Lesson 19a: When You Lose Hope

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Well, it's been up since 2 a.m. and I didn't make one of these yesterday. There comes a time in every creator's life, project, etc., where you will, if you've been doing this long enough, you will lose hope. What do you do about it? You're tired.

You're beaten up. Lack of interaction. And you'll cuss out the universe.

You'll lose faith. Someone will beat you up. The world will beat you up.

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And really the question becomes, what do you do about it? What do you do? You're sick of it. The feeling and the problem is, what's the point? What is the point of all of this? Like, no one cares. For example, you're getting zero like, zero feedback from anybody on social.

You're making this thing, though. And what do you do? Do you want to quit? Are you sick of it? Do you just want to like, sell the thing? Get rid of it? Are you going to keep going? What are you going to do? And this video is for you. To help you figure out how to keep going, whether you should keep going, whether you should quit and give up.

So let's talk about it from a real perspective. Not all the bullshit like, motivation, like adrenaline. Let's talk about the reality of it.

Because it's deep cuts. Like, it goes into your soul. You're bleeding in some ways.

You're angry. You're tired. You're pissed off.

You're frustrated. And I think if you're in this space, I've thought about this for the last day and a half. I've thought about it deeply.

Where do you come out? If you're in this space, you already know the answer. You're frustrated because you have something to give and something to say. And maybe the world doesn't understand it yet.

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Or they're not paying attention. Or because they're busy with their own shit. Everyone's got their own shit.

Hasn't reached the right people yet. And you're frustrated because you do want to make an impact. And you feel like the impact isn't there.

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And maybe it's just a question of impact. You're not listening to this if your whole point is just like, let's go grab some money quick. Let's do a cash grab.

Let's get that bag, you know. You're not listening to this if you're just power at all costs. You're not listening to this if the thing you're doing is at all costs.

I can almost guarantee you that. You're listening to this because there is a deep-rooted sense, some deep energy that you have to get out of yourself. And it's about the work.

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It's about the creation process itself, not about the impact. And we've got to separate those things. If what you're doing is true, and you really do love it, and I'll prove to you if you really do love it, you're pissed off.

You're sick of it. You're done. And what do you keep doing? What do you come back to? Do you keep doing the same thing? Are you still like creating the thing? Are you still like doodling in your sketchbook, writing things, thinking about things, going in search of that inspirational thing? Are you still like coding things, designing things, building things with your hands, strategizing things, crafting things? Whatever that thing is, insert verb, have you gone back to it? Are you doing it as a sense of escape? If so, I'm just here to tell you, you're screwed, bro and sis.

Like you're, there's no other way. You're in it. It just is.

And the bigger issue is going to be like, the bigger issue is going to be if you don't, if you keep rejecting that feeling. If you keep pushing it away and you stop. The bigger regret is 10 years like I didn't.

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Because you don't know what could happen. But one thing's for certain, you don't do it. You do know what will happen.

Not that. And you'll be lying to yourself. And you won't be doing your truth.

You won't be living in your truth. So if it is your truth and you keep coming back to it and like, you're still in it and you're still like, yeah, but like, and go back to old photos, go back to old work, go back to old writing, sketchbooks, thoughts, ideas, go, go back in your camera roll, scroll back in it, go back to the beginning. I can almost guarantee you, you will find something.

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And not just one thing, lots of things over time, over long time periods, as far back as your camera roll will go. It's in there, right? So what are you so upset by? You're doing the thing you were called to do. Maybe you haven't quite figured out every little nuance and the thing just like goes to the moon.

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Maybe it's not supposed to. Maybe it's not supposed to. Or maybe it just takes time.

It took took Steve Jobs, what, 40 odd years before the iPhone? When he first sat down with that like, blue phone him and was like hacking a phone line, took 40 years before the iPhone. They knew the answer. The technology just wasn't there yet.

And they had to wait for the world to catch up so they could like put the thing in a single package and present that package to the world. And finally, the package that they knew was the right package for a long time. All the things had just finally reached a maturity level.

And the world had reached a maturity level such that it could then be put in the market and it would just take off. And all the things that you've been through and learned and relationships that all came to a head. So what would have happened if they didn't? If because in year two, instead of year 40, they just didn't.

Where would our world be? And that's just one example. You could be a poet, you could be an artist, you could be an athlete, I don't care what you're thinking, you could be an Excel wizard, you could, I don't care what it is. But I think that's really it is like, is it still exploding out of you? Even when you're pissed, frustrated, hurt, destroyed, like the human world fucked you up? Is it still there? If it's still there, then you don't have a choice.

You just don't have a choice. You just don't have a choice. So I guess the question then is, what are we going to do about it? There's another quote, Steve Jobs said at the very end of his life, and they asked him like, knowing what you know now, and you go back to when he gave the commencement address, like, what would you change on it? And you know what he said? He said, I think I just turn up the volume.

Just turn up the volume. Dude didn't have that much time. He was like, I don't know what I'm going to do about it.

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He didn't have that much time left. He just doubled down on the same message. It's like, just turn up the volume.

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It's gonna make people uncomfortable. But what's the intent? Isn't that what art does? And if you're creating something, by definition, you're an artist. And what are the great artists do? They make you feel something.

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They push you. They push society. They comment on society to get you to wake up and look at things in a new way.

And if you can wrap that in a product that people get value from at the same time, all the better. It's a hard needle to thread. Wake people up, improve things, push them to be better, productize it.

They pay for it because they get more value out of it than it costs. That's not going to take a minute of your life. That's not going to take a year of your life.

That's going to take a lot of time and effort and energy. So what are you going to do? Especially when the vision is large. If your market size is every human on the planet plus every machine, you have to think differently and you're not going to get there right out of the gate.

It may take another three lifetimes beyond your lifetime before the world, the technology, all the things are ready and come together. But you can prototype it. An idea can be written down in a paragraph.

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I'm looking out there in the sea, and I just see a lot of people making stuff that's super incredible, like really amazing. And some have large audiences, some have small audiences, some people it's the first time, some people don't like being in public, some people have zero likes, zero comments, zero shares, but it doesn't mean the intrinsic value of the work product or them is less valuable than the iPhone. It just doesn't have the same scale or reach.

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And sometimes the audience isn't ready, right, or have even gotten to the audience. So the connected tissue of social media is not built for that. The connected tissue and algorithms on social media is built for a different purpose.

It's built to just push things that are snappy sugar highs that drive clicks and add revenue and keep people coming back for the sugar high and egocentric emotion. It's not built for distributing the right idea to the right people. That is not why these products were built.

Maybe in the beginning, but it's lost that. And so for you to think that social media or the news media or SEO, you know, for you to think that there is a product and a platform on the internet that was custom built to take the essence of your thing and perfectly match that puzzle piece with the open puzzle piece of the people or the machines who are looking for that thing, then of course you're going to be frustrated and disappointed because it doesn't exist. Twitter's not made that way.

Instagram damn sure isn't made that way. Facebook isn't made that way. TikTok isn't made that way.

Even the iPhone isn't made that way. And their app store, it's not meant to put the, I have a thing and it has these properties and I need a thing and it has these properties and to put those together as perfectly as possible. They're crappy systems.

AI gets better at that with chat GPT because you can put in a more nuanced prompt and it's trying to scrape the internet and pull in all the world's data so it can do that match. But if you don't have a profile out there that says, I have this exact thing and it does this exact thing for these exact people, for these exact reasons and with these core values. And there's another one that's like, I'm looking for this exact thing that does this exact stuff for these exact reasons and I have these core values.

That match is not going to occur because no one has built it. So of course you have zero likes because it's not reaching, your puzzle piece isn't reaching the opposite inverse of that puzzle piece. And that's as far as I've gotten.

I mean, we've had this idea about the essence of what the internet is. It's a gigantic marketplace matching engine, but it hasn't, those two elements on either side, it's like a rough, it's like I have a square hole and I'm putting round pegs in it. And of course they don't fit because all these things have been built for different purposes.

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I mean, that's, we've been seeing it for a long time and we built some prototypes and things like that. Kind of jetpack ultra on the profile page. We just keep coming back to it.

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We just keep coming back to it because of this exact problem, not to like pump shit, but this exact problem for ourselves, for others, for our friends, right? Like, wouldn't that be a better experience where, you know, and all these little things like, like Angie's list, right? Where, you know, Uber is a specific, they're just specific examples of become apps and businesses in their own, right? Like, oh, I need a car to take me from here to there. And it's one problem and it's really big, but when the problem isn't that big and like the connection and the match isn't that big, it doesn't get built because the economics don't work. So you can't build a hundred trillion possible businesses.

Maybe with AI agents, you kind of can in this dream, but it still needs a platform to like collect the people's, the wants, the needs, the offers of, and the properties and the metadata of all these things. So someone build it. I mean, we've got the mechanics.

We just described the product of this. I'm not trying to like hold it back so I could just become a trillionaire. I want this to exist because what would happen if that exists? The world would be a better place.

There'd be happier people. There'd be happier creatives. It would help people make a living, become sovereign, which is the point.

You don't have to wake up and be worried about where my next paycheck's going to come from. You can wake up to money because you put your thing in here and you know, it's just going to go out and it's going to find those five people who desperately need that exact thing that you have and vice versa. You're looking for a thing so specific you can't find because, and you're searching like over and over again and you're on social media.

You can't find it. You're on Google. You can't find it.

You're on chat. You can't find it because the data isn't there. There's nothing that connects it.

And AI is just glorified search with a prompt. It's still doing a search under the covers. And if that thing isn't out there formatted in the right way, it's never going to pull back the right answer.

So like we're screwed. Like fuck. So it's got to exist.

And it's a lot of work. How you're going to say to 8 billion people, like put in the thing you actually want on a detailed basis and spend five minutes doing that. And then on the other side, like spend five minutes building out the profile from those things, like what it is, what it does, who it's for, why you did it, and like what are the core values and then doing the match on that.

Like that's a lot to ask 8 billion people and 100 trillion machines. That's a lot to ask. It's not as simple as like tapping on a screen one time, like removing a physical button.

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It's a lot to ask and people don't even know to ask it. So, so then what? Then what? Beats me. Beats me.

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So we're just going to be on Instagram and Twitter and freaking Snapchat and YouTube and TikTok and we're never going to reach that state of the promised land. Like, like we're all down here and where we could be is up here living a way more abundant life. And we're not because, because of that gap, because of that big space in between, we just haven't put that data into the machine on either side.

It does. So no match can occur at scale across all of these things. So I don't know how to do it.

I don't, I don't know how to get 8 billion people and 100 trillion machines to fill out that profile. I don't know how to do it. And I don't think it can work unless it's done.

And the only way it happens is like, yeah, you got to have a place to do it and submit it. And then people got to know about it. Machines got to know about it.

But hell, only 2 billion iPhones. Facebook only has three and a half billion people. It's only, they're only getting like monthly active users.

So we're only getting to have, I mean, the internet's 6 billion. There's another 2 billion that aren't even on there yet. There's folks living in the jungle, right? So it is, it is an impossible task.

It's an immovable object meets an unstoppable force. What will win? Stalemate. Nothingness.

So I don't know, but I am pretty confident that that is needed. I feel pretty good about the fact that that's needed. So in the meantime, we're just tinkering around the edges, like making clothes and tech and objects and throwing a message in a bottle into the vast ocean of the internet and hoping it just like lands on the perfect shore with the perfect person.

Like it ain't going to happen. So no wonder you've got zero likes. So back to the original question, what do you do? Well, you know, the world's a weighing machine and intrinsic value essentially boils up to the surface.

So I think you just got to keep creating and fighting a good fight and you got to stop waiting for the audience. You can't do it for that reason. You have to, you got to just fall in love with the work and just create the thing as best as you can possibly create it.

Don't take any shortcuts, put it out there and then do another one and iterate and iterate and iterate Kaizen. And the more you do it, you got to get it out of your head. You got to put it into the real world.

Then you got to look at it and, and figure out what you don't like about it and what's wrong about it. Get some feedback from others. And then you got to do it again and again and again and again.

And you keep adding and subtracting and new techniques and capabilities and materials and technologies come online and you keep improving it. And you know, it might take a whole lifetime. Um, but what the hell else are you going to do with your time? Sit and watch TV for 50 years.

And then that's kind of a boring life. Sit on the beach, watch the sun go up and down over and over and over again, and never get up from your chair and kind of a boring life. Find a happy medium, whatever that is.

But what the hell else you're to do? You've watched all the content. You've seen it all. So you may as well make something unique, new and interesting.

And, you know, eventually I think it'll find its way to the right shore. Uh, and maybe you just get better at it over time, but yeah, I think filling out that profile would be cool. I mean, I wish it existed.

I'd use that to be the first place I'd go like, oh, you're going to just give me the thing I need. That's way better than an ad because it's a hundred percent purchase conversion rate. And then, oh, like I can put my thing out there and then the customers will like come to me and just buy it.

And that's cool. And then like, I can find the thing that I actually need very easily and then it works out and it's quality and it's great. That's cool.

The problem, I think, is like the low quality stuff. It's the trust factor. It's like this thing sucks or it doesn't do what it says it does.

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And so the claim doesn't meet the reality. And that's, I think, Steve Jobs' whole point is like, don't make shit products. It's like, make great products, make great services.

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And that's part of the iteration process, which only comes from continuing to keep going, which it comes from a love and comes from a deep internal energy for you to do that thing. And if it's there, then you just got to keep going. So we're going around in circles at this point.

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So I'm going to end it here. Hopefully that helps you. I don't know.

Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't, but I wish you the best.