🟢 What's BETTER than more profit?

and better than less work? Hint: 💡🎯🔥🏔💃🔬🔭🧠

(4.5 min read)

Ever since I watched TV/movie producer Brian Glazer tell Graham Bensinger about how “curiosity conversations” changed his life, I’ve been wondering what those could be like.

I used to avoid meetings at all costs.

Now, I’ve set aside 1 day a week to meet new people and go where the wind blows us.

Sample topics I've enjoyed talking with people about:

🟢 Their relationship with work

🟢 Taking leaps / reinventing one's career

🟢 Solopreneurship

🟢 Their predictions for the future (longevity, AI, universal basic income, post-money society, etc)

🟢 Other topics I've mentioned at ryancwalsh.com.

(What are YOU excited to talk about?)

Book a no-agenda curiosity conversation with me! 😊

Schedule at https://cal.com/ryan-walsh/30min (free):

Just for fun. (I have nothing to sell you.)

---

Fuck it.

I’m going to continue to get weird with you here.

You might unsubscribe because these thoughts might be trippy, confusing, or boring or seem off-topic.

But I want to be true to myself. Plus I told you I’d share openly. So here we go.

As I’ve mentioned for a while, I’d like to rename this newsletter from “Work Less, Profit More” to something else.¹

With the current name, it looks like all I care about is Leverage.

Squeezing more profit out of minimal effort.

(I do love leverage, as I mentioned in that recent post.)

I’ll tell you what I care even more about below.

But first, let’s dissect “Work Less, Profit More” and who it attracts.

By design, it does NOT attract entrepreneurs who seek world domination and are willing to work 100-hr weeks and sleep on factory floors like Elon Musk.

Or other people in favor of “hustle and grind” culture.

Who say “If you don’t have what you want, it’s because you don’t have a strong enough work ethic.”

So that’s good.

I’m repelling those people. Alex Hormozi can have them.

I’m done with hustling for external yard sticks.

I regret how hard I worked in high school, Princeton, my 4 years at Bridgewater, and even since then.

Working for money or status is a waste.

Both parts of the newsletter name (“Work less” and “Profit more”) are oversimplifications that can be improved.

A newsletter name that fits me better will attract subscribers close friends.

There’s a difference.

Work

“Work” is a nebulous term.

Some people use it to mean “the opposite of play”.

Or “doing what you don’t want to do”.

But it’s tricky.

For example:

Work in fitness

Fitness requires stressing muscles (and then letting them recover).

Even people like me who don’t find joy in lifting weights (yet? 😉) can appreciate the importance of this “work”.

Instead of trying to eliminate it from our lives, we try to figure out ways to increase it (but not overdo it).

Work in relationships

Relationships are similar.

If you only interacted with clones of yourself, echoing your own thoughts and always agreeing, you’d be bored to death.

Instead, we crave tension. Clashes of preferences. New ideas.

The resolution of this conflict between you and others is what makes relationships meaningful and beautiful.

That is work too.

We don’t want less of it.

Work in career

What about work in one’s career?

See below.

Profit

Talking too much about profit feels like a mistake.

Profit only matters when you don’t have enough.

(fair point)

And guess what.

A) “Enough” is a mind-twisting question that we should all focus on before accidentally overstating the importance of money

B) We’re fast approaching a post-money society anyway.

We will evolve beyond capitalism within the next 40 years, maybe sooner.

Longevity technology will enable me to live many decades (if not centuries) beyond that.

As “Future

Ryan Walsh 🟢

”, I ask myself:

“If life is LONG, and if money is obsolete for most of it, what would you like to make of your life?”

Whoa. 🌀😵

I never thought life was about money, but I hadn’t gone so far as to consider completely removing the concept of money from life.

Let’s return to the question of whether “work” can be desirable in your career, as it is within fitness and in relationships.

(But now we’ll omit the concept of money. If there is any value to work, it will need to be something else.)

---

The point of a song isn’t its finale.

The point of dancing isn’t landing on a mark.

The point of travel isn’t the destination.

The point of a game isn’t the trophy.

---

The point of your career won’t be money.

What will you create just because you enjoy either the beauty or usefulness of the final product or because you relish the process of its creation?

Do your days light you up?

These questions matter so much.

And they’re timeless.

What I care about even more than leverage is alignment.

Maybe life is like golf, and you want to smack the ball in the right spot on the club because if you’re off even a fraction of a degree, your outcome will be way off.

But aiming for alignment isn’t even the best we can do.

Alignment sounds too much like an engineering problem.

What we really want is aliveness.

Are your challenges and struggles ones that feel meaningful to you?

So then we set out to carefully choose the challenges that matter to us.

But it gets trippier.

Consider 2 of my favorite videos ever.

Illustrations of short clips from Alan Watts lectures.

4 min:

Watts reminds us that we’re always moving the goalposts.

As children, we strive to get good grades to get into better schools to get a good job to earn a good retirement, etc.

As we age, we scoff “THIS is where I arrived?!”

But the point was never about arriving.

The point is the singing, dancing, playing along the way.

Paying attention. Savoring. Experiencing.

Let’s keep this in mind more.

Even in a post-money society, it would be a mistake to choose a challenge where we’re again tricking ourselves and focusing too much on the outcome of an accomplishment.

If you always announce “I will be satisfied when ______”, then you will never be satisfied.

What struggle can you enjoy in itself?

Let’s wrap up with one more mind-scramble from Watts.

3.5 min:

Long before Nick Bostrom’s famous 2003 Simulation hypothesis² about how unlikely it is that we live in “base reality”, Alan Watts had already declared something similar:

You’re a god who temporarily tricked itself into forgetting you’re a god.

You’ll eventually “wake up” as your larger self in base reality and remember that this life experience was all a game that you designed.

If that’s true, then what?

One possible answer is just:

Pay attention.

That was my takeaway from one of my favorite movies, too.

“About Time” movie trailer (Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams, Bill Nighy):

And a 2-min thought experiment from Elle Cordova that feels similar:

How about you?

If not “Savor” or “Play” or “Pay attention”, how would you recommend approaching life?

I’m so curious about everyone’s perspectives.

---

🕙 What we learned in recent posts:

🟢 Unleash your freedom-first business using The 6 Points of Leverage

🟢 9,824 subscribers in 281 days

🟢 Most I ever cried in public

🟢 $28,600 per hour from his porch

🟢 [See all posts]

---

👀 Caught my eye this week:

Watch the end of this conversation between Peter Diamandis and Emad Mostaque, who recently stepped down as CEO of Stability AI.

Both of them are so smart, I tend to agree with Mostaque that Microsoft and OpenAI are doing some shady stuff in an irresponsible race towards AGI, which could accidentally destroy the world.

Sam Altman of OpenAI is super smart too, but he also strikes me as power-hungry.

Paul Graham and others (including Sam’s own estranged sister) have called him the most power-hungry person of our generation.

That kind of mindset blinds people.

Mostaque seems the opposite, which is refreshing.

I’m rooting for global cooperation in the development of decentralized Super AI.

(4.5 min clip from 1h13m13s to 1h17m51s)

By the way, my highest-reach LinkedIn post ever was about Emad Mostaque.

---

All of my posts are still 100% free.

I’m not a fan of paywalls, so I’d love to avoid gating my posts.

Click the ❤️ button if you like that they’re free.

Connecting with more people like you will be fuel enough! 😊

1. I don’t have a new name in mind yet and am taking suggestions.

2. That’s around the time when I got to have a small group dinner with Bostrom and Peter Singer 🤯