The solution to anxiety and hopelessness is a quest

Alex Hormozi’s way of thinking resonates with me. He said,

“Hopelessness comes from a perceived lack of options. We don’t know what to do. Anxiety comes from too many options but no priorities. We don’t know what to focus on.”

Both problems come from the same missing ingredient. A quest. One clear direction you have decided is worth everything else you could be doing. Without it, you either see no path forward, or you see too many and cannot choose between them.

“All of us are going to die. But some of us are going to die trying.”

A quest does not have to be building a company or breaking a record. It could be being the best father, the best musician, the best neighbor. What matters is that you have picked one thing and decided everything else bends around it.

But Hormozi’s rant raises a harder question. What do you do when you genuinely do not know what your quest is.

I think the answer is that you cannot think your way to it. You have to go find it. Try things you are curious about, notice what still holds your attention after the novelty wears off, and pay attention to what you are good at that other people seem to struggle with. None of that happens sitting still. It only happens by doing something badly first and seeing what the doing teaches you.

Ed Sheeran said something similar when asked how he became good enough to fill stadiums.

“Success happens from failing a hundred times. It doesn’t happen overnight. You have to be rubbish. And you have to have people laugh at you. And you have to have belief that eventually it is going to get better.”

That is the part nobody wants to hear. The people who look like they found their quest early did not skip the rubbish phase. They just did not stop during it.

This is the part I would say to anyone who feels behind. Not knowing your quest yet is not the same as being lost. It just means you are still in the tinkering phase, and the tinkering phase does not resolve itself from a desk. It resolves out in the world, one attempt at a time.

So here is the question I am sitting with this week. If you already have a quest, are you actually moving toward it, or just thinking about it. And if you do not have one yet, what is the smallest thing you could try this week to find out what pulls at you.

See you next Sunday.

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.