Buyer’s remorse sets in almost immediately after we buy something new.

When the initial joy wears off, we realize our bank account has shrunk and our responsibilities have grown (along with our carbon footprint).

To truly get the sense of the burden of stuff, watch the documentary The Queen of Versailles. It’s one of the clearest examples of the trappings of wealth.

But deleting an item from our lives has the opposite effect. We feel good donating to someone in need. Our space grows—and so does our peace of mind.

Getting rid of something old can give us more lasting happiness than buying something new.

The news makes it so easy to hate our fellow humans. To see them as “other”, “not like us”, “idiots”, or less than.

But the vast majority of people are good in their own way.

Often it’s not that we even disagree, but that we just choose to focus on different parts of the same river.

The person in the rapids wants the river to slow down.

And the person at the delta sees all the accumulated trash.

Fundamentally people aren’t that different. They’re just responding to a different angle of reality.

Most of our time on social media is spent asking others for favors, or to buy our crap.

It’s a rare gift to be able to meaningfully help anyone, but often we see it as an imposition.

The greatest people I know feel much happier doing a favor for someone else than having one done for them.

Alt title: You don’t need to blow up 500 cars to tell a good story.

For (hundreds of?) thousands of years, humans were able to find, create, and convey meaning through telling stories. For the vast majority of human history, these oral stories required the listener to use their imagination to fill in the details. And for generations, this worked well.

Only very recently did we attach money-making to the idea. Only recently did we decide that we needed to blow up 1,000 real cars to make a movie, or to napalm an actual jungle to show us what the Vietnam War was like. Only recently did we decide that packing as much spectacle, destruction, and even sometimes death into a story would lead to greater financial returns.

So now we find ourselves in a position where AI will let us show anything. We don’t even need CGI, or extras, or to destroy billions of dollars of property to make great art.

While this is tragic for the many talented and wonderful people working in the industry, it’s a return to what storytelling was always about.

Stories were never about the money, or the destruction, or the wanton wasting of finite resources. They were about illuminating the human experience. And the spoken word still does that just as well as ever.

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All I know is this: One month after I saw the first episode of 100 Foot Wave, a documentary series following big wave surfer Garrett McNamara’s quest to surf the world’s largest wave, I was being towed on the back of a jet ski in the very spot that these big wave surfers thought the 100 foot wave was surely to come.

Why Nazaré?

Apparently Europe’s largest submarine canyon lives there, creating the biggest waves in the world—the Everest of surfing if you will.

The problem? Not only can’t I surf, I can barely swim. So why the hell would I go to the Everest of surfing? Bad idea.

On paper I went because I signed up for an activity on a conference agenda that I didn’t fully understand. But when we actually arrived at the port that morning, all but me and a VC chickened out. And for good reason! The ocean there is crazy, terrifying, and positively screams DON’T COME NEAR ME as loudly as possible. Go pet a King Cobra if you want a sense of the experience.

But “jet ski tour of Nazare” was an option on a sheet, so I said yes. And the reason I was at that conference was because I was invited to a conference in Portugal a few weeks back (a place I’d never been) and I said yes. And the reason I was invited was because I met one of the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve ever encountered recording a podcast. And the reason I recorded that podcast was because another successful entrepreneur friend introduced me to that entrepreneur. And the reason I met… you get the idea.

So by a series of saying “yes” to seemingly random and unrelated events, I found myself on a jet ski surrounded by the craziest ocean I’ve ever seen.

That’s how experiences stack up when we change our default state from “no way, that’s scary” to “Screw it, let’s do it.”

You never know where saying “yes” today will lead you tomorrow.