Nikhyl Singhal: prediction

Transcript context

…Mm-hmm. That's a good segue to maybe the last question. You told me once that a lot of the people that you work with that have kind of made it have a lot of mental health challenges, that they didn't expect their life to be the way it is necessarily when they got there. Can you just talk about what you see there in that group? Yeah. This is a story that I don't think is told very well right now, and partly because it's such a luxury problem, it's almost a little embarrassing to discuss it openly as so many people struggle with so many basic needs, going through layoffs, going through all these challenges. I mean, these are real issues. But I think that what I've noticed is that if you kind of break career as we've done in this podcast between sort of act one, act two and act three, if act one is sort of learning and being that sort of builder and then maybe building the car, and then act two is building the factory, act three is like, what's after that? What do you do after that? And I think that act three in the past wasn't as long as it is now. Before, people would proverbially retire in their 60s when they used to actually physically work. Now almost all your listeners sit at a desk all day, so they don't need to retire by any means. And health is getting better. You might see folks work until their 70s or 80s. So that means that their careers are potentially 60 years long. So even if you're 20 years or 30 years in your career, you're only halfway through. So this act three could be a thing. And I don't think we talk about act three enough. What often happens is, and this is what I've been watching for people that are at my age, is they sort of succeed and then they become lost. They almost goes hand in hand. So when I was a kid and I was growing up in the Midwest, entertainment was going to the dog tracks, and not even the horse tracks, we didn't have horses. So it was the greyhound dog tracks. So people would bet on a dog and greyhound would go around the ring and then you would see. I bet on number three and I'll make a buck or something. The way that they motivated the dogs was they had these fake rabbits, which sounds kind of cruel and horrible, so I don't want the SPCA to come after you. But the point is that they'd have these fake rabbits. And what was interesting is, the moment that the dogs, if they accidentally touched the rabbit, the sort of the tail because the machine broke, because these tails would go around faster than the dogs, which would then motivate the dogs to go around in circles. Sometimes the machines would break, the dogs would actually catch the rabbit, they would never run again. The reason why they wouldn't run again is because there was like, "Well, what's next? I've achieved what I was looking for." So I think this happens a ton. It's like, your listeners are spending time focused on like, "Well, one day I will be X. I will be that vice president. I will have more money. I will have built something. I will have started a company." But they don't think about what happens next, and when it happens, when they succeed, their North Star, their entire way of wiring their career, themselves, it has been around getting to that place. " But they don't think about what happens next, and when it happens, when they succeed, their North Star, their entire way of wiring their career, themselves, it has been around getting to that place. And I think that if you're going to get there 30 years in and you have a 60-year career, a lot of the discussion I've been having with myself and with others has been, you probably need to start working on that North Star now. What's the second thing? What's your career next look like? How do you ensure that you are always going to have something important and motivating to do with your career? Otherwise, you'll keep working because you had no nothing else to do, but you'll be sadder, or you'll find ways to create war when peace is needed, or you'll spend money in an attempt to earn more, or you'll find habits that are bad. And I really want us to have long 60-year, 70-year careers, not just 30-year or 10-year, which is why I enter this into the vocabulary out there.…

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