Latest / The Vincere Project / Episode 26. Half Way
Transcript
- Vince: Podcast season, podcast season, podcast season. You know, my and my wife asked she's like, Hey you think you know this is episode twenty six ish and Probably done like 28, 29 of them. The recording was messed up on a few, and Aunt Jamie had to course correct us. But the point being, episode 26. We're halfway, and then you have to make an honest assessment, evaluation, measurement, what it is. And I would say a couple things, right? The sound isn't perfect. The backdrop. Some of the podcasts have been good. I look back on them, I'm proud of like a few of them. I'm like, yeah, that's gonna be good. Definitely want my kids to have that. Something, something saved somewhere and shared, and it's good for the campfire in my absence, right? Like when I go kaput. So I'd always recommend people to document their stuff, even if they don't release it to the world. It's good for your family. We have all this technology leverage to keep intact our memories or ideas or concepts or maybe write some things. Journals are really good tools. I have thousands of pages written. Whether I'll do anything with them or not is still to be seen. But man, the the spaceship or the aliens or children, grandchildren, they get to look through it. My grandfather wrote a few articles along the way about a wide range of things that he published or submitted To newspaper, And they published and published whatever. And he wrote one that was really interesting about pre-World War II. He used to in New York see the it was the Queen Mary ship who would sail to Europe or whatever. And sit there with him and his depression baby buddies and dirt poor, you know what I mean? Like struggling like most most Americans at that point in time. And he said he would go to bed and dream about traveling and going on a ship to Europe. And then sure enough, World War II would happen. And they would rip it apart and take the guts out of the ship, right? And then stack him and every other degenerate on the thing, enlisted in officer alike to go over there and do what they need to do and then you know come back to the United States and help help build an economic boom and ensure that the crime rate stayed for the next twenty years, right? And then the United States would find another way to to shake up the pot. But not a history lesson. Point being is this is a documentation of it. And so 26 episodes in, do we want to keep doing or doing? No, I I think I've underperformed. I think so my some of my preparation has been short because scheduling and things got jumbled up and what's the degree of commitment? I think it good practice a few years ago just to be like, hey, would I release a video for one minute? And it was a recommendation from a mentor of mine, right? So yeah, dude, before you like get out there and do this, just make a commitment to do something like that for your see how you feel about it. The good thing is, is I got like 20-ish critical topics that I kept re-documented, refined, and now I use in a clinical sense or or share is probably vignettes, anecdotes, or stories for clients to chew on or think about or to process if it's relevant to what they're dealing with. without giving too much personal disclosure. This has a personal element to it, but it's also the marketing extension of the brand and who I am and what we do and who we are. Because good relationships only need to happen one time, much like you only need to get rich one time. So you only have to be right one time. And the game and the goal in a tent is to never quit and to always keep playing and then learn the rules along the way. How do you preserve and survive and establish a pattern, habit, ritual which mitigates some of the risk, which we talked about in previous podcasts, but do not quit is the most important ingredient in all of it. And I would say that my life is an example of that. I last night I gave my my lecture on resilience, right, to some counseling students. And we're doing human development and lifespan development. And what is resilience, right? And what does it look like in some of the different domains that we all enter and play? And what do our clients come to us with? And it's a wide range of things in the classes are super engaging. It was probably one of the better classes overall. And you know, three, four classes into the semester we can dial up the intensity. Established a therapeutic alliance rapport trust for the purposes of the safety of the classroom, following good rules, policies, and practices. And I can't see every class was like that. That's not how every every class falls. But anyway, I delivered the lecture on resilience. I've delivered it multiple times. I've taught 10 different classes at Kean in the last few years, and I would say I've delivered it at least five or six times. And this was the best one by far, unequivocally. And it's wild is like on the way there, looking at my notes and preparing and thinking about, hey, make sure I hit this topic and that. what's important and so I show up and I'm ready to go and obviously, you know, we open up the conversation of class and their students, depending where out of the program, they're in that season where they're starting to test out, right? Like so any good program in the world, regardless of what you're doing, especially a practitioner based program, is gonna have some sort of capstone event or or examination or or exit, right? It's confirmed or denied that you hold the requisite skills to to proceed and continue. It doesn't mean you're gonna be successful. It means you get to continue. And those national exams as social workers, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, state exams, comprehensive exams, they all pose that kind of opportunity and or barrier for people to enter a profession. And you know on my end, you know, students immediately open up about like, the national counselor exam, their comprehensive exams, and hey doctor Ruiz how did you prepare? What did you do? How did you and I offer them and I share them the exact text that I used. I shared, I used it every day, all day, multiple times a day. Every meal I would commit a period of time on the front end of the back end of that meal to study that content for about four months. And every day, every single day. I didn't miss one day. And I crushed that comprehensive exam and then I crushed the national counselor exam. And in this celebration, the day that I crushed the national counselor exam, I took that in the morning at the university, and then my wife picked me up and we went to go run a Spartan race in the competitive heap. The day. I was smoked emotionally and mentally, my faculties are kind of drained because it's like a three hour exam. But by the time I got to the Spartan race, it's just like you find that second wing and then you turn the page over, eat a healthy snack, and you keep going. And that's the test of resilience, right? You get into that space where you're depleted or strained or or it's beyond your control and it's chaos and it's going to ensue. And then you have to have the mental faculty and wherewithal to continue continue to to fight on. and and push on to whatever the objective is that you've set forth. So the students are asking all these good questions and we go into the lecture about resilience and I really feel like the the conversation was strong and hinged a lot about the idea of quitting. Like when is it okay to quit? When is it acceptable? When is it appropriate? And I I think it all depends. And that's not popular because that's not really good guidance and But it's universal because it depends. It depends. I don't think you have to overinflate what quitting actually means for a person. Like I think there's a lot of wonderful people that have just quit things and used it as a lesson learned in global texting. And I know for me, I've quit on some things, man. You know, like regardless of how tough and determined and accomplished and impressive I am in my own story. Like, man, I I I quit being a good husband at a point in my life, I quit being a good son, a good a good brother, I I wasn't, you know, I wasn't a good neighbor. I wasn't I just wasn't a good citizen, you know, and I wasn't a good soldier at times. I wasn't a good man. I wasn't a a good Catholic. I wasn't, you know, I quit on those things, man. I just quit. I stopped doing the the daily habits, rituals, and practices of what the good version is, man. And I was at odds with The people that believed in me, the things that were making bets on me to be the version that they thought I could aspire to. But now it's caught in the darkness, man. Malevolence, wickedly evil, man, and it's inside the mind. And nobody's ever seen the mind, right? And so, you know, quitting in there. I can't say I was it wasn't the case, man. There was definitely times I thought about, like post Afghanistan, man. It sucks starting a pistol, man. I can't I can't say that didn't happen, man. It was real. I would think about it all the time, man. I'm like, damn, I got this beat up beat up nine mil and I'm like just freaking Lights out, man. Instead, I kept shooting dope. I was like, I'm just gonna keep shooting heroin. And you know, and but then I would have ideation as well, and it'd be homicidal or suicidal. And I'm like, how do you quit that stuff? Is it there's no quitting to you have to you have to relearn the software has to be downloaded and you have to upload new software literally in the most literal sense, you know? And and then I'm in this world now where I'm like, man, I finally have peace and stability, and then the outside noise is like, well, AI is coming, the robots and this and that, and like. I'm excited for that. Cause I have peace of mind. Like I I have control of my faculties to some degree, at least right now. You know, my eyesight's gonna go, my hearing, my thinking, my memory. But like at this moment, like yeah, like people wouldn't be launching trillion dollar IPOs if they thought that their product was gonna kill humanity. Veterans that follow through with their appointments and their claims process and engage in the VA process or use their benefits and entitlements don't commit suicide. Because they're engaged. They have a reason. They're serving a value and a purpose, whatever that is for them. And just observe that, you know? But I understand how it gets like that. I understand how we can become detached and disenfranchised from the things that we love and care about, claim, and our resilience gets strained and tested beyond a threshold that we can handle. You know, the adaptations because the imagination's been beat out of us to find the solutions to the requisite problems in front of us. And that's everything from calculus to to Jenga, the pull-up. These are all just problems to be solved in an every every different level. And I and I for me I can't say I always pull I solve them. Like the most simple ones sometimes would be the most difficult for me. One hundred percent. One hundred percent. I struggle with that. So so quitting, like when when when did I quit? Did I quit stop being a bad person? Or did I quit Did quick stop myself from becoming a good person? I don't know if I said that the right way, but I think I'm trying to say it the right way. Like w when did I quit? But I I don't know, man. I mean for me is a lot of sports, a lot of sports, school a little bit. The dissertation I thought about quitting. I definitely did, so ul ultimate, like when do when do we quit? You know, what do we what do we do with that information? Then our body's sending us a message, or our mind, or emotions. People are telling us we should quit, or we can never be or do, you know. Like I remember writing in rehab every time I hey, I'm gonna be rich. But I don't really know what that means. Really what I meant to say was I wanna be wealthy, not rich. You know. I wanna have X amount of net worth and then I wanna draw a very small percentage off of that and and then you know it's crazy is three years later it I was almost like God sent me Bitcoin and I was like, my goodness And now we see here eleven years later and I'm like, man, you know, like what a weird world. You know, what a weird world in a a beautiful way, right? Like just second opportunity. Like, hey, I don't really understand this, but I saw it on this TV show on HBO and I'm like, all right, these guys are really nerdy and and media has a really funny way of doing this. That means there's somebody behind this that's pushing this message or narrative. So what is it connected to in the information sh you know machine? And then what value does it serve? And at that point in time, crypto is very much popular, dark web kind of stuff, Silk Road think criminality, underworld kind of thing. So for me immediately because of my past, I'm like, Bad guys are always one step ahead of the good guys. The professional criminals are always one. That doesn't mean they don't get caught. They almost all get caught, I would say, or they become known that that's what they do, and it becomes different levels of criminality. But generally when it comes to cyber warfare and cybercrime, they're one step ahead. Anyway, so Bitcoin fits that that part of it. So then it's like, well, even if it goes up or down, right, you look at the trajectory of that span of time, eleven years, and I feel like my life models almost what the Bitcoin did. Arrows go up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down. All the while while r retaining some degree of value or appreciating a value. You know, just like anything that's of of value. And I think I think that's what the second lease in life is. And so do not quit, right? Like don't quit. Don't quit. You know, don't quit. Don't quit trying to be a great husband or a great father. Don't quit trying to reconnect with those people you might be estranged from that you think you would like to have in your life. Don't quit being a good friend and until somebody shows you that it's not worth being a good friend with. See, that's the thing with somebody like myself. I'm not unique in this, right? Folks that have deep empathy and connection and can feel something for a human, right? A degree of warmth, maybe I call it. We're also polar opposite the other way. Ubiquitously cold, calculated. Like, move on. Carcass, side of the road. Doesn't even it's like, what, whatever. Keep going. You know, and that's that's a gift and a curse in itself. It's how I keep peace. You know. So you want to quit on being a friend to people get second chance or lease. Yeah, I think there's I think there's appreciation and I think there's there can be value in apologies or reconciliation or amends, but my own experience tells me not everybody accepts the amends. And so I've learned on the receiving end at times where people have slighted me or done wrong how to process and sort through that at an advanced level and skill because of my own pain and hurt. That own hurt that I've had has made me wiser to when people outstep me what to do with that. See, 'cause for me the the capacity to escalate things into very weird, awkward positions or wide ranges of outcomes that are associated with those things. So I I I any slight or disrespect or mocking or message that gets back to me, I just I take it as and roll with it. You know? Because people have opinions about everything. You know you wanna take it all the way, but you can't be a quitter then though. And I'm an all the way kind of guy, man. You know, someone to compliment my friends and family would say though, as a plug to me. It's like, Man, you can hate or love Vincent Ruiz, but that dude is an all the way guy. So if he's gonna go into the streets, man, he's going all the way. If he's gonna go to war, went all the way. There's no like we're not stopping it from Kuwait, dude. Like I'm gonna migrate my way to the war. And I was I I eight was that man. We Mukta D and Bakubu and a little north of that and The army done a job on them, man. They smashed Al Qaeda and the jam guys out there. Smashed them. The Cav and the 82nd SER guys. We got there and got the queue up to go to Soder, man. Super Bowl. You know, Super Bowl. Got to play and see. And then went to Kunar. Back to back Super Bowls. You know? Do not quit. Be around people that don't quit. Be around people that don't quit. Yeah, family stuff, health stuff. Yeah. Vocational. Vocational. Vocational, man. That's the one. People get caught up in that. There's people that speed to jobs they hate with bosses they hate. That's always weird to me. Like, hey, I'm gonna increase the risk of my life to go to a place that I hate job. It's weird. You know, but I and back to sports, man. I think sports is where it's foundational. I think for me that's it's been great. Daughter was awesome. Great opportunities to teach lessons in there and Overcoming and competition and what does it look like? What do you do with it? Pressure and what's the level of investment? You know, you know, because it in anything, right? Not just sports, right? Anything, any profession, any field. If you keep going and you keep going and you keep going, if you're any good, they'll find you, man. So I tell anybody, like if you're any good at the thing, they'll find you. And you might have to migrate your way to and towards and around the thing. and if you're any good and you migrate and you make the sacrifice required, if you know, you you'll get an opportunity and then you'll have to get another choice or make another choice, right? And you you think about it in terms of like pro sports and you think about the most competitive industries or fields, but then you even think about in the counseling profession, man. And a lot of I think half of the class wanna be school counselors, they're aspiring for that. There's maybe one opening per couple districts that are worth anything. It's like a full-time, like you're on the team, pension, salary, something. And I have to remind students that, man, is like that's how competitive the field they're entering is. And the the stakes are equally as high. You know, it's their chosen profession. And quitting's probably not gonna get you there, man. That's that's that's the seriousness of it. But that resilience thing, making making adaptations to whatever the environment is. You know, and I think I think once somebody starts quitting, it never ever ends. You know, on a personal level, I'll disclose this man. One time I actually maybe during the dissertation, like I said, maybe once in the army-ish. Not really, kinda. I don't know. But not really. Definitely ice hockey I wanted to quit at one point. I definitely liked baseball more at some point. 'Cause where I grew up, like Lakewood was really good at baseball at that time. There's guys getting drafted out of there and stuff. Like it was a big deal. Like you had scouts there, like Like all the time, like watching it. It was a big deal. A little local, local yokel. So every town has something like that, their sport or whatever. But at the time it baseball and I was like, you your friends are playing baseball. I'll gravitate to that. But I also played ice hockey. I tried all the other sports and wasn't particularly good at any of them. but hockey man, I you know, I played, I didn't make the A team, right? That was the big team, my seventh grade year, right? And in my opinion, looking back on it, I was probably better than like three or four of those kids. Definitely. I mean, high school had proved that I definitely was significantly better. But but at that point I probably in my mind was but the politics of it, right? The social part of it, the investment, who's been there forever and knows and coaches and whatever, right? So I'm an and I'm a younger, younger in that age group, right? Like the youngest. So me and two other dudes in we didn't make the A team, go to the B team or on the B team, B team, I know, it's like twelve of us. The good thing that came out of that, I would say, is because we played a level down of probably where we were supposed to be, though, what happened is we never came off the ice. My father would always say after, he's like, you know, return on investment. I didn't couldn't afford to have you guys kids playing hockey, let on two of you. He's like, but he's like, that year was probably one of my favorite years, is because you never came off the ice ever. He's like, you were better. He's like, you're one of the better players. You got more reps. Ice time is expensive. It's hard to get. And you were maxing it out every weekend. Multiple games, man, never coming off the ice. He's like, and your skating just got really, really good. Like because you didn't start skating until eight and now you're you're twelve. Four year gap. He's like, So the kids haven't skiing since they're five. You close that gap on some of them that year, you just didn't realize it. And I'm just you it's just feedback. And I've said coaches told me that too after they're like, Yeah, like there was a jump. The next year we go to nationals, man, and we were probably one of the best teams in the country in our youth hockey, you know, and got to be a captain on that team with the assistants and make some great friends, man. What a crew, right? Like Fifth fifth in the country, won a bunch of things, man. And that crew would stick together, most of us to core, and then play through high school, man. And we would rattle off a bunch of state championships and club and go to the regionals a few more times after that and play in some championship games there and rack off some pub three public school state championships role, man. Like but I I wanted to quit that summer. Like it make the A team. I'd never forget it. And I'm like, I don't know. It's first we it's like September, August, right when the season's kinda turned. They do the trials and give the call and 'cause I was still playing basketball and they had queued me up to be like, hey, like You're gonna be the point guard. And in Lakewood, right? And predominantly black, right? Like basketball was a thing. I think it still kind of is. like they're like, Yeah, my dad's like, Yeah, that's the pipeline, man. Get you out there and get you over to Pop Richardson, man, and those guys. They were winning state championships too, man. They were one of the best public schools at that time. So that's a weird growth moment. And it's like, like, I don't know, I don't know about basketball, Dad. You know, there's kids in my class really dunking at that point, like down the street in the middle school. So it's like, you know, they I was like, I don't know, but I loved hockey, man. There was the violent aspect of it and aggression to it. You could do that. You couldn't do in basketball. Just couldn't play the same way. And but the story goes, man, is like in that moment in time, I'm like, I think I'm gonna quit. My parents were cool with that. My parents were very lousy fair about it. Like, all but you gotta do something, you know, maybe local, whatever. My I think my mom was more like, Hey, no financial obligation to vice hockey. Rightfully so, 'cause it's expensive. You know, nowadays it could be anywhere from ten to twenty grand if you're doing it right. You know. My grandfather pulled me aside, It's a World War II dude. Back to my grandfather about documenting your story. So he's all real. True. He has photos of World War II and his experience. I still have them. And he leans in and he's like, Hey, can I talk to you? Pulls me aside and it's like, you I'm all with my arms folded and I'm like huffy and puffy and like emotional and pissed. It's like, man, I just I just want to let you know. It's like once you start quitting, he's like, You're it never stops, man. He's like, you know, you I remember him saying this to me exactly. So you just found out that the world doesn't care. You know what you do next is gonna matter a heck of a lot more. You know, and I remember like it was like, All right, we'll go play B here and play it and like and then I was like and then the hockey ended. We we we went like and thirty something at one point. I never forget, I used to cry after all the games. And then we won our last two tournaments of the year, man, back to back tournaments. And I was like, and I remember in the car driving home, wherever the tournament was, I think North Jersey or New York, I don't remember. And I told my dad I like, All I'm done. Thank God baseball's here. I'm so done. Like dad, I just wanna go out there and Play baseball. That's what want to do. Because we're good. I was good. Our group was good. And he's like, Well, I'd ask you to just no hockey this summer, so I didn't do camp or anything, there were no clinics. You don't have to skate. It's like, you they they have the skate, you don't have to do it. It's like, you know, if they want you, come back and play the B team again or whatever if you want or not, you know, just try out. So they make an age change that year, and all of a sudden I'm the oldest kid now. Me and the other two kids I played on the B team with, like, made it the eight next A team. We are now the oldest kids. on the team. And international man. You know, so that's serendipity and luck. And that's why I tell young people I work with, student athletes especially, people starting businesses, people making familial changes and moves, just just don't practice quitting, man. Like all the systems and how smart people are and whatever, and all the things in the system, they gotta figure out the mental models as good as they are. It's all free. It's out there. It's for you to explore and hunt, to harvest it, and to reorganize it, and to plan it into your farm or put it into your factory and develop your system. That prints cash and dividends and rewards, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, down through financial. And it requires not quitting because at times, whether it is the coaches or the market or the economy or your neighbor, everybody's gonna have an opinion about what you're doing if you're doing, especially if you're doing anything worth value. And which you get so good that you're actually able to help people and afford platforms and opportunities for people, and they'll still MF you behind your back to other people. That is just how the world works, man, and I can't explain it. And then you hear that second hand and you're like, yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting because I just gave a discount to the particulars peoples, like family, whatever, something. And that was the mistake on my part. You know. But you don't quit. You learn from it. And you're like, all right, I just know not to do that thing again, right? And you don't quit. You keep going and going and going. But yeah. I think that's what you do. What you do with the information, man. That that's what matters most. It's okay to think about it, but it's what you do with the information that matters most. I can't come up with too many things that people once they fully commit to something and then know they're committing to something that means something to them, it's important. They behave and act accordingly and like quitting doesn't even become part of the language. You know? What would Elon Musk do? Like this I don't know. If he would have quit, what'd happen? Alright. Be resilient. Out there. Get after it. Do all the good stuff. I'm gonna do that. I don't know. Cheers.