139 From Overworking To Influencer With 1.3M Followers

My next guest is Josh Terry. He is a Writer, content creator, and investor focused on learning theory, self-development, mental models, and bitcoin. We talked about: His path from 0 to 1.3M followers, Why Social Media is the fastest way to find your brand voice, Horizontal vs. Vertical method of learning, How to use arbitrary limitations to find your niche, How to cultivate disciplines of recovery for workaholics, Knowing what he knows today, what's the #1 thing he'd tell new creatives?

Transcript

My guest today is Josh Terry.

He has built an audience of 1.

2 million followers on TikTok in the last two years.

He's a writer,

He's a content creator,

He's an investor focusing on learning theory,

Self-development,

Mental model,

And Bitcoin.

I'm so excited to have you here with us,

Josh.

Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

All right,

So let's jump right into it.

I'm new on TikTok and I am a fan of you and I want to let you know this publicly.

You're the reason why I started creating on TikTok because when I saw you,

I said,

Oh my god,

This guy is very much of a kindred spirit,

Right?

He's a huge aficionado about mental models,

Learning,

Thinking long term,

The yin and the yang.

All right,

So if he can do this,

So can I.

So thank you so much for inspiring me for being on TikTok.

It's a pleasure.

I'm really happy to hear that.

That's wonderful news.

So let me ask you this.

I know tons of knowledge creators and they're looking at TikTok today as like,

Oh,

Okay,

Only kids are on TikTok still.

So someone who has invested two years into doing this,

What do you think makes it different than other platforms?

Let's start there.

Well,

One is I think the discovery algorithm from a technical perspective,

The discovery algorithm on TikTok is different.

It's seemingly a little bit more random in ADD,

But I think it's really just more matching to how humans work,

Which is we want to find whatever sparks our interest in the moment.

And TikTok seems to be really good at that.

And that birthed a bunch of new,

You know,

Short form things as every other platform started jumping on this.

And I think the result of that is a new form of expression and communication.

You know,

When blogs came out,

Initially it was an amazing opportunity.

Well,

First it was just hobbyist,

But then it was an amazing opportunity for people to,

You know,

Build businesses,

You know,

Different ways to gain wealth,

Things like that.

But then eventually it became oversaturated and a lot of people moved on at that point.

But one of my favorites,

Seth Godin,

Began making classes around blogging and he said,

It doesn't matter if you're going to get financial success with this thing,

It's going to make you into a better human.

And I thought that was amazing.

He doesn't teach blogs as a way to get necessarily financial success.

He teaches blogs as a way to understand your own thinking,

To clarify your own thoughts.

And one of the aspects of blogging is it's,

In a way,

It's very short form.

It's often short form to a length,

Not much longer than maybe one of my one minute TikToks.

I mean,

I post my TikToks as blogs now.

And the TikToks are another way,

I think,

To explore an idea in a short term way so that you can get more reps on exploring ideas.

So as a personal exploration,

I think it's phenomenal.

On top of that,

I mean,

If you look at just a Gary Vee model of marketing,

The standard Gary Vee model of marketing is go on the fastest growing platform and focus on that until it's not the fastest growing platform,

Then go somewhere else and use that methodology as a way to grow and TikToks the fastest growing platform.

So there's a logic to it from a marketing perspective as well.

But for me as a crazy artist,

I really like the fact that it gives me a chance to explore something in a way that if I want,

I can go farther.

And if I decide that this isn't a route that I want to explore,

I can just start a new topic.

It gives me immense freedom of subject material,

I've noticed.

And that's been a huge unlock for me because I'm a person who's interested in many subjects.

I appreciate that.

So there's a few different points.

I really appreciate the way you answer this question.

So first and foremost,

You said it's a self exploration platform for you,

First and foremost.

And then the second is more on the marketing side.

And then the third is,

What was it again?

All right,

It's a R&D lab for you to explore different interests that you have,

Because you're a polymath,

You have different interests and so forth.

I want to do a quick call out.

For me,

People ask me the same question,

Why are you on TikTok?

What's the point of doing this?

I would say,

Yes,

There is certainly a marketing aspect of it for sure.

But 80% of my primary intrinsic motivation is to self excavate.

Because I err on the side of thinking too much,

Not shipping enough.

And this to me,

As you said,

Is the first and the third point that you're making.

This is a way for me to synthesize my thoughts and ship and,

You know,

Productize or package.

What is my current thought of the moment?

And then at the end of the year,

I can look back and say,

Hey,

Here's a body of work.

If there's any questions that you may have on something,

I can now send them a video instead of having to answer that questions over and over again.

Yeah,

I think this is probably the primary benefit for me as well,

Is for people that are very exploratory,

Creative,

Very mental.

They typically,

I guess,

Maybe farther on the neurotic end of the spectrum,

High in creativity and openness,

These sorts of things.

They struggle often with the execution side.

They have amazing ideas,

They have amazing things that they could bring to the world.

I mean,

That's actually what they're wired for is to bring new things into the world.

That's their potential benefit to the world.

But they struggle to,

You know,

Connect that to the real world,

Because they're busy connecting the dots,

And they get one realization and they go,

Oh,

My gosh,

This is amazing.

Let me go on to the next one.

And you know,

You can't build a 40 year empire very easily,

If that's the only thing that you do.

And I think that TikTok is a really powerful tool for people like that.

Because it's not that creatives aren't good at execution.

They're phenomenal at execution.

It's not good.

I mean,

It's not true that people that are neurotic,

Indecisive,

Etc.

That want to,

You know,

Think about a topic deeply and then move on to the next topic.

It's not that they can't apply what they think.

It's that they usually don't have as much practice as most people,

Because they've had this strength of thought that they've leaned on throughout their lives.

So anything that you're really good at,

You consciously or unconsciously lean on it in some way.

So somebody that's extremely creative and thoughtful,

Has learned to get through life in a bunch of ways using that,

And then had a bunch of,

You know,

Costly dilemmas that have come as a result of it.

And the costly dilemmas is usually they're not good at bringing their ideas out in the world.

And the way to get through that is to give yourself reps on it.

It's really to just think of execution as a skill set.

And I think that TikTok for some people is a phenomenal way to practice execution.

It's a way to,

Because I'm going to refer back to Seth Godin.

There's something that Seth Godin talks a lot about,

Which is shipping it,

Right?

So the goal is to ship the product,

Ship it.

And you need practice doing so.

So what people often do is they'll think of an idea for a book and they'll start their authorship career by thinking of hundreds of ideas for books.

And they'll go,

Okay,

Now I'm good at ideas for books.

And then they'll think about like,

Okay,

Well,

Now I need to learn about,

You know,

Book structure.

Okay,

So I'm going to write hundreds of book structures.

And they'll try to go through this process with the idea that once they get to the end of this process,

They'll be really good at writing books and then they'll be able to ship a lot of books.

But the reality is sometimes you need to switch it from this,

Like thinking about getting really good at step one to actually considering all of the steps as step one.

So it's like,

I'm going to go from getting an idea for a book to writing a form for a book,

To writing the book,

To publishing the book,

To selling the book to my mom,

To selling the book to my brother,

To selling the book to my neighbor,

To selling the book to one person on Instagram.

And now you have a full view of the process.

And you might end up at that point that realizing that you hate writing books and then you can go do something else,

Which is,

You know,

A huge relief because otherwise you would have wasted decades of your life.

But also if you realize that you like it,

Now you go,

Okay,

That's the process.

Now if I do that again,

I can get better at that.

And this is a very practical way to think,

But very few of us naturally come to it.

We normally look at learning as something where we will come to it from a beginning set of fundamental reps that we'll work on,

Which will then give us permission to do the next set of reps.

And I think that TikTok gives us practice going from an idea to a completed published product faster so that we get a rep on an entire process of shipping something.

And then it allows us to learn this skill and then we can apply this skill of shipping it or execution to other things.

Dr.

Justin Marchegiani I love it.

Thank you for sharing that.

Actually reminds.

So what you're saying,

By the way,

My style is recap,

Then we can elaborate further.

Okay.

So what I'm hearing is,

Is it really important for those who are more cerebral to complete the entire cycle from,

From the ideation all the way to shipping?

He actually reminds me of something that David Perel shared.

He's the guy who has a program called write a passage and he distinguished a printer method versus a pixel method.

And let me explain what that is.

So printer method is when you print something is line by line by lines,

Perfect clarity,

Print,

Print,

Print,

Print,

Print,

Print,

Print versus a pixel method is,

Is really blurry in the beginning,

And it gets progressively more clear throughout.

And our school system teaches us there's a step by step process.

You get phase one,

Two,

Three,

Four,

Five,

Then it finally tada in the end,

It's complete,

It's perfect.

But in reality,

Especially in the creative process,

What I came to appreciate is really is more of a pixel method.

Now,

If you have the gift,

We get divine download,

Perfect first shot.

Congratulations to you.

That's awesome.

But at least for the rest of us,

My experience is more of the pixel method.

What do you think about that?

I think it's great.

So I want to break down real quick.

The good side of the line method,

Because if we understand the good side,

We can understand why we might not want to apply it in other places.

So the line method comes with an assumption that we know what the hell we want to make.

And if we just learn how to,

You know,

Do all of the steps to get us to that thing,

Then we will have what we want.

So this method of learning the complete version of something is really useful.

For example,

In learning an ancient skill set that's been passed down for generations and has been optimized.

So if you are learning martial arts,

It's really useful to have a teacher not put you in a fight the first day.

It's really useful to have a teacher set you down and teach you about your center of gravity and get you to just learn this process of balancing yourself,

Making yourself more stable.

And,

You know,

Maybe you would explore that for a week where,

You know,

The teacher just kind of pushes you on the shoulder and you fall over and you realize,

Oh,

My gosh,

If I would have shifted my foot this way a little bit,

You know,

I would have been more stable.

So that is a line by line process in the sense that you're not learning how to fight in studying martial arts that way at that moment.

You're learning just this stability factor,

Which will make you better in fights,

Right?

So the reason why that's useful is,

One,

It reduces risk,

Because,

You know,

If you dive into a fight when you're incapable,

You're much more likely to get injured.

But two is you have a teacher that knows exactly where you're going.

He's studied fighting his entire life,

And he knows that if you learn these center of gravity ideas,

Then you will have an awareness that you carry through all of your other training.

Yeah,

This is the Noble Warrior podcast.

So we use the dojo analogy quite a lot.

So I definitely appreciate the whole idea of going to the dojo,

Practicing,

And I also have a sense that I have a master pointing out to you that this works.

Yeah,

Okay.

So yeah,

Let's continue with that.

So if you're learning your skill set from a very skilled teacher,

You can go into it almost blindly with a bunch of faith in the teacher and actually learn faster,

Because he'll just feed it into you,

And you'll learn this one fundamental basic,

Then you'll learn a second basic,

And then you'll start stacking everything,

And you'll be very,

Very good.

But let's say you want to come up with a product that's never been created,

Or you want to invent something that's never been invented.

So if you want to invent something that's never been invented with about 99.

9% certainty,

We can be pretty certain that your first idea for how that thing is supposed to be is wrong.

It's terribly,

Terribly wrong.

So if you were,

Say,

Working on invention,

And you used this method of,

Okay,

So if I want to invent something okay,

So if I want to get to this new type of engine,

For example,

That I want to invent,

And I know exactly how that engine is going to be,

All right,

Now I'm going to use the best material to make this engine.

I'm going to study every element of this thing to make sure it's all good from the bottom up.

Then now you get to wait 5,

10,

15 years before you find out that you had a terrible idea.

So it really depends on what type of thing you're working on,

Which method you want to use,

Whether you want to use a vertical method,

Which would be the pixel method of trying to figure out all of the steps,

Try all the steps to learn about them,

Versus the horizontal method or the line method of trying to figure out the base level fundamentals and then the next step and the next step.

One last piece of this would be inside of back to the dojo analogy.

There's a point where you need to develop your own style inside of the dojo,

Inside of the martial arts.

There's a point where you need to build an original skill set.

The people in martial arts that studied this horizontal technique of here's the first fundamental,

Here's the second fundamental,

Those people get skilled way faster than other people and then they really struggle when it comes time to develop their own style,

Their own ability to improvise,

Their own way of moving.

Somebody who starts with that is then going to struggle with the fundamentals.

There's almost always a struggle between these two things and you almost always,

If you go far enough in a field,

Need to work on both of them.

But if you understand what the strengths and weaknesses of the two ways of thinking and learning are,

Then you can figure out when to apply them.

You can look at a situation and go,

Okay,

This is the thing where I just need to have blind faith in the fundamentals and I need to just learn that thing and slam it into my brain and into my physiology and then I'm done.

And then there's other things where you can spot it and you can be like,

Oh,

This is a moment where I need to improvise and I need to go through the whole process to see what it's like and then rep on that so that I understand that I was an imbecile and this first idea was terrible and I want to go through the 10th iteration to find the thing that's right for me.

What kind of musician are you,

By the way,

Just for my reference?

I went to college for classical violin performance and then I became a music teacher where I taught violin,

Piano,

Guitar,

Voice,

Music,

Composition,

Production.

That's awesome.

Okay,

Thanks for that.

I appreciate that we can use martial arts and music analogies and book learnings and,

You know,

Kind of mix them together.

That's great.

Let's go.

Circling back to your earlier point,

You said first point was self-excavation,

Right?

Self-exploration.

The second point is,

This is where,

You know,

Gary Vee,

This is where people's attention is going.

Let's go down that rabbit hole just a bit.

I really like how TikTok provides a lot of engagement and therefore gives you real-time data of how useful that piece of content is and from that then you can,

Well,

I mean,

I'm 40 days in,

Right?

So I can then navigate like,

Okay,

How do I say this to really deliver the kind of impact and and value that I want to create.

So can you say a little bit more about how TikTok is,

Because you are in other places too.

You're on YouTube,

You're on IG,

You're on Twitter.

I'm sure,

Oh,

Then you have your own blog,

Right?

So this is not the only place,

But you're most active on TikTok.

Can you say a little bit more about how TikTok generates that flywheel effect to help you find your voice,

Find the niche that you want to create value in?

Yeah,

And additionally TikTok drives my creativity on all the other platforms.

So TikTok is the thing that makes it more easy to do whatever else I'm going to do.

So I think the main part of what you're talking about is the feedback element,

Is that right?

Yes,

The feedback.

For me,

Why this is useful for me,

Because then it's,

I get rapid feedback.

Yeah,

I can do hundreds of experiments every day.

I can do a experiment every day,

And then I get feedback right away,

And that's useful for especially for someone like me doing these type of knowledge creation effort that I do.

Yeah,

I agree.

So it's really similar in the sense that it's a short form platform that also,

Because it's a short form platform,

All of the other interactions are sort of extrapolated out from that short form behavior.

So the comments,

The trends,

Just all of the different discussions,

They have an accelerated pace to them.

So you can have a trend go wild on TikTok in a couple of days.

You can have a viral comment on TikTok.

That's always like a serious win.

What's a viral comment?

What is that?

It's just a comment that gets to the top of the page from so many likes.

And it's so funny because it's usually not on your video.

It's not on anything maybe that you have a sense of relation to,

But you get a sense of pride when you're like,

Oh yeah,

I commented something and I worded it just right so that everybody liked it and it went to the top like a Reddit page,

If you will.

That feedback loop is all over the place on TikTok.

And I think it goes back to the idea of shipping it and getting reps where basically not only are you getting reps on your experience of creation,

But you're also getting reps on the social elements.

So I think that TikTok is in a lot of ways an accelerated learning tool because you can learn how people work,

How people think,

How people react to what you do faster here than everywhere else.

One thing,

When I talk to companies about TikTok,

I talk to companies about TikTok.

I tell them,

Look,

TikTok is the fastest way not to grow your brand.

I'm not talking about marketing here in the sense of like getting lots of people.

Sure,

You can do that on TikTok,

But TikTok is the fastest way to find your brand voice because you can get the more reps on it here than anywhere else.

You can get one of your employees to walk around some event and film 20 things with 20 different moods and you can start to figure out,

Okay,

How do I actually want to communicate?

And I think that's tremendously valuable.

I love it.

So.

.

.

I didn't mean to become a salesman for TikTok,

But hey,

They did.

No,

I mean,

We're using it as a proxy to discuss this because TikTok is here today.

It's just like IG was a little while ago.

It was just like Facebook a little while ago.

It's good for now,

But at some point the platform will evolve and it won't be as generous with organic traffic anymore.

And then we move on to another thing.

So to me,

As a knowledge creator,

As someone who is eager for impact and also income,

These are just ways for us to understand the mechanics so we can best advance our message,

Our story,

Our mission in the world.

So I'm merely using it as an example,

But I think TikTok is just a thing,

Right?

I'm personally agnostic to it.

It's just the tool of today.

Totally.

And I mean,

From a super meta perspective,

Because I can't help myself and that's what I do.

Hey,

You're speaking too.

Totally.

Yeah,

I get it.

Let's go.

These things that I talked about,

You know,

Why TikTok is good,

All of these things,

They're good because they help you.

So all of these things,

And I mean,

I've noticed this in my own work,

But I pointed this out to other people as well,

Is all of these things that are working for you on TikTok,

If that stuff works for you,

You can apply it in your own life,

Right?

So it's like the point isn't making short form on TikTok.

The point isn't making short form anywhere.

The point is realizing that,

Oh,

If you shorten the time to production on a thing,

You get more reps,

Which means you become more capable faster.

So all of these things that I laid out as being,

You know,

Positive traits,

I consider them positive traits because they're all things that if you apply them in your life,

They're useful.

I think they're incredibly useful.

So it's okay.

So let's talk about that.

Let's philosophize just a little bit.

What are some of the meta skills of short form content creation?

Let's talk about that.

Yeah.

Okay.

So number one is the reps thing.

And I already went into that.

So I won't drill too hard on that.

Another one.

Let's see.

It was just in my head.

What was it?

Completely lost my train of thought.

Well,

Maybe I could share mine and then see if that inspired some ideas on your side.

So in my mind,

We're in the age where attention span is getting less and less.

So the meta skills is how do I capture your attention,

Rise above the noise?

Because noise is everywhere.

How do I capture attention?

How do I write hooks that actually,

You know,

Oh,

This is different.

This is unique.

So that's the first thing.

And then the second thing is,

How do I retain your attention?

Because TikTok is the worst,

Right?

You got three seconds.

If it's not,

You're not relevant,

The next thing,

Right?

So how do I retain your attention?

Then it's about boys and intonation and engagement and storytelling,

All these other meta skills throughout.

And then eventually you,

You know,

Whatever.

So that's the first thing.

Then eventually you,

You know,

Whatever it is that you want to guide them towards.

So does that inspire any new thoughts as you,

As I'm speaking?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I,

I remembered the thing I was going to say,

And then I forgot.

Fantastic.

I remembered it.

I might have forgotten it.

What is it?

But no,

The,

The,

You know how that goes,

But the,

The,

The other element I think that I was thinking about was around,

Uh,

Your own personal voice and what gets you to create the thing that you want to create.

And I think a ton about this subject.

I think it's fascinating.

Um,

And one of the things that you do on TikTok is you,

You make a lot of stuff,

Which is those,

That reps feature.

But one of the elements of that is it puts a high demand to make a lot of stuff.

Well,

When you have a high man to make a lot of stuff,

You're going to make things differently.

And one of the things you're going to do is you're going to start leaning on your strengths out of necessity.

And I have a whole rant on,

On people not spotting their strengths,

Which is basically like we're,

We're biologically wired not to see our strengths because we're,

Uh,

Imitative creatures.

That's how we learn from childhood.

So we spend our entire lives looking at people around us,

Comparing ourselves to them.

And then we,

We,

Uh,

Use that information to,

To integrate new skillsets and,

And become capable of survival.

And that's good and absolutely necessary,

But also it makes us ignore everything that is unique to us because we assume that,

You know,

That's not necessarily going to make us capable of survival.

So we,

We spend most of our childhood taking out the wiring of looking at what we could actually bring to the world that's unique.

And when there is a high demand put on you,

And I believe this is why a lot of self-development like encourages pushing yourself.

When you put a high demand on yourself,

You actually have to fall into your personal slots of capability.

You have to fall into the pocket that works for you because you can't deliver,

You know,

20 times the number of products.

Then you're used to delivering,

Doing it a way that you're bad at.

You can only do that in a way that you're good at.

You can't create,

Uh,

I mean,

For a lot of content creators on TikTok,

They have to make a lot more content than most other places.

You can't have to make two or three times as much content and do it in a way that you're bad at it.

You actually have to use the tools that,

That you are more adept at.

And from that,

You then get to spot your strengths.

And I,

I think that is,

Is,

Is a phenomenal quality.

This is incredibly important and you can,

You can do this in creating short form content and you can do this in other ways.

This is part of the ethos of Silicon Valley startup companies where they,

They try to,

The,

The,

The goal of the MVP,

The minimum viable product,

You know,

Creating a product in a very short period of time and getting it to market so that you can see what the market wants.

The whole point of that is,

Is the idea of like,

You know,

Well,

You don't really know what you're going to make.

You don't really know what's going to succeed.

So let's just put something out to figure it out and then we'll move from there.

But additionally,

If you do that,

If you push like that,

You're going to have to do the things that you're most capable of because everything else has to go out the door.

So I think there's another,

That,

That as other aspect built in,

Which is if you move fast,

You,

You get to start spotting those things that you're really talented at that you might not ever be able to see otherwise.

Okay.

So how did you do that for yourself?

I'm kind of opening new loops as you're answering.

How did you identify your superpower in the two years time?

Was there a pivotal moment where you're like,

Oh,

People really like this thing that I do or this tone that I use or this character that I portray or this topic that I talk about?

Is there any pivotal moments in two years time that will have you go,

This is it.

Let me double down on that.

Yeah.

So it started far beyond that.

So it,

It,

It's almost like it started working two years ago.

Right.

Uh,

I I'd say I started to spot my strengths maybe five years ago.

Um,

It's probably been at least five years,

Maybe a little bit more that I started to really hone in and realize,

Okay,

This is,

This is what I can do.

And,

Uh,

That didn't result in me all of a sudden being,

You know,

Successful and things working for me.

I was actually a bit of a wreck at that,

That time of my life.

Um,

Because even if you discover things about yourself,

That doesn't mean you can do them.

So a lot of skill sets,

When we discover something new,

Our old skillset is so ingrained that we can't apply it.

So I realized for example,

That I'm super conceptual and this,

This applies differently in different fields.

But in,

In music,

One of the ways that it applies is an improvisation and composition.

And sure enough,

I had a really strong talent there,

But I spent years trying to be technically good and that became my whole world was,

Was trying to be technically good.

And I just,

I,

I became,

I came to terms,

I started to really understand what my skill sets were maybe five,

Six,

Seven years ago,

Something like that.

But I'd already done music for five,

Six,

Seven years the other way.

And I would try to apply these,

This new understanding of,

Hey,

Look,

You've got to let yourself be looser when you do this thing.

You,

You've got to be more improvisatory cause that's you.

I would try to apply it and I would fail miserably because I would,

I was so locked into the perfectionist mindset from all the old habits that I couldn't apply it.

Two years ago,

What I did was I,

I took a bunch of those discoveries that I'd made in other fields and I applied them to TikTok cause I had no ruts in the ground where I was just so stuck,

Uh,

With on a certain specific path that I couldn't get out.

It was,

It was a new thing for me.

So I came with all of the past experience with none of the past bad habits.

And,

And that's,

That's,

That's when things started taking off on TikTok was that.

Got it.

Okay.

Okay,

Great.

So what I'm hearing is also the ability to unlearn things,

Old patterns as well.

There's,

There's a hidden meta skill that one needs to also do as well.

Yeah.

So yes.

And also I didn't unlearn it.

Right.

Um,

I mean,

If I were to go back to music right now,

I would do much better.

Um,

But,

But I,

I didn't actually get to where I wanted to be in the thing that I was already working on.

I actually did it by changing gears so that I could,

I could learn it in a new,

In a new way.

And I think you can do this within a field,

But,

But,

But this idea I think is important where it's not just about taking an old habit,

Breaking it down,

Unlearning it and then,

And then using your new knowledge to apply it to the same thing.

Uh,

I think that's maybe one of the most difficult ways.

I think the,

The accelerant is,

Is,

Is giving yourself,

You know,

A new place to play with information supported by the old stuff.

And I,

What prompted,

What prompted you to jump into Tik TOK?

Cause you started the end of 2019,

If I recall correctly.

Yeah.

So I didn't want to do it at all.

I didn't want to do it at all.

Okay.

Uh,

A friend of mine convinced me,

Um,

And I,

I'd made content for like 10 years and nothing had worked.

And I,

I was kind of discouraged and just wasn't into it anymore.

And a friend of mine just over and over again said,

Man,

You've got to get on Tik TOK.

I know you can do something here.

Like,

I don't know what you'll do,

But I know that this is the right thing for you.

And,

Uh,

And,

Uh,

I finally said,

Okay.

And I,

You know,

Download the app at like 11 PM and texted them at,

You know,

2 AM going,

Oh my God.

You know,

You go,

You go down a rabbit hole the first time you get on Tik TOK,

You don't realize how addictive the thing is.

Um,

And so that,

That was what I initially did.

And then once I saw what a cool thing it was,

I started making content and it was the same terrible content I'd always made before.

Um,

Uh,

I,

I take,

You know,

Full,

Full responsibility for my,

My content failing in the past.

It wasn't good.

Okay.

Okay.

Hold on one second.

Thank you.

Yeah.

What would you say is that makes a difference between the earlier stuff that you did on Tik TOK to today?

Like what's the main difference?

Yeah.

It's very specific and it happened all at once.

Um,

So I,

I,

I started to make this the old,

Same old stuff and,

Uh,

I,

Uh,

But,

But it wasn't like ingrained habits because it was just old things that I'd been doing.

It's the same thing,

Just recorded in vertical format.

And,

Uh,

But throughout my life,

Um,

Is another story,

But throughout,

Throughout my life,

I'd been going through this process where I'd kept asking myself this question of what can you do?

Like just what's within your capability,

Not like stop trying to have this big old dream of the most amazing thing you could possibly do.

What's actually within your capability right now.

And what that started to do was make me give up on things that I was bad at.

And I had made a bunch of music content on Tik TOK and I was personally researching houses because I was thinking about getting into real estate investing.

And I,

Uh,

Saw something that I thought was interesting and I thought,

Huh,

Well I want to make a video about that.

And I try,

I tried to make thought content in the past of different things about my ideas.

It didn't take off because I would look at a camera and I was terrible at looking at a camera.

I would,

I would just lose my train of thought and I'd feel self-conscious and just all of these things.

And,

And,

You know,

The,

The self-development narrative says push through it and be better.

And it's like,

Ah,

Maybe,

Um,

I was terrible at it.

And like,

I struggled in inordinately large amount too much.

And I did that for a long time.

And when you struggle with something for years,

Like,

Do you really want to keep struggling at it?

Not necessarily.

So what I did was I gave up,

I went,

Well,

What if I don't look at the camera?

And,

Uh,

And then,

Uh,

I started to do,

To film it again.

And I was like,

I tried to memorize the thing I was going to say.

And I was like,

Oh man,

I've been trying for years to memorize things.

I'm terrible at memorizing things.

What if I read it off the monitor like a zombie?

And,

And there were like three or four other things like that.

Um,

And they were all me they were all me giving up.

They're all me going,

You know what?

I'm not the amazing,

Talented person that I think I am.

Let's just do the things that you're capable of.

And this,

This now,

This all sounds like a moment of like light bulb moment,

But in reality,

This is like five,

10 years in the making.

Right.

I've been working on this concept,

But I finally applied it here in content creation and it went viral instantly.

They really like it.

Do you know why they like it?

It was just unique and different.

No,

I don't think that's it at all.

No.

Um,

I,

I think,

I think it's,

Uh,

It's the thing that I can do.

Um,

And I think that's the case for almost all content that we like is it's a thing that somebody likes and they're capable of,

And maybe they're really good at,

And it's,

It's about that.

I,

You know,

Like,

Like,

Don't get me wrong.

Like,

Like there's,

There's many things to break down inside of that.

But,

But I think that we really remember how I said we're imitative creatures.

We have an instinct to look away from the simple fact that I did something that was in my wheelhouse and we have it and we,

What we want to do is we want to look at it and go,

Okay,

So what did he do?

Right.

You know,

And it's like,

You can break down these videos and find things that I do.

Right.

And sure.

I,

I,

I know stuff about story structure and I know stuff about how to word English so that it's interesting and,

You know,

So on and so forth.

But the reality was I did something that was,

You know,

I was capable of.

It was,

It was a thing that was,

You know,

In my wheelhouse and this is something I was,

I just had a conversation about this early today is I talk with people a lot about Mr.

Beast because I think a lot of people misunderstand Mr.

Beast.

People really like to break down Mr.

Beast and study him,

Like all of his analytics and,

And all of the things that he does that are so effective.

And it's like,

He's the guy that went on YouTube and counted to,

I don't know,

A million just verbally,

Just one,

Two,

Three,

Four.

And I think you can still find the video and it's,

I think it's got tons of views.

Like he's that guy.

And the fact is,

I think that he,

What the things that worked for him were the things that he was more capable of.

It was his strengths.

So he was the type of guy that was willing to say,

I give up,

I've tried this for a long time.

I'm going to count to a million or whatever number.

Let's see what happens.

And I mean,

You can see the video.

It's hilarious.

He's one,

Two,

Three,

Five,

11,

Just on and on and on and runs on for hours.

And,

And then that level of willingness enables you to,

To try enough things,

To find something you're good at.

And we look at it and we think,

Oh,

He tried these things until he found a thing that worked and that was the right thing to do.

And therefore we should all do that.

And it's like,

Sort of,

Sort of the things that worked,

We can learn from,

There are skill sets within with what Mr.

Beast does,

But also the thing that worked,

It worked in that case,

Not just because it was the right thing.

It was because it was Mr.

Beast's thing.

It was him being able to fall into his pocket.

He's good at what he does.

I would be a terrible Mr.

Beast.

Yeah.

So on noble warriors,

Since we talk a lot on purpose and legacy and,

You know,

This has a little bit of a spiritual flavor a lot at the time when we talk about like,

Darmic path and this type of thing.

Cause I don't know what your spiritual beliefs are.

But the whole idea of it is we're all here.

We all have something unique to bring to the table,

Whether it's DNA,

You know,

Parenting,

Education,

Perspective,

Experience,

Just we are,

What is it that Jeff Spencer said?

There's only one of you in all of eternity,

Not ever in the past,

Not ever in the future.

Therefore bring forth what's unique in you.

And so that's why I want to double click on this very point that you talked about because even for seasoned knowledge creators,

They have a huge platform elsewhere,

New York Times best seller,

This and that,

You know,

Successful entrepreneurs.

But when they look at a new platform,

Like a TikTok or a new art,

You know,

Framework,

You know,

Three minutes only,

How do you convey your soul signature,

Your soul expression?

To me,

If we can do more and more of that,

That's the unique genius,

The unique expression.

And that's to me is the X factor.

So hence why I'm double click on,

Double clicking on not the thing that you did,

But how you discover your X factor,

So to speak.

Yeah,

There's a bunch of different elements to it.

You know,

Part of it is just what you're interested in.

A really underrated concept,

I think is what you desire.

I think that's not tapped into enough.

I think a lot about this in the terms of a balance of order and chaos.

So when you're trying to figure out the things that you want to make,

There are often orderly and chaotic elements that you have to sort out.

And it often leads you to the thing you want to make.

And what I mean by that is,

For example,

Somebody that's like,

Trying to find their niche or their brand,

That their brand voice,

That kind of a thing.

They tend to,

You know,

They tend to,

You know,

They tend to,

You know,

They tend to find what's in quotes,

Right.

They try to,

You know,

Go in and try a bunch of individual things.

But they're not looking at themselves as a creative individual.

They're just looking outward at all of these things of let's test this,

Let's test that,

Let's test that.

When in reality,

It's like we need to test you.

So if you are creating,

Let's take me,

For example,

I have the same camera angle most of the time.

Okay,

So if I change camera angles,

What happens to my brain?

Oh,

Well,

I now have infinite options.

And I'm super slow.

I if you give me a camera where I can put it anywhere,

I will create much more slowly because I'll be indecisive about where to put the camera.

So it's a way to make sure that you're not looking at yourself.

It's about where to put the camera.

So it's a waste of time for me to do that.

So I lock that thing into a piece of order where it's like,

Okay,

That's a piece of order that keeps me safe.

And if people are wondering about order and chaos,

The easiest way I lay it out is a garden can't grow without a fence and a fence has no point without a garden and a fence is order and the garden is chaos.

So there's these creative elements that you want to explore and create and just find all of the new things that could be.

But at the same time,

You can't do that infinitely.

You can't do that in every way or it'll overload you.

So the analogy of a garden and a fence makes a lot of sense.

So that's why people say tell you to niche down is they tell you to,

You know,

Put bumpers on it so that you can explore inside.

So I'm not sure if I'm drifting.

Am I drifting away from your original question here?

That's okay.

On this podcast,

We drift a lot.

We open rabbit holes.

Sometimes we go into them.

Sometimes we don't.

And people complain.

People don't complain.

It's okay.

It's part of the unique flavor of normal warrior.

It's all good.

So actually,

Let me double click on sort of the metaphor on this podcast.

We do talk about the creative energies,

Kind of like water,

Right?

And the water you need to have rivers and river banks.

The banks are your bumpers.

How can you channel this creative surge that you have within you to generate energy or what it is that you want to do,

Right?

So you can create a dam or you can create this other thing or whatever it is that you want.

So I really appreciate you talk about not only the creative,

But also the structure,

Bumpers around it.

Yeah.

I think you were originally kind of asking around how can skilled creators that already have done a lot of this stuff find their voice in a new medium?

Was that kind of where you were going with it?

Basically,

Yeah.

How did you,

In the two years time,

Find your X factor?

Because 1 million,

1.

2 is not an accident.

People don't just all of a sudden,

You know,

And it is a slow burn.

You didn't do it in 30 days,

Right?

You didn't do it in one viral thing.

You were really,

Really consistent at your craft for two years.

So I was wondering not the exact thing that you did,

But how did you find that X factor?

Yeah,

I did work hard.

Thank you.

So I overproduced on set inside of set limitations.

And what I mean by that is I created this set of orderly things,

Right?

A camera that was in place.

I read off of things like a zombie,

You know?

I used notepad,

For crying out loud,

For about half of this process.

I didn't even graduate to Google Sheets for quite a while.

And what I did was I had these things locked in place that I didn't care about so much.

And then I gave myself immense freedom everywhere else.

So me,

The creative,

My first video that goes viral on TikTok is a real estate video.

You might relate to this quickly,

But a lot of people,

This might sound very strange.

But my first thought was not happiness.

My first thought was terror of,

Oh,

My God,

Am I a real estate creator now?

Is that all I'm going to do forever for the rest of my life?

Typecasting.

Yeah,

Typecast forever.

Yeah.

So I had to test my boundaries,

Right?

I did that and I made some more real estate stuff,

Of course.

And then I made something about the stock market.

And that took off and I was like,

Oh,

God,

Okay.

Oh,

No.

Am I a financial TikToker?

Is that,

Is that,

Is that do I,

Am I just a fintech?

Is that,

Is that all I do?

Oh,

No.

And then I made something about psychology.

And that was the point where I started to loosen up a little bit and I started to realize like,

Okay,

No,

No,

No,

This I can explore here.

I have some freedom.

So I had to give myself freedom.

So I gave myself restrictions in places that I didn't care about.

Camera angle,

Performance of,

Of,

You know,

What I looked like on,

On video,

Things like that.

I just solidify,

Stopped thinking about it.

And then I explored in the places that I wanted to.

And Jack Conte,

The CEO of Patreon,

I believe it is,

Has a phenomenal video about this on YouTube somewhere.

Before Patreon,

He was a musician in a band called Pomplamoose.

And he describes this as there,

We have boxes of things that we care about and boxes of things that we don't care about.

And we can move really far in life if we solidify the boxes of things that we don't care about and then optimize the boxes that we do care about.

So when he was a musician on YouTube,

He really struggled.

He,

He,

He and,

And,

And,

And his partner and Pomplamoose,

They,

They,

They were not successful.

They were not doing well.

And one day he sat down and he was like,

What do I care about?

What do I not?

And he's like,

Okay,

I care about harmonies.

I care about melodies,

Rhythm.

I don't really care about form so much.

I don't care about,

I don't care about what song I'm playing.

Oddly enough,

He realized.

And he,

He had been writing original songs and producing those and he realized he actually didn't really care what song he was performing.

He cared about how the song sounded,

The timbres,

The,

The,

The thing inside of the song was what he cared about.

So he covered Britney Spears and he became one of the first successful YouTube cover bands.

Hmm.

That's a great story.

Huh?

They became huge.

That's a really great story.

Huh?

Yeah.

They became wildly successful.

So wildly successful that it was worthwhile for him to start a company called Patreon.

Like,

Like it was a direct extrapolation from Pomplamoose was he,

He had trouble monetizing Pomplamoose and he did use Patreon to do it.

He made Patreon out of that.

And what he did was he realized he didn't care about what songs.

So as a result,

He would go with the most orderly mainstream thing.

So it was the default mode,

Right?

Oh,

Britney Spears is popular.

I'll cover Britney Spears.

Solid.

And for somebody that's super artsy,

This on the surface sounds terrible.

It sounds like,

Oh my God,

I'm never going to cover Britney Spears.

That's not my thing.

It's like,

Cool.

That's fine.

Do you care what brand of guitar you use?

Do you care what the timbre of your guitar is?

Cause there's some original songwriters that care so much about the lyrics and they care so much about the instrumentation.

They do not care which guitar they use.

They just don't.

There's,

There's something,

There's something that you don't care about or something that you're really bad at that you wish you could just let go of.

And those are the things that you want to submit.

You want to cement them in the mainstream dialogue that everybody else does and it works and you don't have to worry about it.

You know,

It's,

It's,

It's like,

You don't want to,

When you build a building,

You don't want to build it from scratch.

Generally speaking,

Generally speaking,

You want to use a bunch of past knowledge and engineering to do it.

And,

And so when you go to make your own creation,

You want to figure out these things that you really care about and then just let the rest of it go.

And I think this applies to any of the bigger creators out there is,

Is just,

Just take,

Take the thing,

The part that you care the most about in what you've done before,

Maybe even that part that,

You know,

Like was your,

Your baby and just plunk that into your new creative endeavor,

But leave the rest up to just whatever works.

No.

Okay.

So let's double click on that.

I,

I see a few creators watching,

Um,

Our conversation right now.

So let's unpack what you just said.

I think this is worthwhile.

So double,

So reinforce your non-negotiables,

Reinforce the thing that's,

That's,

That's so important for you.

That's,

You know,

If you were to sell out on that,

You'd be selling out your soul,

But you know,

Also be really cognizant about a lot of other things that you don't care about.

So regarding,

Let's say knowledge creation,

Content creation,

There's topics,

Structures,

Camera angles,

Right?

Style,

Voice,

Tonality.

Let's just kind of help them out.

Like think about some other things.

Are there other things that we can help them think about?

Yeah.

So I,

I break it into these two chunks is I think of it as stylistic limitations and logistical limitations.

And I think a lot of people don't think about it this way.

And what I would call stylistic is genre,

Tone,

Feel,

Subject matter,

Mood,

Those sorts of concepts.

Sometimes color would be in there.

Color is one that could work in either one.

All of these could,

They're,

They're just concepts.

But,

But these,

These sort of,

Uh,

You know,

Mood genre ask things stylistic.

That's one type of limitation.

So you could be a person that says,

You know what?

I want to only make pop music,

But then there's a lot of musicians that are like,

Oh my God,

I could never just make pop music.

I want to make country.

I want to make blues.

I want to make rap.

I want to make jazz.

Okay.

So you get to use logistical limitations.

How long is the content you create?

What instrument are you using?

Where are you located?

Uh,

Like,

You know,

How long do you have to build the thing?

All sorts of things.

And what I found is a lot of people give advice around stylistic limitations because that works for the majority of society.

The majority of society,

Uh,

Psychology wise are on the less creative end of the spectrum.

They're more on the practical end of the spectrum.

The creative mindset is a minority mindset.

So this advice of niche down by locking in on you're a country artist,

That works so well for somebody that is less on the creative end of the spectrum for somebody that's farther on the creative end of the spectrum that is torturous.

It's it,

It feels,

It makes them actually feel useless because their real offering is basically new styles,

New ideas,

New moods,

New genres.

That's actually what they have to offer the world.

So they often feel useless when they niche down that way.

But there are so many creative people that you can give them a roll of duct tape,

A banana,

Three toothpicks,

A couple of bricks and a log and some matches and tell them,

Make something.

And they'll be like,

I'm on it.

I got this.

Okay.

So,

All right,

Let's shift gear a little bit.

So now that you have a sizable audience,

What's the vision?

What do you plan to do with it?

I know that you're really solid,

You know,

Honing on Bitcoin.

So you're doing projects in the infrastructure side of things.

Is that your infinite game?

And if so,

How do you tie this to what you're doing here on media?

So.

Yeah,

So I think Bitcoin is a solid and infinite game.

I think that's that's one of them.

I really care about what's going on there.

I honestly believe that there's elements of Bitcoin that can help the world.

It's a phenomenal thing.

So,

Yeah,

I'm working on a Bitcoin mining project there.

Bitvolt is what it's called.

So that's something we're trying to sort out.

And I'm really excited about that.

And then on the other side,

Sort of more on the personal development side,

I'm going to be publishing a book.

Oh,

Would you like to be the first podcast where I tell the title?

Let's do it.

I think that would be today.

Yes.

Today's the day.

Here's the title of the book would be Pull Back to Push Harder,

The Competitive Edge of Strategic Rest.

And it looks at a lot of self-development stuff through the lens of order and chaos.

So this idea of like putting boundaries on things in order to perform better,

Putting boundaries on things in order to enable better chaos,

If you will.

So,

Yeah,

It's in the finance world.

Bitcoin is what I'm super excited about in the self-development world.

I'm really interested in these ideas of,

You know,

Establishing order,

Balancing order and chaos,

Learning to become dangerous.

Those are two of the main spots.

And then also I'm building out a creativity workshop that I'll be launching again pretty soon.

Yeah.

How does all three,

What is the common denominator?

I mean,

Obviously you,

The human being is the common denominator,

But what's the thematic common denominator between Bitcoin,

Creativity workshop and helping people finding strategic rest?

Honestly,

How do you tie them together?

Ordering chaos,

Honestly.

Ordering chaos.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'm really fascinated by this and I'd like to write some articles about it down the road.

So let's see,

Where do I start?

So creativity,

We actually talked a lot about my theories of creativity in this.

So creativity is a very important part of my this conversation around,

You know,

Content creation,

Which is,

You want to learn how to establish limits,

But you want to learn how to do it in a way that enables you,

Not that feels constricting,

Right?

So the way a lot of people niche down,

They struggle with it,

But there's ways to niche down that actually feel empowering,

Right?

So my overall philosophy there is benevolent order enables positive chaos.

So when you're establishing order with the right intention and in the right place,

It makes things better,

Right?

If you think about the garden and the fence again,

You know,

The fence isn't there to make the garden feel constricted.

It's there to make the garden feel safe and abundant,

Like it can play and grow,

Right?

And I believe that is a phenomenal way to approach creativity.

Inside of,

Let's flip it to technology,

Inside of Bitcoin,

Bitcoin is,

I think,

A fascinating extrapolation of this because Bitcoin,

For one,

Is a very orderly,

Dumb technology.

It's something that does a couple of things really well constantly,

And it just keeps doing them.

But the way it does it is by harnessing chaos.

The fundamental aspect of a Bitcoin miner finding a block and being able to update the Bitcoin blockchain to maintain that network is the computer that finds the answer to a random problem,

Or finds the random answer to a problem,

Is the computer that wins.

So everybody's looking for a random number,

And that's the most chaotic thing possible,

Right?

So there's a math problem that we have to solve,

And the only way you can solve is by trying random numbers.

This is the most stupidly chaotic thing imaginable.

But when you place that in a bunch of computers all around the world,

It creates a system where nobody has an unfair advantage,

And that enables,

Then,

An economic order,

Right?

So there's an order in chaos within the Bitcoin network of how that plays out,

Right?

You use these random chaos numbers to create an orderly network,

And then that orderly network,

Well,

What that does is we have this economic system where we will never have more than 21 million Bitcoin.

How the network operates is super predictable.

You can't go back on a transaction.

You can't change any of it.

All of these things are a bunch of orderly structures that humans now get to look at and react to.

So societies you could think of as chaotic structures.

They're the innovators.

Societies come up with interesting,

Fascinating things.

They explore,

But they need structures to do it off of.

So this is why,

In times of,

You know,

Really good rulers and really good laws,

Societies developed,

And operated really well.

But in times of unpredictable rulers and unpredictable laws,

Societies done really poorly is because those rulers and laws are structures that enable all of the innovation and exploration.

So to me,

Bitcoin is an economic manifestation of order that enables economies to play in a more predictable environment,

Which makes them,

I believe,

Able to go farther,

Them able to experiment and innovate farther than they would in any other way.

You know,

Actually,

Let's put a pin on that just for a moment.

I will follow that with that question,

But I'm curious to know,

When you write that book,

The Strategic Rest,

How do you deal with your own burnout?

And one of the things that we hear people say a lot,

We teach what we need most.

How do you deal with the tension between teaching someone something,

But also dealing with your own,

You know,

Anxiety and nervousness as well,

Right,

Internally?

How do you deal with that as a teacher,

As a public teacher?

Yeah,

My editor made a post recently about working with some personal development guy about how to kick alcoholism.

And it was almost done with the book.

And then he was like,

Man,

I can't contact this guy.

And it turns out like the guy went on a bender.

And I couldn't help but laugh at that as I thought about how tired I got writing this book.

And one,

We all go through phases and cycles,

Right?

So there are times when it's appropriate to push yourself.

Two,

I was a workaholic when I was 20.

That's just an element of who I am.

And these are the lessons I learned to get me remotely functional.

And by remotely functional,

I mean,

That's really good,

You know?

And I think that's you know,

For somebody to get somewhat functional is awesome,

Right?

So I feel like I got myself to a place where I'm performing,

You know,

At a level that's beyond what I've ever performed at before.

I'm very happy with that,

You know,

Like that's something,

You know?

And there's many ways I could learn to perform better.

There's many things that I still struggle at.

But as I wrote this book,

It was fascinating because I felt like it was reinforcing everything in the book.

So I would start to write the book.

And then I get to a point where I'd made some good progress,

And I'd get excited,

And I'd try to write more,

More than I should in a day.

And then the next day,

I'd be so tired and so sluggish.

And I'd be like,

Man,

I was just writing about how you have to like limit your enthusiasm on something in order to maintain.

You're in your personal development accelerator as you're writing the book.

Yeah,

Yeah.

And it really kind of validated everything because I mean,

Yeah,

Sure,

I got tired occasionally.

But in reality,

I wouldn't have been able to write that book if I wouldn't have learned the lessons in the book.

The lessons made me the type of person who could write a book.

And that I'm very happy with.

But yeah,

I had to really be present to the things that I was talking about as I wrote the book.

Because I mean,

I'm guessing you relate to this.

Another thing of people that are interested in these ideas,

They often want to share them with other people.

They often have a really strong desire to share these things and to be able to share these things and teach and help others.

And that can flatten you.

Say more about that.

What does that mean for you?

When you have a really strong desire to help others,

That can easily destroy you by you just going all out,

Forgetting about who you are,

Forgetting about whether it matters to take care of yourself,

And just putting all of your concentration on the people around you.

And one way of doing that is with a book,

Right?

So I thought,

Man,

If I can write this book well,

It could help some people.

And that matters.

That matters to me.

And so as a result,

It's very tempting to put everything all at once into the book.

And the reality is that won't get you a good book.

Doing it that way won't get you the product that you want,

And it won't give people the help that they want.

And so that's a really interesting point.

Why did you say that?

Well,

It's like killing the golden goose,

Right?

So any time you're helping other people,

You are taking something from within yourself and you're giving it to them.

And so if you use the analogy of the golden goose,

Let's see you,

I mean,

This might get weird,

But I mean,

You give them a medicine that makes them lay too many eggs for that goose to function.

Well,

Now the goose is going to die,

Right?

So everyone has an amount,

A pace that they can work at.

And that pace can be developed and accelerated and strengthened,

So on and so forth.

But everyone has a pace that for that time in their life,

They need to understand and work at.

And if they go over it,

They'll just drain themselves and perform worse.

So a big aspect of what I've been talking about is how,

If you are super desirous of helping others,

You're super ambitious to push your thoughts out in the world and just however you want to help,

However you want to be better.

And it might not be helping.

It might be competition,

Whatever it is.

If you have this strong desire to push forwards and accomplish it on a powerful level,

If you don't limit it in some ways,

You'll get a worse result.

So if you can pull back and say,

You know what,

This is how much you're going to do today.

And no,

You're not a weakling because you did,

Didn't go farther.

You're actually strong because your instinct is to push harder.

You held yourself back.

If you hold yourself back like that,

Then what that does is it fills you with energy and it fills you with a type of tension that makes you want to spring forward again.

Right?

So people that are really excited to go act out in the world,

The people that want are ambitious,

Ambitious,

For example,

Sitting on the beach doesn't really relax them.

It makes them almost jittery,

Right?

Whereas it's like,

All right,

Here we go.

I want to,

I want to go do this thing.

And that's good.

Right now,

On one hand,

You need to learn to relax a little bit,

But on another,

If you have these things that you want to do in the world and you can pull back and sit on the beach for a little bit,

Where you pull back and say,

No,

All right,

This is the limit.

This is the limit of how much I'm going to do.

Then you're going to build up this energy that makes you excited to take the next step.

And over and over again,

I see creators and passionate people and ambitious people who have such ginormous dreams,

Chase after them and get less and less enthusiastic over time because they're trying as hard as they possibly can.

And every step,

Their lightsaber is a little bit heavier.

Every step,

They're just a little bit more drained.

But if instead you recognize your dreams,

You recognize your passions and you say,

Okay,

I see you,

I see what you want to do.

Now,

What's a small,

Tiny thing you could do that would make yourself better,

That would make yourself into the type of person who could do that thing.

And you go do that and then your brain says,

Oh,

But I could take these other five steps to get towards that thing.

And you go,

No,

You already tired yourself out.

Stop.

It's like over-training in the gym.

Stop.

Take a break,

Pull back,

Wait,

Recover,

Learn from the experience and then you go,

Oh,

Now I'm really excited to do the next step.

And maintaining that energy,

That excitement,

The hope and particularly the desire to move forward.

I think that's one of the fundamentals of success.

I like that.

This is counterintuitive to what everyone else is saying,

Right?

Hustle.

David Goggin,

Right?

Definitely go out and tame your inner bitch.

This is the opposite of his advice,

Right?

Yeah.

So I actually really like David Goggins.

He's hilarious.

He's a special human,

For sure.

Yeah.

So I consider his philosophies to be the flip side of the coin to this.

Or this is the flip side of the coin to David Goggins.

So earlier I was talking about stylistic versus logistical limitations.

And I said that,

You know,

Creatives tend to prefer one type of limitation and then people that are on a more practical end of the spectrum tend to like other types of limitations.

Advice is contextual and based on psychology,

Right?

There's things that help some people and things that help others.

And so I think there's a very large portion of society that really needs David Goggins' message right now.

And it's the best thing they could possibly hear.

And I think there's another subset of society that can hear that message and destroy themselves by following it.

Just absolutely wreck their lives because they're the people that already want to push.

They're already pushing as hard as they can and they've been doing it since they were born.

And what they need to do is stop.

So I love David Goggins,

Actually.

And if I were to have followed his advice,

It probably would have destroyed me because I was already wired to do that type of thing.

That I had that desire to push.

I didn't have things that were telling me to hold back.

I had things that were telling me to push forward.

So I think it's incredibly valuable advice,

But I think it depends on the person.

And,

You know,

Maybe a larger segment need David Goggins than mine.

It might be a 60-40 type of thing.

I'm not sure,

Really.

I don't know.

But I do firmly believe that there's two types of psychologies here,

At least.

Where some people really need a message of,

Hey,

Take everything you have and put it into this one point of focus and drive so hard that your mind silences and you can actually see the world for what it is.

And from what I understand,

That is where David Goggins is coming from.

Take everything you have and put it into this one thing and push so hard that it silences the inner bitch.

And I think for another subset,

I think that's what they're already doing.

And they're doing it in a very undisciplined banner because it's probably the part of them that's praised because they've probably been getting things done most of their lives.

I was a good student.

I was an overachiever in a lot of things.

And it was how I would get validation.

It's probably the parts that praised.

But at the same time,

They're doing it in an overkill fashion in a bunch of scattered ways.

And it's ruining them because they're just flattening themselves energetically every single day.

And these are the people that have to set limits and say,

I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to do this other thing.

I'm not going to go to level 12 when I was at level 9.

I'm actually going to go backwards.

I'm going to work on level 6 and level 7.

And I'm going to play with it.

I'm going to learn how to actually smile for once and enjoy it.

Ironic,

Me the guy that doesn't smile on TikTok.

I know.

But if we learn how to play and enjoy with a thing that we already are familiar with,

I think that is another way forward that a lot of these hyperambitious people are not understanding.

And I think that's something that these people are not understanding.

Yeah.

As you're speaking,

A visual comes to mind.

So on Noble Warrior,

We talk about the yin yang sign a lot.

Right?

But those who are typically inactive,

They don't take action,

They think too much,

Or they get lazy or complacent,

Whatever.

David Goggins' advice is great.

Get your two actions so that you can get going,

Get real data.

But those who are driving a lot and they're losing themselves due to burnout and they're burning their health and burning their relationships,

That also that's not working too.

Then for those people,

Your advice is strategic rest.

It's phenomenal.

In my mind,

What I'm hearing is find the middle ground,

Right?

The middle way to find that inner harmony between the two,

Whatever that works for you.

And the only person that can have an answer is not Josh Terry or C.

K.

Lin or David Goggins.

The only person who can know the difference is oneself.

Find the discernment between the two.

You find that middle point where you do have that harmony.

You also mentioned this,

You find that excitement again,

That aliveness again.

Then you go.

Otherwise,

Something is off,

Harmony,

And you need to take some action somewhere.

Is that an accurate recap of what you just described?

Yes.

Yes.

When I got out of college with a bachelor's degree in music and almost straight A's,

I got a job doing manual labor where I stared at a white wall every break and it was a relief.

Because I was so overworked and overwhelmed from how hard I had pushed that I had nothing left.

That didn't make me a better musician.

It didn't make me a better musician to push that hard because you can't push that hard constantly,

Right?

You can't.

If you look at the people that praise pushing hard,

You'll see that they value pushing hard because it enables them to sleep well at night.

I wasn't the type of person that would sleep well at night.

I wanted to work till 3 a.

M.

I was annoyed that I had to get to bed.

Then I would go to bed and I'd wake up in pain because my mind was pretty much in a good mood.

Because my mind was probably obsessing about the creative things I wanted to do while I was asleep.

And I'd wake up and immediately go again.

And it didn't make me better because it was an addiction.

I was chasing it.

I wanted to be good so bad that I was willing to let go of my entire existence to be good.

But that doesn't make any sense because the person that needs to be good is you,

Right?

If you want a skill set,

It's not like you're sacrificing yourself for the skill set.

That doesn't work because you're the person that's got to have the skill set.

Okay,

So on that note,

Since that's circling back to your book,

What you just said,

The overachievers,

The people who are at the brink of burning out,

They probably know that they need to rest logically.

What would you say to that person so that they interrupt their normal behavior,

Their addiction to get the rest they need?

Or the other way around,

The people who is normally complacent.

They intellectually know they need to get their ass off the couch,

Stop watching Netflix,

Listen to David Goggins,

Yet they don't.

What would you tell them to interrupt?

You have to address your reward systems.

So if you're a person who is just pushing on every avenue that he can and you're just addicted to pushing and you're overworking everywhere,

Your reward systems are firing in such a way that you believe that you are a good person if you do that.

Some part of you,

Some part of you thinks that you're more likely to survive.

Some part of you thinks that it's the only way to be loved.

It's the only way to be successful.

Whatever it is,

There's something.

There's something there that makes you think this is the way.

And if you stop,

You will feel immense guilt and shame.

You will feel like a bad person.

You will feel like a sinner to sit down and take a break.

You will feel like a sinner to take a bubble bath.

Because it means you failed according to your mental wiring.

And it sounds nice to say,

Oh,

Well,

You need to flip that and figure out that,

You know,

Oh,

That's not the way it is.

And you need to teach yourself how wonderful it is to take a rest.

And that's not realistic.

It's very,

Very hard to change your wiring.

What you have to do is you have to learn to sit with guilt.

You have to realize that you're going to sit down in a bathtub and take a rest.

And you're going to feel horrible.

You're going to feel like you're a terrible person for sitting in that tub and taking a break.

And you're going to feel terrible.

You're going to feel like you're a terrible person for sitting in that tub and taking a break.

And that's your job.

That's your job is to endure that emotion.

And the reason why you got to do it that way is because you're an ambitious person that has spent your life learning to be wired to overcome horrible things.

And guess what?

The emotions that come up when you rest are horrible.

So now it's your job to endure them.

Well,

Now your wiring is rigged so that sitting with that guilt is a triumph.

Learning to sit there and experience whatever comes up when you say,

You know what,

It's time to take a break.

And immediately your brain kicks back with,

Oh,

Yeah,

You're a total wimp,

Obviously.

You could do like at least three more hours and you say,

No,

It's time to take a break.

When you listen to yourself and you go take a break,

You don't magically suddenly feel like you're not weak anymore.

You feel like you're weak.

But if you know that you're going to feel that way,

If you know it's coming,

Then you can decide this is my task is to deal with this is to deal with this emotion that's going to come up.

And that when that's done,

It's a triumph.

And you can feel that and you can learn that and you can realize,

Oh,

This is my job to this is my job to be like a Viking the night before battle and to sit in this bubble bath and prepare.

This is my job is to rest.

I like it.

This is my interpretation of what you just said is to treat yourself like a professional athlete would do.

Professional athletes exercise the body,

Knowledge creators exercise their mind.

A huge part of being a professional is not just push,

Push,

Push,

Push,

Push on the field,

A huge part of being a professional athlete's recovery.

So to be able to do that,

To only push and not recover,

It reduces the lifetime value of a career.

It's the same thing when it comes to a knowledge creator.

So if you want to truly optimize your throughput as a professional,

Intellectual,

Professional knowledge worker,

Whatever you call yourself,

Is it really important to have covered the entire loop rather than just I'm only productive when I'm exerting myself.

That's not true.

That's kind of what I'm hearing as you're speaking.

Correct.

One other way to look at it is to go after a thing that you want without limits is what a child does.

A child says,

I want it.

And we often fool ourselves into thinking that we're accomplishing great things because we're trying really hard.

We're working really hard.

And we've been told that it's noble and good to work hard.

But the thing is,

Is you're working hard,

Just all in service to this thing that you want,

That you're chasing after.

And that's what children do.

People that are responsible for their family and the ones that they love,

They tell them to go to bed.

And I think that's the difference is it's basically to parent yourself,

To be the adult that says,

All right,

Yeah,

You've got these ambitions,

But also you got to pay your toll bill.

You got to go and eat a decent meal and you need to go to bed,

Take a break,

And then go have some fun.

And I think that's the adult thing,

Taking responsibility for yourself and caring for yourself as if you have a responsibility over you.

And you need to care for yourself.

Thanks for that.

So as you're,

Let me circle back to being a TikToker,

Your journey of 1.

2 million followers.

There's probably a lot more meta lessons because I'm already 40 days in,

I'm already learning,

I've had my first troll.

Congratulations to me.

That was awesome.

I love it.

Nicely done.

And I also notice how seductive it is,

The social media followers and likes and so on and so forth.

So what are some of the journeys or insights that you have shifted on your way to 1.

2 million that you could share with us?

Turn off notifications.

Okay.

All right.

And if I would change anything about that,

Looking back,

I'd say turn off notifications preemptively.

Don't turn off notifications when they're too much to handle.

Turn off notifications when you go,

Oh yeah,

I could see how if this got a little bit more,

It would be too much to handle.

Turn it off then.

And then you can also change notifications.

So if you're a TikTok fan,

You can change notifications then.

Why?

Because dopamine streams,

Right?

So,

You know,

It's just notifications getting get you stuck in the dopamine loops.

But additionally,

We were talking about feedback earlier,

Too much feedback is problematic.

You still need to be a person who can say what's on their mind and create things without too much interference from others.

So you have to be willing to,

You know,

Set all of those notifications aside so that you can think for yourself and,

You know,

Decide,

You know what,

I want to make this today.

Hmm.

Okay,

So got it.

So you don't have a social media manager,

You just turn it off and then you create from what's alive within you.

I mean,

I think that's a really good first step.

I guess probably the next would be start to make connections.

I don't have a social media manager,

But I do have people,

I have somebody that works for me now.

I have people that I'm working with.

Like I'm getting help with video editing,

Different aspects of it.

Somebody that's working on sponsorships,

Various elements of this.

Just as it grows,

You have to realize you're not going to be able to do it all.

Again,

It's about setting those limitations and going,

You know what,

Like,

Let's figure out what part of this,

You know,

You're going to be really good at and hone in on that.

And there's so many things in this process of building out a presence like this that as I look at it,

I'm like,

Oh,

I shouldn't be doing that.

I shouldn't be working on that part.

That would be a disservice to myself and the people that I create content for.

Somebody else should be doing that.

So more and more,

You have to think that way,

I think.

So what's the dream?

Is the dream to potentially launch your own Discord,

You know,

Your investment?

What do you call those?

Syndicates?

Or like,

What's the dream?

What would you like to what's the vision?

Yeah,

Well,

I mean,

I've got a Discord.

I didn't know that.

Why isn't it in your thing?

Yeah,

I need to put it back up in the links.

That's where we held the last creativity workshop.

Oh,

Great.

But so I mean,

Short term,

It's the Bitcoin mining company that's already launched.

Everybody check it out on Wefunder.

Don't listen to the scammer DMs.

Go to the link in bio,

Please.

Then the creativity workshop and the book like those are the main focuses right now.

If those things go well,

I think I probably want to keep expanding out in those directions.

So I think there's so much to be done in the Bitcoin space.

Creativity is always been near and dear to my heart.

So I would love to explore,

You know,

Different ways to teach people that and to explore that.

And then,

You know,

If this book goes well,

I'd love to do another and another after that,

I think I could go pretty far there.

And over time,

I think doing some sort of retreat,

Collaborative workshop type of thing,

I think is probably in my future.

But Bitcoin creativity and self-development through order chaos,

Being dangerous.

I think that's my wheelhouse.

Are there new technologies that you pay attention to regarding creativity,

Self-development or Bitcoin?

So,

For example,

Things that I pay attention to recently,

I came across a really cool neural feedback hardware.

That's wireless.

You can actually track how your brain works and it has a positive neural feedback loop.

So as a biohacker,

I love that kind of stuff.

So are there technologies like that where you're paying attention to that's helping creators or being more creative or things like that?

I'm really interested to experiment with that stuff over time.

I haven't in that particular arena,

But you piqued my interest when you said that.

I mean,

Bitcoin itself,

Right?

That's still a new technology and that's a big place for my attention.

Beyond that.

.

.

Is there a place that you hang out on the social web around Bitcoin?

I mean,

Bitcoin is pretty fascinating.

There's a lot going on there.

And then the three defaults that if people are asking about Bitcoin,

I generally point them towards Anthony Pompliano,

Michael Saylor and Robert Breedlove.

Oh,

And a YouTube channel Antanop,

I think is how you pronounce it.

And then I've got a little Bitcoin course that could be found around.

It's very nicely done,

By the way.

Oh,

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah,

I wanted to experiment with a different format.

I decided,

Well,

You know what,

I'm just going to make a course that's like TikToks and see what happens.

And I got a lot of compliments.

A lot of people liked it that way.

Yeah,

It's short,

It's simple.

It's very.

.

.

I mean,

You can do it in,

I don't know,

15 minutes or something like that.

Yeah,

I'm happy with how that worked out.

And then I'm really interested in AI creation or AI assisted creation.

I think content creators in particular probably could benefit incredibly from there.

Any specific platforms that you pay attention to?

What's AI creation for content creators?

What is that?

I mean,

GPT-3 is seems just terrifyingly amazing.

And I think that some amazing things could come out of utilizing GPT-3.

I haven't really been like diving into it yet,

But whenever I get some some free bandwidth,

I do want to experiment,

Like,

You know,

Maybe making some channels that are,

You know,

AI specific.

Okay.

All right.

So there's a possibility you're going to make another channel.

In time,

In time,

In time.

Is there anything that.

.

.

So one thing about it I'm particularly interested in,

But I haven't seen any real real attempt at it is TikTokers,

Right?

We make educational content,

But the most of the benefits is being read by the platform themselves,

Wipe 2.

0-esque,

Right?

The whole idea of Wipe 2.

0 is smart contract,

Perpetual royalties and things like that.

I just haven't seen that.

So I've seen that done for music and for other things,

But not exactly in the training space yet.

Have you seen anything interesting in that direction?

No,

Not yet,

But I agree.

I think there's something there.

I mean,

For one,

The.

.

.

What's the Oculus Rift stuff?

The Metaverse VR?

Full 3D,

Yeah,

VR stuff.

Like,

That's going to be phenomenal for training videos over time.

And then,

Yeah,

I mean,

Just the whole royalties,

Copyright stuff,

The ways that crypto could help that,

I think is phenomenal.

But yeah,

I think it's a lot to be built in the educational space.

If somebody could create a better version of Google,

I'll be infinitely grateful,

Because Google is getting creepy and tired all at the same time.

I don't know how any.

.

.

It's amazing to me that we could make Google worse,

But somehow we did it.

But yeah,

I mean,

I suspect there will be some sort of search engine technology that comes about from decentralization.

And I think that could be a very wonderful good.

Beautiful.

Hey,

Josh,

I really,

Really appreciate.

.

.

So let me share a couple of things,

A huge takeaway that I got from our conversation,

Okay?

So we talk a lot about your journey from zero to 1.

2.

I keep on saying 2 million,

But it's 1.

2 right now,

2 million to come,

Right?

A huge part of our conversation is how to find your voice by being consistent,

Showing up,

And leaning into your unique strength and let go of everything else.

And then keep testing different approaches.

And at some point,

A platform like TikTok would be able to garner and send audience that is a good fit for you.

That's one.

The second thing that we talk a lot about is strategic rest.

We gave all kinds of different metaphors,

The garden and the fence or the yin and the yang,

Right?

Talking about David Gagen as a way to find the inner harmony to do that and do that well.

What else?

We also talked a little bit about your creativity workshop,

Your Bitcoin mining projects,

How you bullish about it,

And your book.

Is there a website that you want to send people to or do you want to send people to or just Josh Terry plays?

There's joshterryplays.

Com.

I'm slowly building that out.

We've started a blog on there and eventually I'll have a lot more stuff on there.

Besides that,

Yeah,

Just Josh Terry plays across all the social places.

Beautiful.

Oh,

The Josh Terry plays podcast.

Yeah.

Well,

That's right.

Do you want to say something about your podcast?

Because that's a different art form altogether.

We didn't even talk about that.

So you want to say a little bit about how that differs from looking into the camera,

Deadpan style,

To podcast to life.

Yeah,

Just briefly I'll say,

I mean,

Basically what I've realized is there's so much of a strength in TikTok that I need to bear down on it a little bit.

So I've kind of,

I haven't released new episodes in a little while in the podcast,

But I mean,

There's great stuff there.

The last one I had,

I think was Robert Green.

It was great.

Yeah.

Already had some awesome stuff there and I'm looking forward to doing more,

But just for a little while,

I'm trying to hone in on TikTok.

In terms of podcasting,

Yeah,

It is a whole new skill set and I definitely like tried to come at it with the approach of the righteous imbecile,

Right?

You know,

Like trying to just like,

Okay,

It's a new thing.

Let's figure it out.

So,

You know,

It's growing.

I'm learning.

And the last couple episodes I've been really happy with and I'm going to start experimenting with some formats.

I'm probably going to write some essays and read those off as podcast episodes and try some different things.

But yeah,

I am not abandoning the podcast.

I definitely want to build that out.

Well,

From a fan to you,

From one podcaster to another,

I really,

So I listened to the last one with Robert Green.

It was really excellent.

You asked really great questions,

Held really amazing space,

And I believe got something new out of Robert Green,

Which is in itself quite an accomplishment.

Thank you.

Thank you.

He's,

He's an amazing writer and it's,

It's a,

It was a pleasure to have him on.

He's man of brilliance,

For sure.

All right,

Josh,

I really appreciate being here on noble warrior.

I'm looking forward to our next chat.

And until then guys go buy Josh new book and take his workshop.

Pleasure to be here.

Thanks so much for having me.