It's Okay To Be Selfish: FRIDAY FIRE #3
Host: Isaac Mashman · June 12, 2020 · Episode 28 · 14 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
Welcome back to another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman. I'm your host, and you are now listening to episode 28 and episode number three of Friday Fire, the third episode. Now, Friday Fire is a shorter episode compared to my normal ones. It's between five to ten minutes long, and its main purpose is to really give you an extra boost for the weekend, to give you, I don't want to say motivation, because then people are going to call me a motivational speaker, and that's not what I'm trying to do. But what I'm trying to do is help you guys out, help you achieve massive results in life.
These are things that I am doing in my day-to-day life, things that I've actively studied, things that I have experienced, and my goal is to give you that push for the weekend. If you're trying to be at the top of your field, if you're trying to be a part of the [one percent], if you're trying to be an expert, you're going to have to work on the weekend sometimes. Yes, yes, you will. And if you're listening to this on a Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, you're still going to get value from this episode. You're still going to get an extra push for the rest of the week, whenever you're listening.
But today I'm going to be talking about something that will possibly make some of you disagree with me, and that's perfectly okay. We all have different opinions. We all have different beliefs. We all have different morals and ethics to a degree. We have different viewpoints. That's a phenomenal thing about being human and living in the 21st century: we can all think different thoughts.
But what I'm going to be mentioning is selfishness. Is it okay to be selfish? But before I jump into what I want to talk about in today's episode, I want to ask you guys for a very big favor. I say very big, but it's actually rather small. The entire point of this show is to help as many people as possible better chase after their vision, to really learn the ins and outs of just living life and pursuing something other than normal. I [rebranded] myself from an entrepreneur who's in the entrepreneurial online space to someone who rather recognizes that you don't have to be an entrepreneur to have a vision.
You could be someone who is an underwater basket weaver and have a phenomenal vision for your life. I didn't want to box myself in, and I [didn't] want to label myself.
The entire point of the show is to help anybody who has a vision, anybody who has a dream. The more people who listen to this show and the more streams that I get, the more my audience grows, and the more people will benefit. More people will learn information that will provide value to them and actually change their lives if they apply the things that I speak about. So guys, if you get any ounce of value from this episode and from every episode that you listen to, I ask that you share my show. You could post it on IG stories. You could post it on Twitter.
Make a tweet about it. Do something to share Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman. I would greatly appreciate it, honestly, because that's the way that this show is going to grow. I am not to the point yet in my business journey and in my life journey where I can put a ton of funding towards advertisements to grow the show. I'll get to that point, but it would make a lot more sense if you guys were to share it and help me in my journey as well. So I'm trying to help you, and if you could help me.
Man, [that] makes the world go round and round. But today I will be talking about selfishness. Yes, is it okay to be selfish? Now, this is a topic that I have struggled with over the past two, three years since I got started on my journey, because I'm naturally a very empathetic and selfless guy. I naturally make it about other people. I want to help people. I want to help other people win, other people succeed, other people recognize their dreams. I've always been the type of dude where I open up the door for a stranger if I'm at the store. I'm the type of guy who's going to go out of my way to make sure that you are okay, to go out of my way to listen to the things that you have going on.
If you need a shoulder to lean on, I am the person to talk to. Even when it comes to building my brand, I have spent an immense amount of time having one-on-one conversations with a lot of amazing, amazing people. But what I've recognized is whenever you're being selfless, you're giving energy.
You're giving part of your energy away. We as human beings, and we as energy-driven beings, only have so much energy that we can give away on a daily basis. That's the reason we need sleep. We need sleep so we can recharge our batteries, give our brain rest, give our body rest. At the end of the day, if we're consistently doing things for other people, we will feel drained. We come into the world alone, and we're going to eventually die alone, unfortunately. We're the only person who's going to be in our grave at the end of our lives. I'm not trying to depress you, but rather state facts.
You might be like, Isaac, that's pretty cliche. Well, cliches are oftentimes accurate and oftentimes true, I've come to find out. So it's this balance between selflessness and selfishness that I've consistently battled with, because I'm like, if I'm making it about me, I feel like I'm being ego-driven and that I'm being narcissistic and that I'm being arrogant.
But if I'm making it all about other people, then I'm feeling drained. I don't feel as emotionally driven to go out and do things because I'm making it about other people. So it's like, how am I supposed to navigate a world full of other people and be in a business and start up a whole bunch of other different things and promote myself and not be selfish? How can I make it about other people? This balance, you can already see that this is kind of a confusing thing. Finding that balance is such a difficult thing. I've recognized that sometimes we're going to have to be selfish first.
If you're trying to help every other person in your life, but you're not helping yourself first, how do you expect to ever help another person?
You can't. You absolutely cannot. If you do make any difference in their life, if you do contribute to their life and help them out, you're going to be exhausted at the end. You might have spent time helping another person that you could have spent, and that you should have spent, helping yourself first so you can give more in the future. Dan Lok, he's an internet entrepreneur. He has a couple of different businesses. He's big into copywriting. He says, be selfish first so you can be generous later. That's something I've had a difficult time really implementing into my life. Like I said, I always tried to make it about other people, but over the past week, I've begun realizing that I haven't really been as emotionally attached to my purpose and to what I'm doing, because I've forgotten myself in the process.
I've literally forgotten Isaac Mashman. What am I doing this for? [In] the process, because I've been so focused on the long-term vision of helping other people, I failed to realize that, hey, the better off I get, the better off other people around me will be as well. Some people have horrible hearts. Some people are just horrible human beings, to where the more money they get, the more success they get, it won't change any people around them. But for people like you, and I would like to think that if you're listening to this, you're a good-ass person. That's just an assumption that I'm going to make.
Call me a little biased, but I want top-notch people listening to this podcast because I want this podcast to be a top-notch podcast. You know what I'm saying?
So I would like to think that if you're listening to this, you're a good person with a good heart, and therefore the more success that you achieve in your life, wouldn't that result in the people around you benefiting? That results in charities receiving money from you, causes that you care about receiving funding, jobs being created because of your actions. This is very, I don't want to make it just business-owner centered, but this could be for an artist or a rapper. If you're making a million dollars a year and you're generating hundreds of thousands of streams, imagine what you could do to give back. Whether that means doing a free feature for one of your close friends to give him a little bit of a boost socially, or taking some of the money that you're earning from your streams and giving it back in tithing, or giving it back to a family member, or giving your mom a paycheck for a couple thousand dollars, whatever it might be.
But at the same exact time, if you're so focused on helping other people from the get-go that you don't get to the point where you're making any money or where you're actually seeing results in your own personal life, aren't you doing not only yourself a disservice, but also the people who you want to help in the first place?
When a plane goes down, or when they say a plane goes down, right, the air attendant always says at the beginning of the flight, in case of an emergency, put your air mask on first, your oxygen mask on first. Don't help the person next to you until you have your mask on first. I think that's very accurate with life. Society has almost pressured us into giving so much and helping everybody else around us that we forget to help ourselves. Now, I'm not saying do anything that violates the morals and ethics of another person. That's not what I'm saying at all. Don't go around stepping on other people.
Have a competitive edge. Go back to my episode 27 if you want to learn what that competitive edge is. But be in competition with yourself, and be selfish sometimes. Be selfish sometimes. An example of being selfish is cutting off friends, friends that aren't conducive to your success. Isn't that kind of being selfish? Isn't not going out to the bar selfish? You're not hanging out with friends. You're not doing things that you normally would do. Or even when it comes to family members, maybe you don't go to every single family function. I'm not telling you to do this or not to do it. But if you're naturally drained around your family, then you wouldn't go to a family function.
… A personal passage is left out for privacy …
Guys, don't feel like you have to be pressured to make it all about other people. It's like if you don't make it about other people, you're a bad human being. That's kind of, we live in a society that's full of pressure. Just because you might not have the identical viewpoint as another person, you automatically label yourself, or you're labeled, as a bad human being. Guys, this isn't the case.
You can't let a bully internet culture make you into something that you're not or make you feel a certain type of way. That's applicable with all these online gurus and people saying, I want to put on for my family, I want to do this, I want to do that, I want to do this, that, the other, and save the elephants and all that other crap. Not saying that those things aren't great, but a lot of times those people fail to mention themselves. I think that if you focus more on what you've got going on, you'll be able to help other people with what they have going on with a lot less effort, with a lot less stress.
Imagine if you made $100,000. Giving away $1,000 if you're making $100,000 is a lot less stressful than if you only had $20,000 and were giving away $1,000.
You can do the math. Or even devoting your time: if you're spending all of your time volunteering, helping another person, and you don't have any time to go out and build your career, to build your brand, to build your business, to chase after, what is it, your vision, then you're not doing the one thing that you should be doing first. A millionaire never became a millionaire off of doing things all for other people. Their service and product is for other people, yes. But they're not about to spend all of their time giving it away. People value time. These individuals that you look up to value their time.
They're selfish to a degree. Don't be a complete jerk about it, but being selfish here and there, there's no shame in that. So guys, that's all I have for today's episode.
Thank you again for tuning in. It was kind of a slower-paced episode. I'm not really in that whole energy of super loud, super motivated. That wasn't the episode for today. [It was] rather laid back. I want you guys to think about this. I want you guys to really process this information, so listen back through if you must. But with that being said, guys, make sure to follow me at Isaac Mashman across all social media platforms. If you're an artist or musician, I've got amazing things going on behind the scenes. I would love to go ahead and talk to you and see if we're a fit to work together on helping 100 artists in 2020 succeed without ever signing to record labels. So with that being said, guys, always chase after your vision and live without limitations. Much love.