1 Big Idea
This week I’ve been thinking about how easily we fall into the trap of chasing goals that don’t truly belong to us.
When I reflect on some of the goals I’ve set myself over the last few years, I realise many of them sound pretty impressive and look great on paper – things like hitting 100,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel or chasing some huge revenue goal for my business.
But, I never stopped to ask if they really mattered to me.
What I’ve come to realise is that beneath the surface, a lot of those goals weren’t actually mine. They were borrowed.
Picked up from the people I follow, the friends I surround myself with, and the version of success I thought I was supposed to pursue.
That’s the subtle danger of mimetic desire – wanting things not because we genuinely care about them, but because they’re what we’ve been told matter. We see others chasing them, celebrating them, being rewarded for them and without realising it, we start to believe they should matter to us too.
It happens all the time:
- You see someone scaling a business and suddenly you feel behind.
- You watch a friend buy a house and suddenly you start questioning your own pace.
- You scroll past someone running a marathon and suddenly you feel like your daily workout isn’t enough.
Without realising it, your internal compass gets hijacked.
You stop measuring progress by what feels meaningful to you, and start measuring it against what seems impressive to everyone else.
And the consequence aren’t small.
Because even if you win the game, it doesn’t feel like a win if you were playing someone else’s game. That’s what makes mimetic desire so dangerous.
It doesn’t just lead you astray, but it convinces you that you’re on the right track. Until one day you arrive somewhere you never really wanted to be.
Naval once said, “the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.” But that only works if you’ve done the hard work of figuring out what you actually want in the first place.
That’s the part most people skip.
We optimise for productivity. For speed. For volume. But we rarely optimise for clarity.
The takeaway here is that high performance isn’t just about doing more. It’s about doing what matters.
And nothing matters more than building a life that’s actually yours.
3 Weekly Lessons
#1 Most People Are Playing a Game They Don’t Understand
In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse makes the interesting point that most of us play life like it’s a finite game – chasing short-term wins, arbitrary titles, and external validation. But the real game is infinite: the goal isn’t to win, but to keep playing and to keep growing. Most people never realise this. This is why so many of us spend our time playing to look good, not to get good.
#2 Your Environment Shapes Your Ambition
Nearly every high performer owes a huge chunk of their success to timing, geography, or culture. We like to pretend it’s all hustle and willpower, but often it’s just proximity. If you want to grow faster then, upgrade your environment. Put yourself in rooms that demand more from you. Align your ambition with the people you spend the most time around. It’s so hard to dream big if you’re constantly surrounded by small thinking.
#3 Information Isn’t the Bottleneck, Identity Is
We live in a world drowning in information. You can literally just Google your way to any skill or insight. But most people don’t change. And this isn’t because they don’t know how, but because it clashes with who they believe they are. The point is, change doesn’t happen when you know what to do. It happens when you believe you’re the kind of person who does it. So, if you want to improve your actions, upgrade your identity.
5 Things Worth Your Time
A collection of links and other stuff I think are worth sharing.
◾️ The Tail End by Tim Urban: A visual wake-up call that helps you rethink what really matters in the time you have left.
◾️ Roll the Dice: I’ve been really enjoying Charles Burkowski’s poetry this week, especially the one I’ve linked here called ‘Roll the Dice’. This hits especially hard if you’ve been half-committing to something that actually matters to you.
◾️ The Most Important Thing I Do Each Week: My latest YouTube video. It’s all about my weekly reset, which has helped me to save thousands of hours of wasted effort over the last few years.
◾️ The 5 Types of Wealth: A great framework for redefining what ‘rich’ means. According to Sahil, wealth comes in five forms: time, money, relationships, health, and purpose.
◾️ A lesson in self-kindness from Rogan & Naval: If you’ve been giving yourself a hard time recently, I think this is well worth a watch.