You must always have something going on in your life.

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There’s a life lesson my father taught me that I remember very vividly:

Back when I was a kid (about 14 years old at most), the kids in my school were having a party.

I really wanted to go but I wasn’t invited. I wasn’t happy about that.

My dad told me, “If you get your feet stuck in the mud, you’ll never get ahead in life.” (Translated from Hindi)

I won’t bother translating more direct quotes from Hindi to English, but here’s his lesson and it’s always served me well:

In all phases of your life, you always have two options:

You can keep working on yourself and getting better
Decide “this is good enough” and then get stuck at that level for the rest of your life.

If you take 1000 children of similar socio-economic status from the same region (i.e. they roughly have the same opportunities in life), you’ll find that most of them don’t make it big in life at all.

Less than 1% of them become anyone significant.

The others just “get their feet stuck in the mud”.

What does it mean to get your feet stuck in the mud?

It means that instead of pursuing the things that actually matter in life:

Money
Influence
Land
Power
etc.

You start pursuing the things that don’t matter in life:

Entertainment and pleasure
What other people think of you
Acceptance into a purposeless “urban tribe” social group
Vanities like fashion, being “cool”, owning branded stuff to impress people

Everyone needs some of the things in the second list, but the moment your priorities change from the items in the first list to the second list, you are “stuck in the mud”.

My father was telling me – why do I care about not being invited to a party?

Why do I want to be accepted by a bunch of people who haven’t achieved anything in life?

Why was I calling all these people “friends”? What had they achieved in life for me to seek their friendship?

Dad predicted that all these kids would grow up to be losers in life and if I continued to care about all these people I was also going to end up becoming a loser in life just like them. And if I worked on myself, all these people would become completely irrelevant.

And of course – dad was right on both counts.

I worked on myself and I didn’t see or hear from any of these people whose approval I craved ever again. They just become… not relevant.
I bumped into some of them 10 years after school and pretty much all of them had turned out to be total losers. I’m pretty sure if I had continued to associate with them, I’d be like them too.

I’m glad I took dad’s advice and stopped associating with them.

My dad taught me to adopt a simple policy for picking friends:

Is this person seriously building something?

If you aren’t seriously building anything – we cannot be friends.

You’re a loser who’s just floating through life and I don’t want to become like you.

I don’t want to absorb your habits, thinking patterns, and attitude. Sorry but not sorry – we cannot be friends.

“For no reason at all, you’ll end up like the friends you have”

There are many people who are born and die and do nothing eventful in between.

Fate decides their parents. Their parents decide the school they’ll be till they are 18.

After school, they just go with the flow of life from one social trend to another their entire life.

Most people just get a job and slave away following the “life map” that no longer works:

School -> College -> Job -> Marriage -> Buy House -> Kids -> Retirement -> Death

(This doesn’t work because college no longer guarantees a job, divorce rates are sky high, buying a house sends most job-workers in debt, modern companies fire people before retirement, etc. – this ancient “life map” is nowhere near as guaranteed to work as it used to 60 years ago. But that’s a different article for a different day.)

If you talk about the average person:

They are stuck in the mud. They are building nothing.

Ask yourself:

What are you building?

We are men and men are builders.

What are you working on? What are you trying to build? Are you creating something? Anything?

Under no circumstance should the answer be “nothing”.

Most losers will tell you that it’s “okay” and that “everyone is just going through life like you are” but you don’t want to be a loser do you?

I know you don’t want to be a loser or you won’t be spending your time reading Life Math Money – The #1 self-improvement site for winners, so I’ll give it to you straight: You must always have something going on in your life – something you’re building.

And it should be being built seriously.

What I mean is – if you say you’re building a body, but you’re skipping workouts, not eating correctly, not getting enough sleep to recover well, not tracking your nutrition – you’re not building your body, you’re just occasionally hitting the gym.

There should always be some serious building going on in your life.

It could be your body, a business, a family, a piece of art, a book – something. Anything.

If you’re not building anything seriously, you’re stuck in the mud.

You will start caring about vanities and delicious foods and parties and other bullshit like that.

When the British exploited the rivalry between different Maratha leaders to defeat them and reinstated Baji Rao II as a puppet ruler under British protection, this is what the histories say about him:

Baji Rao resumed his palace life, now less as a Maratha leader than a British puppet, but apparently ‘happy with his routine of baths and prayers, eating, drinking and making merry, having no bother of any outside concern… Sumptuous dinners with profuse decorations for plates are arranged daily. Hot discussion takes place on the selection of dishes… (quoted from The Anarchy by William Dalrymple)

That is the fate of men who stop building something.

Look around you. What are the people who are building nothing and have nothing going on in their life doing?

They’re living their life stuck in the mud chasing entertainment and validation.

Talking about movies, actors, TV shows, singers, and other entertainers
Binge drinking, partying, and celebrating without achieving anything
Memorizing sports stats and heights and weights of cricketers
Dancing on Instagram to get more meaningless likes
Eating for pleasure not fuel

This is the reality of the vast majority of human beings.

Most people are stuck in the mud getting nowhere.