I chose to be broke for a year

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
The biggest risk you have is spending your life trying to do a really good job at the wrong thing. Idiocrity is the real thing. For any person with high potential, because it will sap you, sap your will, sap your time, sap your resources, sap your energy, sap your belief in yourself.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:14)
This is Shaan Puri. He sold his company to Amazon and Twitch for millions, and he now runs one of the most successful business podcasts in the world with millions of listeners.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:23)
I know this because I spent 10 years doing things only for like, ooh, if this worked, it'd be amazing. The work has to be the win.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:31)
The win can't be some future hypothetical payoff. Because you enjoy it, you do it all the time. Because you do it all the time, you get really good at it. Because you get really good at it, you do get the results.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:39)
Right.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:39)
That's the flywheel.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
In this episode, we talk about what it takes to be successful, how to work smarter, not harder, and how to live a good life.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:47)
I think hard work is over. It's probably maybe the fourth or fifth most important variable. I think the very first one is.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:54)
I feel like I could rule the world.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:02)
All right. Today's a special episode because I'm the guest of today's episode. Normally, we have guests on and we ask them all about their life, their philosophies, how they work, how they did it, how they made it. But this time, I'm the guest because my former intern, Walter, created his own podcast. He used to work for me when he was, I don't know, 18, 19, 20 years old. He was in college and he's gone on to create a cool podcast and he asked me to come on and so I went on. I'm one of the first episodes of his thing and I watched it and I was like, this is actually a really good interview. And the reason why is because it's a lot of information about before we ever made any money. So, you know, how I was thinking when I was in my early 20s, the ups, the downs, the indecisions, the uncertainty of, do I go this way or this way and how I thought about it? I think it's going to help a lot of people, specifically people who are, you know, you haven't quite made it yet. Maybe you're young, maybe you just haven't, it hasn't all clicked for you yet. I think there's some very useful philosophies in here. So I hope you enjoy this, an episode where I got interviewed by my former intern, Walter.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:58)
You had a great life, seemingly. So why did you end up moving and what was that year of being strategically broke? Right.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:05)
Yeah, strategically broke. That's what I called it.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:07)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:08)
I think most people just call it unemployed, you know, why not? I put a luxury brand on it. So basically what happened is I graduated from college and I get a great job. I got a job paying me $120,000 a year to go work in a boring industry that I knew nothing about, didn't really care about, kind of stumbled into a job that I thought was too good of money to pass up.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:32)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:33)
So I go and I work for this guy and sure enough, I'm like pretty bored. Actually, I'm like, oh, you know what? Like, I can do this job, but I'm fairly bored. And it was a fork in the road because before I took that job, me and my friends had had this business idea. The idea was to create a sushi restaurant chain called Sabi Sushi. It was supposed to be the Chipotle of sushi. So the way you have Subway for sandwiches and Chipotle for burritos, the idea was we were going to do that for sushi. Okay. And we win this business plan competition. So on one hand, we get $25,000 of prize money that the three of us are going to live on. Or I could take this job for $120,000. So I took the job within a month. I'm like, this is lame. I just looked at my life and I was like, this is I made a lame choice. Yeah. The good thing about me is I don't really make great decisions, but I make great reversals of decisions. Once I realized that I have made the wrong decision, I'm not one to linger in it. Right. Mostly because I just can't like tolerate it anymore. Like if I was dating somebody, I remember I was dating this girl and realized like, all right, she ain't the one.