 You don't just want to succeed in life. You want to flourish, bear physical survival, bear career survival. There's a lot of people that are just going on autopilot. They're healthy enough. They're happy enough. They have a decent enough relationship. They have a decent enough set of career goals. But are they really flourishing? No, why not? Because those goals, those relationships, that health, all of those things that basically have been determined from the outside for them. They have no autonomy. True happiness, true fulfillment, true flourishing, Einrann says, comes from making conscious decisions about all of those issues in our lives. So figuring out, we don't all have to figure out the mechanics behind why our automobile works. But you have to figure out what kind of car represents what you want to drive. Are you a sports car guy? Are you an SUV guy? What does that say about me? You don't all have to pursue the same career. You don't all have to pursue the same career path. Some of you may want to go work for a big company. Some of you may want to be independent businessmen, et cetera. But what you have to do is figure out what is appropriate for you. Am I the type of person? Is this me? Is myself the type of person that wants to pursue this type of career? Because that process, she says, is what leads to true fulfillment. Now, the interesting thing about this, and to go back for a moment to the mythology of today or the criticism about the mythology of today, what this means is not, as people often criticize, that everyone has to become a billionaire successful businessman in the steel power or whatever industry that her characters are in. She writes characters that are, one of her characters, probably the most self-made of all her characters, is Hank Reardon, who invents a new medal in the book Atlas Shrugged. He's a metallurgist, and he's a businessman, and he goes into the steel industry, and he works for 16 years to invent a new alloy. It's just pretty damn cool. I mean, literally it's lighter, cheaper, and more durable than steel. It's going to revolutionize industry in the same way that steel took us out of the Iron Age into the steel age. He's going to do the same thing. And this process that she depicts, of course, is of this Titan industrialist. And so people say, often when criticizing the idea of self-making, oh, well, everyone can't be a Titan of industry. Everyone can't be a brilliant metallurgist. Everyone can't be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But that's not the point. And the point is that no matter what your chosen occupation, no matter what level you rise to, the more important question is whether it's done on your terms with your values. And so there are characters. So there's another character in the novel who basically is an office assistant. He's not particularly intellectually brilliant. He's not going to start a new business. He's not going to start a new company. But he's going to do his job and pursue his values with the same kind of moral ambitiousness that someone who goes all the way to the top can. What Rand's point is is not that in order to be successful, we all have to be billionaires. I mean, it would be nice. I'd like to have a bunch of friends that are all billionaires. If you guys all want to make billions of dollars, like, that's a good thing. Don't get me wrong. But that's not the measure of success. The measure of success, but if that's what you want to go for, then that will be your measure of success. But for some of you, the measure of success may be to be successful in my career to find a good relationship and to have the best physical development possible. You're into bodybuilding. So that's your thing. Some of you may say, I want the best career I can get. But for a while, I'm going to pursue another path. I'm going to be a chef. I'm going to do this at home at first. I'm going to try this out. My friends are going to eat a bunch of bad meals for a while. But I'm going to get better and better and better. And I'm going to pursue that as a value. And ultimately, I'm going to pursue that so that that can be my full-time career. Now, you may or may not make billions of dollars doing that. It's about the process. It's about identifying what's valuable to yourself that can lead you to success out there in the world and pursue it, no matter what the scope of that is. Because the scope of all of these things differs, just in the sense that I might want to be a world-class athlete. Unfortunately, it's probably not going to happen. Despite what the Huffington Post said during the Olympics, I don't know if anybody saw this. This was a great piece. The Huffington Post had all this Olympics coverage. And one of the pieces that they had was train like an Olympic athlete. How to? And I thought, if I could train like an Olympic athlete, why am I not an Olympic athlete? I can't train like an Olympic athlete. I just, my body can't tolerate it. I wouldn't be able to do it, right? But within the scope of your ability, if you pursue those values, if you identify and define those values selfishly for yourself, and that you make that conscious rational process to plan out how you're going to pursue them, that is what true self-making is about. Such that any of us can say, I am my own man. Why? Not because I don't owe debt to anyone, not because I don't have a business that depends upon other people and trading with other people. Not because I literally think of myself in a solipsistic way as being divorced from all other people, right? Which is the character that you didn't build that praise upon. That's a character. That's not reality. Reality is of course people trade. Of course people have relationships with other people. But when you say, I am my own man, what you mean is, I am my own moral sovereign. I choose who I am. I define who I am. And when I don't like it, I can change it and fix it. That's what self-making is really about. And that's ultimately, I think what we can get back to this tradition of Benjamin Franklin, if you read Ayn Rand's works, most of her characters have some element of self-making in them, defining themselves. This is what it's really all about. And this ultimately is what can lead everyone, not necessarily, you know, I'm not gonna promise you all wealth. I'm not gonna promise you all, you know, superior physical development. I'm not gonna promise you anything. All I'm gonna promise you is that you can say, at the end of the day, I am my own man. I am who I choose to be. Myself is who I chose. So, let's wrap up there. Hopefully there's still some time left for questions. Yeah, got some questions? Couple questions? Sure. Go ahead. Thanks for your speech. I thought that was very helpful. Well, thank you. So my question is, as a part of being self-made, a lot of times when you pursue a path, you have to not care about what other people think. You know, it might be your family or it might be your friends. But, you know, when do you draw the threshold? Because a lot of times, you know, you could be going down a path and it might not be the right path. And there are people who are wise enough to see that, but you can't see it yourself. You know, how would you balance that indifference factor? Yeah, that's a very, very interesting question. It's a very, very practically difficult question. There is a balance to be drawn between just saying, look, I'm going to define my terms. I'm going to go ahead, you know, full steam. Who cares? Other people aren't going to hold me back. And on the other side, say, well, there are people who are smarter, wiser, and more experienced than I am who are going to be along the way as I'm going full steam shouting at me as I go by. There's a cliff ahead, right? Now, how does one balance that? I think that the best, I mean, just in general, right? Because a lot of these might deal with concrete specifics. But in general, I think that the best way of approaching these issues is by approaching them by saying, other people do have value to contribute to my growth. The question is, how is that process defined? Do people make a claim on me? Right, your parents say, oh, but you know, you're hurting the family or your friends say, oh, we don't want to, you know, we don't like who you're becoming or whatever. Versus people who want to make a trade with you, right? People who see the value that you're pursuing and want to promote your development, right? And there's, and you can start to see in a lot of general context, there are people who make claims on you, who want to hold you back, right? Those are the people, I don't, you don't necessarily just ignore them, but you take what they say and you evaluate it.