The Importance of Focusing on What You Want | 3min snip from The Pathless Path with Paul Millerd

Speaker 2
If you quit your job into your own thing, you'll have plenty of practice because I think the Singapore is very similar to the US. Like, if the US does have its entrepreneurial corners, and they're amazing. But it does have a strong conformance vibe. And
Speaker 1
I was always so surprised to hear that. I guess I bought into the PR and like the movies, like Hollywood. So Americans are supposed to be like Mavericks and like, do whatever they want. I don't care what other people think. And then I read out of like, I mean, I encountered like all those, I mean, just scrolling online, right? You see what people obsessed about other people thinking, like, Oh, okay.
Speaker 2
Americans are humans too, I guess. Yeah. Eric, Eric from had some interesting writing about this. Have you read Escape from Freedom?
Speaker 1
I haven't read that one, but I did once I did read his book about love. And I went else when I was looking at my book, I was going through a whole bunch of his quotes. So I think I read a bunch of it, but not the book itself. Yeah, his argument was basically that like, okay, you give people freedom, but that is so overwhelming. That
Speaker 2
people then need to like either follow a leader. This was his argument, like in Germany, people were following Nazism. In Italy, people were following Bashes. And in the US, he's like, they're doing the same thing. They're just creating like, they're conforming. They're like obsessed with like what other people are
Speaker 1
doing. And
Speaker 2
the only path out of it is basically to like, really reflect and define your own like positive vision, like for something instead of just escaping responsibility.
Speaker 1
So my Twitter bio and like one of my recurring talking points I read to the same thing over and over again is focus your time and energy and what you want to see more of, or most simply just focus on what you want. And it's so simple, but it's quite radical because people aren't comfortable doing it because implicit in that is you have to take responsibility for what you want. And it's much easier to, so in the current news of the past couple of days is that like Lex Friedman tweeted like a list of books he wants to read. And then people are mad about it. Or they're like, it feels like people are just inventing reasons to have a discourse about it. And I'm like, you don't need to care. You can just do what you want. And you know, if you want to read, you can encourage people to read. You can just talk about your favorite books, right? But like, that takes sticking your neck out. Like you said earlier that being a creative online is an act of vulnerability. It's always just so much easier to say, Oh, what that guy is doing is not quite right. Sure. But what are you doing? And even that, so there's like a Nietzsche quote from like, you know, Nietzsche was like in the 1800s. But he was like, I wish to be a yes, sayer. You know, I want to say yes to what I love and what I think is great. And I don't even want to say no to the things that I don't want, you know, because even then, yes, again, you're in that frame of, oh, everyone shouldn't be talking about X. Well, you just brought up X again. You know, so like, you got to be saying, I want to do why, why is what I care about everyone? Check out why. And it's a, it's a more fulfilling, profitable, happy, it's better in every way, except you have to follow your own part or your own, you know, whatever, whatever you think is right. And that's scary to people.

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The Pathless Path with Paul Millerd

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