How to Lean Into Yourself and Detach from the Social Capital Model

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Insights for the Matt's Mindset Podcast drawn from: Insights for the Matt's Mindset Podcast drawn from: ⁠Tim Ferriss⁠, ⁠Sam Harris⁠, ⁠Neil de Grasse Tyson⁠, ⁠Dr. Brene Brown⁠, ⁠Dr. Andrew Huberman⁠, ⁠Dr. Matthew Walker⁠, ⁠Jonathan Haight⁠, Roland Griffiths, PhD, ⁠Niall Ferguson⁠, Chris Palmer, MD, ⁠Dr. Michio Kaku⁠, Noah Feldman, Emile Durkheim, Stanley Milgram, Jean Piaget, B.F. Skinner, Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung ⁠Bill Gurely⁠, ⁠Jason Calacanis⁠, Jim Collins, Aryeh Bourkoff, Balaji Srinivasan, Ed Thorpe, ⁠Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs, David Friedberg⁠, ⁠Howard Marks⁠, ⁠Ray Dalio⁠, ⁠Naval Ravikant⁠, Peter Theil Rick Rubin, ⁠Todd McFarlane⁠, ⁠Bill Burr⁠, Terry Crews, ⁠Hugh Jackman⁠, Matthew McConaughey ⁠James Clear⁠, Stephen Pressfield, ⁠Seth Godin⁠, ⁠Susan Cain⁠, ⁠Morgan Housel⁠, ⁠Jocko Willink⁠, Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, ⁠Tamara Levitt⁠, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Satre, James Joyce, ⁠Malcolm Gladwell⁠

Show Notes and Transcript:

Hello and welcome to today's episode of our podcast. As always, I'm grateful to have you here and to acknowledge all the hard work you've been putting in to become the best person you can be.

Today's episode is all about leaning into yourself and finding your niche. It's not enough to just be kind of good at something or be kind of authentic. You deserve to be the best version of yourself and find true happiness and fulfillment.

I'll start by sharing my personal experience with trying to fit into things that didn't align with my authentic self. In high school, I played football mainly because I was relatively good at it and it had the most social capital. But it never gave me the sense of confidence I craved because deep down, I knew it wasn't the right fit for me. I struggled with anxiety throughout high school and most of my adult life, and I now realize that anxiety is simply your inner self telling you that something is off and you're not where you're supposed to be.

Similarly, I gravitated towards the legal field in my adult life because it seemed like the most natural fit for my unique expression of talents and had the most social capital. But I learned that there's more to life than just money, success, and status. Happiness, joy, fulfillment, self-actualization, peace, and true love are essential components of a happy and fulfilling life.

There are two games of life: the status game and the wealth game. The status game emphasizes values such as power, ego, and desire, while the wealth game sees money as a necessary component to living a happy and fulfilling life. Money is a tool that leads to freedom, the freedom to live where you want, date who you want, work where you want, and on what you want.

I was living just outside of Boston at the time, so a complete cross-country trip was ahead of me. I barely knew anyone on that side of the coast, and I had no family out there. But I knew it was what I wanted to do. It was where my authentic self was calling me. So off to Los Angeles with me.

I spent two years soaking up the sunshine. And what do you know? Los Angeles is not the kind of place where you express your authentic self. Los Angeles is the type of place where you sell a freeze-dried prepackaged idea of yourself, which has been beta-tested by three sets of on-screen audiences to ensure maximum effect. Social capital was on steroids. I felt like I was back in college, and every mixer and networking event started with the question, "Who do you know here?"

So my wish for you, my guidance, is to look within yourself and really get in touch with who you are. Lean into both what you're good at and what you love. If you're a huge nerd, fantastic! It's never been a better time to be a huge nerd. Nerd-dom and fandom have entered the mainstream. Every guy's nerdy about something, even if it's just fantasy football. That's nerdy, I don't care if it's about sports. For every guy who's nerdy about something, there'll be a girl who thinks it's cute. So don't worry about whatever it is that you're nerdy about. Lean into it.

If you're a huge jock and love sports of all kinds, you're just nerdy about that. Sports are amazing. Lean into that. I will say I hate to break this to you, but you're probably not going to go to the league. If you are, you are, so you're not going to let me hold you back. But most of you just give you some guidance are not going to, and that's okay. Because sports teach you the most important lessons you'll ever learn in life. Lessons like teamwork, hard work, resilience, charisma, perseverance, how to run downhill when you're winning, and how to keep going when you're losing. So take those lessons, take those abilities, ground them into something tangible. They'll create abundance for yourself and your family.

And women, I didn't forget about you, women. Lean into what you do best. Don't let society tell you that you have to be one thing or another. Don't let any faction or fraction of society tell you that you have to be a girl, boss, or homemaker. Do both or do neither, but do it for you.

If you're a girly girl who loves makeup, fashion, Starbucks, and being a princess, be her. If you can't wait to start a family, go for it, be a husband, and make sure your home is clean and wonderful. And be her. If you want to go out in the world and be a voice in politics, or run a Fortune 500 company, or write the next great American novel, or find the cure to cancer, or build the next generative AI machine, then be her. Don't go out in the world and try to be a man. Don't try to run a Fortune 500 company like a man would. No, be you. Run a Fortune 500 company the way a woman would. Women are just magical. They have a special type of energy.

I visited my friend's apartment in Utah, and it was beautiful, with a couch, a seating area, a kitchen, a bedroom, plenty of food, coffee, and everything you needed, but it was spartan. The apartment had everything he needed, and nothing else because that's what men do. It's what I do, and it's what all my single male friends do. We get everything we need, and nothing else because that's how the male brain works. We focus on what serves a function, what do we need? And that's it.

After that, I drove to my friend's house in Denver, where he was living with his girlfriend. It was a well-decorated apartment with little decorative pillows on the couch, wonderful quotes on the wall, matching hand towels and rugs in the bathroom, and coffee table books. It smelled nice and had well-framed pictures on the walls. The first apartment was created by a man who had everything he needed. The second apartment was curated by the amazing energy of a woman.

The message here is to lean into yourself, be you, and find someone who appreciates you for who you are. Don't worry about money, social capital, or what people think. Just be yourself. While I've read widely in college, learning from the greats in every field, I've realized that most people repeat advice from previous generations, but the best teacher is experience. It's how God talks to you; not just living in your ivory tower and trying to read and interpret information. Experiences ground your experiences into reality, and every kind of fun you can think of should be experimented with to find your authenticity and follow your bliss.

God tells you what you want, and if you say yes, he gives you exactly what you want. When I was debating leaving Los Angeles, I was on the fence about it because I had spent six years gearing up for it. It was the culmination of six years of writing novels in college and another two years working in the legal field while writing. I finally moved to Los Angeles and hustled for eight years. When I realized that I was no longer emotionally fulfilled on this path, I was debating leaving Los Angeles. I was on the fence because of the sunk cost fallacy. I spent all this time trying to achieve this goal, and now that it was here, I don't feel fulfilled.

And we're waiting outside, the owner comes to the door to unlock it. We're there with the UberEATS guy. And so the owner gets the food, gives the tip, and then kinda looks at us.

He's like, "What are you guys doing here?" If SoundCloud rapper guy steps right up and says, "Oh, I got friends inside. You know, they said come through. Like can I come in?" And the guy looks at him and looks at my friend and I, and we're like, "No, we're not with him. We heard the music and just wanted to drop by. Seemed like a cool spot." And this guy, he must have been probably like 45. He looked like he played bass in some successful grunge or punk band in the '90s or something. Like, he belonged in leather-torn distressed leather pants, like, I don't even know what he was wearing for a shirt. Long, kind of straggly, brown hair that fell to his shoulders, and he could have been in the Sex Pistols or something. He looks at me in the eye, and I can tell he is coked out of his mind. And he just goes, "Are you guys cool?" And we just go, "Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, no, look, you know, we're straight." So he just shrugs, looks at us bleary-eyed, struggling, "Mind your P's and Q's," and just turns.

He doesn't even give us a second look, just turns back and goes back into his house. We come in, and right when we walk in, we walk through this old Zen garden. There's like this little babbling brook running through this guy's house, like, it's like a mini-golf course, literally has lily pads and this little brook in this little pathway. And there's security guards, right? And we walk in, there's two guys, big strapping guys in security shirts, and you know, have a little Secret Service-like wire.

And they just let us through. And we keep walking, keep walking down, music gets louder. And we go into this open floor plan which is literally as soon as you go from the openness of the walkway in the Zen garden.

And then there's a ceiling but there's no walls. It's just this beautiful fireplace, and then you keep walking, and then you just have this incredible view of what he had set up which was a DJ scaffolding, a giant fire pit. It was a music industry gig, up-and-coming musicians, rappers, producers, groupies, free booze, free food just lying around, the whole nine yards.

And you have this amazing view of the infinity pool and then just Los Angeles just behind it. And this guy, like I said, doesn't even give us a second thought. This owner of the house has disappeared without a backward glance. He just goes back up to goes upstairs, which is roped off with these velvet ropes and just goes back up to his room, probably just to snort some coke off a girl's taint. He doesn't even interact or talk to the people at the party. He's just spending God knows how much money to throw this party, and he's not even enjoying the party. He's just upstairs in his room, snorting some coke off a girl's taint. Don't get me wrong, snorting some coke off a girl's taint the first time you do it is pretty fun.

But I remember thinking as I stood there, surrounded by basically what would have been my wish fulfillment, like if I had made it in that industry. This is the best hope, really. What else is there if you're out there too, as I did, on this axis, on that social capital axis?

You have a $94 million house, you have untold amounts of money beyond that. You have access to any type of anything - women or fun or anything that you could ever desire. That's yours at this point.

And it was almost like God was saying, "Is this what you want?" And I remember just saying, remembering thinking, "Is this the goal? Is this what I want? Like, this is just the grand vision because here's the best-case scenario of what you can hope for in Los Angeles." It's because everything, like any other type of dream, if you wanted true love or fulfillment or creative expression, anything like that, it doesn't have to be done in that city. This was the best-case scenario for the current trajectory that I was on. And I just knew immediately then that I would have been incredibly unfulfilled.

The whole point of that story is don't just look at the social capital model. Men, don't just optimize for money and status; factor in fulfillment, factor in how you're spending your days. Because a man who wakes up in the morning and goes to bed at night, and in between does what he wants, is a success.

Women, don't just go for the highest status guy that you can find. Find someone who treats you right, find someone who shares your values. Find someone who wants the best for you and supports you in all that you do as you support him. And be happy with who you are. Be happy with who you've decided to be. Don't let society tell you that you have to be prettier, skinnier, or that you have to be a girl boss or a homemaker. Just whoever you are, lean into that. Lean into him. Lean into her. Lean into yourself. You'll find everything you were looking for all along, my friends. Go in peace to love and serve.