Sam presents five guaranteed ways to live a miserable life — and the inverses of each. He covers Aristotle’s three types of friendship and the Harvard happiness study, the psychology of decision-making and reversibility, SMART goal setting and tracking, the trap of switching projects too often, and why most people should buy index funds instead of picking stocks.
Speakers: Sam Parr (co-host)
Introduction: Five Ways to Be Miserable [00:00:00]
Sam: If you’re ambitious, you’ve heard a thousand tips on how to live a happier, better life. Forget all of them.
I grew up in a blue-collar family. Today, I know lots of different billionaires. I’ve met thousands of successful founders. I’ve hired hundreds of people. And across all of those lives, I’ve spotted patterns in the people who are most happy. But instead of giving you another list on how to live well, I’m going to invert it. Here are five guaranteed ways to live a miserable life. Do the opposite, and you might actually live a good one.
Step 1: Don’t Have a Best Friend [00:00:30]
Sam: Step number one: don’t have a best friend. If you want to be miserable, tons and tons of acquaintances will do just fine.
One of my favorite philosophers to read about is Aristotle. He broke friendships into three types.
The first is utility. These are friends where you get something out of them — money, favors, connections. Once the usefulness ends, so does the friendship. Like coworkers.
The second is pleasure. These are friends that exist just for fun. You get together, you party, you have a good time, and then once that ends, you’re done. Like when you were three years old and you played with another kid — once the play date was over, the friendship was over.
And finally, virtue. These are the rarest and most valuable. People who you admire and who admire you back. They make each other better, and they stick with you no matter what. In modern terms, they’re your best friends.
If you want to have a great life, focus on that last category. The good news, according to Aristotle, is that you only need one to three best friends. I’ve got three: Jack, Ramon, and Neville.
If you’ve ever seen that movie The Town — Ben Affleck goes into his buddy’s room and says, “I need your help. We’re going to hurt someone, I can’t tell you what it is, and you can never ask about it.” And the guy responds: “Sounds good. Whose car are we going to take?” That’s Ramon. I’ve got one of those friends.
A grown man calling another grown man his best friend, telling him he loves him. Make fun of me all you want. But knowing that these guys have my back and have my best interest in mind makes me sleep like a baby.
The Harvard Happiness Study [00:02:30]
Sam: Now I want to show you a study that proves my point. For the last 85 years, Harvard has been running this study — now the longest study of adult life ever done. They tracked hundreds of people from youth all the way to old age.
After decades of data, the number one predictor of long-term health and happiness was not money, not fame, not power, not even exercise. It was the quality of close relationships. What protects you is having a few people — even just one person — you can count on through thick and thin. In other words, a BFF.
Step 2: Don’t Decide [00:03:30]
Sam: Step number two for living a miserable life: don’t decide. Spend tons of time planning and thinking and very little time doing. Miserable people are indecisive. Don’t commit to anything. Stay in research mode forever.
Let me tell you a story about Dan Gilbert. He’s a psychologist — the GOAT on studying happiness. He has this book called Stumbling on Happiness. In one experiment, he went to a college campus and selected two groups of students. Both groups were allowed to come in and select a piece of artwork to hang in their dorm room.
Group one: they could come back a week later and swap out their art if they were unhappy with it. Group two: locked in. Whatever they picked, they kept.
The results: Group one was less and less happy with their art over time, because they kept wondering if they’d chosen wrong. Group two actually got happier over the trailing handful of months — they convinced themselves they loved what they picked.
The takeaway: once we’re locked into a decision, the brain makes peace with it. It literally manufactures happiness. Happy people take more action while miserable people wait for the perfect decision.
Let’s say it takes someone six months to make a business plan. In that same six months, you could have started, run hundreds of experiments, and figured out what does and doesn’t work.
Now, if you’re in this indecisive bucket, I’ve got good news: nearly all decisions are reversible.
When I was about 21, I left college a little early and moved from Tennessee to San Francisco because I wanted to get into startups. I was incredibly afraid. I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to be homeless. I’d saved around $2,000 — enough to buy a plane ticket home to St. Louis.
I called my mom and I said, “If this doesn’t work, am I allowed to move back home for six or twelve months?” She said yes. And in my head I just thought: the worst case scenario is taken care of. Anything I achieve above that, I’m happy. So I shouldn’t doubt this decision.
Most decisions are reversible. Your job is to figure out how to tiptoe and try before you buy. When I was deciding which city to live in, I just rented Airbnbs in different neighborhoods for a week at a time. Significantly cheaper than signing a long-term lease and regretting it.
Also: to make this all work, most decisions need to be time-bound. If you’re deciding where you want to live, where to work, who to marry — it’s a lot easier to say, “I have six months to decide this. At the end of six months, I’m making a decision no matter what.” Because making a decision and acting almost always leads to more happiness than just thinking.
Quick embarrassing story: when I moved to San Francisco, I read Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. He had this quote: “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Get out and get busy.” That was my live-laugh-love moment. I have a tattoo on my foot that says “act now.” Cheesy, kind of lame. Of course it is. But very effective.
Step 3: Don’t Set Goals or Track Progress [00:06:30]
Sam: Step number three on how to be miserable: don’t set goals, and certainly do not track progress.
A book that changed my life was Titan, the biography of John Rockefeller — the richest man to ever live, two times richer than Elon Musk is today. One of my favorite stories from the book: when John was 16 years old, he said, “I want to be rich.” His first step was tracking all of his expenses and income in a book called Ledger A.
I stole that idea from him. When I was about 23 or 24, I wanted to save $50,000. To do that, I had to reduce my monthly expenses to $2,000. For about six months, I wrote down every single dollar I spent — manually. And just doing that tracking thing made it so much easier to hit the goal.
Another example: if you want to lose weight and you track all your calories and weigh yourself every single day, you will start to lose weight. The tracking alone changes behavior.
But if you really want to improve, you have to pair tracking with goals. So many people come to Shaan and me for business advice, and the first thing I ask is: where do you want to be in five and ten years? Do you want to sell your company? Do you want a lifestyle business? Do you want to make $500,000 a year or $100 million?
Imagine going to a trainer and saying, “Hey, make me fit.” It’d be impossible. The trainer needs to know — do you want Arnold Schwarzenegger muscle? Do you want to run a fast 5K? Do you want to get great at swimming? You have to have a goal to know what actions to take every single day.
A real goal is SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
When I was about 23, I had a goal to make $20 million liquid by age 30. That meant I had seven years to build a business that could get to around $15 million in revenue, which I could sell for roughly $30 million and walk away with $20 million after tax. That’s where the idea for The Hustle came from.
My goal for the first year was to grow the subscriber base by 3% every single week. Because I knew that if I had the audience, advertisers would come. Every week was just: did I grow subscribers by 3% or not? What am I going to do Monday through Friday? Anything it takes to grow that subscriber base by 3%. No side hustles, no different business ideas. Just that one thing for 60 hours a week.
By the way, it worked. I ended up selling — I was 31, not 30. But the goal, in my opinion, doesn’t really matter if you hit it exactly. It matters that you have it, and that you break it down into chunks you can act on every single day.
Here’s how I think about tracking intervals: fitness, quarterly. Spending, monthly. Things I’m learning, monthly. Income, annually. Net worth, every five years. My company, decade-scale.
The reason: achieving anything great takes longer than you think. But you also need dopamine hits. Checking my spending monthly and knowing whether I’m doing good or bad gives me progress. Fitness goals — you can see real progress every three months.
My wife and I do something nerdy. Every single month on our calendar, we have what we call a monthly recap meeting. It started nine years ago when we’d combined finances and were only a year and a half into dating. We’d ask: are we happy with how we’re spending money? Are there experiences or services we want to acquire to make our lives better?
When we were younger: “Hey, I’m spending a lot of time cleaning the house. It’s $150 to hire a cleaner. That could save me many hours. Let’s try it and see if that makes us happier.” And those are basically the same conversations we have now. The numbers might be a little bigger, but honestly not much. Most of the decisions are pretty small. And it’s fun to see what changes our happiness the month after.
Step 4: Switch From Thing to Thing Every Quarter [00:12:00]
Sam: Step number four for being miserable: switch from thing to thing every quarter or every year. Mastery and compounding — it’s for suckers. Starting from scratch is way easier.
This is the number one most common miserable trait I see amongst ambitious people who have a ton of promise. They don’t stick to things long enough to see the eventual payoff.
Anything worth doing basically requires you to pay a known cost today for an unknown payoff in the future. And it’s that uncertainty plus a lack of discipline that makes people switch. The pain of focus shows up daily in time, energy, and money. But the reward doesn’t come for months or sometimes years.
If you’re ambitious, you need to know that this is what the path to winning feels like: you lose sleep, you second-guess yourself, you wonder if you’re wasting years of your life. You put in hours and burn energy and the scoreboard still says zero. And it says that sometimes for years. But that’s the price people pay to win.
The worst part is nobody can tell you whether the thing you’re doing is actually going to work. The only way forward is to keep paying that cost while the end payout is still unknown.
Last week I was with Matteo, the founder of Eight Sleep — the company that makes smart mattresses, does hundreds of millions in revenue, worth billions. His entire talk was about how his company failed and nearly died five different times. The most recent was just a couple years ago. Imagine if you’d switched projects after failure number two.
Palmer Luckey — he’s a billionaire, invented the Oculus, has another company worth tens of billions. He has this amazing quote: at some point in business and in life and in romance, you have to commit to a path. A lot of my peers keep all their options open, so they end up jumping from thing to thing. If you don’t commit, you’re going to fail. You have to say, “This is the path I’m on, for better or worse, and I’m going to double down on it.”
Step 5: Pick Individual Stocks Instead of Index Funds [00:15:00]
Sam: Step number five is going to make a lot of you angry. I know the YouTube comments are going to be full. But step number five is: don’t buy index funds. Instead, invest all your money picking individual stocks.
The reason I’m including finances here is that a lot of you listening to MFM, you’re here because you want to make money, you want to get rich. I think there are basically only four ways to get really rich: get lucky by marrying someone, winning the lottery, or joining a rocket ship startup; get into sales; start a small business; or have a good salary, live below your means, and invest all your extra money into index funds.
If you invested only $6,000 a year into the S&P 500, by retirement you’d have over a million dollars. Most of you listening make over six figures, so you can get there faster. But here’s the trap — it happens a lot to young men, it happened to me — thinking you’re smarter than the market and you’re in a rush.
Some facts: over the last ten years, 97% of active stock fund managers underperformed the index. These are people whose entire job is picking stocks. Harvard MBAs. People who stare at Bloomberg terminals all day. Teams of analysts. They still can’t beat the index funds.
My dumb story: at the bottom of the market during COVID, I sold all my positions because I thought the market was done. Then it ripped right back up. I lost a fortune because of that mistake. A smart friend told me afterwards — it’s a cliché, but he said: “It’s not about timing the market. It’s about time in the market.”
Over the past 20 years, if you’d stayed invested the whole time, you’d have made roughly 10% a year — your money doubles every seven years. But if you missed the best ten days of that period, your returns halved to about 5%. If you missed the best 20 days — out of 3,650 days — your gains were almost exactly zero. Picking those 20 days, picking those right stocks, is very hard. Almost impossible.
I sold my company in 2021 and put almost all my money into a basic Vanguard index fund. Over the past five years it’s now worth 71% more and I’ve done nothing.
Look, picking stocks does feel good. I get it. If you’re in that category, buy a very small amount — that should be part of your entertainment budget. But if you want to make money in your sleep with very little stress, invest in index funds. And if you really want to get rich, start a business. That can be your risky thing. But individual stock picking, among almost everyone I know who does it, almost always ends poorly. Just buy the index.
Recap: Five Steps to a Good Life [00:19:00]
Sam: If someone’s looking over your shoulder right now and asks what you’re watching, tell them: “I just listened to something that told me the five simple steps to live a miserable life.”
If you want to tell them how to have a good life, here’s the recap.
Step one: have a best friend. Someone you love and who has your best interest in mind. Step two: decide. Spend more time acting and doing, less time planning. Step three: set goals and track progress regularly. Step four: do not switch from thing to thing every quarter or every year — mastery and compounding works. Step five: get rich — and one straightforward way to do that is to invest in index funds. Don’t think you’re a stock-picking genius. It’s nearly impossible.
All right, that’s it. Go to YouTube if you’re not already there and let me know what you think in the comments.