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Real faith is recognizing the absurdity, the irrationality, the complete impossibility of proving whether something's true or not, and then still choosing to believe in spite of all of those things.

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Like, that is what faith actually is.

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You had Arthur Brooks on the old podcast.

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He came on and he's religious.

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He's a devout Catholic.

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And you had a discussion with him about this.

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And he called it the childish version of religion and faith, which was just, yeah, you just believe and don't question it.

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And he said, actually, the much more durable, much more kind of rock solid version of it is doubting.

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And continuing to choose it anyway.

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There's, that's religion.

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That to him, that was a religious belief anyway.

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Just growing up in the church, I think you do see that more mature version of faith show up in places.

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Like I have vague recollections of certain people in my churches kind of talking about that, that like you're supposed to doubt.

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That's what makes it faith.

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If you don't doubt, that's not faith.

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That's just blind, you know, kind of stupidity.

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The doubt is actually part of the process.

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And it is part of what makes it so powerful and meaningful is like knowing that this makes no sense, but you're going to live by it anyway.

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Now, how to apply this to secular life?

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For me, the most kind of the clearest example of this that I can give is back when I was in music school.

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It was very interesting because if you're going to go into music and you're going to

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And this applies to any of the arts, right?

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Acting, art, whatever it is.

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It is so overwhelmingly likely that you are not going to make a full-time living doing that.

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That it is something you have to really wrestle with.

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And I remember it was something I really wrestled with in music school and most of my...

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my fellow students wrestled i mean we would talk about it we would kind of joke about it um there was a a joke that went around music school quite a bit which is uh what's the difference between a professional musician and a pizza man pizza man can feed a family of four okay okay uh so there's like a very intense awareness yeah and coming back to it being an ethical commitment versus a religious commitment

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I think music for me was very much an ethical commitment.

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It was something that I enjoyed very deeply.

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I was very passionate about it.

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I got a lot of social validation from it, a lot of satisfaction from practicing and becoming better.

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But ultimately, it was a cost-benefit analysis in my life.

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And once I started hitting that dip, and the dip in the arts is very long and brutal, it made me start questioning.

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Yeah.

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why am I here?

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Am I going to make it?

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I'm not as good as that guy or that guy.

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Like,

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There's only so many jobs, right?

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And so I dropped out.

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And most people do drop out.

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In fact, the music school that I went to, the dropout rate, I believe, was like 87%?

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Probably.

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Something like that.

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I was going to say 90% probably.

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It's staggeringly high.

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So I've kind of kept tabs on some of my classmates.

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And a few of them have made it.

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And a few of them have developed careers in music.

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But from the outside, you wouldn't necessarily call them successful.

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It's kind of your wedding band musician, your high school music teacher, that sort of thing.

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Looking back, I think the thing that was really apparent is that the people who were going to make it in music felt like there was nothing they could do other than music.

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When I think about the people who did end up making it in the music industry, they were never the people in music school sitting around joking about a pizza man, you know, asking themselves like, is this going to go anywhere?

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It was unfathomable to them to do anything else.

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They couldn't imagine themselves doing anything.

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Whether they went somewhere or not.

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Right.

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Right.

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Broke, rich, happy, sad, successful, unsuccessful, anonymous, famous.

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Like, I don't think any of that registered with them whatsoever.

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They were just like, this is what I do.

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I can't imagine not playing my instrument eight hours a day.

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So I'm going to play my instrument eight hours a day.

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I remember we had a conversation in the office once.

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Steph, who works on the podcast, went to acting school.

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And she was saying the same thing about a lot of the acting students there.

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You see this in entrepreneurship.

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There's a famous line...

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Elon Musk was giving a talk somewhere and there was a Q&A with the audience.

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Somebody stood up in the audience and asked Elon, what words of encouragement would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?

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He said, I would give none because if you need encouragement, you shouldn't be an entrepreneur.

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There's this sense that entrepreneurship is.

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you don't choose to be an entrepreneur.

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You are chosen by entrepreneurship.

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Like it is baked into you and you don't really feel like you have a choice, but to do it.

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Yeah.

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Mark Andreessen makes that point too.

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Andreessen Horowitz, famous, you know, venture capital firm.

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Uh, he says that the,

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The people they look for when they're getting pitched is he can just tell at this point, too, he's got so much experience with this.

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You can tell it's these people.

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They can't do anything but this.

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Right.

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They can't not be an entrepreneur.

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It's like if they're not going to do this thing that they're presenting to me right in front of it, they're going to go find something else to do it no matter what.

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Yeah.

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But he says you can tell the people who come in and they're like, I came up with this idea and I think it's a good idea.

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And we're going to make a bunch of money.

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And yeah, he's like, you can tell.

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So Purpose, my AI app, my co-founder Raj, I remember when we were having lunch meetings early on to decide if we were going to start the company or not.

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So Raj is like a serial founder entrepreneur.

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He's had a number of successful businesses, a number of exits.

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And he was kind of approaching the conversation as if like, okay, this is my next business.

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we'll probably exit or sell it or i'll step out or whatever we'll hire a ceo and he was doing the responsible thing that every every co-founder pair every group of co-founders should do which is like talk about exit strategy so i remember we were sitting at lunch and he was like well let's talk about exit strategy like what what is your like desired end game for this for this business and i like i looked at him and i was like what do you mean and he said like well

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Where do you want this to end up?

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Like, do you want to exit three years, five years, 10 years?

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Like, do you want it to be cash flow?

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Do you want to like outsource, you know, hire managers?

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And I just looked at it and I was like, dude, I'm going to die in this industry.

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So I don't really care.

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Like, if you want to do something, like if you want to get out after five years, like we can figure that out.

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But yeah.

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I'm in this for life.

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It's funny because he later told me he said one of the biggest reasons he decided to go into business with me is because of that answer.

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But it's something it's true.

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It's something I feel like very deep down at this point, which is that I don't have a choice.

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Like this is this is my life.

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Like this is what we're doing right now.

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Like this is my life's work and it always will be.

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And I'm going to do this till I'm dead.

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There's a certain amount of peace that comes with that, with that certainty.

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There is an irrationality about it, right?

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Like you could easily sit here and make all sorts of arguments.

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So like, well, Mark, you could go start a multimedia company.

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You could become a serial founder.

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You could go into venture capital.

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There's a lot of things that I could do.

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And there was a period where I thought a lot about that and I worried a lot about that.

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And I would say about like three or four years ago, I kind of arrived at this conclusion of like, for whatever reason, call it the universe, call it God, call it fate, call it chance.

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I was put in this situation with this incredible opportunity and privilege of like.

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Speaking to millions of people, being listened to by millions of people, I have a certain set of talents and abilities.

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It chose me.

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At a certain point, it's like, I didn't choose this anymore.

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This is just who I am and this is what I'm destined to do.

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At that point, it just becomes faith.

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Hey, everybody.

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Hope you enjoyed this video.

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It was just one clip from a much larger, more thorough episode.

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If you want to watch or listen to the full episode, click on the link in the description.

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And if you want to work on the topic at your own pace, we have a free PDF guide with all the resources, citations, and exercises at solvepodcast.com slash commitment.

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See you in the next one.