“What makes homo sapiens the dominant force on the planet for the last 150,000 years is the brain.” – Tai Lopez
What would you call a man who spent his teenage years in a mobile home park, lived with the Amish for 2.5 years as an experiment, was a professional tango dancer, dated a Brazilian model, was a self-made millionaire in his 20s, has authored several books and today attends Warren Buffet’s annual Berkshire meeting? You’d call him Tai Lopez.
An aspiring Renaissance Man, Tai has excelled at a variety of endeavors and has learned as much as possible along the way. In this episode we talk about a host of topics including how to earn and deserve what you really want in life, why the 4 Hour Work Week is a myth that won’t make you happy, why you should go straight to the top when seeking counsel and why the more you learn, the more you’ll earn…and loads of other valuable content.
More About This Show:
Tai is clearly a man with a passion and zest for living. He has what most of us would consider the “good life”: he’s healthy, wealthy and dates beautiful women. And he’s learned what it takes to earn all of those things: he says you have to deserve it and you have to work for it…but it is yours for the taking when you do.
He believes books like Tim Ferriss’ “Four Hour Work Week” give us the mythical notion that we only have to work four hours a week and we’ll make $10k a month in passive income. Once we do that, we can go out and do the things we love to do, like learn the art of the tango in Argentina. Tai disagrees, he doesn’t believe financial success happens by only working four hours a week, nor can we find real happiness that way.
He believes there are three types of happiness: the hedonic life or a life built around the pursuit of pleasure (which is the category most people pursue after reading “The Four Hour Work Week”), the authentic life and the meaningful life. It’s in the last one that we find the most joy and the most fulfillment; we reach this state by aligning our work and our love. So loving what we do is key.
Another contributing factor to our happiness is experimenting. To that end, he spent 2.5 years living in an Amish community as an experiment. He wondered what it would be like to live without a material focus and he knew living with the Amish would be the ideal setting to conduct his experiment.
The finer details of this show include:
- Associative Cognitive Bias: what is it and how does it work?
- Why he loves Ray Croc of McDonald’s story.
- How fear impacts our brain and how to annihilate it.
- The hereretical factors that influence women’s attraction.
- What is selective proceptivity and why should you care?
- And so much more!
Coming from a very humble background, Tai has long been fascinated by people who have done great things with their lives. He’s made it a habit to study these people, and he has a few practical tips he’s learned along the way.
The first tip he gave was the 1/10th rule. He says whoever you copy and surround yourself with and idolize, at best you’ll do 1/10th of what they do. In other words, if you want to learn how to earn money and you copy, study and idolize people who have made money you’re going to earn 1/10th of what they earned. So you have a choice: copy, study and idolize people making $500,000 and you’ll earn $50,000 OR copy, study and idolize people who earn $300 billion and earn $30 billion. It’s up to you.
The other tip he has is the 33% rule. It goes like this: spend 33% of your time with people below you, mentor others. Then spend 33% of your time with people at your level, friends, etc. Spend the remaining 33% of your time with people above you, people you are uncomfortable being around because they are so much further ahead than you are. These are the people who are 10-20 years ahead of you. Most people don’t do this last one and it’s critical to growing, learning and earning more.
His final tip is to learn more so you earn more. He has rich friends and he has poor friends, he never lets friends go just because they aren’t at his same level. He says the difference he sees between his rich friends and his poor friends is that his rich friends are constantly learning. Invest your time and your energy in learning more and getting better at what you do in life.
All three of these tips highlight the importance of going straight to the top when you’re seeking advice or you want to learn something. Tai says to be humble enough to listen and learn from everyone, because ultimately everyone has something to teach you. But in the end, heed the advice that feels uncomfortable to you: that is how you’ll know it’s truth.
Tai goes on to say if you’re going to learn from the best and heed their advice, you have to go after it. Bill Gates isn’t going to send you a Facebook message and spoon feed you what he knows. You have to be the one to pursue his knowledge and his advice. You’re the king of the jungle so go after it!
Having Tai on the show was informative and insightful; he has much to share on so many topics. I hope you enjoy listening in and thank you for joining us.
Resources from this episode:
Grinding It Out, Ray Croc
Civilization and Its Discontents, Dr. Sigmund Freud
Made in America, Sam Walton
You’ll also like:
