Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Enough money to say no
No list
Retired Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf, leaving the teams, could not have listed what came next. He worked for a strength and conditioning company, flew jets on charter operations, spent years as a professional skydiver and BASE jumper, moved into public speaking, relocated to Montana, and opened a coffee shop. Given a month and as many legal notebooks as he wanted to write down anything he might do after the SEALs, none of it would have appeared.
He quit the strength company after 16 months with nothing lined up and started selling things from his garage on Craigslist, with years of wondering whether the mortgage would get paid. What that built was less a skill set than a mentality: whatever comes out can be solved, on top of the foundation already laid. It took well over a decade.
No target
Today he has no idea what he wants to do next, and that is what excites him most. Relaxing, white-knuckling less, and aiming at no specific target has brought more opportunities than anything else. He weighs them from a place of whether he wants to, not whether he has to.
His test for a business offer is whether he would naturally do it in his life and enjoy it regardless of the check. If either answer is no, it is an easy no. Friends and family asking is tougher, since it mixes personal and professional.
Why does financial pressure narrow thinking?
Economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir argued in their 2013 book Scarcity that having too little of something captures attention and leaves less mental room for everything else. A 2013 study in Science by Anandi Mani and colleagues tested Indian sugarcane farmers on cognitive tasks before and after harvest. The same farmers scored lower before harvest, when money was tight, than after it, when they had been paid. The researchers estimated the gap was comparable to losing a night of sleep.
How do people actually change careers?
Herminia Ibarra of INSEAD studied career changers and described her findings in the 2003 book Working Identity. She found that most people did not plan a switch and then execute it. They tried small experiments, met new people, and gradually revised the story they told about themselves. New directions tended to come from action first and clarity afterward.
More from Andrew Huberman
