I’m desperate for people to start defining their hopes, dreams, wants, and needs on their terms, not on what I say. I don’t care if you want to hustle 18 hours a day. I really don’t. I don’t care if you want to buy the New York Jets. I don’t care what you want or need. You need to care about what you want and need.
No matter what it is, I want you to win.
You really can’t worry about what I’m saying. You can’t worry about the flavor of the month. Maybe I’m your flavor of the month right now. Maybe the consistent flavor of your life is your mom’s point of view, or your older brother who’s guided you with good wisdom, but wants you to be a lawyer, and you don’t want to be a lawyer. You want to be a street artist. You want to take the chance of being an entrepreneur, or the reverse, or something else.
So many of you are ultimately crippled by fear; by what other people think of you. You’re not defining your wants and needs because you’re not in control. You’ve let the world, and your mom, and the media, define who you are. You have to let go and just do. Taste life, entrepreneurship, hustle, school, sports, being a vlogger, or writing about food. I want you to try it all! Understand yourself and define what you want, enjoy, and need.
Nobody preaches and loves entrepreneurship more than me, but I think you see me all of the time talking about self awareness, and reverse engineering what you really want. This is clearly the golden era for entrepreneurship. Nowadays people come up to me in the streets and ask for selfies. This will go away. It may not go away for me, but it’s gonna go away. Entrepreneurship, just like being a rap artist, or a baseball player, or a heavyweight boxer 50 years ago, is having its moment.
But my advice is to do you. Not everyone has to be an entrepreneur. In fact, not everyone should! I’ve been a “businessman” my whole life. I started selling from a very young age. My friends, my teachers, and the entire world, used to think entrepreneurship was a scam. They used to tell me that I was still “figuring myself out.” Well, I’ve figured myself out. Entrepreneurship is in my DNA. It’s what I do.
I promise you nobody cares who the heavyweight champion of the world is right now. Nobody cares who’s an active astronaut, but they sure did in 1969, and in 1951 for the heavyweight champ, or, you know … Things just change. And they will always change, and right now it’s entrepreneurship, but at some point, this too will pass.
So, the advice I have is to find what your north star is; to understand yourself, and to understand what your work/life balance and ambitions are; what your financial ambitions are;what your life challenges are; the problems that you want to try and solve; and, the mountains that you want to climb while you’re here. You can’t listen to anyone else. You need to listen to yourself, and do you.
Do you really need the money? Do you really need the fame? A lot of that is just a byproduct of me doing. If someone told me 18 years ago that entrepreneurship would have me flying all over the world and taking selfies with fans, I would have laughed. I could care less about the money, or the watch, or the private plane. I want legacy. I want impact. I just want to play the game.
Obviously I don’t make all of these articles and videos for you to be like me. I don’t think anybody should be like me. And of course there are enormous amounts of pressures and sacrifices that I recognize that are just not healthy or valuable for anybody else, but it’s also not healthy or valuable to me, to do some of the things that you want me to do. I have to do me. It’s not fun for me to work 9 to 5. This article is simply a call to action for everybody to recognize that we have to stop judging everybody else.
We have to be empathetic to each other’s wants and needs.
I’m not judging you! I’m creating content for you to use as a barometer to figure out what you like and what you don’t like. I’m trying to provide value through my words, my actions, and my ideas. My hope is to help people amplify their own worlds. That’s it. That’s the clarification. I don’t want people to be like me. I don’t want people to “do me.” I want people to be themselves, and they have to start with understanding themselves, and not trying to be like me at this moment, or that person the next moment, or that person the next moment. The people that win are in tune with themselves. They’ve figured themselves out. Have you?
