Enthusiasm is an underrated, high-alpha trait that smart people refuse to cultivate because it feels low-status, but it creates an uncompetitive playing field where you can dominate with minimal effort.
The speakers argue that enthusiasm is one of several traits that matter enormously but that smart people avoid displaying because it seems unsophisticated, creating a wide-open competitive field for those willing to be genuinely excited. ✦ AI generated
Speaker 2 · My First Million · 2026-08-12 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 25:13
Enthusiasm is such an underrated trait. Everybody knows that it's better to work with somebody who's enthusiastic. Everybody knows that enthusiasm is a positive attribute to have, but it's something that smart people feel stupid when they do it. Like it's a low status thing for a smart person to do is be enthusiastic. And you seem sort of like dumb, like a golden retriever. Well, guess what? Everybody wants that person around. We love golden retrievers. And it's actually a very useful trait for going and doing something hard is to have enthusiasm every day versus just being beaten down by the reality of your situation. So there's these like handful of traits that smart people refuse to work on, which makes it like an uncompetitive playing field. You could just go dominate with very little effort.
verbatim transcript · starts at 25:13
25:13Enthusiasm is such an underrated trait. Everybody knows that it's better to work with somebody who's enthusiastic. Everybody knows that enthusiasm is a positive attribute to have, but it's something that smart people feel stupid when they do it. Like it's a low status thing for a smart person to do is be enthusiastic. And you seem sort of like dumb, like a golden retriever. Well, guess what? Everybody wants that person around. We love golden
25:36retrievers. And it's actually a very useful trait for going and doing something hard is to have enthusiasm every day versus just being beaten down by the reality of your situation. So there's these like handful of traits that smart people refuse to work on, which makes it like an uncompetitive playing field. You could just go dominate with very little effort. >> This is something that I think about all
25:55the time, and I've never come up with an answer that has been truly effective for me. But how to find a thing that you love? So like you were talking about like this is the step before all of this stuff. But like whenever I read about Jerry Seinfeld and he you know, I've known about his writing habit each day. I'm like, how lucky are you that you at
26:21a young age you discovered something that you're obsessed about? And often I ask myself, how do you find something that you're obsessed about? And also can anyone be obsessed about any like anything at all? Like I get obsessed with something for a short time, but I'm not like but anything that I've been interested in for 20 years, I would say that I'm like a 40 hour a week obsessed.