This week I want to share what it took to 10x my income over the last eight years.

I break down how I made it from selling knives door-to-door as a teenager to today, and every decision I made along the way (including several pay cuts). I hope this helps you see what is possible, even when the path to get there is windy and unpredictable <3

Blog version is here.

Today’s post is a little philosophical, so if you’re into that kind on thing, read on.

Recently I’ve been thinking about death and work.

You’ve probably heard some version of the “deathbed exercise” for getting clarity on your goals and values. The idea is to picture yourself at 80 years old looking back on your life, and ask yourself what you’d regret not having done.

Personally, I find this really effective. But often what we think about regretting has more to do with our fear of dying than our real goals.

In his book the Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argues that a large percentage of what we do in our lives is an “immortality project:” Basically, a way to try to outwit death by building something symbolic that feels permanent, like a book, a company, or even our reputation. We’re somehow trying to avoid the fear of death by prescribing ourselves goals that we think will help us avoid it, in a sense.

This kind of fear is called a "transdiagnostic" problem, meaning if you push it down instead of facing it head-on, it can resurface in other areas of your life. In this case, that death fear might make us work on projects for clout that don’t actually matter to us, or prioritize working long hours in pursuit of our immortality project.

Which, in a cruel twist of fate, backfires: Research on dying patients showed that fear of death is strongly correlated to the sense of an unlived life. And over-focusing on work is exactly the kind of behavior that tends to make someone feel like their life is slipping away.

So we fear death and focus on immortality projects, which brings us out of our daily life, which makes us worry about not fully living the life we have, so we fear more, so we make bigger immortality projects… and on and on.

One solution is to shift our focus to the life we’re actually living today, instead of future-deathbed-regret-minimization. As we more fully live the life we’re currently in, life feels richer, and fear of death lessens, which makes it easier again to live the life that's truly fulfilling.

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