47

“The tired sunsets and the tired people it takes a lifetime to die and no time at all.” - Charles Bukowski

That went fast and it’s moving faster. This change in our perceptive of the speed of time begins in our 30’s, and is explained by how memories form and also how we move through time. If you’re a little kid, an hour is a significant chunk of your life. As you get older, each moment is a relatively smaller portion of lived experience. It’s spooky to close your eyes, wake up, and it’s Christmas again. A curtain closed. Another opened. A new act. Oh well. Enough emo.

Beginning at 37 I’d reflect on life, write a few bullet points. Articles entitled, “40 Lessons I learned at 40” are cocaine for going viral. As I’ve gotten older, less is more.

47.

“The more I learn the less I use but to be able to use less you have learn more.” - JJM

A Brazilian Jiu Jitsu expert, Jean Jacques Machado, said in an interview that, “The more I learn the less I use but to be able to use less you have learn more.” Try explaining that one to a 20-something man. He’d tell you it doesn’t make any sense. It’s too Zen riddle or Eastern mysticism. Let me decode it for the younger bros.

You can’t stop learning. As cliche as that sounds now, you’ll see that as you get older, people you know freeze in time. They’ll want to to talk about high school times or college or they’ll only follow current gossip. Their worldview never updates. The times pass them by because they haven’t continued learning. Never stop reading.

Regardless of how much you learn, you’ll find that the basic principles are where you return to. In BJJ, they’ll talk about base or posture. You learn the new moves to know how to not lose base or posture. More is less and less is more.

I’ve done everything from legal scholarship to blogs books to films to media to politics to reinvented how people used social media to e-commerce to investing to where I am now. Gorilla Mindset was a best-selling book. Hoaxed was a best-selling film. I’ve had multiple exits (a polite way of saying you’ve done OK in business). My Tim Walz stolen valor coverage was the most significant political reporting of the last election cycle. Not to mention the Jeffrey Epstein files. I’m always doing something different, while being mindful of the same underlying and unifying principles.

Principles?

Above them all is moral courage. That’s from Aristotle. Instead of reading midwit slop about Stoicism, you’d be better off studying the virtue ethics tradition as articulated in The Nicomachean Ethics. Moral courage is understood as doing what’s right when that’s unpopular, although it also is a reminder to keep your head cool when business is tough or you’re getting head.

As the poem If by Rudyard Kipling says, in a much more flowery way, stay the course when others won’t and then you’ll be a man. For me moral courage meant supporting Trump in 2015, which cost me millions of dollars in lost business, to opposing him during his first term when he didn’t stay the course. And then it meant whipping support for him in 2024. Some call me disloyal. They don’t understand anything. They don’t have a worldview. Cry more.

Courage alone doesn’t mean much if you don’t have a current worldview. That makes you a mercenary. You’ll fight for its own sake. The behavior of a rabid animal.

Physical courage also remains in short supply. I often say, and mean it, that men who write about politics should be able to fight. Otherwise their opinion is irrelevant. Goobers claim this is a “logical fallacy” or “ad hominem.” Don’t care, I’m right.

You need a physical body capable of physical feats or else your moral courage will be irrelevant when you or your loved ones or even an innocent bystander are faced with true danger. You’ll be the fool who says, “Live to fight another day,” as a way to rationalize cowardice.

“Money is like oxygen, you can’t live without it.” My Business Law professor said this on day 1. My relationship with money will always be complicated. From not having enough and not knowing how to manage it, to selling assets too soon out of a mistaken desire to “rebalance your portfolio,” to having too much and feeling guilty about that because so many others are suffering.

In your own life, you need to figure out how to make as much money as possible. Money is its own language and you need to learn it. Cash flow positive. EBITDA. Gross and net margins. Cost of goods sold. Return on Ad Spend. Post-money valuation. Cost-segregation study. Accelerated depreciation. Full-time real estate professional wife and flow through losses. Buyout and earnout. Long term capital gains. QSBS. Living trust. Irrevocable trust. Family foundation. Compound gains. Buy borrow die.

That subject goes far beyond the scope of this article. Go read The Hard Things About Hard Things and that’ll bring you down a useful rabbit hole. Maybe I’ll do a full article on Money, if the people demand it.

Charity.

If you end up like me, wondering why God is unjust because others have so little, you can always donate to charity. I personally offset my indulgences for cigars and vacations with an equal amount being donated to other causes. My favorites are VETS, which helps suicidal and troubled people and their wives get treatment. Operation Smile, which fixes cleft palates, and Toys-For-Tots.

Even when I didn’t have much cash, I donated. In my experience, it comes back to you and then some if you donate with a pure heart and not with an eye for ROI. There have been times where I wrote a check, and a day later something monumental lands on my lap. That’s not why you give. It’s nice when it works out that way though.

You can live many lives in one.

10 years ago I was living abroad and semi-retired. Rolling through the world without a care in the world and plenty of pocket change. It would be fair to say my life was one of extended adolescence. I didn’t give much thought to whether my writing was glib, offensive, or shocking, and if anything, that was what I leaned into. Or if the world was becoming a better place as a result of my existence.

It’s a bit embarrassing to say I didn’t grow up until a few years ago, and it’s often a pathetic show of weakness to say, “I’m a different person.” Not what is going on here. Let people say what they will. They are on their own path.

10 years later I have a nearly unrecognizable life. Wife, 4 kids, 2 cats, 1 dog, a rolling cast of characters as house guests, a social club, two films in production, a lot of friends doing interesting things in business art and politics, and a head full of grey hairs. Some would even say I’ve had significant culture impact. None of this was on the agenda when I was a chubby poor kid growing up in less than ideal circumstances.

This is more a reflection on how your life can change, if you want it to, if you let it, if you make it happen.

Thousands of choices to win, one bad choice and you lose.

“It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute.” ― Will Rogers

Warren Buffett has some useful advice, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”

If you’re a young man in a hurry, which you should be because life moves on with or without you, you may find yourself about to make an ethically questionable choice. Don’t do it. One bad choice can blow up your life. It takes thousands of choices over years and decades to arrive to where you need to be.

Drugs.

I was flying home from a business trip with wifi off. About to land. “Chris died.” A friend of ours had a drug problem. We all tried to help him. He was found on the floor with green puke in his mouth.

Attending his funeral was heartbreaking, not because Chris was dead. That was inevitable. It was his 8 year old daughter’s presence that make me look away. She had brought drawings of happy memories of her an her dad.

If you’re on drugs, get clean. Not for your own sake. You’re going to leave tragedy behind you.

Your friends and parents are going to die before you’re ready for it.

Jesse Itzler is one of the only people I read for “life stuff.” He’s not out to reach into your pocket, he’s upbeat, a family man, and he takes life seriously. (Living life with seriousness does not mean acting like Mr. Self Important, one of my sins to be sure.)

He has a bit where he’ll ask you: How old is your dad and mom? You say 70. Then he asks how often you see them. For most of us, it’s once or twice a year, if that.

Jess says, “You don’t have 10 years left with them. You have 20 visits.”

The same is true of your friends. You don’t have as much time left with them as you imagine.

Health.

Thematically I hope you get the point. You don’t have until tomorrow or New Year’s Day to start. Just get going today. Here’s one article you can start with.

Legacy.

Putting your name on a building is silly egotism. Legacy is less about how you’re going to be remembered (you probably won’t be thought of much at all once you’re gone) and more about the impact you leave here.

Legacy is the metaphor from The Road of carrying the light. You have a divine spark within. Maybe you’ve let the light dim because of trauma or neglect.

You can carry a torch or humanity to lead others while you’re here, and this work will carry on after you’ve left.

And then in the end, there is Judgment.