- 2 days ago
Every person is climbing a ladder they never asked to be placed on, and the view from each rung is stranger than it looks from below.
Every episode takes a lot of research and writing. Drop your next video idea in the comments. I read them all.
Subscribe so you don't miss the next one! 🔔
VIDEO TOPICS/TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 The Invisible
2:07 The Competent
4:33 The Connected
6:40 The Respected
9:04 The Influential
11:08 The Wealthy
13:59 The Powerful
16:22 The Celebrated
19:14 The Monument
21:48 The Memory
Every episode takes a lot of research and writing. Drop your next video idea in the comments. I read them all.
Subscribe so you don't miss the next one! 🔔
VIDEO TOPICS/TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 The Invisible
2:07 The Competent
4:33 The Connected
6:40 The Respected
9:04 The Influential
11:08 The Wealthy
13:59 The Powerful
16:22 The Celebrated
19:14 The Monument
21:48 The Memory
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Level 1. The Invisible
00:01You are not poor in any dramatic way.
00:05You have a roof over your head, you have food in the refrigerator,
00:08your car runs, most of the time,
00:11you pay your bills a few days late, but you pay them.
00:14By every official measure, you are fine.
00:17You are, statistically speaking, one of the people the system is working for.
00:22But you walk into a room and nobody turns their head.
00:25You speak in meetings and your ideas get repeated back to you 20 minutes later by someone else.
00:30Everyone agrees with that person.
00:32You post something online and it gets four likes.
00:36Three of them are from your mother.
00:37You go to the same coffee shop three times a week for two years.
00:41The barista still asks your name every single time.
00:44You are 34 years old.
00:46You work at a company you cannot fully explain to your relatives at Thanksgiving.
00:50You do something with spreadsheets.
00:52You do something with processes.
00:53You sit in a cubicle that looks like every other cubicle.
00:57The people two rows over have been there longer than you,
01:00and they do not know your last name.
01:02You go home to an apartment that is clean and small and quiet.
01:06You eat dinner alone most nights.
01:08You scroll through photographs of people who seem to be doing more interesting things than you are.
01:12You do not resent them exactly.
01:14You just wonder how they got there.
01:16You wonder what they did differently.
01:18You wonder if there was a moment they crossed a line you missed.
01:21You go to bed at a reasonable hour.
01:24You sleep adequately.
01:25You wake up and do it again.
01:27This is not tragedy.
01:29This is not suffering.
01:30This is the texture of an ordinary life lived at an ordinary altitude.
01:35Most of the humans who have ever existed have lived exactly here.
01:39You should feel grateful, and some nights you do.
01:42Other nights you stand at the window and look at the city.
01:45You wonder if anyone would notice if you simply stopped showing up.
01:49The answer, honestly, is that it would take a while.
01:52A few weeks.
01:53Maybe a month.
01:54Someone at work would eventually notice the empty chair.
01:57Someone would call.
01:59But the world would not stop.
02:01The world does not stop for people at this level.
02:04That is the defining feature of this level.
02:06Level 2.
02:08The competent.
02:09Something shifts in your early 30s.
02:11You stop trying to be liked.
02:13And you start trying to be good at something.
02:16You pick one thing.
02:18Maybe it is your career.
02:20Maybe it is a craft.
02:21Maybe it is a sport you took up in college and never quite let go of.
02:25You decide you are going to stop being mediocre at it.
02:29The change is not dramatic.
02:31There is no montage.
02:33There is just the slow accumulation of unglamorous hours.
02:37You read books about your field.
02:39You watch videos late at night.
02:41You practice things that are boring.
02:44You make mistakes in public and you correct them in private.
02:48After about two years, something happens.
02:50People start asking you questions.
02:53Not strangers.
02:54Coworkers first.
02:56Your boss pulls you into a meeting to explain something to a client.
03:00The client nods.
03:01Your boss looks at you differently after that meeting.
03:05A month later, you get a raise you did not ask for.
03:08You join a running club on a Saturday morning.
03:11Within six months, you are one of the faster people in the group.
03:14Nothing dramatic.
03:16You are not winning races.
03:22You are becoming, without quite noticing, someone with a small reputation in a small circle.
03:33Competence is the first form of status that actually belongs to you.
03:37Everything before this was assigned.
03:39Your family name.
03:41Your neighborhood.
03:42Your school.
03:43The face you were born with.
03:46Competence is the first thing you earned.
03:48You begin to understand why people chase it.
03:51Being good at something changes how you walk into rooms.
03:54You still sit in a cubicle.
03:57Your apartment is still small.
03:59Your bank account has not transformed.
04:01But when you speak, people stop talking.
04:04That is new.
04:06You are careful with it.
04:07You do not want to lose it.
04:09You start to notice how rare this actually is.
04:12Most people drift through their careers without ever becoming good at anything specific.
04:18They stay generalists.
04:19They stay replaceable.
04:21You are no longer replaceable.
04:23That word, replaceable, starts to mean something different to you.
04:27It is the line that separates two kinds of workers.
04:31You have crossed it.
04:33Level three.
04:34The connected.
04:35Competence alone has a ceiling.
04:37You hit it around 37.
04:39You are as good as you are going to get at your craft through practice alone.
04:44Further growth requires something else.
04:46It requires people.
04:48You figure this out by accident.
04:50A former co-worker reaches out and asks if you want to grab coffee.
04:54You almost say no because you are tired and it is a Tuesday night.
04:58You say yes anyway.
04:59She tells you her company is hiring.
05:02The role pays $20,000 more than you currently make.
05:05She walks your resume to the hiring manager personally.
05:08Three weeks later, you have a new job.
05:11You did not apply for it.
05:12You did not interview in the normal sense.
05:14You had a conversation with someone who already trusted you.
05:18That is when you understand.
05:20The real economy is not the economy of resumes and job postings.
05:24The real economy is the economy of relationships.
05:27You start paying attention.
05:29You start saying yes to coffees and dinners and introductions that feel like they might go nowhere.
05:34Some of them do go nowhere.
05:36A surprising number of them do not.
05:39You meet a woman at a conference who runs a podcast in your industry.
05:42She invites you on as a guest.
05:44The episode gets 15,000 downloads.
05:47People start sending you messages on professional networks.
05:50Recruiters reach out.
05:51A competitor offers you a job you did not ask for.
05:55You stay where you are, but you use the offer to negotiate a better title.
05:59Your email signature changes.
06:01You notice that the people around you notice.
06:03You start going to events you would not have attended a year ago.
06:07Industry dinners where everyone is wearing something slightly too nice.
06:11Rooftop parties in cities that are not your own.
06:13You are introduced to people as someone worth knowing.
06:17You are now in the circuit.
06:18It is not glamorous yet, but the doors are opening in a new way.
06:23Each door opens onto a bigger room.
06:25You are beginning to see how the structure works.
06:28The invisible hands that arrange who gets what.
06:30Who meets whom.
06:32Who ends up on which side of the rope at which party.
06:35You are inside the machinery now.
06:37You are a small part of it, but you are in.
06:40Level 4.
06:41The Respected
06:43You are in your early 40s.
06:45You have a title that means something to people inside your industry.
06:49Director of something.
06:50Senior something.
06:52Head of something.
06:53The words do not matter.
06:55What matters is that when you hand someone your card at an event,
06:59their eyes move to the line under your name.
07:01Something registers.
07:03They file you differently in their head than they did 10 seconds earlier.
07:07Respect is a strange currency.
07:10It does not show up in your bank account.
07:12But it shows up everywhere else.
07:14You walk into a restaurant and the host greets you by name.
07:18You send an email to someone important and they reply within an hour.
07:22You ask a favor of a stranger and the stranger says yes.
07:26A mutual contact told them you were worth helping.
07:30You were on a first name basis with people whose names you used to see on television.
07:35Some of them have invited you to their homes.
07:37Their homes are not what you expected.
07:40They are quieter than you imagined.
07:42The people who live in them are tired in ways that remind you of your father.
07:47You are now the person who makes recommendations that shape the careers of younger people.
07:51A name you mention in a meeting gets a job offer the following week.
07:56A name you decline to mention gets nothing.
07:59You do not abuse this.
08:01You try not to.
08:02You remember how desperate you were at 30 to have someone of your current stature pay attention to you.
08:08You try to pay attention, but you also cannot pay attention to everyone.
08:13The emails pile up.
08:15The requests multiply.
08:17You develop a filter.
08:18Some of it is conscious.
08:20Some of it is not.
08:22You realize that the ability to not respond is itself a form of power.
08:27You did not used to be able to not respond.
08:30You used to jump at every message.
08:32Now you let some of them sit.
08:35Some of them sit forever.
08:36However, the people on the other side of those unanswered messages are the people you used to be.
08:42You feel something about that.
08:44You are not always sure what to call the feeling.
08:46You keep moving.
08:48The calendar keeps filling.
08:50You have started to notice something about the younger version of you.
08:53The one who would have killed for any of this.
08:56He would not recognize the person you have become.
08:59You are not sure if that is a tragedy or an achievement.
09:03It might be both.
09:04Level 5.
09:05The Influential
09:07Somewhere in your 40s, a subtle transition happens.
09:10You stop being someone who benefits from the structure.
09:13You start being someone who shapes it.
09:15You sit on boards now.
09:17Advisory boards.
09:18Non-profit boards.
09:19The boards of small companies that pay you in equity instead of cash.
09:23You are invited to speak at conferences where you used to sit in the audience.
09:27You are flown in.
09:28They put you up in hotels with views.
09:30You give the talk.
09:31You shake hands for an hour afterward.
09:33You eat the dinner.
09:35You are back on a plane the next morning.
09:37The talks are not difficult to give.
09:39You have been giving versions of them for years.
09:41What is new is that people are taking notes.
09:44You watch them from the stage.
09:46Pens moving.
09:47Phones recording.
09:48Your words are going to end up in articles and in strategy documents.
09:52They will appear in the internal memos of companies trying to be like the companies you work with.
09:56You are a source now.
09:58A citation.
09:59A quoted authority.
10:01Reporters call you for comment on stories about your industry.
10:04You have a publicist who advises you on which calls to return.
10:07You return about a third of them.
10:09Your opinions, once the private property of yourself and your friends,
10:13are now the public property of whatever audience happens to encounter them.
10:16This is intoxicating at first.
10:18It becomes ordinary.
10:20Then it becomes tiring.
10:22You say something offhand in an interview and it becomes the headline.
10:25You make a joke at a dinner.
10:27Six weeks later, you read it back on a website.
10:30It is stripped of its context.
10:31It is attributed to you in a way that makes you sound like an idiot.
10:35You develop a public self.
10:37The public self is not quite you.
10:39It is a slightly flatter version of you.
10:41It is a more consistent version.
10:43It is a version that has opinions appropriate to its role.
10:47The private self watches the public self and keeps a careful distance.
10:51You start to understand why people at this level seem slightly distant when you meet them in person.
10:56It is not rudeness.
10:57It is preservation.
10:58They are protecting the thing inside them that the role cannot touch.
11:02You are doing the same thing now.
11:04You did not mean to become this person.
11:06But here you are.
11:08Level six.
11:09The wealthy.
11:09The money arrives gradually.
11:12And then, all at once.
11:14There was no single event that made you rich.
11:17There were a hundred small decisions compounded over 20 years.
11:20Equity that vested.
11:22A company that was acquired.
11:24A book that did better than expected.
11:26A speaking schedule that you stopped thinking of as a side income.
11:30It began to eclipse your main income.
11:33You looked at your accountant one Tuesday afternoon, and he said a number out loud.
11:37You realized you had crossed a line without noticing.
11:40You are rich now.
11:42Not wealthy in the dynastic sense.
11:44You still work.
11:45You still answer emails.
11:47But the math of your life is different in ways that take time to fully absorb.
11:51You do not check prices.
11:53You do not worry about rent.
11:55You fly in a different part of the airplane.
11:57You discover that there are lounges inside airports that you had no idea existed.
12:02Behind unmarked doors.
12:04Attendants in blazers.
12:05Hot food that is actually good.
12:08You are embarrassed at first by how much this impresses you.
12:11The embarrassment fades.
12:13You move into a house that has rooms you never enter.
12:16You buy furniture that costs more than your first car.
12:19You hire people.
12:20A cleaner.
12:21An assistant.
12:22A person who does your taxes.
12:24A person who manages your investments.
12:27A person whose job is to remember the birthdays of the people in your life.
12:30You did not grow up with staff.
12:33You are uncomfortable with it for a long time.
12:35You overtip.
12:37You apologize for asking people to do their jobs.
12:40Eventually, you stop.
12:42This is how you know something has shifted inside you.
12:45Your relationships change.
12:46Some friends drift away.
12:48They cannot afford the restaurants you suggest.
12:51They do not want to split the bill on a vacation you are paying for in full.
12:55You try to adjust.
12:57You offer to cover things.
12:59Some of them accept.
13:00Some of them take it the wrong way.
13:02The friendships that survive are the ones with people who also cross the line.
13:06Or with people who were on the other side of it from the beginning.
13:10The first group understands what you went through.
13:12The second group was born into what you had to build.
13:15Neither is quite the same as the friends you used to have.
13:18You go home for the holidays.
13:20Your parents look at your rental car in the driveway.
13:23They do not say anything.
13:25They make dinner.
13:26You sit at the same kitchen table you sat at as a child.
13:29Your father asks about your work in the careful way he asks about things he does not fully understand.
13:35You answer in the careful way you answer questions you cannot fully explain.
13:39You love them.
13:40They love you.
13:41There is a small distance between you now that neither of you will ever name out loud.
13:46You drive back to the airport on Sunday.
13:49You rent cars instead of borrowing theirs.
13:51You stay in a hotel instead of your childhood bedroom.
13:54It is easier for everyone.
13:56You tell yourself this every time.
13:59Level 7.
14:00The Powerful
14:02Wealth alone is not power.
14:04Wealth is comfort and options.
14:06Power is the ability to make things happen that would not happen otherwise.
14:11You cross into power in your late 40s.
14:14It happens through institutions.
14:16You are appointed to something.
14:18You are elected to something.
14:19You chair something.
14:21You are named the chief executive of something that affects the lives of tens of thousands of people.
14:27They will never meet you.
14:28Your calendar is no longer yours.
14:30It belongs to a team of people who manage it on your behalf.
14:34Your days are arranged in 15-minute blocks.
14:37You rarely have more than 20 minutes of unstructured time between 7 in the morning and 9 at night.
14:43Every meeting has been pre-briefed.
14:45You walk into each one knowing exactly what decisions need to be made.
14:49You roughly know what the options are.
14:52You make decisions constantly.
14:54The decisions are not large in any one moment.
14:56Each one is small, but they accumulate.
15:00You approve a budget.
15:01You sign off on a strategy.
15:03You say yes to one project and no to another.
15:06Somewhere in a city you have never visited,
15:08someone loses their job because of a line on a spreadsheet you initialed.
15:12Somewhere else, someone gets hired.
15:14Their child will go to a better school because of it.
15:17You never see any of these people.
15:19They never see you.
15:20But the line connecting your signature to their life is real.
15:24You think about this sometimes on the plane.
15:26You used to feel guilty about it.
15:28The guilt has not disappeared, but it has evolved.
15:31It has become something closer to responsibility.
15:34You have realized that refusing to make decisions does not make the decisions go away.
15:38It just means someone else makes them.
15:41Someone who may be less thoughtful than you are.
15:43So you make them.
15:44You try to be careful.
15:46You do not always succeed.
15:47You sometimes lie awake at night replaying a conversation.
15:51You said the wrong thing to the wrong person.
15:54Someone's life was smaller because of it.
15:56You are surrounded by people whose job is to make you feel good about yourself.
16:00You know this.
16:01You have hired some of them personally.
16:03You try to keep at least one person around you whose job is to tell you the truth.
16:08You pay that person well.
16:10You do not always take their advice, but you keep them there anyway.
16:14You understand that the moment you stop hearing the truth is the moment the mistakes begin.
16:19Those mistakes will eventually end you.
16:22Level 8.
16:23The Celebrated
16:25At some point, the work you have done becomes the story people tell about you.
16:30You are introduced now with a sentence that ends in a list of accomplishments.
16:34You are the person who did the thing.
16:37You are the author of the book.
16:39You are the founder of the company.
16:41You are the architect of the policy.
16:44The sentence is always the same.
16:46You have given it to the people who introduce you.
16:49It is your sentence.
17:17Some of these interactions are 30 seconds long.
17:21Some of them stay with the other person for decades.
17:24You cannot know in advance which is which.
17:27You are invited to the events where the other celebrated people are.
17:31You meet your heroes.
17:32A few of them are exactly what you hoped.
17:35Most of them are tired.
17:37A surprising number of them are lonely in ways they do not admit out loud.
17:42You recognize the loneliness because you feel it yourself.
17:45The room is full of people who admire you and none of them know you.
17:49The people who know you are mostly at home.
17:53They are doing laundry.
17:54They are caring for aging parents.
17:56They are going about the ordinary business of life.
18:00You miss them.
18:01You miss ordinary life.
18:03You are starting to realize that you gave something up to get here.
18:07You cannot get it back.
18:09Your children are older than you remembered.
18:12Your marriage has survived through a series of adjustments that neither of you fully acknowledge.
18:17You travel too much.
18:19You work too much.
18:21You are present in the room, but not always in the moment.
18:24Your partner has learned to live around the edges of your life.
18:28You are grateful for this.
18:30You are also a little ashamed of it.
18:32You give a commencement speech at a university.
18:35The students applaud in all the right places.
18:38You tell them to find what they love.
18:41You tell them to serve others.
18:43You tell them that the prizes are not the point.
18:46You believe all of this when you say it.
18:48You also know, in a quiet part of yourself, that you are describing a path you wish you had taken.
18:54It is not the path you actually took.
18:57The students cannot tell the difference.
19:00You are not sure anyone can anymore.
19:03You drive home from the airport that night.
19:05You sit in your driveway with the engine off for 20 minutes before going inside.
19:10You do not know why.
19:12You just sit there.
19:14Level 9.
19:15The Monument
19:16You are in your 60s or 70s now.
19:19You are no longer climbing.
19:21The climb is over.
19:22You have arrived at an altitude where the air is thin and the company is small.
19:27There are perhaps a few hundred people in the world at your level in your field.
19:31You have met most of them.
19:33Some of them you count as friends.
19:35Some of them you count as enemies in a polite way.
19:38It involves sitting next to them at dinners and smiling.
19:42You are no longer a person, exactly.
19:44You are an institution.
19:47Universities call you.
19:48They want to name a building after you.
19:50They want you to endow a chair.
19:52They want you to sit on their board of trustees.
19:54You say yes to some of these requests and no to others.
19:58Your name is now attached to things you did not build and will not maintain.
20:03It is strange to see it on stone.
20:05It will outlast you.
20:06You know this.
20:08It is part of why you agreed.
20:09You write a memoir.
20:11The memoir is a careful document.
20:14You tell some of the truth.
20:15You do not tell all of it.
20:17You cannot.
20:18There are people still living whose stories are intertwined with yours.
20:22There are decisions you made that you are still not ready to fully examine in public.
20:26You give the honest version to a biographer.
20:29The biographer is under contract not to publish until after you are gone.
20:33You are arranging your own history in advance.
20:36This is one of the privileges of having reached this level.
20:39You get to shape the story that will be told about you when you are no longer here to defend
20:44yourself.
20:45You receive lifetime achievement awards.
20:47You have a shelf for them now.
20:49They are heavy.
20:50The speeches at these ceremonies describe a person you partly recognize.
20:54The person on the stage sounds more certain than you ever felt in any given moment.
20:59You stand up.
21:00You thank the people who need to be thanked.
21:03You make a joke.
21:04You sit down.
21:05The applause is warm and long.
21:08You look out at the audience and you see faces from every chapter of your life.
21:12The people who knew you at 25 are now 65.
21:16The people who knew you at 40 are now looking at their own children graduate.
21:20The room is a living map of the years.
21:23You are moved.
21:24Genuinely moved.
21:26You are also aware of how much of this you will not remember by next month.
21:29Time is doing something to you now that it did not do when you were younger.
21:34It is speeding up and narrowing down.
21:37You notice.
21:38You find yourself, more and more, reading books about people who died in the century before you were born.
21:44You are looking for clues.
21:46You are looking for company.
21:49Level 10.
21:49The memory.
21:50You are gone.
21:52The dying itself was smaller than you expected.
21:54A hospital room.
21:56The people who needed to be there were there.
21:58The people who needed to be forgiven were mostly forgiven.
22:01Some of them you did not reach in time.
22:04That is the shape of every life at the end.
22:06A few unfinished conversations.
22:08A few regrets.
22:09You carried them with you out the door.
22:12Your memorial fills a hall.
22:14The speakers describe a person who accomplished enormous things.
22:17They are telling the truth.
22:19They are also leaving things out.
22:21Your children speak.
22:23Their voices catch in the same place.
22:25They remember specific afternoons that no biographer ever recorded.
22:29The memorial ends.
22:31The people go home.
22:32The obituaries are well written.
22:34The tributes pour in for about a week.
22:36Then the news cycle moves on.
22:38That is how it always goes.
22:40In the first year after you are gone, people speak your name often.
22:44In the fifth year, they speak it less.
22:47In the tenth year, only the people who knew you personally still say it with any regularity.
22:52By the twentieth year, the institution that bears your name is run by people who never met you.
22:57They know the biography.
22:59They do not know the man.
23:00Your buildings remain.
23:02Your books remain.
23:03Your decisions, the ones that shaped other lives, continue to ripple outward in ways you cannot see.
23:08A young woman reads something you wrote when you were forty-three.
23:12It changes how she thinks about her own career.
23:15She makes a different decision because of your words.
23:17You will never know this happened.
23:19She will never know you existed in any full sense.
23:22But the line is there.
23:24It is real.
23:25Time is patient with monuments.
23:27It wears them down slowly and then all at once.
23:30Your grave is visited for a while.
23:32Then less often.
23:34The grass grows over.
23:35The stone weathers.
23:37A hundred years pass.
23:38A student in a library pulls down a book about your industry.
23:42She sees your name in the index.
23:44The name is one of many.
23:45The student is writing a paper that will be forgotten.
23:48Your name, in that moment, flickers briefly back into the world.
23:52Then it is gone again.
23:54Somewhere in a small apartment tonight, a thirty-four-year-old is sitting at a kitchen table.
23:59They are tired.
24:00They are not sure if their life counts for anything.
24:02They scroll past the photographs of people who seem to be living larger lives.
24:06They wonder how those people got there.
24:09They wonder if there is a line they missed.
24:11They have no idea that the climb, if they begin it, will cost them almost everything they currently love.
24:17They have no idea that the view from the top is smaller and lonelier than it looks from here.
24:22They have no idea that the real question was never how high they would rise.
24:26It was what they would carry with them when the climb was done.
24:30They will figure it out.
24:31Or they will not.
24:32Either way, the cycle continues.
24:34rire on the top is full.
24:35have no idea.
24:35Let's do CORS.
24:36And we'll meet each other.
24:37Bye.
24:37Bye.
24:37Bye.
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