602 - You Can Change Passions at ANY Point in your Life with Rich Roll

My true skill set as a podcaster was developed through sitting in thousands and thousands of AA meetings, listening to people tell their stories and learning how to tell my own story. That was my training ground for being a public speaker and being a podcast host. You learn how to be empathetic, you learn how to listen, you develop this great capacity [and] compassion for the human condition that I think lends itself towards creating a safe and interesting environment to explore those very themes with another person sitting across from you.

What we do need to do, though, is reconfigure the priorities of education around learning how to learn, and learning how to make decisions, and learning how to interact with people—life skills that transcend pure memorization.

If I'm writing something, I don't publish it unless I'm afraid of what people are going to think of me.

When you double down on your curiosity and you have the willingness and tenacity to follow that... it creates a compounding interest that, in a real-world context, shows up in opportunities that you couldn't have predicted or imagined.

There are a lot of ways to go [about] making money. Making a TV show, or doing a podcast, or going into stand-up comedy, or even being a writer—those are not ways to make a lot of money. You don't go into those thinking, 'Man, I'm going to make billions.'

In the way that the porn industry drove technological innovation on the Internet, comedians, really, are responsible for the birth of podcasting.

If you're not afraid of what you're creating, there's a chance, then, that okay, everybody else has done it because they weren't afraid either. There's got to be some resistance somehow that you get over.

Vulnerability sort of buys freedom. When you're vulnerable, when you are able to admit to... what has gone wrong with you in the past [and] the mistakes you've made, now you're free.

Everything that has been successful in my life has been—I wouldn't call it happenstance—but it didn't result from me putting it on a vision board.

There are a lot of financial reasons why you shouldn't own a home. There are a lot of reasons why it's a really bad idea.