How to Secretly Get What You Want Out of Life

You can have almost anything you want in life as long as you a) help enough other people get what they want, and b) you don’t care that in the beginning, most people will just think that you’re failing. Today, I’m going to show you the hidden benefits of letting people think just that.

The genesis of this idea came to me after reading Plato’s Republic, specifically when Socrates is talking to (arguing with?) Glaucon about virtue (being a good person). They’re discussing whether it’s best to be thought a good person by everyone in the world but really be a terrible person in secret, or better to be thought an absolutely vile individual by everyone in the world, but actually be a good person in secret. Glaucon tries to show that if no one could tell the difference (via the aid of an invisibility ring, just like in The Lord of the Rings), the just man would be tempted to act just like the unjust man.

The question can also be put like this:

“If one man is unjust for his entire life yet thought to be just, and another man is just for his entire life and thought to be unjust, which is happier in the end?

You can probably guess that Socrates took the side of the “virtue is its own reward” gang, and I’m inclined to agree. I think it’s better to be a good person, regardless of whether or not anyone else realizes this. That’s part of the reason I used to anonymously hand out $50 bills on my birthday to the homeless people that populate my city.

Where success and image are concerned, though, we can think of it in roughly the same way. In the beginning, you’re not going to know what you’re doing. That’s just the beginner stage that we all have to go through on our way to mastery.

Worse, you’re probably going to be young, and thus have to deal with older people ignoring you, talking down to you, hiring more senior people ahead of you, or even actively working against you. Being young is amazing, but it has its disadvantages: People think you’re stupider (stupider? Is that a word?) than you really are, they doubt your motives and intentions, they might not like the look of you, just on and on. It can seem endless.

But, and this is critical: in order to get what you want, you have to stay focused on the end result, regardless of the temporary discomfort. You have to do the things that will lead to success, and you have to do them without being focused on distractions like image and how you look while you’re doing those things that you need to do.

And let me tell you: it’s hard to not care what people think of you, and to deal with the human element of success, i.e. managing people’s expectations and demands while you’re trying to get down to work and do what needs to be done.

Everything that people have evolved to want is standing between you and doing the work:

People want to seem smart, but you have to risk looking stupid. You have to be the person who stands up to ask for clarification on that thing you didn’t understand. Everyone else in the audience is going to be nodding their heads like, “I already knew that,” but you have to be the one who stands up and says that you didn’t understand. It’s gonna look like you’re the only one who didn’t get it. After all, no one else asked a question! You must be the dumb one! But secretly, everyone else will be ashamed that they had to ask, whereas you will have learned something.

People want to succeed instantly, but you have to realize that success is a grind, and that it doesn’t just “happen” because you want it to. Social media is all about end results; nobody ever sees the thousands of hours of hard training before you ever heard of people like Sidney Crosby, or Mike Tyson, or Lady Gaga. Mike Tyson literally ran away from his first amateur fight! His trainer had to go find him and bring him back! That was before he knocked out the first 19 professional opponents he faced, most of them in the very first round.

People want to be liked and respected and, while I believe you should usually try and get along with people (and honestly, it’s not that hard), you can’t try to please everyone. You can’t try to appeal to everyone. You can’t hope and expect respect and prestige that you haven’t earned. By trying to appeal to everyone, you’ll end up appealing to no one, and by obsessing over image and prestige, you won’t develop the foundational skills and experience necessary to succeed at the highest level and earn that prestige!

It’s perfectly okay with wanting to seem smart, to succeed, and to be liked and respected, but you have to be okay with not getting them immediately, and you have to be okay with people thinking that you’re never gonna make it at all. You have to be okay with lots of people seeing you as a failure before anyone sees you as a winner.

In my case, I used to work as a security guard in a hospital. I just worked nights, so I usually had between 8–10 hours to myself (during a 12-hour shift) where I could just read and write and learn (and talk up some of the hot nurses, obviously).

But do you think that anyone in that place looked at me like I was a success?

No joke: that job allowed me to read over 800 books. Not a typo. All I did was read, man. And eat. Bodybuilding is an obsession of mine too, and there really aren’t that many jobs that will let their employees take 4 meal breaks during the workday! But I wanted to read Nietzsche, and I wanted to get absolutely jacked, so what’s a guy to do?

There were also plenty of other security jobs I worked where I would be freezing my toes off in my car, in my stupid yellow security shirt, hoping that no hot girls would see me wearing it. But I had my books, I had my protein, I had my laptop, and I just went after it! Night after night after night! I was happy to be there, because I knew that every page I turned and every gram of protein I consumed was getting me closer to where I eventually wanted to be.

Here’s a typical exchange that I would have during those days:

“Your job must suck, man.”

“Yea, sometimes.”

“Ever thought about going back to school?”

“Nope.” *Goes back to his book*

All of this is just to say that it’s not always going to be obvious to other people that you’re on your way to massive success. It’s just gonna look like you’re a frostbite victim making $12/hour. But, like Socrates, you’ll know the truth.

You don’t necessarily have to take a security job, but time is infinitely more valuable than money, and if your craft requires hours and hours of practice, you’re gonna have to find those hours somewhere. I’m not comparing myself to Einstein or anything, but those years he worked in the Swiss patent office is exactly what I’m talking about. It was a job he could perform in his sleep, which gave him the leisure and mental focus to change all of our lives forever.

You’d be in good company too. Plenty of writers have worked as security guards, from William Faulkner, to Rich Karlgaard, to David Foster Wallace (although he hated it and quit after 3 months).

There’s an excellent personal finance book with the super scammy title of The Millionaire Fastlane, and in that book, the author, MJ DeMarco talks about his time driving limousines before he made his first million:

“While driving that limo in Chicago, sometimes I’d sit idle for hours and had plenty of downtime to read books. I didn’t waste that time.” [italics mine]

Alright this is getting a bit long, and it’s time for me to eat again (for the 6th time today), so here are a few big takeaways:

You’re going to get further, faster, if you don’t care how you look to other people while you’re busy getting down to business. Just keep your head down, shut them out, drive forward and capture it.

Start before you’re ready. You’re not ready to publish your first book; you need to write 3 shitty ones that never see the light of day. You’re not ready to win your first professional fight; you haven’t run away from your first amateur fight yet.

Ask questions in public and admit when you don’t know the answer. Whenever I end up talking to a car nut, I run out of car knowledge pretty fast and usually have to ask what the hell that was that they just mentioned. “Ohhh, timing belt. Gotcha. And what does that do?”

Take a job that is optimized for learning, not necessarily for prestige. I mean, it’s great if you can secure both within the same job, but it’s rare. Focus on the learning, focus on the application, focus on the consistency, and the prestige will come to you.

My job at the hospital let me read 200 books a year and get all my meals in before the gym after work. My job as a bouncer taught me how to talk to women at bars and get them to become interested in me enough to actually go on dates with me. My job as an intern at HighExistence taught me business fundamentals, especially as they apply to the online space, which I was then able to use in my own writing career.

None of it was glamorous, none of it looked “good,” but it all had to be done in order for me to develop the skills and opportunities I have today. You can do something similar.

So the next time you’re mopping floors listening to audiobooks or serving drinks to millionaires so you can learn their secrets and then apply them in that business you started in your bachelor apartment, remember Socrates and Glaucon. And just as important, remember that whatever it is that you’re doing in life, you can always do more. If you want to. Realize that, and then get after it!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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NOTES:

I couldn’t fit these in the article above, but The Republic is a really great book! Don’t be intimidated out of reading it by the idea that it’s too difficult for you, or turned off because you think it’ll be boring. Here are some of my notes that I took from Plato, which I hope will inspire you to pick up the book:

“No man is deprived of truth according to his will.” Meaning, we’re all doing our best, but some people just end up holding the wrong ideas. If it was up to them, they would know the truth, but sometimes people go wrong, so have patience with them.

2. “The state in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed.”

3. “Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”

4. “Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing.”