My First Million - Sam and Shaan's New Year's Resolutions

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@theSamParr) discuss why Sam makes new year's resolutions, why Shaan doesn't, and what they're focusing on this year.  _____ * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

I would say that the last 24 months of yours have been the best ever. Yeah, they've been dope. Can't, can't lie. And that's great. And I share that because, you know, it's okay for things to be good. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off.

On a road, let's travel, never looking back. Where do you want to start? You want to start with some New Year's Eve stuff? And then we go from there? Yeah. All right. So it looks like you do resolutions or something like that. So tell me.

I posted that in here. I don't, I don't want to make. mention all the numbers, but are you a, a serial resoluter? Like, do you do this every year or no? Yeah. I do it every, so yeah, I do it every year. And I, so basically I have it into a few categories. It's body, money, mind, adventure, random. And where'd you get it from? That doesn't seem like you. That seems like you got that from somebody. I made that up. Oh, you did. Okay. All right. I like that. Why? I thought like, I don't know, like, remit, say, at the year. So I thought like, that seems this, like, very frameworked out. I feel like you would borrow that. No, that's mine. That's mine.

And the reason I keep that, I keep that thing at the top of my, of all my notes. So yeah, I'm always using that. So yeah, yeah, I hit it. And I usually always hit. So those again were body, money, mind, adventure, and random. Is that right? Yeah. All right.

So walk me through. And by the way, do you usually hit these? Because I think there's this famous thing like January 18th is international quitters day. Because that's how long most resolutions last about 18th, days or something like that. It's like 28th or 18th, 20th, 21st, something like that. that. Most people don't even make it three weeks. And that's why, you know, resolutions are a little bit, there's something, there's something underneath it that's a crumbling foundation. But you seem like an achiever who actually, I hit all. I don't hit all them. I hit 70%, 75%.

I hit most of them. Like this year, I wanted to do some athletic stuff, but I got hurt. And so getting hurt was the only reason why I wasn't able to get it done. But other than that, yeah, I'll get them done. So I'll say them. So body, 12% body fat, 20 minute 5K, 35 inch introvert. And then my first real boxing match. Money, I wouldn't hit a certain amount, just an index funds. I want to invest a certain amount via my syndicate. I want to make $1 outside of my main core competency. And I want to understand my spending. Dude, I struggle to track how much I spend each month. And I want to figure that out. Do you struggle with that? I don't struggle with that, I've just learned the value of bookkeeping in this past year. Like now that my business life is a lot

more complex. Because it used to be all in on one startup. And we had somebody who did payroll books, manage the books, all that. And then it was like, okay, then I've had a job before and we have a job. You just get your W2 and that's it. You go on your way. And now that I have like multiple businesses and things like this, I'm like, fuck, a bookkeeper is like actually one of the most critical hires because it tells you about your spending and what's money in, money out.

But more importantly, it's like prevention rather than the cure. You prevent having problems when it comes to taxis in our cash flow planning because you're on top of things rather than trying to reconcile shit at the last minute. So it's, yes, I agree with all that. It's just hard for personal stuff because it's hard for a bunch of reasons. So I got to figure that out. And then for mind, I want to pick one thing to focus on. I got to figure out a little bit focused. I tend to read a lot, but often I read stuff just to make to improve my life. But really, I just, I want to read for fun a lot more than I have. I want to get become far more comfortable with money. I think I've got a pretty unhealthy relationship with how I view money. I have somewhat of a scarcity mindset. And I want to focus more on. on creating a schedule. I've been real loose with my schedule lately. And then finally have more fun. I don't think I have enough fun and I need to lighten up for some things.

After I do these 15 goals and tasks, I will have more fun. I'm pretty like uptight. And then finally, adventure. All right. So I want to go to a self-defense gun class. I'm going to take a motorcycle trip in two weeks. I want to go hunting for the first time. I want to camp more.

And I want to take a rally car class. That's what I want to do. Those are good. I like that you have these two categories, adventure at random. I don't think most people have adventures that they want to to go on and random in their life, which is... They should. I think it's a miss.

Yeah, if you don't. So my random one is I've got a really bad tattoo on my upper thigh. I want to get covered up. It's a homemade tattoo. And depending on which way you look at it, it either says wow or mom. Is your mom flattered by that? No, of course not. Dude, it's fucking awful.

It's the worst. Okay. So what do you want to talk about with this? So where do you want to go with this? What is yours? So I don't do resolutions for two reasons. One is if I decide that I want something, I just immediately start to pursue it. So what that means is by the time January first rolls around, I don't have like un-unstarted adventures that I need to like, you know, decide on.

Because like if I, if it was December 14th and I was like, I really need to lose weight, I would start December 14th. I might not like finish the goal or whatever, but like I just start goals as soon as the like I kind of. like I kind of have that mindset of inspiration is perishable. It expires. You know, inspiration's like an avocado. And so, you know,

you want to, you want to strike while the avocado is still green. And so that's, that's the first reason I don't do resolutions. The second is they frankly didn't work well very well for me. So when I did do them, I was more like the January 18th, Quitters Day guy.

And I wasn't great at sticking to them. And so I was like, well, this is a stupid system. So the system that actually works for me is two things. I do an end of the year reflection. So I, I basically just go through these five categories, similar to yours.

Yeah. I have this life dashboard that I do. It's basically health, you know, one to five, where am I at? Wealth, one to five, where do I feel? Play. So that's kind of like your adventure. So how much fun am I having? How much am I enjoying my day to day?

And you just rank these? I don't rank these. I have a one to five scale. One being I'm totally dissatisfied with this area of my life. Five being I'm so proud of where I am in this area of my life. Where would I rank it? So like for many years, if I was like really out of shape, my health was just perpetually like a two out of five. I was like, well, I don't have a fucking disease.

So it's not a one. But I'm not proud of where I'm at with this. And so it was like a two, two, two. And now it's like a four because I'm really proud that I've switched my habits up. And so, you know, I just do a reflection because what I've found is you just, it's like what gets measured gets managed type of thing. It's like if just by shining a light on this area of my life, I ended up with way more clarity about what are my, what are my, what are my, what are my, what are my, what, doing? What important things am I neglecting? What unimportant things have I been over-optimizing? And just being aware of it is like the first step. And I try to be just, if I try to focus on the awareness,

rather than coming up with a solution and a fix right away. So that's the first part. That's the first exercise I do. So all right. So what, what were the rankings this year? Okay. So I'll go through. And I did this last year. So the first thing is I look at the change. So I try to see, okay, how much has changed between last, last year or this year. So health is now at a four. Work is at a four and a half out of five. So that's almost perpetually my always my highest ranking one is work. Play is now at a four and a half. Also, kids made it a lot more fun and working out with like friends every single day

made it more fun. So those are like a big boost to the play because kids just make you be silly. Like you can't just be, you can't be serious around kids. Like they're bored. So you have to be a goofball or at least that's for me. I have to be a goofball. And in doing so, I'm just having actually more fun myself. I'm doing it for them, but then really I get the benefit.

The last two categories are love. So, you know, relationship with wife, with, you know, my mom, my sister, stuff like that. And then the last one is self-respect. And so self-respect is the highest it's ever been. It's a four and a half now. So this is the, honestly, of my life dashboard, this is the highest it's ever been. So, you know, this would be like a peak year, I guess I just had for, for, you know, as long as I've been doing this, which is about five years or so. That's crazy.

What was the lowest? A lowest was love because I really, like. Like me and my wife are just like not spending much time together because it's like she has one kid and I have the other kid or if she has both kids, I'm like, great, I'm going to get some work done. And then same thing. If I have both the kids, she's like, great, I'm going to go shower for the first time in two days. Like we just are not hanging out much. And then all these other things I'm doing like work or working out or all this stuff that takes up a bunch of time. And I realize like we haven't spent too much time together in the last, you know, year.

And so that's actually like the lowest one on my on my board. I don't know what I've scored. I think maybe it was like a three or something this right now. For the last five years though, what was the lowest year? What was the, oh, what was the worst year? Probably when I first started this, which is like why I started it because I was like feeling down. I was like, I need to like, is it really down? I need to like check the scoreboard and then I need to make the scoreboard better.

But like let me check the scoreboard. I remember it was at the beginning. Health was super low. Work was low because I felt like I was in this five year slog of my startup. And I just didn't see a light at the end of the tunnel. It was like, is this shit ever going to work? Like am I actually a dumbass? and like I think I'm smart, but I'm actually a dumbass

and that's why this is not working. I was just health was low, work was low, play was low, love and self-respect were fine back then. And now, you know, things have all shifted. Good. Well, I would say that the last 24 months of yours have been the best ever. Yeah, they've been dope. Can't, can't lie. And that's great.

And I share that because, you know, it's okay for things to be good. I think we live in a culture where you are supposed to be sort of like ashamed of being happy in a way. It's like, it's like, it's a bigger status signal to be like vulnerable about how depressed you are than open about how happy you are. You're like obnoxious if you're happy and you're like, you know, a vulnerable hero if you're sad. And I just think that's silly. Yeah, like it's, you're fine, be whatever you are, but just celebrate when somebody is what they actually are and are aware of it. You don't, don't give points for one or the other and like celebrate one of the other. And especially this weird reverse thing where we celebrate

people who are like, you know, in the dumps. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.