Speaker 1: If you get a really bad night sleep, you're out drinking,
Speaker 1: you're with your buddies, you and then you come to
Speaker 1: work and there's traffic on the way to work, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, you're angry. You're angry at the world.
Speaker 1: You don't even know. You're probably angry at yourself deep down,
Speaker 1: but you're not feeling that you're playing on hard mode.
Speaker 2: It's a great pleasure to welcome clear thinker and author
Speaker 2: Shane Parrish to the show. Shane first came on my
Speaker 2: radar when I discovered his hugely popular blog Farnham Street.
Speaker 2: Farnham Street offers timeless lessons and insights to help you
Speaker 2: think better, orn faster, and make smart decisions. Today's conversation
Speaker 2: focuses on the topic of his new book, which is
Speaker 2: called Clear Thinking, Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results. Throughout
Speaker 2: this conversation, Shane convinced me more than ever of the
Speaker 2: importance of clear thinking. He argues that in order to
Speaker 2: be a clear thinker, we must first create the space
Speaker 2: to reason in our thoughts, feelings and actions, and then
Speaker 2: we must deliberately use that space to think clearly. He
Speaker 2: makes the convincing case that if you can master that skill,
Speaker 2: you will have an unstoppable advantage in life. I learned
Speaker 2: a lot from Shane's book and this conversation. I particularly
Speaker 2: love how clearly he explains the main enemies of queer thinking,
Speaker 2: such as are out of control emotions and there you go,
Speaker 2: and also love his practical tips for building strength and
Speaker 2: resiliency and living a life full of things that matter.
Speaker 2: I think you'll really enjoy this episode as well. So,
Speaker 2: without further ado, I bring you, Shane Parish. Nice to
Speaker 2: finally meet you, Shane.
Speaker 1: It's nice to meet you too. A big fan from faraway.
Speaker 2: Oh well, likewise, a longtime reader of Farnham Street and
Speaker 2: just admirer of your well, shall I say, clear thinking,
Speaker 2: you know, which is certainly the topic of our conversation today.
Speaker 2: Really enjoyed reading your new book, gratulations on it. It's
Speaker 2: a really big accomplishment. It's hard writing a book.
Speaker 1: Isn't it, Thank you you would know, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, it's hard. It's hard writing a book, and it
Speaker 2: takes a lot of fortitude and so overcoming self doubt.
Speaker 2: And it's like running a marathon where like no one
Speaker 2: cares about any progress you're making on the marathon unless
Speaker 2: you actually cross that finish line.
Speaker 1: You know. I've learned a couple things through the process.
Speaker 1: One I don't know if I would tell many people
Speaker 1: I was writing another book, because everybody's like, how's it going,
Speaker 1: like a week later, and it's like, it's not going anywhere.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like, you know, exactly your doctorate or something.
Speaker 1: It's like this goal. I'm telling you I'm doing this thing,
Speaker 1: but it's like years away from actually happening. And then
Speaker 1: the other thing I was thinking about the other day was,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of like getting naked on stage
Speaker 1: in front of a thousand people and having them all
Speaker 1: judge you. Like, reading the reviews and the comment it's
Speaker 1: by real people. It's like, you know, there's a little
Speaker 1: bit of excitement inside me, and then there's also like,
Speaker 1: oh god, what are they going to say? What do
Speaker 1: they think? How did this come across to people who
Speaker 1: weren't me because they can only see the words on
Speaker 1: the page and not all the things in my head.
Speaker 1: And so it's been really interesting in that in that
Speaker 1: respect too. I mean, everything has been almost overwhelmingly positive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was just gonna share of that, but yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a little nervous. I check every day. I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: is there a new review?
Speaker 2: Well, look even nasber than no review, Like my book
Speaker 2: Transcend came out April twenty twenty and got wholly ignored
Speaker 2: because of April twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that would be such a hard time to have
Speaker 1: a book come out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a crazy time. I mean, and I
Speaker 2: had so many emotions in so many different directions in
Speaker 2: April twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Were you even focused on the book though, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's sort of an afterthought as I'm thinking about it,
Speaker 1: It's sort of not really Actually, Yeah, I was so
Speaker 1: vid at that point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was stranded wherever I was, and I was
Speaker 2: more just focused on survival. Yeah. Yeah, But then you know,
Speaker 2: then they're like people are like.
Speaker 3: Oh, if a book coming out, I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: it came out last week. But anyway, this is about
Speaker 3: you and about your terrific new book, and how can
Speaker 3: we create the best space for clear thinking today. That's
Speaker 3: what I've been trying to think through because it's in
Speaker 3: these kind of interviews it's so hard to to to
Speaker 3: really narrow down the best questions. But I actually have
Speaker 3: a way I want to start this can you tell
Speaker 3: me a little bit about why Peter D. Kaufman by
Speaker 3: the way, By the way, we love his last name.
Speaker 3: You know, why has he been such a strong and
Speaker 3: why has he had such a strong influence on your
Speaker 3: own thinking.
Speaker 1: So I met Peter Gosh, I'm gonna say eight nine
Speaker 1: years ago in Omaha at the Berkshire Out the Way
Speaker 1: shareholders meeting. And I was there and I was sleeping
Speaker 1: in my car, and I was in the lobby and
Speaker 1: I was trying to get a room and they had
Speaker 1: given it away. And he overheard this, and he came
Speaker 1: and he gave me one of his room. And this
Speaker 1: is how he met this incredible act of generosity and kindness.
Speaker 1: And for people who know Peter, one of his sayings
Speaker 1: is go positive and go first, and this was like
Speaker 1: an example of him living that. And then we struck
Speaker 1: up a conversation. I being a Canadian, I'm like, I
Speaker 1: can't even accept this, right, Like, I'll sleep in my car,
Speaker 1: It's okay. And you know, he basically convinced me to
Speaker 1: accept his generous gift and it was one of the
Speaker 1: nicest things anybody's ever done for me, Just totally blund
Speaker 1: and we struck up a conversation. He said, hey, fly
Speaker 1: out to California, will grab dinner sometime. I got home
Speaker 1: and took him up on his offer, and then we
Speaker 1: sort of became friends. And through those conversations, it's interesting
Speaker 1: to meet somebody who thinks in a very different way
Speaker 1: than I had been accustomed to or exposed to. And
Speaker 1: you know, he has these little pithy saying it's like
Speaker 1: go positive and go first, and you know, when you
Speaker 1: start talking about that with him, it you know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of information behind it. And we've had many
Speaker 1: conversations over the years and he's been one of the
Speaker 1: biggest influences on my life. And he's friends with another
Speaker 1: one of the biggest influences on my life, which is
Speaker 1: Charlie Munger, who recently passed away, and those two together
Speaker 1: have just had a profound impact on my thinking and
Speaker 1: living to the type of person I want to be.
Speaker 1: You know, they say, show me your heroes and I'll
Speaker 1: show you where you're going to go. And I feel
Speaker 1: like those two our giants in that field, and they
Speaker 1: hold me forward in a lot of wods.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they really are. How long have you been so
Speaker 2: interested in the connection between mind thinking and way of living.
Speaker 1: I've been interested in it for a long time for
Speaker 1: different angles though, Right, So, I've been interested in thinking
Speaker 1: since probably two thousand and one, in two thousand and
Speaker 1: two about how we can think better because I worked
Speaker 1: for an intelligence agency, and you know, one of the
Speaker 1: prime very things you have to do there is in
Speaker 1: a way you're competing with other intelligence agencies and you
Speaker 1: don't have the resources that other agencies have, and they
Speaker 1: have people that are just as smart as you, and
Speaker 1: they have better assets than you, and you can't opt out.
Speaker 1: You still have to play. So that was always like
Speaker 1: a really fun sort of thing to think about it.
Speaker 1: And then when it came to living a brown two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, that's when I started thinking about, like,
Speaker 1: what is it I really wanted up life because I
Speaker 1: had worked about seven years straight, sixteen hours a day,
Speaker 1: six days a week, because I started two weeks before
Speaker 1: September eleventh. September eleventh happened, the world changes forever. I
Speaker 1: have no idea what's going on, but like all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, I'm working every day, and you know, I
Speaker 1: developed a lot of close friendships, worked with some really
Speaker 1: incredible people. But those six years really flew by, and
Speaker 1: you didn't really have a choice. And then I remember
Speaker 1: I went with my acts at the time and we
Speaker 1: went to Italy for a vaca and it was three weeks,
Speaker 1: and it was really the first vacation I had had
Speaker 1: since I don't know, I didn't even know because I
Speaker 1: started working when I was fourteen, so it'd be basically
Speaker 1: the first adult vacation I ever really took. And she
Speaker 1: was so annoyed with me because I slept sixteen hours
Speaker 1: a day every day. She would like, go get gelato
Speaker 1: and come back, and I'm like passed out on the
Speaker 1: like on the water fountain and you know, anywhere I
Speaker 1: could sleep. I was just sleeping, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: let me lie down for a nap and then you know,
Speaker 1: we can go out later, and thinking it'd be like
Speaker 1: forty five minutes, but it's like five hours later. I
Speaker 1: wake up and She's like and my body was just
Speaker 1: recovering from all of this stress, this work, this environment
Speaker 1: that I was in. And then I started thinking about, Okay,
Speaker 1: what is it. Like let's think a little bit backwards here,
Speaker 1: Let's take Muger's approach and like invert this a little
Speaker 1: and what if I want to avoid and I want
Speaker 1: to avoid this for the next like fifty years. And
Speaker 1: so it gave me pause and made me start thinking
Speaker 1: a little bit about what do I want the end
Speaker 1: of my life to look like? And am I doing
Speaker 1: the things right now that I need to be doing
Speaker 1: to make it look like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great approach. Most the opposite approach from
Speaker 2: leaving in the moment and spontaneously or impulsively. You know,
Speaker 2: you you worked in at an intelligence agency, like you
Speaker 2: started a month before the attacks on September eleventh, Is
Speaker 2: that correct?
Speaker 1: It started two weeks before? Yeah, two weeks before.
Speaker 2: Wow, So that really got you kicking up high gear
Speaker 2: in terms of the need for queer thinking.
Speaker 1: It really thrust a lot of people into roles and
Speaker 1: responsibilities that they didn't get hired for and they probably
Speaker 1: were ready for at the time. But again, you don't
Speaker 1: have a choice. You just do the best you can
Speaker 1: and a lot of people are counting on you. And
Speaker 1: it's not just people in the organization and your team.
Speaker 1: It's our country, our government, other countries, troops in theater
Speaker 1: are counting on us. And that's why you couldn't really
Speaker 1: opt out because there's so much sort of writing on
Speaker 1: your shoulders, and you didn't want to opt out. You
Speaker 1: wanted to be a part of part of this. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's sort of why you signed up to work there, right.
Speaker 1: You want to you want to help, and you want
Speaker 1: to find solutions. The thing is, you know, I sort
Speaker 1: of got thrust in these roles and responsibilities that I
Speaker 1: really wasn't prepared for and I didn't really know what
Speaker 1: to do. So I started going around the organization and like,
Speaker 1: how do I learn how to make decisions? Like twenty three,
Speaker 1: twenty four, twenty five, twenty six, what nobody's ever taught
Speaker 1: me how to make decisions? There was like no class
Speaker 1: in university on decision making. And now all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you're making a decision that affects your team, your organization,
Speaker 1: other countries, troops in theater, people's lives, and how does
Speaker 1: that work? And how do you think through these problems
Speaker 1: in a rapid environment of an operational pace? And that
Speaker 1: was that was the impetus for sort of like learning
Speaker 1: how do we do this? And can we learn right?
Speaker 1: Or is it just sort of like you're born with it?
Speaker 1: Or do you get lucky? How do you think about this?
Speaker 1: And This led me to sort of like go around
Speaker 1: the organization. I was that guy who showed up at
Speaker 1: meetings and I'd just sit there in the back and
Speaker 1: you know, be quiet. But I was never invited, and
Speaker 1: sometimes I get kicked out and sometimes they let me stay.
Speaker 1: And I was like, I want to learn how, you know,
Speaker 1: our senior people make decisions. And then I went back
Speaker 1: to school and I wanted to do an MBA because
Speaker 1: I thought that that would be the answer to learning
Speaker 1: how to make decisions, and it wasn't. But the NBA
Speaker 1: was sort of the connection to Monger, who you know,
Speaker 1: I had come across before, maybe late in high school.
Speaker 1: I read the Making of an American Capitalist by Roger
Speaker 1: Lowenstein on Warren Buffett, and that was my first exposure
Speaker 1: to them, and I hadn't really given it much thought.
Speaker 1: But then it sort of dawned on me during my
Speaker 1: MBA that I was like, here are these two guys
Speaker 1: in the real world who seemed to consistently make better
Speaker 1: decisions than everybody else. Have they learned something that I
Speaker 1: can use and pull into the organization and apply to
Speaker 1: make us better, to make me better, to give us
Speaker 1: a better chance at success. And that was the start
Speaker 1: of Farnham Street Blog, which is fs dop blog, but
Speaker 1: it originally started as six ' eight one three one
Speaker 1: dash fourteen forty dot blogger dot com, and it started
Speaker 1: as that because it was my reflections on what I
Speaker 1: was reading. I was reading all the Berkshire Hathaway letters,
Speaker 1: I was reading all the Westcoat shareholder letters. I was
Speaker 1: deep diving into these guys trying to figure out, like,
Speaker 1: how is it they've taken you know, Daniel Kahman's work
Speaker 1: and Michael Porter's work and they put it into practice,
Speaker 1: and what is it that we can learn from that?
Speaker 1: And it was a scratch pad for me. I don't
Speaker 1: I don't quite still don't quite understand how other people
Speaker 1: found it because I was allowed to have an online
Speaker 1: persona like I wasn't allowed to be a person. It
Speaker 1: was an anonymous website. It was a series of digits
Speaker 1: because I thought nobody would want to type in all
Speaker 1: those digits to get to the way website. And that's
Speaker 1: no longer the website. The significance of those digits are
Speaker 1: that was the zip code for Birksure Hathaway and the
Speaker 1: unit number for Berkshire Hathaway. So it was an homage
Speaker 1: to those two in terms of what I was learning
Speaker 1: from them, And I think that that that was a
Speaker 1: really good way for me to reflect. Right when we
Speaker 1: think about learning so often, we just consume information and
Speaker 1: we don't chew on it, we don't digest it, we
Speaker 1: don't make it our own. But I was trying to
Speaker 1: take these ideas from outside the organization and apply them inside.
Speaker 1: So I'm taking them from one ecosystem effectively where they
Speaker 1: exist and saying like, well does this work in our ecosystem?
Speaker 1: And like where would it break and what would need
Speaker 1: to change and how do I think about that? So
Speaker 1: I was reflecting a lot on them, And this is
Speaker 1: what I think people miss today with the information that
Speaker 1: we consume. So if you think about learning as a loop,
Speaker 1: as I think of it, and this isn't super scientific,
Speaker 1: but it's sort of my practical real world experience, is
Speaker 1: you have an experience, you reflect on that experience, you
Speaker 1: create a compression based on that reflection. The compression is
Speaker 1: like the distillation of that experience into something like go
Speaker 1: positive and go first, and that becomes an action. So
Speaker 1: you have this loop you go experience, reflection, compression, action,
Speaker 1: and this is our continuous look, and when you cut
Speaker 1: out reflection, you don't really learn. You go from experience
Speaker 1: to abstraction. And if you think about it, most of
Speaker 1: what we consume these days is other people's abstractions. We
Speaker 1: consume the gist, we consume this SoundBite. We don't want
Speaker 1: the details. Those details are irrelevant. And in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases that makes sense, because you don't want to
Speaker 1: be an expert in everything, and you can't we don't
Speaker 1: have enough time. But in the areas where you do
Speaker 1: want to be an expert, you actually need the details.
Speaker 1: You need the reflection you need because that's the process
Speaker 1: by which you learn to understand where does this work,
Speaker 1: where it doesn't it work, what are the edge cases?
Speaker 1: Does this apply in a different ecosystem? Why is it
Speaker 1: likely to fail? And anybody can sort of like, do
Speaker 1: this experiment at home or in your mind. You pull
Speaker 1: out a recipe and you make the rest be at home.
Speaker 1: And if you make the recipe perfectly and everything goes
Speaker 1: really well, it's going to taste the same as the
Speaker 1: chef who created it. It's almost indiscernible. But if something
Speaker 1: goes wrong, there's a huge difference between you who's taken
Speaker 1: this compression and used it as knowledge in this case,
Speaker 1: but unearned knowledge, because the chef will taste it and
Speaker 1: be like, Oh, there's too much salt, the heat was
Speaker 1: too high, the oven isn't calibrated. They instantly know what
Speaker 1: went wrong, and they know what went wrong because they
Speaker 1: did all the work of reflecting. And so I think
Speaker 1: in very specific domains, we as people actually need to
Speaker 1: consume large quantities of high quality, detailed information. And that
Speaker 1: was what I was trying to do from the outside
Speaker 1: and pull that in, and the blog was my process
Speaker 1: of reflecting on that in a way that I mean.
Speaker 1: I wasn't talking about intelligence agencies or anything. I was
Speaker 1: just talking about these ideas and trying to compress them
Speaker 1: in a way that made sense for me and synthesize
Speaker 1: them and connect them to other ideas that I was learning.
Speaker 1: Does that make sense?
Speaker 2: Cool? Yeah, for the most part. For the most part,
Speaker 2: I am interested in why you focus on ordinary moments
Speaker 2: when you talk about a lot of this stuff. I
Speaker 2: think that you you seem like a first principle's kind
Speaker 2: of guide to me. I mean, I could be wrong,
Speaker 2: but do you tell me a little bit why you
Speaker 2: think ordinary ordinary moments determine your position.
Speaker 1: I think, for the most part, the big choices in life,
Speaker 1: we know we're making a decision. When you know you're
Speaker 1: making a decision, you're more likely to be rational about
Speaker 1: that decision that The problems are not that you don't
Speaker 1: have the tools to be rational in most cases. The
Speaker 1: problem is that you don't know you should be rational
Speaker 1: in some cases. And so when you have this moment
Speaker 1: about like what career to pick, or who to interview
Speaker 1: on the podcast, or what you're you know, who to marry.
Speaker 1: These are decisions where you know you're making a decision,
Speaker 1: and so generally speaking, you're able to pause and think
Speaker 1: you might not know you might be you might get
Speaker 1: an advantage to learning how to think better in those moments,
Speaker 1: But generally speaking, we sort of get them directionally correct
Speaker 1: because we know we're making a decision. The ordinary moments,
Speaker 1: the moments when we don't know we're making a decision,
Speaker 1: those are the moments that really can multiply all of
Speaker 1: that by zero. So if you pick the right partner
Speaker 1: but you don't invest in your relationship with them, what
Speaker 1: happens to that relationship? It goes to zero. If you
Speaker 1: pick the right partner, and you take them for granted.
Speaker 1: What happens same thing you wake up to divorce papers.
Speaker 1: And so these ordinary moments actually matter because those ordinary
Speaker 1: moments make life easier, harder, and they can multiply all
Speaker 1: of your progress by zero in these cases. And so
Speaker 1: I think it's important to think about these ordinary moments,
Speaker 1: and I think of them in the concept of positioning,
Speaker 1: which is how do we use these ordinary moments to
Speaker 1: put ourselves in a good position. So what I learned
Speaker 1: from studying other people from decision making is that the
Speaker 1: best in the world, the people that we would consider
Speaker 1: above average at making decisions or getting really good results,
Speaker 1: they're almost never, if you go back in history, forced
Speaker 1: into making a decision they don't want to do. And
Speaker 1: that's really interesting insight, and I think people really underappreciate
Speaker 1: this type of insight. So if you took on too
Speaker 1: much debt and you're being forced to sell your house,
Speaker 1: you can't make a good decision in that moment. You're
Speaker 1: being forced by circumstances into doing something you don't want
Speaker 1: to do or doing something that's bad, and quickly things
Speaker 1: go from bad to worse in those cases. And so
Speaker 1: one of the things that I learned from studying Buffett,
Speaker 1: Hoffman and sort of Rockefeller and Carnegie is that they're
Speaker 1: never in a position where they were forced to do
Speaker 1: something that they didn't want to do. And how did
Speaker 1: they do that. They set themselves up through positioning so
Speaker 1: that they could always take advantage the environment's going to change.
Speaker 1: If you look at Berkshire Hathaway today, I think they
Speaker 1: have one hundred and sixty billion dollars on their balance
Speaker 1: sheet in treasure bills. And think about that for a second.
Speaker 1: So if the stock market goes up, they win. If
Speaker 1: the stock market stays the same, they win, And if
Speaker 1: the economy goes through another financial crisis like it did
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight, they win. So they're passively stable.
Speaker 1: There's nothing that's really going to They're not predicting the future,
Speaker 1: and I think that that's an important distinction. So prediction
Speaker 1: you can prepare for something if you know what's coming.
Speaker 1: Positioning is a broader subset of that idea, which is,
Speaker 1: I don't know what's coming, how do I be prepared
Speaker 1: for a wide range of scenarios that will come. And
Speaker 1: we know there's going to financial curses. What we don't
Speaker 1: know is when they're going to happen, but it's virtual
Speaker 1: guarantee for you and I that there will be another
Speaker 1: one in our lifetime. It could be tomorrow and it
Speaker 1: could be in ten years. We don't know, but we
Speaker 1: can almost guarantee that it's going to happen. So what
Speaker 1: happens when that happens. Can we be in a position
Speaker 1: where we can take advantage of that, or we're going
Speaker 1: to be in a position where we're fighting for our
Speaker 1: survival and we're just trying to stay afloid? Wow?
Speaker 2: Wow, Yeah, But you believe that every moment you can
Speaker 2: make your future easier or harder. That's a really fascinating concept.
Speaker 2: And you think that the kind of the mediating variable
Speaker 2: there is clear thinking. So what are some of the
Speaker 2: enemies of core thinking? My classes keep fogging up, making
Speaker 2: it harder for me to think clearly, But what are
Speaker 2: some of the main enemies of core thinking as you
Speaker 2: see it?
Speaker 1: Well, so I wanted to come up with what are
Speaker 1: the scenarios where we tend not to thank the scenarios
Speaker 1: or situation where it's common for that we just react.
Speaker 1: We respond, and we're animals. So if we go back
Speaker 1: to our biology, you can think that we're territorial, we're
Speaker 1: self preserving, we're hierarchical. These are sort of like ingrained
Speaker 1: in all animals or biological instincts, and they manifest themselves
Speaker 1: through us in the real world. And an example of
Speaker 1: that is, you know, if I slight you in a meeting,
Speaker 1: you're going to respond, and if you catch yourself, you're
Speaker 1: going to stop it. If you don't catch yourself, you're
Speaker 1: going to respond without reasoning. You're just going to react
Speaker 1: because you're an animal. And what I'm doing is I'm
Speaker 1: infringing on your territory. But our territory isn't necessarily physical.
Speaker 1: Our territory doesn't have to be you know, a dog
Speaker 1: walking around peeing on trees. Our territory is how we
Speaker 1: see ourselves. Our territory is our identity. And so what
Speaker 1: does that mean, Well, that means that there's a situation
Speaker 1: where we're not going to think right, where we're less
Speaker 1: likely to think than we otherwise would be. So the
Speaker 1: four defaults that I lay out in the book are ego, emotion, social,
Speaker 1: and inertia, and all of these things create a situation
Speaker 1: whereby we are less likely to think than we otherwise would.
Speaker 1: So if you think of emotion. That's a pretty simple one, right,
Speaker 1: which is you're angry. Are you thinking clearly when you're angry?
Speaker 1: Probably not. You're going to do things that you later regret.
Speaker 1: And then you think of ego. We just sort of
Speaker 1: talked about ego and identity. You're not thinking in those moments.
Speaker 1: Social A great one is have you ever been on
Speaker 1: the phone and said yes to somebody? You don't want
Speaker 1: to say us too, because you don't want to disappoint them.
Speaker 1: You want them to like you, right, So you're not thinking, right,
Speaker 1: so you end up agreeing to these things you don't
Speaker 1: want to do because you want the other person to
Speaker 1: like you. Well, what is that? That's self preserving? Right?
Speaker 1: We've been brought up for ten thousand years. We have
Speaker 1: to fit in with the tribe because if we don't
Speaker 1: fit in the tribe, we get kicked out, and if
Speaker 1: we get kicked out, die, And so we have this
Speaker 1: ingrained in our biologies and are unconscious. We're not consciously
Speaker 1: thinking about it, but we want to be liked by
Speaker 1: other people, so we say yes to things we don't
Speaker 1: want to do, and then inertia, we stay in relationships
Speaker 1: that we've been in that are no longer serve us,
Speaker 1: same as jobs. Right, we just keep doing what we've
Speaker 1: always done, even though we're not necessarily getting the results
Speaker 1: that we want. And what happens in those moments is
Speaker 1: we tend to think, oh, you know what, if the
Speaker 1: world just recognize my potential, all of a sudden, things
Speaker 1: would change. And we're passive. So we just sit there
Speaker 1: waiting for something to change instead of being proactive and
Speaker 1: going out there and making that change. Why are we passive?
Speaker 1: It's because we're not thinking. We're not thinking about what
Speaker 1: we need to do today to put ourselves in a
Speaker 1: better position for tomorrow. And these are the scenarios that
Speaker 1: I came up with. I think they're fairly broad categories,
Speaker 1: but there's real world examples behind all of them where
Speaker 1: we're not doing the things that we want to be doing. Now.
Speaker 1: If we tie this back to positioning, just for one second,
Speaker 1: so all of these things are going to happen. You
Speaker 1: have an ego, you are emotional, You're going to be
Speaker 1: in social situations. Inertia happens every day. If you're in
Speaker 1: a good position, those things are easier to deal with,
Speaker 1: and if you're in a bad position, those things are
Speaker 1: harder to deal with. And the language that I use
Speaker 1: with my kids is easy mode or hard mode? Are
Speaker 1: you playing on easy moode or hard mode? And so
Speaker 1: an example, like one of my children came home. He
Speaker 1: gave me one of his tests, and he didn't do
Speaker 1: as well as he he wanted on it, nor as
Speaker 1: well as I would have hoped that he did. He
Speaker 1: gives it to me, shrugs his shoulders and says, I
Speaker 1: did my best, and I know from playing sports. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about this later, like I you know, most kids
Speaker 1: quit on the car right on the way home, not
Speaker 1: for their performance on the field. And so like we
Speaker 1: let the emotions simmer down a bit, and then later
Speaker 1: that night, I'm like, talk to me, what does it
Speaker 1: mean to do your best? He said, Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I sat down at ten am. I read all the questions,
Speaker 1: I looked at all the points. I followed every everything
Speaker 1: the school told me to do to succeed on tests.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, that's really interesting. Let's like rewind
Speaker 1: seventy two hours here, and did you study?
Speaker 2: Not?
Speaker 1: Really? Were you up late the night before the test? Yes?
Speaker 1: Well why were you uplate? Well? I realized, you know,
Speaker 1: I should have been studying, but it was like ten o'clock,
Speaker 1: so I started studying at ten. I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: did you eat a healthy breakfast? No? Why didn't you
Speaker 1: eat a healthy breakfast because I slept in? Why did
Speaker 1: you sleep in because I was uplate studying. Did you
Speaker 1: get in a fight with your brother that morning? Yes? Well,
Speaker 1: why did you get into a fight because it was
Speaker 1: in the bathroom the same time as him? Normally we're
Speaker 1: different times. I'm irritated I didn't sleep well. I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: so you chose to play on hard mode. Because everything
Speaker 1: we just talked about is within your control. That's the
Speaker 1: position that you're going now. In this case, it's preparation
Speaker 1: because we know the test is coming. It's not positioning.
Speaker 1: But this is a great example of how you can
Speaker 1: think about that. Right, So it's not the moment forward.
Speaker 1: It's all also like what goes into that moment and
Speaker 1: if you want to think about how we can position
Speaker 1: ourselves in our relationship. An example is like if you
Speaker 1: invest in your relationship with your partner. If you imagine
Speaker 1: that there's a patch of grass between you and your partner,
Speaker 1: and you water that grass, you go out on dates,
Speaker 1: you hold hands, you connect, you talk about your day,
Speaker 1: you do all these things. Well, now, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: if something happens, this little spark is going to go
Speaker 1: on this patch of wet grass, and what happens, It
Speaker 1: goes out. But if you don't water that gross, if
Speaker 1: you're in a bad position, you don't water the grass,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, what happens That little spark lights
Speaker 1: this big inferno, and all of a sudden, you're like
Speaker 1: yelling at each other over how you stack the dishwasher.
Speaker 1: Which if I tap you on the shoulder in that
Speaker 1: moment and I say, hey, Scott, do you want to
Speaker 1: put water or gas on this situation, You're going to
Speaker 1: be like water, right, You're instantly going to start thinking,
Speaker 1: but you're not thinking. And because you're not thinking, you're
Speaker 1: not thinking clearly at all. And your whole weekend can
Speaker 1: to rail by this, Your whole relationship can be derailed
Speaker 1: by this an ordinary moment and otherwise ordinary moment can
Speaker 1: destroy if you have too many of these. And so
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, well, how can we think about this differently?
Speaker 1: Can we position ourselves to be stronger in these moments?
Speaker 1: Can we position ourselves so that we're better off. And
Speaker 1: if you think about it, like if you get a
Speaker 1: really bad night sleep, you're out drinking, you're with your buddies,
Speaker 1: you're you know you, and then you come to work
Speaker 1: and there's traffic on the way to work, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, you're angry. You're angry at the world.
Speaker 1: You don't even know. You're probably angry at yourself deep down,
Speaker 1: but you're not feeling that. It's really hard in that moment.
Speaker 1: For most I would say self help books or like
Speaker 1: most people's advice is recognize you're angry, take a deep
Speaker 1: breath like step away from the situation. Well you're not
Speaker 1: you're playing on hard mode. So if you can do
Speaker 1: that on your best day, and maybe you do it
Speaker 1: like thirty to fifty percent of the time, well now
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, you're going to do it ten
Speaker 1: percent of the time. And so if you're in a
Speaker 1: good position, you didn't go out late, you know, sort
Speaker 1: of the traffic doesn't bother you as much because you
Speaker 1: got a really good night's sleep. You might still be
Speaker 1: in a rush, but you're not super angry about it.
Speaker 1: So you've already improved the outcome here and you're more
Speaker 1: likely to recognize what's happening sort of dissipate this situation
Speaker 1: than otherwise. But there's also no sorry, go ahead, no
Speaker 1: I go on. I thought you well, I was going
Speaker 1: to say, like, so, so those are things like you
Speaker 1: can recognize or avoid the situations, but you can also
Speaker 1: come up with rules and sort of turn them automatic
Speaker 1: rules for success in the book, which is, well, how
Speaker 1: can I actually reprogram my brain so that I don't
Speaker 1: have to consciously think? But I turned my desired behavior
Speaker 1: into my default behavior, and I got this idea. I
Speaker 1: was so freaking lucky. I was sitting with Daniel Kahman
Speaker 1: and his penthouse in New York and were chatting away
Speaker 1: and his phone rings, and so he picks up his phone,
Speaker 1: and you know, at the end of it, he's like,
Speaker 1: my rule is I don't say yes on the phone.
Speaker 1: And then he hangs up and I'm like, Danny, tell
Speaker 1: me about this. I've never heard you say rule before,
Speaker 1: Like I've read almost everything you've ever written, and I've
Speaker 1: listened to all your talks, and I've never heard this.
Speaker 1: And he says, well, you know, I tend to say
Speaker 1: yes to people I don't want to say y. S
Speaker 1: two for things that I don't want to do. So
Speaker 1: he's like, I found myself. You know, I was saying
Speaker 1: yes ninety percent of the time, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: be saying yes ten percent of the time. And he's like,
Speaker 1: so I created this little rule, and the rule is
Speaker 1: I never say yes on the phone. Is something I'll
Speaker 1: get back to you tomorrow. And he's like, I realized
Speaker 1: a couple things through this once. After I did it
Speaker 1: a couple times. I didn't have to think about it.
Speaker 1: It just automatically came out of my mouth. Because we've
Speaker 1: been programmed our whole life to follow rules. So once
Speaker 1: we establish that we have a rule, even if we've
Speaker 1: created that rule for ourselves, we follow it. And then
Speaker 1: he's like, the other thing that really I didn't appreciate
Speaker 1: or he didn't appreciate, is that people don't push back
Speaker 1: on rules. So if you tell me your rule is
Speaker 1: we always stay on five minutes after the podcast to
Speaker 1: chit chat, I'm not gonna say, oh, like it doesn't
Speaker 1: you know. It's just like okay, because you told me
Speaker 1: that's your role, and so it's just naturally accepted by me.
Speaker 1: And I looked at him, and I remember this I
Speaker 1: was like, Danny, I know you have a Nobel prize,
Speaker 1: but this might be the most powerful thing that you've done,
Speaker 1: because this, like, cognitive biases are great at determining why
Speaker 1: we made a mental mistake in hindsight looking backwards, but
Speaker 1: they're really poor at preventing us from making one in
Speaker 1: the future. But what you just came up with this
Speaker 1: idea is like you've figured out a way to reprogram
Speaker 1: your brain so that you don't have to call you
Speaker 1: don't have to be in system to thinking to get
Speaker 1: the result that you want in that moment. And so
Speaker 1: I've played around with this idea so many times since
Speaker 1: then with so many people, and we've tested this on
Speaker 1: thousands of people. And you know, a great example from
Speaker 1: my life is I was trying to work out three
Speaker 1: days a week Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I would go to
Speaker 1: the gym, and I would try to go to the gym,
Speaker 1: but I would wake up. You know, I'm that guy.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I don't like going to the gym. I
Speaker 1: just want to be healthy, so I go because I
Speaker 1: want to live a long life and I want to
Speaker 1: be healthy. I don't actually enjoy it. Some people there,
Speaker 1: they're like running on the treadmill. They're not even like
Speaker 1: breaking a sweat. I'm like dying after three minutes. And
Speaker 1: I hate all those people who are just like chugging
Speaker 1: all off. So I go to the gym and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I want to see my stats here because I remember
Speaker 1: waking up one day and I was like, I'm super
Speaker 1: tired today. And then I start negotiating with myself and
Speaker 1: I negotiate with myself over you know, I didn't sleep
Speaker 1: super well, it's been a really long day. I'll do
Speaker 1: extra tomorrow. And that's what I would tell myself. And
Speaker 1: so I went to the gym and I said, hey,
Speaker 1: this is a strange regress, but can you give me
Speaker 1: a print out? Like, tell me how many times I've
Speaker 1: been here in the last three hundred and sixty five days?
Speaker 1: And I sort of mapped it to my calendar, my
Speaker 1: travel schedule, so I knew approximately how many times that
Speaker 1: I should have been at the gym if I want
Speaker 1: three days a week. I was nowhere close to that.
Speaker 1: I was like half of that. And so what was
Speaker 1: how I wasn't doing what I wanted to do, And
Speaker 1: so I was like, well, let's try this rule thing.
Speaker 1: So I created an automatic rule for myself, which is
Speaker 1: I sweat every day, so I do workout every day,
Speaker 1: if you want to think of it that way. The
Speaker 1: duration or scope of that workout changes. Some days is
Speaker 1: ninety minutes, some days is twenty. But I do something
Speaker 1: every day, and since then, I think I've only missed
Speaker 1: four days and it's been life changing. I don't argue
Speaker 1: with myself when I wake up. My negotiation isn't whether
Speaker 1: I go to the gym or not. My negotiation is
Speaker 1: what do I fit in today? What duration? What scope
Speaker 1: do I have? Where does it fit in with my calendar?
Speaker 1: And if it doesn't fit, I just do like sit
Speaker 1: ups and push ups, like one hundred of each. You know,
Speaker 1: I was in a hotel the other day, I didn't
Speaker 1: have access to a gym, and I'm like, okay, what's
Speaker 1: my workout today. It's twenty minutes. It's like sit ups,
Speaker 1: push ups. I'm like doing squats on the floor. It
Speaker 1: doesn't take long and you can always sort of like
Speaker 1: fit it in. But I don't argue with myself. The
Speaker 1: better it anymore, which is really interesting. There's no negotiation.
Speaker 2: Really cool, really cool. That's a great way of hacking
Speaker 2: the hecking the system there or as you would put
Speaker 2: up building strength. You have all sorts of big goodies
Speaker 2: in this book to help you build strength in things
Speaker 2: that we really all really do and want to build strength,
Speaker 2: and you know, like self confident and self control, self knowledge,
Speaker 2: self accountability. What is what is self accountability?
Speaker 1: Well, you have to be accountable to yourself, right Nobody
Speaker 1: is going to hold you accountable, and this is how
Speaker 1: we wiggle out of things. And so you know, one
Speaker 1: way to hold yourself accountable is to have a personal
Speaker 1: board of directors that you report to. It's like this
Speaker 1: little kids game, almost like an imagination, right, It's like,
Speaker 1: here's what I did, here's the results I'm getting. But
Speaker 1: at the end of and what I mean by this
Speaker 1: is think about you at work. There is somebody at
Speaker 1: work right now who knows what's holding you back, and
Speaker 1: they're not going to tell you. They're not going to
Speaker 1: hold you accountable for that one thing getting in your way.
Speaker 1: You have to hold yourself accountable. And one of the
Speaker 1: ways that we can hold ourselves accountable is to raise
Speaker 1: our standards. So if you think about it and the
Speaker 1: fact that we're born into a situation which is pure
Speaker 1: chance our parents are socioeconomic status, our country, the behaviors
Speaker 1: of our parents, the standards of our parents. These are
Speaker 1: all chances, but these become unwritten rules that go into
Speaker 1: our head. They get ingrained into us over eighteen years
Speaker 1: about what normal looks like, so when we come out,
Speaker 1: we think we're normal. One of the big lessons I
Speaker 1: learned from Peter is that you know, if you do
Speaker 1: what everybody else is doing, you're going to get the
Speaker 1: same results that everybody else gets. And so if you
Speaker 1: take those standards that you adopt it as a kid
Speaker 1: and you put them into practice, you're likely to get
Speaker 1: very similar results to your parents, maybe slightly better, maybe
Speaker 1: slightly worse, going to probably be within one standard deviation.
Speaker 1: Because those habits and that mindset gets you here. But
Speaker 1: if you want to hold yourself accountable and you want
Speaker 1: to do something different, you have to have different standards,
Speaker 1: different levels of execution for where you want to get to.
Speaker 1: And if you look at sort of you look at athletics, right,
Speaker 1: what was that last dance? Did you watch that with
Speaker 1: Michael Jordan? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I love dare to think about it.
Speaker 1: People hated him and they loved him. Why did they
Speaker 1: hate him? Because he held them to a higher standard
Speaker 1: than they held themselves. So when you play on a team,
Speaker 1: you can have somebody like that who's just really good
Speaker 1: and they raise the bar and they make you a
Speaker 1: better person, they make you a better and what do
Speaker 1: we do. We just tell ourselves excuses. And so when
Speaker 1: you have somebody like this, and there's a story in
Speaker 1: the book about you know, one of my best friends
Speaker 1: who basically, you know, five days into working with me,
Speaker 1: tells me, he's like, look, if you can't do your job,
Speaker 1: I don't want to work with you. And I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: here's all the other things that I did this week,
Speaker 1: and your your mind is so defensive. It's like I
Speaker 1: got called into this the bus was late, blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: Like I had this list of things, like, Man, I'm
Speaker 1: working sixteen hours a day, here's all the shit that
Speaker 1: I did. I'll get this done. Don't worry about it.
Speaker 1: And he's just like, I don't care. I don't care
Speaker 1: about your excuses. Nobody cares about your excuses, but you
Speaker 1: if you can't do it, I don't want to work
Speaker 1: with you. Ps like buy a car. Stop talking about
Speaker 1: the bus being late. And that becomes the self accountability. Right,
Speaker 1: you can take that and you can, man, this guy
Speaker 1: works at a different level than I do. Am I
Speaker 1: going to raise my game to their level? And if
Speaker 1: I'm not, then I'm not going to be able to
Speaker 1: work with him? And I was super fortunate because I
Speaker 1: was able to work with, you know, the Michael Jordan
Speaker 1: of my industry or the Kobe Bryant of like what
Speaker 1: I did. I literally got to work with the best
Speaker 1: person in the world at one particular thing cool with
Speaker 1: this for seven years, Matthew Holland. He runs a company
Speaker 1: now called field Effect Cybersecurity. He's the most brilliant person
Speaker 1: at this in the entire world. And I was lucky
Speaker 1: because that made me better than I otherwise would have
Speaker 1: been because I didn't know these standards were possible. And
Speaker 1: if you're lucky, you get to work with somebody like that.
Speaker 1: But if you're not lucky, well, now what can you
Speaker 1: do well that? Now you can create a personal board
Speaker 1: of directors, which is one of the ideas in the book,
Speaker 1: and you can report to them, right because they can
Speaker 1: have higher standards than you. You don't need their permission
Speaker 1: to put them on the Warren Buffetts on my board,
Speaker 1: I mean, hen't I didn't ask him for permission, But
Speaker 1: I'm like, what would Warren do in this situation? How
Speaker 1: do you think about this? And I think ultimately, at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, if you're getting the results
Speaker 1: that you want to be getting, getting the results you
Speaker 1: think you deserve, then maybe this isn't an area where
Speaker 1: you need to look into very hard. But if you're
Speaker 1: not getting the things that you want to be getting
Speaker 1: it alive. You are the pilot of your life. You
Speaker 1: are the architect, you are the captain, and so ultimately
Speaker 1: you are in control. And that's where that accountability comes into.
Speaker 1: It might not be your fault the situation that you're in,
Speaker 1: but it is your responsibility for what happens from here forward.
Speaker 2: Damn. What are your thoughts on a culture that's so
Speaker 2: where a victim mentality is so pervasive in our culture
Speaker 2: right now?
Speaker 1: I just opt out of that whole way of thinking.
Speaker 1: Like I send my kids to a really tough school,
Speaker 1: and you know, they get homework and they get tests,
Speaker 1: and you know, they get their buck kick some days
Speaker 1: and they don't. I get a lot of flak for
Speaker 1: talking about this on the Tim Ferris podcast, but you know,
Speaker 1: I'm a big believer that we need resilience, we need
Speaker 1: to learn how to fail, and there's certain excuses that
Speaker 1: I just don't resonate with me. Right. We can always
Speaker 1: play a victim, and we always do right. There's a
Speaker 1: natural sort of tendency for us in certain situations to
Speaker 1: be the victim. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: we are in charge of our own lives and there
Speaker 1: is always something, no matter what situation we're in, and
Speaker 1: that we can do to make tomorrow a little bit easier.
Speaker 1: And if you focus on being a victim, then nothing happens,
Speaker 1: nothing changes, nothing, you don't get better, your position tomorrow
Speaker 1: doesn't get better. You're surrounded by people who empathize with you,
Speaker 1: which is great, and you feel good in that moment,
Speaker 1: but nothing changes. And so you have to ask yourself,
Speaker 1: like do I want the feeling of people understanding me
Speaker 1: and do I want the excuse of not doing anything
Speaker 1: about it? Or do I want to change and get
Speaker 1: different results and do something different than other people? And
Speaker 1: I recognize that this isn't for everybody, so please don't
Speaker 1: like email me if this isn't your thing. This is
Speaker 1: just my way of thinking, and the same thing that
Speaker 1: I do with my kids right, which is like, you know,
Speaker 1: they come home and they get a bad test and
Speaker 1: they're like, well, it wasn't my fault. I had, you know,
Speaker 1: practice last night, I couldn't study, and I'm like, I
Speaker 1: don't care, Like it doesn't the real world, It doesn't
Speaker 1: matter what happened. You need to take charge of your life.
Speaker 1: You need to design a satity schedule that works. You
Speaker 1: need to figure out that you shouldn't go to practice
Speaker 1: tonight because you have a big exam tomorrow. These things
Speaker 1: are not on me to figure out. And this is
Speaker 1: where you fail. I want them to fail. I want
Speaker 1: them to fall down because I want them to build
Speaker 1: up this resiliency. I want them to get bad grades.
Speaker 1: Like I'm not like cheering for them when they get backgrades.
Speaker 1: But what I am happy about in my head is
Speaker 1: this builds mental toughness. This is they're going to recover.
Speaker 1: How do they respond to failure? Do they throw their
Speaker 1: hands up and walk away or they dive in? Like?
Speaker 1: How do I fix this? What can I do different?
Speaker 1: Let's talk about all the things in your control that
Speaker 1: you can do so that this doesn't repeat. How do
Speaker 1: we put ourselves in a better position? So that the
Speaker 1: odds are lower that this happens again. And some days
Speaker 1: you do everything you can and the world just kicks
Speaker 1: your butt. That's what it's like being an entrepreneur. That's
Speaker 1: what it's like being an adult. You do your best.
Speaker 1: Some days it's just a mouthful of glass and you
Speaker 1: got to go to bed and you got to get
Speaker 1: up and you got to do it again, and that's okay,
Speaker 1: and you need to be able to handle that. And
Speaker 1: how do we develop those skills if we never give
Speaker 1: people the opportunity to fail, If we never give people
Speaker 1: the opportunity to sort of, most schools don't give tests
Speaker 1: anymore here, if you I don't know if the standardized
Speaker 1: test scores came out in the US yesterday, they came
Speaker 1: out in Canada. They're like plummeting over the last thirty years. Here.
Speaker 1: We're so soft on kids. We don't expect much of them.
Speaker 1: And I expect a lot from my kids, and I
Speaker 1: expect them to expect a lot from themselves.
Speaker 2: More importantly, I do want to talk about self confidence.
Speaker 2: I found that chapter really personally thrilled. But can you
Speaker 2: can you talk to our audience a little bit about
Speaker 2: some ways that we can solve self confidence.
Speaker 1: So there's a couple of ways to think about this.
Speaker 1: I think the one that is most it's important is
Speaker 1: we sort of convince ourselves that we need the confidence
Speaker 1: to get to the destination we want to get to,
Speaker 1: and the bigger the gap between where we are and
Speaker 1: that destination, the harder that confidence is to have. If
Speaker 1: the confidence, if elon is like I need the confidence
Speaker 1: to start Tesla or you know, SpaceX and get rockets
Speaker 1: into space. That requires insanity, a crazy degree of hubris,
Speaker 1: or a lot of things that most of us don't have.
Speaker 1: But if the next step, I call it next step confidence,
Speaker 1: it's like, can I have the confidence to take the
Speaker 1: next step? Well, the next step is to try to
Speaker 1: buy a rocket? Okay, Well that's what he did. He
Speaker 1: went to Russia. He tried to buy a rocket. They
Speaker 1: wouldn't sell him. One next step was like how can
Speaker 1: I build a rocket? Like why do these rockets cost
Speaker 1: so much? And so if you have the confidence to
Speaker 1: take the next step, it's hugely empowering because I don't
Speaker 1: have to have the end goal. Cigarette often those end
Speaker 1: goals even change. If I can shrink the distance between
Speaker 1: where I am and what I need confidence for I
Speaker 1: massively increase my ability to take action. I massively increase
Speaker 1: the ability to get momentum. And if you think about it,
Speaker 1: like if you're out running, or you talk to any
Speaker 1: professional marathon or and they're not starting the race going
Speaker 1: like I need to get to the finish line. When
Speaker 1: they hit the wall, they're like, can I make it
Speaker 1: to the next stop sign? Okay, well I made it
Speaker 1: to the stop sign? Can I make it around the
Speaker 1: next corner? And they shorten the distance that they're looking
Speaker 1: at and we can all do that too, and it'll
Speaker 1: dramatically improve your confidence because it's like I have I
Speaker 1: can do that, and when I get to there, I'll
Speaker 1: take a look and I'll see what the next step
Speaker 1: is and then you can figure it out. And I
Speaker 1: sort of got this. I was cliff jumping with my son,
Speaker 1: and the situation I talk about in the book is
Speaker 1: it's sort of like a one way door, right, you
Speaker 1: climb up this mountain and we jump off, and he
Speaker 1: wanted to do it, and I was like, oh, that's great,
Speaker 1: Like are you sure though, because we can't come down
Speaker 1: because it's way too dangerous to climb down one slip
Speaker 1: and like you're gonna hit your head on rocks. So
Speaker 1: like if we go up, like you you're up and
Speaker 1: you got to jump in, and he's like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: He gets up and he's like, I don't want to
Speaker 1: jump in. I'm gonna climb down. I'm like, you can't
Speaker 1: climb down, like you're jumping in or I'm throwing you in.
Speaker 1: And that's the reality of the situation. But before we
Speaker 1: get to that, like, let's talk about this, like what's
Speaker 1: going on, Like what do you recognize in your body?
Speaker 1: And he's having this like physiological response right like he's
Speaker 1: looking down and he's hanting, he's breathing, and I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: well step away from the edge here, right, Like let's
Speaker 1: go talk. You walk back five or six steps and
Speaker 1: I'm like, hey, get control of your breathing, depress. What's
Speaker 1: the voice in your head saying right now, well, I
Speaker 1: can't do this, I can't you know this is too big,
Speaker 1: I'm scared. Okay, Well, that voice is determining how you
Speaker 1: feel about the situation. So like, let's change this inner
Speaker 1: monologue that you're having. What are all the things you
Speaker 1: did for the first time that you were scared of? Right,
Speaker 1: Like you went snowboarding, you want wakeboarding. You've done a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of things that you we're really scared of
Speaker 1: doing that you had never done before. It seemed really
Speaker 1: scary in those moments. So now all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it's like, Okay, I can do hard things. And to
Speaker 1: put this in context, he's like eight or nine at
Speaker 1: a time, so like you're talking about things that are
Speaker 1: relevant and age appropriate for him. But you've done hard things,
Speaker 1: so we know that you have an ability to do
Speaker 1: hard things. We've got control of your breathing. And now
Speaker 1: I'm like, you're looking at the bottom, You're looking twenty
Speaker 1: five feet down at the water, and you're like, do
Speaker 1: I have the confidence? Let's change where you're looking visually
Speaker 1: instead of looking down, let's look out. Do you have
Speaker 1: the confidence to take one step off the edge? Do
Speaker 1: you have the confidence to walk out and take one
Speaker 1: step off? Sure enough? You know he's got that little
Speaker 1: voice going and I'm like, don't make it inside, like
Speaker 1: make it outside. I want to hear what that voice
Speaker 1: is telling you. And he's like, I can do this.
Speaker 1: I can do this, like I've done hard things, and
Speaker 1: you know it's that It's literally like that inner modelogue
Speaker 1: you're having, And sure enough he goes and he doesn't
Speaker 1: look down, and he takes one step off the edge
Speaker 1: and he pencils down, and then forty five seconds he's
Speaker 1: back up there like jumping off basically like doing backflips.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's so interesting to me that when
Speaker 1: we look, you know, that water seemed twenty five feet away.
Speaker 1: That gap between where he is and that water was
Speaker 1: so huge to him. That's huge to me too, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there was definitely a little bit of fear in me
Speaker 1: the first time I did it. But when we have that,
Speaker 1: we become paralyzed and so shrink the distance between where
Speaker 1: you're looking. Don't look at the water, look at the
Speaker 1: next step, don't look at the end of the marathon.
Speaker 1: How do I get around the next corner? Can I
Speaker 1: do that?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: I got around the next And then that action actually
Speaker 1: creates confidence in and of itself, and it creates momentum
Speaker 1: so that the next time you're like, oh, how do
Speaker 1: I get to this corner? It becomes easier to do
Speaker 1: each time.
Speaker 2: Brilliant, Absolutely brilliant. It's brilliant. It's because it's so it's
Speaker 2: I logical, I'm wondering what happens. What happens when you
Speaker 2: feel very strong emotions that cloud that queer thinking, Like
Speaker 2: do you ever have panic attacks? Do you ever have
Speaker 2: high anxiety?
Speaker 1: I don't know if I have panic attacks. I definitely
Speaker 1: like feel emotions pretty strongly.
Speaker 2: You human, yeah, I definitely.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we all are. I think, you know, if I
Speaker 1: recognize what's happening. I kind of think about it two ways. One,
Speaker 1: if I can, I usually do physical activity. I used
Speaker 1: to have this thing where I would run until I
Speaker 1: wasn't angry. So if I caught myself being angry, I
Speaker 1: would run and I would only turn around when I
Speaker 1: stopped being angry. I little bit, you know, one day
Speaker 1: I did a half marathon because that was really upset.
Speaker 1: While oh it's time to turn around, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, right, like this is crazy. You know,
Speaker 1: I was mad for a good a good chuck a
Speaker 1: time there, and I'm churning it right Like I I
Speaker 1: don't want to suppress my feelings. I need to let
Speaker 1: them out because if I suppress them, They're going to
Speaker 1: come back when I least expect them. I need to
Speaker 1: think through the problem. I need to get my anger
Speaker 1: out and it's okay to be angry. I'm not hurting anybody.
Speaker 1: I'm not doing anything to anybody else. I put my
Speaker 1: headphones on I run often. I don't even listen to music.
Speaker 1: I just put them in. It's comforting. People don't chat
Speaker 1: with you have them in. They don't do the high
Speaker 1: thing when you're running by well, I jog. I don't
Speaker 1: run so like. Some people are very serious about this,
Speaker 1: And so that was my way of coping, and now
Speaker 1: I have other ways of coping. That is definitely one
Speaker 1: of them. Another one is the sauna. I find high
Speaker 1: heat really good. I find physical stress really good for
Speaker 1: emotional stress. For some reason, I want to stress my
Speaker 1: body out a little bit, and I feel like that
Speaker 1: allows me to feel these things a little quicker than
Speaker 1: I otherwise would. I try not to make decisions in
Speaker 1: those moments if I know what's going on, and often
Speaker 1: what I'll do is like if I'm having a bad day,
Speaker 1: can you normally know you're having a bad day, But
Speaker 1: like ten am, I'll change the day around, right like,
Speaker 1: I'll just and I'm fortunate where I can do that.
Speaker 1: Not a lot of people can. But I'll like cancel meetings.
Speaker 1: I'll be like, oh, I can't do that today, because
Speaker 1: you know what, I want to be at my best.
Speaker 1: You want me at my best. We're not going to
Speaker 1: be at our best in these moments. Sometimes I'll take
Speaker 1: a nap if I'm super tired, but I'll also look backwards, right, like,
Speaker 1: so I want to go back to the positioning angle
Speaker 1: to it was there something that I did that was
Speaker 1: within my control? It made this harder than it otherwise
Speaker 1: would have been. What was that thing? Because I really
Speaker 1: want to start to get at the root cause of
Speaker 1: like what's happening? And can I avoid these in the
Speaker 1: future instead of just dealing with it in the moment.
Speaker 1: And I want to deal with it and I want
Speaker 1: to deal with it effectively. Can I rewind? Can I
Speaker 1: do the same exercise I did with my son? Let's
Speaker 1: rewind seventy two hours? Right, like how do we get here?
Speaker 1: And then that's often illuminating, Right, I'm too busy. Well,
Speaker 1: when I'm too busy, I go back in my calendar
Speaker 1: and I look, I was too busy, right, So when
Speaker 1: I'm too busy, I don't get enough downtime. And if
Speaker 1: I don't get enough downtime, I can't do all these things,
Speaker 1: or I'm more likely to be irritable. But recognizing those
Speaker 1: patterns is sort of the key to solving them because
Speaker 1: now it's like, well, I'll I want to avoid that
Speaker 1: so I can go to my assistant and be like, hey,
Speaker 1: no more than X hours of meetings a day, Like
Speaker 1: that's just the rule, and that's the rule because that
Speaker 1: puts me in the best position possible course success.
Speaker 2: Do you have a rule that like, if someone stands
Speaker 2: you up for more than three minutes, you're You're done.
Speaker 2: It's done with them for that day.
Speaker 1: No, it's like five minutes, I just assume something comes up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: is that a rule?
Speaker 2: I'm curious if that's a rule. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty much a rule. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Because
Speaker 1: it's just like, having been on you know, all sides
Speaker 1: of this, it's like, my default is never to assume
Speaker 1: anything malicious. Though my default is, of course, of course,
Speaker 1: just to send an email to give it a few
Speaker 1: minutes and then something came up and that's okay. But
Speaker 1: I'm not going to sit here like waiting for this
Speaker 1: to resolve itself when I can be doing all these
Speaker 1: other things. And yeah, I think that these little rules
Speaker 1: and you'll have to come up with your own rules.
Speaker 1: But the other thing is you have to evaluate your rules. Right,
Speaker 1: going back to that self accountability. Are are these rules
Speaker 1: getting me what I want? Are they getting me the
Speaker 1: outcomes I want? Are they getting me the relationships I want?
Speaker 1: You know, one of the things that I always try
Speaker 1: to do is win, win on everything. I want everybody
Speaker 1: to win. I don't want to take advantage of anybody.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be in business with people I
Speaker 1: can't trust. I want to associate with people that I like.
Speaker 1: I feel like that that's the best way to live life,
Speaker 1: and that means I say no to a lot of things.
Speaker 1: I say no to a lot of sponsors. I say
Speaker 1: no to a lot of people that I just don't
Speaker 1: want to be dealing with.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it's a great way of to live one's life.
Speaker 2: You know, there are so many different goals that we
Speaker 2: can choose during the course of our day. Well, how
Speaker 2: do you know what goals are? Are the ones you
Speaker 2: should be choosing?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So the last chapter of the book sort of
Speaker 1: talks about getting what you want and wanting what's worth getting.
Speaker 1: I think those two things are very different, and I think,
Speaker 1: you know, for me, it's important to me to think
Speaker 1: about what is it that I'm trying to do here,
Speaker 1: What is it I'm trying to create? What is it
Speaker 1: I want people to say about me when I'm on
Speaker 1: my deathbed? What type of life do I want to
Speaker 1: lose in the sense of am I trying to achieve
Speaker 1: my goals in a way that is consistent with getting
Speaker 1: those goals? So if you look in history, you know
Speaker 1: one thing that everybody's probably familiar with it's Christmas time,
Speaker 1: is Ebenezer Scrooge. What in Scrooge want? Well, Scrooge wanted
Speaker 1: to be the wealthiest, most well known person in his community.
Speaker 1: And he got those things. He became the wealthiest, and
Speaker 1: he became Ubanezer Scrooge that we know of what we
Speaker 1: call people Scrooge, That's what we're saying. So he accomplished
Speaker 1: his goals, but what he discovered in the process was
Speaker 1: that the way that he went about achieving those goals
Speaker 1: was mutually exclusive from what actually mattered to him. And
Speaker 1: I don't want to end up in that situation where
Speaker 1: I have these and and this is the important thing.
Speaker 1: If those are your goals, be conscious about them, right,
Speaker 1: because often society is trying to tell you what your
Speaker 1: goals are. Go after this, go after this, go after this,
Speaker 1: and if you go after that that you're going to
Speaker 1: acquire those things and you might get them, and it's
Speaker 1: so unfulfilling. You have to be conscious about what you
Speaker 1: want to and if you want to go after money
Speaker 1: and power and fame, own it, go after it. There's
Speaker 1: no judgment on my part. Just be conscious about what
Speaker 1: you're choosing and go all in to get it. And
Speaker 1: think about the end of my life. Am I trying
Speaker 1: to achieve those goals in a way that's going to
Speaker 1: get me what I want in the end of my life?
Speaker 1: I want to be friends with people. Well, I can't
Speaker 1: stab them in the back on the way to my goals. Now, okay,
Speaker 1: well now we're starting to get somewhere, right, So now
Speaker 1: I'm coming up with a code of behavior for how
Speaker 1: I'm going to go after my goals. And if you
Speaker 1: want to be ruthless and go all out and try
Speaker 1: to get those things, then then do it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm all for people making their own judgment calls about
Speaker 1: how to live. I think my way of approaching things
Speaker 1: is more likely to result in happiness. But I mean
Speaker 1: to each their own. There's no judgment about that. Just
Speaker 1: be conscious about what you're doing, own it and go
Speaker 1: after it. And I think too often we're not thinking
Speaker 1: about that. And you can't just think about it once, right,
Speaker 1: what you want at twenty is not what you want
Speaker 1: at thirty, not what you want at forty, not what
Speaker 1: you want at fifty. You have to keep thinking about this.
Speaker 1: You can't just close the book and be like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to go after this one thing. You have to reevaluate.
Speaker 1: Am I still is that the thing I still want
Speaker 1: to go after? And if it is, go for it.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's a great point. And that's what's making
Speaker 2: it all the more difficult when you have that thought
Speaker 2: experiment about what you want the end of your life,
Speaker 2: because yeah, what we want changes quick quite frequently.
Speaker 1: But it's fun actually, like if you journal it, right,
Speaker 1: if you were to journal it every two or three years,
Speaker 1: you can actually see that changes happening, which is great. Right,
Speaker 1: we should be smarter than we were last year, We
Speaker 1: should be wanting different things. That's only natural to go
Speaker 1: about approaching things that way.
Speaker 2: A lot of this and a lot of these kinds
Speaker 2: of discussions, it's always about like more and more and more.
Speaker 2: I mean, what if what you want is just to
Speaker 2: be finally content already, Like what if you, let's say
Speaker 2: you've become forty three years old and you have reached
Speaker 2: all the things that you're contending within, then so then
Speaker 2: your goal is to maintain.
Speaker 1: It, you know, And that's okay, right, totally. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: I said, there's no judgment on me. I just want
Speaker 1: people to be conscious about what they're going after. And
Speaker 1: this happens to a lot of people, right. You get
Speaker 1: people like Elon who are wired differently and they achieve
Speaker 1: all this money, this fame, and then they go all
Speaker 1: in on something else, where a lot of us would
Speaker 1: want to protect what we've established or what we've acquired
Speaker 1: or what we have, and we wouldn't want to lose
Speaker 1: it because we have this loss of version to how
Speaker 1: do I protect this safety net I've just worked so
Speaker 1: hard to get and I've been lucky and I've been portunate,
Speaker 1: Whereas you have other people who put all the chips
Speaker 1: on the table and they go all in and they
Speaker 1: just keep doing it again and again. And as long
Speaker 1: as you're conscious about those things, like hallelujah, and you
Speaker 1: might even want to pause. Right, you might. I'm just
Speaker 1: going to do that, you know, I'm just gonna I'm
Speaker 1: just going to sit in this for the next five years,
Speaker 1: and then you might change your mind and be more
Speaker 1: ambitious again.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't even think Walmart started what was
Speaker 1: Sam Walton like thirty eight thirty nine? When you start
Speaker 1: a Walmart, like, we tend to these are like some
Speaker 1: of the rules, right. We think that young people do
Speaker 1: these things, and it's like, no, we can do anything
Speaker 1: we want. We just have to want it.
Speaker 2: That's pretty profound. We can do anything we want. We
Speaker 2: just have to want it. We have to Okay, so
Speaker 2: let's just think that through uh, we will have to
Speaker 2: want it, we have to set intentions about it, we
Speaker 2: have to own that that's what we want.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It doesn't mean you're going to accomplish every like
Speaker 1: you can't bend the laws of physics with your mind,
Speaker 1: but it does mean that we get these rules in
Speaker 1: these norms that are established by society, and we let
Speaker 1: those dictate often what we do and how we act
Speaker 1: and how we behave. And part of thinking clearly is
Speaker 1: thinking independently. So if you want to break the book
Speaker 1: down into sort of like three main categories. It's positioning,
Speaker 1: managing the urges that get other people in trouble, and
Speaker 1: then thinking independently. And thinking independently means that you're going
Speaker 1: to do something different than other people. You're going to
Speaker 1: create positive deviation, and that's what you're trying to do, right,
Speaker 1: And that positive deviation, the most important positive deviation you
Speaker 1: can create is in your own life, where society is
Speaker 1: telling you one thing, go after these things because that's
Speaker 1: what you should be wanting. Well, you know, maybe I
Speaker 1: don't want those things, or maybe I do and I'm
Speaker 1: going to go all in and I'm going to bust
Speaker 1: my bet to get them. And all of those things
Speaker 1: are cool, but you just have to think about I
Speaker 1: don't want other people establishing that for me. It's the
Speaker 1: same as you think of COVID. All these rules came
Speaker 1: out right and the government's sending you. You know, in Canada,
Speaker 1: we were locked down forever. And I was trying to
Speaker 1: teach my kids who were much younger at the time,
Speaker 1: because this was like three years ago. They were like
Speaker 1: ten and nine, and I think, and you know, here's
Speaker 1: all the rules. Well, we're going to violate some of
Speaker 1: these rules, right, so and we're making a choice, a
Speaker 1: conscious choice. I know what the rule is. I'm choosing
Speaker 1: not to follow this rule because I think it's in
Speaker 1: our family's best interests not to follow this. And what
Speaker 1: are we doing. We're thinking for ourselves, we're not letting
Speaker 1: somebody else tell us what to think. And they have
Speaker 1: our best interests at heart. They're doing the best they can,
Speaker 1: but they don't know what we know. They don't know
Speaker 1: about our family, they don't know about our situation, they
Speaker 1: don't know about our environment, they don't know what we
Speaker 1: need neat and so we have to opt out. And
Speaker 1: that when we opt out, it doesn't hurt anybody else, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, has no impact on other people. It's but
Speaker 1: we're not going to follow this rule. We're going to
Speaker 1: do something different. And I have to talk to them
Speaker 1: about that because they know we're going to be breaking
Speaker 1: their pool. So if I don't talk to them about
Speaker 1: it, it looks like, well, we're.
Speaker 2: Just like.
Speaker 1: Flaunting the rules. But I think that the nuance I
Speaker 1: was trying to get there is like they're telling us
Speaker 1: one thing, and I'm viewing these more as guidelines than
Speaker 1: sort of rules, and we're going to opt out of
Speaker 1: certain ones of those and we're going to think independently
Speaker 1: because we think we we can come up with a
Speaker 1: better solution for our family.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Oh wait that now I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Unfortunately, it's really really great to talk to you, Sheane.
Speaker 2: You know, you you have this tagline of your life
Speaker 2: that is mastering the best of what other people have
Speaker 2: already figured out. But look, I don't really think that
Speaker 2: that does That's that's fair. You have. You bring a
Speaker 2: lot of insight, and you've taught me a lot of
Speaker 2: new things. And I can tell you I've read that
Speaker 2: I've had to work four hundred interviews of the Psychology
Speaker 2: podcast and the ten years that I've been doing this
Speaker 2: every week with no break for the last ten years,
Speaker 2: and I can honestly say you have taught me a
Speaker 2: lot of new ways of thinking about myself and the world,
Speaker 2: even the language you create. You know, like I'm going
Speaker 2: to really think a lot now about like things coming
Speaker 2: up in me thinking I've going to opt out of that.
Speaker 2: Like that's that's got the Shane uniqueness to it. So
Speaker 2: I just want to I want to kind of bolster
Speaker 2: you hope a little bit there, because I think you're
Speaker 2: more than just mastering the best of what other people
Speaker 2: have already figured out. Thank you so much for me
Speaker 2: being on my podcast, and I just really appreciate what
Speaker 2: you're putting into this world.
Speaker 1: Oh thanks so much for having me, Scott. I really
Speaker 1: appreciate it.
Speaker 2: What's what Woman's Mann