Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Maybe. I also think of this example with Matt. He probably thought there was easy money for the taking and it wasn’t so easy, was it? It looked like low-hanging dollar bills and they turned out to be some really sour grapes. It turned out he probably destroyed vast sums of money by undermining the whole WordPress trust and the ecosystem and putting question marks in the heads of folks who would choose to use WordPress or something else going forward. So I often think when people think like, “Oh, you left money on the table.” First of all, so what? I don’t have to have all the money, but second of all, maybe the money wasn’t on the table at all. And maybe the cost, even if you got the money, maybe the cost in other ways like we’ve talked about, would outweigh all the money that you could have possibly gotten. I think you said that the thing that makes you happy is flow and tranquility. Those two things. Really beautifully put. And gaining money might assign to your responsibility of running a larger thing that takes away the flow that you gain from being… Fundamentally for you what flow means is programming and then tranquility is like… I think you also have a beautiful post of like, “Nirvana is an empty schedule. ” When I look at a upcoming week and I see that I have no scheduled meetings at all, which is quite common, or maybe I just have one thing for one hour on one day, I think to myself, “Do you know what? This could very easily have been very different. We could have been running a company of 100s of people or 1000s of people and my entire calendar would’ve been packed solid with little Tetris blocks of other people’s demands on my attention and time and I would’ve been miserable as fuck. And I look at that and go, “What more can I ask for?” Which is a really nice state of being, I’d actually say. I didn’t have this always. I did have, early on in my career, some sense of I need a little more, a little more security. And I remember this really interesting study where a bunch of researchers asked people who had made certain amounts of money, “How much money would it take for you to feel secure?” They’d ask people who had a million dollars net worth, “How much money do you need?” “Probably need $2 million. $2 million, then I’d be good.” Then they asked people with a net worth of $5 million, how much do you need?” “10. I need 10.” Ask people with $10 million, “What do you need?” “20.” Every single time people would need double of what they did. I did that for a couple of doublings until I realized, “You know what? This is silly. I’m already where I wished I would be and a million times over, so what less is there to pursue?” Now that doesn’t mean that if more money is coming my way, I’m going to say no to it. Of course not. But, it does mean that I’m free to set other things higher. And I also do think you realize, as Jim Carrey would say, “I wish everyone would get all the money that they wished for and they’d realize it wasn’t the answer.” That money solves a whole host of problems and anxieties and then it creates a bunch of new ones and then it also doesn’t touch a huge swath of the human experience at all. The world is full of miserable, anxious, hurt, rich people. It’s also full of miserable, anxious, poor people and I’d rather be a miserable, anxious, rich person than a poor person. But it isn’t this magic wand that make everything go away, and that’s again one of those insights, just like having children, that you cannot communicate in words. I’ve never been able to persuade a person who’s not wealthy that wealth wasn’t going to solve all their problems.…

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