means that you're not getting mauled by a tiger or about to get ostracized from your group. Now, when you experience positive emotions, the mind broadens and you start being open to more possibilities.

Your peripheral vision starts to become more focused. You start to then explore new areas to be like, Okay, I'm feeling chill right now. Let me go explore that cave over there. I'm feeling chill right now. Let me see if I can find some seeds in that new forest over there. And so you broaden the actions that you do. And the second part is build. You build cognitive resources, you build relationships with people, you build skills, and you learn things when you're feeling good. And we find that they've done so many studies where you bring people into a lab, you split them into two groups, and you ask them to do the same task of creativity, some creative task. In one group, you just give a little chocolate bar before the task, and the other group, you give nothing. Or one group, you show them a film, a 10-second movie that evokes positive emotions, and the other group, you show them nothing or you show them a sad scene. You find that the people who have been primed to feel good are more creative and more productive. On the studies they've done where they measure their stress levels and heart rate and stuff, you find that they're a lot less stressed as well.

So feeling good, following our energy, positive emotions, all of this stuff sounds a bit woo, but there's so much evidence showing that if we can feel good about our work, it makes us more productive, it makes us more creative, and it makes us less stressed. And it also gives us more energy, which we can then apply to the other important things in our life.

For writers and creatives, we often talk about priming, right? I know before I write, I like to go read some of the greats. I'll read Charles Bukowski, and I'll read just a few of his lines because not only is there a positive feeling, but maybe some of that greatness rubs off on me. And it feels the same with productivity, perhaps. On our team calls, one of my big pet peeves as a leader is if people start a meeting or end a meeting, low energy. I think if you are in charge of the vibe setting of a meeting, you want to bring them in and you want to come in and be like, What are we doing today? I'm so excited you guys are here. You're spending your life with us on our mission.

What a treasure. Thank you.

Then at the end, this is where I think a lot of leaders really mess up, is at the end, they just go, Okay, well, anything Okay, see you guys later, as opposed to having something put aside specifically for the end that's a little bit of a call to arms, because people don't really remember the beginning, but they will remember the end. If you want to be the one to prime your team to do more, then you want that to move forward. I've noticed a couple of things as being friends with you that you integrate this into your life consistently. For instance, the mic check.

Tell people what you do on a mic check. Does the internet know about this?

Yeah. When I'm doing a mic check, I will either sing or I'll recite lyrics from a song. So earlier today, we were doing a mic check and I was like, Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high, there's a land that I heard of once in a lalibi. Or before I'm filming a video, I'll either play some energizing music in the background or I'll grab the guitar, which is often next to my filming set up, and I'll just, I don't know, sing Budapest by George Esra or something like that. My team will just be looking at me and being like, Yep, there he goes again. But it's a good sign because it means I'm about to film a video and priming myself into that state of energy. People like Tony Robbins do this before they go on stage. They have a little trampoline, they jump around a bit. For people who are a bit cynical, mostly I speak to Brits, and they're all very cynical, it's like, What is this bullshit? But actually, the state that you're in has an enormous impact on how you show up in your work and how you show up for the people around you.

Yeah.

Well, you think about it this way. My husband was Navy SEAL for many, many years, and they're huge on priming. And so before they go to war, there's a specific set of things that they usually do, including usually really aggressive music that's played throughout. There's a lot of camaraderie joking. A lot of them do a workout before they go out because you're feeling strong before you go out in something that you want to be strong in. And so even those who are hyper cynical, if you can imagine that somebody who's going to war does it with the highest price, when you are doing it with your every day, that seems to make sense. Okay, where I want to end is, I had a tweet on the internet that people hated, which was Probably in a state where I was working too much.

But it was like, you don't need a hobby.

You need to love what you do. I go back and forth on this. I can't decide how I feel. Do we need hobbies, or should we like what we do more? Should we integrate the two? What do you think? You have some hobbies, it sounds like.

Yeah. I've also flip-floped on this because there have been periods of my life where I've been so in the business, and the business has been so fun, and it's growing, and it's exhilarating, and it gets to 8:00 PM, and I still just want to keep working because it's so enjoyable. Usually, I find that when I put too much of the gas on those moments, I don't give myself enough of a time for break or rest or recharging. I'm in the process of reading a book called Rest. I can't remember the author, but he cites so many studies that show that, especially if you're in anything creative, which all business is to some degree, actually having that time for rest Having that time to allow the default mode network in the brain to activate, which is what happens when you're doing nothing or when you're in the shower, when you're going for a walk. That's actually really important to help with creative thinking. I agree, it's really important to love what you do, and it's so nice that as business owners and stuff, we can do that. But increasingly, I'm finding that the value of having a hobby that does not make money.

Because the problem is, it's so easy for us to monetize our hobbies. At one point, I was having art lessons and I was thinking, Oh, I can post this on Instagram If I can get good enough, I can illustrate children's books and I can make money out of this thing. Then I was like, Yeah, but I make money way more efficiently in other methods. Why don't I just let my art or my video games or reading fiction, fantasy fiction, be a thing just for me rather than for the sake of driving the capitalist machine? Yeah, I don't know, going for a walk, going for a jog, spending time with friends, reading a book, playing video games. I love those as a way of, in a way, forcing myself to not just keep on working because I know that over the long term, it will actually benefit my business if I'm working, let's say, 40 hours a week rather than 80 hours a week.

So if you had to tell somebody one thing to take away from feel good productivity or from Feel Good business, what would it be? If they were like, There's one thing they could go and do today.

The first chapter of the book, Feel Good Productivity, is about play. There's a lot of stories of famous Nobel Prize-winning scientists and super successful entrepreneurs athletes and stuff, where they say that the way they approach their work, it's as if they're playing. Now, this is often easier said than done, because especially if someone has a normal job where they don't particularly enjoy it, how do you really approach it with a sense of play? But one phrase that I find super helpful to remember comes from the philosopher Alan Watts, where he says, be sincere, don't be serious. Now, I imagine playing a board game with someone. It's no fun playing with someone who takes it too seriously because they're like a stickler for the rules and just driving the energy away, and it's a bit grim. But you also don't want to play a board game with someone who's completely uncaring. You don't want someone who's just like, Oh, who cares? It's just a game. That's no fun either. You want someone who plays the board game sincerely. They're sincerely trying to win, but at the same time, they recognize it's a game. I find that for me, whenever I feel stressed with my work, when I feel anxious, when I feel overwhelmed or anything like that, it's usually because I'm taking something too seriously.

I'm thinking of my work as being terribly important. I think there's a quote from Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, that says that one of the biggest foibles of human nature is that we think our work is terribly important, where it's really not. Most of us are not saving lives on the daily. And so what I would encourage people is to try and think, how can I dial down the seriousness of my work to allow myself to experience that sense of play? And there's a quote I love from the medical drama, Grey's Anatomy. The neurosurgeon, Derek Shepard, played by Patrick Dempsey, he has a ritual at the start of every operation where he greets the team, everyone introduces themselves, and then he puts some music on, and he says, It's a beautiful day to save lives. Let's have some fun. I just love that. Obviously, it's a TV show, and obviously, it's dramatized and stuff. But having worked in operating theaters and stuff, surgeons genuinely have music in the background. They genuinely joke around. Even when it's life and death, you still get a lot value from approaching it with a bit more lightness, a bit more sincerity, and treating it like play.

I love that. The other day, I was reading some old texts from the Dow, and one of them that I've been ruminating on a lot lately is your biggest mistake is you think you have time. I know it's one of those that you just you're like, oh, it gets you in the gut. But I think everything you're talking about relates specifically back to that. If we know one thing for certain, which is that death is inevitable and that we have less time than probably we value, perhaps it shouldn't all have to be such a struggle. Thanks for being here.

Thank you so much.

Let's see, did we have a comment section we wanted to go over, Rachel?

We do have a comment section. So somebody commented on one of your posts, and I thought this one was... This is probably one of the funniest comments, and I don't know why. So everybody has to let me know if they think this is a good one. You not your job. Stop Job Shaming, Lady. And I don't know why. Like I said, I don't know why this is funny, but the Stop Job Shaming, I don't think I've heard of the term Job Shaming before. This is a new one, but it was from, I believe, a user called Madonna Naine Newman, 7244. So, yeah, what are your thoughts on that first? And also, now I need to know, what does an actual day for you look like? How many hours are you actually working? All right.

So first, let's tackle Job Shaming. I don't even know what that is. I feel like this is a new name, Quiet Quitting. I'm shaming them for working or for liking their job or for not liking their job?

I mean, I don't fucking know. Maybe for embodying, being too into working?

Oh, right. That's a tragedy.

But Yeah, I think- She's not the one working like you are. Yeah. So why do you care if somebody else is working? This is the...

Welcome to the Internet. I think... So listen, there does seem to be this trend on the Internet, just about everywhere, where I don't know whether it's insidious, it's calculated, but there is a manipulation of views from the general populace that to like what you do and to like it so much that you are into talking about it all the time, doing it all the time has become hustle culture, and somehow hustle culture is bad. Now, I think this would be true if you don't have this big, giant opt-out button called the lowest unemployment rate of all time in the US. There has never been more opportunity in our lifetimes to pick whatever Whatever fucking level of the game you want. You want level one Mario Kart, bouncing around, win and everything? Go do it. If you want level 10 super hard, you might fail a lot, but you're going to work a shit ton, go do it. My whole point is that I do not think you should shame anybody for being here on this planet, producing and working and loving what they do. Because let me tell you what, you like your Tesla? You wouldn't have it if fucking Elon wasn't a psychopath out there working super hard every day.

And the same thing goes for most of the things that we take for granted. It's because some irrational human was so driven for the pursuit that they loved, that they labored on, that eventually led to things that you and I get to enjoy. So I'm here, a champion for those who love their labor all over the place. And if you don't love what you do, hey, do you. That makes it easier for me. I'm thrilled. Go fuck off somewhere else with a Mai Tai and spend more money in my company. No problem. But I think telling people that it's wrong to love what they do is crazy, especially in this environment where Where nobody is telling anybody anymore, you have to work 60, 70, 80 hour weeks. I mean, my company is remote almost entirely, and I think I've run remote companies for 10 plus years now. You don't have to be in office from seven to nine if you don't want to be. But if you want to be, go get it and don't feel bad about it. And if you want to work on the weekends, do it. And that doesn't mean that you're going to be on your deathbed wishing that you hadn't worked more.

No, that only happens if you're an accountant, you hate accounting. That's how I feel about that.

I also want to know how much you're working, though. Oh, yeah, sure.

A lot. God, it's such a cop-out. But these days, I think I'm probably working. I work seven days a week, not all day, every day. And I do it as much as I like for as long as I like to, unless there is something that is needed, at which point I'll do what is needed. Often the team will ask me, Cody, do you want to do this? Do you want to do that? And I'll push back and say, that's the wrong question. It's what priority level is this for the business and the mission that we're on? We have a mission to free one million humans financially. And if that thing that I don't want to do is needed, then I'll do it. If we have to film TikToks and Instagrams and podcasts for 10 hours, I've done worse. We're going to be fine. We went out and about. We could insert this clip if we wanted to, talking to construction workers in the heat in the middle of the day, Jack Hammery in the road. And when I think about, Man, it's hard to be me behind the computer in air conditioning, sipping on my coconut milk latte, I look at these guys and think, I'm probably fine.

I can keep going. And thank God, there are some humans like them. I also don't think that you should work until you burn out. I think you need to know your own balance. And so go get a workout in the middle of the day if you need to eat a little bit healthier, go for a run, hang out with some buds also. But yeah, I work a lot, maybe 60, 70, 8 hours.

If you were going to give advice to my generation, which is the I graduated college a few years ago, just started new jobs, stuff like that. What advice would you have around hours working? Because a lot of my friends, I feel like we complain about working really long. And I know people that have been in the workforce a lot longer than us, don't like hearing us complain. So what do you have to say?

Well, a couple of things. Your time should not be tied to your income as often as humanly possible. Nobody on any of my teams hears me say, You haven't worked X amount of hours this week. I think Tana can attest to that. Now, the flip side of it is the team works really hard, but they work really hard on the things we need them to do at the time that we need it done. And then if they need to go take a Friday off, they don't even ask me. They just tell us what's happening, and off they go. So find a job that aligns with your skillset, that the idea of management is not that you owe us your life for deciding to work here. I don't. I don't require that. Tanner has goals at the company. And If we hit those goals and are executing on them as much as possible, and he gets that done in five hours as opposed to 50, then fuck off for the other 45. And I think that's the way that work should be. We should not be trying to say that your time needs to be clocked in.

In Unless, of course, you're in a place where you have to work every single day. But then my goal would be, if I was you, that's just your level one game. Get to level two. Get to the level two where you have skills that don't necessitate being a bank teller for 15 years. Go from being the bank teller to to then eventually managing somebody's money to then having other people manage money underneath you. That's what minimum wage and those jobs are meant for. They're not meant to stay for you for your entire career. You're meant to climb the ladder from a skills perspective, and then you won't have to work so many hours unless you want to.

On the flip side, then, how do you feel about giving advice to people in leadership roles and giving their employees more autonomy towards their own time?

I worked at Goldman Sachs for two years during the financial crisis, and they were 60, 70, 8-hour weeks in the office, we didn't see the sun for a period. We were on phone calls and in Excel spreadsheets. Everybody was fine, but vitamin D deficient. And it was miserable. I actually remember very seriously looking at the clock, watching it count down, and ready to be getting out of there the second that I saw the boss or the manager leave because I had everything I needed to get done done, done. But I couldn't leave until the head guy left. And it was awful. I remember that so vividly. And to think that you would wait somewhere for your life to actually tick down just because you hate what you're doing so much is actually wild when you think about it, but I felt it. So I think what managers need to realize and leaders need to realize is there's a reason that Goldman Sachs, the average tenure is two and a half years. It's because nobody wants to take that bullshit forever. And so I do not think you have to run company companies where you are on top of people every single minute.

All you have to do is in line incentive with outcomes. And that's why Peter Drucker said, What gets measured gets managed. If instead they gave us goals and they said, Execute your goals at your will, we probably would stay at the company longer and we would get more accomplished. And given the cost of turnover for an employee is something like one year salary to one third of a year salary, depending on level, you should want to try to keep your employees more. And guess what? People work for you longer when they're happier, when they have more fun. And so how can you make sure that you get the right people in the right seats and stop making them trade their time for money? Because that only leads to misery. I think there also needs to be some roadmapping mapped for people. People on our team, very often we ask them, What is it that you want to do? Okay, the business requires this right now. You can't do that thing that you want to do right now. But if you figure out how to achieve this goal and then backfill yourself, let's move to the next layer of the game.

I mean, I think one of the people on our team, Christian, he's had three, four different roles at the company in the last two years because he excelled at it, moved himself out of the job, filled the role, went to the next level. And that's the type of company you should be looking for. And as a leader, that's what you should try to do with your people. You want to keep your good ones. Totally.

You explain, too, some people that did hustle early on. I think it's like, we should highlight that in this episode. I know in the show notes, you wrote out some of the founders here and some things they went through. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, let's Let's have a little story time. All right, I was looking up, Cody, are you crazy? And can you actually achieve massive success without a lot of work? And I'm like, I don't know. Let's look at a couple of billionaires. So I literally pulled the billionaire stories of the first five people I found. I did not cherry-pick any of these. That's why they're random. The first billionaire CEO story I found, David Friedberg, famous from All In pod, says that he worked nearly 24/7 for three years straight without earning any revenue in his company. He eventually got to a billion-dollar company. The founder of Forever 21 worked at a gas station, a coffee shop, and a cleaning company all at the same time to get started and get enough money for Forever 21. Larry Ellison of Oracle worked multiple odd jobs at the same time for eight years in order to start Oracle and become a billionaire. This one I thought was fascinating. Ray Ban founder. Worked in a factory for years where he lost his finger before finally getting up enough cash to start his own mold company and create Rayban. The truth is, I can almost always tell who is going to win or who is not going to win in companies that I work with, in companies I invest with and for the people who work for me.

I can almost always tell. There's this little magical something about them. And the first sign of it is that willingness to do more than the other people around them. It's just the easy button. You can't make yourself have a higher IQ, I don't think. You can't make yourself have more money magically. You can't make yourself have better opportunities. Some of that is just out of your control. But what you can certainly do is you can work harder than the next person, and you can take more pain than the next person. And if you do that longer than the other person does, your likelihood of success is just infinitely higher. And maybe this is just because I'm not smart enough to think about a better way to be more successful. But let me tell you what, go ask anybody who's worth millions or has achieved the life that you want to achieve and ask them if they did it without working really hard. And I think pretty quick, you'll get your answer. All right. I think that's a wrap. I got a deal for you. And the deal is we got something else for you this week.

We've got something free for you. So if you take a screenshot of you reviewing this podcast and subscribing, DM me on Instagram at Cody Sanchez. We're going to send you something worth more than 199 bucks, and we're going to give it to you for free.99, my favorite price. And then give us your feedback on if you like it. I'm going to hand out different goodies every single week for you guys doing me the solid of reviewing the podcast, sharing the podcast, because we want to grow this thing because I want more humans that are owners in this world. All right, that's the deal. You know that I got it, no need to look all in a bag. Something like this because I work so hard. I'm the best. I only speak facts. If I say that I have it, you know that I got it, no need to look all in a bag.