🏴 On urgency, pre-obsession, and living in the wrong movie. Ten Bullets by Zach Pogrob.

To the obsessed,

Here's your weekly Ten Bullets. A list of ideas I can't stop thinking about- to help you build companies, make content, and find your life's work.

New Twitter/X Header with some **artifacts of obsession**- a movement I'll build forever.
Ft. two obsessed friends: *Danny Miranda* + *Hunter Weiss*

1. On the root of your problems:

"The root cause of all your problems is that you haven’t found your life’s work yet. Once you do most questions disappear."

- David Senra [Twitter]

2. On Pre and Post Obsession:

All iconic lives can be divided into two parts:

Pre-Obsession and Post-Obsession.

Pre-O is plagued with indecision, highs and lows, and a quiet bitterness. Someone who knows they're capable of extreme greatness, but isn't on the right path. They watch others win in games they feel are 'small,' because their ambition is so massive. But because they have an all-or-nothing mentality, often, they've done close to nothing.

Post-O is a life where things become incredibly simple. You know the one core activity- that will let you achieve anything you want. Writing books. Making videos. Designing clothes. And you have the right vehicle to let it compound. You've found something bigger than you, that you'll build forever. The constant insecurity you had before, vanishes. You know who you are- and you act in full accordance with it. There is no gap. Now, you become a vessel. Every action. Every habit. Every thought. Everything you do filters down to your obsession. And you wouldn't have it any other way.

[Read on Twitter]

3. On urgency:

"You are your worst enemy. You waste precious time dreaming of the future instead of engaging in the present. Since nothing seems urgent to you, you're only half involved in what you do."

- Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

4-5: On being in the wrong movie:

"Sara Blakely was having a bad day. The kind of bad day that makes you question everything. She was twenty-six years old, selling fax machines door-to-door for a living. During a cold call that day, she was escorted out of a building, 'my business card ripped up in my face.'

'I literally had a moment where I pulled off to the side of the road and thought, I'm in the wrong movie. This is not my life.' Right there on the side of the road, Sara's despair led to a clarity of purpose. She went home that night and wrote in her journal, 'I want to invent a product I can sell to millions of people that will make them feel good.' As she puts it, 'I asked the universe to give me an idea that I could bring to the world.'"

On getting your big idea:

"Different people have different ways of expressing how ideas came to them. Sara will tell you that she asked the universe, and the universe answered. We might observe that Sara kept asking herself the same set of interesting questions, starting with 'Is this my big idea?' And one day, inevitably, the answer was going to be 'Yes.'

And that day or evening arrived as Sara was getting ready to go to a party. 'I wanted to wear my cream pants that night, and I had no undergarment to wear under them that wouldn't show,' she says. So Sara took matters into her own hands: 'I cut the feet out of my own control-top pantyhose so I could wear them under my pants and wear any kind of great strappy heel. And it worked beautifully except they rolled up my leg all night at the party.'

'I came home that night, and was like, this should exist for women.'

Sara uttered the three words that flicker like a neon flashing light over a truly big idea. Those three words: 'This. Should. Exist.' They're your clue that you've stumbled onto something with real potential. If you feel, as a consumer, that you need it, if you can imagine a crowd of others nodding with emphatic encouragement, this just might be your idea.

- Reid Hoffman on Sara Blakely, Masters of Scale (Book)

6. On pain:

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you're running and you think, 'Man, this hurts, I can't take it anymore.' The 'hurt' part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself."

- Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

7. On art:

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

- James Baldwin

8. On the war against yourself:

Below is a section from a Dennis Rodman autobiography- when he was sat in a pickup truck, gun in hand, on the brink of ending his life. It felt powerful and worth sharing. I removed some paragraphs here for sake of brevity- so get the book for full context.

"I just kept thinking, This isn't me. This isn't Dennis Rodman, You're looking at somebody who's living somebody else's life. I was sitting there wishing I could go to sleep and wake up in Dallas, back home- a normal, grind-it-out, nine-to-five guy, just like I was before any of this lightning struck in my life. I was burning a big hole in my soul, and for what? I had everything I wanted, but I was trying to be somebody I wasn't.

THE LIFE I WAS LEADING HAD CHANGED ME INTO SOMEBODY I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW.

As I sat there, I thought about my whole life, and how I was ready to cash it all in. Just pull the trigger, bro, and give it to somebody else. Pass on all those problems. There was some real pain there, I didn't know who I was or where I was going, and nobody seemed to understand that but me.

All of this was running through my mind- personal problems, professional problems, everything.

I was two people: ONE PERSON ON THE INSIDE, another person on the outside. The person I wanted to kill was the person on the outside. The guy on the inside was fine, he just wasn't getting out much. The guy on the inside was normal, even though he had a lot of money and fame. The guy on the outside was all fucked up, not knowing what he wanted.

I came up with an idea: Fuck the gun. Why not just kill the guy on the outside and let the other one keep living? I was searching for a way to come to grips with that person I didn't want to be. I wanted to get that part out of my life and let the other one out to breathe.

I sat in that pickup and had a duel with myself. I didn't need the gun; it all took place in my mind. I walked one way and I walked the other way. At ten paces I turned and shot the impostor. I killed the Dennis Rodman that had tried to conform to what everybody wanted him to be."

- Dennis Rodman, Bad as I Wanna Be

I randomly picked this book up in a bookstore with week. It's very, very good- documenting Rodman's rise from nothing to infamy. He's a true one of one.