Back in 2018 riding up 6th Avenue I remember my buddy saying this to me.
He was my training partner and a prominent member of Silicon Valley royalty.
We were headed uptown for violence training which is a different story altogether.
And he said, “Below $6,000 you’ve gotta buy as much as you can.” I looked at him strangely.
Years earlier another future thinking buddy in Vail had been buying Bitcoin in the hundreds and I was mostly just watching!
Investing in future
A client told me about a YPO forum where they went around the table and asked their biggest regrets.
More than a few members regretted never investing in the early rounds of Uber! It all looks so obvious in hindsight, doesn’t it!? It’s easy for your brain to look back at opportunities “missed” in theory with perfect information you can wish you’d made a different decision.
I’ve never been that way. I’ve made enough good and less good decisions and have seen enough cycles to know you can never decide on future outcomes. You must make your best decisions at each point in time and keep moving forward. Never regret, learn.
And I’ve learned to invest nearly zero time thinking about financial investing because what goes up does come down and so too things can go around and around like as we say on Wall Street never let a good trade turn into a bad investment.
Instead nearly all my time is focused on the one investment that pays off all day every day all year every year all the time all your life!
You!?
Aren’t you too!? I’m obsessed about investing in you and living the life you truly want as investing opportunities come and go but you remain!
There’s an old book by one of the greats of the new thought movement where he emphasizes the difference between spending and investing.
He wasn’t talking about dollars at all, but time. Like spending time looking back regretting things you never did is a worst way of running your brain and life, draining your energy and time. Financial investing can be the same because whether prices go up or down they consume your precious energy and mind.
Owning assets can be the same too, can’t it? What you own can own you like many wealthy folks sitting on cars and houses and stuff they never use. And then there’s things like a buddy’s street-legal-racecar he let me drive like we stole it around LA late night last week are an incredible investment in joy and laughing out loud having the time of our lives.
Investing in your health is the same, isn’t it? You can spend all sorts of time and money on things that are opposite of investing in your physical and mental health for living longer and better for the rest of your life. And then there’s investing in things beyond you and your family.
Investing in us
This is what I saw last week in Los Angeles too.
I was at a general meeting with a venture capital firm I advise who has investments in space and boy there’s tons of exciting buzz around space and what they’re doing. They were early before all the recent buzz and it was especially buzzing on the heels of the SpaceX IPO.
Maybe better than anyone on the planet along with Donald Trump Elon Musk knows how to market and whip up people into a buying frenzy and that’s what you saw, didn’t you? SpaceX has reached incredible heights and so many are excited to own a piece of Musk’s dream.
And this is one of those unique moments in time and space when the mainstream is catching up to visionaries like Elon Musk. Because now you see there’s an obvious understanding of the opportunities in space and even a more accepted understanding of its importance.
Yet for decades Musk has been on this mission, as has Jeff Bezos. And both are thinking way beyond obvious investments to the greatest investment of all time!
Investing in humanity
From a fish crawling out of the sea our species has flourished to some 8.3+ billion but even as recently as 900,000 years ago we apparently dropped down to just 1,280 breeding pairs for some 117,000 years! A favorite quote from Elon Musk paints the picture—
“I think it’s important that humanity become a multi-planet species. I think most people would agree that a future where we’re a spacefaring civilization is inspiring and exciting, compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event. That’s really why I started SpaceX.”
Boom! This is what I found so compelling when I first began researching Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos eventually building this method for Rocket To The Top Like Musk and Bezos. Because sure there’s lots of cool and exciting things about space and achieving incredible missions like the 1960s moon landing and all the obvious benefits of satellites and investing in the future of space and such things. And then there is something way more important they are investing in the future of our species.
Not just the future we’re creating for ourselves here on Earth and the planet we’re leaving behind for our kids and their kids and their kids’ kids’ kids or even the future of us humans as a spacefaring species. We’re talking about something even way more important than the very existence of our species to the preservation of this one most unique and special characteristic. As Musk put it—
“Earth is the cradle of humanity, you cannot stay in the cradle forever. It is time to go forth as a star-faring civilization, be out there among the stars, expand the scope and scale of human consciousness.”
Working on consciousness
One thing I found myself talking about a lot at the general meeting last week is seeing what is mainstream obvious now was obvious to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos then!
25+ years ago each was starting SpaceX and Blue Origin! It was even nearly 11 years ago now while the world was still focused on whatever whatever on November 23, 2015 Blue Origin achieved the most critical evolution for us being a spacefaring species with the first successful landing of their suborbital reusable rocket. SpaceX quickly followed achieving the same outcome about a month later with an orbital vehicle.
They were racing to winning space long before most people were paying attention and by the time the world has caught up you must ask where are the future looking people now focusing? Of course AI is in frenzy like the metaverse and crypto were a handful years ago and somewhere in all this noise you can also see signal.
Like the Wright Brothers were flying way before the mainstream believed the futurist Singularity folks of decades ago are now represented in mainstream movements like longevity. But what still isn’t obvious about the future of our species is this most crucial and elusive thing.
What I’ve been working on for 26+ years the extremes of human potential, consciousness and even the nature of this reality we find ourselves in. The world is quickly evolving and I suggest in the coming decade we’ll all accept us humans are simulating!
Working on the future now
This favorite quote from Jeff Bezos captures how Amazon leaders are working on the future now—
“They work in the future, they live in the future, none of the people who report to me should really be focused on the current quarter… People will stop me and say congratulations on your quarter. And I say thank you. But what I’m really thinking is that quarter was baked three years ago, right now I’m working on a quarter that’s going to reveal itself in 2021.”
Another powerful way of thinking about this is Jeff Bezos’ regret minimization framework I wrote about here of projecting yourself forward to age 80 and looking back having minimized your number of regrets. How many regrets will you have minimized? Because you see it’s never about what you did or didn’t do in the past or the investments you did or didn’t make back then but your opportunity right now to be investing in yours and our best future.
‘Do what you want’ I say, just ideally this is something that matters so much to you and your family and also matters so much to others and all humanity as we need more highly capable people on world-changing missions that truly matter to the future of our species.
This is working on the future now.