10 Habits That Make You More Likely To Succeed - Polina Pompliano

the scary decision is telling my boss telling my wife giving up the salary but scary only lasts like a few days like you'll get over telling your boss or disappointing your college professor whatever it may be but dangerous is staying in this job and then when I'm 80 years old looking back and be like damn I wish I started that Brewery my favorite quote that I found so far is if you win the rat race you're still a rat what does that mean to you yeah so um I shifted my definition of success after I read Anna quinlan's commencement speech and in her commencement speech she says something like you know if success looks good good to the world but does not feel good in your heart then it is not success at all is Lily Tomlin says if you win the rat race you're still a rat it just to me means like if you've gotten to the top of the career ladder or the top of your industry or whatever like cool that's amazing for that one part of your life but does that mean that you've lived a fulfilling life it depends like how's your personal life how's your social life whatever um so to me it's like I was I recognized in myself that I was playing that game and I was on that in that rat race and the next step didn't look that exciting to me in my traditional media job so I asked myself like is this it and then I realized like no like I can I can choose a different path and I can play a different game and I don't have to be a rat wasn't there something about uh continuing down the same path would be true failure but changing and not succeeding would be more like success yeah in a way like I see successes trying many different things and also like getting a variety of perspectives rather than just doing this one thing that you know in some ways like I felt a little bit of a hypocrite because I was working at Fortune Magazine covering uh Tech and venture capital and startups and I was talking to these entrepreneurs all day long and I was analyzing their companies and talking about the leadership strategy moves they were making and I was like I myself have never started anything and I've never run a business who am I to evaluate these people like of course there's a time and place for that um but I felt like I want to do this myself and only then will I feel successful okay so how do the best performers Channel their creativity creativity oh in so many ways um in the book I talk about how true original creators have three kind of uh uh characteristics the first is they have a unique point of view on the world the second is that they have this like audacious ambitious goal they want to achieve and third is that they're willing to fail spectacularly in the name of achieving this goal um and a really good example of that is edcat mall at Pixar because he talks about how most people are told when you have an idea you need to like perfect your elevator pitch when you're in the elevator with someone higher up can you summarize your idea in 30 seconds or less so they get it but he's like anything that you can summarize in 30 seconds or less is actually not that original it's probably derivative of something that's been done before he's like if I was to explain some of our top films to someone in 30 seconds it wouldn't make any sense Toy Story that could end up like incredibly commercial right like toys and and whatever and America and capitalism like it might not do well um or Ratatouille a rat in a kitchen that can cook like that's probably disgusting and he's like it doesn't have to make sense and I think that the thing that he says that I love is like they go through this iterative process to make the film from really really bad just less bad to less bad and then he's like even when we put out the film we still think it's [ __ ] but like we just got to the best possible version that we thought we could get it to but it's not the best you know so like sometimes you have to let go and just put it out into the world and see what happens what do you think about somebody that can release a multi-award-winning series many multi-award winning series on Pixar and still not feel confident in the final product is just like creativity is just a living animal I think I don't I don't at least I don't know any creative person who's ever like this is the perfect final version of my creation and and like I think I think even Da Vinci was like you just some you just gotta put it out there it's never Finn yeah I actually think it was Da Vinci who said uh like great art is never finished only abandoned so like it's it's really you you just uh you get to the best possible version uh that you can live with that's interesting yeah I I'm trying to be as positive as possible at the moment just generally in everything to try and counteract some cynicism that I'm seeing a lot on the internet and uh there is a bit of me that thinks too much positivity not necessarily positivity but too much satisfaction kind of loses the edge that drove you towards the maniacal obsessive Focus that created the competitive advantage in the first place whether or not you can find a balance a delicate balance between being driven by the desire to do more whilst not fearing the insufficiency of not being good enough but if the head guy of Pixar says that he's struggling as well then I don't know maybe there's no hope for any of us but when it comes when it comes to inspiration what have you learned about where that comes from whether people should wait for it to strike if if they need to create an environment that engenders it what about that yeah I really do believe that activity is a skill and it's not a muse or it's not something external um and I agree with your point that a taste of success a taste of something working or a creative act working can bring about complacency and that's you know every one hit wonder and then they feel the pressure of the second album or the second film or whatever uh and or they became complacent they just can't produce again um the the thing about creativity that I found is in in staying hungry is constraint and like forcibly or forcing yourself to start over in in various ways so for example in the book I talk about Grant Atkins who's like one of the most Innovative chefs in the in the country he's behind alinea um this restaurant in Chicago and he like for he makes his staff no matter how popular the menu is he makes them every six months just blow up the whole menu and start over and it's just like they hate it because they're like but this works so well and he's like that will make us uh complacent I want originality I want creativity and I want Innovation and the only way we can do that is if we create these constraints upon ourselves so we don't have to but you're forcing yourself to reinvent constantly there's a quote that says unstructured freedom is the enemy of true creative achievement find and learn the rules you can break them afterwards yeah there's a lot of um a direct like film directors and like it creative people in general who believe that rules and structure can actually augment creativity because if you know what the rules are you can only then break the rules if you don't know what the rules are you're just like you're finger painting you don't know where the lines are and you don't know where you can be Innovative so I think like every great company like Spanx she knew what the rules were but she was like I want to play with within and without like I want to break some rules I want to create some rules so like you can't break or invent rules if you don't know what they are in the first place yeah there's a difference between disregarding convention and believing that you can break the physics of a system right like on YouTube for instance um something that we spend an awful lot of time on thumbnail design and title design and stuff like that we've been able to get increasingly creative and break conventions some conventions that we've created but the only way that we learned what those conventions were were by following them for a while and this is why the overnight success especially in a creative Arena just I I don't it doesn't happen it can take 10 years to become an overnight success and the latent leverage means that the inflection curve is so vertical that it feels like you're an overnight success but you won't you had to learn all of these different things the same goes with music or guitar playing right my housemate's a guitar player and it's his skill developed he is now breaking rules that he had to teach himself but if you're just trying to disregard the entire physics of the system you end up with something that sounds like if I tried to play it which is not good yeah and just just one thing I I started listening to your podcast really early on like 2018. 2018. okay so so I was I was listening really really early on and even though the format the video like you added video all this stuff Everything's changed you're the essence of it your creativity and your questions have remained the same and that's why like people like me still listen because I I love the way you think therefore like the the fundamentals are there even if you've broken the rules along the way there's another one as well from Stephen King which I really really love reminded me a lot of um uh Stephen pressfield war of art type scenario uh there is a muse but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room he lives in the ground he's a basement guy you have to descend to his level what's that mean yeah okay so many people especially in in Creative uh uh you know spheres they talk about like oh I can't do this because I don't feel inspired I I don't I'm not in the right mood to create and it's like I I guess because maybe because I've been in journalism and there's deadlines there's no like oh I don't feel inspired to write it's like you gotta write now uh because you have to turn this in later so to me like it's creativity has always been like yes you can be creative but also you gotta sit down like butt in chair and do the work um and I think that for example when I have complete unstructured freedom without deadlines and without any sort of structure I get lost and I never get anything done and I think like he talks about um I think Stephen uh King has like I write 1000 words a day like he he has um fake deadlines that he's created for himself but but uh he sticks to them because it forces him to sit down and work and I think like in today's society like it people don't want to do the freaking work Jack butcher is a fantastic example of this so he's a guy behind visualized value and I remember I had a conversation with him he is a graphic designer by trade so he has played with fonts and typography and colors and shapes and Hues and all manner of different ways to graphically represent something in an interesting way when he came to his magnum opus which is visualize value anyone that's read the almanac of Naval ravacan the illustrations in that are from Jack he constrained everything white on black no color uh sort of uh dot matrix geometric style illustrations and the same font so all of the degrees of freedom that a graphic designer previously would have been playing with have been removed and asked him why and he said I've constrained that because the highest point of contribution is what is the concept that I'm explaining and how well can I explain it I don't want to get lost in should it be green should it be red I changed this font and do all the rest of it it's like no no I've facilitated freedom in the most important areas by constraining freedom in the ones that don't matter it's also constraint breeds creativity and also if you look in the business World some of the most iconic companies like uber Airbnb Etc started in times of constraint when VCS weren't investing a ton of capital when founders had to bootstrap when there was a financial recession going on 2008-2009 that's when those companies started but like you learn Financial discipline and you learn how to uh you learn that within constraint you can figure out different ways to do things instead of if you're like flush with money and you're just like spending everywhere you have no discipline what did you learn about mental toughness so many things I know this is something that you're very like an expert on and you've actually interviewed David Goggins who I talk about in the mental resilience chapter but I think the biggest thing that I learned that I had never previously actually thought about I I learned this while writing the book and noticing these patterns is that some of the most mentally resilient people personify pain and there's several examples I include one is David Goggins who talks about how he goes into this dark room to face himself and he's super honest and he's like you're fat you're lazy or a liar like what are you gonna do about it and then you know he exits that dark room a different person then there's um Courtney doll Walter who sees pain she she talks about it as a place is like again similarly to David Goggins she sees it as a pain cave and she's like I'm equally as in as control I'm in control when I enter and I'm equally as in control when I leave but it's like this place of transformation and then the third person that I talk about in terms of this is um Anthony Ray Hinton who uh he he was shoved into a a dark place against his will because he was um wrongfully in prison for 30 years on death row and he was he often spent time in a solitary confinement cell so again a place of pain and suffering but in that place he managed to keep his mind sane by um visualizing like different lives he could have had like he talks about like having tea with the queen or winning Wimbledon or marrying Halle Berry and so uh I I think that's so powerful because if you personify pain and visualize it as a place then you see that place as something that can transform you so David goggin says when you enter that dark room and you face yourself if if you don't break you'll transform so it becomes like a place of like Metamorphosis almost and and I love that I I love that like visualizing it in that way when talking about pain and suffering one of the other things is this sort of fine line I suppose between self-criticism and self-accountability and I think that people often get these two confused you know there is a subsection of the world that often talks about you need to take more responsibility for the things um Joker willink extreme ownership and I I don't disagree that maybe even on average for most people lots of people the majority of people uh this is a strategy that's needed but I would guess that for most of the people that are listening to this podcast they don't actually need that they probably already over index for accountability they believe that something is their fault when they had nothing to do with it a good example let's say that I have a bad episode on the podcast that the guest just doesn't perform that day I blame me right it's my fault I I should have guided them better my question should have been better I should have controlled the vibe should have been a Vibe architect in a more effective and sort of dexterous manner but then if I guessed on a show and that one goes bad that's still me I'm like okay so I I do understand that taking ownership for things is a smart strategy but there is definitely a way that you can overshoot that where you just like lambast yourself you're like whipping yourself prostrated under the cat of nine tails because I don't know you're a [ __ ] Puritan I'm not really too sure but what about this line between self-criticism and self-accountability yeah I think um actually Amelia Boone who she's a tough moderate Champion um I also talk about her in the book I don't include this in the book but when I talk to her she told me that she calls this the Merry-Go-Round of self-flagellation where like you think you did something wrong but then you focus on that thing but then you you feel bad about it and then you feel bad for feeling bad about it and you're just like in a constant circle of this um I think the way to get off is just like yes like take responsibility but then do what David Goggins does and he's like what do you what am I gonna do about it and I think if you've done all the things that you think would contribute to an episode going well then you've done your job and then you're just gonna have to let it go because I'm sure you've noticed some of your favorite conversations maybe haven't performed as well as some of the other ones where you're like that was an okay conversation but like why is this popping um sometimes that you can make all the right decisions but the outcome doesn't match yes victimhood mentality this sort of pervasive victimhood mindset which is the other side I guess of this a blade that we're talking about what did you learn about that um yeah so uh Edith Eva eager she was a holocaust Survivor and when she was on the train to Auschwitz with her sister and her mom her mom told her by the way no matter what happens in the next few weeks or months or years just remember that everything can be taken away from you except what you put into your own mind and Edith as a teenager at the time really took this to heart um and it really carried her through that horrific Journey um but she talks about how every single person will be on the receiving end of some sort of victimization so she calls it like the neighborhood bully the spouse that cheats the you know the boss who yells like those are all external things that you're on the receiving end of the victimization the victimhood comes from the inside it's not external it's only you can make yourself feel like a victim and so I I think that like this this is such a fine line and it's exactly what you just said there's extreme extreme ownership on one side and then there's like internal victimhood on the other and I think most of society is kind of locked into one of two extremes and we need to move towards the middle somewhere where it's like I take responsibility for my own thoughts and my own actions but there's only up to a point that I can control and and I don't make myself feel like the victim in every single situation even though I will be victimized by life um so I I keep that in mind it's almost like a Continuum or like a spectrum where you have to not over index on one yeah this feels a lot like it's related to the concept of talking to yourself and listening to yourself and the difference between those two yeah man you really read my book Chris don't [ __ ] about Elena also your husband your husband would have sent me a actually I've got it here and everything no it's proof I appreciate you I read it I promise yeah um no so the so yeah so listening to yourself is basically when like you're in pain let's say you're running a marathon and like everything hurts and you think you're dying and listening to yourself would be oh my God my legs are barely working how am I still running I should stop whatever and then talking to yourself is actively like taking control over that internal narrator and not letting it run on autopilot and instead choosing what you tell yourself so almost like a coach being like all right you got this you only have like five more miles to go your legs got you here they'll get you there and you're just like pumping like pumping yourself up to not when you hit the wall to be able to continue uh I um I had a really bad in the monologue and I still like it still arises every so often probably more frequently than I would like why um I can try and you know bro psychoanalysis it but you know I was I was unsuccessful and largely a massive loser until I pretty much got into University and um I think that the story I told myself was that I'm not good enough that nobody likes me why would anybody like me you don't deserve love or acceptance or praise or belonging um I didn't really have a community of friends to kind of uh ameliorate or mediate any of that stuff so one of the advantages which I know that you had because you couldn't speak the language when you first came to this country is that you spend an awful lot of time observing people which means that you're very detail-oriented and you can detect patterns which is why I became really good at being a club promoter because I could see what other people wanted and then I'd reverse engineer that into a nightclub but yeah I had this sort of pretty pretty bad in a monologue I think for a good chunk of time which again still arises more than I want it to but especially over the last two probably the last six years since I was meditating very consistently and exposing myself more positive stuff and then it's been really supercharged on top of that strong Foundation within the last 18 months since Living in America because you guys are significantly more extroverted and kind of positive about everything and everything is going to be fine people can take the piss as much as they want but it's a really useful strategy to have George Mack just release an awesome Twitter Thread about the rationalist's guide to like uh positive affirmations or like manifesting your dreams it's like basically a rational optimism justification and um I know from first hand experience that I can adjust I can nudge the inner voice to now where it's pretty unrecognizable it genuinely is I did a workout this morning with Tim Kennedy and a bunch of his psycho friends at Roca wow and this workout was just awful like absolutely 45 minutes of hell and I remember because I did CrossFit for a long time about seven years ago and I remember the texture of my mind then and I know the texture of my mind now and the difference is massive so you know it's nice to think that talking to yourself and nudging it and assessing and listening back as well to what's coming what's coming up is something that can move you closer and closer toward the world that you want because we spend an awful lot of time trying to change our external environment but the texture of your own mind is fundamentally the source code of your existence and if you can nudge that more that's a huge uh increase in quality of life that's such a good way to put it and also like the comparison you're able to remember what you thought back then versus now I think is huge because you can see the you can see the difference what about having healthy relationships well um so much um so okay so having health y I was really interested in the research of John gottman who with a ridiculous amount of things like 94 97 really really high percentage of certainty he can predict whether couples will you know live happily ever after or get divorced and he can do this just by putting them in like an apartment like lab setting in observing them and um he found several things that can predict marital stability that are so counterintuitive and like kind of so little that you're like really that's that's it um one of those things is when you ask a couple like how they met do they fondly remember the beginning and kind of like joke about it and have like a whatever or is it just a very clinical and like cold like yeah we met at this bar and that was it um because I guess happier couples or happier people tend to romanticize like the past and the beginnings a little bit more than uh more negative people the other thing um that he talks about is answering the bid so throughout throughout the day each one of us makes bids for attention whether it's for a with a partner or a friend or anybody else so when you make a bid for attention you're like hey look at this cool meme I just saw if the person is like texting or not paying attention to you and doesn't respond to that bid you feel slighted but it's not enough where you like get upset or mad and he's like most relationships don't fall apart because of one big blowout fight they fall apart after years of like chipping away at this um disrespect in a way it's very small but it builds up over time and then you resent each other and you don't even know why and it's because after years of like of this not answering each other's bids even it could be literally a head nod or or whatever or a glance and the way he measured this in the lab was he looked at couples who answered each other's bids like there was a couple who was like oh you know look at this cool bird pointed out the window and if the person turned their head he was like they're gonna last so in that regard do you see love as a skill that you develop yes I I do think that like love is something that can be learned like I will say like I don't think I was a very good partner early on because I always assumed and I think like our society does this where you always think that everything has to be like magnificent and extraordinary and life is about big moments when in reality it's a lot more like I I can't remember who said this but like I think it was gottman um Small Things occasionally Small Things often is much more powerful than big things occasionally and it's just like we all think like what are you doing for Valentine's Day what are you gonna get me for my birthday but in reality it's like the daily answering the daily bid for attention is way more important and significant than those big moments so I think over time I learned that it's like actually the small ordinary moments that make a good life than it is like the big grand gestures I suppose even in a modern world that applauds these big gestures and you can upload them on Instagram everybody expects it to be not totally [ __ ] on their birthday and October holy [ __ ] on Christmas and not totally [ __ ] on New Year's Eve so you go okay the bar is set much higher for you to be super impressive on somebody's birthday because they were already expecting something whereas the daily um how you permeate the physics of your relationship like what what is the foundation that all of this is built on and then that stuff picks up on top there's a quote that you had trust compounds so does mistrust what's that mean yeah well um so it's like I talk about the compound interest of trust and how like all great returns whether Financial or personal um they pay interest and that interest can be in the form of trust um and like for example Naval ravacant says that if you come compound trust over a long period of time uh then you can see all deals and you can do a lot of really high impact things with just the handshake because you trust that person so much but the only way you can build trust is to be consistent over a long period of time that's why I include the formula trust equals consistency plus time because it's like let's say you know you you meet somebody for the first time and you're about to go on a date and then they cancel at the last minute that's not detrimental to the relationship but if they keep doing that over and over like promising they're going to do something and they keep breaking their promise it's just it becomes really hard to trust them um so I think and I think um Shopify founder Toby lutke I have to say his name right um he has this like idea that I love where he's like when you first meet someone um you meet and you have each have a trust battery and your trust battery stays charged at 50 percent every single interaction you have with that person either discharges it or charges it a little bit and he's like aimed to be a person whose battery stays charged at over 80 percent so basically most of the things that you say you're gonna do you end up doing uh so that it works in any area of life in personal relationships and business and with my newsletter subscribers like it works with every area how should people tell better stories um they should focus on conflict and intent so sorry so uh basically when most people tell a story there's some sort of intrigue there's some sort of conflict but what they forget is that it has to be laced with intent in order for it to be interesting one of the great storytellers I talk about in the book is Aaron Sorkin who's known for uh the film he's known for many films but one film is the social network which is the Inception of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and sorkin's like I'm not interested in Tech I'm not interested in startups I wasn't particularly interested in Facebook the thing that Drew me to this story is that there were two different lawsuits against Mark and he was defending himself so there was Mark Zuckerberg a lawsuit from his buddy Eduardo and also the Winklevoss twins who claims he stole their idea and he's like what I loved about this was that there were three different versions of the truth and there was no ultimate truth and if you watch many of his films many of his films play with perspective and there's like not an ultimate source of Truth um so he talks about like when you have a protagonist or a character you need to show the conflict they're mired in but also their intent so he's like the intent maybe get to Philadelphia get the girl get a sandwich whatever it is it has to be compelling enough that the character wants it and he's like even better that he needs it in Mark Zuckerberg's case he wasn't chasing money he wasn't chasing anything but Prestige and social status he had been kind of like ignored by his peers he wasn't invited to these like fancy Club parties that they had at Harvard so he wanted social status and Facebook was his key to that even though he had all this conflict he was determined to plow through everything to get there so anytime you're telling a story for example if you're a Founder pitching a company or you're someone you're trying to date somebody or whatever present all the challenges and the obstacles standing in the way of what's going on now maybe the company editors the market landscape whatever and how you are going to solve that problem because your intent is why there was some language tricks that my housemate told me about I think from the creators of South Park about using uh but instead of and and I think that you you found this as well yeah Aaron's hurricane also says this he's like you don't have a story unless you have the words but a accept or and then so like those words are what kind of make up a story there's Intrigue there's suspense there's mystery yes I remember so when I first started the show which you'll remember because you've been listening since I thought um I was like kind of obsessed with uh productivity that was my thing it was like a productivity bro for a good while and adamant if I just refined my getting things done to-do list task manager and I did enough pomodoros that all of my problems would fade away and like spoiler alert they didn't but I also took that across I think into the philosophy of the show or at least my like how I showed up in the beginning by thinking right my job as a podcaster is to ruthlessly index all of the key points that this guest has and then distill them down like uh blinkist or short form for whichever person I was speaking to and over time and again this is learning the rules before you can break the rules I've realized that just being a Vibe architect is much more important and getting stories out Vibe architect yeah I know I I should trademark it um like trying to elicit and not not unnecessary Superfluous stories but you know David goggin's book uh his first one can't hurt me is a good example the best selling self-published book in history there's things that you can take from it but there's nothing that isn't couched in a story like don't make a point without the story and don't tell a a story without a point and yeah just over time that's that's really sort of been reinforced to me like try and almost be overly Whimsical with it you know you can lean into a little bit of drama and Intrigue and add unnecessary uh detail into stuff because that's what fleshes this thing out and and fundamentally we're a storytelling species which I think actually drives the point home better than if you've just given the Tweet length summary of what the person believed it's in it it's largely that we we tell stories to make points because stories trigger emotion and empathy and emotion triggers memory so I'm more likely to remember a point that is captured in the story because I can empathize with whoever's going through whatever they're going through and I actually I like overdosed on you and George Max content in 2018 because of exactly this like many of the podcasts I would listen to were kind of like surface level or they let the the guests just say facts like which is fine but what I really appreciated about you that you always did is you took out the Practical takeaways that I could apply to my own life because that's why I was listening I wanted like every single time somebody's listening to a speech or listening to a podcast or watching a video selfishly you know without knowing it they want to take something away personally they're not just like listening because you're a really good speaker they're like how can I apply this to my own life and that's why I wrote the book this way I'm like yes these are human stories but each one of them contains a little nugget that you can like take away and Implement in your own life today yeah one of my friends uses the term does it grow corn it's like this is it's lovely I like the idea it's fantastic compelling motivating whatever but like show me show me does this thing grow [ __ ] corn like can it turn this tilled ground into something useful that I can eat and I think that um again you know it's the following the rules before you can break them thing you can totally go down the emotion Pawn story Whimsy roots for forever and then you look back on a conversation or or a a book or a you know a movie and realize I didn't actually take anything away from that it was you know a remotely enjoyable Journey but the uh outcome that I got at the end of it was no con yeah no corn oh I love that it's cool all right what about becoming a more effective leader yeah so I think that the best leaders approach it from a Bottoms Up perspective rather than a top-down approach one good example is um Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Eck he is very much he wanted to create a culture of like Bottoms Up leadership he's like the employees are the lifeblood of this company I want to as the CEO be there so I can guide them and give them resources and kind of fuel their ideas but their ideas Drive the company so this really came to a head when there was this team that was working on a new feature and they're really excited about it about it they were like what if we created a personalized play playlist for every single like listener of spotify and Daniel I heard this idea and he was like honestly like I wasn't really excited about it I thought this is kind of stupid why are you spending all this time and energy on this um would it be just like a tiny feature and then they were like eh but they kept working on it given even though he was like not enthusiastic about it and then they ended up like launching it to the public without telling him and he read about it in the Press just like everybody else and he was like I remember reading about this and I was like oh my God this is going to be a total disaster I can't believe they did this but then that turned into discover weekly which is like one of spotify's most loved features and he's like that would have never been possible if they didn't feel the freedom and like have the agency to do that because like if you're terrified of your boss you're never gonna do that you're never gonna ship something without telling the CEO but the fact it speaks to the culture of that company they were able to do that uh and and that it was successful what's the difference between that and servant leadership it's it's similar uh servant leadership was something popularized by Robert Greenleaf uh which is basically the CEO is there to serve um uh the employees of the company and Mark bertolini who is now co-ceo of Bridgewater but he used to be the CEO of Aetna the large insurance company um he he has something he calls like the four levels of Taoist leadership and he's like the first level is that your employees hate you the second is that they fear you the third is that they praise you and the fourth is that the company runs itself because you're invisible so if you think about it most leaders they don't want to become invisible they want to be needed they want people to say like this company can't operate without this person but actually the highest level of like leadership is that you've run this organization so well and you've trained everybody so well that the company can go into the future without you and he in his final chapter at Aetna ended really successfully because he was able to kind of Shepherd it the sale to CVS uh health and then the company went on without him and it's just like I think it speaks to the priorities of certain leaders and why some of them do much better than others Ben Francis CEO of gymshark on the podcast that I did with him said when your Ambitions for the business are bigger than your Ambitions for yourself that's when you'll truly be a leader basically that he founded the company then became CEO then step down as CEO and then got re-instated as CEO all because those were the best decisions for the business and he didn't have the ego to hold on this is my company and it's my position and I want to be at the head so I just want to do whatever's best for gymshark I want to grow this company though because you have to put your ego aside which is like the hardest thing yeah you mentioned there about um making yourself redundant as the ultimate goal that all owners or Founders I think should aspire to and everybody is addicted to systems and and trying to automate what do you think gets overlooked when it comes to designing systems and automations for our lives for our lives yeah and for business as well like the way that we interact with our professional in our personal world yeah I think so I think most of us get too focused on the outcome um versus creating the right system um and chess players talk about this a lot like when they evaluate a game they look at the systems not necessarily like that one mistake that they make because they're like okay if I just focus on the mistake I can focus on not making that one exact same mistake again but if you think in terms of systems you're like where where did the the fundamentals Break um and then you can focus on not making that mistake and like future of hundreds of similar mistakes like that one if you get the fundamentals right can you think of a less Chessy analogy that might be uh more like obvious for people to follow yeah yeah okay so for example like let's say you want to run a marathon and the outcome is I want to run a marathon I want to keep running marathons whatever but like you can train for that one marathon and you can do it and then that's it you're never going to run again or you I I ran a marathon then didn't run it all for a year but I think like the point is if you get the systems right you can I think James Clear says you don't win once you win every single day you become a runner if you have like it becomes a way of life instead of just focused on this one outcome um so you have like a training plan but also like you find a way to build it into your life and that's what for example James Clear talks about with identity based habits is you become the person and you don't just focus on the one outcome yeah there's a I remember from his book he says if you uh do a key ppap with the football does that make you a footballer no if you go and play one game in the park does that make you a footballer no well what about if if you play every weekend for two years yeah well most people would probably say yeah you're a footballer now you play football and so there is a line at some point that is based off the back of repetition routine consistency commitment uh well it's indicative of commitment right that's what the the consistency is like the uh the projection of the internal commitment you can be as internally committed to being a footballer as you want but if you never kick a football then you're not uh there's a cool quote as well don't look at the scoreboard play the next play I love that yeah Nick Saban from his uh college football coach of Alabama he's he's often reminding players not to look at the scoreboard but just to focus on doing their One Singular job because they're all part of a larger system because if I do my job and you do your job and the third person does their job then the outcome will take care of itself it's like stop looking at the scoreboard just like play the next play correctly and execute it right what about taking risks how can people become better at taking risks oh man um so so risk taking there there's so much um I think we live in a very uncertain world at the moment uh and there's there's a lot to it's like it almost feels like there's a lot of like information coming in uh and we don't have enough answers but what I found is that a lot of times you have to evaluate and calculate risk properly in order to make the best decision in the book I talk about several stories but one of them is um Jim Cook who's the founder of Samuel Adams beer he worked at Boston Consulting Group as a consultant and he was making 250 000 a year which in today's dollars is like a million dollars a year and he was like oh I really want to quit my job and leave this amazing salary and start a brewery to make American Beer you not being from the US you know how the jokes especially in the 90s and early 2000s was that United Americans can't make beer American beer tastes like water and water can be arguably stronger than American Beer um German beer is normally yeah so so he um his great great grandfather had immigrated from Germany to the U.S and when Jim was like looking in the family attic for something he came across an old beer recipe from his great great grandfather and he was like What if I take this recipe and make an American Beer that actually has flavor um and uh and so he he kept like toying with this idea but it was a really big risk for him to leave his cushy job to do this and so he started thinking about two words which are um scary and dangerous and he was like the scary decision is telling my boss telling my wife giving up the salary like whatever but scary only lasts like a few days like you'll get over telling your boss or disappointing your college professor whatever it may be that you're scared of but dangerous is staying in this job and then when I'm 80 years old looking back and be like damn I wish I started that Brewery so it's like you want to make the scary decision and then in terms of like you don't want to stay in the dangerous one because that could be forever and so if you were like making a decision right now and you think is it risky is it not a good framework is is this decision scary or is it dangerous in which path am I on right now before I made the move to America I rang George and George had already pulled the PIN to go out to Dubai because we'd spent a month in Dubai to flee British lockdowns in 2020 and he loved it and he was having a great time out there and I was like dude you know I'm gonna have to let go of this previous version of me that I thought I was this club promoter and this success and and Accolade and notoriety and I'm thinking about going and doing this thing in America but you know I started talking to people on the internet and accidentally made it a job isn't it doesn't exactly fill me with tons and tons of like this is definitely going to work and I'm so naturally risk-averse like unbelievably prudent as a decision maker and he introduced me to reversible and irreversible decisions yeah yeah he was like look what's the worst that happens you go out there it doesn't work out you come back with your tail between your legs and in a couple of weeks time everybody's forgotten but the alternative is so I think that the um whatever scary and dangerous risky and dangerous yeah scary scary and scary and dangerous and reversible and irreversible sort of map over the top of each other quite a lot too I also include that question and there too the basically you want to make reversible decisions quickly uh that you can learn a lot from but make irreversible decisions deliberately and slowly because some of those you know may not they're irreversible you can't go back if you have a child you're going to be a parent for the rest of your life but if you move or like if you quit your job you can always go get another job that's reversible so it's like if you don't have a ton of Prior information just make the reversible decision quickly what about that story from Chris Hadfield yeah um so he Chris hadfield's crazy incredible and interesting but he's an astronaut at one point he was on a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station holding on with one arm doing work on it when his like left eye slammed shut he was like what the hell just happened he went temporarily blind on a spacewalk outside of the ISS and the reason that happened is um some like small there was like a mixture of soap and oil that they used to clean their advisors it got caught inside of his helmet and into his eye but because there's no gravity that thing just like became a blob and then it went over into his other eye so he's like now totally blind outside of the ISS and most people would panic in a situation like that but the way he saw it was like I know that my first reaction is panic but I can give myself optionality and I think that's what people forget a lot when they're in like uncertain or risky situations it's like what can I do right now what action can I take to give my future self optionality and he he was like okay right now I have three options I can call Houston I can get my fellow astronaut like Scott persinski to rescue me or I can cry a little bit and let it dilute out of my eye he ended up doing a fourth thing which is opening a vent on the side of his helmet to let some oxygen out help it evaporate and then he continued working and um Chris has been in kind of like impossible situations to most of us he one time fixed an ammonia leak on the ISS another time he broke in to a space station I think yeah another one not that it's a a space station with a Swiss army knife and a third time he does disposed of a live snake while piloting a plane so like all these things obviously you can't plan for but when they happen you've you have the skills because he's an astronaut or a pilot or whatever and he's had training um you're competent enough to figure it out and give yourself options and he always says competence breeds confidence so even when you're in like seemingly impossible situations it's important to remember like by the way this is not the first risky thing I've done or uncertain situation I've been in and all those other times I figured it out and I'm here today so like it wasn't a life or death situation so he talks about um how when you're literal and you're learning to ride a bike the bike is really dangerous and you see it as this like death trap you're like I could get on I could fall I could break a leg break my head but then as you get more competent and better the bike gets becomes silly to be afraid of so he says people um no things aren't scary people get scared so another another way in other terms the bike itself never changed it's just as dangerous as it always was but you are the one who changed and I think like that's how it is in life as you get more and more competent it's silly to become to to still be fearful of uncertainty because you know you have the skills to figure it out well that's the problem right the um asking for confidence without competence is Wishful fantasy yes and you know having no confidence whilst having competence is self-delusion you know you can have I call it imposter adaptation which is the Imposter syndrome continues to persist even as you disprove it every single day and after a while after you've disproven it enough times you end up realizing that it's got nothing to do with your ability to do a thing and everything to do with your ability to feeling like an imposter like you're addicted to feeling like an imposter absolutely um Lewis Hamilton as well another person who performs high speed very risky maneuvers you had to look at him right yeah yeah yeah he um he's fascinating because he sees himself as like a master of his craft so he you know he's a race car driver but he's like I'm never done learning and improving and you'll find that the most successful people like just really enjoy tinkering with their craft until they feel like they're masters of it um but but I think the point with Lewis is like you're never done learning and you're constantly getting better and better and more competent uh and like you said like confidence is hollow without having the things to back it up and I think you see it often like with with podcast hosts who are just starting they want to like they want people to perceive them as confident and to respect them immediately but it's like you have to earn that respect and through reps and like many many conversations so um so I think like I I love the idea of Lewis of just constantly what does he calling he calls it like painting a masterpiece or something but you're are constantly putting little splashes of paint on that masterpiece yeah I wrote something down for a potential newsletter um it sat in my notes at the moment and it says uh you're not ready for the audience you want to have which is a lot of people and me too right for to so long was adamant the show's under subscribed the show's under subscribed I would listen to this why why people more people not listening to it and I still think that that's the case but I wasn't ready to have the level of scrutiny that I do now because when that thing kicks in and when 25 million people a month are watching you you'd better have some skills because the level of scrutiny is going to be so high that if you don't you're going to get eaten alive you're not ready for the size of platform that you want to have that is so true and you don't you haven't had the time to develop like the thick skin necessary to emotionally deal with that correct so clarifying your thinking one of the reasons that I love this chapter apart from the fact that I'm big into Clarity of thought is that will store and Rob Henderson two of my boys were in it yeah I love this chapter I feel like this chapter doesn't get enough enough like I I've done a few podcasts and nobody ever asked me about this um so I love that so the reason in 2018 I think I was drawn to your podcast is because I was trying to like force myself into becoming a more rational thinker I was like very much driven by emotion and um I think you and I have like some similarities in terms of like feeling like Outsiders or bullying or things like that like I I get it um so when I was trying to like become like a more rational logical thinker um I came across several things uh but one of them was I was always obsessed with the idea of like why people join Cults I'm like what kind of person does it take to join a call and it's very much like built on a belief system in like a black and white tribal like we believe this you will become this type of person and um and James Clear talks about how like the reason it's so hard to get people to change their belief even though they are absurd is because you're not asking them to change their beliefs you're asking them to change their tribe so the people that they've surrounded themselves with whether it's politically or however you attach your identity to whatever you are asking people to like leave those people find a new friend group find a new support system and like that's really hard to do so this whole chapter just breaks down like how can you become more of a scout instead of a soldier when talking about uh beliefs and information how can you um better gather the facts and then analyze them and and create a more accurate picture of reality versus being a soldier which Julia gailiff talks about how you protect you defend you want your piece of information your belief to win and approaching life more as a scout is much more powerful how do you go about separating what are our beliefs compared with what have been absorbed just from others or societal Norms or passive lease resistance or trauma responses or whatever how do we actually know how do we get clear enough in our thinking that we know what we think yeah I uh so okay um I think Elon Musk tweeted this once and it stuck with me and it was just basically like you need to build a really really powerful mental firewall because whether you like it or not people's beliefs are going to seep into your mind and then you're going to confuse them for your own and that's why I earlier I asked you the negative inner monologue like where you think that comes from because for a lot of people it's actually not them it's actually their abusive parent or the bully at school or like whatever it's something you heard that you ended up internalizing without questioning and um I also when I read Tara westover's Memoir educated she talks about like how the first time she set foot in college she was like I had sexist homophobic racist beliefs that I said out loud and that people were able to challenge and only then did I realize that I myself don't know why I believe this but those weren't my words those are my father's words because as a kid you don't question it you just like you download Somebody else's software into your own hardware and then it's very hard to separate like what's yours and what somebody else's yeah I think especially for people that like to consume a lot of content that you know consider themselves curious introspective reflective ruminative types of people you can quite easily cage yourself in a way that a less introspective person couldn't like there's there's a double-edged sword to being smart right that yeah you you're able to guard yourself against uh other sources of counterfactual information more aggressively you know the the um fortification that you've managed to place yourself in ideologically intellectually in terms of world view is so strong that you can become a slave to your beliefs very easily because the beliefs are so in your view well grounded yes precisely absolutely and and I think like for example I I've never held a belief so strongly that I was willing to like fight people on the internet over it or anything like that maybe that's that's a fault of mine but actually I think that this the like my biggest strength is that I can empathize with most people because I see different perspectives because I always feel like an outsider and yeah like I moved from Bulgaria to Georgia and then to New York as an adult but as a child um coming to this country and then like seeing the cultural norms and how people think and the way they whatever I notice every single thing and when you don't speak English you're forced to observe people and you're like why do they always sit there in the cafeteria you become really really good at social skills um without knowing it um and then and then you move to New York and people in New York are like I can't believe people in Georgia believe this one thing and I'm like I really I can tell you exactly why they think that and it's like I I'm constantly like switching roles even if I go back to Bulgaria people would be like oh that's where you feel at home like that's where you're an Insider but actually I feel much more like an outsider there because now I'm too American and now I have like thinking you know I can see why these people think this way whatever but um but I really do believe that the people who get sucked into these like ideological culture wars are people who have not had many experiences or people who haven't been around a diverse enough uh group of people I'm pretty sure that 60 of Americans don't have passports exactly so you know you're very well traveled world view going from New York to Upstate New York to New Jersey doesn't exactly give you the world's perspective that you think you might and this is how you end up being myopic because you don't actually ever get outside of your own bubble and then you know this isn't the echo chamber that is facilitated by online media this is the like geographically you don't move that far you haven't seen many other things or eaten other Foods or been to different places or spoken to Alternative people but in traveled look at the people that you surround yourself with are they really people with like a diverse set of experiences in life uh you know obstacles that they've had to overcome where you can see a different perspective and just because somebody looks a certain way doesn't mean that they've haven't undergone whatever kind of trauma in their past what would you say talking about Community Building what would you say are the biggest pitfalls that people encounter when it comes to building a community what are the ways that you could ensure that a community would fail um if you want to grow really fast really big really fast without taking the time to do the work person by person by person um Troy Carter who used to be Lady Gaga's manager said with Lady Gaga they implemented this approach called it was the slow bake versus the microwave in terms of audience retention and audience growth Lady Gaga would play you know little clubs every single night meet the people interact with them on social media like it was super individualized and then those people became her spokespeople and it snowballed into a massive mass of following uh but you know that they're so loyal because of the early days of Lady Gaga um Taylor Swift another thing that I think people try to do that is like um they they uh they do the thing that scales because they think that'll bring them more people instead of the non-scalable thing and I think it's the non-scalable thing that actually builds more loyalty Taylor Swift you'll notice she I mean she has a global phone she doesn't need to do this stuff but she knows if she does this these people are Taylor Swift fans for life which is she randomly shows up shows up at people's weddings which is incredibly cumbersome like time consuming thing she um surprises fans by going through her social media finding random people and like sending them gifts and they're just like what on Earth or she invited again people she found on her Instagram to her house she bake them cookies and she let them listen to like uh the newest album before it was released so these are all like super non-scalable things but why is Taylor Swift doing them she already has a massive following it's because she doesn't want to just have an audience she wants to build miniature communities right and like really really tight-knit communities um and I think the final thing the thing that I think most creators who have big followings should do is try to create moments of serendipity that your followers may not get in any other way so at one point um I got inspired by Tim Urban's he has he has weight but why which is the blog but he created an event called wait but high and on the same day all over the world his readers got together London everywhere so I was like I want to do the same thing at the time the profile only had 10 000 people so I was a little bit over ambitious but still um we did one weekend in December and there were people in like New York Atlanta London Nairobi Kenya even if there were only two people the thing that brought them together was reading the profile and um and I remember the guys from Nairobi wrote to me and they said we came together as strangers and we we left as friends and the point of that is like that was a moment of serendipity there's still groups that still meet up like I think the one in La so it's just like there there's there's you can create these moments of serendipity but that's a true community and I think author Chris Brogan says the difference between audience and Community is which way the chairs are facing so if you're only one channel communication meet a mini that's an audience but if you if the chairs are in a circle and if there's constant interaction between you and your listeners and your readers and whatever that's community so much good stuff there I love the uh non-scalable things being the high impact things because they're a costly signal right you know anybody can send out an email newsletter with a video that's been taken for everybody but only one person can receive a personalized video that's been sent in their Instagram DMS from Lady Gaga yeah we've been um you might have seen I'm doing live shows at the end of the year uh Island and the UK and at that there's a there is an incentive to sell VIP tickets right and as with a you know a Peterson uh type show or a Sam Harris or a heberman that's you know maybe 1500 to 3 000 bodies uh they can't do uh meet and greet for everybody so they need to Arbitrage it and then you just take that same model and do it yourself that's typically how stuff's supposed to be done and that was the advice that we were given look if you want to maximize Revenue um you should have scales of ticket vvip they get to go backstage beforehand and you look at the difference in terms of the bottom line because live shows don't make that much money and you're like wow that would be nice like that would be that would be lovely that's just free free bottom line I don't have to do anything different it's just free bottom line but I spoke to my tour manager and both of us said look if if this ends up being something that's cool and that we start doing consistently we can do that in future but given that these are the first ever shows that we're doing how much cooler would it be if everybody just got to do a meet and greet so all it's going to be like two and a half thousand people over the space of four days but you yes fights a lot um but like I don't know that just seems cool and there's also something as well when it comes to building a community and getting buy-in you have the opportunity to and this goes back to you are not ready for the size of the audience that you want you have the opportunity to track the journey step by step over time and you know let's say that you do get to the top of the mountain whatever industry or world or Pursuit it is that you're trying to get to looking back and having a cool origin story is really really good like and honestly the [ __ ] the better like the [ __ ] the first few iterations of whatever you do I genuinely think the better it is when you look back because it creates a lower bar for the current High bar to now be compared to and uh yeah I think first set of live shows everybody gets to do meet and greet that's going to be cool it's going to feel really personal and intimate and then if we sell out Sydney Opera House in three years time you look back and go [ __ ] dude you remember when we did 500 people on a reigning Friday in the middle of Manchester and we went and met everybody in that Pub afterward but those like 500 or 2 000 people are never going to forget that um who was it I think it's like is it Will Smith I forget who said it but it was like some celebrity it was like I always stop and take a photo with the fan because to me it's just another photo but to them they're gonna remember this for the rest of their lives and like how do you want that experience to go so I think like that's the non-scalable thing like these people this will be Monumental to them when you are uh you know um selling out stadiums and whatever they're gonna be like I was there one of those 2 000 people and I had this experience like I think that's awesome one of Jordan Peterson's hacks and this is for anybody that's getting more attention than they used to and getting stopped on the street and I've I've taken this as well so this is like when people see me that the source code's going to be revealed and ruined but um Peterson Peterson taught me um that whenever he meets somebody because he's met you know like [ __ ] hundreds of thousands of people the first thing if it's if it's in the middle of the street the first thing he always asks is what's your name because you know someone's meeting Jordan Peterson and maybe they've consumed a lot of his content and they're feeling all emotional and they're really really excited but everybody can remember their name everyone knows their name so you say hi what's your name hi John really nice to meet you and then the conversation begins flowing and then this was something that I added on which hopefully is is Meaningful I'm really bad at remembering names like [ __ ] terrible remembering names but I work super super hard if I do do that as I say goodbye it's Tom it was really nice to meet you hope you have a good day man and I know I hope that that it's it is effort like it's [ __ ] hard to remember someone's name it's really embarrassingly difficult um but yeah I hope that that's something that's cool so I've taken Peterson's strategy and added a a parentheses at the start and the end of the same thing I'm the same way even when I'm responding to emails when readers write in I always end with like I always mention their name uh one time I think I read this somewhere somebody said like the best compliment somebody can receive is like the sound of their own name or something like that you you love hearing that especially from people that you admire talk to me about why it's important to optimize your content diet this is something that I've been very very big on for probably the last 18 18 months to two years so why is it important to you so okay so a few years ago uh let's say 2017 I was like binge watching The Bachelor The Bachelorette every dating show you watch Love Island UK I hope that you did but I still need to watch it I know we're not going to be you're not going to be friends with me anymore no I love that it's a different lifetime I get like really absorbed into people's stories so um so I was like watching all this stuff and I started realizing that I started seeing the world through this like prism of relationships but in a really bad way like in a way that was like oh I wonder if he's mad at me or I wonder what she thinks of me or I wonder if like you know like that kind of like insecure thing that you hear on these shows constant questioning myself and like hyper self-awareness instead of like using my mind to think about other things so then I started thinking about this idea of like how we're so cognizant of what we eat in the portions and what type of diet and and what percentage of meat what percentage of whatever so I was like what if we did that with content and it's like a Content diet which doesn't mean you can't still watch your dating shows it just it's not the bulk of your diet it's maybe a sliver um so I think like what I I conducted I called it a Content audit so I I genuinely like was very realistic of like what do I listen to what do I watch what do I read and who do I hang out with on a daily basis um once you are able to see what you're putting into your brain then you realize like am I filling it with like interesting ideas or am I just kind of like mindlessly going about my day um and once you do that you have to make it practical if you want to read more high quality content stop like reading headlines and click bait for me it was like starting the profile I was forced every week to read these long-form profiles and like kind of synthesize it it was a forcing function like create something in your life that you can't get out of that forces you to do that um and then and then I found like I became a more interesting person ironically because I started reading more interesting things and talking to more interesting people um so that's that's kind of the idea and like since then I I'm always very mindful that the people you can really tell what people what their content diet is based on how they view the world I have a friend who said if you want to know who somebody truly is you don't need to give them a personality test or take them in for psychometric evaluation just look at their YouTube suggested feed between the hours of 10 pm and 11 pm at night oh my God that's hilarious so good um so something that I was playing with for a while and I use as a life hack a few months ago on the the newsletter was um how do you feel after you consume a piece of content so you know there are a variety of different shows that you can watch on YouTube or on TV at the like limbically hijack you right you know it's people shouting at each other it's it's adversarial antagonistic it's backbiting it's snarky it's sarcastic and it it gets you compelled but it gets you compelled in the same way as being shocked with an electrode gets you compelled and if you feel the way that your body feels after you consume this stuff you're uptight and and your shoulders are high and you've almost got tinnitus in your ears because everything's just activated you're just super super like sympathetically switched on and it's not it's not good I don't want to go outside and call my friends and tell them that I miss them I don't want to go and play sports I don't have a positive some mindset I don't believe that the world is fundamentally a good place and then I watch other things and I'm like oh [ __ ] yeah like I should ring my mum I should ring my mum and I should tell that I'm thinking about her that I miss her and that for me is you know if somebody's listening and they say oh this content diet thing sounds great and I wonder how to do it but your felt sense and your remembered sense of what's going on are always going to be different right because your felt sense whenever you're watching anything by virtue of you watching it means that you're not bored by it so the felt sense is is kind of you kind of need to disregard how you feel as you watch it and then very quickly afterward I think yeah you've got the perspective to be able to see it okay so I have a very similar thing but I do it with I've always said this like whenever I meet somebody even if in the moment I'm absolutely like captivated by them and they're so Charming how do I feel once they've left like for some reason my brain can't decide how I feel about someone until after like I'm by myself I'm like whoa was that was that just like a snake oil salesman you know what I mean like you you're able to um evaluate it better after you've had some separation from it so I like this idea of like how do you feel after you've watched it because while you're watching it it might be amazing and like stimulating but like afterwards like how do you really feel like a piece of [ __ ] sometimes yeah George is in town I don't know whether you knew but George is in Austin at the moment oh nice so you guys he's going to come on yeah which would be the first one two three years I think and we've got so much [ __ ] to go through um but he is one of those guys when I leave having spent time with him we were at Soho house on Sunday in Austin Sat by the pool and ordering food and just chilling out and um I leave and I feel rejuvenated and I've got loads of new ideas and I've been hearing stories about Winston Churchill and NASA and you know God knows what like the Persian Empire and I I just leave and I'm like yeah this is nice the Sun's shining a bit brighter you know the colors look a bit more vibrant and there's other times when you consume things or do even like doing particular tasks you know like how do you spend your time like I love I really love being on Tick Tock overall or being on my phone overall or or playing video games or whatever and that's fine if you feel great afterward but the period of life after you do a thing lasts way longer than the period of time of you doing the thing and largely what you're looking for are just little pokes of uh uh who do you say yeah yeah just little little nudges each day when you do a thing and it just keeps on pushing you in one direction or another and you need to make sure that you're being pushed in the right direction so the Final Chapter which is title of the book what does it mean like what what is a hidden genius you've got this like sort of silhouette thing on the front here um I don't know if you're are you one of these is that are you any of these little Silhouettes you should have been more weight way more egotistical and narcissistic and put yourself high profile yeah um no uh so hidden genius it's just really that differentiator that makes you exceptional and I am optimistic enough to believe that each of us has hidden genius but many of us just have not taken the time or been aware enough to discover it and it could be like a piece of wisdom it could be an experience it could be a skill set something that you've acquired that you uniquely know or a point of view of the world that you can share with others and you can teach others if you think about like David Goggins maybe he's not classically intelligent on like an IQ test maybe he is but I don't know but but but his hidden genius is his mental resilience and the fact that he's sharpened his mind so well that it's like a weapon um so so it's just like it can be found in anybody the the packaging is not this like classical actually I remember I think when I was talking to the publisher about titles they were like I don't know like genius kind of has that connotation that people think of like Einstein and whatever and that's not at all what I what I think Geniuses um so in this chapter I talk about the ingredients that you've been reading up to now and I think hidden genius starts with identity and like if you've noticed throughout the book there's been themes and layers of playing with perspectives and also like playing with identity who you are if I ask you like who's the real Chris is it Chris 10 years ago is it Chris yesterday is it Chris today or is it Chris in 10 years there is that like it's so you but like who is the real you and um and I think like figuring out that tying your identity to one single thing isn't what makes you you helps you discover your hidden genius and then in the conclusion I have 10 questions that will hopefully get you closer to that answer does this stand Gilbert quotes which you use which is so good human beings are Works in progress that mistakenly think that they're finished yeah yeah because if you think about it biologically speaking you are not the same person you were 10 years ago I think your stomach lining uh is every few years your like livers ever like everything regenerates so it's like are you you're biologically different but like are you spiritually the same like how do you define that yeah it's um I can't remember who who's quoted as that says the funny thing about life is that it has to be lived forward but only makes sense in reverse and understanding where you're at at the moment believing that you're the finished article and yet also knowing that you're a work in progress is is an odd Duality to try and hold you got this I was surprised to see Francis and ganu in here I know that if I fail I can start over and over and over and over I have that skill and you can take everything from me but you cannot take that I thought that was so powerful yeah he yeah I just I took a lot from him even though I know nothing about MMA I think that his brain and the way it works is fascinating and uh when I interviewed him um basically I he's had this crazy journey to get to the states um including like going from Cameroon to Niger Niger to Nigeria Nigeria to Algeria Algeria to Morocco in Morocco to Spain and from Spain eventually he she was homeless in Paris ultimately he made it to America through MMA and I told him that my family won the Green Card Lottery and he was like oh well I used to play that too but like I would never leave my destiny in somebody else's hands I was like ah right but um way to make me feel like a piece of [ __ ] exactly no but his point was that like he was like maybe if I had won the Green Card lottery I would have made it to the US but maybe I'd be working as like a bodyguard or like a security guard or something I wouldn't have had maybe the same success that I did if I hadn't taken this insane Journey um but his thing is that like he's been very vocal about how like UFC contracts aren't fair and like things like that and I'm like okay well and he's like I don't uh my identity is not tied to being MMA champion and I'm like who are you then like what does that mean and he's like there will there have been many before me and there will be many after me this is not who makes me me what makes me me is that I have the ability to to reinvent and I have that skill set and he's like very talented people are just really afraid of starting over and that's why they grip so tightly to what they already have is because they're scared from starting to start from zero again so who knows what his next chapter is but the beauty I think in his thinking is like I am not these external accolades I am Francis and I can be whatever I want to be regardless of like what Society tries to slap on me yeah there's a line as well you've got that says embody the version of yourself you want to be very petersonian uh approach there I think but it's so it's so so lovely and um you know one of the themes I guess that we've spoken about today is this this line between confidence competence delusion positive thinking realism fantasy trying to sort of work all of this into a big a big blob and showing up in the way that you would do and like a question I've got this written on my fridge I've got this written on the front of my fridge and it's been on there for like four months now and it says what would you tomorrow want you today to do exactly and like I me tomorrow would want me to get up on time to train hard to high five with the boys after we complete a grueling 45 minute workout to not go and spend time on my phone once we finish this podcast but to go for a walk like that's what me tomorrow would want me today to do and that's embodying the version of myself that I want to be yeah it's like living like your aspirational self and um and I think like here's the thing like I think the way you bridge what you said you're like the cynicism with the positivity is not to go all in to like manifesting and like positive thinking although like you know a lot of athletes say like they do positive visualization which is like they they focus and they visualize themselves like making the play and being the thing and doing the thing but actually what a lot of people I've interviewed have told me including uh this Olympic swimmer is that what they end up doing when they're like standing there on the blocks I think that's what it's called at the Olympics about to dive in actually what's more powerful than like positive visualization is looking at the past and like playing a mental movie of every where you've been how far you fell how how much you failed and like what you had to overcome that led you to this moment right here and I think like that's so powerful because that gives you real confidence versus something you haven't achieved yet oh yeah Paulina I really appreciate you you've got new book you've got newsletter you've got other things where should people go if they want to check out your stuff online thank you Chris for my newsletter it's readtheprofile.com and for the book it's hiddengeniusfuck.com if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe