How Small Wins Compound Into Greatness - Alex Hormozi (4K)

here we are again hard things are hard that's why they're hard another episode the biggest risk to your future isn't your competition it's the distractions you insist on keeping in your life rather than doing the things you know you should be doing but aren't people delay doing things they don't like for longer than it takes to do them there have been so many times in my life where I I knew I needed to do something and then I filled all this extra time not doing that thing and then the moment I did it I was like wow that took way less time than I thought it was going to take and not only that it took way less time than it took me to delay to actually get to this point and if I had only started with just doing what I was supposed to do I could have done four or five other things that I was also supposed to do by this exact same point and so thinking about it from that perspective I've tried to elate as much time between I think I should do this thing and beginning doing it and I think you get this positive reinforcement cycle that occurs every time you start I call it pulling the thread it's like I just need to start pulling the thread and then all of a sudden what feels really unknown becomes very tangible and you're like oh I understand the six problems I have to solve to do this big thing but now I know the problems and then it feels like you can you can wrap your arms around it and then you can start taking it one bite at a time the same thing works in Reverse as well that when you put something off it makes putting it off more Manana Manana Manana I used to define Power by the distance between thoughts and reality um meaning if you think about somebody who's omnipotent so if God or the god figure would be omnipotent as he thinks things are so there's zero space between thoughts and reality and so if we want to be more Godlike in our lives the distance that we can shrink between wanting to do something or thinking something should be done and it being done is a direct indication of our personal power in our lives and so that has helped me basically think don't be a powerless [ __ ] like just shrink the shrink the Gap and I think that's why a lot of my my little like personal hacks of waking up and then trying to shrink the time between when I wake up and when I start working and shrinking the time between one task and the next task like you don't need to take 30 minutes of getting ready to start working like you can just start working because as soon as you get into it you start pulling the thread and you're like oh here it is and all of the time that I was getting ready to work I was just using up my best brain power time on things that truly don't move the needle at all yeah I came to call that the productivity rain dance that you sort of do this weird sacred ritual beforehand and we've spoken about this before but it's you know there are certain things that you can do that will make uh success or productivity or focus more likely and better that doesn't mean that you should disregard them that over Reliance on them makes very fragile um unrobust way to get into working I would delineate the difference between preparation and routine and so if I'm preparing for a presentation for example I might assemble my notes I might read some stuff about the audience ahead of time I might read about whoever's you know doing the the event and learn more about that I see that as preparation for the thing which I still see as work and I think some people I made a post about preparation is like everything I put a lot into preparation they're like oh see you have a morning routine I was like no no no I don't need to to you know stand on one foot and do 17 cold plunges and write six affirmations because none of those things are directly related to the work that I'm going to do and so for me if it's basically preparation is just a stage of the work and so if I need to prepare to work then that's fine as long as it's related to the work that I'm going to be doing well we spoke about this yesterday the difference between focusing on inputs and focusing on outcomes if you optimize for outcomes the inputs are always optimized but if you optimize for inputs you go what did I actually get done at the end of the day so the person that does do the productivity reain dance and it takes ages and everyone's done this everyone's got a blank piece of paper in front of them and they end up washing dishes that they never use you know the the weirdest tasks become alluring because of that focusing on outcomes I so we when we brought this up it was perfect cuz I had a whole thing that I was wanted to talk to about this so I'm a b big proponent of something I call the rule of 100 and I'm not the one who invented this but it's basically 100 primary actions so I talk about this within the context of advertising so you make a 100 minutes of content you do a 100 Outreach if you're doing outbound you do you spend $100 a day on ads you or and if you've already spent the money on ads then you're doing a$1 100 minutes a day of writing ad copy looking at other people's ads looking for Hooks and then trying to create more advertisements for your business and the rule of 100 for most people takes about 4 hours a day is and the thing is is that that's pure inputs not output but I've already taken the time to Define what those inputs are that create the outputs but later on in the book $100 million leads um I talk about the rule of 100 on steroids which is something that I learned from a guy who owned 13 or 14 really successful gyms and he called it open to goal and he said yeah yeah yeah he said my managers work open to goal and I was like what does that mean it's like so they work open until they hit their goal and so sometimes that means they hit their goal by noon and they can cut out or that means that they have to go from 5:00 a.m. until midnight that night because that's how long it took them to hit the goal and so I've seen this across a lot of high Achievers across domains so like I'll keep shooting free shots until I hit a 100 free free shots I will uh run until this happens I will practice my presentation until I do zero mess ups right or whatever that that output is that you want for quality or quantity and I think that you have to first figure out what the input is that most closely correlates or tracks with the output you want and then you jam as much as you possibly can into inputs because if I said hey go get me 10 customers somebody yeah exactly you freeze because it's like what do I do and so then normally people start they skew like Behavior skew so it's all over the place it's scattered it's shotguns sprays and then they eventually figure out one thing that works and then it's like once you hit that then you just Jam that button as hard as you possibly can and I think that I've been disproportionately successful in different domains of My Life by ruthlessly focusing on one input I mean even when I was a kid when I play video games it's like if you find a a spawn point for zombies right before the end of the level I would just sit there for like eight hours and just wait for the troll to come up and just slice them again and get my my little diamonds and put it in and I would just do that for hours because I was like oh I got to level up my Avatar um but I think I play the game of business the exact same way Andy Groves says there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little and that's the lack of correlation between inputs and outcomes yeah I think the vast majority of business own I'm obviously I come from the business perspective the last vast majority of business owners um work a fair amount they just work on the wrong stuff and they do it the wrong way and so they get so little for their effort that they wonder when they're at home empty-handed in bed why isn't this working when I am working but if you define work at least the way I do which is um output so I Define work by output and in order to get output it's volume times leverage so how many times you do the thing times how much you get for each time you do it and so that is the do you work smart or do you work hard it's you do both you do as many reps as you possibly can and you are you do it with the most leverage possible so if I make 100 phone calls The Leverage that I can have there would be how skilled I am so if I make 100 calls I might get 10 times more and so I worked more I had more output than somebody who has less skill but the only way you get skilled is by doing more inputs by working more and so it's this virtuous cycle of doing more and getting better and then you get more for what you do yeah magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding all the time every single time that there is we're not making progress in this way what is the highest pain task that's in front of me that I've put off the most it's always that one it always is you know after you spend enough time thinking about work and deconstructing the way that you piece your day and your life together you sometimes believe that the answer is is still out there and what you actually realize is that you've already learned it and it's like it's that quote or that Insight or that book it's one of the first books you read because all of the big insights from productivity and personal development are the lowest hanging fruit they're the ones that are repeated across the most books because they're the most reliable scalable and robust it's like I don't need to be looking out there for most of the new insights they're just [ __ ] that I already learned yeah we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught it's one of my favorites bad things don't come in threes bad things happen people don't know how to cope and they allow one bad thing to snowball into more bad stuff sucks the only thing worse is letting one bad thing ruin many good things I'm glad you found that one um that was one on that list of things that uh you know quotes I had gone more viral um the amount of I think it happens more when you're younger but you know girlfriend breaks up with you okay then you go into work and you sulk because you're distracted and then you don't do the same level of effort and you're not enthusiastic and then all of a sudden your work suffers and you get you get put on a pip or you get fired and then now you're fired and you don't have a girlfriend and then you start gaining weight and you stop going to the gym and all of a sudden you're like man bad things happen in threes it's like no bad things happen all the time and they only become interrelated if you let it affect your behavior and so I think the equal opposite of that is thinking okay this bad thing occurred what can I do to decrease the likelihood something else bad occurs in the meantime and then boiling everything down to activities or the actions that I have to take and I think about that actually a lot which is how like if you think about from the power perspective of okay something bad happens how much will affect my behavior well the person who is indestructible would have something terrible happen and then nothing thing with change and I I love that or they get better exactly yeah that's anti fragility right yeah the um the Sword of Gryffindor it only drinks in that which makes it stronger ah [ __ ] Harry Potter reference weren't expecting that um yeah the people don't know how to cope thing especially with bad stuff is um it does explain why you end up with this weird spiral tiny little Avalanche Pebble at the top and then this huge sort of overe exaggerated reaction Downstream yeah people don't know how to manage their emotions I think the the more at least for me the more I've tried to create space between how I feel and what I do the more consistent my outcomes have been what do you mean so if I need to create content and I'm not feeling it or I'm feeling tired or things like that the more times I give into that excuse or that feeling then the more superstitious I become about doing it in the future whereas a lot of times if I can just start when I am tired or when something is painful and then still execute about the same as before I look at game tape or I look at video or look at the content from those sessions for example and I see that I remember feeling terrible during the session but can't really see anything and I think the more times you get that Loop going the more you can separate how you feel and what is required and the more times you do what is required to get what you want the more times you get what you want I spoke to huberman last year I think it's called the anterior mid singular cortex it's an area of the bre if I've got that right [ __ ] yes bro the best advert for neonic ever um uh basically there is an area of the brain that tracks when you do something that you don't want to do and you strengthen the connections in it by doing things that you don't want to do especially when you really don't want to do them so you're hypertrophying it's this exact sort of intuition that you've got that some people would call it resilience or willpower or whatever but there's a this is uh neurologically represented in the brain these uh connections get stronger so I think it's so funny um gim Bros will need a gym analogy in order to be able to believe that their brain changes but it's it's really useful to think hey you're hypertrophying this area of your brain I snapped in Achilles I had to do a very particular series of rehab movements in order to grow it back this is just the same yeah agreed successful people this is kind of similar to what you were talking about bad things don't come in threes successful people see opportunity in every failure normal people see failure in every opportunity both are right only one gets Rich yeah so I was so this has been something I've been thinking about a lot which is basically the shittiness of stuff um which is when you're growing in a business it's very painful when you're stagnating in a business in your plateau and you don't know what to do it's very painful when you're declining and you also don't know what to do it's very painful and so that means that all conditions of reality are painful and so if pain is a prerequisite for reality then it means it's just a signal that we are alive and so in thinking about that rather than pain is a problem it is a signal that I'm breathing and then becomes irrelevant how do you ensure that you're not suffering unnecessarily you know pain can be a useful signal it can tell you to move away from certain things that are suboptimal yeah I am I probably have relatively contrarian views on this um but just even the judgment on pain I relatively reject just like pain is good pain is bad I mean in the in the gym to give a gym gym example they found that the pain that you experience when you're going to work out and there's a difference between like massive joint like oh I just snapped a muscle and like just feeling bad but feeling bad has zero correlation to your performance in the gym and so I remember reading that for the Olympic you know weight team they talked about that and I was like oh well if it has no correlation then it's almost irrelevant and I can just keep living my life and so I think the ultimate version of the resilience that you referencing earlier is rather than you know in the beginning you're like I feel bad and then you think that that should weigh on the decision of whether you do the thing that you're supposed to do and then you start realizing that you can do the thing even though you don't feel good about it and you start hypertrophying it but I think the ultimate version of the hypertrophy when the muscle becomes a tendon or it just becomes fused is when you don't even consider how you feel it's just not a thought you just keep you just do it that's that movement from sort of type two to type one thinking you know from it being very conscious very effortful to it's just a reaction I get up and I start to write right and um you don't use up any war power no because it's just what you do right there's uh Rory southernland that we were talking about yesterday um in his he's the only guy that I've ever heard swear in a TED Talk and um it he gave me this idea which he's kind of related things are not what they are things are what we think they are for instance you're doing a hard workout which gives you a signature feeling you're laid on the floor panting heart rate at 180 sweating from everywhere with the taste of metal in your mouth this is oddly enjoyable but if this exact same sensation was to spontaneously occur in your car while sat in traffic you'd call an ambulance for fear that you're having a heart attack framing is everything Rory Sutherland says sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window the problem is when you're not smoking and staring out of the window you're an antisocial friendless idiot if you stand and stare out of the window with a cigarette you're a [ __ ] philosopher the power of reframing things cannot be overstated it's significantly easier to find a way to reframe your experiences as enjoyable while you improve them rather than waiting for them to be done before you give yourself license to be happy so a friend of mine she's a a very very successful therapist uh and she always asks her patients when they come to her and say some terrible thing happened she said what would it take for this to be amazing and so for example lady comes says we're getting a divorce and she says so what would it take for this to be amazing and so it just completely shifts the reality of like okay how could this be an amazing thing that could happen to me and this is relevant for me shifting gears because I we just had a big tryy out inside of our company for a presentation slot that we have an event so we had a bunch of the leaders in the company like the [ __ ] Hunger Games yeah we put a cash price fight to the death pitch folks we did no we put a big cash prize out there oh oh yeah I totally did that I I told I was like I'll have no no expression just in a toga yeah exactly and um and I could tell that some of them were nervous and I thought about this because you know I speak a fair amount and I don't get a lot of nerves in general and I have a whole bunch of thoughts on that but um the most basic one is that if you're still feeling anxiety which many of them were like hey I'm so nervous or hey I have a lot of anxiety before going up I thought about it and champions just interpret anxiety as excitement and if you're excited to go up then you're like I'm amped versus I'm stressed but it feels the same the way you frame it totally changes how you feel when you're stepping on stage um but my two sense of if you are feeling lots of anxiety it means you need to practice more that just my two cents and that comes for everything whether it's to have a meeting or give a presentation or write an email or do a book like if you feel nervous before you release it then you probably didn't work on it enough and I think the reality is that most people to get not anxious about whatever they're doing you have to do it so many times that by the last time you're doing it you're bored of it like you don't even want to see the thing again when you're sick of it is the point where you'll have no adrenal response to the stimulus because you've seen it so many times you could do it in your sleep because you hate it at this point and then when you get up you're like oh my god let's just do this because I'm I can breathe this over with yeah what's the gap between your expectation of what is going to happen yeah and the um requirement that you need to perform right this is where I need to be and this is how I think I'm going to perform yeah as opposed to the other way so I saw this firsthand when I did the live tour last year so I did I think 17 shows in 28 days three continents right like proper tour like real proper proper tour thing and um you know I did four work in progress shows and then that run all around UK Island Dubai Canada US Canada again us again and I could see because it was around about every other day for a month and each time that I stepped out on stage every single time that even though I'd done the prep I'd spent all of this time I'd done the i' tried to you know I'm not nervous I'm excited I'm not nervous I'm excited um still that degraded over time until at the end of it and this is why comedians I think when they end up doing really big tours one of my friends did a 300 day tour of the same show he said I no longer felt like a comedian I was a performer oh yeah because he's not stepping out on stage he is so dialed and routinized that he's bored while he does it and uh yeah that's how you look at oh my God Joe Rogan just did Netflix live to [ __ ] God knows how many millions of people metropolitan area of San Antonio's internet probably went down for him to be able to get that con ction moving and uh how could he do that all of these people watching and all the rest of it that set that Joe did I have seen at the Vulcan Gas Company downtown in Austin and I've seen it at the mother ship in different iterations for coming up on three years now and his last special was six years ago that guy has said those sentences and waited those times and got those laughs and understood the inflections and the the the the little pauses he needs to do maybe 300 times s on that one set there's no more degrees of fre the only thing that could go wrong is a real Quirk mistake that's kind of to be honest out of your control if you misspeak a word when you're paying attention that's not your fault uh so yeah that's how people have unbelievable performance ability uh and it's just a case of stepping there sort of one degree of competence at a time and if we think of confidence as the percentage likelihood what we think is going to happen will happen as a predictive metric then in order to be more confident we want to have more proof that what we think will happen will happen and so the easiest way to do that is to do it a lot of times and so it would be reasonable to say that you're confident that it will go the way you want because it has gone the way you've wanted so many times in a row before I've just realized I've never thought of this before the fact that the word confidence is in how we describe it from a psychological perspective and confidence is in the interval level that you have numerically at the same [ __ ] word that's so funny operationalizing what how do you become confident do it enough times that you feel like it is unlikely that what you think should happen won't happen my model of the world is accurate I'm confident when I go up to girls well you start going to girls and you start tanking and then one out of 10 times it goes well and then you do it another 10 times and two out of 10 times goes well and then four out of 10 times and then eight out of 10 times and all of a sudden you're confident because you have a high degree of predictive power when you say it will go this way that's such a good reframing of confidence and the best part is you get to use the same word and you can boil it down to inputs you just have to do more I've been using my eight Sleep mattress for years and I absolutely love it when I'm on the road like now I'm miserable I go to bed and I'm too hot and I have to use the air conditioning to try and cool me down and it doesn't work and my sleep sucks if you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night because of temperature this is the solution eight sleeps brand new pod 4 ultra can cool each side of the bed down to 20° below room temperature and for those who snore heavily it can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve air flow and stop it it cools it Heats it elevates and it is clinically proven to give you up to 1 hour more of quality sleep every night best of all they ship to the United States Canada UK Europe and Australia and if you're not sure there is a 30-day sleep trial so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 days if you do not like it they will give you your money back right now you can get $350 off the Pod for Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's EIG ghts sleep.com slod wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout this is my favorite one I think from you over the last few months you once wanted the life you have and if you don't like the life you have you probably probably won't like the one you want but don't have either yeah this one I think about all the time because I think about the life that I have now and I know that I wanted this life but I obviously do a lot of thinking about this type of stuff um but the equal opposite of that is that when I was poor I was pretty happy I was okay with being poor and now that I am rich I'll put quotes on that degrees um it's it's about the same and so then it just goes down to well then the richness had nothing to do with the level of contentedness which means that my wants in past and present and future all go into the bucket of irrelevant in terms of their ability to affect my perception of reality in the present and so and thinking about that it makes my wants have less stake today and so a lot of anxiety that I think a lot of people have around things that haven't happened yet either good or bad like I hope this speech goes well or I hope I get this job promotion but the reality is that once you get the job promotion you wanted it you resettle and the negative version of this is and you've probably seen this stuff but when handicap people get handicapped so they have a terrible accident they get paralyzed or they lose a leg or whatever there's a dip in their subjective well-being but after 3 to six months it typically restabilize which means that if I didn't get paralyzed or even if I did get paralyzed it'd be just about as content as I am right now it's like whatever is about to happen's probably not as bad as that and so that's the worst case scenario which is nothing so okay good things aren't as good as you think they are bad things aren't as bad as you think they are yeah life is life well it's the it's the you've already achieved goals that you said would make you happy again it's the other side of this and you know the fact that we take for granted things that only in recent memory we would have beg beged to have had the opportunity to have been able to have and now we're flippant about them the new car that you thought about and you researched for 18 months and then you finally got it and you just curbed the tires yesterday and you go all right whatever and you're like you real you spent all of this time thinking about the house that you're going to move into the marriage that you were going to do the holiday you were going to take I told you about this last time Morgan howel steps out onto after this huge big buildup with his kids and his wife steps out onto the balcony of this holiday that he'd taken and his first thought was wow it would be so good if we could come back here next year that was like during the process of experiencing the thing he was thinking about the next thing and he caught himself and thought okay this means that success isn't a goal a journey or a destination when you get it wrong it's a horizon every single step that you take towards it it runs one step further away M so during my year off off that I took after during the year of the sale when I couldn't you couldn't I couldn't really work on the business because you don't want to change anything major when you're going through a sale um but I didn't know why if I was going to be owning this business soon so I basically just had to do nothing because I also had to demonstrate that the team could do it without me so that's still a sellable asset so I basically just sat there for a year that's when a lot of my like thoughts kind of caught up from you know when I had started years earlier and that was when I kind of refined my kind of theory of living for me which is that hard work is the goal and so it's not like work hard so that X because as soon as you have a so that then the x is the thing but if the goal is to work as hard as you possibly can then the only real output we have is who we become along the way and so in reframing that then it's something that I can win or measure myself against every day in real time throughout the day which is how hard am I working because that is the goal and then even I say this just for audio but like everything else takes care of itself still puts the everything else as the goal still it's just being vager but if you just say like the only point is working hard because I know that whatever I'm going to get is stuff that I will become accustomed to and the I guess opposite of the hedonic treadmill is like your the resilience piece is that my ability to work hard itself is growable and so I just need to keep my RP my rate of perceived exertion at 8 or 9 or 10 because I know that when I look back on my life the days that I loved the most were days when I had nothing left in the tank and there's this thing that Jesse itler has this and I love it I hate him for having it so [ __ ] good um but he has he taught us who kids which is he has them they have a little zero means that there's nothing left in the tank and when they finish a race or they do whatever it's like did you leave did you leave anything in the tank and I thought about that and the best days of my life were once when I had nothing left in the tank and so then the goal becomes to empty the tank not what where I drive but just to drive the car as hard as I possibly can and that means that in the beginning it's just straightaways I'm just seeing how high I can rev the engine but as it become more advanced it's like all right well now we've got turns and then it's turns and elevation and then it's turns and elevation without guard rails because we have risk and so when I think about how hard I want to work the interesting thing about that is that the only person who can judge you on your success is you because you're the only one who knows how much left in the tank you really had and the better you get and you can resonate with this you start winning exteriorly and that's when people are like it felt so empty it's because they didn't actually work as hard as they could have they just worked hard enough to beat everyone else but that discrepancy between how hard you could have worked to to work your hardest versus what was required in order to win to me that's the opportunity that shift ing towards the work being the goal unlocks for you and I work harder now than I did when I was poor and I think it's because I've learned to enjoy it how do you ensure that the hard work Focus doesn't detach you from outcomes and inputs this seems like there's a little bit of a tension with what we started talking about in the beginning I just to oh toally it's Direction Over speed is the first one but we're now talking about maximizing for Speed yeah so how do we balance direction and speed so with the question if the alc that we're trying to have is being present then the outcome actually is irrelevant because it's about how much empty the tank if we're talking about the signs of achievement then the outcome the outcome does matter obviously um and so balancing both of those things which is that if I want to accomplish all my goals then I need to make sure that my inputs are tied as closely as humanly possible to the outcome if I want to be satisfied it doesn't matter at all and so I think it's marrying those two ideas where the perfect world in my opinion would be you work as hard as you possibly can because you thought ahead of time what is the input that has the closest correlation with the outcome that I want and then you put your blinders on and you start digging we don't rise to the standards we have when others are watching we fall to the standards we have when no one is watching the only work that really matters is the work that no one sees it shows you who you really are rather than who you say you are there's this line that I heard David goggin say on Rogan and I can't remember who he was saying it to or what he said in response to but he just said I'm David goggin's [ __ ] and I remember him saying it and I thought to myself like you want to be able to say that in the mirror to yourself and not laugh at yourself and the only way that I can do that is know that when no one's watching I work harder than when they're watching and thinking about it like that has given me this persistent and everpresent scorecard or third party that's like no one's watching which means now you have to work because otherwise you're full of [ __ ] and so it's this continuous reinforcing cycle of the me and other me holding the whip behind me to see how much I can take but with each of the whip that I take learning that I can take it and continue to trudge on and so as long as you keep going you bear witness to yourself of what you are capable of and I find that incredibly satisfying in the trenches of misery when you have to go through it you're not full of [ __ ] I'm still here it means that you're not full of [ __ ] what it comes down to is I think I told you this story about when I was with Sam last year in La so um Sam ens used to make content on the internet now he's very much an operator rather than a front-facing which is funny to think about Sam the Creator as opposed to Sam the operator and I asked why he'd stopped making content and he said because I felt like I had to start living up to in private the things which I was saying in public and he was beginning to feel discordance between the two you know he was making changes personally but he created a brand publicly but I think if you can get to the stage where the public version of you is the best version of you and then private you has to live up to the best version of you and then you get to do this sort of self-reinforcing cycle that's kind of The Virtuous version of that which I guess is kind of similar to what you're talking about here so I think what we're teasing at is authenticity and so a lot of people feel like imposters because what they think what they say and what they do are completely different um but from an operational perspective because that's how I like to define a lot of words which is what do I have to do to be that right what do I have to do to be authentic and you can describe someone as authentic by saying how would you behave if there was no possibility of punishment and so if you could not be punished at all that behavior is who you are authentically and so in my opinion our degrees of freedom are predicated on how much to what extent we act as though we could not be punished and so if what we want to do and what we do have no possibility of punishment that is what we are when we are our true selves Jimmy car talks about um nobody throws a Coke can out of the window with kids in the back right that means you're a [ __ ] monster yeah it's what you do when there's no one around your uh old one about authenticity people are attracted to authenticity but it's hard to Define for me here's my best attempt true alignment of what you think what you say and what you do the hardest part is realizing that our thoughts are [ __ ] and that we have to fix them instead of Faking the next two and it's exactly that and I think that I actually think Ground Zero of that is living out your [ __ ] thoughts and then slowly try like I think it's it's it's I think the hardest jump is actually doing and saying what you think when someone's like hey what do you think about this and you're like I wasn't paying attention at all it's like oh wow okay and so then you basically become because I think if personal truth of not lying to if you start by not lying to yourself and then you start saying those things then you start not lying to other people and I think if you can decrease the the friction between what you really think and what you say it starts to create some virtuous cycle outside of you that starts to orient your behavior so that you actually start doing what you really think and I have integrity but in the TR truest sense as one of my personal kind of goals um but it's it's jarring to people when you're just honest and like really honest like hey what do you do you want to go to this uh to to Sarah's birthday party no and they're like uh what do you mean you busy like no I'm not busy but I don't want to go people have a hard time just saying no to things and I would encourage you if you're listening to this like try saying no to try actually telling the truth when you don't want to do something because we say we have so many social niceties that we say oh I'm really busy or it's a really bad time right now or whatever it's um I had somebody the other day I was with a friend and he like I didn't notice that I did this so sometimes it's nice to have somebody from the outside and so somebody came up to me we were looking at a real estate property and someone knew I was going to be there and so that guy showed up unannounced or whatever and he was like Hey man can we do a podcast and I was like um I'm just in town GNA hang out with Lila for the next few days like not really trying to do that and he asked again and he was like hey um he like 20 minutes let's like we can just we can just rock one out and I was like well let me show you my calendar and I pulled up my calendar and it was all empty and I said see it's there's nothing on there and I was like and I I just want to keep it that way and I didn't think anything of it but apparently he left and then my friend just start just starts crying laughing just thinking how hilarious he's like I can't believe you said that you that was so boss blah and I was like what is he talking about he's like you just showed him your calendar that you had nothing and you were still like you're still not going to get any of my time and I didn't perceive any of this extra narrative that he added to it but I think just being able to say no to stuff when people ask you for it because people ask you for stuff all the time and it's these little these little nibs these little tiny things hey can you do this or hey can we show up to this thing or hey you're supposed to or hey your aunt did that one thing for you so therefore you owe her um and saying like I don't subject myself to those rules and I had a a New Year's resolution which I do believe in in making resolutions like why not um if you stick with them and so one of my more recent ones was um there are no such thing as social obligations only consequences so you have no social obligations you have social consequences but you don't have social obligations and so you have to go I don't have to go if I don't go they what will happen as a result it decreases the likelihood they will invite me again which is great because then I won't have to say no again so this actually saves me time in the future future and so a lot of people don't play out the like what happens if it's like oh more of the thing that I would prefer which is not getting invited to these stupid weddings or not getting invited to these you know christs or whatever they're called you know bris whatever I don't bris whatever the thing is you you probably know what the word I'm trying to say what you're talking yeah well kids getting circumcised or uh I think you go watch it like a viewing Gallery common thing yeah is it yeah I think whatever doesn't matter all right point being if you say no and are honest about why you said no people will be Jarred but then you get this muscle when we're talking about that muscle of being authentic which is just saying what you really think and I think that when you do that you unlock a certain level of confidence in yourself where you're like oh I didn't die oh actually what I would prefer to have happened happened as a result of that oh you know what it's Friday night and I am going to get a good night's sleep because I do have a clear day tomorrow and I'm going to work my face off and I didn't have to go to Sarah's thing and to me that's like like over time I think I just do more and more and more of that and it feels better and better and better it's funny that your friends saw that as a flex that that it was and I I can see why and I think I would oh my god dude like you totally owned him with that thing like you showed off the fact that you've got nothing but really if we're all being honest if we didn't want to do it that is the truth the only reason that it feels like a flex is that it's such a left turn from the social mores that people typically go through I said this to you yesterday Dan bills Aran superpower is his frictionless from what he wants to his mouth say what you want about Dan but he's lived very unapologetically and that's what are the things that you can get Downstream from that I mean maybe you don't like his values or his principles maybe you think that he's a bad guy or maybe think he's worth more or less money than he actually is all of these things but what you can't say is that you don't trust the things that he does are not the things that he wants to do and that commands a level of respect that absolutely and it should command and a level of respect I actually think that when you live that way people trust you more because their ability to predict your behavior 100% if I can't trust your no how can I trust your yes right and I think when people see you say no and then later say yes your Yes means a lot more of course because it's the same thing Peterson talks about that a rabbit can't be good it just has no choice to be otherwise you you can't The Vicious actually I think that some rabbits are a bit like the [ __ ] so you probably can find some that are nasty you might have heard me say that I took my testosterone from 495 to6 last year and one of the supplements I took throughout that was tonat Lai I first heard Dr Andrew human talk about these really impressive effects that tons of research was showing which sounds great Until you realize that most supplements don't actually contain what they're advertising msts make the only NSF certified tonat Ali on the planet that means they're tested so rigorously that even Olympic athletes can use it hubman is actually the scientific adviser for momentus so if you've ever wondered what supplements he would create or what he really uses himself this is the answer best of all there is a 30-day money back guarantee so you can buy it completely risk-free use it and if you do not like it for any reason they will give you your money back and they ship internationally right now you can get 20% off everything sitewide including tonat allei by going to the link in the description below or heading to live.com sodern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's Li e m o n us.com wisdom a modern wisdom a checkout if you want revenge for the bad things that have happened in your life start with the version of you that hasn't lived up to your potential so I think a lot of us have the the battle of the other self that we're the the Lesser version of our self that we're trying to kill every single day and so a lot of times we have this desire to point the blame finger exter Al but wherever you point the finger of blame power follows and so whoever I blame for the life I have is the person who I give all the power over my existence over my circumstances and so it hurts but if you turn the finger inwards and you start saying huh I don't like my life the person that I need to punish or get back at is the real person who got me here which is me and so you may be right that other people did certain things or you got dealt a bad hand it also doesn't matter because the only thing that you can't control is obviously the actions that you take and the only person who's in control of that is you and so the revenge porn is thinking about what the version of you who got you here did and then acting in the exact opposite of that as as many times as you possibly can and the pain that you feel by rejecting the thing that you used to do that got you into this bad circumstance that's the real revenge it's kind of like uh the stoic Fork the dichotomy of control but it's just taking all of that and just lumping it all on you yeah it's it's you know I mean this is kind of the the push back against victimhood culture that externalizing the Locust of control it is the fault of the politics or the e om or it's the state of the dollar or it's the patriarchy or it's whatever he goes hey look you will get 100x a THX your returns placing your efforts to try and change those things on you as opposed to on the world like you I think basically the best way to move through the world is to see your entire surroundings as immutable and you as mutable you're the only mutable thing in the entire world you're the only anything that can change everybody else people opinions places economy politicians policies all of that none of that's going to change you you can change that's it and then maybe some of the other stuff does and that would be great it's a really interesting concept so do we accept the world and change ourselves or do we change the world and accept ourselves and so it's a really interesting dichotomy when you ask the question because on because both of those sound right you're like I should accept myself and change the world but on the other hand you're like wait no I should accept the world and change myself and so yeah because they're both piy Pym PA right and so um I think all of it come Downs comes down to when you change yourself you will change the world because you will change how you see it I think as well when it comes to accepting yourself do you want to accept you do you want to accept a version of you that you shouldn't accept one that you're not proud of one that doesn't live up to their word one whose thoughts actions and uh intentions aren't aligned fly you go well I mean I I can but I don't particularly feel good about that that feels like the higher version of me the potential version of me that I want to live up to is I'm sort of derating them that it's this isn't really the tri to them that it should be and yeah that's why the self-acceptance movement that's why people feel icky about it people feel icky about the self-acceptance movement because they know that people are accepting a version of themselves which is falling short from what it could be I would say that they're not accepting themselves in saying that they accept themselves so if I say is there a version of yourself that's better than you are right now and most people hopefully would say yes it's like great accept that person and I think that to me when we talk about the authenticity accepting yourself is accepting the ideal that we can live up to and that's that is what we accept not the shitty version of that that we are today and I think that marries both sides of the argument Jimmy car broke my brain with this one everyone is jealous of what you've got no one is jealous of how you got it I love that quote my God people see the trophies but not the training ground everybody wants the view but no one wants the climb I love it but the people who win love the climb and the real mountain has no peak and so the view is always present the whole way up the climb but it seems to me to push back there it seems to me like a lot of the time your head down the pleasure comes from the climb not the view for you uh again maybe sort of uh non- typically constructed from a psychological perspective that was nice that was diplomatic um uh so what would you say and this is something that I think you know with these episodes that we do I often want to try and get you to push a little bit more to adapt your ideas and your insights for people who may do have a little bit more of that emotionality that comes through to try and sort of soften this up like I understand that people need more degrees of freedom than me typically I understand that people probably can't get themselves to the level of work that I can so do you ever sort of play with that idea of okay what does a little bit of view taking in look like whilst we're climbing I think a lot of the discontent comes from the judgment people have about what they should or should not do along the way and so they take my description as prescription for what they should do so I describe my life and then people think I'm prescribing what they should do and it couldn't be further from the truth if you want to take a break at every two steps and take in the view do it I mean in four generations no one will remember your name and so enjoy the view if you feel like it I just happen to enjoy how much I can see that I can do that's what I enjoy and I and I feel like I am most present when I work and so I'm not going to go into work life balance whatever because we already know where that conversation goes but people have a harder time accepting that someone can just work all the time and and truly love it and I Define that by there's nothing else I would rather do at any time time and so for me I feel like I ex exercise absolute freedom in my life and freedom is reinforcing for all species dogs cows fish humans freedom is one of the re most positively reinforcing thing that people have that everyone wants Freedom everybody wants to be able to say f you right but once you say [ __ ] you you have to do something because you can't just stay stand there and saying [ __ ] you over and over again for hours for the rest of your life you start to do something and that thing that you choose to do after you do after you say thank you is what you want to do that's an interesting point so there are um certain things that you have to do to get to the point where you don't have to do things you don't want to do and then when you're liberated there is a whole new challenge now because it's a completely blank map where you have to actually Define that that's one of the things you know about working for yourself there's there's a lot of derogation about 9 to-5 and University education and kind of the typical track and stuff like bro I you should be very cautious about criticizing people that have more normal salaried 9 to-5 jobs because I look at most of my friends and they can't not take their work home with them so for certain psychological makeups who's more free the person that actually gets to shut their work laptop at 5:00 P p.m. in France they've got this new policy now where you can't uh email staff uh after I think it's maybe 5:00 p.m. or 6 p.m. at night in certain businesses to try and sort of enforce this work life balance and stuff like that uh so for certain people you're shaking your head what's you what have you what's your problem I mean my first thought was well France just took the it's irrelevant economy and just made it less relevant and and secondarily the person who made that rule is someone who fundamentally doesn't understand human behavior so if they were to pass that rule for me then what they did is they actually made my life worse this was the thing when Elon took over Twitter so it's one of my favorite stories over the last couple of years Elon buys Twitter Elon finds out that 80% of the staff base just drink smoothies and go on hot girl walks all day and he fires them yeah and says this team it was him and a bunch of Asian dudes uh selfie and he says this is the team that's going to run Twitter now and he put I think a job posting out maybe on Twitter and he says I want people who want to work harder than they ever have on the most difficult problems in the world and blah blah blah blah blah and he got tons of [ __ ] for it and they said this is a regressive policy for industry this is taking people back to sending kids up to chimneys and so on and so forth and it's just a complete failure of theory of mind that there are people out there for whom that is the job advert I want to work harder than I ever have on the most difficult problems in the world at an intensity that would kill most people because that's where I derive pleasure and satisfaction action from that's the best situation that I could hope for and trying to take your model of well yeah but what about my maternity leave and yeah but what about you know jeans Fridays and yeah but what about you know hot girl walks all of that is those are things that people don't want adding those in gets in the way of the thing that they do want I think a lot of the confusion around the people who are wanting to work harder than they are or don't like that I work hard or that you work hard think that they they take this statement as a judgment or criticism on how they live their life and it's because on the other side of that free line you're like okay I'm now free I have a blank slate if I do something or you do something that they deem painful for them now or something that they don't enjoy they then say you are suffering and that is bad and both of those things I reject wholeheartedly first you don't know that I'm suffering because you have no idea what's going on inside of me come and also what does your judgment mean at all to me there's a Tim Cook internal memo that he sent there's a saying that if you do what you love you will never work a day in your life at Apple I learned that is a total Croc you will work harder than you ever thought possible but the tools will feel light in your hands so good chef's kiss chef's kiss Tim Cook feel like you crushed that one I have a friend who worked for a very highlevel uh recruitment company SE Suite XX for the biggest companies on the planet I don't know whether it was some internal internet thing or whether they actually saw these people or they maybe candidates with other companies but he was able to see the breakdown interviews with some of the best CEOs in the world so he was able to see the summary of Tim Cook and Susanna was juky the lady uh and apparently the first line so these guys are seeing everybody the best on the planet right and I was like okay so just explain to me the interpretation difference between the guys that are already AAA and then Tim Cook and he said the first line of Tim Cook's summary just said Rockstar that was the first thing all it said was Rockstar and he realized that in a pool of the best Executives on the planet people like Tim and people like Susanna still are heads and shoulders Above the Rest I just thought that was so cool to like see these people in their nent stage before they've got the thing that they're going going to really magnify they had all the attributes they didn't have the proof yet yeah they didn't have the playground they didn't have the petri dish to be able to show just how much they could multiply it yeah which I think about that a lot when it comes to kind of like potential energy versus reality for people on their way up and so there's this huge time delay between when we start behaving in a way that a winner behaves and when we start winning and the problem is that the bigger the mountain you're trying to climb the bigger the W you're trying to get typically the more delayed it is yeah between when you start behaving like a winner and when you start being a winner and most people don't get the fast enough feedback loop to know that they're on the right path when they are taking these first steps in the right direction because they have this really big goal but they forget that with that really big goal comes the even longer delay that it takes to get there while still continuing to act with no feedback from society positive reinforcement whatsoever and I think that's like if I actually had to put a real like what's what's been what has worked so well for me and why the input over the output Focus has been so powerful is that I can extend the time Rison basically indefinitely because the goal is me and then the external goals occur you don't need the positive reinforcement I mean everybody's seen it I need the positive reinforcement but the the positive reinforcement is coming from me interally I'm just being like just just because I think it's important the positive external reinforcement that most people are looking for right but if you if you are the goal then the actions you take every day are reinforcing who you believe yourself to be that's where the confidence comes from as long as the directionally correct and if you just want to be satisfied then just work your ass off uh yeah I mean everybody's seen one of those exponential graphs and I I one of my good friends George bought me uh at Professor um he's great he's [ __ ] fantastic I I found I'll tell you once Ro [ __ ] he won't let me say it um but he's just got the most insane client uh like one of the coolest companies on the planet um he bought me for a gift last year it's uh the 1 million subscriber announcement post that I did uh it's the first ever test footage episode I did in 2017 and in the middle is the play graph that goes between the two and you look and it is up until a year at the time up until like a year before it's flat there's nothing there was days I remember looking back there was days when we were doing this show in March April and May of 2018 where we did zero plays we'd already launched I was releasing an episode a week and there was days where we did no plays and I released an episode and we did no plays I went back through and looked I don't think I even told you this this I messaged every single one of the Thousand contacts in my phone that I'd accumulated from nightlife promo on WhatsApp saying hi I've just launched a podcast would you mind subscribing to me a thousand different people bunched into 50 person broadcast lists because that was the maximum broadcast list you used to be able to do and I was the most ground floor door-to-door sales to try and accumulate an audience and it just keeps happening there's no presuming that you keep on going exponentially it makes every previous version poultry and uh yeah being able to continue doing something without seeing the results of your work is one of the best competitive advantages because everybody else is feeling the same discomfort that you are everybody else is going I don't know if this is going to work and this is hard and why is no one telling me that I'm doing a good job and [ __ ] another day with no plays that's stupid and then you end up looking at the top 100 podcasts in the world I think account for 80% of the global plays 100 shows out of about 4 million account for 80% of the plays which means there's what 399,900 9 [ __ ] that has got the entire rest of it that's 20% for those that's it the leading indic at of a successful person is the ability to act without anything happening and when you continue down that path it happens slower than you expect and then faster than you can imagine and I think that's the part that everyone misses is they expect the faster than they can imagine and they imagine really big and so then their expectations are really big really fast but they they take the intensity and they don't apply it to a timeline that's appropriate in other news this episode is brought to you by element you might not be you might not need more caffeine you might just be dehydrated and proper hydration y it's not just about having sufficient water it's about having the electrolytes to allow your body to use those fluids element contains a science backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium that helps to regulate appetite curb cravings and improve your brain function this orange salt tastes like absolute Godly nectar first thing in the morning it's the way I've started my day for over 3 years now and it's a complete Game Changer I can feel the difference when I use it and when stop and you can try it completely risk-free with their nobs no questions ask refund policy buy it use all of them if you don't like it they'll give you a money back and you don't even need to return the box that's how confident they are that you love it right now you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drink LM nt.com slod wisdom that's drink LM nt.com slash modern wisdom this is from Mark Manson why I hate being around negative people being an [ __ ] is a weak person's idea of strength complaining is their connection never let yourself be held back by other people's fears people criticize what they were afraid to do themselves because bold action reminds them of their own inaction if you're afraid to be criticized why do you care about the opinions of those who are too timid to do it themselves if you are the criticizer does tearing down someone who has the courage you lack make you better yeah people criticize because it helps them justify the risks they chose not to take in the hopes that it'll dissuade you from doing it so that you can be in the exact same position as them which then justifies that they made the right call this happened when I stopped drinking uh you know it was now going low and no on alcohol is kind of invogue and super duper common but as a club promoter in whatever 2015 2016 that was pretty rare and um I think a lot of the pushback that I got from the people around me some of the people around me was your behavior is throwing my behavior into sharp contrast and you know this is the lonely chapter right this is why the movement away from your existing friend group this is Neo you've already been down that road you know where it leads you know you don't want to go there it's all of those things but because at least for me I always have such inherent uncertainty of my own opinions and such uh a sense that everybody else is balanced and actually knows what they're doing that I give undue weight to the criticisms of others oh maybe they are right maybe it is stupid for me to stop drinking maybe this does make me boring maybe it is pointless for me to do like who even knows if meditation Works [ __ ] Sam Harris right like you know all of these doubts that start to creep in and that like we were saying before this is the discomfort that everybody feels whether you're launching a business or doing personal development or doing all the rest of it and as opposed to thinking about it as a bug think about it as a feature and as opposed to thinking about it as something that's a personal curse that's difficult think about it as the selection criteria that everybody has to get over that's the reason why so few people are equanimous and actually have peace in their mind because meditation is hard and everyone thinks am I doing it right this kind of sucks and I'm Twitchy and I'm tired today why is so few people in in shape because going to the gym and sticking to the gym is difficult maybe it's a tiny bit easier for some people that like it than others but for most people most of the time it's really really hard thinking about the challenges that you need to face it's just a selection C the cost of doing business right this is just the cost of doing business and I need to pay it it's rarely the information or the intensity that makes things hard it's the sticking with it that makes it hard and so the desire that we have to quit is simply breaking the consistency and and so that's why consistency has always been the hardest thing for most people to achieve but the intensity of what you have to do to be successful is much lower than most people expect and so oftentimes they suffer significantly more in a short period of time than is required to be successful over a much longer period of time with a much lower intensity and so it's just like if you walk for five minutes a day you're going to get you know 50% of the health benefits probably more than that I'm sure um of just even exercising you add 10 years to your life if you walked five or 10 minutes a day um and the path of personal development is befriending uncertainty and so I obviously sit from the entrepreneurial perspective but almost all decisions that you make in the beginning you have incomplete data and you have to make decisions anyways and so it's growing comfortable with taking your best bad guess and being directionally correct rather than searching for a perfect answer because a perfect answer assumes perfect information which you can only have after you begin and so in some ways making a decision is the perfect answer so that you can get the information feed to then improve the quality of the decision later and I think that one Loop is what a lot of people miss out on is they spend they obsess for years sometimes on the perfect pick the perfect business the perfect job the Perfect Mate when most of the times beginning each step illuminates the next step which means the information the feedback that you get from walking gives you more about where to walk than trying to sit at the beginning in the darkness and pick a direction well it's the difference as well I think between people who are super Advanced super developed super far down the line and people who are beginning it's like dude what have you got to what are you risking by trying to do this thing you've you for you it's fine for you to spend 18 months negotiating with Sam on the school deal but if you are yet to do any business that's probably not necessarily the right way to go about things uh Tim Ferris says in the short term your success depends on your intensity in the long term your success depends on your consistency do not sacrifice the latter for the former what's wild about the fear that people have when they're starting out is that they say things like I have nothing going for me I have no advantages I have nothing to my name I have no money I have have no network I have no resources but using Rory Sutherlands reframing it also means that you have nothing to lose which makes you incredibly dangerous and I think people wildly underestimate how many shots on goal you can take when you have nothing to lose whereas when someone has something to lose they have to be more and more selective about the the shots they take and so you have the perfect conditions for taking risk because the worst case scenario is Baseline is where you're currently at correct yeah and so that means side is this which means that it's like going to the casino and playing craps but they say that you can just keep playing until you win but people are afraid to roll reminder for anyone internally debating weekend plans if you don't want to go don't go if they care whether you go or not they don't care about you and if they care about you they don't care if you go or not just because you have free time doesn't mean anyone who asks for it isn't title to it I think the F the second part I want to start with which is if you see that you have an empty calendar most people assume that if someone asks you for that time it's therefore theirs and it's only not theirs when someone else has claimed it which means that your time only belongs bels to other people and then you're surprised by the fact that your investment of time has yielded nothing for you when you've given the only and most valuable asset that you have to everyone else who often give a very poor return on it for you and so in the beginning if you don't have money the only thing you have is time and so that is the only thing that you it's the only currency you can spend to improve yourself or get closer to your goals and so if that's the one currency you have then why on Earth would you give it away I think it's genuinely right to say that your calendar is a better measure of your wealth than your bank account it's also the easiest way to know where someone's going to be in five years or even a year how so you just see what they're where they're investing their time and you can predict like more accurately what their life is going to look like in a year based on what they're doing today and it's a good thing you know for us from it's hard for me not to put the business stuff into it but a reminder that the life that I'm living today is a result of the work that I did 6 and 12 months ago and so if you to look at my calendar 6 and 12 months ago then you might extrapolate out to what I'm doing today but just like people want the immediate reward they also see their current condition as a result of the behavior they're doing today it's not at all and so that's why I think having in some ways a very vivid imagination of like this is where I think the the benefit of quote visualization comes into play I don't see it as much as a benefit for like oh I have to imagine this thing to happen but I think it's more powerful to think I'm doing this thing today and I'm imagining it happening so it's an approximation of the feedback loop that you want to have and so it helps you substitute and get through the period where nothing's actually happening this is it was so cool to learn this going to the gym is one of the very few Pursuits that you can do where in the act of doing the thing you get a brief window into what it will be like if you continue to do the thing if I go on Dual lingo and try to learn Spanish I don't briefly become much better at Spanish like where I'm going to be at in 6 months or 12 months time but if I go to the gym and get a pump on I go hey that's me hopefully flat in 9 months time like how I look now at the end of the session is where I want to be toward the end of this year and that reinforcement Loop is so good I think I genuinely no one's spoken about this the pump preview yeah but like that I think is the feedback mechanism that makes the gym so compelling it's one of the reasons why it makes the gym so compelling you get this brief window into a future version of you and you go [ __ ] dude I look so my delts look [ __ ] awesome I can't wait for that to be how I look when I wake up on a morning and you go okay that's how I'm going to get that and that's why it's such a it's so gratifying right it works in the moment and it works over the long term so one of my closest friends or my closest friend Dr cashy and I talk about this but the difference between experts and beginners is that experts have more ways to reward themselves in a given condition and so if you think about an expert salesman there are so many interactions they can have that they are good at that they can find rewarding and positively reinforcing and so the goal is to develop enough skill that your external environment and conditions can deliver enough positive feedback that it can become self- sustaining give me a tangible example so if you're an editor and you edit videos for a living in the beginning you have to you know you watch a video and then you try the thing and if it doesn't work there's no there's no I mean there is a feedback loop it's null um and then you go back you try it again and then you do get a positive feedback oh i' made that transition happen I made that color grading occur whatever I'm talking that a you get the idea there are some roles like sales and editing where there's a lot of people who music where people become passionate because there's enough fast feedback loops in the beginning where they can try something and then get good a master musician can pick up any instrument and have positive feedback loops everywhere and so the more you master any skill the more ways you can win and so it allows and that's ultimately what makes the rich get richer is that because everything is so positively reinforcing because they start to develop skills then they do more and more of it and as they do more of it the rich get richer the better get better the better become best and then everyone who's starting out is like how on God's Earth does this guy have this work ethic but it's really that he has high levels of skill and all right I'm going to go on attention here but I think it's going to be worth it so I think about everything in terms of skill and I have more or less divorced myself from the words like feelings psychology uh intuition whatever I've just I've just taken it out of my vocabulary and simp character traits and tried to focus ruthlessly on what are the actions that I can take to become patient and if you say hey be patient what does someone do right they have to figure out what to do in the meantime that's the definition of patience if you say hey be more charismatic the problem with that directive is that it's a bundled term and so I say charismatic but it what it really means is 12 skills underneath of it that means that when you walk into a room stand up straight when you walk into a room look everyone in the eyes when you walk into a room announce yourself speak louder Shake people's hands and look at them while they're talking when someone talks nod your head if you do all of these 12 behaviors or 15 behaviors people begin to describe you as charismatic and in the path of personal development we want to become more of these things but we haven't chunked down the bundled term into the series of behaviors that create the description that people will then call us later and I think by breaking things down then it's not like oh I'm just not that insert character trait it's really oh I have not mastered these 12 skills and so by doing that it demystifies much more precise exactly this is from a business perspective also really good for training employees so like for example on our team I was like KB was the first person who did video with me that I ever enjoyed and so I was like why and then somebody else came in and I was like I'm not having as much fun in these sessions and I'd like to recreate the conditions of success and so how can I make it so that I operationalize fun exactly the most Alex hosy thing I've ever heard hey hey guys let's operationalize fun for a moment and so we had to but then this is the part that everyone misses is that you then have to look with a microscope and say what are all the little things that Caleb does that other ones other people don't do and so it turned out when he was behind the camera he would be nodding his head and if I said a banger line he would he would stick his thumb out and so ID get these many positive reinforcement Loops while I was recording and then as soon as I was done he would come over and be like dude that was fire and then he would take out his phone and have all of these really interesting follows because I could see that he was actively listening and he had thoughts and so then when we retrained the team we said hey when Alex is is talking nod your head slowly so he sees that you're actively listening if he says something cool do one of these give them a thumbs up and then all of a sudden my recording sessions without Caleb became as good as my recording sessions with Caleb and we operationalized Caleb ISM right and so I could say I just need you to be more like Caleb but that's not helpful to somebody but if I said I need you to do all these things then I can operationalize that the reason I'm hitting on this so hard is because this has been such a core change in how I see the world and it has been so useful in terms of making bending reality to what I would like it to be because there's this huge disconnect between what people want how they describe what they want and what it takes for that to occur and by by being able to look with detail about the Char traits or the things that people who are better than you at a certain thing do you can then stop being like man people think I'm a dick it's like well if someone says stopping a dick not helpful I mean good to know that whatever I'm doing is not working but doesn't give me any active directions and so we just try to break down ad acquisition. comom but in general and for myself what are all what is the 18 things that I have to do and often times it's significantly more things but they're also much easier than you think think if I just said I need you to nod your head while you're going on camera it's not that complicated to understand and so when you break it down that way all of a sudden it become you wrap your arms around it and you're like oh so this is what it takes in order for me to be an exceptional videographer this is what it takes for me to be an exceptional podcaster I'm sure and we call like this is why I love living by checklists but right now if you were to if I were to say hey what makes a good podcast you'd be like probably about 128 things or more right but everyone on the outside say say you're just so you're so natural on camera you ask such thought-provoking questions like man you just get the best guests right and you're like sure and so this is but the thing is is I think this is the mysticism this is the unknown that the beginners or the people at the very beginning of their path don't understand is that there is no magic there is no mysticism there is no spirituality around this everything comes down to behavior and ju and by doing that you can take out all of the the HBL all of the the voodoo that unfortunately is so prevalent on social media and so when you hear the the podcast clips and whatever of people saying you just need to be more this if they haven't described it by a behavior it is useless and so this has allowed me to also separate signal from noise when I'm consuming content in general or if I want to learn something I'm immediately thinking well what does this mean that I have to do and if someone can't break it down into the behaviors then they don't know either and they may be very good at the thing but they may be very bad at teaching it and being able to separate those two skills because those are skills too being able to transfer a skill is a skill will allow you to audit who you're listening to so that you can get the highest return on your effort because then you know that you're doing activities that lead to the outcome that you want we'll get back to talking to Alex in one minute but first I need to tell you about Shopify Shopify Powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States they are the global force behind gym shark all birds and neonic Shopify is the Commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business you can think of Shopify as your business sidekick the robin to your Batman you come up with genius ideas and Shopify handles all of the heavy lifting you can sell without learning to code or design just bring your best ideas and Shopify will help you to open up shop plus shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way you didn't get into business to learn to code or to do design or to do inventory management Shopify helps to get all of that stuff out of the way and allow you to focus on what you came here to do which is designing and selling an awesome product right now you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slod wisdom all lowercase that's shopify.com wisdom now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in we have this big nebulous term of anything let's call it confidence and then there's these component component parts that confidence is made up of and only by defining those can you actually bring it closer to you yeah I think you know in terms of getting people past the paralysis of be confident like what the [ __ ] does that even mean where do I start what are the component parts of confidence and yeah you know breaking down any big thing into small manageable steps is kind of the key to achieving large goals breaking down nebulous Concepts into high resolution very tangible very obvious individual skills I I really like that I really like that I think it may be the single source of singles tough one of the largest correlates to what has worked for me in my life because a lot of this Obsession around this and you probably know more about it off camera than people can hear on camera has come from me fundamentally not understanding the world and so so I put so much effort into trying to understand when people would say do like stop being that way or you're you're really cocky or you're really arrogant and I was like how do I not be that and or you're really distractable or you're really you know you're scattered and these are all things that like you know it hurts when you hear these things but you're like okay but what do I do and so I would encourage you if you have either negative traits that you're trying to get rid of or positive traits that you're trying to acrew or become more like to Simply demystify It by breaking it down into the behaviors and when you do that you'll realize that though there may be many variables in that there are lots of little things that it takes they're usually not nearly as complex as you'd think and so then you just start looking at it as a checklist and saying okay people think I'm arrogant when I begin my conver begin talking to them about how much money I make okay so I have two options I can either be around people who like talking about money and don't see it as arrogant or when I'm around people who I think have a high likelihood of that and I care about their opinion for some reason then I won't begin that way and then all of a sudden fewer and fewer people begin to describe you as arrogant now you are still the same but people would describe you less in those terms and so I'll give you a different example it's completely off-the-wall here so one that was really helpful for me was defining love and so the problem with the English or all languages is that there's many words that mean the same thing and so we can look up we you know Webster diary whatever but if you actually look at the definitions I think most words are actually poorly defined because if you Jus defy them by what someone has to do then most definitions fall short and many of them if you find online are circular right but like likingness and loving to me are a Continuum it's not like I like this person I love this person just just exists on this I hate to I really like cool now if I were to say I love you what does that mean operationally so for me I Define Love by what I'm willing to give up to maintain my relationship with something or someone and so by using that definition I was able to see huh maybe I don't love my family as much as I thought because I'm actually not willing to give up very much in order to maintain this relationship and I might actually love my friend or I may love my co-workers a lot more than I love my family if we use the definition of what I'm willing to give up in order to keep it and then then the more I thought about it I was like oh I love my goals more than I love anyone I'm not willing to give up my goals in order to maintain a relationship and so I actually when I realized this I sat down with Leila and I was like hey I think I love my goals more than I love you how did that go down great because she was like my whole goal in life has been to help you accomplish your goals and I think the reason that we've had such an aligned relationship is that both of us want to help the other person achieve their goals and in so doing then you're aligned and it's like wow I I would give up everything to maintain peace because if Leila is the person on Earth that helps me accomplish my goals more than anyone else and my goals mean more to me than any anything else is now the conduit between the two yeah she's like Inception mind [ __ ] you into yeah yeah yeah now some people get really uncomfortable by me saying that but it sounds transactional in some ways and it is I believe but I believe in transactions and relationships in general but when we sat like for some reason in marriage it sounds weird but on a first date the first thing you share is these are my goals this is what I want to do like is that at all interesting to you because if it's not if you're not aligned with where I'm trying to go then maybe we shouldn't walk in this path together but for some reason later that no longer applies I believe what you apply on first date should also apply on 10 years in at least that's what's worked for us and if there's ever been a moment where we're like hey we feel off-kilter here this feels like it's conflicting with what we our earlier agreement then we reconcile it right and so I bring this up because there are so many terms like loyalty trust and I spend a lot of time trying to Define these terms so that I can say not do I trust this person but how much do I trust this person this person is honest or not no how honest is this person and the only way that you can know someone is honest if is if they've had the opportunity to lie where it's not socially where it's not socially socially um beneficial for them where they lose status by still being integrous and saying what really occurred and so I have this massive list on my phone it's got all the all the terms that I refer to frequently um but I would encourage you to Define them by what Behavior you have to do have you got your phone on you now yeah can you pull up one and give us a give us a t that you like to look I'll give a phone one I have tons this is fun wait words and that's one of the things that uh I appreciate is anybody that spends enough time crafting words and thinking about them precisely ends up having a very accurate view of the world because all of the fluffiness that comes about we we mediate our experience through language and then what you've got a [ __ ] eating grin on your face I've just got so many okay well what pick pick one of your favor I'll do I'll do I'll do two three of them two of them that interr related then a different and then a third one all right so this will be really good this will this will be nasty for the people who are listening at home so learning means same condition new Behavior so phone rings you answer the phone you say ABC I say cool read this script instead that says DF phone rings same condition you say DF you have learned same condition new Behavior intelligence is rat of learning it's speed it's a measurement of speed and so it means how many times do you need to be exposed to the same condition in order to change your behavior if I teach someone something that's script and then on the first try they say DF and someone else it takes five tries for them to say TEF they are not as intelligent as the first person here's why this is interesting every person who's listening to this right now has listened to a thousand [ __ ] podcasts and they're in the exact same condition and yet they have not changed their their behavior which means one they have not learned and two they are dumb which also means that if you can control your behavior you can also control how intelligent you are and so if you want to be a smart cookie then it means that you just decrease the amount of times that you do not change your behavior under the same conditions and so when I think about this when I teach my team when I teach anyone I think in these conditions and so every time you watch or you consume a piece of content you read a book if you think what be behavior I'm going am I going to change as a result of this if the answer is nothing you wasted your time and you pretended to be learning but you were really entertaining yourself and so that frame has been incredibly helpful for me to speed up how quickly I take action because I don't want to be a dodo bird so that's two two different ones learning and intelligence one that I've been thinking a lot about with Dr K and how we go back and forth is motivation so I'll tell you a story and then I'll I'll bring it I'll bring it around so I had uh I was at an event and a young lady said Alex can you just give me 60 seconds of motivation and of course it's like you know dance monkey dance and so I I you know I took a deep breath and I was like Define motivation and you know she just like melted she had no idea right I was like so you're you want me to answer a question or make a statement about something that you can't even Define and so how would you have any idea of whether or not I actually did it and so then I probably gave her the answer she really wanted which was let me Define motivation for you so motivation is the equal opposite of deprivation so we are we are most motivated when we are deprived of something I'm most motivated to sleep when I'm sleep deprived I'm most motivated to eat when I'm deprived of food I'm most motivated to have sex when I have sex in a while now that logic carries for physiological needs but then you would to get into psychological things or or intangible constructs so like let's think about money by that same logic you'd think oh poor people should be more motivated because they're deprived of money but that we don't see that in reality many poor people are not that motivated so it would then follow and I've seen some incredibly rich people who are wildly hungry for money and so then it would follow that the deprivation comes from our reference point because money is intangible and so it's how much do we perceive our deprivation around money and so if all of my friends are billionaires and I'm worth $100 million then I have a $900 million deficit that I have to come up I'm $900 million poorer than the person who just is at 5,000 a month who wants to make $110,000 a month I'm more motivated to make money than they are because I'm more deprived of it and so in thinking about this I then think okay what am I deprived of that motivates me to go get it and also when I want to try and judge the behavior of others or predict their behavior I have to think what things are they deprived of because would have a much stronger predictive power than trying to say how do I motivate this person look at what they lack it's a much more accurate way to predict the things that people are going to chase after operationalized what do they do so I found this quote from Timothy ly and it really it's really fantastic I think that you like this find the others admit it you aren't like them you're not even close you may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them watch the same mindless television shows as they do maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes but it seems that the more you try to fit in the more you feel like an outsider watching normal people as they go about their automatic existences for every time you say Club passwords like have a nice day and weather's awful today eh you yearn inside to say forbidden things like tell me something that makes you cry or what do you think Deja Vu is for face it you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator but what if that girl in the elevator and the baling man who walks past your cubicle at work are thinking the same thing who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on a conversation with a stranger everybody carries a piece of the puzzle nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence trust your instincts do the unexpected find the others there's many Matrix undertones here um I mean I think we might have we might have covered this on a past podcast but um the idea that many people want to be exceptional but they're afraid of being an exception I think is such a it's it's wanting it's wanting an outcome without the requirement that the outcome has and so we can't do the same thing that everyone else approves of and then somehow get a different outcome than everyone else does and so I think it's that's why High that's why High Agency for me is something that I look for in other people which is you know asking someone why do you believe what you believe and we talk about this yesterday but if you have a belief and you can't explain why you believe it it's not yours it's someone else's and most people walk around parting other people's words for the vast majority of their lives and so they basically act as recorders where they clicked record at at one part of their life and then they click play in another time of their life and they're just clicking record play record play record play over and over again and the reason there's that in my opinion that other self that's behind it is because none of those words are yours and so it makes sense that people feel alone and they feel like they're acting because they never say what they think and as a result they also sound like everyone else because they were never themselves to begin with it's those first three lines admit it you aren't like them you're not even close and it sounds quite sort of self aggrandizing or or kind of narcissistic in a way to oh you considering yourself as being above other people I think I don't think it's to do with that I think it's that so many people ctail themselves and optimize for a mean that may not exist you know they're reverting to a mean that's just a figment of everybody's imagination and the only reason that people coales there is because other people think that other people are going to coales there you know the Keeny and beauty contest same same as that basically I don't know what it is oh okay so Kian beauty contest is uh people make judgments on not who they think is the most beautiful but on who they think other people think are the most beautiful and they're knowing that other people know that other people are going to make that decision based on that you end up with this infinite regress of trying to predict things this is what's happening with politics right it's not about picking the person that you want in your area it's about making the most tactical pick to ensure that overall accounting for the other people and what they're going to choose that the person that you really don't want in power doesn't get the seat in your area but somebody else in some other area so when you have this sort of recursive but it it happens socially too I say the thing that I think that you want to hear knowing that you know that I could say the thing that I want but so what I say is some mediator halfway between what I want to say and what I think you want to hear from me and it just ends up with people nobody being themselves and everybody being some weird simum of what they think everybody else wants them to be and if we go back to motivation the question is what quote motivates people to do this or or to behave in this way and so most times it's fear of something right and so they're afraid of something in their minds but when you actually play it out which is one of my favorite frames in the world which is let's take this to the hypothetical extreme or let's play it out two more two more plays two more turns and most times you end up getting way closer to what you really want the moment after the bad thing that you think will happen happens and so we've we've discussed that that there's so many amazing things that have happened in my life and your life and many people's lives that happened immediately after they get out they have something bad happen that gets them out of that realm of just barely good enough but not really and so we have this fear of disrupting that just barely good enough but not really but you're also already miserable and so the fear of disrupting your misery feels ridiculous and so when you think about it like that right so when you think about it like that exactly the only thing we have to lose is the current misery of mediocrity that we're trudging through every day and so worst case you're just also still miserable but maybe you won't be mediocre anymore because at least you won't be like everyone else but there's also a possibility that you are not miserable and also not mediocre and by doing that you might also just start seeing who you really are because I think a great portion of our identity comes from the proof that we give ourselves of the things that we've done and said in the past and so if we want to build towards a different version of ourselves then it begins with acre stacking evidence that aligns with that future self and so in some ways break the plate take the shot get rejected because when you do that then again the worst case is you have a broken plate but you didn't like that plate to begin with it is astounding how many people want to be spectacular in life but also want to fit in and be normal like by being normal You Are by definition aiming for average normal people get normal results weird people get weird results you literally can't do what everyone else does and not expect to get what everyone else has by doing what everyone else does you guarantee average results it's your brother your mom your friend the one comment they're going to say you've changed why are you doing another kick like this oh you're going to try that now okay here we go again and the thing is is that it's not about them being right or wrong again it's about how right and how wrong they could be and so for example let's say you wanted to start a podcast in the past and you did three episodes and then you fell off and then they think I told you so stop with these dreams stop with this crazy content stuff you're never going to become an influencer or whatever your goal is replace influencer with what whatever your thing is the thing is is that you are still closer having done three than having done zero and so it's just about directional correctness and real realizing that criticizers are more often correct but when it matters most Incorrect and so this is where frequency and intensity become uh flipped so somebody I mean from the investment world it's like okay if I take 10 bets and I lose nine some people might say he must be a bad investor but the question is how much did I lose on the nine and how much did I make on the one and the best investors in the world understand the benefits of outside returns both on the upside and the downside and so meaning the perfect way of betting is having no downside and having a limited upside you want to make as many of those bets as you can and in the beginning that is literally what you have and so the problem is you have a bet that you take you make three podcasts and you didn't stick with it and so then criticizer gets one point but you lost nothing you maybe even gained a little bit of skill and you gained some experience which means you're actually still better off than than you were when you started so it is a zerol loss game by choosing to begin that's the thing about cynic right 99% of the time and wrong 100% of the time I use this example because I think it really drives it home so if you if you have judgmental parents or judgmental friends or judgmental whatevers and you date people and you bring them home if they say I don't think this is the girl for you they're right every single time your entire life except for the one person that you decide to marry and then they are absolutely wrong at the time that it mattered most and the thing is is they get to say on your sixth girlfriend and seventh girlfriend and eighth girlfriend because let's face it you've been alive for a while I have a perfect I have a perfect guess I'm right 100% of the time this Ru will see how long this one lasts and two years in they're like see you finally broke up with her I told you at the beginning it wasn't going to last well it never [ __ ] lasts except for the one that's going to stick duh and the business never works until it's the one that does and the episode doesn't take off except for the one that does and whether it's 10 or 10,000 eventually one does because when you do more you get better at doing which is why not quitting is the best skill and the only thing that matters because by default with an infinite game perspective which I encourage everyone to have the point of the game is to keep the game going it's the only objective because even if I obviously come from the business world so even if your goal was to be number one at business it's like by what metric Enterprise Value growth profit Revenue all of a sudden okay maybe it's richest man in the world okay for how long look at the history of mankind not one person has ever been richest man forever and so you get to touch the top even if you're that one guy for a moment and then it's gone again and so you can't have that as the the end point because it is bides very nature finite but the competitor who objective is to continue to play can't be beaten because by playing he wins this is why I think a lot of people have chips on their shoulders once they get to even a modicum of success because everybody that starts off has this huge amount of Escape veloc vity that's needed to be accumulated starting from Total inertia lifting off where the gravity is strongest going past all of these the disbelief and the criticism and the lonely chapter and all of this stuff so they've had to go through all of these trenches and get over all of these hurdles and then they finally get to the stage where they're in a little bit more light altitude they're floating out there a little bit more and maybe their uh velocity gives them or their their fuel gives them more returns in terms of their velocity and now people say I must be nice for you and you go dude [ __ ] you like if you could have seen how much criticism and hard work and lonely nights and all of this stuff when nobody was watching and I was was unsure of myself chronically miserable and I criticized and all my friends took the piss out me and I did all of these things I had to go through all of that for you to now say must be nice and that's why you know Cameron Haynes um carries this rock up ahead and it says poser on the back of it 72b Rock and he carries it up a really really steep hill and he does it with sometimes there's cameras around but a lot of the time there's no cameras around and uh he does that to it's the the only work that matters is the work that you do when nobody's watching the reason the goal isn't coming at you fast enough is because every person you've seen accomplish the goal you only see it the moment they accomplish it and the reason that it hurts so much when people are like must be nice oh that happened overnight is because every time you fail no one cares and no one sees but when you finally win people take notice discredited but it's the only time they notice is when you actually win and so to even further reinforce the point the fact that everyone looks like an overnight success means that the 10 years where they sucked no one saw and so the fear that you have about people noticing the fact that you fail is ridiculous because they're barely going to notice when you succeed yeah I think this is one of the reasons why tracking the journey this is something that uh Chris bumstead's done very well you know he's had his um videographer Calvin with him for forever essentially and you know tracking autoimmune disorders and and depression and his wife's pregnant and then having the kid and I got to come back and do yeah yeah all of that um I think one of the ways that you can at least lighten the load or bring it into land a little bit more effectively is to construct that story arc you know the story of you sleeping in the gym and the cars go over the top and it makes the loud noise and stuff that is an important part of getting people to buy into where you are now by proving that you were there when the line was flat or the actually somehow managed to break through the floor and go negative a number of times and um I remember I was watching Maisy Williams she was one of the she was Arya Stark in Game of Thrones and um somebody asked her what she wished that she'd done differently and you know I think she starts on that show and she's 11 or 12 and it's all of the most formative years of her life until she's or something in the decade of doing this show and somebody asked her what she wished that she'd done differently and she started journaling I think in season five and there's maybe nine Seasons or something and she had no recollection of what happened in the beginning and she really wanted that and I think that uh if there's a regret that I have with this show it's that we didn't track more of what was happening behind the scenes from the very beginning partly for everybody else to show just how much [ __ ] I went through to kind of prove that but more so for me to remind myself of where it was and I'm sure that you know there's a couple of photos you know the bed in the corner of the gym like [ __ ] I wish like I had that and I wish I had this and I wish I had another one uh you know if you'd had Caleb with you the whole time imagine how [ __ ] I'd be poor and broke I never would have made it out probably Pro probably in [ __ ] hospital as well being on the back of a motorcycle um but yeah I I I think it's important I think it's important to track that to track that Journey for yourself and for for other people but it's such it does piss me off like I wish that human psychology wasn't so easily manipulated like when you see that trick when you see the well if you go Zero to Hero even if you go Zero to Hero to zero to back to Hero again like as long as you can construct that narrative sufficiently strongly for people you can just get other humans to buy into you but it hasn't changed what you did it's just changed the way that you presented it to people and the story that you told so it when you start to see things like that it makes I find it disenchanting because it reminds me how fickle crowd mentality is and it's why uh Ethan SLE um big Hollywood actor weighed 500 or something and now he's 260 and he used to play Fat Guy funny roles and now he plays Jack bearded biker dude roles and the reason that his transformation is so fantastic is that you know him from before and you know him now but the dude that just gets in shape or that goes through the silent quiet Challenge and didn't track the progress gets noneof the Accolade despite going through all or maybe even more of the challenge so much done pack um I'd say one of the strongest mental frames that has gotten me through my hardest times is thinking this will be the story that I will one day tell and that means the harder it is the bigger the dragon the more epic the story and by Consequence the more epic the hero and if you think about the difference between winners and losers winners Define themselves by what they made happen and losers Define themselves by what happened to them and the difficult part of the Lonely chapter is that the rocky cut scene lasts 90 seconds in the movie and lasts five years in reality with no promise of it ever ending no guarantee of Glory what's interesting about and I don't again I don't like using the word psychology but I'll say what's interesting about humans is that our ability to endure is very robust if we know that we'll make it out and so they've done mice studies where they drop the mouse in and then they let it drown and it drowns really fast and then they drop a mouse in and then before it gets to the point where it drowns they pick it up and then they put it back in and the second time they put it in it can last like 20 times longer I think for the stats of something around will drown in less than an hour if it's taken out dried off and allowed to relax it'll swim for a day an absurd amount different and so if I were to say hey I need you to hold your breath but I don't tell you how long 20 seconds in you might be thinking this is stupid is he going to stop is he going to wait for me to pass out and all these stupid thoughts go into your mind but if I say I need you to hold your breath for three minutes your lungs might burn but you can see that there's this end that's coming the difficulty with personal development and Entrepreneurship is that you don't know when the end is coming but you still need to fight like the second mouse who gets out gets red off and gets put back in and the only certainty that I can give you is that it's the same thing that every other Mouse every other person who got through that period went through and you won't die and if you do die you won't care because you'll be dead and so best case you win worst case it won't matter it's the same mentality it's the same reason why Uber works the reason that Uber works is partly because you can get a car from anywhere but the real reason is that you know when the car's going to arrive MH you know remember back in the day you'd ring a taxi and then just wait and you go well I mean he's some far away I don't know how far away and then it ends up coming along we've mentioned it a couple of times today a frame that I've used North a lot over the last year or so uh is this is the price of doings business M uh so reframing things from Bugs to Features MH uh you know you need to get into one of my nightclubs 10 years ago there's an entry fee at the door and this is the cost of doing business I remember uh Facebook got this the biggest fine in Tech History maybe 10 years ago or something like that and they find some obscene numbers absolutely huge number and somebody worked it out that it was like half of one quarter of one territory's profit and you think well I'm I'm aware that in sort of absolute terms this is a massive number but in relative terms they can just go okay well we'll just Factor this into the p&l and go through this so thinking about the byproduct of things that other people see as a luxury that you have uh reduction of privacy that that comes along perhaps with increasing the size of your platform and you go okay well I can shout and scream and rail against this uh people saying must be nice you know that's a good one [ __ ] hell that's a difficult one I going to get people saying must be nice because I just got a promotion at work and that's unfair because I worked hard for that and I want them to say to me well done I know that you probably went through tons of hardship that I didn't see or wow you've really changed the texture of your mind due to all of that meditation that you did um I'm sure that 500 Mornings in a row sat on a cushion in your bedroom in butt [ __ ] nowhere listening to Sam Harris speak in your ears was really really tough they're not going to say that they're going to say well I mean it's all right for you man you just don't seem to get angry that easily you go dude you know [ __ ] nothing about me you have no idea how hard it was for me to get from where I was to where I am now but instead of seeing that as you cannot change what other people are going to say because that is the natural human response to minimize progress that other people have made in order to shorten the gap between you and them because if it's due to hard work that's something that they could have done if it's due to Natural innate Talent OR genetic predisposition that's something that they have no control over so it shortens the gap of work and worth between you and them so instead of seeing it as oh my God this is malignant and a personal curse and so [ __ ] unfair you just go this is the price of doing business if I want to be a mindful person people are going to say to me dude you just seem so calm all the time I wish I was like you I wish I was built like you but you know I just had too hard of a childhood or dude you you you're doing so well at work I wish that I didn't have the kids or I didn't have those restrictions or that my parents had taught me more about business it's just the price of doing business you know a fun frame with that is when someone says must be nice you can just say yeah it is or someone says man you must have exceptional genetic ICS to have the body you have and it just happens so easily for you and you're like yeah it's sweet and the thing is is that if we think if we were to just say like if we lean into it right to some degree by leaning into it you also eliminate a competitor if you want to hear my my ugly side because if I just affirm the fact that they think it happened overnight or that it was genetic or whatever makes it more Out Of Reach right yeah I've thought dude I've thought about this so this is such a good point such a good point the somebody telling you going David Goggins mode and somebody saying this is how hard I had to work to achieve this thing look at how hard I had to go through and look at all of the setbacks I had and look at just how in the red I was before I got to the black before I got to the green just look at all of these things people see that as a threat people see that as a humble brag but what it is is a treasure map this is where I was and this is where I went and me with all of my inefficiencies and deficiencies and setbacks got from there to here you aren't even as far into the red as I was so all of the talk I I understand why hustle Pon kind of gets a cringe push back from the world but what it actually should be is an unbelievably empowering message that anybody can get from wherever they are to wherever you are the much more disempowering one was yeah man it you know it just comes to me easily so yeah if you really want to [ __ ] somebody up tell them that it's ineffable tell them that it's ethereal and astral and you can't get here one of my favorite ways to help someone overcome an excuse or limiting belief is to tell them I believe them and so if I'm like hey why don't you double your prices and then they give four reasons why they can't double your their prices and then I'll say then you'll fail forever and then they're like well no because X Y and Z and it's like great glad we got there that's like your thing about only one person can be in the angry boat yeah one person can only be in the negative boat yeah it work it's unbelievable how powerful that is um what's interesting about a lot of the discontent that we have around how people judge our success or achievement is that we have this unspoken demand that they have a visceral understanding of everything that we went through without having been there and the problem with that is that if they understood everything then they would have a complete understanding of how to do it themselves and so it's making an impossible demand of strangers to somehow be successful already so that they can appreciate our success it's also removing your competitive advantage and so it's interesting this is just for everyone who's listening is that Chris you can probably attest to this is that um of the people that I've met in my life who've been extremely successful at any Endeavor there's this kind of and I want to make a video about this but it's what people say in the back room and there are these common things that we say to one another that other people wouldn't believe so we're like they just don't get how much actual work it is to do a podcast like this PE like you don't actually get that what 100 hours of preparation for one 1 hour event looks like you you can understand it conceptually but when you actually set a timer and you only use that timer and you pause it when you stop working and you do 100 hours of work all of a sudden by the end of that 100 hours you have a very different understanding to the very granular level of what it takes to be great at anything and that's 100 hours not 10,000 hours but 100 hours with feedback and so everyone's like in the back room they want this magic pill they want to they want to know the secret but there is no secret it's just hard work but I think the thing that everyone who's who's listening lacks is the context on how hard hard work is not in that it's complex but just in that it's a continuous and unending Focus on one thing and noticing the details that separate mediocrity from greatness and if you're like I don't know what the difference between those two things is that is the opportunity that hard work reveals is that it takes watching 10 hours of you presenting and then taking notes at every time that you say um or that a transition between slides is unclean or that the audience kind of gets lost there because I can see that there's no reactions to that I should probably add a visual there and then when you go slide by slide realizing that okay I can put a thousand slides together for 90 minutes of presenting if I really put one thought with one visual per slide and every one of them and I love this description is like a coat of paint it's like you just put another coat of paint on the skill set or the achievement that you're working towards and most people expect that the pencil wireframe that they do on their first shot is hard work because that's the hardest they've worked not the amount of hard work that is required in order to get the level of outcome that they say they want or that they expect and so there's a divorce in reality because they don't have the context from which to make a judgment because they've never been great at anything and until you get great because as soon as you get great at one thing you realize just the tremendous amount of hours and work that it takes to be great at one thing and then there's this oh [ __ ] moment that I can express personally which is you realize that there's so few things that you can be great at and then the discipline comes down to saying what are the two or three things that I can be really good at in my life because it will take me five to seven years to be exceptional at this one thing and so like even like making content a lot of people see my stuff now but I just had a friend send me a video that he interviewed me before I made any other videos and I showed I sent it to my team and uh he was like dude I I watched it and he was like and it was you but then I like I covered the face and it he was like I mean it's your voice but he's like your Clarity of thinking wasn't there in the way that you articulated and the thing is is it's it's uh if to the untrained eye to a beginner they look at that video and they look at my current videos and say I don't get why he blew up because it's the same dude but the master or the expert level can say I can give you a hundred different things that could have been better about his now or his old videos compared to his Now videos and it's the granularity of that feedback that allows you to see the discrepancy between your current and you're desired and I think that once you actually give yourself the reality glasses not the wo is me glasses but think no really if I had to do this what are what are all of the things that I would have to improve then you see how incredibly long that list is and then you take this deep breath and that list is the hard work it's starting at the top and then wanting to cross the first one off after your first day but then realizing you still haven't done it well enough to cross it off and you're like wait I have to do another day and I still haven't quote made a dent in this list and then you do it another day and a third day and a fifth day and a fifth week and then all of a sudden you're like okay I think I've got the first one done and then you still look at this list but along the way of doing that first one you realize 20 other things that you could add to that list for every one that you cross off you create 10 more because you start to win in the weeds you start to look at a higher resolution and that's the never ending cycle of Excellence it makes great things seem closer than you thought and further than you thought at the same time same time 100% there's no perfect way to live your 20s you either live them up and become an unders skilled 30-year-old or you work come up and become an underlied 30-year-old you just have to figure out which you'd rather be accept the tradeoffs and know that there are no doovers and door three if you consider work life then you get to do both that one ruffled a lot of feathers wa because people look back on the 20s and realize that they are one or the other all right I'm I'm going to lean into this I I am okay I had a conversation with my team about this and I said I am okay being a beacon of Relentless hard work I'm okay being the guy who says [ __ ] your mental health I'm okay with it because I've given it a lot of thought I think that there is the other side is wildly over represented and I'm willing to sit on the logical extreme because I think it will help more people and there are more people that I have met in my life who are dissatisfied by their Live It Up 20s then dissatisfied by their work it up 20s because most of the time in your 20s you have no idea what you want but knowing what you need to do to work and move ahead is fairly straightforward and so you can take the known and make progress on the one that you have high confidence that you can make progress on and then along the way gain perspective Ive on what are the things that are actually important to you in your life and you may find out often that they're far fewer of those things than you really originally thought because what you thought live them up in your 20s was was actually your mom and your two homies who are both mediocre and you don't care about their opinion now when you're 30 anyways but what a waste of a life it would have been to quote live up your mom's dream or your friend's dreams to then only get to your 30s and realize you didn't live it up and you also didn't work it up and now you have neither I think a lot about you know the first day that I sat down at University my first ever seminar I sat next to my what would be future business partner for 15 years so I'm skinned I say to him I've spent all of my money partying during Fresh's week the first week I'd spent my entire maintenance loan which was supposed to be food and everything else for the of the term until [ __ ] Christmas and it's September the 29th it a big week it it was a good week um which I could not survive now and I think uh I think back to sort of the the time that I spent and the endless hours I'm not kidding and I don't talk I I don't reflect that much on the the club promo stuff maybe to my detriment I should do it more uh I've spent between 5 and 10,000 hours stood on the front door of nightclubs I've spent at least 3,000 hours stood on the front door of the same nightclub only on Saturdays right I didn't miss 202 Saturdays in a row I took four day holidays from Sunday to Thursday so that I could come back to come and do this thing and I look back at my 20s and I think you know was that how much was living how much was accumulating skills and The Grass Is Always was greener with this because in hindsight you think well you know you imagine that you could have gone back and still accumulated all of the insights and the skills that you really value in yourself that would have still happened but that you would have got to maybe have more variety or you would have maybe the fun or the whatever the thing and uh when I look for me with my Constitution at what I value most in myself almost all of those things have been accumulated by having a 20s and now a 30s that has been dedicated to work it up not to Liv it up to 4-day holidays in between those things now remembering that now is not forever I think is really important again you're on the outlier right hand end of the distribution for work most people are going to pull themselves back across in terms of balance between work and play but you can periodize what you're doing right now you can accumulate all of that work all of that experience all of that explore time to work out actually I don't like doing admin stuff it turns out I'm really great at creative or I really don't like traveling it turns out I'm really great at routine all of those things there's like a buyin you remember CrossFit you do the you do a buyin thing you it's a one mile run and then it's this workout you have to do that buyin let's say everyone has to do that buyin doing that buyin when you're 25 is way easier than doing that buying when you're 40 right I finally work out who I am in the the world because you start to accumulate all of these better directional assistances you're moving in a more directionally accurate way earlier which means that you make more progress over the long term so in retrospect I'm glad that I did work it up 20s and I'm glad that I did work it up 30s as well so I'll say two two things that might be helpful um one is you obviously know my stance if you're listening to this on work life balance but maybe as a as a concession for you your work life balance Obsession may just be too narrowly focused on the present and not extended into seasons and so you can have work life balance where I work for three years and then I have a more chill year and I think that most people think about work life in terms of their split of the day rather than their split of the year or the decade and I think that you can have a much better outcome on both sides es if you were to split it up on a longer time Horizon so good I mean everybody knows what it's like to go through it every January intense period of diet I [ __ ] it at Christmas again too much chocolate too much too much dinner and you go okay well what are you going to do I'm going to work hard I'm going to focus on my diet and my training for a while and then I'm going to hold those gains for a period or I'm going to build a business okay my Health's probably going to take a hit for a little while or or I just got out of a relationship I need to go dating all right well I'm probably not going to be able to spend so much time at work or maybe I'm going to be sleeping later so my my fitness is going to knock off a little bit all of these things happen for periods of time and yeah remembering that now isn't forever is and that's such a great frame like a hyperbolic discounting and inability to be able to imagine that this is not the way that it's always going to be and that's good for good things and for bad things this isn't the way it's always going to be so bet enjoy this win this isn't the way it's always going to be so I better not get too disheartened by this loss you will come back that's the the beautiful thing about this sort of uh honic renormalizing they go good things aren't as good as you think they are bad things aren't as bad as you think they are so if you if you use that extended frame as a way to approach different types of goals so I'll break a very standard one which is that people measure the amount of calories that they need to eat per day but very few people measure the amount of calories they need to eat per week and so people will blow the day and say well screw it I messed up today I might as well have a pizza on top of it because I had chocolate and I went off my diet or whatever but if you have a weekly Outlook even then all of a sudden you're like oh well I can have a pizza tonight I'll just like skip most of my food tomorrow besides protein or I'll have a wedding weekend and know that this whole week I'm going to be light and so I have you know 13,000 calories for the next seven days that I can work my way through which gives me a tremendous amount of flexibility MH and the thing is is that the further you extend the time Horizon the more flexible you can be with your achievement of it as long as you only get the few things that matter most and so it allows you to focus and prioritize on those few things that move the needle rather than be overly obsessive on such a small narrow window of time that is irrelevant anyways so there's a there's a coordination problem that happens when you try to balance too quickly when you try to have a little bit of fun and a little bit of play and a little bit of fun and a little bit of play whe whether it's task switching whether it's just sort of the cognitive effort of uh your personality like your identity is I'm gym guy for three months hooray I'm work guy for three months hooray but when it's I'm gym guy this morning I'm work guy this afternoon it's tough it's tough to do that so yeah kind of the same as you get dis economies of scale as a business grows because there's more interconnectedness and communication between each person the more use there are going on inside so this is an argument for sort of aggressive periodizing I'm uh hyper proponent of one single narrow Focus I'll Define two more terms since the audience didn't ask for it sadness is a perceived lack of options it's why it feels like hopelessness because you don't know what to do you don't know what options are available you see none which is why it feels like there's no way out anxiety is many options but no priorities which is why you feel scattered but you can't decide they feel very different but fundamentally those are the difference in the conditions that make people feel like they're anxious or they feel like they're sad and so when we're working through what you were just talking about with okay I want to be gym guy and I also want to be work guy we have many options but a lack of priorities and so we have anxiety over the fact that we're not making progress on any of them because we have not been able to say this comes first so if we think about what priority means it means prior it comes before everything else and what I think a lot of people have a hard time doing is being okay with saying no and saying okay I will allow myself to just not get fatter rather than get fitter during this period and what's interesting about most skills is that the amount of effort that it takes to maintain a skill versus the amount of effort it takes to grow a skill is like on10th the amount of effort and so this is where the effort Arbitrage is so important an in terms of allocation and so if you do a four out of 10 on 10 things you will make progress on none you will make the same amount of progress that you could have made if you just did one out of 10 which is none you just don't regress but the extra three points that you save on the nine you could put on one other item and have a 10 out of 10 or a 13 out of 10 in effort and then after every periodized chunk of time have a Big W or win that you can look back on and say I did that and therefore I am and so I think that that's how you step up the mountain of progress when you're trying to work on many different skills quote at the same time it's just that the at the same time is over a year not over a day George told me told me this while we were on mushrooms in Nashville [ __ ] brilliant so I'm there watching the hook got got to get people in the door yeah I'm there Fourth of July George turned to me and he said General ambition gives you anxiety specific ambition gives you Direction there is nothing more anxiety inducing than I want to be better and I don't know what at and I don't know how like just think about that for a second sort of embodi that I I it it's sort of a chasing it's a lean in and it's it's tight and sort of your shoulders are up and there's a ringing in your ears and you have no idea it's like a threat you've heard a noise in the forest and you have no idea where it's come from specific ambition gives you Direction and I think the concept of specific versus General ambition ladders up to bundled terms I want this big thing but I haven't broken that thing down into what I can actually do once you get specific into the actions you don't have a lot of anxiety because you can see what is required in order to get it and so to circle the loop back on sadness which is because some people who are listening to this may be sad so this is for you to get out of sadness and I've been sad many times in my life the thing that's helped me get out of it is realizing that a perceived lack of options is what causes sadness not a lack of options a perceived lack of options which means that all I have to do is figure out what I need to do and figuring it out becomes the option and so then I have Clarity on the one thing that I need to do to pull myself out of this moment of sadness which is oh I just have to figure out what to do and that is how I get at least for me have gotten out of my sder periods controversial take you really can solve a lot of male Problems by getting in shape and making money you still have problems they're just smaller and you have more resources to handle them the world is there for the taking for anyone who can learn from their mistakes do what they say they were going to do and stick with it even if it's not sexy what used to make a man acceptable now makes you extraordinary the Batha winning has never been so low show me two groups of men that need to learn a new skill or achieve anything where the men that are in shape and have learned to make money do worse than an identical group of those men who are out of shape and have not learned to make money and it's a it's a skewed purposefully test because the skill of getting in shape requires many other skills the skill of making money has many other sub skills and so the real question is give me a group of more skilled men and less skilled men and and I promise you the more skilled men will do better and so for anyone who gets offended by that you're a [ __ ] and so the idea is all men and women benefit from learning more skills there's no world where being more skilled hurts you what about the BFF winning is never been solo if you think back to college when you were a freshman you think wow this is so hard or whatever and then by the time you're a senior like man these kids are so soft and so we remember things as harder than they were but I also think that there is a thread of reality which is that the younger generation is softer and I think we are softer than the generation above us when I think about the guys who were storming Normandy and I think about the people who' be attempting to do that now as a class I think that we are softer and so the thing is is that if you can barely decide to take any action at all and peel your eyes away from your phone for just a moment it's so much easier to beat everyone else because most people are overweight they're distracted they're poor they have so few skills because it has never been easier to start a business to make money to get in shape it's just also never been easier to do nothing and so in a world where it's never been easier to do nothing doing something becomes extraordinary yeah the bar genuinely never has been so low which is it really does blow my mind sort of the self-defeating cynicism mindset and I think also that's why the idea of the Lonely chapter resonates so much with people because it it literally is like taking the red pill if you see this version of the world where you go I can impact my outcomes I can learn a thing apply a thing and then I change as a byproduct of doing that as soon as you take those steps you realize almost all of the people around you who have parts of their life that they're not happy about are kind of making a choice for it to be that way now it may be an uninformed or an ignorant choice because they haven't taken said pill and then you go oh [ __ ] that means that all of the things I don't like about me and I don't like about my life are my responsibility because I can change it but given that you've got generalized cynicism everywhere as opposed to thinking I'm despondent this sucks I wish wish that the world was more hopeful you can still think that and also go so that means that my competition has never been weaker more vulnerable more Fragile the ability to set myself out from the pack has never been easier I think people struggle a lot with the concept that something can be both painful and empowering it's this hurts therefore it's bad when taking full accountability of your life with all of the deficiencies that you have may be the most painful thing that you do when you look yourself in the mirror and say this is my fault but in saying this is my fault those are also the first two steps of progress because it's my fault not anyone else's which means it's my responsibility and my action that can change that and I think that marrying short-term pain with long-term progress is one of the first connections that most people who are on that path have to make this is the lead indicator of what will be the lag indicator that I want people get frustrated not achieving what they want because they assume that they're going to jump across a cavern in one Leap but if you picture your goals like you're trying to build a bridge across that crevice and every brick that you put on that bridge is progress and each one of those bricks represents a skill that you need to learn along the way it just takes all the way until you get to the other side that you can actually walk across and so the walking across is the outcome it's the external perceived achievement but if you can reframe your progress as what are the hundred things on this checklist what are the hundred skills that I need the micro skills that I need then you can have much faster feedback cycles of wins that you're achieving along the way and I think if you can Define it that way then you can feel like you are winning a more often but B with higher intensity because as you win skills stack on top of each other and so I give this example a lot but I like it is that if you are you learned how to do math that's a skill great if you then learn how to do accounting that's a leveled up version of that skill but you require you have to know how to do math before you can do accounting once you learn how to do accounting you can learn how to do transactions and structure deals and then all of a sudden you can become a CFO and if you learn how taxes work and insurance work then all of a sudden you become and and you learn how to raise money all of a sudden you can be a rain maker but the thing is is that the gap between rain maker and I know how to do math feels very big but if you look at all of the micro things along the way you might not get your first major deal done which is what everyone in the man he did that deal and made $20 million on one signature must be nice right and it is uh but if you if you break those things down into the into the the requisite skills then you can make significantly more progress along the way and I think that is more positively reinforcing and I'm just I'm sharing this because this has been a perspective that has served me so well in my life because the goals that I have now take many years to come to fruition like I'm I'm working in a goal that in the next probably 18 months I will have been working on for 13 years and it will it will probably come du and the crazy thing is is that the bigger your goal the bigger your timeline has to be but the the even crazier thing is that the bigger your timeline the easier it is if I said you just have you have to learn French and you don't speak French and you have to do it by tomorrow it's impossible you're not going to do it there's no way that you're going to be able to do it but if I said you have to learn in a decade you're like oh I could I could easily do it you could probably learn 10 languages in a decade and so all of a sudden the goals that you have can be significantly more achievable and you can feel like you're consistently making progress by moving out your timeline but because people are so short-term minded because they can't just stop scrolling over and over again they actually make it harder for them to achieve their goals because the only goals that they deem acceptable are ones that are on an unrealistic timeline and so they doom themselves from the beginning how to avoid tons of problems in life go to bed on time so I love these I want to find single behaviors that have many positive outcomes so if you think about leverage as what you get for the effort you put in if you have lots of Leverage then it means you can do one thing and get many big outcomes right or one very big outcome that's high leverage if you put a lot of work in and get a very little bit out of it you have low leverage and so the highest form of Leverage I think of are what's one Behavior or one skill that I can learn that then has many many Downstream impacts and so for and this is specifically I'll say for the the 20ish year old so 20 to 30 20 to 35 if you can simply go to bed on time you avoid drinking and getting in a DUI you avoid early pregnancies you avoid missing messing up your work because you don't sleep well because uh you show up hung over the next day and then you don't get the career advancement that you want or you get the judgments from your co-workers from the fact that you're responsible because you drink even though it might have been responsible drinking but you still smell like booze because it's in your system if you go to bed on time it's less likely that you'll get mugged it's less likely you'll be in a car AC like there's there's all of these Downstream impacts from one single behavior and you also have better quality sleep in general if you go to sleep at the same time every day over and over again so that means that you have life extension things that happen you look younger and so now 5 years 10 years later people are like wow you look so good for your age there's all of these things from one Central Behavior which is just [ __ ] go to bed on time and so if you want the action for this you set your alarm for when you go to bed not for when you wake up if you set your alarm for when you go to bed you will always be able to wake up naturally whatever you time you wake up and it's very difficult to oversleep when you go to bed at 9:00 because you can get 8 hours of sleep and still be up by five what are some of the other behaviors that fit in that category do you think oh the the the mega bang behaviors M give you one that A friend gave me one thing uh buying a dog with his so um externalizing your sense of self having something which gives you unconditional love uh your step count has just quadrupled at least uh there is a sort of degree of um responsibility it's sort of early onset furry child rearing that makes you a better parent in future just Downstream from this one decision an in essentially infinite number of good things happen are you gritting at before my team's smiling because they know that there's probably like one thing that I tell everyone not to do get a dog yeah wow why don't you want them to get a dog so I think that getting a dog for the reasons that you outlined makes sense for living life satisfaction like if you don't walk walking a dog is a good thing if I already walk I don't get that benefit if I have interpersonal relationships and an outside version awareness of self then I don't necessarily get the benefit but there are significant costs to having a dog which for me from a making money perspect perspective because that is the game that I like to play uh it costs a lot Dogs cost a tremendous amount and so they cost you not being able to go to events they cost you having to break up in the middle of the day to go home to let the dog out they cost actual money uh the amount of total time that you spend walking the dog if you already work out is most of the time just wasted now you could say hey I'm listening to a podcast fine but if it but it will interrupt deep work for the most part and so I uh so to give you context on how extreme I am about this uh Leila uh bought a dog and then I uh got her to give it away uh what sort of dog was it King Charles um spaniel the little nice strong British dog very yeah super nice dog nothing wrong with the dog good dude racist decision yes and so I uh we just gave it to somebody else in a good home and it's very happy and you know what it probably forgot about me instantly what else what some of these other Big B I mean there's obviously the exercise because like if you think about what are the what are the big things that because the dog one was Downstream from I mean for me a big one there is exercise like if you walk or two it's like physical and psychological Health basically yeah so it has multiple there um I would say eating your body weight in grams of protein per day so if we think about uh lean body mass is one of the big predictors for long-term health and things like that um there are only three things that are anabolic hormones resistance training and protein like if someone doesn't eat protein and they start eating protein they have more muscle like you don't have to exercise if you just eat more protein you gain muscle because you have you lose less muscle because more of it comes from your diet than eating away of the muscle you have that's it like those are the three things and so like you can do one of them and the nice thing is for most people who want to operationalize this there's this big idea and I'm not going to get into food and fitness stuff cuz dear God but people think I have to eat healthy and it's this big amorphous thing but if we chunk it down it means that you need to pick two things that you like to eat in the morning that have the macros that you need to hit and you can try as many times as you want because you only need one or two that you actually like and then you can stick with it this is one of the best insights that you had about diet which is people over comp okay trying to deconstruct what a diet consists of but if you actually look at what you eat across a year it's probably five meals on rotation maybe less I think I've probably got three good meals in my locker you know my my Gordon Ramsey would be [ __ ] ashamed of coming from the same country so okay we just optimize those three meals or those five meals and that's it and the thing is is that a lot of personal development things business things are a lot like that where they feel like an elephant when you are trying to trying to break down this math like I have to learn nutrition I have to there's five meals 10 meals Max that you eat 90% of the time you just need to shift the dynamic of those meals even the restaurants that you go to even the way that you order your food in the restaurants that's it and so that would be one that I would say is a super high leverage one thing you can do is just change the three to five meals that you eat most commonly to be the ones that are Mor Ed with what you want and go to bed on time and go to bed I mean shoot if you go to bed on time and you do that king of the world king of the world uh this is one from me having a clue is overrated there's this funny myth that people actually know what they're doing I've spent time around some of the richest smartest highest status people on the planet and let me tell you it's idiots all the way up normalize saying I don't have a clue I'm going to work out how to do it anyway having a clue is overrated one of my green flags for intellect is someone being able to say that they don't know like it's almost inverted at this point because I think at some point during school if a teacher calls on you and you say you don't know you're punished for that and so we have such a repetitive cycle of both having it happen to us and watching people like us have a punishing experience that it's very very hardcore taught to us to never say that that we don't know but that most basic lie trains us over and over again to never say what we actually think and if we don't know then that may be one of the easiest ways to start telling the truth it's kind of the same as the if I can't trust you on know I can't trust you a yes I love it yeah it's the exact same energy not knowing is really powerful because then learning becomes the only clear directive and so if we know what learning is which is same condition new Behavior then it's like what do I need to change about what I do in order to learn this thing it also allows us to say many things are not worth learning because they probably won't affect my life in any way well think how much you pity the person who like it is literally the worst if you imagine a quadrant of no and not knowing and thinking you know and thinking you don't know the worst quadrant to be in is thinking you know whilst not knowing right and that is every single person who isn't prepared to say I don't know yeah and internally doesn't believe it I've already got the answer for that you know they they they are unable to transition across into white belt or beginner mentality they're always in that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I know about that I know about that I think Mark Twain said it's it's not the things we know that kill us but the things that just that we think we know but just ain't so a lot of self-work can be summarized into thoughts aren't true feelings don't require actions things aren't good or bad they just are our greatest enemy is ignorance to change your life change your surroundings our actions not our pasts Define who we are I think that's pretty much probably 95% of self-work I stand by my statement thoughts aren't true feelings don't require action things aren't good or bad they just are our greatest enemy is ignorance to change your life change your surroundings our actions not our pasts Define who we are man I could unpack all of those so let's start with ignorance so I am not a moralist but if I were a moralist then I would say that ignorance is the only evil and therefore knowledge is the only good and so most atrocities if we Define them that way that humans inflict on one another comes from ignorance we don't know something about the other person or the other party and if we had absolute context on why someone does what they do if we lived their life then we would have absolute knowledge on it and then we would be them and so then we probably wouldn't try to hurt them because we would be them and so I see the pursuit of knowledge and it's corollary how I like it the pursuit of learning changing our Behavior to be my ultimate purpose in life because if I think about myself as going through life then I want to learn as much as I can which is changing my behavior ideally suited to the direction that I want to go in as for the if you want to change your life change your surroundings if we want to behave a certain way then we want to increase the likelihood that a behavior occurs and so BF Skinner said this and I just love this it's like my most Savage quote of his he says people say you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink false said if I dehydrate the horse I salt its mouth I put it in the Heat and I put its face one inch away from water I can veritably guarantee that it will drink and I think about that visual all the time when I think about myself as the horse and I think to myself what is the behavior that I want drinking water and what is the salt in my mouth and what is the dehydration the motivation for this behavior that I can create and so I am not a believer in Free Will I believe that we respond to the conditions that we've had and then we learn behaviors as a result of those things and so for example I could get everyone in here the entire crew to get naked guarantee you I could do it all I would do is I just crank up the temperature and I'd wait and eventually everyone would get naked it would happen and so everyone has this idea that they have this free will but that's what would happen eventually and so if that's true then we have significantly less control and at the same time more control of our Behavior if we can stack the deck in our favor and so part of the reason going to bed at 9:00 p.m. is so powerful is because we're changing the conditions so that we can change our Behavior if all of your friends are poor Harvard did that long study and said that the the number one correlate was your reference group which is who you compare yourself to also note not who you spend the most time with it's who you compare yourself to and so if you want to change your life change who you compare yourself to number one but part of who you compare yourself to is who you spend your time with or who at least you can assume the most stuff so if you're doing this then maybe that's a good thing or maybe it's a terrible thing because you're comparing the wrong people but either way if you want to get fit if you get around fitter people you will be deprived of Fitness because you'll be the least in shaped person and then all of a sudden you'll be more motivated if you are poor but you're the richest of your friends or the same level of wealth as your friends then get around people who make more money and then of course people say but I can't get around people who make more money okay no one else has ever done it no one who has had it worse than you has ever figured out how to do it you're right right of course you're not right so shut the [ __ ] up thoughts aren't true oh I mean how many things do we think every day that are just false one they can be factually false but also from the um reactionary perspective I'll give an example so someone miscommunicate and Wrongs me in some way I get angry and think I should wrong them back now that's my first thought if I then say what does that behavior increase the likelihood of occurring as a result what do I want to have happen as a result of my behavior well I want them to apologize or I want them to just not do that again well then me reacting back to them increases the likelihood that they will retaliate and so in doing what my first thought was I increased the likelihood of the negative occurrence that I'm trying to avoid and so thinking through what happens after that thing in inpersonal Dynamics and also from a business decisions perspective has helped me so much like I've had I'll give you an example of one that happened not that long ago somebody reached out to me relatively big account and says hey um can you read my book it would mean the world to me if you left me an endorsement um and I said out of respect for you I won't just ghost this message or or give you a half-hearted answer and then just hope that you forget that I said yes I'm not going to endorse your book but you're welcome to send it to me I will probably just flip through it because I have a lot of other books that I need to read that are more closely related to my goal but I appreciate the flattery that's implied in you ask me to do that before I wrote that message I was like okay what do I want to have happen after I send this message now if I say the go if I just ghost him then I will probably have a null outcome and he'll probably have a slight negative because he'll remember but but he'll be like okay fine that was his way of saying no but if I say if I compliment him thank him for the compliment with me and also tell the truth I'll probably get somebody who in the future will know that my Yes means something when I when I choose to do it and so it's thinking like two steps ahead of what happens after I say this thing back and is how do I increase the likelihood of that second move not the first move and it sounds silly to say because people are like oh of course but like I don't think most people do that and it has helped me so much and even like with interpersonal Dam with with my marriage with Ila if I want Leila to to talk to to me a certain way then if I punish her when she doesn't talk to me that way what she'll really do is she'll avoid talking to me in general and so it's like I have to find a time when she does that thing so that I can immediately reward her so that I can increase the likelihood that it occurs and so I I think about this all the time with most of the Dynamics that we have and so um anyways I'll just stop on that tension but I think uh this is something especially over the last year that I've as a rehabilit people pleaser big people pleaser uh being able to make your needs known being able to make demands uh is a real skill and it's a it's so strange given that pursuing your needs is maybe one of the most fundamental human things that there is but I kind of realized that especially people that you respect in a sort of social dynamics way people don't want to hear what they want to hear they want to hear what you actually think about a thing so so many times someone will ask you opinion what do you think of the Oppenheimer movie what you think they want to hear is whatever they think which is oh wasn't it great did you watch in IMAX yeah I did did you get Sour Patch Kids yeah I did uh but what they actually want to hear if you were to say do you know what it is man like I don't know it was just a little sort of drawn out for me and all of the visual effects felt a little bit more I haven't seen it I don't [ __ ] know but what you think people want to hear is is not what they actually want to hear they want to hear what you think and that requires you to tell the truth and oddly enough that means that telling someone what they don't want to hear ends up with a bigger net positive for you than actually giving them the thing that they wanted for the business owners or for the advertisers in the room or the people who make content by the way this is the ultimate hack is just tell the truth because when you do that you will by definition make very unique content because everyone else is so of thinking or saying what they actually think and so you can stand out without trying to stand out the problem is that the vast majority of people who quote make content or try to quote add value just regurgitate what they think adds value rather than just saying what they really think Al the benefit of experience right because it's the only way that you can stress test whether or not this thing that you're trying to talk about is an actual thing and you also get an extra perspective on that too when you know that this is what most of the people say about a thing I have tried it and this is my perspective on not only the thing but why other people think that this thing is a thing given that I know that it doesn't work feelings don't require action very similar I think this one is super powerful for we'll relate All Phases but especially the beginner so if you're a beginner you have to separate you feeling something and you acting on that feeling because you may feel hopeless many many times but you need to continue to do the activities that are aligned with your goal you may feel hungry but you need to not eat the cookie to stay align with your goal you may feel angry but know that retaliating at your coworker has no likely positive outcome you may hate your boss but undermining them in front of the team may make you feel good in the moment but again destroy your long-term career prospects and so I think creating a gap and so I was talking to one of our CEOs who was having a little bit of stress issue and I said I I want you to think that you're a Yeti can I want you to think you're one of these cans that has a vacuum between both walls I like you got your feelings on one side you've got your internal temperature and you've got your external temperature and I was like I just want you to do this just create space and space within the context of behavior is time which is when I feel something and I have the desire to act on it you can at that moment you have the lowest action threshold which means that you're the highest likely of Behaving or or doing something thing is when you have this feeling and so I want to make as logical of decisions as I possibly can hopefully we're all aligned on the fact that logical decisions in general work out better than illogical decisions and so if we make logical decisions on a regular basis then we'll have longer term outcomes if we want to increase the likelihood that our decisions in general are logical then we want to create space between when we feel and when we do and encapsulated in one sentence it's just because you feel something doesn't mean you need to act on it and if you have an idea that you want to act on because of a feeling if it still feels good in the morning then do it but I've never regretted taking time before acting when I was angry but I sure as hell have regretted almost everything that I've done immediately the moment I felt angry things aren't good or bad they just St oh this is the essence of mosy um I'm not the only one um so I think what makes life more difficult for people is the Judgment they have on themselves about what they believe they're supposed to do or supposed to have achieved or that this condition or this thing that happened is good or bad or it should have been good or it should have been better and the story of the boy with the horse in the village I'll tell it in 30 seconds which is uh dad gets kid a horse and everybody in the village says that's amazing the old man says we'll see and then the kid is riding the horse and he breaks his leg and everyone in this town says oh that's so horrible and the old man says we'll see and then the Army comes to town to take all of the young men to War and the kid can't go because his leg is broken and everyone says that's amazing and the old man says we'll see and the thing is is that as we continue to play out the timeline of life we can't know if anything is good or bad until the day we die and the day we die it won't matter because we'll be dead and so it means that at the end of the day all the things that occur simply occur and for me reminding myself of that that I think this is bad or I think this is good it limits the Peaks and it also Limits The Valleys and saying this just is and I think it's in my opinion absolute acceptance of the world without casting judgment on it and it's difficult to do because we all want to make judgments and we have to make judgments in order to live we have to approximate this is a good decision bad decision this is a decision that will increase the likelihood that what I want to have happen will happen but most of the good bads that we have that are coming up are not for our own benefit are not aligned with our goals they're aligned with one person that told us something when we were seven years old and then we incorporated that and we say oh this is bad because someone else when we were a kid like you hit your head and then you look at the adult and the adult says that's bad and you say oh it's bad I'm going to cry now right and so there are so many thousands and millions of those tiny judgments that are passed on to us that do not serve us and so for me it has been more beneficial to whitewash everything and then actively rebuild what I believe to be good or bad based on those things but with a baseline reality that none of it is it is kind of narcissistic or solipsistic to believe that you know whether a thing is good or bad means you know the future you know what the outcome of this is going to be right there's this story that uh I couldn't believe it was about September 11th so I didn't realize this but the night before September 11th actually had quite bad weather I think and it meant that people getting home from baseball games got home way later and then you'll remember the morning of September 11th it's beautiful blue clear skies so had that Storm been only 12 hours later the whole world would have been different but it wasn't there's this story of a guy who was going for a meeting and I think it was his birthday the lady that he worked with had got him one of these uh illustration ties you sort of gudy hideous thing with drawings all over it and he was wearing a shirt that clashed with it and she gifted him this as they had coffee on the morning of September 11th early downtown Manhattan and she says look your shirt's wrinkled and it really doesn't go with this tie wear the tie it'll make you feel confid it's a nice present for you so he goes back to the hotel she goes to the North Tower she dies he's alive how on Earth are you supposed to say giving that tie was good or bad you have no idea what's going to happen Downstream from the things that are cut so I know this guy who has a podcast and years ago he like Snapped his Achilles and could barely walk and so the crazy thing is is that many people in that time would have been like this is the worst thing that could have possibly happened but because he had snapped his ailles he was like well I have to make the best of us I have to do something I might as well stick with that podcast that I said I was going to start and then years later he became a top 50 podcast in the world and I think an amazing frame is you can make anything that feels circumstantially negative in the moment if you ask the question what would make this thing the best thing ever and so I would argue maybe you would agree that you snapping your Achilles was probably the best thing that ever happened to you because it got you here and right now you probably have your version of The Snap to killes that's going on in your life but there's also the version of the top 50 in the world podcast that is waiting for you to take action as a result of your snaap Achilles I always had this problem with people who said it was meant to be right because retrospectively you're kind of taking your agency out of the situation so for instance me saying I'm so glad that Co happened and shut all of the nightclubs down which forced my business to close so that I could focus on the podcast so that I would restart playing Cricket so that I would snap my achilles so that I would then move to America and then blah blah blah blah blah but I actually think that that's quite a disempowering frame to put around things because he goes it totally takes away the difficulty that you had to overcome you know if you're in a car accident and you break your femur and you say it was meant to be because I met my partner who was the nurse that looked after me while I was being rehab back to health you go okay or on the flip side of that you managed to be sufficiently Charming to get a partner while you had a snapped femur in the hospital that wasn't meant to be that was your agency so retrospectively you want it all to be on you and known and in advance you want it all to be completely up in the air and unknown I think the the high agency frame allows you to break your Achilles and say what will I do to make this amazing and I think that's where that's where the magic happens because then everything serves you our actions not our pasts Define Who We Are victims see their past as their fate Champions see their past as their origin story and so a lot of people are living through their origin story right now or they're living through the very reason that they'll never be successful but it could be the exact same situation and the only difference between either character is the actions they choose to take which means that if you're using Joe Rogan's frame waking up in your main player character today in this moment as weird of a contract as this is the past doesn't exist just gone it's not anywhere and so the only thing that we absolutely have control over is the actions that we take right now and it's a weird eraser of time to when you really start thinking that like it's only exists in chemicals in my brain but it doesn't exist right now to think about the past that way but in some ways it's also very freeing because it means that I get to start with no baggage and in some ways for me it makes the present feel light because you're not carrying anything into it have you seen that Tim Urban illustration of the tree of time these sort of branches so it starts off with life and there's only one Black branch that is the particular path that you took and there's all of these green ones that you haven't taken and then it gets to now there's a line where it's now and then it turns to every branch is potential right so you had lots that could have been only one that was and now you have lots that could be and an unlimited number that may be alt together and that's it is you're right it's light when you think about that frame it makes the present moment feel well it doesn't matter it doesn't matter matter what happened yesterday it doesn't M matter what happened when I was a kid it doesn't matter it only matters if you make it matter so Jean Paul satra someone screenshotted this from a book I have no idea what the book is but it's a [ __ ] I have led a toothless life a toothless life I have never bitten into anything I was waiting I was reserving myself for later on and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone a lot of people wait for perfect conditions to start but don't realize that starting is the perfect condition and the part of that quote that I like a lot from little French is uh your teeth can get sharper and stronger too so that he's saving himself to use his teeth but he could have had all of his teeth at the end if he had been using them the whole time and so we have this idea I call it the fallacy of the perfect pick but thinking that you're going to have this one shot this one pick of this one opportunity this one podcast this one Whatever that's going to take you all the way but it's the habit of biting that takes you all the way not where you choose to bite the first time and I obviously now have a huge history of this and you do too which is we have learned to just bite and know that our teeth will get stronger and we will learn how to Chomp down along the way and waiting to begin never got anyone anywhere yeah I had I kind of became obsessed with this belief that one day life's duties will be out of the way and then you can finally start doing the thing that you want to do or you're meant to do uh Marie Luis Von France says she calls it the provisional life which I love there is this strange feeling that one is not yet in real life for the time being one is doing this or that but there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about it's also known as deferred happiness syndrome the common feeling that your life has not yet begun that your present reality is a mere Prelude to some idillic future this idle is a mirage that'll fade as you approach revealing that the Prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death there really isn't any other time and the more you know like this is one of the I guess Melancholy realizations of getting older that you actually think oh you know what it is there are things that I can't do now that I could have done before it is going for both of us it is going to get linearly harder to build muscle for the rest of time it's never going to be as easy as it was 10 years ago to build muscle and you go okay well that's an argument for starting sooner and the same thing goes for becoming more psychologically healthy for becoming more balanced for becoming more wealthy for investing in good habits friends oh God Christopher Hitchins it is a Melancholy lesson of older life that you can no longer Make Old Friends like find your people now find your people right now and become friends with them find your habits right now and start doing them yeah it's never been easier to get a muscle than it was 10 years ago it's never been easier to make money than it was 10 years ago but it'll also never be easier than it is right now now it'll only get harder and so that's actually like a pretty strong impetus to do it now it'll literally never get easier Alex hosi ladies and gentlemen dude yeah I appreciate you man these fug State episodes are fun where should people go you want to keep up to date with what you've got going on or what have you you got any cool stuff coming up um yeah I mean I've got my next book coming out that's in uh you will know about it uh but it's uh within the next 6 months mons or so um it'll be coming out uh so very excited about that been working on that one for six years um so it's finally finally ready um you finish writing that yeah cool because the last one was a little closer to the W oh yeah this one I so F I'll tell you the story so um I wrote this book first and so um I'll tell you the sub headline which is uh how to make money and I after finishing that book and being like this is my masterpiece I then was like oh no they won't be able to use this unless they know how to advertise because you can't use all of these things about making money until you get someone to know who you are and then I was like oh shoot they won't be able to advertise unless they have something to advertise which is an offer so I ended up writing this book first and then realizing that I had to write offers two books away and actually release that first even though I had written this other book and then I had to write leads to bridge the gap between offers and this book but this is the book that I've been waiting for everyone to read and consume because I think it will make the most people the most money barut did you have a problem given that your writing ability will have probably improved over the other two bucks have you had to go back and sort of catch it up a little bit oh I rewrote it nine times in the last year fantastic but the first draft was done and so the ninth draft which is now in publication or not in publication but is is a finished product um is now done heck yeah what else anything else um I mean we're we're just we're continuing to invest in portfolio companies if you're a company that's looking to scale you can go to acquisition. comom and if you a beginner just learning figuring out uh how to make your first dollar uh I'm a co-owner of school.com SK l.com uh you can start for free it's a cool setup that we have to help people do it and right now 54.1% of people who start a pay community on school make money so we have put a tremendous amount of effort Sam and I into trying to remove all barriers and all friction for people who are getting started so that they have literally no excuses it's a way better strike rate than only funds yeah I don't know what their what their strike rate is but we've worked really hard um to if you saw the amount of detail I mean maybe you heard some of this from the podcast but the amount of detail that went into like where buttons go and what things we remove was actually a big one was how can we so pair this down so that people don't get overwhelmed because the number one reason people cancel or decide not to do something is overwhelm and so we're like okay how can we funnel action into the clearest possible steps that people go step one step two step three and then all of a sudden they're like oh I this actually worked and so it's been um really cool to uh to see the thousands of people who have you know made their first dollar which is what I make all my content about it to begin with and so it's been uh it's been it's been the ride of my life it's been awesome I can't I appreciate you man thank you thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode you will love my full length conversation with Mike isrel waiting for you come on go on there it is