Transcription of the famous video – Sam Hyde: Outcome Independence – text, lyrics and subtitles. Full script:
I don’t want to take away from the beauty of life, but it’s important that you stop being a freak ASAP.
And this is a message to my younger self. Maybe it doesn’t apply to you. Maybe you’re pure code-based, maybe inside your head you are thinking in C++, and you don’t need to hear this. That’s fine. But I needed to hear this.
People should be more realistic and not romanticize things as much as they do. This is advice for young men—specifically young men who are like I was.
I was thinking about what bothers me so much about these types of people. I think what it comes down to, really, is outcome independence. You may have heard that term before if you follow pickup artist circles, as I do. The reason that stuff is good is because you can apply it to many other things in life.
This is going to sound crazy, this is going to sound goofy, but life—okay, the world—is a bit like a woman. Life, the world, the outside atmosphere out here (IRL) is emotional, hysterical, flighty, temperamental, and borderline abusive.
The stuff they type out in their little blogs about dealing with women? Half the time, you can use that to deal with life. Life and women are like an ocean. I’ll get lower here—you want me lower? Life and women are like an ocean; a man is like a ship. Women shit-testing you. That’s the storm. You have to remain steadfast through the storm.
Okay, look, I get how that sounds. Listen guys. You have to light a vanilla-scented candle, get out there, and just open yourself, man, open yourself to the world. Open your chest, and it’ll smell the vanilla-scented candle. I understand how that sounds. I’m saying it for a reason. I’m not saying it because I have nothing else to say. I’m saying it, because it has has helped me at times to view things through that lens.
Outcome independence is extremely important. It’s a trendy little chunk of two words, but it means something deceptively simple. You might see “outcome independence” and think, “No, that can’t be it. That’s just two words, and it sounds trendy.” But that’s it. That’s like a massive life skill, a massive upgrade to the lens through which you view the world. It’s not being attached to the way shit goes. It is the only effective mindset. Anything else. Anything other than outcome independence is anxiety at best.
If you get all bent out of shape about the way something goes. EEEEeEeeeEE it ain’t what I wanted!! What else are you going to do? If you get f’d up financially, if someone steals from you, if someone does you dirty, if something bad happens to you—that’s your life now. You are now living on that timeline. There is no going back.
IiIIiiIii wish, my parents were different. My living situation sucks right now, and everything sucks. They don’t have a job, and this didn’t happen the way I wanted to. She doesn’t love me.
All that is a figment of el imaginación. You could write that in a book, make a short story, you could make a Second Life or Skyrim character who has the perfect, amazing life. That’s awesome for you. But once you’re on the wrong timeline, you cannot go back. No! Not gonna happen.
The healthiest, best way to deal with that—the way most conducive to your happiness and a realistic worldview—is just being detached from the outcome.
The story about that guy who wrote poetry and took pictures of himself? That was all true. He was older, so that would be like me right now—35-year-old me. He wasn’t 35, but I can just imagine rolling up on some MDE fans: “Hey man, I think you’re everything to me. You’re like the brightest star I’ve ever witnessed. You affirm in me, my reason for living. You have this vivacity that’s just beautiful, man.” And I don’t mean that in like a gay way. And he absolutely did mean that in a gay way.
This is not like a one-off story. This is not a rare occurrence. There are people like this often, especially in the crowd of cerebral, precocious, I was the gifted child man, which you probably are, and you’re probably friends with these people. I am too.
White guys always shoot up schools. White guys are always on antidepressant, white guys are always writing homo love letters: “Hey man, you have this golden aura about you, and I just know you’re gonna do amazing things.”
One very useful way of thinking about anything is to gamify it. Imagine you’re playing a role-playing game as yourself. It’s called Reality. Not being detached from outcomes, being dependent on good things happening, being dependent on getting the girl—“She’s the one. We were meant to be together.” That’s the messed-up thing. It’s not just that you want something. I want everything. I want hot orgies, I want a BMW S1000RR (which I’m getting), I want an MV Agusta F4 (which I’m gonna get), I mean, I guess I shouldn’t talk about myself because I basically get everything I want. Oh geez, that’s tough. Yeah, my life sucks. There’s stuff I’m not able to get that I want.
It’s not wanting something that’s the sick part. The sick part is needing something to feel fulfilled or happy. What that suggests is that it’s not a real need—it’s just a manifestation of mental illness, neurosis. “I need this to be happy. I need her to love me.” And here’s the sick twist: “She and I were meant to be together.” You’re saying that about some girl, Lauren? No.
We don’t have equity, man. It’s these corporations keeping me down. No, man. What’s keeping you down is you’re lazy. You have no skills. I wouldn’t pay you one dollar to do anything because you’d mess it up and do so much damage. I’d pay a thousand dollars to keep you away from me.
Corporate greed, man. If they would just vanish, I’d be recognized as a god. People who have that mindset tend to sway more often to doing music or something absolutely not like farming or working in a machine shop. Like, “We put 1,000 rivets in this boat, comrade. Then the commissar didn’t give us the cheese.” No, you’re not even that. You’re like, “I downloaded a new drum kit today. Where’s my check?”
It sucked losing a TV show, but if I had that mindset of being hardcore attached to outcomes—which I used to have—if I had held on to that, if I had held on to the promise of being a gifted child—“Your IQ’s been tested. You’re going places.” That’s absolute poison. If I had held on to that and been as entitled as I was when I was 22 for the rest of my 20s and 30s, I’d be downloading torrents of TV shows right now and organizing them. I’d be one of those dudes.
The Beach Creeps Hide Wars—it’s not just about being creepy. It’s about holding on, trying to build a life vest out of imaginary straws. You’ll become a weepy guy. You’ll be one of these guys who drinks. Don’t drink.
But like, if you’re—and anytime I say something critical, it’s because I’ve been there, all right? In my early 20s, I was very entitled, very attached to getting Lauren—who was riding Scott from the band like a Thai prostitute. Well, she laid on her back for me, breathing heavy. Thanks, Lauren. I was also very attached to getting some kind of job doing motion graphics or, eventually, one day having a TV show. “One day, I’m gonna be this. One day, it’s gonna be golden. We’re gonna have golden times. I need this to complete myself.”
So, I was like that. The big problem with being outcome-dependent, being a weepy, poetic mess, thinking that—for some reason—your haiku about the minutia of your dumb-ass life (well, you work at Target) is ever going to amount to anything… the problem with that is the downtime.
Okay, I harp on about this often: time is actual gold. When you’re a grown-up, when you’re an adult—you’re 27 right now, living with your parents, you’re not an adult. When you are an adult and grown up, you want to be rich like the Monopoly man. You want to have a yacht. The real Monopoly man, the real-life Monopoly man—the thing that Bill Gates, CEOs, millionaires, and billionaires around the world value, if they have any brains, is time.
Time is gold. And the longer you sit on your ass or lay in bed thinking about her, you’re watching that river just go. It’s going without you, and it’s gone forever. You cannot get it back. Thinking about all the different things that could have been, or how things should be, or, “Oh, it’s wonderful—this tree is growing even though gravity is trying to keep it down.” All that stuff I talked about in this episode—the big problem with it is that it’s just burning through time.
I would rather have someone tell me they watched a YouTube tutorial on origami or whatever stupid thing interests them than have them tell me they spent a single second thinking about the love of their life. Screw you if you’re thinking about the love of your life right now. Screw off with that.
There’s a lot of guys—a whole gang of guys in college, online, everywhere—with Sugar Plum Fairies in their heads. Anytime someone comes to you with an idea to start a podcast, a literary club, a zine, or wants to talk about her or go out drinking, always ask: “Does this guy have sugar?” If the answer is yes, go ride a motorcycle instead.
Creating a new world in your mind that’s more beautiful, poetic, and meaningful than reality and living there—even when your parents are telling you to clean your room, get off your ass, get a job, even when you have a reasonably hot girlfriend who’s nice to you that you could be appreciating—you’re living in this other world. There are no CEOs who do that. There are no important people who do that. It’s not a boss move. It’s not a baller move. Nobody who’s achieving anything is doing that. If someone’s doing that, they’re on drugs, they’re about to fall off, they’re messed up, they’re about to ruin their legacy.
The people who run the simulation we’re living in—the hyper-intelligent computer engineers—they look at your thoughts and see, like, when you play The Sims and make a room with no doors, and your Sim goes to the bathroom on itself and gets all stressed out. That’s what the people running the Sim are thinking when they look at your little poem. I’m not saying you, but the people who do this.
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