I recently asked a podcast guest (who was a medical doctor that started a software company):

How do you stay focused and achieve success?

His response surprised me: I focus on the only thing that will never change: human nature.

The Unlimited Distraction Machine

Today’s world is filled with distraction.

Our phones have created an environment where distraction is quite literally at our fingertips.

Every hot new trend pulls our attention away from what we working on— and makes us question:

We have endless options.

But what I have learned after speaking with dozens of successful people is that they all focus on what doesn't change: people.

More specifically, they focus on human nature.

Why Human Nature?

Human nature is the collective feelings, patterns of thinking, and behaviors that we all generally exhibit.

Simply put, its the natural tendencies that all people engage in.

Understanding humans is a pre-requisite to success:

Everything that occurs in our world is based on the decisions of people. Sometimes its an individual, and sometimes its a collective group.

But it all happens on the basis of human nature.

A quick read of Ray Dalio’s book The Changing World Order— will show you just how predictable humans are.

The saying history repeats itself is actually based on the fact that we know how people will generally behave during certain periods of time.

Dalio’s book outlines the major periods that tend to happen just prior to a powerful nation falling:

• Internal conflict

• External War

• Increase in debt

Sounds familiar?

Understanding the Why

The fundamental reason to improve your understanding of people is level up your life.

Understanding the ‘why’ behind people’s thoughts, actions and feelings will improve your relationships, career, wealth and your life.

The difficult part is that you cannot truly begin to understand other people until you have understood yourself.

Until you have been able to understand your own thoughts, behaviors and emotions, you will not be able to effectively assess others.

So how can you start?

The step that worked for me was simply asking the “why” behind my emotions.

We all feel things, but few dig deeper to understand why we are actually feeling that way.

I am not referring to things like “someone passed away, now I am sad”

I am referring to things like

“Why am I always leaning toward anger when things are mostly good?”

“Why do I tend to retreat when a conflict arises?”

“Why am I never satisfied with what I get done?”

“Why do I always feel like I never have enough time to do things?”

I promise if you sit down with yourself and start asking the harder questions, you would be amazed at how much you uncover about yourself.

I’ll give you a personal example.

The Problem

I noticed that I got particularly frustrated when I had a lot of social events planned in a short amount of time.

Normally people would be excited about having all these things to go have fun at.

But I always found myself frustrated instead of excited.

So instead of just feeling frustrated, I kept asking myself why I was feeling this way.

After weeks of trying to figure it out— I uncovered the answer.

I felt like I lacked agency over my time.

I felt as though my life was on a constant schedule determined by other people.

I thought I was not able to ever set and control my own time.

The Solution:

The ironic part was that the problem wasn’t the social events, it was how I spending my time around the social events.

I was not being deliberate enough with my time outside of the pre-planned periods.

The moment I started taking control of my free time, all the frustration melted away.

Pre-requisite for Success

I started this letter saying it is necessary to understand human nature for success— and the primary reason is that we can better understand ourselves and spot our blindspots.

There is a whole other part that highlights the reason we need to understand other people, but I will save that for a future letter.

My advice is starting asking “why” more often.

Start asking it about yourself first.

Then start asking it about the things around you.

I always ask why that advertisement was placed there

Or why the store is set up the way it is

Or why that person phrased their tweet that way

There is always a reason behind things whether we realize it or not.

But the understanding comes after asking why.

Something New is Coming!

I am very excited to announce a new project coming out soon, called Productize.

This will be focused on people looking to build, scale and monetize whatever they are working on. Fusing together product, growth and human behavior to create the highest quality ideas.

If you’re interested you can join the list here:

Hope to see you all there.

Talk soon,

Matt