The Market Is Crashing. Here’s What We’re Doing About It…

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, can we talk about the stock market going down? Because I had to yell at a bunch of people. So basically, the market's dropped what? 5% this week. And in our little circle jerk world, it felt like the world was ending.

**Shaan Puri** (0:23)
So I guess the Dow had its worst day in two years.
SP500 is down about 5% so far this week as of time of recording. And I think the tech stocks did a bit worse. So NVIDIA is down 12%. Google, a couple of the tech stocks, which is more maybe where we are at in a bubble, did worse. They gave back a lot of the gains that they've been having so far this year. And so it was a bad day for the markets. And by the way, I wake up, I wake up, and I think some people on the East Coast, you're on the East Coast, a couple of people in the group chat on the East Coast, and it either says one of two things. It says, the world is ending with four or five likes on it in our group chat, or it says, we're going to Valhalla, boys, and it has four or five likes on it every morning. And I really, I don't even check the market. I just look at that text and I know directionally is the arrow up or down. But it kind of gets to you that way of thinking.

**Sam Parr** (1:15)
It bothers me. I had to yell at my partner, Joe, because he just calls me, are you freaking out about this? I'm like, freaking out about what? He's like, the markets are just going down like crazy. Should we sell everything? What do we do? My reaction was just like, this is expected. If you just buy index funds like I do, there are ups and downs, but in general over five, 10, 20-year periods, you're expected to go up and down. He just freaked.
It made me angry. It made me angry because I was like, I wasn't stressing, but now I am, and this is not healthy, and that's what happened.

**Shaan Puri** (1:50)
Okay, so I had a similar experience. Ben calls me. I'm on vacation, so Ben calls me and he's like, dude, what are your thoughts on the market? First of all, are we only going to do calls when the market crashes about the market? It's not a topic we normally discuss. Okay, so first of all, I have no thoughts. It reminds me of that skit back in the Dave Chappelle skit where it was like, what does Ja Rule think? What's Ja have to say about this event?

**Sam Parr** (2:18)
We have to get Ja on the line.

**Shaan Puri** (2:20)
Yeah, let's get Ja on the line. Let's talk about the mark. Second thing, he was like, he goes, yeah, we should probably do another thing. But I did think maybe we should do XYZ. He laid out some new plan. The funny thing is, I have been in a mode where I've understood that one of the most powerful things you could do is take a simple idea very seriously.
I'm actually going to do a whole episode on this, taking a simple idea seriously. But in general, picking a few things that matter and then just simply doing them as well as possible and reinforcing it. So I actually do a thing which is, I wrote out for the year, I said, here's the three big things, big shifts, I always call it like three shifts I'm making this year. I'm making this shift, this shift and this shift. Those are the three things that need to change in my life. The rest of the things are going great. I don't need to talk about the things that are going great. And every single week, I write down that shift again in our Slack, I retype the exact sentence, and then I say what I'm doing today and how that ties to that shift. And if I am going to do something today that doesn't tie to that shift, I just simply don't do it or with very rare exceptions to it. So I've been doing this for a while now. And I told Ben, I was like, Ben, so remember that thing we've been saying over and over again, but like what we're doing this year, why we're doing it, why it's the right plan. Did we need to add a disclaimer, which was unless the stock market crashes and then we're just going to throw all the shit out the window and suddenly change our decision-making about all the things that we're doing. And it sounds ludicrous to say it like that, but that's where is my mind went in the moment. And I don't blame him because my mind used to go there too. And I've developed a set of rules for myself through making horrible, expensive mistakes, which is fundamentally when markets crash, just I have to assess like, A, is the wolf at the door? Like, do I actually have an existential crisis? If so, okay, I'll shift my attention to this and change. But if that's the case, it's because I somehow over levered or really stretched myself too thin or like I've made a huge bet that I should have never made in the first place. So is the wolf at the door? No. Okay, if the wolf is not at the door, simply do not react. Just do nothing for 30 to 90 days and then see where you land. Hey, real quick. One of the cool parts about what we're doing is that people have reached out and told me that they've built actual million dollar businesses, made their first million off an idea they heard on the show. That is crazy. That's wild. That's why we want to do the show. And we want to see more of that. One of the questions we get asked over and over again is, is there some kind of idea database or spreadsheet where we list out all the different business ideas that we've talked about? Well, the answer is finally yes. The fine folks at HubSpot have dug through the archive and pulled out 50 plus business ideas and put them into a business idea database. It's totally free. Go to clickhubspot.com/mff and get the database for you. All right, now back to the show.