The Pillars of A GROWTH Mindset | Tom Bilyeu

I went through, starting from the worst fixed mindset that you can imagine, making horrific and stupid decisions because I had a fixed mindset. So, I got a 990 on my SATs, and when I went to college, I ended up having a pretty emotionally difficult time. By the time I finished, I felt like a complete and absolute failure. And when I walked out of college, I really felt like I was walking into hopelessness. I did not know how to make something of my life. It matters what you build your self-esteem around. So, if you're focused on being right, being smart, being worthy, all of those things are incredibly fragile. It wasn't until I stopped doing that and I started focusing on identifying the right answer faster than anybody else. That changed my life. Your brain has evolved to be a thing. And there's a lot, rightly so, of focus in the popular zeitgeist around mindset, about understanding the mind, and that is critically important. But so few people take the time to really understand what gives birth to the mind, which is your biology. And so, understanding your mind within the context of evolution and the brain become critically important. And people that don't take the time to distinguish between the brain and the mind are doing themselves a disservice. I think much of what they go through is going to be It's going to be surprising is what I was going to say, but the reality is what people end up getting stuck on is they confuse feeling with thinking. And the immediacy of feelings, the visceral nature of them, there's something about embedded in the way that we experience an emotion is this just screaming from our subconscious that this is real, this is true, this is this is like this is it. This is the context. Everything you need to know, dear mind, is contained in this emotion. And it's really an interesting process that I I think warrants a lot more thought on certainly my part uh and probably science's part and for sure um any of you that are following along at home uh a big part of what you should be thinking about is the nuance of how all of this comes into being and how how emotions are the great trick that they pull is they they paint themselves to be self-evident. Thank you for letting me think in real time here. This is interesting. Emotions feel self-evidently right. I don't even want to say true because true doesn't capture what's really going on. When I try to talk about the physics of being human, a big part of that is that sense that my reaction to this moment, to this event, does not strike me as a decision. It strikes me as self-evidently right because of the things that I feel. And I'm pretty sure that as we went through one of the classes I read um a quote by Thomas Sowell, which I'm going to paraphrase, and it's the problem isn't Timmy doesn't know how to read. The problem isn't even that Timmy doesn't know how to think. The problem is that Timmy doesn't know what thinking is. He confuses it for feeling. And we feel something. It feels so self-evidently right that this reaction that we're having is not an echo of biology and context and our own life experiences and a bazillion decisions about what to believe that we have made. It feels self-evidently the only logical way to react to this set of circumstances. And that is what leads people to spiral because people have different reactions. They both think they are self-evidently right and people spiral. And so now re-anchoring you guys back around this idea of no, no, no, you have a goal. The only thing that matters is will reacting the way that you're reacting take you towards that goal. And if we can all embrace this idea of fulfillment, that fulfillment is the goal, having a positive emotional state that is resilient to the ups and downs of life because we have self-respect, self-worth, we're elevating ourselves, improving ourselves, and elevating, improving those around us. If that's our goal and we can all buy into that, now we have a steering mechanism. And this is the thing that's crazy-making for me in this, you know, um cultural upheaval that we're living through right now, which is people don't agree on what the goal is. And when you don't agree on what the goal is, now you have what Lisa and I call a collision of values. When you have a collision of values, either talk about the collision of values or shut the [ __ ] up. Like legitimately, those are your two options because option one, let's talk about the collision of values and like what should be the goal. Fruitful things can come out of that. Arguing about the tea, as Lisa and I call it. The biggest argument we ever had was over a cup of tea. Now, you can imagine that doesn't make any sense. How could you ever get in a fight that large over a cup of tea? The answer is you can't, but you can get in an argument that big about a collision of values, which then attacks your sense of self, identity. There's this incongruous thing where your reaction feels self-evidently correct. And yet this person is acting in a crazy way because the way that I feel that is self-evidently correct. There's no need to even question it. It is obviously right. Now, you get these massive fireworks because the other person is thinking the exact same thing. They feel self-evidently correct because they have all these emotions that are kicked up by their biology that is kicked up by millions of years of evolution misinterpreted through this lens that we live in called life in a modern context completely removed from the evolutionary soup that our brains marinated in. Our brains marinated in as they were formed. And now all of a sudden people cannot allow themselves to conceive that oh, this emotion was a choice which I have made somewhere through a string of the gazillion little moments that led up to right now in this moment. All of those decisions have formed a set of values and those values are essentially invisible to me because I have mistaken them for truth. Therefore, my values become water, right? To the fish. Fish is the last one to know what water is. It's just it permeates everything in their world. It just is. It's like us in air. Right? That actually had to be discovered. Imagine. The hundreds of thousands of years, like really think about how long, where you've got human-level cognition, as we think of it today, and yet, there's no concept of I'm in this thing. It just You're here. And values become that water. You don't even think about them. You don't think that they govern essentially every aspect of your life. And yet, they do. And the failure to recognize that my values are not objectively real, they are simply choices that I have made invisibly based on all these emotions that I've gotten, which were kicked up to me by evolution. I don't understand them. I don't understand what drives them, but they feel self-evidently true. Therefore, I go with them. Therefore, however I feel, I confuse with thinking. And I think I've thought through the problem. I think I have articulated what my goal is and how I'm going to get there, but the reality is I've just been feeling this whole time. And chaos ensues. All right, guys. If you're going to unlock your potential and achieve everything you've ever wanted, you are going to have to constantly be making progress towards your goals. So, what do you do when you get stuck? The bad news is getting stuck happens to everyone at some point. It's pretty much unavoidable. But, the good news is that if you're willing to take action, there is a framework that you can follow to get back on track. If that sounds familiar, or if you're stuck in a rut and not achieving your goals as fast as you want, I've pulled a class out of Impact Theory University that you need to watch right now. It's called Six Steps to Getting Unstuck, and you can watch it for free at unstuck.impacttheory.com. Inside, I'll teach you about how to use cognitive re-frames, my four-level value stack to becoming unstoppable, as well as the single most important thing to start doing today to regain momentum. To watch this free preview for Impact Theory University, go to unstuck.impacttheory.com. I'll see you on the inside, guys. All right, take care and now back to the episode. I can hear you asking, "Tom, why should we be listening to you?" And the answer to that question is, I've been through it. I went through starting from the worst fixed mindset that you can imagine, making horrific and stupid decisions because I had a fixed mindset. At one point, I actually referred to myself as the king of remedial jobs and all I was trying to do was put myself in a position where I'd be smarter than the people around me and that is a terrible strategy, especially when you're not the brightest person around. So, I got a 990 on my SATs. I took it twice. That is my combined score, which is terrible, but that was where I started. And my whole life was about looking smart, not getting better, not educating myself, not actually becoming smart. My whole life was about looking smart. And when I went to college, I ended up having um a pretty emotionally difficult time. I did well in the beginning and I was really crushing it and that's a story for another day. By the time I finished, I felt like a complete and absolute failure and when I walked out of college, I really felt like I was walking into hopelessness. I did not know how to make something of my life and I felt like I had failed in film school, which is what I studied and I came out not knowing how I was going to rebuild from the realization that I did not have talent. And that's not me being humble, that was the reality and my life has since proven that you can build talent, but at the time, I realized I didn't have talent and what did that mean for the rest of my life? And then, I got a lucky break and I started teaching and in teaching, I realized I was in so far over my head that the only way that I was going to be able to go into class and not embarrass myself was to start doing all this crazy research at night, putting these lesson plans together. And then in doing that and going in and teaching the students, I realized I actually could make their films better. And in realizing that I could make their films better, I started to ask myself the very simple question, "Can I not make my own films better?" And that began, that combined with my obsessive reading about the brain because I was trying to avoid a slow slide to depression. I needed to believe that there was hope. I needed to believe that I could get better. And like I said at the time, it was hotly debated whether or not older people could learn new things, whether the brain was truly plastic or whether it was fixed. And I decided, again, these are choices. I decided to believe that I could get good at anything. I decided to believe that the brain really was plastic. And that ended up being one of these transitional moments in my life upon which everything else rested. And because I made that decision, I started to see it everywhere, most notably when I was teaching. And then the break of all breaks, I met fellow entrepreneurs. And they invited me to work in their startup. And they said, "Look, you can have any job in this company you want, but you have to become the right person for the role." And that meant I was going to have to learn a lot. I was in so far over my head, I had no idea what was going on. But I was so desperate to get rich, which is a story for another day, but at that time in my life, I was so desperate to get rich, I thought, "I've got to [ __ ] learn this. I've got to figure this stuff out, otherwise I'm going to get left behind." And so that became my obsessive mission was to get good, to learn, learn, learn. But by being around other people that had what we would now call a growth mindset, unfortunately I did not have those words back then, but what we now call a growth mindset, being around people that were convinced to the core of their being that they could improve, I then adopted that same belief. I adopted the value system of the people that I was around, moving quickly, pushing myself, getting way the hell outside of my comfort zone, making massive demands of myself, holding myself to a standard, taking complete and total ownership of my life, and it changed everything. And I took myself from scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car, that is a real story, to building a billion-dollar business. And that transformation, which was purely a transformation of mindset and skill set, is exactly what we're going to be talking about in this course. And the very goal of this course is to help you guys understand at a detailed level the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. We're going to cover that in detail. We're going to talk about the beliefs that are needed to build a growth mindset. We're going to talk about how to develop your talent and intelligence, which most people think is a fixed trait. That would be a sign of a fixed mindset. We're going to talk about the process to acquiring skills. We're going to talk about how to avoid the traps that are coming your way. And let me tell you right now, if that sounds insurmountable, let me promise you, if I can do it, you can do it. Too often people look at me as the after picture, and they don't realize just how much I had to crawl through, including low self-esteem, massive insecurities, crippling anxiety, having I I at one point I couldn't even tell a story in front of five people in my own family because my voice was shaking. I was so freaked the [ __ ] out. And right now I'm around 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. Looks like we have about seven people in this room. I routinely speak in front of massive crowds, and all of that was a process. It is a process that is teachable. It is things that you can go through to completely and radically change your mindset. And in changing your mindset, you change the wiring of your brain. And that's what I want you guys to understand. You can change the physical structures and the functions of your mind. Another thing that really messes with people is they don't have a real understanding of the brain. This was a big breakthrough moment for me when I really began to research the brain and came across the whole notion of brain plasticity. When I was growing up, people actually debated whether or not an old dog could learn new tricks. And people said that you're born with a certain number of brain cells and that's it. And hey, every time you go out and party, you're just diminishing your brain cells and you die with far fewer than you began with. And now science has proven that absolutely is not true. And being able to imagine that process, I think will really help you guys. Um people also hold the mistaken belief that only kids are able to learn that, you know, up until say 11, 12, or 13, you know, it's easy to learn. And people often cite languages. And after that, it gets a lot harder. But again, that just isn't true. It doesn't match the brain science. It just as a lifestyle, we don't often put ourselves through the paces that kids are going through. And that doesn't mean the kids don't have an easier time. They do. But it is certainly something that you can do to a profound extent as you get older. But thinking that you can't is really going to hold you back. It matters what you build your self-esteem around. So, if you're focused on being right, being smart, being worthy, all of those things are incredibly fragile. And it wasn't until I stopped doing that and I started focusing on identifying the right answer faster than anybody else, that changed my life. Because now all of a sudden you can actually run the physics of progress because you're going to see the data truthfully. Whereas when you've got this story or this crushing, sucking wound of a need to be right so that you can feel smart, which is where I was, then you either see what you want to see instead of what is really there, or you know that you're focused on the wrong thing. And because it was your idea and you need to be right, you'll argue for something that you know is wrong. And I realized that these two things had come into collision in a moment in um building one of the first companies that I was building. I constantly was wrong. And because I knew the least of the three founders of that company, I knew the least. And I had an idea, I needed it to be right, and so I was just arguing for it. And in my mind, there was a voice screaming, "You know this is wrong. You know this will move the company backwards." And yet I kept arguing and arguing and arguing, and probably they just relented finally and said, "Cool, we'll do it your way." And they walk off, and I thought, I got what I wanted out of that argument, but it's now going to move me away from my goal. So, I need to be honest with myself. What is it that I really want? And in finally being honest with myself about what I wanted, I could see that I had two conflicting desires. I had one to feel smart, and I had another to actually succeed in my goal of becoming wealthy. And I thought, "Okay, you're going to have to rank order them. And if what you really want is just to feel good about yourself, that's fair enough, no judgment, just go do that. You're going to need to leave this company, cuz here you're in over your head all the time. You're going to constantly feel stupid, it's part of the learning process. So, if you don't want that, then bounce, and and don't keep wasting time here. But if on the other hand, you really do want to generate wealth, then you need to accept that you have to pursue the right answer, and that means that you're going to be pursuing other people's answers, maybe all of the time. And understanding that I did need to feel good about myself, I couldn't just divorce myself from that, and that I really did want my number one priority to be um my goal of generating wealth. So, I was like, "Okay, then what if I switched what I built my self-esteem around? And instead of feeling good about myself for being smart, I felt good about myself for identifying the right answer, and that changed everything. And so, that is being the learner. And it's the only antifragile mindset identity that I've seen. Um and I constantly shout out for people to give me one that's better. Um I've yet to see one that's more effective than adopting the identity of the learner because being a learner is what's required for the physics of progress to work. The physics of progress are it is the nature of progress. There is nothing um to reduce the physics of progress down to. That is the nature of moving forward distilled as uh far down as it can go. And so, those two pieces go hand in hand. The one that I have struggled with most, I mean, the cheesy answer is maybe that one because you have there's so much evolutionary pressure at your back to be right, be good, be smart. Like, no matter how much of the grand accomplishments in my life are due to me switching over my mindset to um identifying my pride around identifying the right answer, I still get hype from a uh psychological energy perspective, just an absolute avalanche of dopamine when I had a crazy idea, everybody thought it was dumb, and it ends up being right. Like, that's so [ __ ] amazing. And it like instinctually, I feel that much more strongly than I do when I sort of run the more um logical aspect of, "Hey, this wasn't your idea, but to get to your goal, that person's idea is right, and so you go invest." I do get the dopamine response from that, but it isn't as profound. So, I do find myself basically every day having to constantly reorient myself back to the goal, back to the goal. You're a learner, you're a learner, and in learning, you'll be able to actually achieve your goals. So, make sure you're obsessed with that. To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities. I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished. I have no pity for them because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not. That one endures. I've the chills on my face right now. The reason that that quote gives me the chills is because to me the very meaning of life is to see how many skills you can acquire that have utility and then put those skills to use in the service of something bigger than yourself. But the only way that you're going to be able to do that is to build into the core of your being the ability to endure. Life is hard. Life is going to kick you in the face. There are going to be a thousand times in your life when you're going to want to give up and the only thing that is going to see you through, the only thing that's going to make sure that you actually [ __ ] endure is your mindset. And if you get that right, if you lay the foundation for that, if you put all the pieces in place, then you're going to persevere. Then you're going to push through. Then you're going to be able to see things through to the end. But if you don't do that, then you're going to break. And that's what I see happen to so many people and that's where my own life started was not believing in myself. And that is one of the most important things for you to understand is that your mindset is one of the most important feeders into your perspective and perspective is everything. And the first most important decision that we all have to make and this is one of my favorite Einstein quotes is each and every one of us has to decide whether we live in a friendly or a a universe. And understanding that that is a choice, that's the critical part. And a lot of people don't see that as a choice. They believe that the universe is either working with them or it's working against them, and it's just a matter of fact. It isn't something that's open to interpretation. And what I want you guys to understand with the whole Mindset 101 course is one very simple thing. It is a decision. It's something that you have to decide. And whatever it is that you decide, you're going to end up seeing the evidence for that. So, you have to be really careful whether you decide that life is difficult, it's this slew of things that's coming at you that's trying to break you, and nothing ever good happens to you. Or if you choose to believe, no matter what happens to you, you can always choose your response. You can always choose to believe that it's happening for you and not to you. And in that perspective, and having that mindset, then you're going to begin to look for the solutions. You're going to look for the ways out. You're going to look for the lesson that you can learn in the hardship. That is mindset. It's a subset of beliefs about what you're capable of and what the world really is at its foundation, whether it's working for you or against you. So, understand that these things are all a choice. Mindset also just affects a whole lot of stuff in your life. From happiness, it affects the outcome because you're going to take on the burden of learning and growing and being able to flip something from a negative to positive. It removes you as an obstacle, which is something we're going to talk more about. I think the number one thing that holds people back is their own mindset. When they see or when they choose to believe that the world is working against them, they just quit. And why wouldn't you? Why would you try to move forward if it's hopeless? If the world is just a deck of cards that's stacked against you and you're never going to be able to get ahead. I get that, and that's why I tell people the only belief that matters is that you can grow and get better. Once you believe that, then everything unlocks from that. And another thing that having a growth mindset is going to help you do is it's going to keep you open to criticism. A lot of people are shut down by criticism, and a lot of times that criticism is going to unlock a whole new set of potential for you. And it's going to reframe stress as challenges instead of something that's dangerous. Mindset also plays deeply into your self-esteem. It also helps you regulate your emotions, and it, like I said, is going to allow you to flip things from negative to positive. All right. That is why this is so critically important. Now, I want to walk you through why so many people struggle with this. Building an empowering mindset is very difficult for people because they're fighting against, often times, decades worth of entrenched beliefs that started when they were a kid. One of the most devastating things about me, and this really frustrates me about mindset, and it frustrates me about the general importance of childhood, is that, first of all, many people have a shitty childhood. They have parents that are modeling terrible behaviors, and they don't realize that the mindset that's building up in them is actually choices that they're making along the way, whether it's just to listen to what your parents say, or the behavior that's being modeled by your friends, or what you see your teachers doing. But all of that stuff are these little choices that are being made when you're far too young to understand that they're choices, and they're beginning to solidify and then hard wire in your mind. So, when you get caught up in these negative loops, which happen in childhood, they begin to seem like objective truth, instead of recognizing them for what they are, which is really just these patterns that have become hard wired. So, mindset 101 is about going in, unwinding that stuff, but it's incredibly difficult because it's been happening since you were a kid. So, one of the things you're going to want to do in this course is to just begin to recognize the patterns that have happened, that have been planted in your youth, and begin to supplant them with new patterns. The easiest way to sum it up in a single sentence is to say most people build their mindset by accident. It just happens slowly over time. My question is do um do we base goal on our action or on results? So, here's my question. Emotion should never stop you from achieving your goals. So, if you feel stuck, overwhelmed, low on confidence, you're beating yourself up, or you feel like you're not deserving of the things you want in life, I have something to tell you. Emotions are not facts, and you should never let them hold you back. And yet, I find that people do this all the time. They mistake that feeling for objective truth, and it sends them in this downward spiral. Reaching greater levels of success in life means knowing how to use your brain. And if you're in a rut right now, or if you've been struggling for a while to achieve your goals, then I've pulled a class from Impact Theory University to help you get back on track. It's called Six Steps to Getting Unstuck, and it's for anyone who wants to know the exact steps to achieving big goals when life puts challenges in your way. If you want to check it out, go to unstuck.impacttheory.com to get access. It's a free preview. All right, guys. I'll see you on the inside. Now, let's get back to today's episode. Let's see. Here's my question. I will follow a program or execute XYZ instead or will I base it on Okay, my goal is I'm going to follow a program. Yep. And that's my goal. Instead of I'm going to lose X amount of pounds because I can't control that, but I'm going to follow the program. Or Yeah. I'm going to I'm going to execute this instead of I'm going to earn X amount of dollars. I know. I know right where you're at. So, I'll I'll put this in context of the language that we've used in the different classes. Some of this is actually going to be from the business class. So, the plan is basically our path. The goal is the weight loss, okay? So, there is multiple paths to heaven, as they say. So, if you have a path that you're running that you think is going to work, to put it in the language of the physics of progress, that's just your hypothesis. Now, in testing a hypothesis, you must have what we call lever actions, which are just simply put things you can do that you control entirely that nobody can stop you from. Showing up in the gym every day, right? Doing the workouts, air squats, body weight, right? Nobody's going to be able to stop you from doing that. So, we're going to show up, we're going to rock that plan, which is just one hypothesis on how we actually achieve our goal, which is the weight loss. And then we're going to see whether or not that actually worked. And if it worked, then we keep doing it. If it isn't working, then we're going to immediately discard that hypothesis, form a new hypothesis with more lever actions, and then we're going to try that. So, let's say at first our path is we're going to show up in the gym every day, and we're going to work out for an hour. And we show up in the gym every day, we work out for an hour, and we're not losing our stated goal in terms of number of pounds, right? We can just let's say we gave ourselves 3 months to lose 10 lb. We're looking at it, the math isn't adding up, you know, maybe we've lost a quarter of a pound or something in a month. We know we're never going to make it. Okay, cool. Well, then what would the next hypothesis be? And if this were a real example, I will give you the punchline, which is don't worry about the gym, it's entirely what you eat. So, now the next hypothesis is going to be, okay, I'm going to change my diet, and I'm going to change it in this precise way. I'm only going to eat these things, and then you're going to run that experiment, which is again is lever actions. I'm only going to eat a vegan diet with no additional sugar or a carnivore diet and it's just, you know, nose to tail on the animal. Whatever the thing is that you're going to run. And then you do that and you know whether you did that or not and then you check to see if you made the progress that you wanted to make. But what matters in the scenario is the goal, not the path. So, we're going to have a bunch of hypotheses. Inevitably, some amount of them are going to be totally wrong or wrong in some part and we will have to refine. And so, what we're going to look at is just the data. Now, you used a wonderful example because this is one where I will say, "Now, even before you begin, you've got to make sure that you've chosen a wise goal." Because the scale is your enemy when what you're trying to do cuz you don't actually care how much you weigh. If I said, "I'm going to double your weight. You're going to weigh 220 lb, but you're going to look like a supermodel at the like height of their prowess." You'd be like, "Count me in." So, what we really care about is actually body composition. So, a certain amount and type of fat combined with a certain amount and distribution of muscle mass. Okay? So, that's what we care about. Now, muscle mass is lean, dense tissue. So, as you gain muscle, which makes you look leaner, you actually go up on the scale. So, a lot of people end up making catastrophic errors because they chose the wrong goal and they weren't, you know, thoughtful enough about their goal. And that's why if as you were going and you're doing this, you're like, "Jesus, I'm losing weight, but I hate my life cuz I'm starving all the time and I don't like the food and I miss that euphoric rush I got in the gym." Okay, well, now that's more data points and we can use those data points to create a new physics of progress hypothesis. And we say, "Okay, my hypothesis is going to be it's a combination of food and exercise." Okay, cool. And then we go in and we figure out what the levers are that we're going to pull, the specifics in there about what we're doing to our diet, what we're doing to our weight loss plan, and then we run that. And then we see what the results are that we get there, and then you're going to keep going and going and going cuz weight loss is really complicated. It is. But it's uh it's a great it's a great one cuz it points at the need to be very conscious of what goal you set. One of the things that really helped me in this whole program is that you talk about your anxiety openly, and it really taught me to go all in despite all my health issues. And the question I have is how do you manage to become a diamond under pressure without having stress affect your health? Well, now I have some bad news for you. I don't know that um prolonged stress is always going to affect your health. The lifestyle that I lead, I am convinced is shortening my life. So, I want a full disclosure that. So, this comes down to what is the life that you want to lead? And if the life that you want to lead makes the demands that you're going that hard and playing that hard and that's part of what you love and enjoy, then there are going to be some consequences that you will have to accept. Now, having said that, there are things you can do to wildly mitigate what would be a level of stress that is physiologically damaging for some person would be something that you'll barely notice. So, what you're trying to do is raise the threshold of what is damaging. So, my wife, for instance, tries always stay below the threshold of what's damaging for her health, whereas for me, I'm I'm always trying to optimize for like where's my breaking point? And I just want to be a pixel below my breaking point. So, you have to decide, you know, for each of us. So, here is what you want to do. First of all, meditation is going to be one of the most important things you can do. And I'll just assume that your diet and exercise are right. So, your diet has to be right, exercise has to be right. Um but meditation is huge because in meditating, what you're training your brain to do is to not um not bunch up. So, that's a terribly metaphoric way of explaining it, but if you think of the brain as a muscle for a second, which it's not, but this will be a I think a handy analogy. If you think of the brain as a muscle, if you flex your bicep and you flex it as hard as you can, uh it will cramp. And it actually ends up diminishing in strength, right? So, you can't just clinch clinch clinch clinch clinch the muscle. In fact, what happens is if you've ever seen the movie Awakenings, finally what they realized is those people who looked like they were just completely brain dead, what what had happened was their muscles were firing so intensely that they were just frozen. But they weren't frozen from inaction, they were frozen from perpetual action. So, you have to train your brain to literally relax, to not keep secreting the um cortisol that's making you feel constant fight or flight. So, you're going to get out of the sympathetic mode, sympathetic nervous system, get into the parasympathetic nervous system. And the only way to do that is to actually train your brain to switch back and forth. Because by default, if you're living a stressful life, it's just always going to be in the fight or flight mode, always going to be in the stressor response, always going to be pumping cortisol, which is the thing over long periods of time that begins to break down the tissue, causes the heart disease, and all that. So, you want to get very good at relaxing, metaphorically, the brain as a muscle. And the way to train yourself to do that is to meditate. That's going to be the biggest one. And then the other is to find ways to put yourself in artificially heightened um fight or flight moments. So, one way that I've done this is by playing uh first-person shooter video games, which has actually been really fun, first of all, but also really useful. And what I found is when everybody's like shooting at you like crazy, your brain clenches, you're total fight or flight, your field of vision narrows, and you get worse. Even though it feels like the right response, what you need to do is the exact opposite. You need to relax your posture. Feel almost like you're slowing your mind down, which feels again like, "No, no, no, that's not what you need to do. You need to get hype here." But the more you do that, the more you tighten up, the more your field of vision narrows, the worse you do. So, you know you need to relax, slow down, widen the field of view. Andrew Huberman talks about this, how you can literally shift what part of the the nervous system you're accessing by what you do with your eyes, and by bringing your field of vision back out wider, you slow down, you calm down, you get into the sympathetic or the parasympathetic nervous system. And now, even though you're under the same amount of stress, just use the video game example, the same number of people are shooting at you, but that stress or response that the other people might be choking because of, you now are able to play with the same amount of response, right? The inputs are the same, but the way that you respond is very different. And that's the goal, to continually push that level under which you can perform optimally without succumbing to the physical nature of the stress. And so, some of it is recontextualizing, right? So, a big recontextualization for me is, "Hey, this big crazy thing doesn't really matter. This isn't performance, this is only practice." And I'm saying that specifically to lower my anxiety. Another is just to do it a lot. And the more you do it, the more you realize, "Oh, I didn't die." Like, I know what the consequences are. There are consequences. They are not life-threatening, and so I can dial this back. And so, the bravery in the face of the fear, in the face of the danger, in the face of the anxiety begins to help lower it. Also, just outright imagining it going well. So, one of the worst things that you can do if you have anxiety is to rehearse the failure. So, one thing I used to do when I would get really anxious, I would rehearse my escape route. Like, how do I get out of this if I I start getting really out of breath, my [ __ ] heart is racing, I can't think clearly? I I need to be able to get out of this so I'm not like standing on stage embarrassed, right? So, in doing that, I first had to imagine it going wrong. So, now I found all my mental rehearsal was around it going wrong. And so, now as I went to go on the stage, I had rehearsed a thousand times it going wrong. And so, I started repeating to myself, let failure surprise you. Be so convinced that it's going to go right. Have rehearsed it a thousand times going right, going right, going right, every time right, right, right. Feeling perfect, walking on the stage you feel amazing. This is all wonderful. Every thought that I need is going to be there for me. The audience is going to eat it up. It's going to be amazing. Now, I may get out there and fumble, the audience turns against me, but at least I'll be totally surprised by it having gone wrong. I won't have rehearsed it. And in rehearsing the success, my odds of success go up. Now, you keep doing that year after year, and all of the sudden you realize that the things that used to freak you out don't freak you out anymore. There are probably still things that will trigger your anxiety, that is certainly true for me. But, whereas I went through a period where sitting in the living room with my closest family left me paralyzed and unable to speak because I was just so anxious, which was the breaking point of course and where I realized, okay, my current strategy of dealing with this by pretending it's not real is not working. So, now I need to address this head on. And now, it's like I can't I can't believe that I used to be that anxious. So, just got to work that process over and over and over. Mhm. Can I ask one more follow-up question? Please, of course. So, totally get that I need to find calm in the stressful situation. I know how to get there, meditation and what you explained. In the beginning you said you are aware of the or you're aware that the lifestyle you lead will ultimately maybe lead to a shorter lifespan. And still, I wonder from a very logical point of view, isn't it smart to have a long lifespan as you can have an impact longer? So, where is the balance in that? And then I also heard you say in several of your YouTube interviews that your ultimate goal is to be um I'm looking unsterblich in English, like that you're never going to die. Yeah. Immortal? to live forever. Yeah, I want to live forever. Yeah, yeah. So, what how what's the balance there? Do you know what he thought? Here's the honest answer. Um part of it is that I love my life and I really enjoy going so hard, so fast, and taking on so much that I'm able to build things that are bigger than what other people can accomplish just because they're not willing to endure what I endure. And when I look at the harsh reality of would I shave 10 years off of my life to feel the way that I feel now, the answer is yes. So, since tomorrow isn't guaranteed, it's hard for all of us, myself included, to optimize solely for longevity, right? Because I could get hit by a bus, uh probably not likely during quarantine, an earthquake could, you know, collapse my house on top of me, far more likely. Um so, because I so enjoy that and I have um chosen to build pride around my ability to keep pushing my threshold up up up up up um, and because I'm constantly trying to find ways even at that peak to you know, lower my actual stress levels um, but I just don't ever want to fool myself or other people that if I optimize entirely for health my life would look differently. So, I put it out there more just so that I don't lead somebody down a path that they're you know, trying to keep up with me and it's not fun for them and they they have a should I should be able to do what Tom does. So, I just want people to know, look, even though I'm doing everything I can to optimize so that I'm not damaging my health just assume if you're going down this path that it's like an athlete running uh, a triathlon a day. You just know like that's got to be taking it's toll, right? So, um, there's that and then also in terms of the longevity thing, you won't hear me talking much about it anymore. So, this last year was the year of me realizing that embracing my mortality is more advantageous than embracing that I can live forever. So, for a long time the thought of me living forever allowed me to make far longer range plans in the neighborhood of say 70 years, right? I can make these 70 year plans and and that feeling like I'll be there to see them through really got me going. And then I don't know, something flipped and I realized that actually isn't pushing me as fast anymore as now saying, "Actually, you're probably going to die." As of right now, there's no technology that's going to save you. So, as of right now, you're on a one-way collision course with death. And that was like, "Yeah, I'm going to die. [ __ ] like I got to get after this. Like, let's get going. Come on. Like, we could die today." And really spending time thinking about what that meant. And all of the sudden I was like, "That now has me more hyped and pushing harder than the thought of living forever did. So, I just chase what's usable. So, now because that's become a more usable sort of frame of reference, that's where I live. Okay. You got me with better a short life that you enjoy than a long one that you don't. So, whatever you enjoy, do it. And finding that threshold below your own barrier. And for me, if that's for me with the gut disease, it's So, it's completely different than for you with anxiety issues, fine. But, find it and then stay there. Yeah, I know gut issues are a whole thing under themselves. So, just remember there's there's a whole cumulative effect. So, you probably have to be more strategic cuz one like if you if I redline into stress, then I can easily back off by just saying, "Okay, I'm not going to do that project." If you spill over, you could now be in a cycle. And that cycle could last a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks. So, you probably need to be a bit more cautious. This is where the like sort of hype train versus the reality train are different. And because Lisa struggles so profoundly with the gut, I'm all too aware. So, Lisa has early warning signs that she goes, "Okay, I know where this I'm not yet having a problem, but I know where this goes." And so, she lives more by rules. So, she stops work say 3 hours before bedtime. Whereas, I stop work right at the moment where I turn off the light. So, those are things that are very important for her to manage her life. So, just be thoughtful with the gut stuff because it there's such a delayed reaction, and then it can take so long to rectify. Mhm.