7 Semi-Controversial Rules For Success - Shaan Puri

we already did this once it went well it went amazingly well and I was very sad that we couldn't put it out because we had technical difficulties this time we're both in our home setup no technical difficulties and we're going to run it back from what we got through last time plus more well last time I was also very sick that night uh after we were I recorded a podcast I did the podcast with you so two podcasts in a row and I went home and basically just was in bed with a fever for the rest of the night so uh if you thought that was good great uh because I thought it was terrible and I was feeling terrible at the time I got it I gotta do better than that okay maybe that's just what all guests feel like once they've finished up recording with me that's what I like the post title like depression that occurs after you've podcasted with me I'm not too sure I'll have to ask some previous guests all right so I want to go through some of your most controversial or semi-controversial opinions which you've kind of become famous for I think first one one of my favorites hard work is massively overrated why well I'll take a step back the reason I like these controversial opinions is uh a you always look cool if you have some controversial opinions uh but B I I'm I've learned how much of what we believe is just simply stories that we're told um this goes from everything religion to uh school to being taught what you should be doing for your career and all this stuff and so I've actively tried to just deprogram myself and ask and question the Assumption so I actually started with looking at what are the things that almost nobody disagrees with and are those really true and one of those that I found that I in practice disagree with was growing up I was told hard work is what's most important hard work is the key to success hard work is and you just hear hard work preach and it's almost like you'd have to be insane to be um anti-hard work right like some people do it just for the just for the effect but I don't I don't really being like that I just mean it's overrated it's not that it's a bad thing but that it is overrated because what I found in my life is that what you do is far more important than how how hard you work on that thing so for example you know I thought about the hard work thing and I used to work in restaurants and nobody works harder than people in restaurants restaurants are open you know from breakfast till till late night every single day seven days a week it is uh you know a thankless job you were working in a hot kitchen um and you are you know Cooks work hard Cook's in the back line of a kitchen work hard janitors work hard you know the cleaning lady works hard um but you know you sort of think about you're like why isn't the janitor driving a Bentley right like if hard work was the key to success then why aren't the people who I think works work the hardest in most these situations doing better um and it's because you know hard work will let you win the game that you're playing but it doesn't help you if you chose the wrong game and so the most critical decision is actually project selection what you decide to work on uh what you decide to do with your talent and your time and your your work ethic is far more important and I don't really hear that in fact I actually growing up heard the opposite um you know you get to college and they're like What's your major uh I don't know I'm 17 18 like how am I supposed to you know I just came from high school right like I don't I don't know what the thing is yet um is there a list I can look at of like the jobs and what they're like can I do do I get to go see one um you know instead it's just like just pick if you don't pick if you don't declare if you don't declare your major this is in the US at least I don't know how it's for you if you don't declare your major you're behind like already it's like you if you've chosen to wait and see or think or go test you've fallen behind right so it just became this thing where picking what you do was like this quick one second thing you were supposed to just get right right away with no preparation and then spend the rest of your life working hard and I just found that the opposite actually turned out to be true for me which was picking the right project made the made a huge difference and working hard enough was good enough I consider myself to be frankly somewhat lazy but very happy and successful so you know I you know I don't know if I'm the outlier or what but like at least disproved it is not um it is not the main thing in terms of success I believe it's overrated yeah to clarify here I don't think that you're saying hard work doesn't matter hard work isn't a competitive Advantage you're saying that for the people who believe that hard work is absolutely everything it is the end-all be-all that there are other higher points of Leverage that you can do that open up layers uh levels and and layers to the hard work so that it can be maximized yeah exactly hard work is Maybe the fourth or fifth most important factor or ingredient um so you might say uh what what's more important so number one to me is what you work on number two would be who you're around who who you work with because those people will influence you in a far greater Direction and provide more opportunities in the future so what you work on who you work uh who you work with far more important than how hard you work I sort of think it's something like fourth or fifth most important on the list and that that really there's just a threshold you need to reach so um if you simply don't take action you don't do the work it doesn't matter how good of an idea you had or how good of Partners yet obviously not gonna work but um it is a threshold and that going far beyond that threshold going from 40 hours a week to 70 hours a week to 90 hours a week like some people will will popularize um has much less of an effect than I think people think it just sounds good sounds cool and it sounds like you earned it yeah why why is it if if you're true if what you're saying is correct and hard work is as overrated as you say it is why is it such a pervasive myth it's virtue signaling most people um you know the reality is if you looked at um like a contribution a chart that showed the contributions to success well I was born with like all my healthy functions right yeah 10 fingers ten toes everything works great um I was born in the United States so already that was like far more influential in my future success and Endeavors than uh you know somebody who had a you know the genetic Lottery played out differently for them they're born in a different place with a different set of fiscal resources um and you just keep going down the list of like how uh what you what what actually contributes to success a lot of those things are out of your control I can't take credit for where I was born I can't take credit for the genetics that I was given or the gifts the talents that I had uh as a baseline um so what people try to do is they try to shove those away pretend those don't matter because you didn't earn them and people will say you're privileged if you if you bring them up and so instead they go to the thing that sounds like they made a choice to do it and that is the sole reason why they had the success that they had I chose to work hard I put in the time I earned it and it's sort of like you know the same thing happens in uh in any any Endeavor um when I win it's because I'm great when I lose it's bad luck so why is that why do we think that when we win it's because of what we did and when we lose it's because what everybody else did right what the what the economy did what the weather did what the uh you know the government did like you know people are very quick on the downside to offload uh accountability and on the upside to load in accountability so just notice these things notice human Nature's Tendencies and realize it does seem like that would be the convenient thing to do uh to assign credit to your actions and to make it sound like you if you if you have a lot if you earned a lot if you got a lot of success the reason why is because you put in a lot and in reality we know that sometimes it's asymmetric sometimes you just make a few critical decisions simple decisions I might have taken you a very short amount of time to do but totally differentiated between success and failure yeah I think there's a few things going on um one being if you achieve success and it wasn't painful people who are working hard and suffering and haven't achieved success to you to them you just look like a wanky sort of Bourgeois Aristocrat of some kind like a a Randomness Aristocrat that was blessed by this this sort of chance um Sam Harris has got this idea that I didn't get chance to bring up with him on our episode The Myth of the self-made man and he takes this one step further because he folds in determinism and a lack of Free Will so he's basically like none of the things none of the achievements that you have are yours to Bear because you didn't choose the circumstances you didn't choose the laws of thermodynamics he didn't choose your genetics he didn't choose the randomness he didn't choose anything and he uh sort of aims this at the right and says this does an awful lot of heavy lifting for people right of Center and uses it to kind of lambast this this myth of the self made man the problem that I have with that is it's a very disempowering story to tell yourself I I don't see it as an Adaptive or useful story like I want to feel pride in my successes because otherwise I know that I'm not going I'm going to leave more on the table because what's the [ __ ] point like I get satisfaction from doing things well so it's almost like uh it might be a literal truth but a figurative falsehood in that it's not adaptive to believe even if it's true and I think that I don't know maybe there are times when self-deception can be justified and that might be one of them 100 agreed um on both of the points you made so I think the first is that uh you know if you were honest about what actually works and what doesn't it might annoy people um because if they have it hard if things are going poorly or it's hard uh they wanna nobody likes to hear uh how easy it was for somebody else or how simple it could have been if they had made different decisions uh so it's sort of like Keeps The Barbarians at the gates type of thing to be like no no the reason the only difference was I put in more time in this direction and you put your time in this other direction you know and it's the most Equitable way to describe this uh that pisses off the least number of people however for me pissing off people is not really a priority or a concern I'm not trying to do it nor am I trying to avoid it I'm just simply trying to be and let the chips fall where they may if you some people will love it some people will hate it and that's okay um I don't really care too much either way um the second point you made which is uh there is no you know the complete myth of the self-made band is it is disempowering and so um I have this whole category of things that I always say are maybe true but not that useful so for example if it's true but not useful there's plenty of things like we'll be in a meeting at work and somebody will say something I say that's that's true I don't argue with what you're saying but it's simply unimportant it's not useful to what we're trying to decide or what we're trying to do here similarly if it is true that we sort of have no Free Will and that it's all determined anyways and that doesn't really matter what would you do well that's not that useful because it doesn't actually serve me that's not a story that serves me and once you realize that it's all just stories anyways pick the ones that serve you pick the ones that make you feel the way you want to feel that get you to the outcomes you want to have and and not the one that make you feel like crap a related Point another opinion of yours what are the most underrated skills in the world right now in your opinion so I have two the first one people don't even think is a skill which is how underrated it actually is is um enthusiasm sort of a lame maybe a little bit of let down from the way I I framed that but uh I don't think it should be a letdown I think it should be exciting that enthusiasm is underrated I'll give you a little story so I had a realization one day so I was 24 years old and I took a job it's like I moved to Silicon Valley to take this job I joined the company and I think at the time I was probably the youngest employee in the company about 20 people there I was the youngest of 20. and um and I looked around and there was engineers and there's designers people with all kinds of talents that I did not have couldn't code couldn't design uh you know can't dance can't do a lot of things right so it's a not like don't feel like I have a bunch of hard skills and I was like what am I good at all right you sort of have that sort of like imposter syndrome self-doubt moment where you're like what why do they have me here why do they put me in charge of this project is it because I literally give them like you know and I and I realized that like one of the things that I had that turns out to be quite important for most people who go on to do interesting things is I had a lot of enthusiasm meaning I was very excited about what we were doing I would paint a picture that was compelling to me and then I would Sprint at it and the ability to paint a picture that excites you the ability to bring excitement to a situation sounds cheap sounds fun sounds totally frivolous until you're around a group of people that don't have it and then when the first person comes in that has a bunch of enthusiasm that has hope about the future that brings energy to the table it's contagious it changes the way everybody feels and if you're going to do something that's important generally it's hard right I come from the world of entrepreneurships Entrepreneurship people sort of realize like yeah it usually starts off like you're starting from scratch you have nothing trying to make it happen there's a lot of force of will that goes into that and discipline is one force of will I'm gonna show up at the right time and do the right things the other is enthusiasm which is I'm gonna believe before it's here and I'm gonna believe that it's gonna happen I'm going to take that I'm going to borrow on that future excitement today I'm going to take out a loan against the future and I'll borrow my happiness and excitement about the future and I'm going to deploy it today to invest that that enthusiasm today that's how I think about enthusiasms borrowing from the future and um I think it's a skill I think it is massively underrated I think having enthusiasm when things are going good is quite easy having enthusiasm when things are neutral to bad is where you get the value of it and um most things are hard and most things have pretty deep dips um so having enthusiasm is I think completely underrated because people don't even see it as a skill they don't see it as something you could develop and they see uh and they don't place the importance on they don't realize how important that source of fuel is how contagious that is how it brings everybody's level up when you have it so I think that's underrated I'll tell you the second one is storytelling I want to go I want to jump I want to jump in on enthusiasm two things by the way three or disagree uh I have noticed since I've been in America I've realized the value of people around me being excitable the British are genealogically like we are genetically predisposed to be kind of dour uh sort of personality is very similar to the weather it's sort of gray and everything's a bit [ __ ] um but we're very great with the satire and the sarcasm and the cutting the cutting remarks and stuff but my disposition doesn't need any more of that and what I realized one of the reasons that I flourished since I've been in America is I've been around people who believe that things are going to be better than they are right now they continually presume progress is baked in it it's factored in all the time that things are going to get better because it's going to grow oh dude it's going to be fine this catastrophe you're going to get over it and everything that may be America overall I'm not sure that may just be my particular cohort of particular people in this particular City that I'm living in but what it's done is it's raised my ambient mood an awful lot um we do not know the things that are going to happen in the future right we are not Clairvoyant we don't even really truly know ourselves we're self-deceptive other people deceive us we don't have a crystal ball that shows us what is going on either outside the world or inside of our own minds and our own bodies given the fact that we have to have some form of delusion Why not pick a delusion that's going to be beneficial to you right like you have the choice to do this why ER on the side of and the only real reason I've been railing against cynicism for quite a while now and it was Michael malice's book the white pill that really got me onto it cynicism is the opposite of enthusiasm in some regards and what I realized is the people who were being cynical were doing it because it was like sour grapes at an existential level I called it the cynicism safety blanket that if you presume that things are going to be terrible you can never be disappointed by the world exactly and it just seems like it's like a coward's way to live and I understand I understand people have had bad things have happened to them they've gone through traumas they've had discrimination they've had all of this stuff like don't I get it right I understand and that would set you up to believe this may very well happen in the future but like what does it do for you what con does it grow show me the corn that you're growing from this the corn you're growing is [ __ ] shitty so yeah I think less cynicism more enthusiasm the skill two questions you can respond but two questions as well how do you develop it as a skill and how do you feel it effectively let me um let me give you a couple different angles of this okay so I come from Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley the cynics get to be right and the Optimus optimists get to be rich um so the cynics get to be right that you know eight out of the ten things are gonna fail of course yeah you were right you get to be right eight out of ten times and the two out of ten that actually work you sat on the sideline thinking it was just another thing that's not going to work so Silicon Valley Silicon Valley retrains your brain so one way to train your brain to default optimism rather than default pessimism is to play in the game where optimism gets rewarded and so come to Silicon Valley you get to play again uh the up against broader here's another here's another angle where it comes from this great Conor McGregor quote I love it used to be my desktop background I told the story before I came to silica Valley and uh every engineer has like multiple monitors it was like a status symbol like they don't have Louis Vuitton or the status levels like how many monitors you have how elaborate is your desk setup so I'm sitting here with just my laptop and I'm like [ __ ] I got the I'm like the you know I'm I'm wearing the the thrift store version of of this luxury style idiots kid at the party exactly I didn't even know what I would do with another screen but hey I need another screen here it guy come on let's go so I get another screen and I don't know what the hell to do with it and so I just put up one quote because I was like I don't have any functional you like there's no functional utility here aside from again honing this skill of enthusiasm I'm controlling my mood and the quote that I had on there was a Conor McGregor quote where he said they were like Connor you always have this personality and even when you lose you seem to be having this like I feel like we never get to see you you know down in the dumps and this is usually a sport of highs and lows and he goes at the end of the day the quote is this at the end of the day you got to feel some type of way so why not feel unbeatable why not feel Untouchable why not feel like the best to ever do it and I just love that quote which is I'm in any moment I am going to feel something I'm going to be feeling a certain type of way and I think what a lot of smart people do is they try to make that neutral because it's just like almost logically mathematically rationally makes sense it's like well I'll make my default emotional home to be neutral feeling nothing and as good things happen I'll feel better and as bad things happen I'll feel worse and this is like a unspoken thing that I see a lot of smart people do a lot of intellectuals do this it is like a neatness and starting at zero and then I'll go up if you're good and bad if it goes down whereas people with the self-delusion and which are usually if you you get to sit down with like kind of people remarkable people every week you'll notice that their emotional home is not zero their emotional home is closer to ten they default feel Untouchable Unstoppable unshakable they just enjoy that feeling and they just start there and yes sometimes the world will beat them down a little bit and they'll dip but they'll everybody always returns to your emotional home and so you have to like program it set that like a temperature like a thermostat in your room what is my default temperature going to be and I I just took time to do that um so that's the first thing the second thing is here's enthusiasm in a non-business context um anybody who's ever dated somebody knows that like there is the quote-unquote honeymoon period like the start of every relationship that you get into um is typically where it's like you know the highs the you know both people like I always say a first date it's like two people sitting down and deciding to lie to each other it's like you present your best self you're going to um you're going to basically play everything up you're gonna your gentleman how genuinely are you you're gonna play it up here let me get that door for you let me let me dress up let me do XYZ you know nobody farts on a first date and so what happens is later in a relationship uh people will Retreat back to their emotional home their their personality home um and all of a sudden they'll start to behave differently somebody you know at the beginning let me take out that trash at the you know at the end why I always have to take out the trash why don't you do whatever you know for once once in a while um so we we kind of slip and we slip in these ways and the worst way we slip is that the enthusiasm dips uh we get comfortable and the enthusiasm dips and the kind of the classic Trope here is like when um if you see somebody come home from work you see like a dad come home from work this person you know Dad might have been left left the house at six in the morning seven in the morning worked hard all day drive back home sit in traffic for 40 minutes get back to the house open up the door they're hungry they're thirsty they're tired they put down the briefcase take off the suit jacket finally and like they sort of slump through the door and what all they want to do is get to the couch get the cold beer turn on the TV and turn off their brain and this is how like I think a lot of the world operates and I heard this once and I never let it go which was that if you if you if you do what you did at the beginning there would never be an end and um and there's Works in relationships if you act the way you act at the beginning there would never be an end in the relationship because both people would be on their absolute best behavior giving to each other uh all the time and the version of this that I try to like make as a practice or a habit is to have honey I'm home energy so honey I'm home energy is like have you ever seen I Love Lucy back in the day the guy opens the door he's bursting with energy like nobody comes home from work like that but this guy did it in the show because it's a show he would come home honey I'm home and you can just hear from the voice if somebody's in the house oh get ready it's on like get ready for a great ball of energy coming your way that is going to be loving that is going to be affectionate it's going to be playful and flirtation is a Charming all the things we kind of want to be um but we we slip and we don't do it and so one simple practice to develop the skill of enthusiasm is to have this honey I'm home energy which is before you walk through a door whether it's to a meeting whether it's to your house your apartment whatever it is just decide to walk in with that honey I'm home energy and you only need to do it for like 45 seconds but if you just do that for 45 seconds you'll like the way it feels they will respond to you differently and it'll just carry um versus if you come in slumped over you're going to have that type of energy and that type of interaction those types of experiences which nobody actually wants to have we'll get back to talking to Sean in one minute but first I need to tell you about HubSpot look I spent a decade and a half networking with people and following up with them and ensuring that the messages that you send are well crafted is such a crucial part of that and hubspot's free follow-up email template guide is absolute gold for this it's got over 30 email templates covering everything from a simple thank you to asking someone out for a coffee without seeming too weird one of the best ones that's in there is they're sharing resources template if you ever come across a valuable nugget of information from say listening to this podcast perhaps or anywhere else on the internet you now have a template to share it with other people which in my opinion is a really underutilized networking skill because it gives them a gift for free and it keeps you in their mind I highly recommend that you download the 100 free follow-up email template guide by going to the link in the description below or click hubspot.com lnx that's click hubspot.com lnx or the link in the description below yeah the enthusiasm or excitability portion is it's almost kind of like a personality trait that I didn't know about it's like finding out that there's a new type of weather you just step out one day and you're like what the [ __ ] is this oh I've never seen this before it's like that right and um yeah I I very very much I'm completely Pro I've been calling it toxic positivity I'm very Pro toxic positivity like just seeing seeing the good in situations being around people that do the same there's definitely an undercurrent in the UK of um excitability almost being naive it being uh kind of immature it's being lame um and then you know even as you move up through the the IQ distribution smart people like the idea of being cynical because it seems heterodox and it's it it seems like you've considered all of the options only somebody that's a you know a smooth brained idiot would believe that things are going to go well yeah obviously you know that's what that's what that's what the Normie midwards think no no I I've considered the options um but it fails to recognize that all ultimately your experience of your life is largely determined by the story that you tell yourself about it in fact you could maybe say that it almost it's almost exclusively determined by that there's a thing called the so people talk about Vicious Cycles and we've seen Vicious Cycles how people slip into depression how companies fail how vicious cycle a vicious cycle for example would be if you break it down into its core elements there's just three little it's a triangle three dots triangle dot one is belief if I believe that something is not going to work this relationship is not going to work this company's not gonna work this meal is gonna suck whatever whatever it is if I believe that it's not gonna work the second dot is actions how much action am I going to take towards making it happen right like I'm going to take minimal action because I don't believe that it's going to work if you don't believe it's going to work you just sort of tiptoe in you're not actually gonna like Go full full force on it so minimal belief leads to minimal action which leads to a minimal result which only reinforces your shitty original belief and that's the Vicious Cycle so then the next time you just reinforce that oh you know um I don't really believe I'm gonna stick to this diet so therefore I'm not actually gonna like throw away the junk food I'll just put it away in the closet a little bit and therefore I'm gonna actually end up snacking on the stuff because I know where it is it's in the closet it's just I just have to open the door and then I get a shitty result and I say I knew it I'd never follow through with these things right like these are the stories you tell yourself silently in your head the voice in your head and the opposite is true there's also the winner cycle or The Virtuous cycle the virtual cycle is the exact opposite massive belief oh my God this is going to work what if you knew that like if you knew that if you get to this like you're what you're going to the corner store and if you knew at that corner store there is the winning lottery ticket it is there the next person who prints it wins would you would you walk or would you run right like you're going to run so your belief if you really believe that you would take Massive Action you would Sprint and when you sprint you would actually get there first right and like you would actually have a different result than you know Lottery is not exactly right because you're not gonna the belief is ill-founded in that case but you would take Massive Action and generally Massive Action over a consistent period of time leads to results which reinforces your belief that I'm the type of person that whenever I set my mind to something I do it and when I do it I get results right like that that just becomes how a winner thinks and so enthusiasm is another word as a sort of a it you know roommates with belief and if you say belief beliefs are these kind of like heavy long-term you only have a few beliefs enthusiasm is a general state that you operate in such that it takes your default level of belief in something up which takes your action up which takes your results up over time and that is sort of like the this and to me the strategy that under that explains why this works not only does it feel good to have positive enthusiasm or positivity but like there's an actual Advantage I think there was a TED Talk Back in the Day called The Happiness Advantage and this guy was talking as a Harvard professor and he explained that like happiness is not just doesn't just feel good it literally makes you perform better they did many tests to see how you actually perform on the same same test if you came in in a certain State versus a different a different state the Happy Happy State versus not yeah George Mack has this really great idea that I'm going to write an article a code written article with him about of um uh public metrics and hidden metrics and he talks about stuff like peace of mind being a hidden metric but money being a public metric and time is very interesting times somewhere between the two we kind of don't know time but we kind of do as well uh so for instance people will happily sacrifice that peace of mind in order to achieve money because there's no dashboard that tracks your peace of mind and it's almost like enthusiasm right enthusiasm is such a hidden metric uh as opposed to it being something that you fail to see the cost of it's something that you fail to see the Returns on uh because the the inner texture of your mind is not something that you're open to so that's people will learn another language they'll tick a box oh I'm gonna learn Spanish um versus work if you said I'm gonna work on upping my general level of enthusiasm you'd be looked at like an insane person what's going to actually serve you better in life we need to do a lingo we want to do a lingo for enthusiasm yeah I actually I prefer the opposite I am happy to be the one who is massively exploiting this Arbitrage captain or capturing all of the games exactly that's a talented talentless guy like me thrive in a world like this right okay second skill what's the other one storytelling um so stories are then storytelling is is massively uh underrated because stories are the natural um like transfer mechanism between individuals so like if you want something to stick in somebody else's head you really have two choices music or story um and you know you look at like through all of time what are the things that have lasted thousands of years um religions how are religions coded do you remember all of the all of the rules of religion no but people remember the stories um same thing with you know anything that lasts a long time or sticks in people's heads uh you know I couldn't tell you what I learned in seventh grade but I could tell you the plot of Lion King uh you know a play-by-play plot of Lion King why because it's encoded as a story so stories are like an encoding mechanism for for information or for knowledge music is another one people will naturally you know uh remember catchy music uh most people don't have the ability to make music but almost everybody could tell a good story so uh if I could do the music thing I would uh but instead I'll do the story thing and I think this is underrated because um and I think you know Steve Jobs had some quote like this he's like um uh something like the Storyteller is the most powerful person on Earth because they get everybody else to take action so uh they're the ones who move one person to the next and this is how politicians get people this is how uh CEOs run companies and stories and so um but you're very rarely taught how to tell a story like if I went and asked somebody like just explain to me like how if I wanted to get better at storytelling what would I do like what what what are the skills like give me like the two or three big Concepts and so they're very uh uh nobody really knows how to articulate it you're not taught this in school and um because of that again there's a massive Arbitrage you have a thing that is quite it is very valuable that most people don't know how to do very well so if you even try a little bit you'll become the top 10 one percent of storytellers very quickly and from there you know you get the sort of results that a great communicator would get what are the principles of Storytelling as far as you're concerned so if you listen to like um Aaron sorkins the guy you know the the writer and movie guy who did you know I think he did like whatever West Wing and Newsroom and a bunch of other stuff like The Social Network movie he's like if you ask him like I wanted to take his master class I had set out a day I was like I'm gonna learn everything there is to know from this guy about storytelling because this guy's a master Storyteller I cleared my calendar and like in the first 30 minutes he just repeats the same one principle over and over again I'm like oh that seems to be it uh which is stories are about intention and obstacle he says I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle so basically if you watch any movie you watch any TV show within the first second you will you you should know right like at any given time you should be able to pause and you'll know this usually within the first five minutes of every story There's a Hero and the hero wants something they have an intention and they have an obstacle what's in the way of it um last night I was watching a show called hijack you've seen this it's on that yeah I finished it did you finish it I finished it last night oh yeah everyone should go and watch it right away you see Idris elbow well I'll I won't spoil it but Idris Elba wants one thing right at the very beginning is he wants to be with his family and he's got some obstacles wife doesn't want to be with all right so like you get that if you go watch Die Hard Die Hard oh it's this movie about defusing a bomb and doing it let's create this terrorist plot what does he want at very beginning he gets a call he wants to be home with his family but then there's this terrorist plot and really at the at the end of Die Hard all he's trying to do is just get to his family like the whole movie is hero wants something and there's something in its in his way in this case a terrorist plot um and so and then throughout any story that escalates so like let's take uh this show hijacked right the name kind of gives it away a plane gets hijacked Okay cool so now this person wants something different he doesn't want to you know bring his family back together he immediately just wants not die from this terrorist right or not die from this hijacking land safely now that's the intention what are the obstacles well there might be people working against that plan and so every story must have at its underpinning and intention and obstacle okay that's the first key principle of Storytelling and um it doesn't matter if it's a romantic comedy oh what does she want well she's a high-powered lawyer but all her friends are getting married and she's not dating anybody what does she she has an intention she wants to remember he wants to have a loving relationship the obstacle she's so successful in all the guys she meets are [ __ ] okay cool she's busy and happy tassels okay now what do you do to to make a story more compelling the next ingredient you need to add is steaks so you sprinkle some steaks on there what are steaks steaks are elevating the what's at stake if they don't get it so intention obstacle if the intention is I'm hungry and the obstacle is you know lunch is over there in the other room it's not that exciting of a story if the stakes are this person hasn't eaten in 30 days and they're you know if they don't eat they're gonna die right like now all of a sudden you have something more interesting so steaks are how you elevated now Stakes don't always have to be life or death the best story some of them some of the best things like I don't know if you've seen this show called The Bear that's out recently it's on uh it's on Hulu and it's cool it's just kind of like critically acclaimed like cool people think it's cool type of show and in that there's not life or death Stakes there is no terrorist plot there is no like uh life on the line but they know that for everybody in a in whatever your world is there's something that's the highest Stakes thing the thing you want the most and all you have to do is convince the audience that this character really cares about this that the character really feels like it's a like a life or death it's a life-changing swing if it happens or it doesn't happen so all you have to do is make it believable that that that's the case so when I tell stories um I do I actually take both pride in a story where on the surface the stakes are small like I told the story once at a corporate retreat it was like an executive Retreat and they went around the circle and everybody's supposed to say what's going on and everybody was trying to one-up each other with a more import a bigger problem a more urgent fire that they had to put out and I went the other way I said so I just moved out of my house uh into my own apartment this was back in the day I've just moved out of my house my own apartment living on my own for the first time and my mom is coming over now my mom's coming over and I had told her that like I'm living on my own I'm a man now I'm a big boy now I can do it but the reality was I was still you know like clothes are all over the floor house is a mess I don't have groceries nothing but I told her I'm cooking dinner for tonight and I'll be damned if I didn't look like an adult for at least two hours while my mom is there and so I've established the intention I've established the obstacle right I'm trying to look like an adult obstacle I'm not actually an adult Stakes my mom's opinion of me matters to me I can convince you that it matters I convince you that like drop everything I will not fail at this I will it will be so bad for me if this happens and I talk about in the story I'm like you know I and this is true really I made brussels sprouts because that was the most adult thing I could think of um YouTube I'm trying to figure out how to make brussels sprouts taste good I've never even eaten brussels sprouts and like I tell the story people loved it they loved it because I took a low stakes thing and I told a story well um I love that that's really really great and yeah I say this a lot but aspiring fledgling podcasters that ask me about sort of what I wish I'd known when I started the show and there's all the technical stuff and all of the Strategic stuff that's good for growth hacking but when it comes to the show when I first started doing it I thought that the job of a podcaster was to basically be blinkist for your guest that you were supposed to ruthlessly index whatever's in their head and that you any moment that was Meandering away from it any sentence that wasn't directly driving some sort of uh return that people could action in their life I basically wanted to be Andrew huberman's website dictated right to people but but for everybody on the planet and over time it increasingly I've realized that the best podcasters are just five Architects they architect the vibe and all that they're doing is they're just allowing you to marinade in that Vibe you know today's Vibe is here are some contrarian thoughts that you may take offense to but you're probably going to find interesting and we're going to Whimsy our way through a bunch of Side Stories before I decide that it's time to move on to the next one that's the story right that's that's the vibe for today so people know what they're going to expect and I love these listical style articles in particular because it keeps everything quite Snappy and it keeps it moving and it stops everything getting to but it's not about being like right Chan I need to know the five-step process on storytelling and then I need to understand exactly how to do the whatever it's good because it focuses you to make sure that you get something out of a conversation but allowing someone to meander and let's not forget I've sat down opposite Rogan uh a lot of my friends have multiple multiple times that man is a like he's like a cook for Meandering like he is in love with Meandering and it works amazingly on his show because it's it just feels so naturalistic because that's how you talk with your boys oh that's how you talk with your girls right when you sat at the dinner table or out having a beer or you've just finished playing pickleball or whatever someone sees a a particular type of bird guess what the next 15 minutes are about birds like and then the next five minutes after that are about how birds are actually a psyop from the government and I saw this Conspiracy Theory online and oh what about Australia remember you've seen that thing that Australia doesn't exist and that's a sign up yeah actually my aunt went to Australia I've got a friend who's doing rattlesnake conversion therapy because rattlesnakes are turning gay but due to East regions in the water how do you think that Alex Jones trial is going in isn't he the most suit person and you're like it just Frank pictures and branches off it's like Freestyle rapping but really slowly and I think that that protracted just allowance of I'm gonna follow the Curiosity it it keeps people who have got varied interests interested because it doesn't it doesn't pigeonhole you too much it's a natural representation of how people have normal conversations and even if you sit down to try and have a normal conversation with someone and then you began to constrain it everyone would feel the constraint like I've Got a Friend really famous comedian who sat down for dinner with Jordan Peterson this is a long time ago now it's the first time he met him and now he's become friends the first time he met him he had notes he tried to have a conversation with Jordan and apparently halfway through it was like I need to like stop [ __ ] about with these notes like I'm not I'm not here to interview I'm not the New York Times right The Washington Post he'd just have a conversation with the guy and guess what like if he had a bad flight that morning you're talking about flights for 20 minutes and that's fine and yeah I I Vibe architecting storytelling Whimsy really leaning into it like you know unnecessary detail like cold blustery November night all this [ __ ] like yeah get in there I love that I love that yeah I think it's uh podcasting is a medium that allows for that that's the beauty of it um not other mediums you can't do that you can't Meander in a tick tock in the same way but you could do other things in a tick tock which are very interesting um like you can say nothing in a tick tock and it works as long as you had the vibe right there too have you seen this girl who did this uh what the [ __ ] do DJs actually do video that went viral you ever see this no what is it oh my God we need Jamie here to pull this up for you okay so this is Tick Tock because this girl I think she's a model she's she's just looking at her phone like she's like very close to her phone it's not even like a staged whatever it's like she's just look at her phone and she's she's like crying there's like a tear going down her cheek which is inexplicable because all she's saying is she's like almost like uh broken down she's like what the [ __ ] do DJs actually do like what are they what buttons are they pushing what do the buttons do is it even connected to anything and she just she did that and it was so funny it was not trying to be funny but it was so funny she was saying nothing but she was it was the whole vibe was there because immediately she was like somebody who was so shook by this like this unknown and this like realization that I don't even know I don't even understand this thing and I think it might even not even be real are we sure that this is real and it went viral now and then a bunch of DJs started doing it turned her saying that into a sample and turned it into a song so they're turning it into a a song and um and then she came back as she came back on also like the very next post where she was like so many DJs are answering me about what DJ's actually doing now just got me thinking what if what does footballers actually do I mean like are you guys just running around like she's like almost flirting like yeah yeah yeah maybe you guys should slide into my DMs now and tell me what you do because that other one worked so well yeah it's but she gets Tick Tock in a way that nobody does I think like she's gonna be a superstar I watch a bunch of her content and it's because she is a Vibe architect there she knows how to be at her house doing nothing while still entertaining you and making you feel like you know her like she did this like kind of like Girl Next Door hot thing right like she's hot enough that Tick Tock is interesting but she's makes it feel like she's not trying she's related feel relatable yeah and she's talking about nothing but she's entertaining when she the way she says it so it's this like amazing like mashup now Rogan does the equivalent of that for podcasting or he's like he gets a good guess but not like celebrities really like it worked when it was like his friends who are good hangs he's like then we're gonna talk about stuff but we'll kind of go wherever and we could talk about nothing but you still are entertained and you still kind of learn something because we talked about a nothing subject that you knew zero about um and so you know he gets you that way so I find this stuff very very entertaining are very interesting how it all plays out it's not how you would have thought um and I'm sure many people told him like dude three hours way too long for a podcast um cut it down trim it out edit it make it 40 minutes that's the length of a commute yup and he was like I'm just gonna do what I want how about that and I like it I remember when I first started doing podcasting and I looked uh you know run everything by the data okay so um what is the optimal length for a podcast well if you want to maximize completion and balance that with value you're looking at it's between sort of 30 and 40 minutes I think because that's the length of a commute you want people to be able to commit to it during a commute it doesn't account for those Psychopaths out there like me and probably you that listen to stuff at like 1.5 or 2 or 2.5 times speeds it's like that's like double commute or whatever but um yeah and ultimately it comes down to are you having fun because if enthusiasm with storytelling enthusiasm plus storytelling or enthusiasm about your story is a vicious combo me and my house might always talk about this these uh Riley cro not rallycross what's the is it Motocross or rallycross rally driving like off-road rally driving thing like Holly McRae what he used to do um there are these guys that wear anorax and it's the Scottish Highlands and it is the middle of October and it's pitch black and freezing cold and they've been camping there and they stand there by the side of this dirt track to see 0.25 seconds of a cargo past that's it and then they turn to all of their boys and they're like and they can't believe it and watching anybody get fired up that much about anything fires you up as well this is why enthusiasm is contagious and this is why toxic positivity and going against cynicism is good because it has a trickle-down effect right like a contamination Zone from a nuclear spill you've got this Fallout that just continues to go and it can happen on the internet and it's this girl this girl was genuinely so intrigued and found it so funny to to observe this thing like what do DJs do and I've employed them for 15 years and it's still a question that I can't give her a definitive answer to she's under something what the [ __ ] do they do and so yeah I think very very good okay next one if you're in your head you're dead what's that mean I guess there's kind of a theme with these which is um smart people do really dumb things and I think um an example of that is people who are in their head a lot so if you're in your head you're dead I heard that once and it just resonated with me partly because it Rhymes I'm a simpleton but also partly because there was something that was very true about it and I didn't even fully understand it yet but I was like yes what though yes and what that was my reaction to it which is a very good like signal for something you want to know more about which is an immediate visceral yes without the intellectual understanding yet and what I learned from this was a very simple thing I want to be happy like many people do but I did something that most people don't do which is trying to figure out how the hell do you actually be happy and one of the things about actually being happy is that you need to get out of your head so most people who are again the type people who listen to podcasts I'll call out with a lot of people who listen to podcasts they are in their head they try to think their way through life they think their way into they think their way through problems and that serves them but then they think they can think their way through feeling like they want happiness so they try to think their way there whoa no no hold on you can't you know like that's like saying I'm gonna talk my way through cooking no no there's two different things like I can maybe think my way like in logic my way through logical problems but I can't think my way through emotion that doesn't that's not how emotion Works trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction George Mac dude George two bangers in this episode I love it he's great I just added by the way I just added George to my work slack even though me and George don't work together because I was like I just need more George in my life so we just have a channel in fact we're like I'll just dump random [ __ ] like this and he'll he'll do the same it's amazing highly highly recommend um so the the the realization here was I always had a mindset I thought the formula worked like this I thought if you um think a certain thing you will feel a certain way which will lead you to do a certain thing and that is true if I think that this person is um this person just cut me off while I was driving I will feel pissed I'll feel angry and I will then do something in retaliation I'll road rage I'll drive I'll cut them off I'll flick them off whatever it is right think leads to feel leads to do I thought it's a one-way Street and I realized most like like math equations math equations are like reversible like if a plus b equals a then C equals a plus b so the other way also works and it actually works better in this case so if you do a thing you will feel differently which will cause you to think differently and so anybody who exercises knows this intuitively whether they've wrapped words around this or not which is uh if you if you focus on if you think so if you think you're feeling tired or shitty and therefore you um you know if you think I don't have enough time or I'm feeling I didn't sleep enough last night whatever you'll feel tired and shitty therefore you won't do exercise but if you just happen to overcome that if you if you quickly just short circuit that and say nope not listening to that thought and you instead just go do the thing you go and you get do 50 push-ups right now on the ground you go into a cold plunge you do something physical you will immediately feel different which will lead you to have a different thought and um and so once I realize the equation works better the other way the street the traffic is less crowded going driving the other way on that road I was like this is the hack and so um now I realize that the thoughts are not the sort of Master controller of the universe they're just an equal party to this they have one seat at the table feelings have another and actions have another and actually they all influence each other so if you want to feel differently you can either think something different or do something different and doing is just way easier because if you try to think yourself out of it you just tie yourself up in knots usually and so once I realized that realize this I realized I had lived a lot of my life in my own head trying to think my way through everything at a much faster version of this was to just do something this plays itself out um in a bunch of different ways so one time I saw on Twitter somebody say something like I've been having panic attacks or anybody found a way to you know get myself to not have these panic attacks and they were like therapy or you could try just you know really talking yourself through it so you're not feeling that you don't think that thought therefore you don't have that feeling therefore you don't have the panic attack and then Emmett Shear who's the CEO of twitch the guy who had acquired my previous company uh replied to it and this was I never really thought a CEO would chime in on like hey here's how I deal with panic attacks but he did and he goes uh fastest fastest hack for panic attacks uh immediately dip your face uh submerge your face into ice cold water um you will stop having the panic attack immediately because it activates the mammalian dive reflex yep and I I never heard this before I just completely new to me but it was exactly in the same line of thinking which is often the fastest way to change how you feel is a rapid change in your physiology which then will lead you to think a different thought which then will lead you to feel a different way and have a different action it's just a hack it's a just a complete Life Hack That most smart people don't utilize they're just brains sitting in a dead vessel and you see this go go watch how people operate they just sit in their car sit on their couch and sit at their desk or like you want to make a you want to have a meeting where you're going to make a key decision they might change the trajectory of your entire company and everybody sits there hunched over tired after a long day eating shitty food full of muffins yeah yeah trying to get a coffee just to stimulate themselves just to kind of get through that thing it's insane we make decisions when we're in that physical state it is it is a uh an absolute leak or weakness in most people's game one of the interesting things I learned from Kelly starrett's supper leopard guy was if you've ever had to take a really mentally challenging phone call what you will sometimes find yourself doing is like a puppeteer has got a hold of you you'll stand up from your seat and you'll start locomoting around the room you'll just do laps you've got a 30 square foot room that you're in and you're some you've somehow managed to create some totally arbitrary route that you're walking in a figure of eight or an infinity symbol or whatever around this room we're just built to move humans are built to move we're built to be on the ground we're built to be out in nature we're built to be connected to the the ground to see Sun etc etc this you don't need to go full like Aubrey Marcus psychedelic woo like biohack Ben Greenfield biohack stuff here like it's just it's notice within yourself what your physiology feels compelled to do when things happen to you like you do something you reach for something because the cookies or the cinnamon rolls or the coffee or whatever is in front of you and you've conditioned yourself to think that that's the thing what's that's going to change you huberman's got the best quote on this which is you cannot change the mind with the mind you have to change it with the body I don't know if that's strict as with most aphorisms there's exceptions meditation is purposefully changing the mind with the mind right like it's it's actually isolating the mind to cycle on itself but I think that the broad rule is very true and I've always said this that if you gave me the choice between having a good night's sleep or going to the gym I will go to the gym every time and my mood will be reset more from pre to post training then from pre to post bed right I can wake up and yesterday's bad mood or whatever can bleed through the night I'll have a dream about being kidnapped by people from Liverpool and being forced to do their marketing or I had that literally happened a couple of weeks ago I also had another one where um I'd committed a war crime and my old cricket team from 20 years ago knew that I'd done it and they were mercenaries hunting me and Sam Harris was a newscaster trying to track me now speaking of Sam the episode that I did with him he had this really lovely bit where he's he's talking about kind of this um like cerebral pornography that a lot of us have where we sort of pray at the altar of cognitive horsepower and um and and presumed it because we've got such good Concepts that we can just you know we can we can sort all of this and when you when he tries to explain to his smart friends that meditation and maybe letting go of that and and finding a little bit more ease releasing the tiller a little bit more might be a good idea they say well that sounds roughly equivalent to being hit over the head with a hammer you know I I look at all of my great Concepts you would have a much better life if you had some cut you should have more Concepts like mine like imagine how great you'd be if you had my concept right and it's yeah I I it's a permanent battle I think and you're right as well to point the finger into the ears of the people that are listening to podcasts like mine and yours because you're so good at this uh you just told a funny vulnerable the story about being adapted forced to do their marketing is so funny to me by the way that is [ __ ] amazing and uh and then you like connected the dots to some like Sam Harris like you have this like Bank of quotes and Frameworks and nuggets from the smartest people on Earth that's so amazing that you have that so first of all you're good at what you do I appreciate that thank you uh the second is I had a realization while you were talking that I think is a a new philosophy that I have I I just realized let me try to work this out live um mental minimalism so basically I think it's becoming Vogue to have a sort of minimalist lifestyle maybe fashion style like minimalism is in in a bunch of different areas one area where it's not in is mentally so um the sort of knowledge porn worshiping at the altar of the cognitive cognition um collecting you know mental models and Frameworks like their stamps like you know I think a lot of this is complete wasted energy and actually counterproductive um you know it's what's that Bruce Lee thing it's like you know I don't fear the man who knows a thousand kicks I fear the man who's practiced one kick a thousand times same same the same Seas you know like that's how I feel about like I really just want to understand a few principles and that's it how do you know which are the right principles um I think there's the I think they're the ones that resonate and they'll still change over time so like at any given season of your life you need different there's different principles that will speak to you um almost in a like when the student is ready the teacher appears type of thing um right now in my life I think that there are certain ones that uh that stand out more than others but this mental minimalism thing I think works because it ties into my favorite meme the uh the midwit meme The Yours Mine and George Max George is ask him about if he's going to do it uh the midwits Guide to Life so I haven't heard that he's he's thinking about doing a uh coffee table book which is every page is a different midwick Meme and it's just just all of them I mean first customer you know whatever Kickstarter I'll put I'll put author whatever it is that Meme I I told my business partner at the beginning of the year I said that's this is the meme of the year I said this meme explains everything I've done wrong in life and everything I've done right in life when I did it right I did it right according to this meme when I did it wrong so if people don't know the meme it's basically I'll actually I think you might explain it better than I do can you articulate what is the midwit meme and then let's let's play with that a little bit of course yeah so it's an IQ distribution which is a bell curve right so you have a graph and from left to right you have stupid on the left and you have super super smart on the right you have this bell curve that runs showing that there's more people in the middle than there are on the edges on the left you have this guy that kind of looks a little bit like a neanderthal with this sort of furrowed brow and sort of these sort of recessed eyes he looks kind of thick and then in the middle you sort of have this woke sort of sjw screaming very tense kind of like glasses stressed out guy and then on the right you have the sage who almost looks like a Jedi Jedi Master or whatever and usually you have both people the stupid and the smart person end up coming to the same realization and the person in the middle has some over complicated idea so one of the obvious examples would be um lift weights eat protein stupid guy guy in the middle I must ensure that my pre-digested grass-fed coffee butter is perfectly served 30 minutes before to ensure that my protein window lift weights eat protein right Georgie's Georgie's favorite one of these is um the guy on the left says I'm the guy on the left the guy in the middle says I'm the guy in the right and the guy in the right says I'm the guy on the left that is good there's levels to the midwit meme I'm now learning um I think that Meme explains someone much of life I think that most people should strive to be uh you know the funny thing you could strive to be either the neander all Neanderthal or the Jedi doesn't matter they come to the same conclusion um and this idea of mental minimalism can you distill down why you're doing something to one reason people love pros and cons lists and they tie themselves in knots trying to weigh this out the scale of one pro one con two Pros one and a half cons and they and they can't make any decisions or um this happens to me a lot in the business world I I talked to a Founder today they're starting a new company and I said your last company was so interesting you raised 20 million dollars you did all the stuff you did some good things but it obviously didn't work out that's why we're here uh versus on your yacht so um so what'd you get wrong and you proceeded to talk for 20 minutes telling me about everything he did right and I was like what happened I asked you a question I said where did it go wrong you gave me 20 minutes which already is an incorrect answer because the answer should be simple um and then the 20 minutes were weaving through things you did right and things that other people did wrong and things that other companies tried and what are you talking about people don't even learn the right lesson from what they did and so like you know I would simplify a lot of the things in life right they like the diet part of my life eat real food not too much exercise right like that's it right um um eat real food mostly veggies and exercise this is this is diet advice at the simplest level um all I need to do now is intensely do that thing right the difference between knowledge and wisdom knowledge is knowing what you should do and wisdom is doing what you should do like to me that is my definition of wisdom it's knowledge applied it's doing what you should do um you do need enough knowledge to at least know roughly what you should do but what most people do is they then over index on knowledge and go try to learn all the possible things that there are to know about the subject and under index on wisdom which is actually doing and applying that the the base knowledge that they have yes so trying to take the mental minimalism thing uh making it a little bit more applied I think that it makes me think a little bit about the explore exploit framework which is that you need to be able to expose yourself to enough ideas that you can work out which ones are good which ones are bad Tim Ferriss has a phenomenal idea which is his system for memorization and it's called the good [ __ ] sticks and what He suggests is you know if your Tiago Forte and your or Ali abdall and you're built from like that cohort of people you'll have a perfectly organized Evernote external brain that's got everything's root folded and decision treed back to whatever whatever if you listen to something and it stands out to you and you can't not send a screenshot of it to someone from a book or screen record it and send it to your friends or put it in a group chat or write it down in a note yeah that's good that's good the good [ __ ] sticks and um that that for me is the easiest way to remember stuff because you don't ever have to remember things that you're not excited about remembering it's easy to remember stuff like the one that I've got from you earlier on today that uh cynics get to be right and optimists get to be rich money Beyond money right I can't forget it I can't I'm gonna remember that now for five years right I'm gonna be quoting that in in half a decade's time can't get rid of it it doesn't matter if the if the story about storytelling if you've switched off and you started thinking about like what you've got to do later on today or what you're going to make for lunch or whatever like sweet then you don't need to go back and try and remember that because it wasn't for you right and that's you know you just enjoyed the lovely warm tones of what we're going through so explore exploit good [ __ ] sticks good good that's so we've got um how do I expose myself to it how do I allow things to pop up like what's my selection criteria from the things that I've been exposed to so that's a nice little framework to to run ourselves through and then I would maybe say when it comes to like stopping yourself praying at the altar of cerebral horsepower quite so much all of the people that I know that are the most effective in life have a very small number of operating principles and one orientation usually one single orientation and this is a lesson orientation what do you mean by that they're moving toward a a particular destination I hesitate to say goal because I don't think it's quite the same as a goal it's more an area that they're moving toward so for instance for George um his would be he wants to be able to have fun and write so his entire life is built around him being able to have fun and write wants to write for two hours every single morning it doesn't matter where on the planet he is and he wants to have fun and fun for him can be from hanging with friends it can be doing cold cold tub it could be learning to play Pickleball it can be traveling it can be doing whatever right uh two stories one from Jeff Bezos apparently while he was at Amazon every single decision that was made was run through one single orienting principle that orienting principle was does this improve the customer experience does this improve the customer experience every single decision don't know if it's true symbolically it's useful second one Elon Musk does this get us closer to Mars does this get us customized and if you have a single orienting principle evidently does me taking a poop now or taking a poop in 15 minutes time which one gets us closer to Mars like that's you know you're not going to ask yourself that question but just having that orienting principle and this is why uh homozy who is uh got an interesting approach to this he talks about periods of Life uh phases phases or periods of life um and he was talking about for this next phase or for this next period and it breaks them up into seven year blocks he was like I know that I'm going to be in Vegas for the next seven so I don't mind like I can just lock in I'm in Vegas this is this is what we're gonna do we've got the apartment I've got I know where I'm going to buy an office and I'm going to do the whatever and I'm going to build a gym um by having phases or periods of your life it allows you to be more ruthless with your orientation principle because you don't it doesn't need to scale for quite as long if you accept that you're time bound on what you're doing at the moment I actually think seven years is [ __ ] insane like and obviously he's probably got it broken in the 90-day Sprints and one year blocks or whatever whatever but by having it at least time-bound what it permits you to do is be like right okay all that I need to do within the next 90 days is build up a healthy eating habit and my social life can go out of the window and my business might take a little bit of a hit but I've decided in advance that this is the thing that I'm going to do and I like the orienting principle as like a a way to simplify down I've been exposed to all these ideas some good ones have stuck about the ones that I enjoyed are the ones that I've I've kept now what what am I really really aiming towards okay which one spoke to me the most how does it fit with my lifestyle and how can I time by time bound that for the next however long yeah the time thing is interesting because um you can use it in a bunch of different ways you can play with time in a bunch of ways so when you think that something's going to be really hard you shrink the time to time box to be like cool what's the best I can do in the next 45 minutes and all of a sudden the brain becomes a I call the brain an answering machine you just have to figure out what the right questions the right prompts like AI what are the right prompts I need to give it in order for it to give me a different answer ask a better question get a better answer and so uh you get time box on the short scale to be more productive to be more creative you can time box like you said to depressurize a decision so you can think uh in both directions what I'll do sometimes is say what if I was long like how do I take a longer term term uh orientation towards this so for example I might say um there's a meeting on the calendar I don't really see the agenda it doesn't tie into this thing I'm doing right now but like over a long time Horizon I think Chris is awesome and I want to do awesome things with awesome people in the long run great it's worth doing or you know this person I could kind of win more in this deal now but maybe if I give a little it actually builds some good will with us and it lubricates the next 10 deals we do together I met a friend once um I really wanted to be an investor and I had no money and he was like um so first I just didn't do any deals because I didn't have the money I just was limited by my imagination don't have money don't do deals and I missed three Deals I became billion dollar companies and at that point I was like okay well I don't want to really see number four so I'm gonna find a way I still have no money but I'm gonna find a way so I asked a different question in my brain how can I invest even though I don't have money brain says well you got friends with Buddy why don't you ask them uh why don't you why don't you do a deal with them take a little less economics but at least you do the deal and immediately go to a friend who's maybe 10 years older than me or so seven seven to ten years older and um he's got money and I said want to do this deal he said yeah I said okay well I don't really know what's the fair split here like is there a standard I'm Googling I can't find it I don't want to be a sucker but I also don't want to be greedy and I don't know the answer and he I thought well this and this guy's a business shark so I'm like certainly he's gonna shark me with this offer I gotta prepare myself for this shark attack this guy's been so successful made hundreds of millions of dollars he is I'm playing chess against Magnus Carlson here trying to negotiate this deal with this guy and instead he texts me and just says um uh whatever you think is fair is fine with me in this deal I actually don't care about this deal what I care about is doing deals with you for the next 20 years and I was like huh never had a text message like that never even had an experience like that never met somebody who takes that long-term orientation Bezos and others have they I think Bezos donates a lot to the long now Foundation which is like this in San Francisco there's a clock that's like 10 000 year clock or some [ __ ] like that it's like this this tells you like think longer think bigger um you'll operate differently than somebody who's always short-term minded so you can go in that direction or you could shrink the time Horizon and say you know what I don't know the forever answer of my purpose in life and what I want to do with my career and all the stuff but what I do know is like this is fun right now I think it'll be fun and why don't I just set two years what's what are great decisions I can make though I'm happy to commit to for a two-year period but not necessarily a 20-year period so you could depressurize the situation and allow yourself to think more clearly my buddy Sam has a version of this called worry time and he's kind of like I'm a pretty laid-back guy he's a lot more like high strung in general and I'm like how do you live like that he's like oh I've found my mechanism so he goes I have something called worry time he's like I used to worry all the time about whatever it is money my car repair whatever whatever's going on he's like and I realize like that really doesn't get me anywhere um to have this like low ambient worry at all times this low-level non-specific stress at all times he's like so I just started setting out time I said okay I don't think about I don't worry about money except for Sundays from 11AM to noon and that's my time I know it's there and I'll think about money during that time and I'll say do I have enough and am I spending too much and whatever and I'll make some adjustments I say I'm good till the next Sunday and he's like that's what I do I literally just schedule it in it and just the fact that I scheduled it of like now is the time I'm gonna work work on this or worry about this um totally changes my like allows me to then function freely and think clearly other than that I love that hack Justin Mayers has a similar one about choosing what to work on he's like a common thing you see is people get to a certain point like middle of their career and then they get paralyzed they can't decide what to do they're looking for the perfect project that's the perfect conditions that's just going to be like sufficiently ambitious and prestigious and Noble and uh lucrative and all these things and they just don't know what to do they can feel totally lost and he goes uh one of the big things that works is basically committing to something and being like I'm gonna not question this decision every day um my trainer says this thing he goes you don't plant the seed and then dig it up the next day and say are you growing like no you plant the seed and you just water it you just water it you just you you know that that plant is going to take a little time to sprout you that's okay you don't dig it up every single time and question it and so um let's get this sort of scheduled worry time or scheduled commitment times I think I think people are mostly victims to time and then you meet some people that are sort of Masters of time they manipulate time in a different way and I didn't even have language around this until I met them and I started to realize oh there's some games you can play with time that actually make it work for you versus just this thing you're running out of and don't have enough of next one people think they learn from failure but I don't find that to be true why uh it's another one of those things that everybody says and you sound crazy to disagree with it um everybody says oh I failed but I learned so much right I didn't lose I learned right and these are it's a great mindset to have if it were true it is simply not true in most situations because you if you press on that you ask about it so what what did you learn answers not at the tip of the tongue okay let me give you some time let's think about it okay so what did you learn right I gave the example of the the founder who I said well it failed why did it fail and they had a different story some people in success learned the wrong lesson uh I had a guy work for me 18 years old and he he was talented what he was doing but he had like he'd you know like many people do I did it 18 too I had a bit of a degenerate streak like to gamble and uh you know when I gamble I played online poker kids nowadays they play Robin Hood and they play crypto and they play other things right so he was like you know I'm talking to him on a call and he goes quiet for a second um I hate did you are you do you hear me like I said let's do this you're writing the notes you stopped writing what happened he goes oh sorry I saw that Bitcoin crash to four thousand dollars and I wanted to buy and I go and I'm like two things a we're in a meeting why are you looking at the Bitcoin price B why is Bitcoin four thousand I wanna buy two that's how I win she bought on like some crazy leverage so he's buying like 25x or something like that so he puts in like five grand but buys 25x worth but like he's gonna get liquidated if the price drops anymore but he played that right he makes money and so he's 18 or 19 years old I think he's got a couple hundred thousand dollars in the bank from like a combination of like taking all the money I paid him for work and then gambling and trying to run it up and I'm like okay that's good um and I'd always talked to him about this one company so there's this company that he uh he was really interested in that was like whatever some gaming company listed on the Australian stock exchange he kept talking about this I'm like dude do you think I care about some company in Australia like why do you tell me about this he's like I think it's gonna be big so I'm like if you think it's gonna be big you should invest in it but I forgot that he's not a normal person and he's going to invest everything in it so he does he invests all of his money into this one stock of course things don't go right this that company wasn't doing so well they say they decide um you know what shit's not going well for us we're going to do what was in Vogue at the time we're gonna pivot to crypto so they go and they say we are now a blockchain gaming company Australian stock exchange doesn't like that they boot them off the exchange they say we don't support crypto publicly traded companies so you they de-list them so now my friend is 20 years old he's holding 200 000 of a stock that is no longer listed on the market and basically has no Pathway to get back on there and just seems like a dead end so he joins this Facebook group of people who also were like stockholders like a you know like uh victims of a victims group and people in that group are um just like what do we do like I own the stock I can't even sell it anymore and so let's not publicly traded anymore so what do I do and so some people are offering like look I'll buy it off you for like you know 10 cents on the dollar like I'll just I'll give you 10 cents for every dollar you have of this and people are happy to move on from their position so my friend decides you know what the thing I'm gonna do the lesson I've learned so far in this like extreme risk-taking thing is that I didn't take enough risk he immediately goes and doubles down on it and um he he buys he goes and borrows more money and starts buying up more stock from all these people that are selling for pennies on the dollar he becomes like one of the largest shareholders of this company somehow through like dumb luck um this company starts to uh like crypto crypto hits a bull run crypto starts going up now any crypto company is looking good nfts become a thing this company's perfectly positioned to do something nfts share price goes way up but it's still delisted but it's now worth a lot so a guy um approaches him and says I'll give you two million dollars for it hold on I'm gonna take my daughter to go pee one second that's okay all right potty training here I am dropping knowledge bombs and then I have to go wipe a button potty training the duality of man get you a man that can do both exactly that was the commercial right there um where was it okay guy comes up offers him two million dollars for his stock I'm like how the hell did this work out from of course he says no he says this is going to go bigger and he goes forward and I'm telling the story and at the time I told the story I was telling it because I was like this guy who's my intern had this crazy story like isn't that amazing and one gentleman at the table goes huh he goes so do you think he learned the right lesson out of that I had never even heard somebody say this question which is did you you learned yes but did you learn the right thing from this experience and um I don't think I had even learned the lesson and definitely my friend who was the the kid who's doing this had not learned the right lesson which was his he was taking away this lesson of like I'm a genius and I'm right um as his like takeaway when he actually probably should have been taking away you know a slightly different lesson and I just see this over and over again um and I think there's a practical part of this too people don't write down what they were thinking at the time or later like they don't really have a system in place that will let them assess what they're doing so you can kind of like our memories are generally quite bad our memories of our own thoughts are worse our memories of our thoughts when we were wrong you're kidding me like there's no chance we have an accurate view of that and so because you don't actually have this like accurate like I'm doing this for this reason I think this is how it's gonna play out fast forward here's how it actually played out you don't have this before and after after to learn from so I think generally people aren't very good at learning from this and I think it's also um interesting that they don't have a system to do it and I think people should have a system to assess the decisions you make because judgment and decision making is probably the most important skill you can hone over time but we just kind of leave it up to like I hope it just comes with age when actually you can probably increase the rate of learning on your decision making if you like establish a little system for yourself of being just writing things down right now while you're doing what you're doing and why and then assessing it later regularly regularly assessing it I always thought it would be really cool if there was such a machine as being able to take a photo of the texture of your mind and being able to revisit it you know for the people that are trying to become more positive or more enthusiastic or more balanced or Economist or or mindful or peaceful or aggressive or overcome their shyness whatever go back to you five years ago you 10 years ago and get a sense for what sorts of things captured your attention on a daily basis what were the sorts of things that you were caught up ruminating about and worrying about whether they were going to happen or how they could have happened or if what you would have done had you not wanted them to happen if you were able to go back and experience that literally feel it again the texture of your mind the contrast would be so unbelievable but it's the drip drip drip Japanese water torture of erosion that's so slow like a tectonic plate moves over time that it nudges what we expect from our daily existence to the point where you can't notice it when did you become confident when did you overcome your shiners when did you whatever like it it's there's no point at which it happened it's just it's like asking someone when they became old right it's just a gradation that you went through when did you become peaceful when did you become angry when did you become resentful like all of these things they just occur and I think that self-deception around things that we got wrong as you said is just it's it's [ __ ] I went to the doctor the other day and I'm sitting there and I'm like yeah I think I might have sleep apnea I don't really know um I did a test back in the day they said you know it was very mild but I feel like it's gotten worse I don't really know and he goes um he's like have you gained any weight and I was like um yeah maybe a little I don't know yeah I think so but like not like something drastic and it pulls up my chart and the the doctor's office I go to it's like the charts like in between you two so it's not like back in the day the doctor used to have it and they used to look at it then talk to you here we could both see the screen and so I'm looking at the chart and literally he's like so 20 2017 you were 40 pounds lighter than you are now I was like 40 pounds that sounds like a lot of weight to get I guess it has been I basically gained 10 pounds a year for eight pounds a year for five years and it was like um yeah I knew I'd been getting kind of out of shape dad bod status but like uh when you hear it that way or you see it on a chart you're just like what like it was eye-opening and that's me and I can see my body imagine my brain and my level of wisdom and the things I focus on and my my intellect and my decision making like I have no chance of noticing either the degradation or or improvements to be honest of those over time I do wish a such a machine uh would would exist George so again this is like George is the third guest here uh it's just it doesn't happen to be contributing it's been very quiet today he's got this thing that he's doing which is pretty deck pulled as it goes where at the end of each day he's trying to capture some key lessons about the day so that he can make the hidden observable uh in terms of how he feels and you know journaling is is kind of a more qualitative solution I suppose for this um but you know a dashboard like what Rob is trying to design or George has managed to Cobble together on a free type form website or whatever it is that he's using um I do think it's a good way to to start visualizing uh the things that you care about all right next one I love this one being a billionaire is a stupid goal why you're around billionaires you you're a man of of many means and do you have friends with as many means and even more means why well first of all they just give the money away anyways so clearly it couldn't be that valuable um like they worked their whole life to get it and then they give it all away um so already that tells you that like acute massive accumulation and abundance of money Beyond a certain point certainly doesn't matter otherwise they would not give it away like let's say I gave them extra health I don't think they're donating that let's say I gave them extra time 100 extra years of life I don't think they're donating that but you can give them a billion dollars and they'll give away 99 of it so that's the first thing uh just the first signal that maybe this is overrated uh the second is I'm not against abundance so some most people who hate billionaires just hate abundance they hate when anybody wins at a large scale I'm not that guy I like people who win I admire and respect and you know strive to be one of those people but what I admire and appreciate the most is somebody who picks the right game to play somebody who chooses a game or designs a game of their own liking so um the question then becomes what are the other things that could become massively abundant and a massive winner of okay the money game is one um and there are certainly checkpoints along the way of money that matter when you don't have to have any more money like you don't have to have a job because you have your Investments make you enough money right that's Financial Freedom that was like the key checkpoint of life or it's not being in debt you know getting back to zero for somebody who's in debt is a big checkpoint um but beyond that you know the checkpoints run out or they spread out in a big way and the the prizes shrink um it's like what what's the difference between somebody's got 50 million dollars and 500 million dollars like one rents the jet the other owns the jet there's not that much of a difference right uh one has a library in their house the other guy pays for the library at the school it's like who cares do I really care about that anyways not worth dedicating my life to so the question is what things what things of abundance are worth dedicating your life to and how do you think about those so I think it's great to have an abundance of Time free time but also youth that's youthfulness and also if you're just a young person like when I was 21 I just wanted everything that the 40 year olds around me had they seem to have the money they seem to have the relationships they seem to have the the cars and the the status and the the cool job and everything else and now that I'm you know I'm 35 I'm going to be 40 soon all I want is what the 21 year olds have time and youth energy abundance like Freedom like you know and so you know youth is wasted on the young in that way so I think having abundance of time is amazing having an abundance of generosity would be amazing have an abundance of fun is amazing I got I've figured out what to do with my life just by simply asking the question who is having the most fun in their career and that was a much better guiding principle um for me to figure out what I actually wanted to do with my life was look around and figure out who's having the most fun I knew a lot of successful people those people were not having a lot of fun and uh the the scary part the most dangerous part of it all was if you asked him are you having fun they say yeah but if You observe them it's like somebody whose volume knob is stuck on seven they don't even know that there's eight nine and ten they can only go to seven they think seven is sufficient and maximally fun um once you see somebody on 10 you look at the seven you're like ah there's a clear difference who were the people that were at 10. um so there's some people that are like of I would say first it was sad how hard it was to think of this because I was like I know a bunch of people who by traditional measures are successful and it wasn't like I just could rattle off 20 names of people who are winning like if you said who's winning the money game I could name you 20 people if you said who's winning the audience game I could name you 20 people but if who's having the most fun who are the people that are dominating that'll have fun in life game it was a lot harder for me to think of those names which means I kind of surrounded myself with the wrong people the wrong inspiration I think that Joe Rogan has a ton of fun and he's kind of like a popular person so it's not that cool of an answer but what I think he's done amazingly well is he has managed to make his life about his Hobbies without turning his Hobbies into jobs so his Hobbies loves you know martial arts fighting UFC becomes the commentator for the UFC gets to call all the biggest fights sit ringside no get to know the fighters follow the sport study it for get paid to study this thing get paid to watch this thing he would otherwise be paying to watch hmm that's great but he also avoided all the trappings of that job he's not on the road 200 days a year like Dana White is he doesn't have to he literally just said I'm only gonna do the Vegas shows which happened to be the best shows which happened to be one hour from where he lives you know was living when he was in LA um and he's like I'm not going to travel to Abu Dhabi for with one fight it's just not worth it right he loved comedy he finds it creatively challenging to do that and finds it amazing to like make people laugh for a living he does that and he's he has one in that game as well um but he again doesn't have to tour 250 days a year like most comedians it doesn't have to censor himself like many comedians podcasting he's like oh I'm just curious guy I'd love to have these conversations became the number one podcaster right um didn't have to but what you don't see him do is what a lot of content creators do they get on a Content treadmill that they don't enjoy and they're constantly begging the begging for audience trying to figure out what do I need to do to get more clicks more likes more whatever and they almost ruin what's otherwise the best job in the world he's managed to become the podcaster without doing that and so he kind of hits the goals but also what you call the anti-goals which are basically the traps you could fall into while achieving your goal um I'll never forget like a friend in college her dad was a partner at a big consulting firm and he was making literally one million dollars a year and I thought that was mind-blowing that somebody could make one million dollars in a year let alone like I thought having a million dollars was like what you accumulate over time that was the end point of money and he was making a million dollars a year but he also traveled Monday through Thursday night and he would get back Thursday night and then be there Friday Saturday and then Sunday he would leave again basically travel uh for his job and he did that her whole life and now she's in college and he missed like basically her her whole life and she resented him for it and I was like wow uh you know can you you know you want success but you want your kids to like you you want success but your kids didn't know you you want success but you want your wife to still like you and be faithful in that relationship so like you know Define the game a little differently so I think being a billionaire is a stupid goal because it defines the game on terms that for an abundance that doesn't actually matter I love that are you familiar with um die with zero Bill Perkins stuff good book yeah I like that book yeah I became really tight with him after I brought him on the show he I mean you know for anybody that doesn't like that book and I can understand why it rubbed certain people up the wrong way because it's a book that's written for people who have Surplus income and not everybody does which means that the people who don't have it get upset about it here's a man that lives that philosophy we've finished classic Case by the way of pointing the blame the wrong way uh you're bad at this guy who wrote This Book for some people uh because you're you know you don't have what those people have uh you know that's misguided anger I would I would agree um yeah we finished that podcast within 30 minutes we are on his boat being driven by the captain of his boat wake surfing for the next three and a half hours with Phil the Unabomber uh somebody somebody the poker player uh and I'm like and then over the next like three or four weeks I spent a ton of time at his house and and he just he does the things this is related tangentially to something that I think you've done recently or at least I've seen someone write about you or maybe you write about yourself which is the life-changing nature of having an assistant and integrating them correctly into your life uh what does that look like um let me say two things one there's only one thing I remember from the die with zero book I read it I liked it but I only remember one thing and it's a story he tells about I want to tell it again because it was so impactful to me and I feel like everybody needs to hear this so I'm like oh let me just say his his bit here he talks about like he was he had some job uh at a bank or investment firm or something like that like you know the job you want and um his friend was like I want to go on a trip to Europe for like five to six weeks like let's go backpacking through Europe they were like just out of school 22 22 to 25 years old something like that he's like let's go back to Europe and then I was like oh yeah that sounds sounds great but like how are we gonna get six weeks off he's like we're not probably I will ask but they probably won't say yes and then we'll quit and we'll hope that there's a job for us we can come back he's like ah man like that's irresponsible like I don't want to do that so his friend goes and he's at the time he's laughing at him like stupid guy made stupid decision to quit his job and go backpacking frolicking through Europe like and he's like you know I'm here making wise decisions that guy's making unwise decisions friend comes back friend is like dude he's like how was it he's like I mean I can't even put into words like anybody who's done study abroad comes back with the same thing where they're like it's hard to even explain it was so amazing I stayed in these hostels and I was um like we met this band and we just jumped on their van and we toured with them for two nights and then I met this girl and she was amazing uh we're still dating and I've tried this food and whatever slept on the beach three to three of the dice it was amazing he's like wow damn he's like I knew immediately that I had made a mistake should have had those experiences and second thing he says finally he's like 32 33 years old he's like has accumulated enough Social Capital at this company to be able to take time off and go do this so he goes on the backpacking trip at like 33 or 32 and he's like you know it's not that fun staying in a hostel when you're 33 and like you know it's it's different there's actually it's not just that it would have been better to do it then he's like there's a time a season of life where you should do certain things and they're really those things have maximal impact during those seasons and what I thought he was doing was unwise and actually he was doing the life-wise thing to do which was to take advantage of our youth and um and go have this experience at the time where that experience is amazing and um I just oh that that stuck out with me I just I feel like that is such a such a important lesson right like what do you want to add a an additional one in that he hasn't released yet he has this shows the levels of wealth we're about to talk about your assistant this guy's got an experienced architect who their only job is to find different things that they think he might want to do and then put them to him and then even if he says that he doesn't want to do them convince them that he's going to go and do them and one of them was training which is like inter railing in Japan and there are these five-star very expensive trains that go the full length of Japan and it's like being on a cruise but being on a like a really really expensive train and they sent it across to him and he said eat [ __ ] that sounds [ __ ] lame I don't want to do that why am I going on a train I've got a hot wife like what am I I'm gonna go on this train on my own it's gonna be full of old people I'm gonna hate it it's gonna be moving around and blah blah they convinced him to go he gets on falls in love with it he's like I want to do this I want to do this every month for the rest of my life what he realizes is is that he can do that when he's 70. he can't keep wakeboarding when he's 70. so he is banking this anticipation for when he's going to get back onto intervaling or training or whatever across Japan and God knows where else he's going to go but that's for the future so he there are certain experiences that you can only do at particular periods of your life they're better maximized during that time it's kind of less lame to do them during that time and it allows you to match the uh it's a lot of it is to do with health like health wealth and time are the three factors that you play with in his book your health is largely a determinant of what it is that you're able to do because you like your hips aren't going to take it skiing when you're 80 right right but you probably find to do training like to sit on a train and be served like cake by by a nice Japanese person right like that's that's that's gonna be fine right um so yeah uh periods yes you assistant what have you done how's it worked uh yeah I mean I don't even think it's that crazy but uh I think that most people I I I I sort of rail on these like controversial things which is like the common theme of all of my St all of my beliefs comes down to the following which is don't follow what most people do because most people don't have a result that you would want so like in America most the average person is obese literally like by the definition I think the average was obese um what 50 something percent of marriages end in divorce so that's kind of like that's the average expected outcome there um and Below don't have you know more than a thousand dollars in the bank or ten thousand dollars for you know like an emergency whatever the numbers are the specifics don't really matter directionally they're all correct which is that it is easy to feel safe doing what most people do until you realize that most people are going to a destination you don't want to be at then it becomes very risky to do what most people do so um most people when they get money buy luxury luxurious things like fancy cars clothes watches uh maybe vacations things like that and um I have this you know and so there's this I would say one of the general wisdoms is experiences are greater than things and I always say services are even better than experiences uh like um I was able to hire uh you know an assistant works full time for me for like the cost of a couple of purses and an assistant improves the quality of your life far more than a person that sits in your closet because you're afraid to take it out and get a scratcher um same thing with a car I hired a private Chef for our family for less than what most people pay for a luxury car because I didn't care what it looked like for like when I drove around or you know like I like a quality car a safe car but like I didn't care if it was an Instagram car um but I did care that somebody would go get fresh ingredients make healthy food for me and my family that tastes great and better than I can and I don't have to worry about going getting groceries cooking or cleaning or cleaning up afterwards um so I got my time I got my health and I got my taste like I can't believe everybody doesn't do this who can right so um so that's the first thing um assistant same thing hired assistant um through Shepard she's in uh the Philippines so I didn't even go with a full-on personal assistant here so let me try first let me dabble with it this way and it's great she she's the first line of defense on your email inbox and your time and um she makes me uh she helps me be a better friend I'm like hey my friend had this thing I think I want to give him this gift can you go find a you know I want to buy him a candle that has this funny thing about this inside joke on the front and just send it to him in a month and also when's their birthday let's make sure we remember that this year because I'm kind of a shitty friend otherwise it'll just help you be a better person they help you be whatever the person you want to be they can help you be and I created a system to like to do that so I had to learn how to even operate uh you know with this with this new functionality to have to have somebody who could do this with you once I learned it it's pretty big unlock um but I would say just in general finding a way to to buy luxuries that you actually want is great I will also say I think for people who are sitting there listening they're like oh great oh wow it was great to have a private Chef an assistant yeah good for you douchebag right like that's fair uh take that on the chin but I will say I used to have a big reaction whenever I would experience uh whenever I encounter people who had this type of stuff it was basically bitterness and then but it would be disguised as oh that's stupid I wouldn't want that that's stuck up I would tell myself some story that would make myself feel better and the story was either that having that thing would make me a bad person or that I don't want that anyways um for whatever reasons reasons um and I had this visceral experience I went to somebody's house in Las Vegas and they had live in like a basically a palace and then they drive the fanciest cars and they have literally there's a pool that goes around their house like a circle like a moat but it's just that's their swimming pool it would be cooler if it was a moat exactly it's like a swimmable boat it's a moat you just want to stay in instead of crops and um and I was talking to my buddy and I was like yeah they have all the stuff but I wouldn't want that anyway I was being defensive about it I didn't even realize it he goes he goes uh you know just gonna let you know one friend to another uh you know like one black belt to another trying to master we're both trying to master our minds uh you're you're talking very differently than you usually do and it kind of makes me feel like uh maybe um you know it's kind of bothering you that you don't have these things and you're telling yourself all these things about why you don't want them anyways or why it's bad to have them or how this person's douchebag for having them instead what if you switched what if this was Costco and you got to walk around and you're sampling a bunch of things of a lifestyle to figure out which ones you want and which ones you don't and so instead of the reaction being I don't have this and therefore I feel bad be like oh I'm so lucky I get to try this to figure out if I like this how I like this or if I don't care for this at all fantastic what a cheap way to learn that um and I just flipped my mindset into like oh I actually seek being exposed to other ways of thinking or living in order to get a sample a little taste a little test to find out oh that's awesome or hmm they do it this way but I would want it this remix way or just oh I don't want that at all think I don't have to desire that because it's not something that appeals to me and that really changed the way I interacted with people who I felt like because I felt uh embarrassed at the way I was reacting before having a friend who calls you out in a what sounds like reassuring but firm way like that about your [ __ ] is you need to keep those sorts of people close to you well we made an agreement it was like hey look I want to be this way you want to be this way we're both nerds about this stuff so let's make an agreement that um in our quest to master this to become a black belt uh there are going to be times where you're going to have to point out techniques I'm doing wrong things I'm doing and I agree so uh I want you to just say them to me when you see him and I promise you that I will receive it as a gift the feedback is a gift and I will receive it that way um so that's that's the agreement we're both going to do that for each other that's part of who we're both like-minded this way so we know we can talk to each other about that whereas if we talk to the wrong person who's not seeking that type of input or uh or opinion they might take it out the wrong way but uh let's set an agreement a foundation right now we are men who want to live by a certain code that's our code and uh we both are down with this crowdsourcing your personal growth I like it very much Sean Puri ladies and gentlemen dude I'm so glad that we got to run this back the first one was phenomenal and I want to do this again so please keep on coming up with controversial tactics for people to have a better life where should people go to keep up to date with all of the different things that you do uh yeah you can go to just uh my my email list is where I put I think the best content so just go to seanpuri.com s-h-a-n-p-u-r-i.com uh you can put the link in there whatever um and just put your email in there I send out uh stuff that I think is the most thoughtful stuff that's hopefully Gonna Make You uh make you think is really all my only promise I I think I I can spark thoughts in your head um and then the second thing is the podcast so we have a podcast called my first million uh you know if people listen to this podcast probably to become more wise most people listen to this podcast are our podcast to become wealthy and so um yeah it's me and my buddy Sam it's a good time it's very entertaining and it's kind of about business and opportunities that we see uh or stories that we hear that you know we get to share uh on the Pod so my first million go subscribe to that oh yeah Sean I appreciate you thank you man thank you 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