Shaun Gold of YouTopian Journey, Interesting Interview #2
Shaun Gold on motivation, self-health, mental health and improvement and much much more..A must read interview for those taking the high road.
Today we will be interviewing Shaun Gold; businessman, bestselling author and creator of YouTopian Journey.
YouTopian journey is the first graphic novel about motivation, mental health and self-improvement.
The text below has been transcribed from an audio interview of Shaun Gold.
When looking at your work one can clearly see that you are multi-talented and touch upon many layers. What’s your background?
I’ve been a life-long entrepreneur. Growing up I wanted things and my parents told me if you wan’t it - buy it. And that made me want to find ways to hustle to get what I want.
When I was 17 I got into nightlife; that was my watershed moment and made me realise that’s what I want to do.
I moved to Miami simply to get into nightlife and throw parties and that’s what I did for 15 years and how I built my entire network.
I got into writing during nightlife - I wrote 4 books and that’s how I got into screen writing because my Hollywood contacts told me my stories would make great movies or TV Shows.
I always treated everything as an experiment, there wasn’t an opportunity cost for me. I messed around with screen writing and that was the time I started doing startup consulting, brand development etc.
I never really had a normal job. Anything I had an interest in I went after. I got into the comics first because I’ve been a long life fan of them. Once I started writing them to use as concept art and trailers for my films projects, I discovered how awesome it was to see your vision come to your life.
Literally in the second week of the lockdown it hit me to create YouTopian Journey – a comic book for mental wellness, motivation, inspiration – and the idea to create it just came to me in a moment of clarity.
In less than a year from that day I created the Substack and it’s the best medium to reach the most amount of people, to keep me committed to researching, reading and releasing the artwork.
I always wanted to do something that would make money and be meaningful, fulfilling, purpose-driven and that can benefit the society at large.
Whatever I did was usually to help other people, whether getting them into a night club, or help them network with other people. In the case of YouTopian Journey to help them get inspired, motivated and help them think and really get moving and take action on what they want to do.
Philoinvestor comments that he believes YouTopian Journey will become huge and that content compounds over time.
YouTopian Journey is a comic book and a graphic novel of around 90 pages, and we haven’t even cracked 20 pages yet. So it’s definitely a long term play.
“Everyone has challenges, if you don’t have challenges you’re doing something wrong. Life is not easy – and existence sucks. Nobody has the bluntness to say it, but I do.”
I equate life to working out. On Instagram everyone is training and smiling, but if you’re really working out it hurts and you don’t want to be there. And that’s how life is for everybody.
Humans are fragile creatures, we have to deal with anxieties and fears – we contemplate the future and all those problems that never come.
And as the world gets more tech advanced, it only gets worse for a person to find their one place and do something valuable.
Essentially it’s all about challenges and we have to overcome them. And they never go away.
Some people think that by reaching their goals, they have it made. And for me you never have it made – you have to go to another goal.
BEYOND MOUNTAINS ARE MORE MOUNTAINS
So many people think that if they get to the top of the mountain they’ve made it. And they don’t realise that there are bigger mountains past that.
You have to go forward. Man is a goal-seeking animal. And I mean real powerful life-affirming goals; I feel we don’t even have goals anymore.
Things have been reduced. I think people need to have something to shoot for.
Because when they go after that they are changed, they start to realise – “I don’t need to do this. I don’t need to play this video game.”
Your life changes, you stop hanging out with certain people. You realise that they are aimless and they start holding you back.
The people that I keep in touch with and the people that I get along with are usually people similar to me. They are striving for something and they are restless in a way in that they always aim for something higher and bigger that they know they can go after.
You need to stay away from those that say, “What’s the point? Why are you doing this? You don’t have the experience.”
These people become obstacles in your path - you don’t wanna hang out with them. They have nothing to offer.
The distinction is important. It’s one thing to give constructive criticism that can help you grow and it’s another to constantly have someone belittle you.
It’s not worth it, you have to surround yourself with people that understand what you are doing and that can offer CONSTRUCTIVE criticism…
“I don’t like the art, it doesn’t work for me – if it’s about mental health why are your characters so attractive – why do you write so many quotes? People don’t understand all that, you should write more simply.”
These people don’t have your interests at heart, they have their OWN interests at heart. Anything you do will not have support, people will not get it. You have to walk your own path, you can’t stop for any barking dog.
LONELINESS & SOLITUDE
There is a post coming out on YouTopian Journey about loneliness and solitude - and the two are not the same.
The distinction goes like this. Loneliness refers to the pain of being alone, solitude refers to the glory of being alone.
The people that handled solitude went on to create amazing things.
During the solitude of the pandemic I learned everything I could about startups and venture capital - I created YouTopian Journey and the vast majority of the world was baking bread.
People waited their whole lives to have an opportunity like this and when they got it they squandered it because they couldn’t hack it.
And there’s never gonna be another opportunity like that where you are forced to stay home and you can do what it is you want to do. I think society in general has failed the test.
We literally had everything we needed in our fingertips and people just wasted time or spent time complaining. When someone asks me what I did during the pandemic?
I created this and I spent time researching and writing and making this a reality.
And you need a pandemic to do that, you need a desire to go after your goal and hit it with everything you have and hope that it works. But if it doesn’t at least you FAIL ABOVE EVERYONE ELSE.
Because most people won’t step out of line, they won’t go to that lonely barren path. They would rather stay among everyone else and at least they are among people but they lose the greatest part of themselves – that’s the price.
Life is what you make of it. And the vast majority of people make it a mess because they can’t handle the changing circumstances.
If you can handle it and possess a level of flexibility you can do anything. Nothing can stop you.
History has shown that it was the periods of isolation that led to the great works.
Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince when he was exiled. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous anti-nazi dissident wrote Papers and Letters from Prison when he was imprisoned under them.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about his years imprisoned under the Soviets in the Gulag Archipelago. Victor Frankl wrote about his experience in nazi concentration camps in Man’s Search for Meaning.
All these experiences can bring about game changing works of art if you can suffer through it enough and endure it enough to create something that makes the suffering meaningful and makes the situation bearable.
In the pandemic we lived a provisional existence, nobody knew what was going to happen or when it would end. Normalcy was far away and people just couldn’t live over that abyss.
Society now still lives in a provisional existence, “I want 2 weeks vacation, I wanna go to Spain, I wanna go to the music festival”. Small plans that are for leisure and not plans that work towards a grand scheme.
I don’t know why people are like that, I had to strategically distance myself from the people that are the naysayers of our life.
Life is a battle, it always has been and it always will be. When life ceases to be a battle, life will cease to exist.
Time is the most valuable asset we have, and it’s what we spend the worst.
My goal is to make people realise that you have a very finite existence, and you should spend it doing something that is meaningful and purposeful and not exactly pleasurable but if you could find that, great.
And if you can have something that beats back the darkness then you gotta do it no matter how out of the box or eccentric it is – because people waste their time away.
People sacrifice today for tomorrow and they sacrifice the night for the dawn, they keep putting everything off.
They act like immortals in all that they desire but mortals in all that they fear.
MEMENTO MORI.
People forget things. Life goes from promotion to promotion and vacation to vacation and they don’t realise how much time is wasted.
I am very particular for my time and I can’t do it for people that want to waste it.
I don’t care who they are, I just come out and be blunt with it. I’m too busy if you can’t compensate me.
People don’t wanna give anymore. You have to be a giver to good people but you have to be really blunt with the people who are out to get you.
Everybody wants the free lunch, you cant. That’s what it is, the knowledge and the experience is the value.
People are too small-minded, and because they’re stuck in their own thoughts they don’t see the potential that exists.
And those who say it can’t be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
People will doubt you but at the end of the day you are responsible for what you do.
When we started out people thought it would not work and they were against it. But I kept it going and I just had my 1 year anniversary.
During this time I had 2 posts go viral, the one had >12,000 views and the other was on Hacker News and got 6,500 views. These things can happen.
If you listen to anyone that says it can’t happen - you are sacrificing everything you want to do for the opinion of someone who is not gonna be there six months down the line.
My entire life has been surrounded by naysayers. When I got into nightlife my best friend told me that I shouldn’t do it and that it would be a waste of time.
My parents, everybody, I had no supporters and I did it anyway. That decision to go left instead of going right, made my entire life.
I always tell everyone - if it’s something you really want to do, I don’t care if you don’t have any supporters. Go and do it.
It’s gonna be difficult but every journey has unknown destinations.
You don’t get to those unknown destinations unless you’re on the journey. A person who has a goal committed and goes after that goal, will go into new places and will have doors unlocked for them or they will meet new contacts and they will have new experiences that they never thought were possible. I am living proof for that.
And YouTopian Journey I have it connected into a lot of different things like the Global Wellness Initiative which is partnered with the United Nations, it was featured in the media, I got awards for it; and many people are hitting me up telling me how they love it and how it has helped them. For me that’s very fulfilling.
The knowledge is timeless. I want people to look back on it many years from now and still resonate with it.
I want people to take action and take responsibility while they still have time because the clock is running, and it runs out for everybody.
CONFORMITY is now crowdsourced. Everyone jumps on the bandwagon, if you jump off it you are attacked and labelled by the people on the bandwagon.
If you go back to the renaissance and you go back to Da Vinci and Michelangelo, if there was Instagram back then they would be live streaming what they were working on. And I don’t think we would have the works we have today because everybody would be watching and whoever had the most views the other one would think he’s a failure and stop.
“Why am I painting this stupid Mona Lisa?”
If the herd is not following you, then you must be doing something wrong. But paradoxically - it’s when you’re doing something right that they will not follow you until you’ve arrived.
You have to have this inner strength to endure, you have to have this inner drive to go forward and you have to be stubborn enough to say I’m doing this.
"Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me, and the damned world can go to hell.”
Rollo May, Man's Search For Himself
The younger generation are just following the same stuff and they are competing for the same positions and the same awards and no one is stepping out to do their own thing.
For them to do their own thing is having a Tik Tok channel, and it could be good if you get millions of followers but even then if you don’t translate it into profit you’re not gonna do anything – it’s very ethereal.
You have to have something that grounds and drives you, and that makes you who you are and who you are gonna be - and we need that. I never had something in my life that everyone loved instantly and instantly supported.
Everybody was saying, “It’s not gonna work.”
Every great innovation and everything that was society changing was not accepted - and every great person was misunderstood at their time.
On medical innovations that were rejected at first 👏🧼
Ignaz Semmelweiss, as Robert Greene wrote in Mastery, was the doctor who promoted the idea that medical practitioners should wash their hands after touching their patients - and that idea was considered heretical. Every innovation faces resistance in the start and then it’s completely adopted.1
Society is resistant to the things that will benefit them. The computer, the internet all these things faced resistance. The trailblazers of society had to punch through that resistance. And it’s only by going against the grain that you can have success - and people don’t want that, they want to follow the easy path.
When you’re doing something that is groundbreaking and revolutionary, you are very vulnerable - because you’re exposing the world to who you are and what you do - and essentially people can’t stand that pressure.
“Great spirts have always faced resistance from mediocre minds” -Albert Einstein
What’s the end game for YouTopian journey?
I want it to go forever. To have an impact on as many people as possible, millions. I want to have a brand, not only of comic books, but books as well. I wanna make it a thing that people can look for guidance.
I had this idea that if people had a graphic novel that they could read through and have a quote at the end that relates to what they are going through – their day would be better.
Are you full time on this?
I’m full time on everything. For YouTopian Journey the work was done in the pandemic.
With YouTopian Journey no matter how annoying people get or how tough things get it gives me a great amount of pleasure when they comment, share or personally message me. It’s very rewarding.
“You have to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It’s that easy and that difficult.”
I am also a screenwriter and I have had high level meetings; and there is a production company backing my feature.
The movie genre is philosophical. It is action sci-fi wrapped in existentialism, free-will and determination.
Think Matrix but a whole different type of movie. It explores a lot of concepts while doing heists and other type of criminality, not while doing Kung-Fu.
All I want is a 10 second cameo being the guy that can’t get into the club. For me this is just another experience!
“Theres no easy path from the earth to the stars.” -Seneca
Considering what the world is going through right now - a global pandemic that is still affecting us straight into a global military conflict, high inflation and an energy crisis. What do you think investors and investment professionals should do to endure through all this?
First, we need to get rid of the idea that every moment of every day will be bliss.
We have been raised with this notion that prosperity is the name of the game. That isn't the case; it’s resilience and endurance.
The world has always gone from war to purge to conflict. Let's look at the start of 20th century, where we had the worst of wars at the best of times. The First World War was unlike anything we had ever seen before, with more men dying from weapons than disease and exposure.
Then we had the Spanish Flu epidemic, followed by the Russian Civil War, the rise of fascism, a global depression, the second world war, the cold war, the atomic age, and so on and so on.
Our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents survived all of this. We too can survive. I think people need to have a resilient mindset and a long-term focus, not allowing themselves to get upset at every new crisis as there will be more to come.
I have always believed that health is of primary importance in success. There is no success without health. On that note, could you offer philoinvestors any lifestyle guidelines to follow for lowering stress and living a better life?
Anxiety and lethargy are enemies to people in any industry. Yet when it comes to investing, it could be fatal. You need to be on your game to react to the constant changes in the market. I would recommend very simple solutions for lowered stress and a better life.
First is exercise. Nothing will have a better effect on your mind and body than working out several times a week. I personally practice calisthenics as it keeps me grounded and allows my body and mind to work as a unit.
Second, I recommend daily walks outside, without a phone or any technology. Just walking alone with your thoughts is one of the best forms of relaxation and I can speak from experience that some mental breakthroughs can happen when your body is in motion. Finally, one needs to eat healthy and stay away from drugs, alcohol, and unhealthy foods. They offer nothing to your body or mind.
Thank you Shaun, I will be sure to let all philoinvestor knows that they should subscribe to YouTopian Journey below 👇
Thank you!