DailyJim: Do we want to be powerful or look powerful?

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Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. This is the first one in a while and it's live streamed. Trying this new Daily Gym live episodes so that you know I record it in real time and it's uploaded immediately and then maybe there will be clips or something afterwards. But just trying to do it very real time. Tired of living in a world that is so produced and edited. So this is the episode for Monday, June 16th, 2025. And today I want to talk about the difference between looking powerful and being powerful. Or rather, do you want to look powerful? Do we want to look powerful? Do we want to be powerful?

So this comes up in conversation a lot and in thought a lot when I'm here in Kenya. I notice sometimes a lot of people will want to go to the clubs and they will want to buy the very expensive bottles of alcohol. They will want to have the sparklers going and the signs and people dancing. And they want people to see how much money they've spent on a very fancy bottle of alcohol. And I've thought, is this about looking rich or being rich? Maybe the question is, do you want to be rich or do you want to look rich? Or do you want to be powerful? You want to look powerful. You want to be strong? You want to look strong. You want to be beautiful, you want to look beautiful. If you want to be smart, you want to look smart. I think it can come up in so many different ways. And I think looking one way is having other people believe that you're that way versus actually being that way, you believing that you're that way. A lot of people who spend a lot of money on the clubs or on cars or on houses or on whatever they clothes or things like this, they may look rich, but they're not actually that rich because a lot of times people will have debt. They take all the money they get and they spend it or they spend more than they even get. And so they have credit card debt or they have loans that they have to pay back to other people. And so this, it can be a trap of trying to show other people that you have one specific trait when you don't actually think you have it yourself. So a lot of times the people who want to be rich in this example, don't show others that they're rich. Because sometimes if you show other people you have a lot of money, then a lot of other people want the money from you. I remember when I first studied abroad in Costa Rica, one of the advices was, if you are walking down the street, don't wear a Rolex or don't have your, I think, iPod at the time hanging out because people will want to steal it. If you are flashing the wealth in front of people, then people know it's there and they might want to take it. And so my experience, sometimes people who have a lot of money don't look like they have any money or look like maybe they're just normal, middle class, kind of average.

But I think the same thing comes to strength. Think about the people who are some of the strongest, top-tier black belts that you know in martial arts. Some of them don't even look like they do martial arts. Maybe thin, but lean, very lean, very flexible, but they just look like kind of your average type of person. But if you see them in action, they can destroy you. But they don't, because they don't need to show you how strong they are, because they know they're strong.

And maybe sometimes again they don't want to show other people how strong because if you show that you're a really strong person then other people might attack you i have friends who are very tall or very big very muscular and they've often been attacked in clubs or on the street just because, they look like big men and a lot of times other people are like yeah i can take on that big guy, And so sometimes showing the strength or having other people, if you look strong, it can bring more problems. And sometimes when people look strong, they're not actually strong on the inside. They don't think that they're strong. I look at a military parade that Trump did a couple days ago on his birthday, and that is maybe the supreme example of trying to look strong on one's birthday. Look how powerful I am. Thump my chest. Boom, boom, boom. But again, the ones who are really powerful, who believe they're really powerful and strong, don't tend to do that. So because they believe it. Same thing with intelligence. A lot of times the person who is trying to say how smart they are wants other people to think that they're smart and.

Not often because the person doesn't think that they are smart. There's an insecurity there, not believing that their situation is that good intellectually. And so wanting other people to maybe reinforce it, to show it. I watched a movie a couple of days ago called Materialist. I think it's Materialist about a woman who was a matchmaker in New York, who is basically torn between her ex who is an actor uh with very little money and the new guy she's dating who is like private equity super rich and um yeah it's just that there's one line in the movie and if you don't want to me to spoil it somewhat then maybe just tune it out skip forward like 15 seconds but, basically saying that when other people would spend money on her she would feel valuable when she had fancy dinners, she had fancy restaurants, she had fancy clothes, she had fancy vacations, she felt valuable, valued, like she was valuable.

And so I think sometimes when we're trying to look a specific way, it's because we don't think we are that way. We want other people to think we're that way, so maybe it would convince us we're actually that way, convince us that we're worthy to reinforce our self-worth but what if we could actually get that self-worth from just letting ourselves believe that way for letting ourselves feel that way.

What if we realize that we're smarter than we think we are? What if we realize that we're stronger than we think we are? What if we realize that we're richer than we think we are? We are more powerful than we think we are. We are more beautiful. We are more capable. We are more loving. We are more kind. We are more good, may be better, than we think we are. What if we realize that?

Instead of having to show it to other people, hoping that they would give it back to us, so therefore we believe it. So many of us are in much better situations than we actually think. I got a message earlier today saying that a friend of mine from a long time ago basically only has a few days left to live.

Man, our life is so much better than we think it is.

I just wish we would realize that sometimes. And so this is just an episode to talk about the difference between being powerful and looking powerful. Between knowing what we are and then hoping other people will tell us we're that way so that we can believe it. We can just believe it. We don't have to get the confirmation from other people because it's fickle. What if they don't believe it? Then we don't believe it anymore. Is our self-worth conditional on what other people think?

Is our self-worth conditional on how conditional their self-worth is? A lot of other people who don't think we're good people who don't think we have good intentions don't believe that they are good people and don't believe that they have good intentions.

We are trying our best, and we have much better intentions than I believe most of us think we do. And we are in much better situations than I believe most of us think we are. And I just wish more people in my life, more people around the world, realized that.

People ask me, you know, what are you doing? Why are you asking for money in this Project 40K and 40 Day thing? It's because I think we need to scale some of these messages. I just want people to hear these messages and really let them sink in. I can do them one-on-one, but really a podcast is like doing one-on-one on scale. So I'm grateful for this opportunity. I'm lucky that I'm able to do this. I am having a bigger impact than I realize.

I am much better financially than I think I realize. I'm much better physically, emotionally, intellectually than sometimes I think I realize. And so I'm really grateful that I do things like this and that I have the opportunity to speak with you like this. I hope it's okay that I do it audio only. I don't want to do video every single time. So on that note, 10 minutes seems long for video anyways. So I'm going to close and I hope people are actually listening because I'm just speaking into the void. I don't know if there are live people commenting because I'm just talking into my phone. There's a simple app that just broadcasts from the phone, audio only. So if you're commenting, I will look at the comments later. And yeah, these daily gyms, I probably won't answer comments, but there will be other episodes video based where I will answer comments so thank you and take care here's the outro music. Music.