How To Free Your Mind From Endless Clutter - Shane Parrish

do you think that it's possible to truly think independently I do but I think you have to rewind a little bit and set the circumstances for what creates independent thought it's not just the idea that you need to have that's different and independent thinking for it to be valuable has to be Divergent thinking so it has to be advantageous Divergence you have to go against the crowd and you have to be right it's not enough to just go against the crowd so what sets us up to be able to think independently is a really interesting question and a lot of it is your ability to withstand pain can I look like an idiot in the moment to become better in the end am I can I financially do that can I mentally do that there's a can I emotionally do that there's a whole bunch that goes into that that people don't think about am I in a position where failure is going to make a huge difference in my life on this particular thing and if I am that makes it harder to think independently this is why a lot of people who work for big organizations tend to just go with the flow and say what they need to say whether they are doing that consciously or unconsciously it's because hey if I stand out if I'm the tall Poppy and I lose my job while I'm in financial trouble so it'd be interesting to see an organization we see some of this in Tech actually where people have enough money that they could lose their jobs and it wouldn't financially sort of determine the rest of their life and those people are able to speak up more about what they think is right what they think they should do um and I would imagine that it's it's a really good scenario to create that psychological safety too where you feel like you're not going to be punished to think independently and so if you think of clear thinking the book that I wrote I sort of there's three overarching themes to it one is how you position yourself determines whether you're playing on easy mode or hard mode how do you manage the urges this is two how do you manage the urges that get other people into trouble including the social default and three how do you think independently and I think you need the first two in order to think independently it's sort of like the natural followon to the first two talk to me about easy mode and hard mode then people use this on the internet all the time but I think your conception is a little bit different yeah I was thinking about this my son really solidified it for me he came home and he he's a te teenager and for any of you who have teenagers the story will make sense but I think it perfectly encapsulates what I mean by EAS or hard mode and he hands me this exam and you know he's got a really bad grade on it and he just sort of looks at me shrugs her shoulders says I did my best and for anybody who's played sports like me uh during high school you know that's not the moment to talk to them most people quit Sports on the car ride on the way home they don't quit because their performance on the field sucked they quit because the conversation with their parents or their friend's parents in the car ride on the way home so I was like I'm going to let this dissipate right he's emotional right now let's Let It Go I was quite emotional too I was like what happened here later on that night I walk up to him and I'm like hey talk to me about this you said you did your best what does it mean to do your best I was like go through it in detail he's like well you know I I sat down at 10: and I read over all the questions and I checked how many points for each question I allocated my time appropriately and I answered them the best I could I did my best I was like wow you think of this like adults think of this this is really interesting so you think that that point forward from the point that you sat down that's the point where things matter I was like let's rewind 96 hours here did you study no not really I crammed the night before did you sleep well no I was up late studying did you you eat a healthy breakfast no I I didn't because I got up late did you fight with your brother yes why did you fight with your brother well because I got up late so then all of a sudden we were in the bathroom at the same time and you know I didn't sleep so my temper got the best of me and we started you know shouting at each other I'm like okay so you chose to play on hard mode that doesn't mean you don't get a test but what are the things you could have done to put that on easy mode well you could have studied every night for four nights leading up to the test you could have eaten healthy you could have gotten a good sleep these are all things within your control and those things determine whether you're playing on easy mode or hard mode and if we think of that sort of in life we can think of it in positioning right do you have low debt do you have high debt are you exposed to variable interest rates have you maxed out sort of the amount of money to your paycheck are you spending it all every week are you investing in your relationships with your partner your kids your employees your customers are you sleeping well are you eating healthy all these things position you to put you in a position to manage these sort of things that come along in life and they come along to anybody it doesn't matter if you have the best idea in the world from a stock market perspective if you have no money in your bank account to take advantage of it you might as well not have that idea and it you know if you sleep and you eat healthy and you invest in your relationships well the inevitable emotional ups and downs the inevitable anger that people go through the highs and lows you're in a much better position a much stronger position to go through those think imagine there's a patch of grass between you and your partner and if you water that grass every day what's going to happen when a spark lands on it it's just going to go out but if you don't water that grass every day it's going to dry out and then what happens all of the sudden you have a fire between the two of you and then you have to take all this time and energy and try to fix that fire if you can and all all that time and energy comes at the expense of furthering a relationship doing the things you want to be doing working on the things you want to be working on and we don't think about it like that yeah so in some ways could you replace the word positioning with preparation it seems like a large amount of it is preparation sort of preparation to me implies that you know what's going to happen whereas positioning is I am prepared for multiple possible Futures because I'm not trying to predict the future so when I use the word positioning I'm being a bit more vague because I want to account for things that I can't anticipate whereas preparation if I know I want to promotion in six months and I know that job is coming open well now I can prepare and that is a form of positioning but it's not the only form of positioning yeah so I think when we when I first started this podcast 2018 I got intro to fs. blog I think that year and started reading a lot of the the stuff that you were writing about and I think there was a period at least in my life and I know in a lot of my other friends lives where we believed if we could just wrote recite the top 91 mental models from fs. blog that we all of our problems in life would be fixed that it was just simply a matter of knowing the definitions and we'd we'd integrate them somewhere down the line H and your first two books were first few books actually series of books were kind of about breaking down these Thinking Tools it seems to me that at least in my life and perhaps in yours as well there's this pivot or maturity or kind of like ascendance from just looking at rules and the thermodynamics of how our mind works into something kind of more integrated and holistic and and it's to do with how does this fit into the various vicissitudes of life and what are the urges that get in our way they don't fit you know being angry doesn't fit within a mental model it's like you're just angry or you're upset or you're hungry or you're tired or you're whatever uh have you noticed this in yourself this sort of development over time from a a more kind of um disperate to a much more integrated uh Viewpoint when it comes to Thinking Tools well I love the word that you just used there integrated because that's how I think of it and I think of we wrote a series of books through fum Street uh called the Great metal models and the idea was to take the 101 that you would have learned in most University introductory classes and put it out there for people easily accessible easily digestable and in more plain language than you would hear in University how do you use those ideas and how do you think right the first book of that was General Thinking Tools which is like what are the the tools that we can use to sort of think through problems in a three-dimensional way and I think that those are important lenses into a particular situation if you think of decisionmaking specifically the source of all problems in decisionmaking is blind spots and if you can put these lenses onto a situation you reduce your blind spots you're never going to eliminate your blind spots but you'll reduce them and that is one part of life right so eliminating these blind spots another part of life is dealing with our emotional self and dealing with social situations and and dealing with anger and these things inevitably happen to us and we can't change the fact that they're going to happen but we can change how we respond and all the mental models in the world aren't going to give you confidence and all the mental models in the world they might help you see something but they could also create this paralysis where you know you you sort of look at a situation you overanalyze it and you don't actually take action and and so I don't want people to think that that is the be all and end all it's one component in a mosaic that leads to the overall image and that component can shrink or expand depending on the problem at hand and and probably a particular moment in your life but it's still an important component it never goes to zero and I sort of think of work life balance that way too I don't think of it in terms of balance I think of it as what are the Integrations that I need in life and what size do they need to take right now and if you think of it in terms of a mosaic well you can have your relationship you can have your work you can have your health you can have all the things and they can never go to zero but it might mean that you're prioritizing different things at different points in time like with my kids I you know I went up to them I'm like Hey we're launching a book it's going to be really busy for a few months and then it's going to go back to normal uh but for a few months work is going to take a bigger shape and bigger form than it has in the previous few months and then afterwards it's going to shrink back down to where it was before and I think it also gives us a language to think about the inevitable ups and downs and flows of life sometimes things are more important doesn't mean that our partners not the most important thing or our kids aren't the most important things but sometimes we just got to buckle down and do what we're supposed to do at work I need a a mental model or a meme to remind me that things don't last forever like I've got this it's kind of like short-termism I suppose you know you're in a a period of of heavy work like that and it takes more effort than it probably should for me to remind myself this isn't forever this is just going to happen for a little bit of time and it's periodized and then we can get out of that on the other side and I know that you're unhappy because you're not spending enough time in the gym uh or your diet's been all over the place or your sleep's been all over the place or you're feeling a little bit more stressed or you're a little bit more worried about the future it's like this isn't going to happen forever but there is such a myopia around what is now is what will continue to be and God this is going to be my life so definitely taking that sort of broader holistic longer term View and looking to integrate things I think makes a hell of a lot of sense when it comes to clear thinking you've breaken down broken down a bunch of enemies of clear thinking and I think it's a nice conception because in order for us to think clearly we first need to get past the things that stop us from thinking clearly it's all well and good having as you said all of the tools in the world and I'm going to do my decisions in this way and I've got the mental models but if there's something that stops you from being able to access that state it's game over you've multiplied by zero so what are the main enemies of clear thinking yeah so so before I get to the enemies just to backtrack one little step here we're animals right and so we tend to exhibit the same thing that animals get which is we're instinctive and we're responsive and the question becomes what are the scenarios that lead us to think less to react more to react without reasoning and do those scenarios get us in trouble and sort of the four that I came up with in the book are we're emotional we're ego driven social uh and ritual or inertia and I think you know a great example of social for I think emotion and ego sort of um people understand what they mean but what do I mean by social situations well not only group think but I mean we don't want to disappoint other people right in part because we are uh animalistic and one of the the biological Tendencies of animals is that we're self-preserving and so the ability to get along with other people the ability to say yes the ability to try and be liked or at least not hated by our tribe is really important to us it's literally ingrained in our biology so we end up saying yes to things that we don't want to say yes to and I got this this sort of dawned on me through two people one Peter Koffman who uh has been a great friend and given me a lot of ideas that appear in the book but I was in Daniel conman's Penthouse in New York and he answered the phone and at the end of the call he said to the person my rule is I don't say yes on the phone I'll have to get back to you tomorrow and he hung up the phone I was like whoa what is this your rule what are you talking about here and he's like well I found I'm a pleaser I really end up saying yes to things that I don't want to do and I was like I think we're all sort of like that to varying degree some more than others but yeah we all end up saying yeah I'll have a coffee with you in six months but I wouldn't do it today or tomorrow right and then six months rolls around you're wondering why your calendar has this in it and you're like oh God I don't want to do this I don't I don't even like this person why did I say yes to this so so we all end up in these social situation and you're not thinking in that moment right you're just saying yes because your instinctive desire to please somebody so here's an example of an ordinary moment and the subtitle of the book is turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results so here's an example of an ordinary moment you end up saying yes to something you don't want to do and it ends up having this cost on you not only in time but mental threads you got to keep track of uh rescheduling all of these things and so I was like what do you mean by rules and he's like well the rule I just used a rule he's like we've been taught our whole life to follow rules so I thought well I'll just create a rule and if I tell people my rule they don't argue with it and I was like Daniel like this is I know you've won a Nobel laurate a Nobel Prize but dude this is probably the most profound thing you've ever really done in a practical way this is like and I'm like what other rules do you have he's like not enough he's like oh my God this is the most powerful thing in the world so he created a rule to take away these defaults and rewire his brain in these moments so his unconscious response he doesn't even have to consciously process it is now the one that he wants so he turned his desired Behavior into his default Behavior with a rule and gets around a social situation that generally causes us to do things we don't want to do I think that's incredibly powerful well one of the problems that you have is and I certainly know notice this from my time learning and listening to people on your podcast and everything over the last few years all of these concepts are fantastic but when it comes down to tactically how this grows corn for me like how does this actually show up in my life for instance is it your rule about always pay invoices as soon as possible is that your one yes so that rule that you wrote in your newsletter three years ago four years ago maybe something like that absolute game not that I wasn't doing it already I think I kind of intuited that if you pay people as quickly as possible your partners your contractors will always prioritize your work because they know that they're going to get paid straight away and you've got to pay them eventually in any case so why not pay them as soon as the invoice comes in and that as a rule is so good I don't know whether it it's not got the same kind of like Keystone change as something like Carman talked about but those tactical um justifications for things are such huge game changers so my favorite one that I use is whenever I think about a friend I always text them and tell them whenever I'm thinking about a friend if some memory pops up from a business partner from back in the day or someone that I saw a couple of months ago or someone that I saw yesterday I'll just text them hey man thinking about you hope everything's good or dude just remembering that time that we did x y and Zed like sending my best that has been the best trigger for keeping on top of friendships and for making other people in my life that I care about feel good because they know that I think of them and you're already thinking about them so why not tell them like that's just it's a free gift that you can give them so that's another trigger of mine that I've used from not saying yes on the phone paying invoices immediately uh texting friends when you think about them yeah the last thing the world needs is another book on thinking that's just intellectual masturbation it has to be practical and applicable in real life and it has to help people in scenarios that are difficult to be able to help them so in the book there's a lot of safeguards and a lot of rules around uh here are things that you can implement the the tricky part is I'm giving you examples but you really have to take what are the desired behaviors I have and how do I create defaults around these desired behaviors and that that's sort of what the book lays out but I mean I can't create that map for you I can give you practical ones that work on thousands of people or work with thousands of people but the best ones are going to be very specific to you like the most powerful one to me is work out every day my rule is I work out every day the duration can change the scope can change the fact that I sweat does not change I might be in a hotel room and just doing you know a couple hundred push-ups and sit-ups and that's my workout for the day because that's all I can fit in because I'm traveling and there's a lot going on but I used to do this thing where I was like I'm going to work out three days a week and then you know I'd wake up and I'd be like I'm tired I'm busy I got a lot going on today I'll work out at the end of the day five o'clock comes around six o'clock you're like man I don't feel like working out and then you lie to yourself this little voice in your head comes in it's like oh we'll make up for it we'll do extra tomorrow and so uh Tomorrow Never Comes it just doesn't work that way tomorrow is where dreams die I went to the gym and I was like you have my fob give me my stats for the past year I want to know every time I swiped in because I was trying to go three days a week turns out I was going about one and a half days a week and I was like yeah exactly right so I'm lying to myself and then I created this rule where I'm like I'm just gonna sweat every day uh and I've I think I've only missed one or two days since then it's been a few years I feel give me some of the other safeguards give me some of if you were to create your like highest Leverage tactical implementations what do you think would make that criteria this is where it becomes dependent right so for me the most impactful ones are specific to me so no meetings before 12 I don't take meetings any morning why do I do that it's because the most valuable time of my day is the morning and you know I'm not going to argue about morning people or night people the most valuable time for me is is the morning and I never want to be in a position where I have to search for time to work on the most valuable thing so I just block off every day every day I have a block of time from whenever I leave the house whenever I get up whenever the kids go to school till 12 o' and that time is sacred it doesn't mean that it never gets interrupted but it's incredibly rare that that time gets interrupted why do I do that that allows me to work on the most important opportunity at hand it allows me to learn and develop and make myself more valuable in the future and it allows me to just you know I need a break today I need to go for a walk I just just don't need to do anything and I don't feel guilty about any of those things uh I invest in an index fund every month that's a rule too and it's just a no-brainer it's like that you know we know how to get rich uh you save more money than you make and you invest it you dollar cost average it into an index fund and you wait a hell of a long period of time and a lack of patience changes the outcome for most people because they get bored of that and they think they're smarter than that and so then they start going all in on different Investments or they start doing all these things so you devise these rules that help you avoid the things that you want to avoid and I'll give you an example for organizations because these aren't sort of just for you as an individual so organizations have problems they need to solve these problem what is one of the most common reasons we don't solve problems we go to these meetings with people and we work with smart people they're all type A people they all want to demonstrate value that's how it works we go to a meeting we're like what's the problem and how do we solve it and somebody throws out a problem definition and you know it sounds reasonable and it sounds accurate and then what do people do they jump in they start solving this problem nobody's actually paused and been like hey is this the actual problem and all of the sudden we're running we're running to solve this this problem that you know it's probably close to the problem but not the real problem and that causes a lot of stress and anxiety and lost time but it causes it later we don't see it in the moment because solving the wrong problem it just keeps cropping up causes a whole bunch of miscommunication causes people to be frustrated those are all problems in the future to solve for right now we're just solving this problem we all feel good we all feel reinforced but what can we do differently that'll lead to a better outcome or more likely to lead to a better outcome we can break the problem definition from the problem solution meetings into it doesn't mean you take more time you can have a half hour problem definition meeting you can have a half hour problem solution meeting but what you really want to do is make sure you're solving the right problem so that's a safeguard that you can Implement at work we're going to break these meetings into too ideally you have a night in between them but you don't even need to do that you can have one in the morning one in the afternoon if you need to solve it for whatever reason on the same day I used to work in operations we used to separate them by a day all the time unless there was an urgent situation where we actually needed to do something in the next few minutes and in that case those are very esoteric specific decisions another Safeguard you can put in place is that committees don't make decisions people do somebody has to assign their name to the decision that one thing single-handedly will change a lot in your organization because the person who the person who has to assign their name to a decision takes the process a lot more seriously than the person who is part of a group what happens in in groups in practice right in the real world what happens when groups make decisions well if the decision is correct everybody takes credit for it and if the decision is wrong everybody tried to talk them out of that so there's no there's no advantageous there's no accountability there's no responsibility it's just a big mess everybody's always right all the time regardless of oam you need people to assign their name to a decision because the person who assigns their name to the decision also has to be the person that comes up with a problem now all of the sudden I care I'm putting my name on this literally I would have people sign their name to decisions I Joe you know whatever or Jane whatever decide that I want you to say it I want you to say it out loud because I want you to care and I want you to put your pride and your reputation and I want you behind this and if you're not behind it I want to know you're not behind it why aren't you behind it what's going on here I want some insight and I think that this single-handedly changes if you look at all the organizations that we think of as dysfunctional they're all Decisions by committee and if you look at all the organizations that we think of as successful or or at least um doing above average I can almost guarantee you when you drill into it people are making decisions individuals are making decisions one of my friends uh has an idea about everybody needs to own a process so there is something end to end and there is somebody that is accountable for making sure that the way that this gets finished it's on that one person and uh it it feels like exactly the same here that you know uh particular piece of content goes out and there's a mistake that's been made and oh well you know like is it the editor or is it the strategist or is it the the producer or is it the the factchecking guy like you know all the way way down people hide in groups and uh yeah having that accountability having that increase in accountability is a big difference no I was just going to say think about another example of like where that would make a big difference is if you work for a large organization you have to fill out these forms to justify expenses or these forms to justify travel and you find these forms tedious asking for information that it already has or you have to fill out the same information multiple times imagine how different that would be if somebody's name was on that form if somebody had Pride in that form if somebody took ownership over that form all of a sudden everything would be streamlined you would just ask the things that you need to ask you would get in and out as quickly as possible and you would not try to interrupt the working time of the person filling out the form you get away with all of that stuff you get away with all this [ __ ] because there's nobody's names on this form nobody is accountable for this form it's some Department somewhere and most people don't even know which department it is is yeah okay so people need to build more strength in their thinking what are the component parts of how people should become stronger thinkers well I think the real thing you need to do is get out there in the world learn by doing uh develop all of the the ideas of what do I what what can I do to put myself in a position to play on easy mode but the most important thing is a little chapter in the book on confidence and actually doing things one thing to think you know about something it's one thing to chat about it and a lot of the world is filled with people who lack the confidence to take action and so we just sit there analyzing over and over again or or expecting to have the confidence to get to the outcome instead of the confidence of the next step and it's really important that we focus confidence around next step confidence what does that mean I don't need the confidence to get to the end goal I need the confidence to take the next step and that action will create momentum and that momentum will create its own confidence yeah I mean trying to create confidence without any degree of evidence is asking for delusion the other things we can do to build strength are sort of knowing oursel right we have to understand where we're strong or where we're weak most people try to fix their weaknesses I think you should just amplify your strengths uh if you're an adult you want to be a little bit well-rounded but you really want to be really really good at a couple things that other people can't be really good at and you have to be accountable to yourself about your mistakes learning from your mistakes accountable about your actions your responses the things that you do that's where we start starts from a foundation of it doesn't matter where I am today it doesn't matter where I am on this grid I am in charge of my trajectory it might not be my my fault where I am it could be pure luck it could be you know I was born into a bad house or bad situation or bad country it doesn't matter it's your responsibility to take control of that trajectory at some point and that point is today and what are the things that I can do the little things that I can do to position myself for tomorrow what do you mean when you talk about self-control you know discipline and doing hard things and resilience kind of buzzword that get thrown around an awful lot what does self-control mean in the clear thinking framework well the idea around self-control is you sort of opt out of these emotions that get other people into trouble and you can do that in a variety of ways one like let's consider you're angry well I can recognize that I'm angry and not respond and on a good day I might be able to do that 20% of the time now if I'm positioned to play on easy mode I got sleep I'm eating healthy I'm exercising well I can probably recognize that I'm angry like 40% of the time now but what do I do with the rest of the 60% of the time how do I avoid these situations well if I know somebody makes me angry self-control is also not about control in the moment it's like I don't want to hang out with this person I'm gonna I'm not going to put myself in that situation to begin with why would I temp myself so self- control is about designing your environment in a lot of ways and your environment is not just your physical environment it's your mental environment the information you consume the people that you're around you create these sort of rules which are a form of artificial environment that sort of put you on the right path and I think that those are really things that we can do that are tangible that make it a lot easier you can also set rules I don't send emails past nine because I've noticed in the past all the emails I've send past nine you know I've had a couple glasses of wine maybe they're a little more liberal than I want and you know that's a form but that's a form of like how we can deal with this or you know if you have an iPhone you can sort of set you know if you find yourself lost in this world of Instagram hopefully not Tik Tok that thing is like um imported fenel I think is the digital well I don't want to say anything too bad I used to work for an intelligence agency and that is one app that I will not even allow in my house um and you can read into that what you want but it is definitely digital fentol um you know and you can set time limits on things so you know I part of being accountable and being responsible and and taking ownership is not necessarily in the moment I I can do that in the moment when I'm strong to prevent me from doing something I don't want to do in a moment where I'm weak so on a I wake up you know I decide in that moment I don't want to use Instagram or I want to use Instagram last or I want to use my phone phone less well I can set a timer on Apple for all these apps and I can change the password I can give it to somebody else I I can set this environment up in a moment where I feel strong so that in a moment where I'm weak it changes my desired Behavior to the default Behavior what have you come to learn about how people can cope with risk you know the the fear about making a decision the concern about is this going to be right and oh my god what happened Happ s if if this goes a different way and I've done the preparation but sometimes even doing a lot of preparation can make you feel like youve got a greater sense of concern of all of the different ways that this could go wrong what have you come to learn about coping with risk I think the biggest thing that people don't understand is what they're afraid of a lot of people are afraid of failure and just as many people are actually afraid of success do you think that's true afraid of success cuz I I I hear this I hear this get said a lot and I'm never actually too sure what people mean when they say that so what do you mean sure let's look at two examples uh one my parents uh they wanted to quit smoking they tried for years to quit smoking and they weren't successful because quitting smoking meant changing their friends so yeah they wanted to quit but they didn't want to change their friends and so success meant they had to change their friend group consider somebody who wants to go to the gym and get in shape another example success means I'm not drinking with my friends anymore I have fomo success means I I'm gonna feel left out success means I'm gonna have to change my friends probably that's an interesting that's an interesting conception so it's not necessarily that people have a problem with the actual success itself but that Downstream from that success there are externalities that they don't like the idea of having to deal with yeah and they're not even conscious my parents weren't conscious of the fact that they weren't thinking oh you know to actually quit smoking we need to change our friends they're thinking you know willpower will take care of this for me I can hang around people who smoke and choose not to smoke but eventually everybody loses the battle with willpower so if you want to go somewhere you're going to have to change a friend group if you want a promotion well lot of people don't necessarily what holds them back from going for that promotion even though they want it and what it's subconscious so I'm not saying it's a conscious conversation with your mind is like now I'm going to be different from my peers and we all know that we want people to be successful but we don't want them to be that much more successful than us everything is relative to us this is how individuals think it's like yeah I'm rooting for you Chris but I only want you to be you know 5% better than me because the minute you're 6% better than me well [ __ ] you like you know and we can't be friends anymore and and these thoughts really hold people back in a lot of ways and and failur is another one right we we don't want to do something different than the crowd because we don't want to stand out and then you have to dive into why don't I want to stand out is it because I'm emotionally not capable of handling what people are going to say about me is it because I'm financially not capable of losing my job what's really holding me back from taking this risk and you really have to start asking yourself these deeper questions about what is holding me back and is that a valid reason not to do this thing that I want to do and I think you know I I know a lot of people who work for organizations I have a friend who who just you know implemented this thing at work and they don't do themselves any favor right he saved his company about $20 million a year uh in expenses through through something he didn't he took a big risk by doing it and they gave him like a $2,000 bonus it's like so I was talking to him and he's like there's an asymmetry to these successes too inside organizations where you know if I'm wrong I would have lost my job I'm right I saved them a ton of money and my reward was like two grand and that to me explains why things rarely change without a crisis the new manager comes in recognizes everything has been dysfunctional before and all of a sudden yeah I'm gonna change it but they just change it like maybe five percent you know it's enough to say they're doing something different but not enough to actually create a different result and that's why things stay the same there's an asymmetry to it yeah what's that Rory Southerland insight about no one gets fired for hiring McKenzie where you know people will happily fail in very boring and normal ways but much more fear succeeding in adventurous and different ways because if if you just follow the blueprint well we follow the blueprint it's like Yo dude the blueprint failed the last four black Fridays in a row it's like yeah no but you know work this time yep yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah this time the same thing is going to have a different outcome and uh but what's the most powerful algorithm we've ever seen in the world it is literally Evolution and evolution is blindly trying things over and over again and doubling down on what works and then blindly trying things over and over again with failure being part of the process failure is okay you just have to be mentally resilient to it financially resilient to it to put yourself in a position where you can take these risks that you want to take and I think for a lot of people it's not Financial I think for a lot of people they don't want to put their thoughts out in public they don't want people criticizing them they don't and why is that they are they not capable of handling that and you know you and I I mean we probably both get uh hate mail and you know the the first few times you get that it really hits you and then eventually you sort of build up this muscle to it a little bit and you're like oh okay yeah I've heard that one before yeah I've heard that one before uh you know come up with something that's actually a good point if it's a novel if it's a novel insult on the internet like oh wow like at least that was at least that was new but yeah you are right one of the interesting things is you in some regards you see how um how much mono thinking there is across an entire culture uh that being said maybe the maybe everyone is picking up on the same thing and you actually are a dick or you can't pronounce the word fragile or you are like do you know what I mean like there is one thing that everyone's able to see uh but no I I I I don't disagree man like and think about success just going back to the group for a second I if I'm in a group and you know we're all slightly overweight and lazy and you start going to the gym and losing weight and start taking up a side hustle well how does that make me feel about my myself now and it makes me feel really bad about myself because I'm seeing all the things that I could do and all the things that maybe at some level I want to do but all the things that I'm not doing and you're reminding me of those things are you familiar Imagine You Must Have Spent an awful lot of time on the incel and black pill forums that must be where all of your best ideas come from but if if you do ever stumble upon these there's something called ascending and ascending is moving out of the world of the ins spere and into one where interactions with a woman mostly and maybe sex and maybe a relationship become possible for you and ascending in most of the black pill uh communities is very very heavily discouraged and for instance you might think it would be a girl gave me her number today and I posted it in the incel Forum but it's something so small like the Barista at Starbucks's eyes l lingered on me for slightly longer than I thought maybe this suggested that she was interested in me even that tiny little glimmer would be seen as the early stages of ascending right like stage zero Ascension that's very very heavily uh discouraged and one of the reasons that I think this is the case is if everybody agrees to wallow in their own self-pity and despondency and lack of ability to change their situation no other person in the community is given the potential of Hope and that means that no one has to face the fact that maybe I could do something to change this if everybody is completely locked in to this behaviorally genetic determinism world of you are a dead end and nothing is ever going to change about this you there's a degree of comfort to that right because things can't change they couldn't change they're never going to change this is the way that they are but as soon as you see somebody that potentially lays out the option to change this oh god well maybe maybe that means that I could could change too and as soon as you posit an ideal you begin to compare yourself to that ideal and almost always you find yourself lacking yeah you create a a contrast correct correct what about so like triaging priorities and and working out what we actually want to want in life allocating their time prioritizing everyone has more things that they can do do I want to start up that Pottery side business or do I want to get in really good shape and compete in CrossFit or do I want to start a family or move to a new country or whatever how do you think or what are the tools that you've come to use when prioritizing and triaging what you can do in life and then implementing that into your time management what have you relied on that a couple of things the example I use in the book is who got what Society told them to want who wanted to be the most respected wealthiest you know well-known person in their Community all things that we want you listen to that and you're like yeah I want that and it was eanes or Scrooge and what did Scrooge want at the end he wanted to do over and I think that that's an important lesson for all of us and and Scrooge is a fictional character but I I've met many billionaires who I think feel the same way uh and I think that's that's one reason philanthropy becomes such a large part of a lot of people's lives at least publicly is almost to repent for some of these U the way that they've acquired their wealth and so I think about a couple things one being do a thought experiment close your eyes you can do it as you're listening right now not if you're driving though please Don't Close Your Eyes if you're driving and imagine you're 95 and you're on you're last night you're in the hospital and you're in a coma but you can hear what everybody around you is saying and everybody's gathered to sort of wish you would do and what are they saying about you are they saying the things that you want them to be saying about you and that tells people about your behavior because they're not going to be talking about your work priorities or your Twitter followers or your bank account or anything like that they're going to be talking about did you show up were you a good person were you the biggest fan were you supportive were you win-win did you love them did you respect them and are you living your life in a way that makes people want to say that about you and do you want to and I'm not advocating that that is the only approach to life just be conscious about how you're living life I've seen too many people wake up at the end of their work life and try to develop relationships with people they thought were their friends only to discover they were transactions and why were they transactions because the way they got to the top was mutually exclusive from relationships of meaning it was sharp elbows it was stepping over people it was a doggy dog and if you're consciously doing that and you're pursuing that to get to this end and that's the end you want to get to Great uh but I think there's a better approach which is can I get to that end and be win-win can I get to that end and build people up can I get to that end and be the type of person that I want my kids to see me as and a lot of people think you can't do that and maybe you can't just be conscious about how you're playing the game and then in terms of of I think the point of that is to make sure that what you want in the end is worth wanting in the first place well that's the what do you want to want thing right yeah it's one thing to get what you want but it's another thing totally to want what's worth getting and that that's sort of the end to the book because I think that's summarizes a lot of why we're trying to think clearly to begin with it's like do you are do you want to get to this destination here's the path you're on think about it evaluate it like is that where you really want to go and then I think on a workfront you know Society just tells us to say yes to everything going back to that social default we want to be the person who's busy we want to be the person who talks about 10 projects we want to be the person who who takes on everything and overcomes the world and the real it is you can probably only handle two or three priorities you need to cut everything else and it sounds really harsh but you know in order to go further and go faster you really just have to do less and we live in a world where doing less allows you to do a little bit more quality in what you are doing and we live in a leveraged world where that little bit of difference in more quality creates a huge distribution and outcomes it creates massively nonlinear outcomes if you can be 1% better at the thing that you're really good at to begin with it's going to be disproportionately rewarded in the world that we live in for most people one of my friends says it's narcissistic to believe that you can do two things and beat a person who's just doing one totally and even if you think about it like if you're starting from a higher base could be luck could be innate skill could be Talent they're starting from a lower base they're still eventually going to pass you you can't compete with somebody who's Allin on one thing and this is why being Allin on one thing is so successful and there's certain things where you you sort of have to be all in on it in order to be successful but you can't sort of go online and be like Oh I'm gonna half write a book or you know I'm going to half ass this side project and I'm going to go compete with Shopify no like if you you want to do this thing you have to burn the bridges you have to go all in you have to sink the ship you have to like you land on the beach and your only path out is success and you can't accept failure and that doesn't mean that you won't fail but it means you're really going to enjoy the ride yeah what uh what are some of the other myths that you think Society tells people about what they should want in life you know if we're talking about not just being able to get the thing that you want but to want the thing that you can get and to actually work out what's worth wanting what do you wish if you could strike through a bunch of things that people typically think that they want what would they be just just eliminate everything the digital fentanyl tells us to want right so like your car doesn't matter the size of your house doesn't matter traveling on private airplane doesn't matter I mean Jeff Bezos uses the same [ __ ] iPhone that you do what's different between you and him is his ability to leverage it and I I think we have all of this stuff within our we have all the things we want right in front of us and we need to be driven to go after things because individually that might make us unhappy to go after that new car to go after that house to go after these things but collectively it actually moves the world forward this is how we get Innovation this is how we get failure this is how we learn this is how we progress flip side is everybody wants the outcome man you got to want the process it's the process that's worth wanting the process of how do I make money and how do I build this business you know how do I do this that's what I want to be focused on how do I get better at this how do I make a better ad how do I make a better email how do I create a better thought how do how do I become more useful how do I treat my customers better how do I serve them better how do I get my food 1% better how do I make sure my bathrooms in my restaurant are always clean these are the things that you need to be driven to do these are the things that make a difference and they're actually the things that end up making you happy at the end of the day you have to make money as a business because that's going to enable you to do all these things but if your goal is to buy a new car buy a new house or do all these things you're never going to be happy because you're going to get a new house and then your reference Point's going to change and you're going to start comparing yourself to people with bigger houses now you're going to want a bigger house and it might drive you to do these things and you might be successful at them but you're not going to be happy you really have to enjoy the ride enjoy the process I wrote in my newsletter today something that might relate to this I I'll read it to you now dopamine is not about the pursuit of happiness it is about the happiness of pursuit and that's Robert suppos so true so much of life and enjoyment is about the anticipation of things coming in fact the anticipation is often actually more enjoyable than the experience Tim Ferris used to book week-long holidays years and years in advance so he could get as much enjoyment out of the anticipation as possible this puts a new perspective on it's not the journey it's the destination there actually is no destination each arrival at a destination simply marks the beginning of another journey toward the next destination Morgan housel told me that when he went on holiday recently after months of planning and organizing to get there he finally arrived and one of his first thoughts was wow we should totally come back here next year it would be great if we could come back here next year so literally during the supposed enjoyment of the destination Morgan was already captured by the Allure of the next Journey how absolutely tragic and hilarious yeah there's a lot of wisdom in that you know we're just caught up in not the right thing and changing your focal point we talked about next step confidence and that's sort of the same thing if you think about it just applied differently here which is the next step is how do I get better at the process how do I become a better person how do I become more useful how do I the next step is not sort of the ultimate things that those lead to I mean all of that will take care of itself if you love the process yeah one of the uh I can't remember if it's you I can't remember if it's you or Ryan holiday who said something about um if you get bored with the process you negatively affect your trajectory I feel like that was you yeah yeah I I I don't know all the things I've said but that sounds like something I would say yeah where are we let me find it uh I'm going to be able to pull it up pretty quickly it was you congratulations you actually did you actually did say it um but yeah I think the most scalable way to keep on doing anything is to actually enjoy the things you're doing and one of the most reliable ways to hate the thing you're doing is to pile tons and tons of other things on top of it like there's fewer more enjoyable experiences than only having a small number of things to focus on and getting really good at them and there are fewer more unenjoyable experiences than trying to spin a [ __ ] ton of plates and not getting better at any of them I think most people are in the latter category there not the former we talked about this before we started recording about consistency I think a large part of what creates golfs and outcomes or differences in outcomes between people is their ability to be consistent the professional can do it on the days they don't feel like it whereas the amateur only does it on the days where they feel like it and if you have 10 or 12 plates spinning at one time well if I don't feel like doing that one thing that I know is important I'm just going to go to another plate and it becomes like an excuse not to you know you procrastinate by doing more you actually procrastinate doing the thing that you're supposed to be doing that's going to make a difference yeah so I'm I'm thinking about how you know I asked you a question earlier on about prioritizing and triaging the things that you do in life but if you have fewer things to do in life there's less prioritization or triage needed why I just have these small number of things to do so maybe one of the best ways to actually fix the prioritization problem is to only do the number of things in life that contribute in the highest form possible you know the Greg McKuen thing of less but better right not the trivial many but the vital few and then if you do that you'll find you're more consistent even on the days you don't feel like it because the distractions aren't as easily available from a project perspective I've got bored with this one thing let me just task switch to the other I it's fine that I'll fix that problem that difficult problem I need to overcome Manana but for now I there's emails to be answered or there's whatever to be done I saw this thing with my my son last night he studying he's got exams this week he gets to a really hard part in His science uh studying and he immediately switches to studying French and I was like what are you doing you have your science test tomorrow and he's like yeah but you know French I need French too and I'm like what's going on here and then we we sort of rewound and and the thing that he was trying to study in science he he didn't quite understand so what he was doing is exactly what we do as adults I'm just going to switch to this other project it's a little easier uh and hopefully this problem solve itself but the problem doesn't solve itself it just grows Shane Parish ladies and gentlemen where should people go they want to check out all of the stuff that I've been obsessed by from you over the last few years and also pick up the book where do you want them to go uh you can go to fs. blog uh you can Google shane Parish or you can pick up the book clear thinking turning ordinary moments into extraordinary outcomes thank you so much Chris I appreciate you and go and check out the knowledge project it's where I first learned about a ton of interesting guests on this podcast like Rory Sutherland Shane I appreciate you I'm excited to see what you do next man you've been very formative in my thinking Journey from total idiot to adult infant or whatever I am now and uh yeah long may you continue coming up with interesting insights so happy to see your success man it's amazing when I come across you online I see how you've blown up it just makes me feel really good I appreciate you thank you man if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe