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Stop taking life so seriously.

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No one is getting out of this game alive,

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and in three generations, no one will even remember your name.

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And if that doesn't give you liberation,

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to just drop your f***ing problems for a moment and find some joy,

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I don't know what will.

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Because there'll never be a time when there's no problems in life.

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And that's why this time in between Christmas and the year

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has a really wonderful time to plan big dreams and goals for the year.

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So let's talk about that.

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Chris Williamson is one of the world's leading podcast hosts and thinkers,

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and now he's back.

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Educating us on how to build discipline,

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turning goals into results,

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what's stopping us finding love,

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and what makes a good man in today's society.

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The single best question to work out what you should be doing next year.

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What would have to happen by the end of 2026?

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For me to look back and consider it a success.

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And it usually comes down to only a few things.

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The first one is in order to pick something up,

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you have to put something down.

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So setting the bar unrealistically high

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does not increase your performance.

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Like you could probably lose 20 pounds and get a boyfriend.

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You can't do that and move cities and start a new business,

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so make the assumption I can do no more than I'm doing now.

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Second thing, the life was a movie,

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and the audience were watching what would they be screaming at the screen,

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telling you to do with your life.

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It is obvious, leave the relationship.

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The job is not working for you.

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The kill is hiding in the cupboard,

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because if you're not careful with how you design what it is that you chase after,

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you can spend your entire life realizing that you climbed a huge f***ing ladder

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that was leaning against the wrong wall.

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And is there anything else?

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So there is wonderful upside in trying to conquer

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and trying to achieve mastery, trying to really drive yourself to go and do stuff.

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But I'm not like f***ing your feelings just hustle and grind until your eyes bleed either,

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because one of the biggest lessons I've taken away from this year is

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suppression isn't the same thing as strength,

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and it's a good thing for guys who feel their emotions

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to show that they feel their emotions, right?

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Like I've been at some of my lowest points over the last 12 months.

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It felt like my better self was slipping through my fingers.

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I realized my emotions are legitimate,

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and denying myself that is not helping anything at all.

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What happened?

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Just give me 30 seconds of your time.

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Two things I wanted to say.

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The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show.

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Week after week means the world to all of us,

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and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had,

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and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.

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But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.

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And if you enjoy what we do here,

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please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly

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and follow us on this app.

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Here's a promise I'm going to make to you.

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I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.

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We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to,

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and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.

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Thank you.

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Chris, my audience care a lot about changing their life for the better.

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And I think at this time of year,

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change is front of mind for everybody.

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Everybody's thinking about New Year's resolutions,

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who I want to become in 2026.

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But when you look at the stats,

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23% of people quit by the end of the first week of January,

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their New Year's resolution, the thing they aimed at.

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Roughly half of people will quit their New Year's resolution,

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the change they sought by the end of January,

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and only about 9% of people will keep their New Year's resolution for the full year.

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So I guess my opening question to you is,

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does this time of year matter at all?

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Is it a useful, productive time to be thinking about change in your point of view?

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I think the world is split into two camps.

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One camp says there is no difference between January 1st and December 31st.

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Like why wait?

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Just December 10th, just do it now.

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And the other camp likes the idea of there being a culturally appropriate moment

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to stop doing something and start doing something else.

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Most people need to realize that they're already spending tons of time worrying about the future in the past.

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They're going back to this thing that they regret.

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I wish I'd done this differently.

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Oh, I have rumination about something that occurred.

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I have a sense of whistfulness for something that I've maybe missed.

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I'm grief for something that I've lost.

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And then they're concerned about the future.

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They think I'm uncertain about this thing that's going to happen.

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I could plan, I could try and come up with a solution for this.

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So you're already worrying about the past.

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You're already doing reflection and planning.

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Just in a very unstructured way,

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where you don't get to choose when it hits you in the face.

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This is a culturally appropriate moment,

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like a scheduling appropriate moment.

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If you just step in and think, okay,

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in between Christmas and New York, people at work in retail,

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God bless you, people that are going to go back to work and do that thing.

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But usually there's a bit of downtime.

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It's a little bit slower.

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It's boxing day, you're chilling out on the couch.

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And you're kind of thinking, wow, I was here again at Mum and Dad's house,

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or with the in-laws or whatever.

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What was it doing last year?

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What was it like last year?

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You're already in a little bit of a reflective mode.

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There is no special magic super secret squirrel source in January 1st.

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But it is a good moment to check in because life tends to slow down a little bit.

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Work time is a little bit more slow.

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And you're already doing this.

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You're already thinking about the past and the future.

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And this is just a good structured opportunity to check in and do it.

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I guess the question that everybody should be asking themselves is,

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what should I aim at?

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And is there such a thing as aiming at too many things?

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What is a good goal for change?

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When you think about all the people you've interviewed and the change you've seen in your own life,

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what does a productive,

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near-resolutional productive goal sound like?

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And how do I get there?

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Yeah, it's very overwhelming.

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Uh, if you realize, wow, I can do anything I want.

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I could look at my entire life.

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Let's terrifying.

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That's absolutely terrifying.

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One thing I would say, this is your opportunity to change anything.

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Behaviorally, you can change anything you want.

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Not everything you want, right?

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That's the problem.

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You can become anything you want behaviorally,

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but you can't be everything you want.

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So you need to pick a small number.

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The single best question to work out what you should be doing next year.

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What would have to happen by the end of 2026 for me to look back on 2026

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and consider it a success?

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I think that really helps to just give you a bit more perspective.

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And it usually comes down to only a few things.

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You don't usually have so much in your mind when you do that.

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Setting the bar unrealistically high does not increase your performance.

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Imagine this.

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Imagine that you went into a buffet.

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And you made your plate as big as possible.

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You said, I want all of these things.

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I'm going to put all of this stuff on my plate.

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And my stomach is going to expand to be able to fit it.

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That's not the way that our stomachs work.

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And that is not the way that our workloads work.

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So first rule, in order to pick something up,

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you have to put something down.

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Don't assume that just because you've loaded more onto your workload plate,

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your work capacity will expand to be able to fit it into your stomach.

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That's not the way that it works.

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Assume, make the assumption, I can do no more than I'm doing now.

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I can switch stuff, but I can't add more in.

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Maybe you can.

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Maybe you're going to be able to squeeze your phone time.

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Maybe you're going to be able to come more efficient, more productive, whatever.

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But it's safer to just assume this is the pie that I'm playing with.

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And in order to pick something up, I have to put something down.

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That's a really important thing.

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Because at the moment, it's December 29th, I'm full of gusto and motivation,

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and I can't wait.

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I'm going to crush it.

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And yeah, for the first week, maybe you've got that.

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But if you're using motivation and enthusiasm to work yourself through your goals,

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your goals are predicated largely on a fuel source that you don't have control over.

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Don't have a massive amount of control over your motivation over a long amount of time.

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Like it comes and then it goes.

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You want something that's a little bit more rigid.

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So in order to pick something up, you have to put something down.

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I think that's a really important point.

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Because when we think about the goals, we'll start setting it this time of the year.

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All of them are asking for more time or more energy.

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Like pretty much all of them are asking, I want to start running.

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I want to start going to the gym.

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Whereas, as you say, that means I'm going to have to take something off the plate.

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And we don't think about subtraction at this time of the year typically.

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We don't think I'm going to spend less time with my friends.

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I'm going to cut out Netflix.

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We think of addition, but logically, there's still just the 24 hours in a day

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and the finite amount of any body budget that we have in terms of energy.

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So are you saying that I have to create both an addition and subtraction list

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and make sure that they equal out, they net out to zero?

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That would be optimal.

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I think one question that you really should be asking yourself,

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let's go through a bunch of uncomfortable questions.

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People can ask themselves, that could be cool.

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Okay.

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How would I spend my day if I wanted to make 85-year-old me as miserable as possible?

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What is it that I did over the last year that made me right now

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feel

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into this constriction?

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Okay.

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I don't like my relationship with my phone.

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I spend a lot of time on my phone.

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I don't like how my mornings aren't very productive.

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I've noticed that when I'm with my friends, I'm not very present.

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I've noticed that I spend a lot of time on my own,

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I tend to isolate when things get difficult.

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I've noticed that I've got into the habit of not telling the truth

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when people ask me a question.

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I've noticed that I've got into the habit of advocating for my needs

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when I should do.

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I don't hold my boundaries sufficiently well.

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Like, this is why the reflection parts are really important.

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So, what would I do to make 85-year-old me as miserable as possible?

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How would I spend my day?

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And in what ways am I already doing that?

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Well, a lot of those are going to cross over.

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That then diagram is not going to be as far apart as you might think it is.

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I've heard you asked the question before about

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if someone was watching this in it was a movie.

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Yes, I mean, it's the, this question is so fantastic.

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If your life was a movie and the audience were watching up to this point,

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what would they be screaming at the screen telling you to do with your life?

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They would be, it is obvious.

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Leave the relationship.

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The job is not working for you.

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The kill is hiding in the cupboard.

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What would the audience be screaming at the screen telling you to do with your life?

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So, you've asked three questions.

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And I'm going to ask you those three questions.

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So, the first question you asked was about

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what would have to happen at the end of next year

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to look back and consider this year's success?

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So, for you personally,

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I want to spend more time thinking about ideas and the less time court of doing admin.

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Admin is a drain on me.

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I don't enjoy emails.

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I don't enjoy the operations of that sort of stuff.

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Spend time making or?

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Yeah, I want to be in maker mode, not manager mode.

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We'd be a way to put it.

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I want to spend more time with my friends.

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I've been solo, praner, grind, set,

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pick it up and lift it type thing a lot for the last forever.

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More time with my friends.

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More time connecting with people.

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So, that's two things.

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If I can do that, spend more time with my friends and the less time doing admin.

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Now, one of the problems that you have is

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I want to lose 20 pounds.

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I want to get my bench press up to 200 kilos and I want to do this.

248
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It's like, really?

249
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Do you really, really, really want that?

250
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Because when I think about it,

251
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I have like much more gentle goals,

252
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of much broader goals.

253
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And that's the stuff that I think is important to me.

254
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And if we think about your subtraction framework,

255
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what are you going to have to subtract?

256
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What's interesting about those is that actually those aren't necessarily additions.

257
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The friends thing is an addition,

258
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but the executive functioning thing,

259
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the admin burden is not.

260
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So, actually, that's nice because I want to do less of that thing,

261
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which should hopefully open up a little bit of time.

262
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What I need to get rid of?

263
00:11:49.840 --> 00:11:52.080
I'd realistically need to get rid of some time

264
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sat in front of my computer doing boring admin stuff.

265
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I'd probably need to spend less time scrolling on my phone,

266
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less time on social media.

267
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I would maybe need to make some sacrifices in training as well.

268
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If I'm going to go out with my friends a little bit more in an evening,

269
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I'm going to have to get up a bit later.

270
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So, there's some of the trades that we're going to have to make.

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The other question was,

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around if this was a movie and the audience was screaming at you,

273
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what would they be screaming?

274
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You're already doing enough.

275
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You're already doing enough.

276
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Stop whipping yourself into submission,

277
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thinking that your happiness sits on the other side of the next set of goals

278
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that you're going to achieve.

279
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You've already achieved goals that you said would make you happy.

280
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So, if you haven't made it now, if this isn't when life is going to begin,

281
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then when you're going to start,

282
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there's this wonderful idea of the deferred life hypothesis.

283
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The deferred life hypothesis is basically the sort of common belief

284
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that our life hasn't yet begun.

285
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That what's happening now is a sort of prelude.

286
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It's an intro to our life truly beginning.

287
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And upon reflection, what a lot of people realize

288
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is that this prelude that they run through

289
00:13:08.080 --> 00:13:11.760
was a mirage that sort of faded as they approached

290
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and they were actually just running toward the end of their life.

291
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Like, they're permanently putting things off.

292
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I get it.

293
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People have got realistic structural,

294
00:13:20.160 --> 00:13:21.920
monetary requirements.

295
00:13:21.920 --> 00:13:23.440
They've got to get up, they've got to go to work,

296
00:13:23.440 --> 00:13:25.520
they've got to change their nappy,

297
00:13:25.520 --> 00:13:26.320
they've got to walk the dog,

298
00:13:26.320 --> 00:13:27.760
they've got things that they need to do.

299
00:13:27.760 --> 00:13:28.720
That's not what I'm talking about.

300
00:13:29.600 --> 00:13:33.760
My point is everybody thinks a lot of people think

301
00:13:34.400 --> 00:13:37.360
in one form or another that my life will begin when

302
00:13:37.920 --> 00:13:39.280
they're holding the happiness hostage.

303
00:13:39.280 --> 00:13:40.640
They're in a holding pattern,

304
00:13:40.640 --> 00:13:42.880
like a plane that can't land for some reason.

305
00:13:42.880 --> 00:13:46.400
It's like, what if that never changes?

306
00:13:47.120 --> 00:13:49.920
What if your problems in life are never ever going to go away?

307
00:13:49.920 --> 00:13:51.360
What if problems are always going to be there?

308
00:13:52.240 --> 00:13:52.640
What then?

309
00:13:53.600 --> 00:13:56.640
Oh wow, well, I'm never going to arrive.

310
00:13:56.640 --> 00:13:58.320
That means I need to start living now.

311
00:13:58.400 --> 00:14:00.240
And I think for me, there's definitely a lot of,

312
00:14:01.120 --> 00:14:05.120
I will get there when, once the tasks of today are completed,

313
00:14:05.120 --> 00:14:06.560
once the problems are gotten through,

314
00:14:07.520 --> 00:14:09.280
there'll never be a time when there's no problems in life.

315
00:14:09.280 --> 00:14:10.800
Problems are a feature, not a bug.

316
00:14:10.800 --> 00:14:15.040
I sometimes wonder if this is a trait of just human evolution.

317
00:14:15.520 --> 00:14:18.880
Like, it makes a survival sense for it to be hardwired

318
00:14:18.880 --> 00:14:20.320
into my genetic code to strive,

319
00:14:21.360 --> 00:14:23.120
to basically continue to strive,

320
00:14:23.120 --> 00:14:25.120
like to continue to conquer, to continue to build.

321
00:14:25.120 --> 00:14:27.120
And in fact, maybe if my ancestors didn't have that,

322
00:14:27.120 --> 00:14:29.280
we wouldn't be sat in a room now with all these lights

323
00:14:29.280 --> 00:14:31.200
and fancy cameras and such,

324
00:14:31.200 --> 00:14:34.000
because this is the consequence of a species that strive.

325
00:14:34.880 --> 00:14:36.960
And so I wonder if this is like the curse of being human,

326
00:14:36.960 --> 00:14:39.200
which is we just endlessly strive and then we die.

327
00:14:39.200 --> 00:14:42.240
And because we did, our offspring have a higher rate of survival.

328
00:14:42.800 --> 00:14:44.720
And like, when I speak to people from, you know,

329
00:14:44.720 --> 00:14:46.800
like East Asian traditions and stuff,

330
00:14:46.800 --> 00:14:49.280
they talk about being at peace and being at one,

331
00:14:49.280 --> 00:14:50.880
and being satisfied and all these things,

332
00:14:50.880 --> 00:14:54.800
but it seems so alien to me to be satisfied.

333
00:14:55.600 --> 00:14:57.680
I think I live in a dichotomy,

334
00:14:57.680 --> 00:15:00.160
where I'm like, well aware nothing will change my happiness.

335
00:15:00.160 --> 00:15:03.040
And then at the same time, I'm completely striving as if it were.

336
00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:05.440
Well, of course, that's a human condition.

337
00:15:05.440 --> 00:15:07.440
We habituate in both directions.

338
00:15:08.000 --> 00:15:13.760
So, if your ancestors had been satisfied when they got to a cave,

339
00:15:14.480 --> 00:15:17.040
when their family grew and they needed a bigger cave,

340
00:15:17.040 --> 00:15:19.600
then what, you don't just go and find one bush,

341
00:15:19.600 --> 00:15:21.200
you find a ton of bushes and then you expand

342
00:15:21.200 --> 00:15:22.640
and that gives you additional security.

343
00:15:23.040 --> 00:15:25.760
But unfortunately, in the modern world,

344
00:15:25.760 --> 00:15:28.560
that causes us with an infinite amount of things

345
00:15:28.560 --> 00:15:30.240
that we can do and can chase after.

346
00:15:30.880 --> 00:15:32.800
We sacrifice the important for the urgent.

347
00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:35.360
The urgent's always in front of us,

348
00:15:35.920 --> 00:15:37.520
the email, the next meeting.

349
00:15:38.080 --> 00:15:38.880
Yeah.

350
00:15:38.880 --> 00:15:43.360
And this is, again, why should anybody care about doing an annual review?

351
00:15:43.920 --> 00:15:45.280
I should anybody care about the new year?

352
00:15:46.000 --> 00:15:49.760
Well, you're busy living your life for almost the entirety of the year.

353
00:15:49.840 --> 00:15:55.120
And this is one moment where the urgent can just take a tiny bit of a backseat

354
00:15:55.120 --> 00:15:56.480
and the important can come through.

355
00:15:57.440 --> 00:15:58.480
Who have I been over the last year?

356
00:15:59.200 --> 00:16:00.880
What do I want from next year?

357
00:16:00.880 --> 00:16:02.240
Every single year is a chapter of your life.

358
00:16:03.840 --> 00:16:06.080
The next year, it's chapter 38 for me.

359
00:16:06.080 --> 00:16:07.440
What do I want that chapter to be about?

360
00:16:09.120 --> 00:16:13.040
Do you think there's a single change you could make to your life

361
00:16:13.040 --> 00:16:15.200
that would yield the greatest return on happiness?

362
00:16:15.200 --> 00:16:16.880
Like, if you could go into your own hardware

363
00:16:17.360 --> 00:16:18.800
and rewrite the code a little bit.

364
00:16:19.920 --> 00:16:22.560
I think less striving would actually make me happier.

365
00:16:22.560 --> 00:16:26.800
I think that a lot of striving and a desire for success comes from a sense of insufficiency.

366
00:16:27.440 --> 00:16:32.560
Like, if only the world recognized my brilliance than I will be validated.

367
00:16:33.040 --> 00:16:38.000
And it takes a long time to realize that you don't fix internal void to external accolades.

368
00:16:38.000 --> 00:16:40.000
And the problem with that is it's an unteachable lesson.

369
00:16:40.640 --> 00:16:45.920
You try and tell people that money won't fix your happiness problem or fame won't fix yourself worth problem.

370
00:16:46.560 --> 00:16:47.760
I should see a parents more.

371
00:16:48.240 --> 00:16:50.080
Time in a hammock is never wasted.

372
00:16:50.080 --> 00:16:51.360
You don't love that pretty girl.

373
00:16:51.360 --> 00:16:52.960
She's just hot and difficult to get.

374
00:16:53.280 --> 00:16:57.200
Like, all of these things are only lessons that you can learn once you've got there.

375
00:16:57.200 --> 00:17:01.600
And people who haven't yet gotten there think, well, that's easy for you to say.

376
00:17:01.600 --> 00:17:05.760
And then when they arrive for some reason, they seem to evangelize the same insights.

377
00:17:06.320 --> 00:17:08.640
Like, somebody that's just gone through religious revelation.

378
00:17:08.640 --> 00:17:10.480
So either one of two things is true.

379
00:17:10.480 --> 00:17:15.680
People who achieve a thing are lying about the fact that that thing didn't fix their

380
00:17:15.680 --> 00:17:19.040
problems, their internal void with external accolades.

381
00:17:19.040 --> 00:17:23.600
Because they're part of some cartel that's trying to pull the ladder up after they've just gotten in.

382
00:17:24.560 --> 00:17:26.400
Or it's the truth.

383
00:17:27.120 --> 00:17:30.080
But it's an unteachable lesson.

384
00:17:30.080 --> 00:17:36.560
You will not understand that that thing outside won't fix your internal void until you get that.

385
00:17:37.200 --> 00:17:41.040
And I actually think to Navale quote, it's very easy to achieve a material

386
00:17:41.040 --> 00:17:42.720
desire than to renounce them.

387
00:17:42.720 --> 00:17:47.920
Like, if you want a Ferrari, it's much easier to actually work real hard

388
00:17:47.920 --> 00:17:50.320
and try and like, oh, get some nice car, whatever it is.

389
00:17:51.200 --> 00:17:53.120
So that you learn that the car isn't the thing that you want.

390
00:17:53.120 --> 00:17:56.240
Then it is to rid yourself of the desire for the car overall.

391
00:17:56.240 --> 00:17:58.560
And that's not to say that getting a Ferrari is easy.

392
00:17:58.560 --> 00:18:01.280
It's to say that getting rid of the desire is essentially impossible.

393
00:18:02.000 --> 00:18:07.680
I think me and you are probably two guys that at some deep level had some kind of internal void.

394
00:18:07.680 --> 00:18:09.120
Is that accurate statement?

395
00:18:09.200 --> 00:18:10.560
Of course. Are you speaking in the past tense?

396
00:18:13.280 --> 00:18:15.040
You've now accomplished so much.

397
00:18:15.040 --> 00:18:17.360
You're like one of the biggest took putt cars is on planet Earth.

398
00:18:17.360 --> 00:18:18.560
You're famous.

399
00:18:18.560 --> 00:18:20.560
People know you're biggest in the world talking to second biggest.

400
00:18:20.560 --> 00:18:21.520
Congratulations.

401
00:18:22.720 --> 00:18:24.080
But people know who you are.

402
00:18:24.080 --> 00:18:26.000
You've got money.

403
00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:27.120
You've got freedom now.

404
00:18:27.120 --> 00:18:28.000
You can go wherever you want.

405
00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:28.640
Do whatever you want.

406
00:18:28.640 --> 00:18:29.440
People know who you are.

407
00:18:29.440 --> 00:18:31.760
You get restaurant table reservation tables.

408
00:18:32.320 --> 00:18:32.800
You did it.

409
00:18:34.320 --> 00:18:35.280
Is it what you expected?

410
00:18:36.080 --> 00:18:38.720
And has it actually changed that internal void?

411
00:18:40.000 --> 00:18:40.960
The interesting thing is,

412
00:18:41.680 --> 00:18:44.640
I never actually thought I was going to amount to much.

413
00:18:46.400 --> 00:18:50.080
I was just really interested in what I was doing, what I was doing, what was in front of me.

414
00:18:50.640 --> 00:18:51.360
I didn't think

415
00:18:53.200 --> 00:18:58.480
this is going to lead to me being achieving something or living in America or whatever.

416
00:18:58.480 --> 00:19:00.240
Each different step got me there.

417
00:19:00.240 --> 00:19:01.920
But no, of course not.

418
00:19:01.920 --> 00:19:02.320
Of course.

419
00:19:03.280 --> 00:19:06.160
The unteachable lesson has smashed me in the face, which is

420
00:19:06.160 --> 00:19:09.360
they won't fix yourself worth.

421
00:19:09.360 --> 00:19:10.480
Money won't make you happy.

422
00:19:11.040 --> 00:19:12.560
You should see your parents more.

423
00:19:12.560 --> 00:19:14.080
You can take a day off.

424
00:19:14.080 --> 00:19:18.000
Like all of these lessons, you have to live them to learn them, unfortunately.

425
00:19:18.000 --> 00:19:18.880
Am I last question on this?

426
00:19:18.880 --> 00:19:21.520
When I asked about the change to your code that you'd make,

427
00:19:21.520 --> 00:19:24.000
you talked about fixing the striving.

428
00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:26.480
What's been the downside of this striving?

429
00:19:27.040 --> 00:19:29.440
There's a common sense of not enoughness.

430
00:19:29.440 --> 00:19:30.800
Like I will be enough when.

431
00:19:31.680 --> 00:19:34.880
Because you can either run away from something you want or run towards something.

432
00:19:34.960 --> 00:19:37.840
Run away from something you fear or run towards something you want.

433
00:19:37.840 --> 00:19:39.680
What's the consequence of that not enoughness?

434
00:19:40.320 --> 00:19:41.200
It's a sense of lack.

435
00:19:42.160 --> 00:19:44.080
It's also a provisional life.

436
00:19:44.080 --> 00:19:44.960
It's putting life off.

437
00:19:44.960 --> 00:19:50.480
I will be happy, satisfied, peaceful when.

438
00:19:50.480 --> 00:19:52.160
And is that a thought you have?

439
00:19:52.160 --> 00:19:53.600
It's more like an embodied sense.

440
00:19:53.600 --> 00:19:54.560
You feel it.

441
00:19:54.560 --> 00:19:55.760
I very much feel it.

442
00:19:55.760 --> 00:19:57.360
It's this striving, it's this pull.

443
00:19:57.360 --> 00:19:59.120
It's this sort of magnetism moving forward.

444
00:19:59.840 --> 00:20:03.920
But yeah, dude, if your life was a movie and the audience were watching up to this point,

445
00:20:03.920 --> 00:20:05.760
what would they be screaming at the screen telling you to do?

446
00:20:07.120 --> 00:20:12.960
It's usually a very reliable indicator of where you should be putting your attention.

447
00:20:12.960 --> 00:20:16.720
So as we think about next year, the things one should aim at.

448
00:20:18.400 --> 00:20:20.160
I think you said it on the high performance podcast.

449
00:20:20.160 --> 00:20:22.800
You said you're really obsessed with understanding what success actually is.

450
00:20:23.840 --> 00:20:26.640
So I also, just before we go into the more practical things,

451
00:20:27.360 --> 00:20:30.400
if someone's sat at home and I know people come up to you on your tours and ask you questions like

452
00:20:30.480 --> 00:20:35.680
this a lot, if they're sat at home trying to figure out what success actually is for them,

453
00:20:35.680 --> 00:20:40.000
is there a framework or a principle or a method to figure out what it might mean for them?

454
00:20:40.560 --> 00:20:43.600
I've heard you talk about two ideas, which I love, which is the region beta paradox,

455
00:20:43.600 --> 00:20:47.680
but also the power of the Mexican fishermen, which I think both stayed with me in a profound way.

456
00:20:48.240 --> 00:20:51.520
Yeah, so three things.

457
00:20:51.520 --> 00:20:55.600
Success, region beta, Mexican fishermen.

458
00:20:56.480 --> 00:20:59.360
What success looks like for any individual person is going to be different.

459
00:20:59.440 --> 00:21:01.040
For you knowing that you really want a family.

460
00:21:01.040 --> 00:21:03.040
There's people out there that are like, I'm not that fast.

461
00:21:03.040 --> 00:21:05.600
I don't think that that's on the cards for me, and that's fine.

462
00:21:06.560 --> 00:21:11.840
Other people might really, really want to put the workload down and step off and go and do the

463
00:21:11.840 --> 00:21:17.040
dad or the mum thing. Unfortunately, you can't take somebody else's purpose or success.

464
00:21:18.160 --> 00:21:23.360
That's, you can't wear it as a suit to bad idea, because it's going to not fit.

465
00:21:24.080 --> 00:21:27.760
Wonderful line. Let go or be dragged.

466
00:21:28.800 --> 00:21:31.200
If something doesn't fit, eventually, it's going to hurt wearing it.

467
00:21:32.720 --> 00:21:36.880
That means if you're not careful with how you design what it is that you chase after,

468
00:21:36.880 --> 00:21:41.680
you can spend your entire life realizing that you climbed a huge fucking ladder,

469
00:21:41.680 --> 00:21:44.960
a very, very long ladder that was leaning up against the wrong wall.

470
00:21:46.320 --> 00:21:49.040
You need to ensure that you don't do that. This is why we need to just sit with ourselves,

471
00:21:49.040 --> 00:21:52.560
sit with a little bit of reflection. That's why this time between Christmas and

472
00:21:52.560 --> 00:21:57.200
year, I think, is a really wonderful time to do this. How do you work out what it is that you want

473
00:21:57.200 --> 00:22:04.000
to do? The big picture goals are going to be hard for you to get to, but if you just think one

474
00:22:04.000 --> 00:22:08.080
year ahead, what do I want over the next 12 months? I think that usually helps you. Maybe you want

475
00:22:08.080 --> 00:22:10.960
to be in a relationship. I want to be in a committed relationship with someone who really loves me.

476
00:22:12.880 --> 00:22:17.200
Now we can start to talk about fun to do that, but you need to have a little bit of silence.

477
00:22:17.360 --> 00:22:22.640
A problem with permanently being busy stops you from being able to listen to

478
00:22:22.640 --> 00:22:26.960
fleeting thoughts that are in the back of your mind, and that quiet voice is usually the

479
00:22:26.960 --> 00:22:34.400
really powerful one, but there's a wonderful line. The answers you seek are in the silence you're

480
00:22:34.400 --> 00:22:40.960
avoiding. The answers that you seek are in the silence you're avoiding. Do you meditate? Of course.

481
00:22:40.960 --> 00:22:49.280
Do you do? Yes. Do you? No. Do you wish you did? I think the definition of meditation is quite

482
00:22:49.280 --> 00:22:53.520
blurry, because for me, when I will have a shower for like 30 minutes, and all I'm doing in

483
00:22:53.520 --> 00:22:59.120
there is thinking, I'm not cleaning. I'm clean after five minutes. I was going to say it's a

484
00:22:59.120 --> 00:23:04.240
gesture that you come out of the shower and not clean, but with great ideas. Exactly. No, but I

485
00:23:04.240 --> 00:23:07.600
mean that you get cleaning like five minutes, but then I spend the other 25 minutes because there's

486
00:23:07.600 --> 00:23:13.680
something about the water falling and the alone time that drops me into a spiral of thinking, which

487
00:23:13.680 --> 00:23:17.600
I think is my version of meditation, then treadmills and the stapper at the gym. Treadmills are great.

488
00:23:18.320 --> 00:23:22.160
My version of meditation. Shower thoughts are overrated. Toilet thoughts are underrated.

489
00:23:22.160 --> 00:23:26.320
The other thing that I love that you talk about is when we talk about metrics of success,

490
00:23:26.320 --> 00:23:30.240
you talk about observable metrics and hidden metrics of success?

491
00:23:30.240 --> 00:23:35.680
Yes. A lot of the time will trade a hidden metric for an observable metric. Something that's

492
00:23:35.680 --> 00:23:40.880
observable would be your job title, but your salary is per year. How many people know you,

493
00:23:40.880 --> 00:23:45.200
your bank balance, the size of your house, the car that you drive? Things people can see.

494
00:23:45.200 --> 00:23:49.520
Yeah, of course. The only way that your success can be judged is outwardly.

495
00:23:50.080 --> 00:23:54.960
So naturally, we trade something which people can't see for something that they can see.

496
00:23:54.960 --> 00:24:04.480
For instance, lots of people would trade a longer commute for a higher salary or a better job title.

497
00:24:04.560 --> 00:24:08.800
One of the problems that you encounter with that is that the length of your commute is one of the

498
00:24:08.800 --> 00:24:14.320
most correlated stats with your happiness. Longer commutes reliably make people more miserable.

499
00:24:14.320 --> 00:24:20.800
And what's the hidden metric that you've lost by doing that? Well, that's less time with your

500
00:24:20.800 --> 00:24:25.520
family, with maybe your kids that are growing up, with your wife to connect. That's less time to

501
00:24:25.520 --> 00:24:32.240
pursue your own passions, even if your job is your passion. So what about a more stressful career?

502
00:24:32.240 --> 00:24:35.440
Going to move into a different industry that's way more stressful, but it pays more

503
00:24:36.160 --> 00:24:39.840
observable metric. What's the hidden metric? What about the peace of mind that you have as you go

504
00:24:39.840 --> 00:24:45.280
to sleep at night? What about what that does to your health and the quality of your relationships and

505
00:24:45.280 --> 00:24:49.120
your ability to be present on a weekend? You're not able to turn your phone off because your last

506
00:24:49.120 --> 00:24:57.520
job was 95, but this one is 24-7. Well, it's difficult to say because people want and need

507
00:24:58.480 --> 00:25:02.080
real resources. I want to improve the quality of my family. That's a noble thing to do.

508
00:25:02.080 --> 00:25:08.480
But after a while, you have to admit if you already live a comfortable quality of life and you

509
00:25:08.480 --> 00:25:17.120
trade it, you trade your happiness or your peace in order to get more, you're making a bad choice

510
00:25:17.120 --> 00:25:21.040
because you're going to sacrifice something that you want, which is happiness, peace, connection,

511
00:25:21.040 --> 00:25:24.400
for something that's supposed to get the thing that you want, which is money,

512
00:25:25.200 --> 00:25:31.120
job title, big car. Which I think links to this story of the Mexican Fisher. Yeah. Parable of the Mexican

513
00:25:31.120 --> 00:25:38.640
fisherman. An American businessman was away on a holiday in Mexico and he got taken out by

514
00:25:38.640 --> 00:25:42.240
a fisherman and he asked the fisherman, so what do you do each day? The fisherman said,

515
00:25:42.240 --> 00:25:48.880
I spend each morning out on the water, I fish a little, I catch some food, I take it home,

516
00:25:48.880 --> 00:25:52.720
and I sit in my house with my wife and my family and we eat what I've caught for the day.

517
00:25:53.280 --> 00:25:57.600
The American says, that's stupid. This is a stupid idea. What you should do is you should get a

518
00:25:57.600 --> 00:26:00.480
bigger boat and then you could catch more fish and then you could go sell it at the market.

519
00:26:01.120 --> 00:26:04.880
The fisherman said, why would I do that? So well, once you've sold it at the market,

520
00:26:04.880 --> 00:26:07.920
you could buy some more boats and you could get your friends to come and work for you

521
00:26:07.920 --> 00:26:10.800
and then they could catch more fish and you could start to sell it wholesale.

522
00:26:11.360 --> 00:26:16.240
The fisherman said, why would I do that? Well then you could create a canning factory and you could

523
00:26:16.240 --> 00:26:21.920
export it back to the UK and you could have a huge business. The fisherman said, why would I do that?

524
00:26:22.720 --> 00:26:26.880
Well then you would be able to retire and fish a little on a morning, catch some fish and then

525
00:26:26.880 --> 00:26:32.560
spend the afternoon with your family. It's the same lesson as Paulo Quayla's The Alchemist,

526
00:26:32.560 --> 00:26:39.120
which is this young boy goes on a huge big journey and he finds out the thing that he was looking

527
00:26:39.120 --> 00:26:44.720
for was in the back garden all along. But that's an unteachable lesson and the big lesson behind

528
00:26:44.720 --> 00:26:50.720
the Alchemist is going on a massive journey to end up back where you started is not the same

529
00:26:50.800 --> 00:26:56.800
as having never left. And this is what an unteachable lesson is. You have to go to the top of the

530
00:26:56.800 --> 00:27:02.960
mountain to get up there and go, dammit, dammit, like I thought that was going to be the answer. But now

531
00:27:02.960 --> 00:27:08.960
that it's not, I can rid myself of that. I've crossed it off and it's so unpopular, it's so unpopular

532
00:27:08.960 --> 00:27:12.560
to talk about this online because everybody that doesn't have a thing assumes that the thing will

533
00:27:12.560 --> 00:27:17.520
fix their problems and that the people who have got there achieved it and say that it didn't

534
00:27:17.520 --> 00:27:23.040
are ungrateful. Like, oh my god, the thing that I want and they're just casting it away.

535
00:27:23.040 --> 00:27:28.240
Like how dare you? How dare you say that the thing that I know I want isn't the answer to my problems.

536
00:27:29.600 --> 00:27:35.120
And yet reliably, everybody that gets there says it's not the answer.

537
00:27:36.960 --> 00:27:41.680
It's very true. I was thinking back to all the goals that I wrote in my diary 18 years old and then

538
00:27:43.040 --> 00:27:46.800
it's no surprise that I have none of those things now. They're all like material things and outcomes

539
00:27:46.880 --> 00:27:52.320
I was looking for. But let me give you another one. A great question to reflect on. Knowing what I know

540
00:27:52.320 --> 00:27:59.280
now, what advice would I give myself 12 months ago? Do you know what mine would be? Mine would be

541
00:27:59.280 --> 00:28:05.840
around, it would be around, around prioritization. It would really be around saying no. Like we

542
00:28:05.840 --> 00:28:10.000
don't really teach, it goes back to what you're saying about adding and subtracting, but my life

543
00:28:10.000 --> 00:28:16.640
would be much better if I was even 10% better at saying no to things. It would be so much better.

544
00:28:16.640 --> 00:28:21.680
I'd be so much more sick. The upside isn't like 10% upside. It's like 50 or 100% upside because

545
00:28:21.680 --> 00:28:26.960
the compounding force of focus. Okay, so that's what advice you would have given yourself 12

546
00:28:26.960 --> 00:28:31.200
months ago knowing what you know now. Yeah, guess what? Well, it's almost certainly what you need to

547
00:28:31.200 --> 00:28:36.640
hear right now. The big problems are the big problems. In the same way that you've got the feet

548
00:28:36.640 --> 00:28:42.720
that you had a decade ago, the big drivers psychologically for you tend to be the same throughout

549
00:28:42.800 --> 00:28:49.280
your life. I put other people's happiness ahead of mine. Maybe that showed up when I was a child and

550
00:28:49.280 --> 00:28:53.760
I didn't speak up to mum when I felt upset because I was worried that it would upset her. Maybe that

551
00:28:53.760 --> 00:28:57.520
happened when I got into my first job and I didn't advocate for myself when my boss was treating me

552
00:28:57.520 --> 00:29:03.200
poorly. Maybe that happens when I get into a relationship and I'm scared of making my needs known

553
00:29:03.200 --> 00:29:08.400
to my partner because I'm worried that they're going to reject me or think lesser of me. When it

554
00:29:08.400 --> 00:29:11.840
comes to my child, I'm terrified to discipline them because I need their love and I don't want them

555
00:29:11.920 --> 00:29:18.160
to make them upset. This is a single trend that's occurring throughout your life and all of the time,

556
00:29:18.160 --> 00:29:21.440
one of the most common questions that people ask is, what would you tell yourself 10 years ago?

557
00:29:22.000 --> 00:29:26.960
Great question to ask, not because it's trite, but because it is almost always the very same thing

558
00:29:26.960 --> 00:29:35.680
that you need to hear right now. What would you have said 12 months ago? Stop working so hard.

559
00:29:36.800 --> 00:29:41.520
Stop working so hard. Take your day off. Take your day off. Take your day off per week. Put your phone down.

560
00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:46.240
Put your phone down. Go outside. Touch some grass. It's the same thing now.

561
00:29:46.800 --> 00:29:49.440
It's the exact same thing now. Do you think you're going to accomplish it?

562
00:29:50.880 --> 00:29:58.560
I don't know. I don't know. I'm trying. I'm trying, but behavioral design, I've got better.

563
00:29:58.560 --> 00:30:04.960
The one thing that I can say and the beautiful thing about the end of your review, there are some

564
00:30:04.960 --> 00:30:13.520
resolutions which I decided on a decade ago that I still do now. I think that's really cool.

565
00:30:13.520 --> 00:30:18.400
So when I'm faced with the opportunity to plan, because I gave myself a little bit of space,

566
00:30:18.400 --> 00:30:23.040
and it never happened very few of the habits that randomly appeared in the middle of July,

567
00:30:23.760 --> 00:30:27.840
a ones that I've stuck with and I really care about, bad ones maybe. Maybe you accumulated bad

568
00:30:27.840 --> 00:30:32.560
habits in the middle of July, but most of the ones that I really love that are very conscious that

569
00:30:32.560 --> 00:30:37.040
are aligned with where I want to go, that ones that I consciously designed, that ones that

570
00:30:37.040 --> 00:30:40.960
were done purposefully, and that's always been around a review period. So yeah, end of the year's

571
00:30:40.960 --> 00:30:46.320
not special, but when else are you going to do it? When else are you going to do it? But yeah,

572
00:30:46.320 --> 00:30:50.880
12 months ago and 10 years ago, I was doing the same thing, different industry, running nightclubs.

573
00:30:51.520 --> 00:30:57.760
Chill out. Take your day off. So what is this annual review template that I haven't printed me?

574
00:30:57.760 --> 00:31:02.080
At the end of each year, you need to have some sort of a format. If anyone wants to go and download

575
00:31:02.080 --> 00:31:06.640
it, they can go to chriswillx.com slash review. It's totally free. They can just copy and paste it

576
00:31:06.640 --> 00:31:12.400
into their notes app of choice and then fill it in. I realized that this big question of,

577
00:31:12.400 --> 00:31:16.800
it's the end of the year and I need to look back on it. I want to reflect on what went well and

578
00:31:16.800 --> 00:31:24.560
badly and I want to plan my goals. Without a structure, you're just like cast out a drift,

579
00:31:24.560 --> 00:31:28.960
free wheeling everywhere and you have no idea what to do. So there's a bunch of questions,

580
00:31:28.960 --> 00:31:35.200
stuff like, how has this year gone? What went well? What went badly? And why? What lessons did I

581
00:31:35.200 --> 00:31:40.080
learn? What habit or system accounted for most of my success? What are the most valuable ways that I

582
00:31:40.080 --> 00:31:45.200
spend my time? How can I find more time for this? There's a section for memories. What was the best

583
00:31:45.200 --> 00:31:50.880
surprise, best meal, coolest new experience? My favorite new city, my favorite new friend. What

584
00:31:50.880 --> 00:31:55.920
was my favorite day on my most intense day? Was the best sex I had? It was my favorite quote and

585
00:31:55.920 --> 00:32:01.200
song and artist. And then there's a plan. What would I do this year if I wanted to make 85

586
00:32:01.200 --> 00:32:07.520
world me miserable? What are the things I do to make my day go great? What do I think is productive

587
00:32:07.520 --> 00:32:14.640
that isn't? What is productive that I don't realize? Those are two big ones. And then there's

588
00:32:14.640 --> 00:32:18.240
some final thoughts. What would have happened by the end of next year to look back and consider

589
00:32:18.240 --> 00:32:22.720
it a success? Who do I need to become the next chapter of my life to go the way that I want?

590
00:32:22.800 --> 00:32:26.560
Knowing what I know now, what advice would I give myself 12 months ago? For the people that are

591
00:32:26.560 --> 00:32:30.400
frantically taking notes, they can just go to chriswellx.com. I've reviewed and this is a bit worth of

592
00:32:30.400 --> 00:32:34.080
risk. You mentioned there that goals you set 10 years ago are still some of your most important

593
00:32:34.080 --> 00:32:40.000
today. What are those goals that you cherish the most? Habits, habits, goals that you cherish the

594
00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:46.240
most that you set out to. So I reflected last year on the highest ROI resolutions that I've ever

595
00:32:47.200 --> 00:32:52.560
done. And what I think would be cool would be if people put the single best return on investment

596
00:32:53.920 --> 00:32:59.040
resolution that they've ever done in the comments. Because that will create maybe the biggest

597
00:32:59.040 --> 00:33:05.040
repository of the highest value New Year's resolutions that anybody's ever had. And the best

598
00:33:05.040 --> 00:33:08.560
ones will get uploaded and the bad ones will be heavily criticized in the replies. So that can

599
00:33:08.560 --> 00:33:12.800
be kind of cool. Okay, so that was an instruction, which means if you're listening right now,

600
00:33:12.800 --> 00:33:16.800
leave a comment below with the resolution you set yourself at any point in the past that

601
00:33:16.800 --> 00:33:21.760
returned the most for you in any area of your life. You love it the most. And if you agree with

602
00:33:21.760 --> 00:33:26.960
someone's, please hit the like button on their comment too. And this should create, as Chris says,

603
00:33:26.960 --> 00:33:32.160
a repository of the most impactful highest ROI resolution. I think that's cool. I want to do it.

604
00:33:32.160 --> 00:33:36.320
I want to know what everyone else's big resolutions are. So I'll give you mine. Okay. No phone

605
00:33:36.320 --> 00:33:43.200
in the bedroom at night. Charge it outside. Interesting. It's an instant 15% quality of life

606
00:33:43.840 --> 00:33:48.880
increase. Why? Because when you start your day, if you use your phone as your alarm,

607
00:33:48.880 --> 00:33:53.040
you roll over, you turn the alarm off and immediately you're looking at your phone,

608
00:33:53.600 --> 00:33:56.800
you haven't got up, you haven't got moving, you're not hydrated, you're not seeing sunlight in

609
00:33:56.800 --> 00:34:03.440
your eyes, you are hit in the face by the world telling you what's happening as opposed to you having

610
00:34:03.440 --> 00:34:08.160
a tiny little microcosm of peace. This little oasis for you. Now get it. People that have got

611
00:34:08.160 --> 00:34:13.920
young kids are hit in the face by the children, not by the phone. But even if you do adding the phone

612
00:34:13.920 --> 00:34:16.960
and the scroll and everything else on top, that means you're not present with the kids. So even if the

613
00:34:16.960 --> 00:34:22.560
kids are a problem, you don't need to have the phone in there. You wake up. It means that you're always

614
00:34:22.560 --> 00:34:27.200
on the other side. The world is happening to you. You're not happening to the world. When you go to

615
00:34:27.200 --> 00:34:31.920
bed on a nighttime, you're going to be using your phone before you go to sleep, which means that

616
00:34:31.920 --> 00:34:37.760
you're going to cut into your sleep time. You're going to be in an environment digitally that's

617
00:34:37.760 --> 00:34:42.640
going to make yourself feel horrendous. It's not good. It's not good for sleep. Whether it's the

618
00:34:42.640 --> 00:34:46.000
blue light, there's a little bit of research that seems to say that it's not the blue light so much

619
00:34:46.000 --> 00:34:53.120
as it is the scroll sort of dopamine trigger, adrenal, intermittent schedule reward thing. That

620
00:34:53.120 --> 00:34:58.080
that's the main issue of what's going on. But it also means if you can't sleep, you know,

621
00:34:58.160 --> 00:35:01.840
you can just roll over and pick your phone up and now you're two hours into a YouTube scroll hole.

622
00:35:01.840 --> 00:35:06.160
That's who you truly are, by the way. People think that who you are is your journal entries,

623
00:35:06.160 --> 00:35:10.720
your diary entries. No, no. Who you truly are are the videos that you watch on YouTube between 10

624
00:35:10.720 --> 00:35:15.600
pm and 12 pm at night when you can't sleep. That's who you really are. So getting your phone and

625
00:35:15.600 --> 00:35:21.200
putting it outside of the bedroom is no cost. There's no reason to not do it. The only reason to

626
00:35:21.200 --> 00:35:25.680
not do it is somebody needs to ring you or something like that. I get it. Maybe you've got

627
00:35:26.320 --> 00:35:30.160
kids that are out late and you need to make sure that they're okay in case some sort of catastrophe

628
00:35:30.160 --> 00:35:33.600
occurs, but really there are very few excuses to not have it outside. Radio alarm clocks have

629
00:35:33.600 --> 00:35:40.080
existed forever. Buy a radio alarm clock. Take your phone cable now and put it in the kitchen or

630
00:35:40.080 --> 00:35:43.840
put it in the living room or something. I'll put it on the other side of the room. So you don't

631
00:35:43.840 --> 00:35:49.360
wake up with no charge on your phone. It's the single biggest improves quality of sleep. It means

632
00:35:49.360 --> 00:35:52.080
that your morning's a better, it means that your night's a better, it means you're less distracted,

633
00:35:52.080 --> 00:35:55.280
it means you spend the last time on your phone. You're forced to do something even

634
00:35:56.160 --> 00:36:00.960
tiny bit more productive, like watch Netflix or read a book or talk to your partner. It's interesting

635
00:36:00.960 --> 00:36:06.080
because I was thinking about this through a four-quadrant graph. You draw on a diagram. I'll

636
00:36:06.080 --> 00:36:09.440
throw it up on the screen. Please make it look better at editing team because nobody's going to

637
00:36:09.440 --> 00:36:13.440
be up. This is not coherent. On one axis, you've got things that are low effort and on the other

638
00:36:13.440 --> 00:36:17.600
axis, you've got things that are high return and this is right up on the top right, which is like

639
00:36:17.600 --> 00:36:22.720
very low effort, high return. Cosplay, habit. Yeah. Which is probably where one should aim,

640
00:36:22.720 --> 00:36:26.720
most, but I imagine a lot of us are aiming at high effort, low return. Morning walk every day.

641
00:36:27.520 --> 00:36:32.000
Okay. Morning. It's like high effort. The research around this is fantastic.

642
00:36:32.000 --> 00:36:35.360
Hubermann's obviously pushed this a lot. Morning sunlight in your eyes. Even if you don't have

643
00:36:35.360 --> 00:36:39.200
the sun, even if you're somewhere dark and cold and wet, it doesn't matter. Getting up and doing

644
00:36:40.160 --> 00:36:45.680
ambulation, so walking through an environment while your eyes scan left and right seems to tune down

645
00:36:45.680 --> 00:36:51.600
your fear response. It makes your amygdala just a little bit more calm. So regardless of whether

646
00:36:51.600 --> 00:36:55.280
it's a sunlight, fantastic. That'll be even better. Five minutes, 10 minutes. And I know people

647
00:36:55.280 --> 00:36:59.840
have got structural limitations. This is me assuming that you've got like 20 minutes on a morning

648
00:36:59.840 --> 00:37:03.520
that you could slot this into. And if you're not waking up with your phone in your hand,

649
00:37:03.520 --> 00:37:09.600
that probably is the 20 minutes, right? Little walk. Bit of fresh air. Just get up, put your shoes on,

650
00:37:09.600 --> 00:37:12.320
get going. Just get moving. You don't need to think. You don't need to do anything at all.

651
00:37:12.320 --> 00:37:15.280
Don't need to brush your teeth. Get up and go. Probably need to get the bathroom actually. Get up

652
00:37:15.280 --> 00:37:20.960
and go. No caffeine within 90 minutes of waking. Just push your caffeine a little bit later.

653
00:37:22.000 --> 00:37:27.440
It seems like the adenosine system isn't dominant during the first 90 minutes of the day. Your

654
00:37:27.440 --> 00:37:32.000
adrenal system is. So adenosine is the receptors that deal with caffeine and tiredness.

655
00:37:32.000 --> 00:37:35.680
Correct. And tiredness. Exactly. And caffeine binds to it and it stops you from feeling tired.

656
00:37:35.680 --> 00:37:39.600
Salt action on your adrenal system. So if you use some sort of electrolyte drink first thing in

657
00:37:39.600 --> 00:37:43.440
the morning, that will help to get that moving. But the main reason for this, regardless of the

658
00:37:43.440 --> 00:37:49.360
research, most people have a 1 p.m. slump. I feel a little bit tired. And I think if you just

659
00:37:49.360 --> 00:37:53.520
push that caffeine a little bit later, just see if you can hold on. When you wake up, you should

660
00:37:53.520 --> 00:37:59.440
be okay-ish. Just the natural cortisol. You've gone for your little walk. You know, here we are.

661
00:37:59.440 --> 00:38:04.720
The days begun. You really need a coffee within 20 minutes of waking. That's what most people's

662
00:38:04.720 --> 00:38:08.480
first thing is. Just see what happens. Test it. See what happens if you push it back by 90 minutes and

663
00:38:08.480 --> 00:38:14.160
see how you feel. At least for me, I know that that works well. No alcohol for six months.

664
00:38:14.160 --> 00:38:19.040
This is a big one. This is much more high effort for a lot of people. Even people that don't drink that

665
00:38:19.040 --> 00:38:28.640
much. Because a lot of the parties and things that you attend are not superbly fun. And some people

666
00:38:28.640 --> 00:38:36.800
use alcohol in order to make their family or the wedding or the birthday a little bit more

667
00:38:36.800 --> 00:38:42.000
comfortable. Social lubricant. Correct. Yeah, of course. But if you take alcohol out for about

668
00:38:42.000 --> 00:38:47.920
six months, what it forces you to do is think, I really want to go to that party. I'm actually having

669
00:38:47.920 --> 00:38:55.280
to anesthetize myself of the people that I'm around. Like if you can only bear to be around your

670
00:38:55.280 --> 00:39:00.560
friends when you're drinking, that's probably not a good indication. And if your friends only want

671
00:39:00.640 --> 00:39:05.440
you to be around them when you're drinking, they're not friends. They're drinking partners.

672
00:39:06.720 --> 00:39:13.840
So I think alcohol is a big... I just like it. It just makes me have more fun. Hey, I get it.

673
00:39:13.840 --> 00:39:18.880
But I think if people look at it closely, they realize that they're using alcohol as a bit of a

674
00:39:18.880 --> 00:39:26.320
crutch. They're using it to bolster themselves in a way. What's interesting is it's one of those

675
00:39:26.320 --> 00:39:32.400
areas where you don't understand the hidden cost until you really give it up for a while. And then

676
00:39:32.400 --> 00:39:36.640
I think about my own relationship with drinking. And I stopped drinking at 30 years old. I'm now 33.

677
00:39:37.280 --> 00:39:42.080
And I had just drank because I just drank. I'd never ran the experiment of just giving it up for a

678
00:39:42.080 --> 00:39:46.800
while. And then it like, I don't know, maybe I was at 31. I thought, do you not have a drink again?

679
00:39:47.840 --> 00:39:51.680
Because now I could really aby test it. I had a year of not drinking, decided to have a drink

680
00:39:52.560 --> 00:39:58.240
again. It ruined three days of my life. I had a couple of glasses of wine, didn't get drunk.

681
00:39:58.240 --> 00:40:02.720
It ruined three days of my life because of the domino effect it caused. So I meant that I got

682
00:40:02.720 --> 00:40:07.280
worse sleep that night. And then because I got worse sleep that night, I more poorly the next day

683
00:40:07.280 --> 00:40:12.320
because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up. And then I

684
00:40:12.320 --> 00:40:17.840
podcasted worse. I didn't go to the gym the day after. That day or the day after because of that

685
00:40:17.840 --> 00:40:21.200
because I felt really bad. I then slept worse. And I could track all of this on my week,

686
00:40:21.200 --> 00:40:25.200
hashtag out, hashtag sponsor, hashtag investor, whatever. Yeah. And I was like, oh my god,

687
00:40:26.000 --> 00:40:30.880
there's three glasses of wine had this hidden domino effect that I must have been living with

688
00:40:30.880 --> 00:40:36.480
for my whole life. So many people want to build habits. They want to build meditation routine.

689
00:40:37.200 --> 00:40:41.520
They want to go to the gym more consistently. They want to improve their eating habits. They don't

690
00:40:41.520 --> 00:40:45.520
realize that the thing that's stopping them from doing that is sat at the bottom of the glass of wine

691
00:40:45.520 --> 00:40:51.200
that they have for nights a week. It's tough. Some people are able to do it and they don't mind.

692
00:40:51.200 --> 00:40:58.800
The cost benefit ratio for some people is great. I'm just saying try. Just try, try six months.

693
00:40:58.800 --> 00:41:03.280
The reason you need to put an end date on it is that you have, it's like running a race where

694
00:41:03.280 --> 00:41:06.800
you know that there's a finish line. There's no finish line. It's really hard to run the race. How

695
00:41:06.800 --> 00:41:11.120
are you motivating yourself to get there? I think that 90 days would be the absolute minimum. 30 days

696
00:41:11.120 --> 00:41:15.520
isn't long enough. You need longer. Especially given that the hardest bit is the start,

697
00:41:16.160 --> 00:41:19.760
which means that you've paid all of the pain at the very beginning to not actually get any of the

698
00:41:19.760 --> 00:41:24.240
benefits of this being my new habit. Do it with an accountability buddy. Do it with your partner.

699
00:41:24.240 --> 00:41:29.520
Say, hey, I listen to those two British idiots talk about how not drinking might be a good idea.

700
00:41:29.520 --> 00:41:33.680
Why don't we do that? Why don't we try going sober until July? You haven't missed the summer.

701
00:41:34.240 --> 00:41:37.440
The summer's just about to kick in. So if you think, oh, I can't wait to get back to drinking. You

702
00:41:37.440 --> 00:41:44.400
can have a beer and a beer garden. A huge proportion of people will not want to go back to drinking.

703
00:41:44.400 --> 00:41:52.000
They'll do it. Take time off. Get into it and realize I actually don't like this. I love the fact I

704
00:41:52.000 --> 00:42:00.160
got more reward from building good habits, from now having a meditation practice, from now getting

705
00:42:00.160 --> 00:42:05.920
up on time, from being able to go to the gym more. I've become more dependent on that than I ever

706
00:42:06.000 --> 00:42:10.480
was on the alcohol. This is an idea. When we talk about habits, when we read these habit books,

707
00:42:10.480 --> 00:42:16.480
we're often aiming at the ninth domino in a set of dominoes. I was just thinking then,

708
00:42:17.120 --> 00:42:21.760
the conversation probably needs to start with what are the foundational things? What is the first

709
00:42:21.760 --> 00:42:27.440
domino? Because we know from science that what I choose to eat is heavily impacted by my hormone

710
00:42:27.440 --> 00:42:31.200
balance today and my hormone balance is impacted by my sleep, my emotional regulation will be

711
00:42:31.280 --> 00:42:36.240
things. A lot of people play domino number nine. I think I will change that one, having no idea

712
00:42:36.240 --> 00:42:42.640
that actually this is downstream from a set of other foundational decisions. Even if someone that

713
00:42:42.640 --> 00:42:50.480
sits here with scientists and experts all the time, if my core state isn't good, the chance that I'm

714
00:42:50.480 --> 00:42:56.720
going to pick the right thing or go to the gym is extremely low. Being smart is basically pointless

715
00:42:56.720 --> 00:43:04.000
unless you're at peace. Any amount of intelligence can be overridden by ego or insecurity or

716
00:43:04.000 --> 00:43:12.560
immorality or bad incentives or impatience or poor sleep. Sleep as far as I can see, it's the

717
00:43:14.240 --> 00:43:18.400
pebble at the top of the avalanche. It's the gateway drug to everything else being horrendous.

718
00:43:18.400 --> 00:43:22.560
Your caffeine use is impacting your sleep. Your phone use is impacting your sleep. Your alcohol

719
00:43:22.560 --> 00:43:25.920
and an evening time is impacting your sleep. If you think that you drink in order to go to sleep,

720
00:43:25.920 --> 00:43:32.240
you're not sleeping, you're sedating yourself. If we can sort the sleep out, how many other things

721
00:43:32.240 --> 00:43:37.120
open up? But you don't sort the sleep out. You sort the caffeine intake out and you sort the

722
00:43:37.120 --> 00:43:42.800
nighttime phone use out and you sort the drinking out. Then I've got all of this extra willpower.

723
00:43:42.800 --> 00:43:46.560
The thing that I thought was the issue, which I kind of always feel a bit tired and sluggish

724
00:43:46.560 --> 00:43:53.920
in the morning, I always want to eat salty foods around midday or I always think too straight for

725
00:43:53.920 --> 00:43:57.840
the first couple of hours. The problem might be hiding at the bottom of the glass.

726
00:43:58.560 --> 00:44:03.680
We think the cause is actually a symptom. I just noticed this because when I changed a couple

727
00:44:03.680 --> 00:44:08.960
of core foundational things like exercise and sleep, everything was lubricated.

728
00:44:08.960 --> 00:44:15.360
What's your highest ROI New Year's resolutions? My highest ROI New Year's resolution

729
00:44:16.560 --> 00:44:21.920
was actually a change in a previous resolution. My previous resolution in 2017 was I'm

730
00:44:21.920 --> 00:44:26.160
going to go to the gym every day. It ended up being a terrible resolution. So her

731
00:44:26.160 --> 00:44:30.480
end is resolution. Yeah, so 2017, it was go to the gym every day and I've got about four,

732
00:44:30.480 --> 00:44:36.160
five months in. I missed a day. The resolution's done because it was a it was a

733
00:44:36.160 --> 00:44:40.720
completeable resolution in an area of my life where I didn't I need an incompatible resolution.

734
00:44:40.720 --> 00:44:46.160
So 2018, my resolution became consistency in the gym and this is when everything changed

735
00:44:46.160 --> 00:44:52.720
because consistency is a goal. I get a shot at every day irrespective of what happened yesterday.

736
00:44:53.440 --> 00:44:58.080
And I've got the rule. Let me give you the rule. Okay, this is from all of the habit stuff.

737
00:44:58.080 --> 00:45:01.920
James Clears being on my show. I think he's been on your show too. Yeah. Yeah. Best

738
00:45:02.720 --> 00:45:08.320
habit book of all time, Tommy Cavitz of all of the things. There's only two that have really,

739
00:45:08.320 --> 00:45:13.440
really, really stuck. This is the best rule when it comes to habits. Never miss two days in a row.

740
00:45:13.840 --> 00:45:19.920
Like you are not going to be able to go to the gym every day. There will be one day when an

741
00:45:19.920 --> 00:45:26.880
absolute catastrophe occurs. You ate some dodgy sushi last night. You can't go but what you have is

742
00:45:28.480 --> 00:45:35.520
one misday is an error. Two misdays is the start of a new habit. And it alleviates this

743
00:45:36.720 --> 00:45:40.160
all or nothing mentality that we all have. If you put a packet of biscuits in front of me and you

744
00:45:40.960 --> 00:45:46.960
we say you can have none of them or you can have all of them. Easy. Tell me to have two of them.

745
00:45:47.600 --> 00:45:52.000
Fuck you, dude. No one has two biscuits, right? You have all of the biscuits or you have none of the

746
00:45:52.000 --> 00:45:57.760
biscuits. And that's kind of humans are absolutist creatures like thinking extremes. Yeah.

747
00:45:57.760 --> 00:46:01.600
Going to be super, super dialed in on my diet and it's going to be great and I'm going to get

748
00:46:01.600 --> 00:46:05.920
up and do my meditation and do the rest. Or I'm going to go full degen mode and I'm partying

749
00:46:05.920 --> 00:46:09.360
in it to be thorough and so on and so forth. Like there is no middle ground really with this.

750
00:46:10.000 --> 00:46:18.800
And that means that small errors can snowball into complete demolitions of the habit. But if you

751
00:46:18.800 --> 00:46:24.800
just think, okay, at some point this year, I'm going to miss it. And the rule is if I missed it

752
00:46:24.800 --> 00:46:31.680
yesterday, I have to do it today. And that alleviates your issue, which was I cranked it for the

753
00:46:31.680 --> 00:46:36.320
first couple of months and then one day came in and I thought, oh, and then the second day and

754
00:46:36.320 --> 00:46:40.960
then I thought, well, this is just me now. The other trap that I've noticed in that is one of my

755
00:46:40.960 --> 00:46:45.440
friends had great success with the new habit with going to the gym for like three or four months.

756
00:46:45.440 --> 00:46:49.280
He messages us in the group chat. He says, I finally cracked it. I finally figured out how to do

757
00:46:49.280 --> 00:46:54.240
this. And I said to him at the time, I said, this is mate, like the best, the best thought I've ever

758
00:46:54.240 --> 00:46:59.120
had that's made my habits be consistent is the realization that you never crack it. And actually

759
00:46:59.120 --> 00:47:02.480
thinking about the day when I fall off the horse and what my strategy is for getting back on the

760
00:47:02.480 --> 00:47:07.600
horse, like being really, really cognizant of the fact that at some point, I'm going to eat the sushi

761
00:47:07.600 --> 00:47:11.760
and it's going to fuck up my belly. Or I'm going to be on a flight from Australia and I'm going

762
00:47:11.760 --> 00:47:15.840
to land and it's going to be midnight. And like having a strategy to get back on the horse and

763
00:47:15.840 --> 00:47:21.120
this just deep belief that you never crack any habit has been the single most important thing

764
00:47:21.120 --> 00:47:25.600
for me being consistent. Because when it happens and I feel unmotivated and that guilt can creep in

765
00:47:25.600 --> 00:47:32.320
and say, you fucked it, I was expecting this. Yes, of course. It's not a bug. It's a feature.

766
00:47:32.320 --> 00:47:36.160
Yeah. This was the price of entry. It's the cost of doing business of trying to do behavior change

767
00:47:36.160 --> 00:47:44.000
that it's not always going to work. Another one, another great resolution. 10 minute walk

768
00:47:44.000 --> 00:47:51.440
after every meal. Interesting. Huge, huge ROI. Dude, crazy. So it's called a post-prandial walk.

769
00:47:52.400 --> 00:47:58.560
And what it does is it helps to regulate glucose. It gets your blood sugar moving. Your stomach

770
00:47:58.560 --> 00:48:02.400
because of the contralateral movement of how your arms and your legs work. The muscles actually

771
00:48:02.400 --> 00:48:06.240
cross across your stomach, which helps you to digest food. You know, you have a huge big meal.

772
00:48:06.240 --> 00:48:10.960
You have a great conversation. You sit there and you're like, I mean, this conversation's so great,

773
00:48:10.960 --> 00:48:18.480
but I feel awful. This sucks. You just, after you go up for dinner, if you've got lunch break

774
00:48:18.480 --> 00:48:25.360
from work, eat your food 10 minute little walk. Again, I challenge people to do it and not say

775
00:48:25.360 --> 00:48:29.760
that it makes them feel really good. You go for dinner, you're with a friend, you're out with

776
00:48:29.760 --> 00:48:33.440
a partner, you're meeting somebody for the first time. Hey, do you know, why do we have a little

777
00:48:33.440 --> 00:48:38.000
stroll? Sometimes going to be freezing outside, whatever. Do what you can. Let's go for a little

778
00:48:38.000 --> 00:48:44.000
stroll. It makes a huge difference. Huge difference. What about matters of productivity? Do you

779
00:48:44.000 --> 00:48:46.960
think much about this? Because again, this time of year people are thinking about procrastination,

780
00:48:46.960 --> 00:48:50.640
productivity. They're trying to get more done. They're trying not to doom scroll so much,

781
00:48:50.640 --> 00:48:54.480
beyond Netflix, waste time. I think a lot of the guilt does come from feeling like we're

782
00:48:54.480 --> 00:49:01.040
unproductive. Absolutely. There's a wonderful idea called productivity dysmorphia. It's the

783
00:49:01.040 --> 00:49:07.280
inability to see your own success, to acknowledge the volume of your own output. It sits at the

784
00:49:07.280 --> 00:49:16.720
intersection of burnout, imposter syndrome and anxiety. You think of it like ambitions alter ego,

785
00:49:16.800 --> 00:49:22.640
basically. The pursuit of productivity spurs us to do more while robbing us of the ability to

786
00:49:22.640 --> 00:49:26.640
save or any of the successes that we achieve along the way. First off, people are not particularly

787
00:49:26.640 --> 00:49:31.600
good judges of how productive they are. I think so many people are whipping themselves into

788
00:49:31.600 --> 00:49:35.280
submission saying you're not doing enough because in the past, that motivated them to do more.

789
00:49:38.080 --> 00:49:46.320
After a while, you have to accept, I'm doing quite a lot. If you were an athlete on a sports team,

790
00:49:46.320 --> 00:49:51.680
and your coach only ever pointed at you when you made a bad play, you wouldn't feel particularly

791
00:49:51.680 --> 00:49:59.040
motivated by that. A lot of people have this sense of productivity debt. They wake up every day,

792
00:49:59.040 --> 00:50:04.640
feeling as if they're already behind. Only if they dominate their entire day perfectly,

793
00:50:04.640 --> 00:50:10.080
can they drag themselves back up to some minimum level of acceptable output. Only then can they go

794
00:50:10.080 --> 00:50:16.720
to sleep that night without feeling like a loser. This means that your set point is lost,

795
00:50:16.720 --> 00:50:22.640
and the best thing that you can do if you crush the day is get to a draw. You never win.

796
00:50:23.680 --> 00:50:27.520
And then there's this weird drill sergeant in the back of your mind that's saying,

797
00:50:28.080 --> 00:50:32.080
all right, you can have a little bit of a break now, but just so you know,

798
00:50:32.640 --> 00:50:34.640
as soon as you wake up in the morning, it's all going to happen again.

799
00:50:35.520 --> 00:50:40.400
And I'm speaking to a very particular type of mindset here that there is a huge cohort of people

800
00:50:40.400 --> 00:50:44.720
on the internet who do need David Goggin screaming in their face telling them to go hard and

801
00:50:44.720 --> 00:50:50.480
sort their life out. The sort of people that listen to your show and listen to modern wisdom are

802
00:50:52.320 --> 00:50:56.240
probably not in that camp. Do you know what's surprising? I am in that camp.

803
00:50:57.040 --> 00:51:00.640
I'm in the camp of productivity dysmorphia. Of course you are. Why is that surprising?

804
00:51:01.200 --> 00:51:05.600
Look at what you've built. How could you not do that with if you were seeing how much you did?

805
00:51:06.240 --> 00:51:10.800
I can't really think of many days. And just for context, when I wake up in the morning until,

806
00:51:10.800 --> 00:51:17.360
you know, two, two am at night, I'm working, but I can't think of many days or really none come to mind.

807
00:51:17.360 --> 00:51:21.600
Well, I've got in bed and thought you were productive today and crushed it. You met the standard.

808
00:51:21.600 --> 00:51:24.640
Productivity debt. Yeah. You woke up feeling like you're already behind.

809
00:51:24.640 --> 00:51:28.480
100% because of yesterday and the week before and the month before and the to do this.

810
00:51:29.040 --> 00:51:34.720
You see your own shortfalls from a front row seat, right? And this is one of the curses of people

811
00:51:34.720 --> 00:51:42.000
who have big dreams, goals for themselves. The size of their goals is always greater than their

812
00:51:42.000 --> 00:51:47.840
ability to deliver them. And we assume that by having very, very, very high standards for ourselves,

813
00:51:47.840 --> 00:51:52.160
that what is it? Shoot for the stars and even if you don't get it, you'll end up on the moon,

814
00:51:52.160 --> 00:51:57.520
something like that. Yeah, whatever. That's great for a while. And it's very good at the

815
00:51:57.520 --> 00:52:02.240
beginning of your journey. But after a while, I think you just need to give yourself a fucking break.

816
00:52:02.240 --> 00:52:09.840
Like people are destroying themselves in this perpetual sense of not enoughness. They're always

817
00:52:09.840 --> 00:52:14.960
chasing the next thing. So that's all of that is for me to say that people want productivity,

818
00:52:14.960 --> 00:52:20.160
desire productivity. I'm just trying to say, you're probably working real hard as it is.

819
00:52:20.160 --> 00:52:24.640
That being said, how much do I think about productivity and how can we like twist the knife a

820
00:52:24.640 --> 00:52:30.640
little bit more to give people some tools? Best question to ask yourself, if I could only

821
00:52:30.640 --> 00:52:36.080
achieve one thing today, start of every day, if I could only achieve one thing today, what would

822
00:52:36.080 --> 00:52:40.720
that be? You're only allowed to do one thing. And it's the big thing. It's usually the scary thing.

823
00:52:40.720 --> 00:52:44.640
It's usually the thing that you probably don't want to do. How many times does someone go and clean

824
00:52:44.640 --> 00:52:49.600
the cupboard in the kitchen that hasn't been touched for six months? Re-range, I'll rearrange all

825
00:52:49.600 --> 00:52:54.080
of the plates because they don't want to have that conversation with their boss. Because they don't

826
00:52:54.080 --> 00:52:57.680
want to face that particular piece of work, which is big and scary. I don't really know how to

827
00:52:57.680 --> 00:53:03.520
tackle it, how to begin. You will do everything that doesn't need to be done in order to avoid the one

828
00:53:03.520 --> 00:53:09.520
thing that does. It's because it's a big scary task that people will endure months, years,

829
00:53:09.520 --> 00:53:15.760
decades of misery to avoid a couple of days of pain. And that makes sense. It's a good trade

830
00:53:15.760 --> 00:53:19.920
in some ways. But over time, you're going to accumulate an awful lot of discomfort.

831
00:53:20.800 --> 00:53:25.200
Reminds me of what Near Iell said when I interviewed him about procrastination is the avoidance

832
00:53:25.200 --> 00:53:30.800
of discomfort. And he really said that most of human motivation is just the avoidance of discomfort.

833
00:53:30.800 --> 00:53:34.720
Because I tried to test his idea. I was like, what about having sex? That's surely the pursuit

834
00:53:34.720 --> 00:53:38.240
of pleasure. He was like, no, you get horny, which is a form of discomfort. And in order to

835
00:53:38.240 --> 00:53:42.240
alleviate it, you go and have sex where you pursue, he said, all of our behaviors driven by

836
00:53:42.240 --> 00:53:46.080
discomfort. So in your example, I've got a big, I've got to stop the manuscript from my new book,

837
00:53:46.080 --> 00:53:49.520
but I end up cleaning the house. It's because I'm like a personal example.

838
00:53:49.520 --> 00:53:53.520
No, but it is. I remember how long I procrastinated on starting my new book because it's like

839
00:53:53.520 --> 00:53:58.000
being stood at the foot of Mount Everest, starting a book. It's huge. When you think about procrastination,

840
00:53:58.560 --> 00:54:06.080
which is part of becoming more productive, what in your mind are the causes of me avoiding the

841
00:54:06.080 --> 00:54:11.600
thing that I should be doing? As far as I can see, there's two main reasons for procrastination.

842
00:54:11.680 --> 00:54:16.720
The first one is you don't know what to do. So you have this big book in front of you,

843
00:54:16.720 --> 00:54:22.240
but nobody's ever written a book. They've written a sentence. And then that sentence is accumulated

844
00:54:22.240 --> 00:54:28.400
over time into pages and paragraphs and then a book appears. Or you've reviewed a book. You've

845
00:54:28.400 --> 00:54:34.320
looked at the edit. You've made a decision about the color for the front cover. But you do what's

846
00:54:34.320 --> 00:54:39.600
called a next action from getting things done. David Allen's productivity strategy. People want a

847
00:54:39.600 --> 00:54:43.360
really, really great productivity strategy. Getting things done by David Allen is about as good as you can

848
00:54:43.360 --> 00:54:51.200
get. You do a next action. So I'm procrastinating over a task. What is the next physical action

849
00:54:51.760 --> 00:54:57.520
that I can do that pushes me toward that goal? I need to write an email. Well, you better go and

850
00:54:57.520 --> 00:55:01.680
open your email client. If you don't have your email client open, it is impossible for you to

851
00:55:01.680 --> 00:55:05.360
send the email. Well, actually, before that, I need to sit down at my desk. But actually,

852
00:55:05.360 --> 00:55:10.000
before that, I might need to put my pants on. Okay, pants are on. Hooray. I'm moving.

853
00:55:11.040 --> 00:55:15.920
I'm down at the desk. All right. There we go. I opened Instagram. Fuck. Okay. Close Instagram.

854
00:55:15.920 --> 00:55:22.000
Email client. That's the next action. So any bit, what is it like a completely marathon is just

855
00:55:22.000 --> 00:55:25.520
a ton of steps one in front of the other. It's just one fight in front of the other. Do this

856
00:55:25.520 --> 00:55:28.880
really, really big thing by breaking it down at small chunks. That's the first reason in my opinion

857
00:55:28.880 --> 00:55:32.160
for procrastination. Before we move on to the second thing, it reminds me of something Jordan

858
00:55:32.160 --> 00:55:36.640
Peterson said to me about why people don't change their life. He said, people don't change

859
00:55:36.640 --> 00:55:42.080
their life because the first steps doing so are so so small that it's like embarrassing, correct?

860
00:55:42.080 --> 00:55:45.760
And he told me this story of a guy who he was trying to get to change his life. This person

861
00:55:45.760 --> 00:55:49.920
wouldn't leave that bedroom, plates stacked to the ceiling, messy bedroom, and on day one,

862
00:55:49.920 --> 00:55:53.360
he walks in, they put vacuum cleaner in there, they do nothing else. Day two, they come back,

863
00:55:53.360 --> 00:55:56.800
they plug it in, nothing else. Day three, they come back, they turn it on, nothing else.

864
00:55:56.800 --> 00:56:00.400
And by the end of the 30 days, this guy is out of his bedroom. His room is clean and he's out

865
00:56:00.640 --> 00:56:04.960
in the world, which he was scared of. And it always made me think the first step to real change

866
00:56:04.960 --> 00:56:09.280
isn't some great leap, which is going to cause huge cognitive dissonance and discomfort.

867
00:56:09.280 --> 00:56:12.560
It is often so embarrassingly small that we don't think it's consequential.

868
00:56:12.560 --> 00:56:15.440
Yeah. And I think about that with my life all the time, I'm like, actually, maybe the first

869
00:56:15.440 --> 00:56:22.720
step here is just like buying, buying a notepad, you know, to start writing my book.

870
00:56:23.440 --> 00:56:31.360
There is definitely a sense that focusing our attention on a small step kind of reveals the

871
00:56:31.360 --> 00:56:38.000
smallness of our lives that like, oh my god, I said that I sat down at my desk like, how

872
00:56:38.000 --> 00:56:43.760
pitiful is this really how small life become? I should have this big cathedral of achievements

873
00:56:43.760 --> 00:56:48.000
and monumental stuff. He got, well, yeah, but how do you get there? I'm going to go to lay the first

874
00:56:48.000 --> 00:56:57.360
break. So humility, being humble and compassionate yourself. Okay, I did a thing today. I went for

875
00:56:57.360 --> 00:57:03.040
a walk, felt like crap. I ate this bad sushi last night. And I, you know, I did one thing,

876
00:57:03.040 --> 00:57:07.280
did one thing, one small thing that moved me toward my god. Anyway, maybe that's because we never

877
00:57:07.280 --> 00:57:11.360
get to see that first small step. We get to see the outcome. So if I'm thinking about becoming

878
00:57:11.360 --> 00:57:16.000
a podcaster and following in your footsteps, I see you've got this fucking digital screen with

879
00:57:16.000 --> 00:57:21.120
you've got Matthew McConaughey sat in this set of, I do his movie and I'm thinking, oh god,

880
00:57:21.120 --> 00:57:25.840
that's a long way to go. Well, the beautiful thing about a lot of stuff on the internet is that

881
00:57:26.560 --> 00:57:31.360
it is archived for the rest of time. So you can go back and watch my first ever episode, which is me

882
00:57:31.360 --> 00:57:35.200
in my old office for the nightclub stuff that I did and my business partner yelled at me afterwards

883
00:57:35.200 --> 00:57:37.760
because I kicked everybody out so that I could record and he's like, you can't keep doing this.

884
00:57:37.760 --> 00:57:43.920
It's not your studio. It's our office. And it's a single iPhone and a blue Yeti USB mic that

885
00:57:43.920 --> 00:57:49.040
looks like a big white dildo and it's up and over the top of the desk and it's me and a friend

886
00:57:49.040 --> 00:57:53.040
from the gym talking about how he might row the Atlantic one day. Embarrassing to start there for

887
00:57:53.040 --> 00:57:57.440
someone that's watching you do Matthew McConaughey in a digital screen. It's embarrassing. But also not

888
00:57:57.440 --> 00:58:01.920
because that was the first step. But that wasn't the first step. The first step was deciding what name

889
00:58:01.920 --> 00:58:10.560
it was going to be and then driving to Gateshead to buy the Yeti second hand from some dude on eBay

890
00:58:11.520 --> 00:58:17.280
and that Yeti went on to do 500 episodes of my podcast and then we changed to nice microphones

891
00:58:17.280 --> 00:58:23.120
or something. So everybody's journey begins embarrassingly small and I think just having a little

892
00:58:23.120 --> 00:58:29.520
bit of compassion for yourself, having the humility to go the first step that I do is going to be

893
00:58:30.080 --> 00:58:35.120
so small that it almost wouldn't register on the ledger of accomplishments. It would be my

894
00:58:35.920 --> 00:58:43.280
going okay that's still a win. First thing you don't know what to do. Second thing you know what to

895
00:58:43.280 --> 00:58:49.360
do but you don't know how to do it. So you can sit down in front of the spreadsheet and you know

896
00:58:49.360 --> 00:58:53.440
that you've got to do a V-Luckup on this spreadsheet. We have no idea how to do a V-Luckup. What's

897
00:58:53.440 --> 00:59:00.480
like V-Luckup? It's something like some Excel thing that Excel nerds will know. ChatGPT, Google,

898
00:59:01.280 --> 00:59:08.080
Ring a Boss, Ring a Friend that is an expert in Excel. So for me when I look at my procrastination it

899
00:59:08.080 --> 00:59:13.520
occurs to you to usually one of two things. Poorly defined next physical action. I don't know exactly

900
00:59:13.520 --> 00:59:18.240
what the next smaller step is that moves me toward my goal. I do know that and I sit down I don't

901
00:59:18.240 --> 00:59:22.400
know how to do it. Like how do I, like if you don't know how to open a file. You don't know how to

902
00:59:22.400 --> 00:59:26.800
unzip a file. It doesn't matter how many files you've got in front of you. You can't unzip them.

903
00:59:26.800 --> 00:59:31.760
You can't see them. It's okay. I need to learn, hey dude, I've got this zip file. Where do I go to

904
00:59:31.760 --> 00:59:37.920
get it? Oh, okay. Thank you. And then we've got moving. So it's either an action issue or a

905
00:59:37.920 --> 00:59:42.640
skill issue and both of those are usually pretty simply fixed. Reading your newslette you talk about how

906
00:59:43.440 --> 00:59:47.200
some people procrastinate because they're scared of what they'll find out about themselves

907
00:59:48.240 --> 00:59:54.160
if they try the thing and I thought that's so true. Yeah. I mean if you, the upside of never

908
00:59:54.160 --> 01:00:02.000
trying is never having to feel the pain of failure. Right. If you never face that discomfort,

909
01:00:02.000 --> 01:00:07.680
like if I tell myself that all women are terrible, then I'm excused of ever having to talk to a

910
01:00:07.680 --> 01:00:12.480
woman and as a result, I never have to feel the pain rejection. If I tell myself that everything

911
01:00:12.480 --> 01:00:17.440
is shit or that things will never get better, I'm excused of ever having to try anything. It's

912
01:00:17.440 --> 01:00:23.920
more comfortable to get fatalistic and call it pragmatism. Like the cope is framing hope as

913
01:00:23.920 --> 01:00:30.880
pathetic and embarrassing and optimism as delusion. This is cynicism, right? Synicism. And

914
01:00:32.240 --> 01:00:36.000
the opposite of that is enthusiasm. Since moving to America, I've been surrounded by very

915
01:00:36.000 --> 01:00:44.640
enthusiastic people. Americans kind of have permanent first line cocaine energy. And I like

916
01:00:44.640 --> 01:00:49.920
enthusiasm. I wish I could export some of it back to the UK. I was really disappointed by

917
01:00:50.000 --> 01:00:55.120
me. You featured in an article recently in a very well-known British paper. Maybe this came

918
01:00:55.120 --> 01:01:01.040
across your desk and maybe not. No idea. Okay. So it was it was the same week that the Spotify

919
01:01:01.040 --> 01:01:05.040
wrapped came out. Yeah. And in the top 10 in the world, there's me, you and Jay Shetty. There's

920
01:01:05.040 --> 01:01:09.760
three brits. I think we're punching above our weight. Yeah. Absolutely. With regards to this.

921
01:01:09.760 --> 01:01:17.280
Lady who wrote this article basically said it was a rejection of our patriotic inheritance

922
01:01:18.000 --> 01:01:24.480
that we were trying to do self-improvement at scale. Like whatever happened to the British stiff

923
01:01:24.480 --> 01:01:29.600
upper lippness where we sort of feel stoically satisfied in our own loneliness and misery.

924
01:01:29.600 --> 01:01:34.960
That's like an almost an exact quote. Really? Yeah. It was really it really made me sad and it made

925
01:01:34.960 --> 01:01:41.360
me sad for a few reasons. First off, the UK is not exactly showering itself in glory at the moment.

926
01:01:41.360 --> 01:01:47.200
There is an entire content bucket of American streamers reacting to news from the UK and going

927
01:01:47.200 --> 01:01:52.320
oh, the downfall of the UK with the whatever. Whether that's true or not, the optics aren't great.

928
01:01:52.320 --> 01:01:58.000
Coming out of the UK at the moment. And you've got three people who have done it. I don't know

929
01:01:58.000 --> 01:02:02.640
where the Jay is from working class, but I'm from as working class as working class can be. I know

930
01:02:02.640 --> 01:02:09.120
that you're like even lower than me somehow. Congratulations. And wherever Jay's from. And you've

931
01:02:09.120 --> 01:02:13.760
actually got these three guys who are genuinely trying to make the world a better place. Really working

932
01:02:13.840 --> 01:02:19.680
hard at it. And your main takeaway was not during a time where the UK is kind of eating shit on

933
01:02:19.680 --> 01:02:25.760
the global stage. Congratulations to three people who can show young entrepreneurs, people that

934
01:02:25.760 --> 01:02:30.400
want to do personal development, improve their own lives that maybe you can do it too. And maybe we

935
01:02:30.400 --> 01:02:35.040
all got lucky. I don't know, but it made me real sad to read that. And this isn't just that I was

936
01:02:35.040 --> 01:02:39.840
like, I would have been nice if the UK like UK press back to us and said, good on you guys.

937
01:02:39.920 --> 01:02:46.640
But on top of that, it just reminded me of a mindset in the UK that kind of has

938
01:02:47.440 --> 01:02:54.480
like Stockholm syndrome for their own sad moments for their own like zero some like

939
01:02:54.480 --> 01:02:59.600
toll poppy thing. And I really don't like the toll poppy syndrome in the UK. And it made me sad

940
01:02:59.600 --> 01:03:05.040
to read that. If I had one wish for people in the UK and if you're listening now, there's a high

941
01:03:05.760 --> 01:03:12.960
possibility you're in the UK is lift people up and be positive like clap for strangers.

942
01:03:12.960 --> 01:03:16.960
If someone does something, if someone falls flat on their face in the pursuit of a big goal,

943
01:03:16.960 --> 01:03:21.680
clap for them. So that was amazing. At least you tried because their success paves the way for us

944
01:03:21.680 --> 01:03:25.040
all to fail and fall flat on our face. But right now there's a bit of an inversion of that.

945
01:03:25.600 --> 01:03:30.800
I was in San Francisco last week. And I swear to you, one woman came up to me. She told me three times

946
01:03:30.800 --> 01:03:34.320
she had failed at her start out. She's now back living with her mom. And she wore it like a

947
01:03:34.320 --> 01:03:38.560
credential in a badge of honor because in that room it is. But back home, that's a hit piece.

948
01:03:40.000 --> 01:03:44.480
Look at this stupid delusional woman who tried to do this thing. It's evidently not going to work.

949
01:03:44.480 --> 01:03:51.360
How embarrassing. Oh, yeah. Her employees have been let go. She owes this much. All these things

950
01:03:51.360 --> 01:03:56.160
it would be framed as a negative. And actually, when I read the thing that the Spotify top 10 thing,

951
01:03:56.160 --> 01:03:59.440
yes, we're all doing self-improvement stuff. But for me, that's kind of beside the point.

952
01:03:59.440 --> 01:04:04.880
We built media businesses. And there's not a lot of intensive competing with America and

953
01:04:04.880 --> 01:04:11.360
competing with the rest of the world. It's crazy that three British entrepreneurs managed to

954
01:04:11.360 --> 01:04:18.640
contend with the United States, the home of media, more capital, more brand partners, more access

955
01:04:18.640 --> 01:04:24.480
to talent. Everything is here. It seems. And for three brits to do that, I was so proud. I don't

956
01:04:24.560 --> 01:04:30.240
need anyone to tell me. I was so proud of you. I was so proud of Jay because that is a real

957
01:04:30.240 --> 01:04:38.560
underdog thing. And many of us started a lot later than the people. You know the Indiana Jones movie

958
01:04:38.560 --> 01:04:43.200
where he's like running and the big doors coming down, the big stone door is coming down real slow

959
01:04:43.200 --> 01:04:46.720
and he's running, running, running, running. He slides underneath and he grabs his hat as he comes in.

960
01:04:46.720 --> 01:04:51.520
I kind of feel like that was us in the podcasting world. We just look at him before this sort of

961
01:04:51.520 --> 01:05:00.000
explosion and we rode the increase in platform size. But yeah, look, having people around you

962
01:05:00.000 --> 01:05:05.280
that genuinely are prepared to watch you take big swings is something I wish I could get to the UK.

963
01:05:05.280 --> 01:05:12.960
But the way that I would put it is Americans want you to succeed in case you take them with you

964
01:05:13.600 --> 01:05:20.480
on the journey. And the worst parts of British culture don't want you to succeed in case you leave

965
01:05:20.480 --> 01:05:29.920
them behind. And I know that there are so many people that this is just a mimetic issue,

966
01:05:29.920 --> 01:05:36.160
that if you had one key mover within a group, that that would start to spread and spread and spread.

967
01:05:36.960 --> 01:05:41.200
But so the people in the UK that are doers and are builders and are actually making stuff happen,

968
01:05:41.200 --> 01:05:45.760
like you have one of the hardest jobs in the world. Because not only have you got to get over the

969
01:05:45.760 --> 01:05:49.280
lonely chapter, the challenge, the difficulty, the procrastination, the getting up early, I've got

970
01:05:49.280 --> 01:05:53.360
to stop drinking caffeine 90 minutes after waking, holy fuck that so much on my plate. You have

971
01:05:53.360 --> 01:05:59.760
this additional gravity of a culture that doesn't tend to celebrate success and risk taking in quite

972
01:05:59.760 --> 01:06:08.080
the same way. So if that's you, I think like power to you, I really do. And there is a community of

973
01:06:08.080 --> 01:06:13.200
people out there, even if it feels lonely now. What do you think of the UK versus US conversations

974
01:06:13.200 --> 01:06:18.800
generally? Do you think it's really as bad as you hear on X or on social media? Do you think the UK

975
01:06:18.800 --> 01:06:25.840
is really as doomed? I don't know, man. I mean, I hesitate. I don't like to throw a ton of shade

976
01:06:25.840 --> 01:06:30.320
at the country that I left three, four years ago now, because it does feel a bit like pulling the

977
01:06:30.320 --> 01:06:35.760
ladder up after I got the last life of the Titanic and me going like, sorry, I had my problems

978
01:06:35.760 --> 01:06:41.760
while I was there. I had my criticisms of the UK while I was still in the UK. I wish that people

979
01:06:41.760 --> 01:06:47.280
were more positive. I wish that there was less told poppy syndrome. I wish that risk was

980
01:06:49.280 --> 01:06:56.640
more celebrated. You know, we have the same number of universities in the top 10 in the world as

981
01:06:56.640 --> 01:07:04.320
America, but we produce 80% fewer entrepreneurs. And what is entrepreneurialism? It's like vision,

982
01:07:04.320 --> 01:07:11.440
risk taking, it's being prepared to do something that hasn't been done before. And maybe there's

983
01:07:11.440 --> 01:07:15.600
something else I'm not seeing that's part of the, maybe it's the weather, you know, maybe it's

984
01:07:15.680 --> 01:07:20.720
the fact that we're a waterlocked island or that the population density is 10 times that of the US.

985
01:07:21.440 --> 01:07:25.040
But there's something I feel like bottom up that's putting a bit of a restriction on people.

986
01:07:25.040 --> 01:07:33.520
And yeah, it was a shame it was a shame to see that the UK press was just living out the exact

987
01:07:33.520 --> 01:07:39.120
cultural script that I assumed that they would. Shame, shame.

988
01:07:39.600 --> 01:07:44.800
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989
01:07:44.800 --> 01:07:49.280
They're tested by the weight of the admin that comes with every client. All the follow-ups,

990
01:07:49.280 --> 01:07:53.760
all the meetings, all the notes, the timelines that never ever stop. These were a constant source

991
01:07:53.760 --> 01:07:59.200
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992
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993
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994
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995
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996
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998
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999
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1000
01:08:37.040 --> 01:08:44.480
started. That's pipedrive.com slash cio. Productivity. Have we closed off the book of

1001
01:08:45.200 --> 01:08:47.840
things that really one of the things that I've read in your newsletter as well as

1002
01:08:47.840 --> 01:08:51.680
what it's productivity is just this idea that a lack of confidence kills more dreams than a lack of

1003
01:08:51.680 --> 01:08:57.520
skill. And confidence I think is maybe one of those big foundational things that sits at the

1004
01:08:57.520 --> 01:09:02.320
very top of the stack of dominoes to be able to do anything which is like do I actually believe

1005
01:09:02.400 --> 01:09:10.560
I'll be able to. Well, let me give you this. I think a lot of people assume that self-belief

1006
01:09:10.560 --> 01:09:17.440
is kind of the answer to what it is that they're looking to do. You can just do things.

1007
01:09:19.040 --> 01:09:24.800
You can just do it anyway. You can do it tired. You can do it with no self-belief.

1008
01:09:26.400 --> 01:09:30.480
You can do it when you don't want to. You can do it when you think it's not going to work.

1009
01:09:31.440 --> 01:09:38.720
You can just do things. And I've learned that you can have no self-esteem and show up anyway.

1010
01:09:40.320 --> 01:09:42.480
You can have no self-belief and things still go well.

1011
01:09:43.600 --> 01:09:47.840
Ryan Holiday says self-belief is overrated, generate evidence.

1012
01:09:50.640 --> 01:09:56.800
Fuck yeah, I want evidence. I want an undeniable stack of proof that I am who I say I am.

1013
01:09:56.880 --> 01:10:02.800
And I am the poster boy for imposter syndrome, dude. I never assumed that I would amount to

1014
01:10:03.440 --> 01:10:10.240
really anything. But I'm pretty stubborn. And being stubborn has meant that I've just kept showing up.

1015
01:10:10.240 --> 01:10:16.000
And the stubbornness feels even more in reach than consistency. Consistency is pretty in reach.

1016
01:10:16.000 --> 01:10:22.080
Don't miss two days in a row. All right, well, I can write 500 words a week. Start a

1017
01:10:22.080 --> 01:10:25.360
sub-stack and write 500 words a week. You can probably do that. You can probably find 500 words

1018
01:10:25.360 --> 01:10:28.640
a week. It'll take you half an hour. Write 500 words a week. After a year, you're a writer.

1019
01:10:28.640 --> 01:10:32.160
Congratulations. You're a writer. You have the license to be able to call yourself a writer. How

1020
01:10:32.160 --> 01:10:38.720
fantastic. And then who knows? In four years time, you've got penguin came knocking. Maybe there's

1021
01:10:38.720 --> 01:10:43.760
a book deal for you. How fantastic with that. I've published author with penguin. How fantastic

1022
01:10:43.760 --> 01:10:50.480
is that? But it starts by just going... I'm going to see what happens if I do this little thing.

1023
01:10:50.480 --> 01:10:54.880
So interesting is you said that I thought, you know what? When I started, I had no evidence.

1024
01:10:54.880 --> 01:10:59.040
Definitely didn't have belief that I could do what I've done over the last 10, 15 years of my life.

1025
01:10:59.040 --> 01:11:04.960
But I also had no choice because of that internal void. I had no evidence, but no choice.

1026
01:11:04.960 --> 01:11:10.000
That's the region beta thing that you mentioned earlier on. So the region beta paradox,

1027
01:11:10.640 --> 01:11:16.800
imagine that if you were going to travel less than a mile, you'd walk it. If you're going to travel

1028
01:11:16.800 --> 01:11:22.320
a mile or more, you would drive it. Paradoxically, you would travel two miles quicker than you would

1029
01:11:22.320 --> 01:11:28.000
travel one mile. So you jump in the car. And what this suggests is that if we only act when things

1030
01:11:28.000 --> 01:11:34.560
cross a certain threshold of badness, worse things can be better than better things. So for instance,

1031
01:11:35.040 --> 01:11:40.400
the person who lives in an apartment and it's in a kind of a sketchy area of town and there's

1032
01:11:40.400 --> 01:11:45.120
a little bit of mold on the ceiling and the house makes it kind of a bit weird. But it's really cheap.

1033
01:11:45.760 --> 01:11:48.560
And they quite like the bed and it's not too far from their work.

1034
01:11:49.360 --> 01:11:53.760
Someone's in a relationship and their partner's not abusive or mean to them, but not really that

1035
01:11:53.760 --> 01:11:58.240
fight up and don't really see that much of a future with them. Or the person who's got a job and

1036
01:11:58.240 --> 01:12:01.920
their boss is a bit of a dick and it doesn't pay that well, but it's really cushy and they don't

1037
01:12:01.920 --> 01:12:07.360
actually have to work that hard. All of these people would be better off if their situations were

1038
01:12:07.360 --> 01:12:14.800
worse because it would galvanize them to go and do something. And this zone of comfortable complacency

1039
01:12:14.800 --> 01:12:19.120
that people get into is where they can sit for a very long time. And this is a really dangerous

1040
01:12:19.120 --> 01:12:24.720
one. Things aren't bad enough to be bad, but they're nowhere near good enough to be good. And this

1041
01:12:26.400 --> 01:12:31.760
sort of grey zone, this liminal space, this sort of like productivity purgatory that you sit in

1042
01:12:31.760 --> 01:12:36.400
just sort of allows you to keep moving forward. You're not moving toward what you want,

1043
01:12:36.400 --> 01:12:41.120
but there's not enough discomfort to get you to do it. One of the most spicy questions that's

1044
01:12:41.120 --> 01:12:45.280
been asked at one of my life talks about this was, should I purposefully make my life worse

1045
01:12:46.320 --> 01:12:51.520
so that it kicks me out the bottom of region beta? I'm like, it's a high-risk strategy. I wouldn't

1046
01:12:51.520 --> 01:12:55.760
I wouldn't recommend it, but it is a difficulty. Is your saying that I was thinking about how our

1047
01:12:55.760 --> 01:12:59.680
relationship with that uncertainty is going to define our lives and that a lot of people are

1048
01:12:59.680 --> 01:13:03.840
choosing certain misery over the uncertainty that you'll encounter as you go in search for more.

1049
01:13:03.840 --> 01:13:09.280
And I always almost imagine it as being stood on the edge of a cliff and the part of the cliff I'm

1050
01:13:09.520 --> 01:13:13.760
on is illuminated. I know it. It's not great, but I know it. And then I look off into the

1051
01:13:13.760 --> 01:13:17.840
the abyss and I've got to jump into this uncertainty. I don't know if there's land there,

1052
01:13:17.840 --> 01:13:22.480
I don't know what's in there. And I think people's relationship with uncertainty defines their

1053
01:13:22.480 --> 01:13:30.000
entire life. Like can you quit when it's meh? And I look back on my life and go, if there is one

1054
01:13:30.000 --> 01:13:35.520
defining skill, maybe because of this sort of internal void, it's been not overstaying my welcome

1055
01:13:35.600 --> 01:13:40.800
by many days in a situation that pushes back against your, I say, yes, too much. It seems like

1056
01:13:40.800 --> 01:13:46.800
you do have the capacity to be able to quit when. Oh, yeah. But it's, I mean, so these are like

1057
01:13:46.800 --> 01:13:50.880
big life decisions. And what I'm talking about when I say, I don't say no enough is like

1058
01:13:52.320 --> 01:14:00.480
gradual clutter. Gradual clutter being starting a newsletter when I have no time to write.

1059
01:14:01.360 --> 01:14:05.840
Whereas when I'm thinking about this uncertainty, it's like went to university,

1060
01:14:05.840 --> 01:14:11.280
lasted a day, never went back. Walked in, thought this is like schoolwork where I failed, never

1061
01:14:11.280 --> 01:14:16.400
went back, built a company, was going well, raising investment, very successful, quit out of the

1062
01:14:16.400 --> 01:14:21.360
blue. Started, this other company called Social Chain did that up until the age of 27. 10 days

1063
01:14:21.360 --> 01:14:24.560
before we're about to go on this IPO roadshow for the company to uplist to a new stock market,

1064
01:14:25.200 --> 01:14:30.640
reach this point where I'm like, even though my entire identity is this Social Chain guy,

1065
01:14:30.640 --> 01:14:33.600
and even though we're about to raise this money and the company would eventually rally up to

1066
01:14:33.600 --> 01:14:39.360
what being worth 400, 500 million on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, I'm going to jump off into

1067
01:14:39.360 --> 01:14:44.160
nothingness. I'm going to leave it all with no plan B. And that's when I reflect on my life and

1068
01:14:44.160 --> 01:14:49.280
go, oh, like in the big moments, I've not required, so I've not needed certainty. What I've needed

1069
01:14:49.280 --> 01:14:54.560
is that realization that this certain misery is not what I want. That's brave. Do you know what I'm

1070
01:14:54.560 --> 01:14:58.800
saying? I look at people's decisioning and their life story through this lens, which is like how

1071
01:14:58.800 --> 01:15:05.360
much conviction do you need that you're in the wrong place? Obama said on stage, when I spoke,

1072
01:15:05.360 --> 01:15:09.680
at this event, that he spoke at many years ago, that on his big decisions in life, he gets to 51

1073
01:15:09.680 --> 01:15:13.120
percent certainty and then makes the decision with the peace of mind that he made the decision

1074
01:15:13.120 --> 01:15:16.480
with the best available evidence. He talked about getting a summer bin Laden in that compound

1075
01:15:16.480 --> 01:15:21.760
in Pakistan. He had never seen that he was there, but he risked to her patchy helicopters of

1076
01:15:21.760 --> 01:15:27.840
lives. What percentage of certainty do you need to make a big decision? I think is it a

1077
01:15:27.840 --> 01:15:33.760
determinant for the long term success you'll have in your life? Some people need to get to like 95

1078
01:15:33.760 --> 01:15:39.760
percent and you never get there on most things. Yeah, it's the difference in behavioral economics

1079
01:15:39.760 --> 01:15:45.600
between maximizing and satisfying. It's like the two terms, like basically what's your threshold

1080
01:15:45.680 --> 01:15:50.560
for conviction? Yeah, you know, the paradox of choice by Barry Schwartz. Do you know this? Okay,

1081
01:15:50.560 --> 01:15:55.520
so Barry Schwartz uses this wonderful example of people buying jeans 50 years ago,

1082
01:15:56.160 --> 01:16:02.160
going into the jeans store. You go in and there is one type of jeans, maybe different sizes,

1083
01:16:02.160 --> 01:16:06.880
maybe, and you go in, you buy the pair of jeans, you leave. Maybe they're not the perfect jeans

1084
01:16:06.880 --> 01:16:11.200
that you wanted, but you had no other choice, right? So you've got them. So you're okay with your

1085
01:16:11.280 --> 01:16:14.880
decision. It would have been happier if there was others, but there wasn't. So your decision

1086
01:16:14.880 --> 01:16:21.280
regret is basically zero. Roll the clock forward. It's 2025. You go into the jeans store. Do you

1087
01:16:21.280 --> 01:16:25.120
want skinny or stretched? You want boot cut? You want ripped? You want bleached? You want gray,

1088
01:16:25.120 --> 01:16:32.240
blue, black. If you walk out of the jeans store with a suboptimal pair of jeans, this is no longer

1089
01:16:32.240 --> 01:16:36.560
because of restriction from the environment. This is because of your inability to make the right

1090
01:16:36.560 --> 01:16:42.880
choice. This causes people to fear making choices. They project the potential regret they're fearful

1091
01:16:42.880 --> 01:16:47.760
of in the future down into the present and it causes decision paralysis. They don't do anything.

1092
01:16:47.760 --> 01:16:51.360
I think there's so many different options here. This is one of the paradoxes where you think,

1093
01:16:51.360 --> 01:16:56.000
well, lots of choice allows you to maximize what you want. You get the perfect pair of jeans.

1094
01:16:57.040 --> 01:17:01.440
Why is it that firstly people tend to be less satisfied with their decisions when they

1095
01:17:01.520 --> 01:17:06.160
give in more options? Secondly, why so many people struggle to make decisions in the first place?

1096
01:17:06.720 --> 01:17:10.080
Because they're paralyzed by the overanalysis they have of all of the different

1097
01:17:10.080 --> 01:17:18.720
optionality that's in front of them. Overanalysis paralysis. Jeff Bezos's Amazon thing about type

1098
01:17:18.720 --> 01:17:22.480
one type two doors is really useful here because when kids come up to me at the tours and stuff that I've

1099
01:17:22.480 --> 01:17:27.440
done, most of the time the question they're asking me can be answered with a rebuttal which is

1100
01:17:27.520 --> 01:17:32.960
if you're wrong, could you go back? If you're wrong about quitting at a city bank, would

1101
01:17:32.960 --> 01:17:38.560
city bank have you back? You've been there for three or four years, you're like a high

1102
01:17:38.560 --> 01:17:40.720
performer, you're killing it, you can do it with your eyes closed, of course they're going to have

1103
01:17:40.720 --> 01:17:44.640
you back. In fact, you probably get pay rise if you go to their competitor. In such a scenario,

1104
01:17:44.640 --> 01:17:50.400
go be the violinist in Peru and do the cupcake thing. Start the cupcake store because if you're wrong,

1105
01:17:50.400 --> 01:17:55.360
you can always go back. When I say that to kids, it's almost like the most common rebuttal I give

1106
01:17:55.520 --> 01:17:58.720
them which is like if you're wrong about this dream you have, would you be welcome back to your

1107
01:17:58.720 --> 01:18:03.680
current life? Well, think about this. If you're succeeding at a job that you hate, imagine how great

1108
01:18:03.680 --> 01:18:07.760
you'd be at one that you loved. If you're not fired up about the thing that you're doing today

1109
01:18:08.480 --> 01:18:16.080
and you're still winning, what could happen if you actually enjoyed you were fired up when you

1110
01:18:16.080 --> 01:18:21.280
woke up on a morning? Imagine that. Some people have never experienced snow that it's possible.

1111
01:18:21.360 --> 01:18:24.400
It's suffering and lots of people have got real world restrictions which

1112
01:18:24.400 --> 01:18:29.520
fucking blows but there's always something that you can do that's little. Another question people can

1113
01:18:29.520 --> 01:18:34.720
ask themselves and reflecting on last year, what are some of the thoughts that you repeated too many

1114
01:18:34.720 --> 01:18:39.520
times this year? What are the things that came up over and over that little voice in the back of

1115
01:18:39.520 --> 01:18:46.720
your head, that conversation that you need to have? What are the thoughts you repeated too many times

1116
01:18:47.280 --> 01:18:53.600
to the point that it caused harm or distraction? It plagued you. There's this thing that's there.

1117
01:18:54.560 --> 01:19:01.280
Like that thing that my partner said to me 18 months ago over dinner is still in the back of my mind

1118
01:19:01.280 --> 01:19:04.960
and I'm ashamed of bringing it up to them. I'm even more ashamed to bring it up to them now

1119
01:19:04.960 --> 01:19:07.920
because they're probably not even going to remember but they said this thing or they looked at the

1120
01:19:07.920 --> 01:19:16.320
way to that way or my boss mentioned something in an email that made me feel like they really don't

1121
01:19:16.320 --> 01:19:23.120
value me and it's just over and over or I need to sort my diet out. I need to sort my diet out.

1122
01:19:23.120 --> 01:19:25.920
I should sort my diet. I can't sort my diet out. I'm going to sort my diet. I should sort

1123
01:19:25.920 --> 01:19:31.360
I can't over and over and over again. What are the thoughts that plagued you this year? What are the

1124
01:19:31.360 --> 01:19:37.680
ones that kept on happening over and over and over again? Typically from that, there is a conversation

1125
01:19:37.680 --> 01:19:42.160
that you need to have or there is an emotion that you're unprepared to feel.

1126
01:19:43.040 --> 01:19:45.840
So another great question, what are the emotions that you're unprepared to feel?

1127
01:19:46.400 --> 01:19:50.160
If fear comes up, do you run away from it? You distract yourself away from it? You drink yourself

1128
01:19:50.160 --> 01:19:53.520
away from it. You lift yourself away from it. What are the emotions you're unprepared to feel?

1129
01:19:54.560 --> 01:19:58.160
You're safe to feel these emotions. You can just sit there.

1130
01:19:58.160 --> 01:20:02.640
It's interesting because as you said that, I thought about how the framing of 85-year-old me

1131
01:20:02.640 --> 01:20:07.360
was actually such a wonderful way to understand this because I know the question we asked earlier

1132
01:20:07.360 --> 01:20:11.760
was what would 85-year-old you really be annoyed that you did today? But the inverse of that is

1133
01:20:12.320 --> 01:20:18.160
85-year-old Stephen is just going to wish I took care of my body more. It's not going to care

1134
01:20:18.160 --> 01:20:23.280
about the mind. You can't walk up a fucking hill, my guy. Your glutes have blown out and you don't

1135
01:20:23.280 --> 01:20:31.120
have flexibility and you're hunched over and you lose respiratory, you can't walk upstairs without

1136
01:20:31.120 --> 01:20:36.480
being out of breath. And it's so interesting that if 85-year-old me is going to be so pissed off

1137
01:20:36.480 --> 01:20:43.600
that I didn't take care of my body more. It's even as someone that seems to take care of their

1138
01:20:43.600 --> 01:20:50.160
body quite a bit. But then still. Yeah, you're making trades. What would I do to make 85-year-old

1139
01:20:50.160 --> 01:20:54.160
me miserable and what would 85-year-old me want me to do more of? Great, great, great,

1140
01:20:54.160 --> 01:20:59.600
great, friends. Let me give you a couple on problems and stress. One of the issues that people

1141
01:20:59.600 --> 01:21:07.760
come up against is you've got the start of the this wide-eyed blue sky vision for what's going to

1142
01:21:07.760 --> 01:21:14.480
happen. And even though you know that stuff's going to come and sort of get in the way, it always

1143
01:21:14.480 --> 01:21:21.120
feels unfair when it does. It shouldn't be this way. You sort of rail against the road bumps

1144
01:21:21.120 --> 01:21:28.000
that we have along the way. So six lessons about problems and stress. And one, problems are a feature

1145
01:21:28.000 --> 01:21:34.160
of life, not a bug. And there will never come a time when you have no problems. What did you,

1146
01:21:34.160 --> 01:21:39.920
you think you were going to wake up one day and there be no more problems like completing a video

1147
01:21:39.920 --> 01:21:48.000
game level and going to a map where there's nothing there? Things are always going to incur problems.

1148
01:21:48.720 --> 01:21:54.960
Your problems will change but having problems is going nowhere. Number two, whatever negativity

1149
01:21:54.960 --> 01:22:00.880
is consuming your thoughts probably won't matter in three months time. Like in three months,

1150
01:22:00.880 --> 01:22:05.520
you won't remember the corrosive texture of your own mind or the boring repetitive things

1151
01:22:05.520 --> 01:22:10.640
that you thought or maybe even what you worried about. I think what were you worrying about three

1152
01:22:10.640 --> 01:22:17.040
months ago right now? Probably can't remember. But all of the time that you spent worrying will have

1153
01:22:17.040 --> 01:22:22.720
passed. So you're sacrificing your joy and your presence in the moment for a problem that you

1154
01:22:22.800 --> 01:22:29.200
won't even be able to recall in the future. So immortality would kind of be the only life where

1155
01:22:29.200 --> 01:22:35.360
so much flippancy with the time that we have would be acceptable. Learning comes from the edges.

1156
01:22:35.360 --> 01:22:41.920
Number three, change is uncomfortable and it rarely occurs without a lot of stress. Learning comes

1157
01:22:41.920 --> 01:22:47.440
from the edges. From the edges. Yeah. Proctimate zone of development. What does that mean? You pushing

1158
01:22:47.920 --> 01:22:52.720
yourself just beyond what you're comfortable with and sometimes this can be emotional paying too.

1159
01:22:52.720 --> 01:22:58.480
Leaving the job happens when you get pushed out of region beta on the bottom end or growth happens

1160
01:22:58.480 --> 01:23:02.800
when you overextend yourself the right amount not so much that you get injured but so much that

1161
01:23:02.800 --> 01:23:07.760
you're challenged that this is a new zone for you to get into and clawing up. Wow. And it expands

1162
01:23:07.760 --> 01:23:14.160
your potential, your idea of what you're able to do and it's like it pushes you so that your system

1163
01:23:14.160 --> 01:23:20.640
becomes more resilient on the other side. Many of the periods of radical important change that

1164
01:23:20.640 --> 01:23:25.040
you have had in your life have only occurred because of severe challenges you faced. Like look back,

1165
01:23:26.560 --> 01:23:31.920
almost all of the big periods of growth in your life have germinated from your lowest points.

1166
01:23:34.240 --> 01:23:39.120
In retrospect, would you have avoided them if you could? Probably not.

1167
01:23:39.920 --> 01:23:48.000
So, yeah, this challenge is a gift. You can lean into discomfort as if you invited it through

1168
01:23:48.000 --> 01:23:54.880
the door. It's like, oh, there we are. Hello. It's good to see you. What thoughts did you repeat

1169
01:23:54.880 --> 01:24:00.000
too many times this year? You're working too much. Okay, so this is a recurring theme here. Of course.

1170
01:24:00.000 --> 01:24:04.480
Yeah. Again, the big questions, the big problems, the big problems. And you want to orientate your

1171
01:24:04.480 --> 01:24:10.960
life towards just having bigger gaps of emptiness. But probably filling it with this stuff. Family

1172
01:24:10.960 --> 01:24:15.120
is the same as you. I can't wait to be a dad in dog. I should have a dog. I should have a dog.

1173
01:24:15.120 --> 01:24:18.080
How many times have I thought the thought I should have a dog? Get a golden retriever.

1174
01:24:18.080 --> 01:24:23.440
I saw a tweet which has kind of haunted me for 12 months. The tweet said, why do all the big

1175
01:24:23.440 --> 01:24:29.440
male podcast is not have kids? All the big male podcast is not have kids. They all talk about

1176
01:24:29.600 --> 01:24:34.560
the population crisis and this and that and the other. And then it was like Chris Williamson,

1177
01:24:34.560 --> 01:24:43.120
Huberman, Lex Steven. J got kids. J Shetty. Yeah. No, okay. Yeah, but then also Tucker Carlson's

1178
01:24:43.120 --> 01:24:49.680
breeding a lot. He was number 10. Rogan's got like three daughters, I think three or four daughters.

1179
01:24:49.680 --> 01:24:54.640
So. Rogan's the only one that think about it as well. There's a generational difference here.

1180
01:24:54.640 --> 01:24:59.840
Like Tucker and Rogan are of the same generation. And this younger generation of like very flattering

1181
01:24:59.840 --> 01:25:05.440
for Andrew Huberman in his 50s. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But why is that? Why don't we have kids?

1182
01:25:07.200 --> 01:25:13.920
I mean, it's a great question. For me, I spent a lot of time in my 20s really trying to work out

1183
01:25:13.920 --> 01:25:20.160
who I was. I had my head up my own house. I'm happy to say that I had a slow development

1184
01:25:20.240 --> 01:25:24.640
psychologically in terms of becoming the person that I wanted to in terms of realizing

1185
01:25:24.640 --> 01:25:31.600
how important different things were to me. Like how long have you known felt it? I should have kids.

1186
01:25:33.440 --> 01:25:37.680
I've always wanted kids, but I've not put steps in place to make that happen

1187
01:25:38.880 --> 01:25:44.320
up until the last two years. And you know what's crazy? I'm completely unprepared.

1188
01:25:44.480 --> 01:25:50.320
I am my life as it is now is not ready for kids. I fly too much. I'm too busy. I have

1189
01:25:50.320 --> 01:25:54.000
so many other priorities. I ordered to pick something up. Yeah, but I'm not something done.

1190
01:25:54.000 --> 01:25:58.240
But I have this sort of meta view, which is the big step up in meeting in my life will probably

1191
01:25:58.240 --> 01:26:02.720
come from that. So even though there's no emotion in my body that's telling me that this is a good

1192
01:26:02.720 --> 01:26:09.760
idea close my eyes and do it. And I will adjust. I will adjust to the responsibility as I always have.

1193
01:26:09.760 --> 01:26:14.080
There was no room in my life for a podcast when I started this podcast, but I adjusted.

1194
01:26:14.080 --> 01:26:21.040
And so it goes against every inclination that I have to have children right now as a man that has

1195
01:26:21.040 --> 01:26:26.320
freedom, who is 33 years old, who can go every once when every once and doesn't really have to

1196
01:26:26.320 --> 01:26:30.640
answer to any major responsibilities outside of my businesses. Do you like that? Do you like the

1197
01:26:30.640 --> 01:26:39.440
fact that you don't have dependence in that way? If you ask this brain, yes, I like freedom.

1198
01:26:39.440 --> 01:26:44.240
I like the fact that I after this conversation, I can welcome my business, go to the gym,

1199
01:26:44.240 --> 01:26:50.640
go wherever I want, fly somewhere, go to Hawaii. I like the freedom. However, there's this like

1200
01:26:50.640 --> 01:26:57.440
meta brain. That is my regret brain. And it lives 50 years from now. And it's been inspired by all

1201
01:26:57.440 --> 01:27:01.760
the conversations I've had on the podcast. And it says to me that actually the most meaningful thing

1202
01:27:01.760 --> 01:27:06.160
you can do is increase the amount of dependence and responsibility that you have. This is an

1203
01:27:06.160 --> 01:27:13.200
unteachable lesson, dude, that you should probably have kids now, right? That could be a lesson,

1204
01:27:13.200 --> 01:27:17.600
perhaps, that you will never feel ready. That could be an unteachable lesson.

1205
01:27:17.600 --> 01:27:27.200
We have this population decline situation going on. And is it not a function of a consequence

1206
01:27:27.200 --> 01:27:31.840
of the fact that we have more freedom, more control, we're more nihilistic, we

1207
01:27:32.800 --> 01:27:38.000
are more like me, me, me, me, me. Now, there's like a subtle narcissism, which is bread and

1208
01:27:38.000 --> 01:27:43.600
society. I'm like, I ain't got kids, but just so you know, lads without watching, I'm doing

1209
01:27:43.600 --> 01:27:47.840
everything in my power. Some things that I can't actually tell you about, but I'm doing everything

1210
01:27:47.840 --> 01:27:52.560
in my power to have kids as soon as possible. Okay, so I imagine that I'll be a part of that.

1211
01:27:52.560 --> 01:27:57.680
That just sounds like shagging all the time. Well, yeah. But I think I'll be a dad within the

1212
01:27:57.680 --> 01:28:02.960
next 12 months. Amazing. And I, and I have to say this again because it's so important, like,

1213
01:28:03.840 --> 01:28:07.680
there's no part of me in this moment of time. That's like, oh, I really, really want to be a dad.

1214
01:28:07.680 --> 01:28:12.640
I can see the cost, but the benefit is unknown. I have to take other people's words for it.

1215
01:28:12.640 --> 01:28:19.360
Crazy, dude. It's a painful realization. And I've had some of the best demographers in the

1216
01:28:19.360 --> 01:28:24.880
world on live in stone from the Institute for Family Studies, Stephen J. Shaw, who did the

1217
01:28:24.880 --> 01:28:31.040
birth gap documentary. These people know what's going on. And it's a, it's a function of a lot of

1218
01:28:31.040 --> 01:28:36.640
things. It's a function of people having other stuff to do. There are so many other things to do

1219
01:28:36.640 --> 01:28:43.440
than have kids, a reliable contraception that means that you can choose to put it off and continue

1220
01:28:43.440 --> 01:28:50.320
to push it off for as long as you want, specifically women's socioeconomic emancipation into the

1221
01:28:50.320 --> 01:28:57.200
workforce and in higher education. It means that at 18, the first thing you do is get married.

1222
01:28:57.200 --> 01:29:00.800
Oh, I'm going to go to university. I've just put three or four years into university. I'm going

1223
01:29:00.800 --> 01:29:04.480
to now go and get a job and now commit it to the job. I'm going to maybe climb the corporate ladder.

1224
01:29:04.480 --> 01:29:08.880
And that's pushed the vitality curve back. It's made it later, rather than being earlier.

1225
01:29:08.880 --> 01:29:12.560
And another problem is because there is such a multiplicity of different life directions that

1226
01:29:12.560 --> 01:29:18.240
people can go down, the likelihood of you being ready at 22 and you meeting someone else who's

1227
01:29:18.240 --> 01:29:22.560
also ready at 22. It's actually quite low. So if you think that you can have a graph like this

1228
01:29:23.440 --> 01:29:27.920
vitality curve, it's called by Stephen Shaw. And previously it would have been very short and sharp

1229
01:29:27.920 --> 01:29:32.960
and spiky. And that would be like when people want to have kids, it's like, you know, from 18 to

1230
01:29:32.960 --> 01:29:37.280
24, let's say, if you meet anybody within that age range, it's likely that they're at the same

1231
01:29:37.280 --> 01:29:43.200
life situation as you. As you flatten that curve, make it longer and you also push it a little bit

1232
01:29:43.200 --> 01:29:49.760
later, you're now 35 to meet somebody that's also 35 and ready to have kids. You meet some,

1233
01:29:49.760 --> 01:29:55.120
not because there's too much area under the curve that's flat as opposed to everybody kind of

1234
01:29:55.120 --> 01:30:01.040
dancing to the same tune or dancing to different tunes. So that contributes to it. I certainly

1235
01:30:01.040 --> 01:30:08.240
think that there is an anti-family message that comes about that there's a girl with the list

1236
01:30:08.320 --> 01:30:15.040
on TikTok, which I think is this girl who wrote 350 reasons to not have kids. It's like eight pages,

1237
01:30:15.040 --> 01:30:20.640
nine pages long and it went super viral and it's everything from literally a parasite growing

1238
01:30:20.640 --> 01:30:26.480
inside of your body to can't work cute heels with the girls. We'll have to miss brunch all of the

1239
01:30:26.480 --> 01:30:31.600
different issues that can occur during childbirth. And then I think there was a list of things for

1240
01:30:31.600 --> 01:30:39.200
kids and it was maybe a page, a half a page long that she'd written. And she is open to seeing

1241
01:30:39.200 --> 01:30:43.360
the world as she wishes. I think by the sounds of things, it is a really good idea that she's not

1242
01:30:43.360 --> 01:30:51.040
a mother and I'm glad that she's choosing to not have kids. But that tone, that sentiment is like

1243
01:30:51.040 --> 01:30:59.840
prevalent because people see this is what I have to sacrifice now, pain, discomfort, lack of freedom.

1244
01:31:00.160 --> 01:31:06.080
For something that I have no idea about whether or not it's going to make me satisfied in

1245
01:31:06.080 --> 01:31:12.080
future. And yeah, maybe people say it's the most important thing or whatever, but it's easy to

1246
01:31:12.080 --> 01:31:16.160
excuse away when there are so many other things I can do with my life. I can travel around Bali and

1247
01:31:16.160 --> 01:31:19.840
I can watch Netflix and I can build a business and I can start a sub stack or I can build a YouTube

1248
01:31:19.840 --> 01:31:24.880
channel and do a podcast. All of these things that you could do, pushing off, pushing off, pushing

1249
01:31:25.040 --> 01:31:32.080
off. It's no surprise. And the final point is I think having kids is mimetic. So you model the

1250
01:31:32.080 --> 01:31:35.920
behavior of the people that are around you and the people that you see. So good example of this.

1251
01:31:37.120 --> 01:31:43.120
South Koreans got one of the worst birth rates in the world. For every 100 South Koreans,

1252
01:31:43.120 --> 01:31:48.880
there will be four great grandchildren. 96% reduction over the next century. It's insane.

1253
01:31:48.960 --> 01:31:55.280
Their entire classroom told schools in South Korea that are unoccupied. Now, and there are many,

1254
01:31:55.280 --> 01:32:02.960
many reasons. The four B's movement, the increasing of women's acceptance into education. And then

1255
01:32:02.960 --> 01:32:07.120
when they got into the workforce, they were still being prejudice against, which meant that they

1256
01:32:07.120 --> 01:32:11.440
swore off a lot of the things that they were promised. Like lots and lots of different reasons.

1257
01:32:11.440 --> 01:32:18.240
But one of the big ones, culturally, which is really fascinating, is K-pop. K-pop was this export.

1258
01:32:18.240 --> 01:32:23.760
The career was going to put to the world. We have this ability to construct like the perfect

1259
01:32:23.760 --> 01:32:27.200
boy band or girl band. We're going to export it to the world and this is going to be a representation

1260
01:32:27.200 --> 01:32:31.360
for us. One of the things that K-pop stars have to say is that they will be celibate

1261
01:32:31.360 --> 01:32:35.440
while they're in the band. So not only does this mean that they can't be in a relationship. So

1262
01:32:35.440 --> 01:32:42.560
the most popular cultural influences in South Korea aren't showing a pro-relationship narrative.

1263
01:32:43.440 --> 01:32:47.680
They also obviously can't be mothers or fathers because they can't be in a relationship.

1264
01:32:48.640 --> 01:32:51.520
The converse of this, cultural intervention in the country of Georgia,

1265
01:32:52.160 --> 01:32:58.640
very religious. And there's this superstar pastor guy, very religious country. This pastor that's

1266
01:32:58.640 --> 01:33:07.840
kind of like a really rock star, so to do. He said, I will personally baptize the third child

1267
01:33:07.920 --> 01:33:13.680
of any family in the country. So now these parents are speedrunning having kids so that their

1268
01:33:13.680 --> 01:33:19.600
child can be baptized by the equivalent, you know, the goat. He's like the fucking

1269
01:33:19.600 --> 01:33:30.960
avicie of pastors. K-pop did the exact opposite. They had a cultural intervention which showed a

1270
01:33:30.960 --> 01:33:37.680
non pro-family influence, whereas Georgia had this one that was a pro-family influence. So

1271
01:33:37.680 --> 01:33:42.960
a cultural intervention that South Korea could easily implement would be to say the only way

1272
01:33:42.960 --> 01:33:49.360
that you can become a K-pop star is to already have had a kid. Like we're only going to create

1273
01:33:49.360 --> 01:33:54.640
boy bands and girl bands out of people who have already had families. This kind of brings the

1274
01:33:54.640 --> 01:33:58.080
conversation to me and you because there's a lot of men that listen to your show. There's a lot of

1275
01:33:58.080 --> 01:34:02.800
men that listen to my show. And I do think in many respects we're modeling to some respects,

1276
01:34:02.800 --> 01:34:08.480
to some people, what it is to be a good man. By what we choose to do, you know, you have a lot of

1277
01:34:08.480 --> 01:34:11.680
influence. I've watched the videos of people coming to you after your tours and they say to you

1278
01:34:11.680 --> 01:34:14.640
that you're their friend. They're like they thank you for the fact that you have been there,

1279
01:34:14.640 --> 01:34:18.480
their big brother or their friend to look up to. And so I actually think about this a lot which is

1280
01:34:18.480 --> 01:34:24.160
like, what am I modeling? As a podcast, we're both in the top 10 list of the global podcasts

1281
01:34:24.960 --> 01:34:30.240
calling to Spotify. So do you think about what you model? And do you think about what a good man is?

1282
01:34:30.240 --> 01:34:34.960
Do you think about what you want your audience to think of a man's responsibility is?

1283
01:34:34.960 --> 01:34:39.760
Yeah, very much so. That being said, I've never claimed to be some shiny example of what people

1284
01:34:39.760 --> 01:34:51.040
should do. I certainly know that I try my best to be the sort of guy that I would want

1285
01:34:51.600 --> 01:34:58.000
to be friends with. I quite like me. I quite like me. And I've worked really hard. I didn't like

1286
01:34:58.000 --> 01:35:04.400
me. And I worked really, really hard to form myself into a shape, a construction. I feel big emotions

1287
01:35:04.400 --> 01:35:08.480
for instance. And for a long time, I was really ashamed of them and I wouldn't get below the neck

1288
01:35:08.480 --> 01:35:14.320
and I would use intellect to like protect myself from feeling my feelings. And on stage,

1289
01:35:14.320 --> 01:35:18.880
anybody that's come to see my live show, I get teary every night. I get teary telling the same story.

1290
01:35:20.320 --> 01:35:26.800
Okay. Well, I think that's like a good thing. I think it's a good thing for guys who feel their

1291
01:35:26.800 --> 01:35:32.000
emotions to show that they feel their emotions. Right? Suppression isn't the same thing as strength.

1292
01:35:33.200 --> 01:35:41.840
And I've stopped suppressing. Wonderful. I think that there is a wonderful upside in

1293
01:35:42.960 --> 01:35:46.880
trying to conquer and trying to achieve mastery, trying to really drive yourself to go and do stuff.

1294
01:35:46.880 --> 01:35:51.920
But I'm not like fuck your feelings just hustle and grind until your eyes bleed either. So I'm trying

1295
01:35:51.920 --> 01:35:55.760
to show balance. I think mindfulness is really important. I think that physical practice is

1296
01:35:55.760 --> 01:36:00.080
really important. Now, all of this stuff kind of appears in the exterior. Remember what I said

1297
01:36:00.080 --> 01:36:04.080
before? What's the conversation room prepared to have? What's the one thing that you should be doing?

1298
01:36:04.080 --> 01:36:07.840
It's usually the big thing. The big thing is probably going to be something to do with

1299
01:36:07.840 --> 01:36:12.480
have a fucking family, dude. Like it's time for you to have a family. But it's a,

1300
01:36:13.120 --> 01:36:19.520
is that scary for you? Be honest. To have a family? No. But the sacrifice and commitment

1301
01:36:19.520 --> 01:36:24.640
is to be. It used to be. It used to be. Yeah, of course. We did that change two years ago.

1302
01:36:24.640 --> 01:36:27.520
Really? Two or three years ago? Yeah, yeah. And again, we are

1303
01:36:28.480 --> 01:36:35.040
products of our environment. Like all of the corner copier of different things that we can do.

1304
01:36:35.040 --> 01:36:41.040
Look at this panoply of options that I could spend my life doing. You sort of get shiny objects

1305
01:36:41.040 --> 01:36:46.560
syndrome and you chase after things and isn't it going to be exciting? And then you get to

1306
01:36:46.880 --> 01:36:52.400
where you thought you wanted to be and you go, that might not be the answer.

1307
01:36:53.760 --> 01:36:59.200
That's why having a bit of time to reflect, having a little bit of time for quiet,

1308
01:36:59.200 --> 01:37:04.160
fleeting thoughts to come up. Like a busy calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness.

1309
01:37:05.120 --> 01:37:10.000
If you are always needed by somebody, you don't have to sit with your quiet thoughts.

1310
01:37:10.000 --> 01:37:14.960
You don't have to think, oh, that deep question that's been in the back of my mind,

1311
01:37:15.360 --> 01:37:20.160
it's easy to push off if people want me or I move from caffeine-fueled meeting to evening dinner.

1312
01:37:20.960 --> 01:37:24.560
I actually have to listen to that. But if you sit with your thoughts for a little bit,

1313
01:37:24.560 --> 01:37:28.560
and this is why a lot of people don't like sitting with their thoughts, this stuff comes up.

1314
01:37:28.560 --> 01:37:31.840
And that's why the question, what emotions you weren't prepared to feel is so good.

1315
01:37:31.840 --> 01:37:34.960
What changed two years ago that made you change your perspective?

1316
01:37:34.960 --> 01:37:40.800
I don't know. I grew up. I guess that's what growing up is called. It wasn't some

1317
01:37:41.680 --> 01:37:47.680
moment where the sky's opened and things changed. I noticed, I used to think that kids were

1318
01:37:47.680 --> 01:37:52.800
super annoying. My business partner had his first son when he was 25, so it would have been

1319
01:37:52.800 --> 01:37:58.800
25-2, 25-26 maybe. And I remember thinking, fuck, you just can't come out with me anymore.

1320
01:37:58.800 --> 01:38:04.560
He's busy, he's got all this stuff to do. And then each kid that was about two years apart,

1321
01:38:04.560 --> 01:38:11.440
each one, I noticed my relationship to the child was different. I was like, okay, well,

1322
01:38:11.440 --> 01:38:15.760
they're kind of cute or whatever. And then another one came along and I'm like, okay,

1323
01:38:15.760 --> 01:38:22.880
so I saw this sedimentary rock, this archaeological dig of myself change. And now I'm

1324
01:38:22.880 --> 01:38:27.760
Godfather to my best friend's daughter, beautiful daughter, who's like four months old, five

1325
01:38:27.760 --> 01:38:32.640
months old. And I love going around and seeing her. And yeah, I don't know, it's just growing up,

1326
01:38:32.640 --> 01:38:37.920
dude, growing up's weird because something changes and you kind of didn't choose it. Do you know what

1327
01:38:37.920 --> 01:38:43.760
I mean? Like, did you choose? No, fuck me. No, it's weird, man. It's weird. This belief climbs inside

1328
01:38:43.760 --> 01:38:49.200
of you and sort of wears you a little bit. And a lot of the time we're scared of that and I understand

1329
01:38:49.200 --> 01:38:56.400
why. But like resisting the fact that that's there, like, I don't know, it's kind of a denial of

1330
01:38:56.400 --> 01:39:00.080
this beautiful thing that's just been given to you. There you go. There's like something new and

1331
01:39:00.080 --> 01:39:05.440
exciting that you can move into. And I think a lot of friction is in the resistance, right?

1332
01:39:05.440 --> 01:39:11.040
Suffering is in the resistance of the thing. I've just finished writing my third book. I haven't

1333
01:39:11.040 --> 01:39:15.920
found up the title yet, but I have started walking up some different designs and I've been doing

1334
01:39:15.920 --> 01:39:19.920
this with Adobe Express, which is one of our sponsors. What I love about Adobe Express is that

1335
01:39:19.920 --> 01:39:24.880
it makes it so easy for me to obsess over the tiniest details, the typography, the font, the color,

1336
01:39:24.960 --> 01:39:30.000
the text placement, the stuff that might sound petty to most people, but actually compounds to

1337
01:39:30.000 --> 01:39:35.280
create something that stands out, something that's one better than the rest. And designing my

1338
01:39:35.280 --> 01:39:39.200
cover art has reminded me of how many creative things I've learned over the year, but it's also

1339
01:39:39.200 --> 01:39:43.520
reminded me that there are so many creative minds around me that are also sitting on their own

1340
01:39:43.520 --> 01:39:49.440
secrets. So I've created the one better guide in Adobe Express to bring those tips to you. And in

1341
01:39:49.440 --> 01:39:54.080
it, you'll find principles from the very, very best in their industry turned into quick and easy

1342
01:39:54.080 --> 01:39:58.720
practices for you to apply. So you can train yourself to create exactly like the best performing

1343
01:39:58.720 --> 01:40:05.040
teams in the world do just head over to adobe.ly slash one better to download Adobe Express now

1344
01:40:05.040 --> 01:40:10.480
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1345
01:40:11.280 --> 01:40:15.920
You know, every once in a while you come across a product that has such a huge impact on your life

1346
01:40:15.920 --> 01:40:24.000
that you'd probably describe it as a game changer. And I would say for about 35 to 40% of my

1347
01:40:24.000 --> 01:40:29.440
team, they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called Keytone IQ,

1348
01:40:29.440 --> 01:40:34.400
which you can get at keytone.com as a game changer. But the reason I became a co-owner of this

1349
01:40:34.400 --> 01:40:39.280
company and the reason why they now are responsive to this podcast is because one day when I came to

1350
01:40:39.280 --> 01:40:43.680
work, there was a box of this stuff sat on my desk, I had no idea what it was. Lily in my team says

1351
01:40:43.680 --> 01:40:48.560
that this company have been in touch. So I went upstairs, tried it and quite frankly the rest is

1352
01:40:48.560 --> 01:40:55.040
history in terms of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive I am,

1353
01:40:55.040 --> 01:40:59.680
game changer. So if you want to give it a try, visit keytone.com slash Stephen for 30% off.

1354
01:40:59.680 --> 01:41:05.040
You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment and now you can find keytone IQ at target

1355
01:41:05.040 --> 01:41:09.600
stores across the United States where your first shot is completely free of charge.

1356
01:41:10.560 --> 01:41:15.680
You mentioned a word earlier on you talked about the lonely chapter. You could say the word

1357
01:41:15.680 --> 01:41:20.960
briefly. I guess this lonely chapter idea is a consequence of what will happen when you go

1358
01:41:20.960 --> 01:41:24.480
and pursuit of a big goal. You want to start the business, you want to quit the job, whatever,

1359
01:41:25.280 --> 01:41:29.920
explain to me what the lonely chapter is. The lonely chapter describes the time in your life

1360
01:41:29.920 --> 01:41:34.880
where you're so developed that you can't really resonate with your old set of friends,

1361
01:41:34.880 --> 01:41:38.000
but you're not yet sufficiently developed that you've built a new set of friends. Give me an

1362
01:41:38.000 --> 01:41:43.520
example. You have decided to stop drinking. Your new year's resolution is six months I'm going to

1363
01:41:43.520 --> 01:41:49.200
stop drinking. You can go out with your friends that want to go to the pub on an evening time,

1364
01:41:49.200 --> 01:41:53.200
but you feel a little bit ostracized. They're having digs at you and jibes at you. Come on,

1365
01:41:53.200 --> 01:42:00.960
mate, only one beer. Who do you think you are? So your change is creating some friction between you

1366
01:42:00.960 --> 01:42:06.480
and them. Your friends like to play Xbox on an evening time and that's how they hang out,

1367
01:42:06.480 --> 01:42:11.680
but you want to start going to the gym. But your friends don't go to the gym and then when you do

1368
01:42:11.680 --> 01:42:15.200
hang out with them, you're talking about the gym because that's your new thing and they're still

1369
01:42:15.200 --> 01:42:22.880
talking about Xbox. So there is a friction that happens as you try to grow because if your friends

1370
01:42:22.880 --> 01:42:27.200
don't grow at the same pace as you, you don't speak the same language. A friend referred to it

1371
01:42:27.200 --> 01:42:31.920
as changing a dialect so much so that over time you and your friends don't even speak the same

1372
01:42:31.920 --> 01:42:37.280
language anymore. And it's very uncomfortable because it's tempting to go back to the old life

1373
01:42:37.440 --> 01:42:42.320
that you're used to. The old patterns, the old routines, the old friend groups, the old

1374
01:42:42.320 --> 01:42:47.840
everything. And you have to stop doing the things that you know bring you validation in the moment

1375
01:42:47.840 --> 01:42:54.320
to start doing things that you have no idea about whether it'll actually work. Like you're going

1376
01:42:54.320 --> 01:42:58.720
to tell me that I'm not going to go out with my friends this weekend because I'm going to keep my

1377
01:42:58.720 --> 01:43:03.760
meditation street going. Who even knows if meditation works, right? It's so much easier to just

1378
01:43:03.760 --> 01:43:07.600
stay in the routine that you were previously doing the same sort of things. If you to pull away

1379
01:43:07.600 --> 01:43:12.240
from that, you're going to have to do stuff usually that makes you more different, more easy to be

1380
01:43:12.240 --> 01:43:21.360
mocked and more alone. And the initial sad reality is that on your journey of personal growth,

1381
01:43:21.360 --> 01:43:26.000
at some point, you may need to leave a group of friends behind who aren't growing at the same

1382
01:43:26.000 --> 01:43:32.960
pace as you. But the really sad reality is that if you do it a lot, you may have to do this

1383
01:43:33.600 --> 01:43:37.760
multiple times throughout your life. And it's not a value judgment about who's better or who's

1384
01:43:37.760 --> 01:43:42.640
worse. It's just a stark reality of what happens when you start to make changes in your life. And

1385
01:43:43.280 --> 01:43:47.520
for instance, I met a million people on the front door of nightclubs, million people in person

1386
01:43:48.240 --> 01:43:52.720
had a handful of friends. I worked with half of them. Million people, handful of friends in internet

1387
01:43:52.720 --> 01:43:56.720
marketing speak. My friendship conversion funnel ratio was not very good. Million people,

1388
01:43:56.720 --> 01:44:02.640
handful of friends. And the only way that I could work out who I was was to kind of follow my own

1389
01:44:02.640 --> 01:44:08.160
instincts and do some of the personal development stuff, like a thousand days sober, 500 days without

1390
01:44:08.160 --> 01:44:14.800
caffeine, just fucking miserable, nine gratitude meditation journals with no idea if any of it was

1391
01:44:14.800 --> 01:44:20.960
going to work. And this is the really important thing. And it's a bit that all origin stories miss.

1392
01:44:21.920 --> 01:44:28.160
I wish that they paid more attention to it. It seems to me that on every hero's journey,

1393
01:44:28.880 --> 01:44:32.560
as soon as they make the commitment to go from where they are, to where they want to be,

1394
01:44:33.440 --> 01:44:38.560
their self-belief never waivers. I'm not sure. There's ups and downs in the journey and the progress,

1395
01:44:39.680 --> 01:44:45.440
but that conviction doesn't slip. It's like at that moment, the clouds parted and I was sure I was

1396
01:44:45.440 --> 01:44:48.800
going to become a UFC fighter. I was going to become a businessman. I was going to get off drugs,

1397
01:44:48.800 --> 01:44:57.040
change my mindset, whatever. In my experience, that's not the way it is at all. Like your

1398
01:44:57.840 --> 01:45:05.120
entire journey of personal growth is just steeped in doubt and self-pity and uncertainty. And it

1399
01:45:05.120 --> 01:45:11.120
tarnishes the whole experience. It's not sexy. It's not cool. You're like, this is supposed to be my

1400
01:45:11.120 --> 01:45:14.720
rocky cutscene. It's three and a half minutes in the movies, but it's been four years for me.

1401
01:45:14.720 --> 01:45:19.200
What's going on? There's not even the promise that there's any glory on the other side of it.

1402
01:45:20.080 --> 01:45:25.680
And this is exactly why it's so much easier to just go back to your old patents,

1403
01:45:26.480 --> 01:45:30.400
why it's easier to just go back to doing the old things that you used to do. People make small

1404
01:45:30.400 --> 01:45:36.480
changes. They do little things. Those five pounds or they change companies. How many people do you

1405
01:45:36.480 --> 01:45:40.800
know that have really changed their mindset? I lost 50 or 100 pounds or change careers or moved

1406
01:45:40.800 --> 01:45:48.320
from the city that they grew up in. It's rarer. I think the reason that I love this lonely chapter

1407
01:45:48.320 --> 01:45:57.920
idea is that it names something that a lot of people feel is a bug, not a feature of personal growth,

1408
01:45:57.920 --> 01:46:01.360
which is this discordance with their old patents and their old friend groups and the fact that

1409
01:46:01.360 --> 01:46:06.880
they don't know whether the uncomfortability is supposed to be there. Is this discomfort right?

1410
01:46:06.880 --> 01:46:10.800
Is myself doubt? Surely I should just believe and see it, believe it, achieve it. Am I not supposed to

1411
01:46:10.800 --> 01:46:19.040
just be single mindedly going toward my goal? This doubt is supposed to be there. I can promise you

1412
01:46:19.040 --> 01:46:24.480
that every single person who has gone from a place where they didn't want to be to one way they did

1413
01:46:25.040 --> 01:46:33.280
has had to go through this lonely chapter and deal with all of this. And I think it resonates with

1414
01:46:33.280 --> 01:46:39.600
people because there's sort of people who listen to modern wisdom and your show, the sort of people

1415
01:46:39.600 --> 01:46:45.600
that this is about. It's the kind of people who live in the UK and want to do something themselves

1416
01:46:46.960 --> 01:46:52.000
who want to build a business, do something that there isn't a particularly good role model for.

1417
01:46:52.000 --> 01:46:55.760
That's presumably because they want to do something. They want to become better. They feel like

1418
01:46:55.760 --> 01:47:01.280
they're built for more. And this is what I meant when I said before, you can just do things.

1419
01:47:01.920 --> 01:47:07.600
Just do it anyway. Do it tired. Do it sad. Do it lonely. Do it without a role model.

1420
01:47:08.800 --> 01:47:11.920
Because if you're waiting for somebody to come along and give you that helping hands,

1421
01:47:12.800 --> 01:47:16.400
sometimes you're going to be waiting too long. It reminds me so much of

1422
01:47:18.080 --> 01:47:21.200
Jeff Bezos' shareholder letter where he talks about resisting the equilibrium.

1423
01:47:22.080 --> 01:47:28.400
In his final 2020 shareholder letter said differentiation is survival and the universe

1424
01:47:28.400 --> 01:47:32.960
wants you to be typical. And the way that this stuff tells into what you've said is your environment

1425
01:47:32.960 --> 01:47:40.480
is very, very much holding you in place. And actually in every facet of life, every organism is

1426
01:47:40.480 --> 01:47:45.360
currently expending a huge amount of energy just to resist the pull to be typical.

1427
01:47:45.360 --> 01:47:49.040
Regression to the mean. Exactly. So if you were to leave your friendship group now,

1428
01:47:49.040 --> 01:47:54.640
the amount of energy it's going to take to stay untipical is tremendous. And he says,

1429
01:47:54.640 --> 01:47:59.200
this is my last annual shareholder letter as the CEO of Amazon. And I have one last thing

1430
01:47:59.200 --> 01:48:04.960
of utmost importance. I feel compelled to teach. I hope all Amazonians take it to heart.

1431
01:48:04.960 --> 01:48:10.240
Here is a passage from Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker. It's about a basic fact of

1432
01:48:10.240 --> 01:48:14.400
biology. Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself,

1433
01:48:15.280 --> 01:48:19.920
and that is what it is when it dies. The body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with

1434
01:48:20.080 --> 01:48:25.360
its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content

1435
01:48:25.360 --> 01:48:30.480
or the electrical potential of a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different

1436
01:48:30.480 --> 01:48:36.080
from the corresponding measure in its surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than

1437
01:48:36.080 --> 01:48:40.560
our surroundings. And in cold climates, they have to work hard to maintain that differential.

1438
01:48:40.560 --> 01:48:46.080
When we die, the work stops. The temperature differential starts to disappear and we end up

1439
01:48:46.080 --> 01:48:51.760
the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all animals have to work so hard to avoid coming

1440
01:48:51.760 --> 01:48:57.280
into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work. For

1441
01:48:57.280 --> 01:49:01.440
instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content in their cells.

1442
01:49:01.440 --> 01:49:06.800
They work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world.

1443
01:49:06.800 --> 01:49:12.000
If they fail, they die. More generally, if living things didn't work actively to prevent it,

1444
01:49:12.000 --> 01:49:16.400
they would eventually merge into their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings.

1445
01:49:16.400 --> 01:49:21.360
This is what happens when they die. And what he's talking about here is that to be different

1446
01:49:21.360 --> 01:49:26.880
in any context or environment, work is being done, like to stay atypical. And I think about this

1447
01:49:26.880 --> 01:49:29.920
as we come into the new year, which is if you're planning to be different, quit the job,

1448
01:49:29.920 --> 01:49:35.680
go and be the violinist in Peru, start the cupcake business, it's going to cost you so much energy

1449
01:49:35.680 --> 01:49:40.320
to resist the equilibrium that you better go back to what you said about subtracting things.

1450
01:49:40.480 --> 01:49:46.640
You better save energy somewhere else because I had a neuroscientist on the podcast that

1451
01:49:46.640 --> 01:49:52.000
was the neuroscientist that discovered we have a biological budget of energy, literally like a

1452
01:49:52.000 --> 01:49:56.560
bank account. And what tends to happen, I think, in why the new year stats are so horrific,

1453
01:49:56.560 --> 01:50:02.240
in terms of the amount of people that stick to their goals, is we go in search of a new state,

1454
01:50:02.240 --> 01:50:08.000
a new life that's going to cost us even more energy to resist the current environment

1455
01:50:08.720 --> 01:50:13.040
without budgeting for it by saving elsewhere. And I think about this through

1456
01:50:13.600 --> 01:50:18.800
the lens as a business owner, because as a company, the dire of a CEO will become like the mean,

1457
01:50:18.800 --> 01:50:22.640
the minute we stop the fight, the minute we stop experimenting, the minute we stop pushing

1458
01:50:22.640 --> 01:50:26.800
the boundaries, the minute you stop doing the big digital screens, the minute you give up the fight,

1459
01:50:26.800 --> 01:50:31.680
you will become every other show. That's what I meant when I said problems are a feature of life

1460
01:50:31.760 --> 01:50:39.680
not a bug. Like there will be no day when you don't have any problems and railing against it.

1461
01:50:39.680 --> 01:50:44.160
Why is the flight delayed because flight to get delayed? Because flight to get delayed, that's why.

1462
01:50:44.720 --> 01:50:49.360
And did you think that there's going to be a day when no flights were delayed, that you're going

1463
01:50:49.360 --> 01:50:53.920
to reach some escape velocity, where this was no longer an issue. I love this analogy using

1464
01:50:53.920 --> 01:51:00.160
escape velocity. Imagine that we've got a rocket ship here. So when this is taking off,

1465
01:51:00.160 --> 01:51:03.920
on the launch pad is when it needs the most energy. The inertia is the highest, the resistance is

1466
01:51:03.920 --> 01:51:08.080
the most. So that's when you need to use whatever fuel you've got. Use the chip on your shoulder

1467
01:51:08.080 --> 01:51:13.120
from the kids that bullied you in school. Use your desperate desire to be seen by that girl out there.

1468
01:51:13.120 --> 01:51:19.200
Use your need for validation from your parents, whatever it is. And then what happens is the old

1469
01:51:19.200 --> 01:51:24.800
school style rockets, nothing you Falcon 9 ones. What happens when this takes off? This fuel

1470
01:51:24.800 --> 01:51:28.880
source switches off and then the booster rockets come on. That's as you get to a different level

1471
01:51:28.880 --> 01:51:34.080
of altitude. And now you're using a different sort of fuel source. And then this falls away,

1472
01:51:34.080 --> 01:51:39.360
the bottom falls off, and it keeps on going. And then it gets into escape velocity. Use what you have

1473
01:51:39.360 --> 01:51:43.360
at the start. And at the start, most people have way more discontent than they do love.

1474
01:51:43.360 --> 01:51:47.920
There's, I mean, even this ties right back to New Year's resolutions because if I am going to

1475
01:51:47.920 --> 01:51:52.800
make a change and reach escape velocity, then I'm going to need to focus all my energy. And

1476
01:51:52.800 --> 01:51:57.520
therefore save leakage, like save wasted energy in this moment of time. And I've heard you talk

1477
01:51:57.520 --> 01:52:01.920
about this when you do, and you review that, again, it goes back to what it's saying, like,

1478
01:52:01.920 --> 01:52:07.120
you do need to cut some shit. And you can't have it all at the same time if you are going to change

1479
01:52:07.120 --> 01:52:13.440
your life. This is one of the problems of overcooking your goals for the next 12 months. I think

1480
01:52:13.440 --> 01:52:22.160
you can probably do two big things in 2026, two big things. You can probably lose 20 pounds and

1481
01:52:23.120 --> 01:52:29.440
get a boyfriend that you really, really love. You can't do that and move cities and start

1482
01:52:29.440 --> 01:52:36.560
a new business and learn to play the piano. No. And that, again, is why don't go into a buffet

1483
01:52:36.560 --> 01:52:42.000
and assume that however much food you put on the plate, your stomach will just expand to fit it in.

1484
01:52:42.000 --> 01:52:46.800
Because what you're going to guarantee is that you fail. Make sure you can almost guarantee

1485
01:52:46.800 --> 01:52:50.400
that you fail at doing this thing. Is it great to set your sights high? Yeah, that's real cool.

1486
01:52:50.400 --> 01:52:54.080
And maybe you've got lots of things that you want to do. But just what would have to happen

1487
01:52:54.080 --> 01:52:57.840
by the end of next year for you to look back on it and consider it a success. And what if

1488
01:52:57.840 --> 01:53:02.080
you created a rank order list? I'm like, okay, I need to kill one of these. And you left yourself

1489
01:53:02.080 --> 01:53:06.480
with one or two. What's left? You don't need to do one thing next year. Cross that off,

1490
01:53:06.480 --> 01:53:12.400
cross that off, cross that. What am I left with? Really want to lose the weight. There we go.

1491
01:53:12.400 --> 01:53:15.520
Now we can break that down into individual steps. I need to get a gym membership. I need to get

1492
01:53:15.520 --> 01:53:20.560
some cool gym, why that makes me feel good as I go to the gym. I've heard you talk, you mentioned

1493
01:53:20.560 --> 01:53:24.960
that getting a boyfriend next year. One of the resolutions a lot of people will have, even if it's

1494
01:53:24.960 --> 01:53:31.280
not directly, is to find a partner. And I heard you referencing psychological stability.

1495
01:53:32.000 --> 01:53:37.120
That's the thing we should be looking for in a partner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you mean by

1496
01:53:37.120 --> 01:53:42.640
psychological stability? After some sort of emotional perturbment, after something happens,

1497
01:53:42.640 --> 01:53:46.880
how long does it take for them to get back to baseline? Oh, okay. So I'm looking for

1498
01:53:46.880 --> 01:53:52.720
someone who is just emotionally stable or they returned to their emotional equilibrium.

1499
01:53:52.720 --> 01:54:00.720
Right? So let's say that we're going on holiday. And the flight is cancelled. And it's a big deal

1500
01:54:00.720 --> 01:54:05.920
because their family is going out there. Is that the sort of thing that happens? And then there is

1501
01:54:05.920 --> 01:54:11.600
a reversion to baseline within a few hours? Or is that the sort of thing that blows up the entire

1502
01:54:11.600 --> 01:54:18.720
trip of the holiday with their family? Something occurs that causes emotions to be impacted.

1503
01:54:18.720 --> 01:54:24.320
How long does it take to get back to baseline? That's emotional stability. And it's very predictive

1504
01:54:24.320 --> 01:54:32.160
of relationship outcomes. Some other stuff, conscientiousness, persons thoughtful. They think a lot

1505
01:54:32.160 --> 01:54:38.800
about you specifically. And they care. Agribleness. And someone who's moderately agreeable, you want

1506
01:54:38.800 --> 01:54:49.520
somebody who, when you propose plans, is a yes and person. And finally, you want someone who's

1507
01:54:49.520 --> 01:54:56.480
moderately open in openness, personality trait. This is three. Conscientiousness. Agribleness,

1508
01:54:57.120 --> 01:55:00.800
openness to experience. Want someone who's moderately open so that they're prepared to go and

1509
01:55:00.800 --> 01:55:06.000
do new things. As soon as you get into high openness, that's when wandering eyes come in. This

1510
01:55:06.000 --> 01:55:13.920
isn't to say that personality traits are destiny. But based on Tai Toshiro's work, this is pretty

1511
01:55:13.920 --> 01:55:18.240
reliable. I also like the psychological stability thing. I think that's really, really lovely.

1512
01:55:18.240 --> 01:55:23.200
You want somebody who feels like home. You want a relationship that feels like a safe harbor

1513
01:55:23.200 --> 01:55:29.280
that you can wall yourself off against all of the ills of the world. Your business can fall apart.

1514
01:55:29.360 --> 01:55:34.560
Your health can decay. Your friends can abandon you. But you know that at home,

1515
01:55:35.280 --> 01:55:39.120
there's someone who loves you for who you are not for what you do. And they've always got your back.

1516
01:55:40.080 --> 01:55:47.840
And I think aiming for a relationship that feels like a safe harbor is a really good idea.

1517
01:55:47.840 --> 01:55:53.040
It's rough at the moment, isn't it? I'm so glad that I'm not single because when I look out at the

1518
01:55:53.040 --> 01:55:59.040
dating landscape of like dating apps and all this stuff, I'm so glad that I'm not out there

1519
01:55:59.040 --> 01:56:06.160
in that war zone. There's a lot of single people that follow you, men and women. When you think about

1520
01:56:06.960 --> 01:56:12.400
if you were 30-year-old Chris and you're a single guy, you're not doing the podcast, people

1521
01:56:12.400 --> 01:56:16.240
don't know who you are, if you were trying to solve the love problem in your life, where would you

1522
01:56:16.240 --> 01:56:22.240
aim at first? The love problem, that's cool. The first thing you need to do is say, am I the sort of

1523
01:56:22.240 --> 01:56:30.480
person who the sort of person I want to date wants to date? If not, it's obvious where you need

1524
01:56:30.480 --> 01:56:34.800
to work, where can yourself? That's such an important question that requires such honesty.

1525
01:56:35.440 --> 01:56:39.920
And this again is why some time away from the urgent and the importance, some time to reflect,

1526
01:56:39.920 --> 01:56:43.760
some time to listen to your fleeting thoughts, you know that your wardrobe sucks.

1527
01:56:44.560 --> 01:56:48.320
You know that your wardrobe sucks and you hate fashion and you've excused it. It's like,

1528
01:56:48.320 --> 01:56:53.280
I don't need to do that. I'm not interested or whatever. Hey, dude, I'm sorry.

1529
01:56:54.480 --> 01:56:57.360
Chicks care about how you look. Shock horror. They care about what you wear.

1530
01:56:58.320 --> 01:57:01.680
Probably need to go and update the wardrobe. You've got a female friend. You watch a few YouTube

1531
01:57:01.680 --> 01:57:06.720
videos online. Maybe that's where you need to start. I'm a bit overweight. I'm a bit skinny fat.

1532
01:57:08.160 --> 01:57:12.240
Jim is one of the most reliable ways to increase your attractiveness. One of the most reliable

1533
01:57:12.240 --> 01:57:17.360
ways is a man to increase your attractiveness. You need to be a real superchad to not need to have

1534
01:57:17.360 --> 01:57:22.000
any physical practice at all and still be able to get the sort of woman that you want. So,

1535
01:57:22.720 --> 01:57:26.880
okay, maybe you're going to start to go to the gym. But let's assume that you have reached

1536
01:57:26.880 --> 01:57:32.240
the level that you need to be at in order to be attractive to the sort of person that you want.

1537
01:57:32.240 --> 01:57:36.800
That's the first one, right? Because if you're not, you're permanently condemning yourself to always

1538
01:57:36.880 --> 01:57:44.320
pine after partners that aren't going to want you back. Next step, where do partners

1539
01:57:44.320 --> 01:57:48.640
like the sort of person that you want to date hang out? Where do they go?

1540
01:57:49.760 --> 01:57:54.720
If you love dance music, it's probably a bad idea to go to a breathwork class. Why don't

1541
01:57:54.720 --> 01:58:00.000
just go to parties that have got dance DJs on. Or if you're really into lectures and philosophy,

1542
01:58:00.000 --> 01:58:04.640
go to an Alex O'Connor live event or something and hang around outside or talk to the girl that's next

1543
01:58:04.640 --> 01:58:10.240
to you. If you really love sport, like obviously go to the gym, pick up pickleball, like start doing

1544
01:58:10.240 --> 01:58:15.920
that. Where are the sorts of places inhabited by the sort of person that you want to be like?

1545
01:58:15.920 --> 01:58:20.640
There's bonus points. If you can go and do a thing that you have a little bit of a competitive

1546
01:58:20.640 --> 01:58:26.800
advantage, especially as a guy. If you used to play tennis in high school and you've got a bit of

1547
01:58:26.800 --> 01:58:30.960
hand out coordination, it can probably be one of the best pickleball players at recreational court

1548
01:58:30.960 --> 01:58:34.720
pretty quickly. And you're going to be that new guy who's like, you've seen, I want to play with

1549
01:58:34.720 --> 01:58:38.960
him like he always wins or whatever it might be. Not being manipulative, you're just playing to your

1550
01:58:38.960 --> 01:58:43.120
strengths. What decision did you make in your life that made you more attractive than any of the

1551
01:58:43.120 --> 01:58:50.160
decision? Go into the gym. Go into the gym. I started training when I was 18. The Center for

1552
01:58:50.160 --> 01:58:54.720
Sporting Excellence at Newcastle University. I had no idea what it was doing and was taking

1553
01:58:54.720 --> 01:58:59.920
blueberry extract and unflavored, hydrolyzed way in a desperate attempt to see if I could gain

1554
01:58:59.920 --> 01:59:09.680
some size. I just didn't stop. It makes me healthier. It makes me feel powerful. It added to my frame.

1555
01:59:09.680 --> 01:59:16.240
I had real hard gain. It took fucking ages to put weight on. I remember when I was 20 and I broke

1556
01:59:16.240 --> 01:59:22.560
70 kilos for the first time. I was like, I'm fucking huge. I just didn't stop. I think

1557
01:59:23.440 --> 01:59:27.920
not only is it something that's great for me, it's something that really very reliably makes you

1558
01:59:27.920 --> 01:59:33.600
more attractive to women. What about women? What do you think in your peer, they would make?

1559
01:59:35.040 --> 01:59:42.080
I would be tempted to go for the gym thing too. The reason that I like it is that you benefit

1560
01:59:42.080 --> 01:59:47.360
on multiple levels. What you don't want to do is do something that makes your life feel like

1561
01:59:47.360 --> 01:59:51.680
a performance for your future partner. You want something that even if that doesn't come along

1562
01:59:51.680 --> 01:59:56.800
you're still glad you did it. How many people say I went to the gym in an attempt to get better

1563
01:59:56.800 --> 02:00:00.080
legs because the guy that I want to attract is kind of like intergirls that have got good legs.

1564
02:00:00.080 --> 02:00:04.640
I want to wear like nice dresses and look cute in them and all the rest of it. I really hated

1565
02:00:04.640 --> 02:00:11.040
the way that my boyfriend didn't come along and what I broke myself trying to do. I lost myself

1566
02:00:11.040 --> 02:00:16.800
trying to do that. No, you made yourself. You won independently of whether or not that person

1567
02:00:16.800 --> 02:00:22.480
came along. How wonderful is that for you? This is just me shamelessly shilling for everybody to

1568
02:00:22.480 --> 02:00:27.680
go to the gym and get jagged. I think that would be good. One other thing I think that is maybe a

1569
02:00:29.680 --> 02:00:37.680
slightly unusual strategy that women can cultivate is receptiveness. I think especially in a post

1570
02:00:37.680 --> 02:00:42.320
Me Too world, a lot of guys are very scared of approaching. Guys have always been scared of

1571
02:00:42.320 --> 02:00:48.640
approaching women. In a post Me Too world, they've been taught that anything short of a hell

1572
02:00:48.640 --> 02:00:53.200
yeah is a no get away from me so that you don't make the girl feel uncomfortable.

1573
02:00:54.960 --> 02:01:01.760
Guys already were quite nervous going up and talking to you. You have to treat a man and his

1574
02:01:01.760 --> 02:01:07.600
interest kind of like slightly an experienced golden retriever. It needs to be very loud,

1575
02:01:07.680 --> 02:01:14.160
very obvious signals of interest from you. So in the Middle Ages or aristocratic Middle Ages,

1576
02:01:14.160 --> 02:01:20.720
ladies would drop a handkerchief in front of a gentleman. Oh, mom, mom, oh, in 2025 in New York,

1577
02:01:20.720 --> 02:01:26.960
there are women stealing finance bros salads, finding their names from the salad on Instagram

1578
02:01:26.960 --> 02:01:30.800
and the messaging them and saying sorry I accidentally took your salad. That's the 2025

1579
02:01:30.800 --> 02:01:35.280
equivalent of dropping the handkerchief. But receptiveness I think is important. Hey ladies,

1580
02:01:36.080 --> 02:01:41.440
if you like that guy and he's not approaching you, maybe assume that he doesn't know that you like

1581
02:01:41.440 --> 02:01:48.720
him and apply a little bit more receptiveness. And another, the other side of this is if a guy does

1582
02:01:48.720 --> 02:01:55.120
come up to you and you're not into him, don't mock him or make it uncomfortable to his face

1583
02:01:55.840 --> 02:02:02.880
because you are ruining the next girl's chances who really does want him by making him feel not

1584
02:02:02.880 --> 02:02:10.320
enough for doing it. It's taken a superhuman amount of strength to come up and say hello. I just

1585
02:02:10.320 --> 02:02:16.800
wanted to say I thought you looked really lovely today. What's your name? That was the most

1586
02:02:16.800 --> 02:02:21.840
terrifying thing that that guy has done that day. And if you're not receptive, even if you don't

1587
02:02:21.840 --> 02:02:27.680
want it, it kind of creates this culture of men feeling broken and like they shouldn't do that more.

1588
02:02:28.400 --> 02:02:32.960
So yeah, that's some. What is the most important things we haven't talked about that we

1589
02:02:32.960 --> 02:02:37.520
should have talked about Chris as it relates to this time of year, the strivers who want to make

1590
02:02:37.520 --> 02:02:45.120
change become someone else. Stop taking life so seriously. No one is getting out of this game

1591
02:02:45.120 --> 02:02:54.880
alive literally. In three generations, no one will even remember your name. And if that doesn't

1592
02:02:54.880 --> 02:03:01.760
give you liberation to just drop your fucking problems for a moment and find some joy,

1593
02:03:02.880 --> 02:03:09.920
I don't know what will. Life is inherently ridiculous and guaranteed to end sooner or later.

1594
02:03:11.840 --> 02:03:15.760
So you might as well enjoy the ride. Do you know your great granddad's name? No.

1595
02:03:18.240 --> 02:03:23.360
People don't like that idea and I get it. Maybe you will be remembered for generations to come.

1596
02:03:24.880 --> 02:03:30.160
Just assume that you don't. This is this deferred happiness syndrome thing, dude. Like don't wait.

1597
02:03:30.160 --> 02:03:38.800
Life really is happening right now. There is this belief that once life's duties are out of the way,

1598
02:03:40.160 --> 02:03:43.760
then you can finally start doing the thing you want to and fully living your life.

1599
02:03:44.960 --> 02:03:50.640
It's called the provisional life is sort of strange feeling that you're not yet in your real life.

1600
02:03:50.640 --> 02:03:54.960
For now, you're doing this thing or that, but there's always the fantasy that at some point in

1601
02:03:54.960 --> 02:04:04.400
future, the real thing will come about. There is a kind of urgency that I think we could all

1602
02:04:04.400 --> 02:04:12.560
do with and that's not to put pressure on people so that they feel like a failure if they fall

1603
02:04:12.560 --> 02:04:19.360
short. It's not to deny the fact that people have got real legitimate resource and time constraints.

1604
02:04:19.360 --> 02:04:23.120
I mean that they can't do a thing, but don't wait.

1605
02:04:24.320 --> 02:04:32.080
Whose life really is happening right now and I can't think of many times when you're going to regret

1606
02:04:34.800 --> 02:04:39.840
trying to make something happen now. I guess one other thing,

1607
02:04:41.040 --> 02:04:44.960
the sort of people that have made it this deep into the episode are the ones that this is about.

1608
02:04:45.120 --> 02:04:51.200
I think type A people have a type B problem, so insecure overachievers.

1609
02:04:51.920 --> 02:04:52.640
Is that type A?

1610
02:04:52.640 --> 02:04:58.160
Yep, need to learn how to chill out and relax and lazy people need to learn how to be motivated

1611
02:04:58.160 --> 02:05:02.480
and work harder. But given that someone is two hours into a podcast between me and you,

1612
02:05:03.440 --> 02:05:08.240
I'm going to guess that they're probably type A, some version of a walking anxiety disorder

1613
02:05:08.240 --> 02:05:13.200
harnessed for productivity as Andrew Wilkinson says. Here's the thing that you may have already

1614
02:05:13.200 --> 02:05:19.520
realized, which is type A people with type B problems often get very little sympathy,

1615
02:05:20.320 --> 02:05:26.560
because a miserable but outwardly successful person always appears to be in a much more preferential

1616
02:05:26.560 --> 02:05:37.600
position than a content being lazy but on the verge of bankruptcy one. One feels like a limitation

1617
02:05:37.680 --> 02:05:43.360
and the other feels like a choice. One is a systemic imposition and the other is like a bourgeois

1618
02:05:43.360 --> 02:05:49.120
luxury. I need someone to teach me how to work harder and be disciplined, feels upward aiming,

1619
02:05:49.120 --> 02:05:54.080
noble, charitable. I need someone to teach me how to switch off and relax, feels dopamine

1620
02:05:54.080 --> 02:06:02.880
ergic, transactional, like opulent. Every underdog movie ever has a scene of some person down on

1621
02:06:02.880 --> 02:06:06.560
their luck learning how to work harder and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

1622
02:06:07.920 --> 02:06:11.760
None include a scene of a guy learning how to log out of slack at 6 p.m.

1623
02:06:12.400 --> 02:06:17.840
Or finally enjoy a beach holiday. And like I said before, maybe more people do need David

1624
02:06:17.840 --> 02:06:22.160
Goggin screaming in their face to go harder than need Eckhart Tolle whispering in their ear that

1625
02:06:22.160 --> 02:06:30.160
they're enough already. But for a perhaps minority of people, they actually need to hear the

1626
02:06:30.160 --> 02:06:37.040
opposite message. We need a parasympathetic Goggin who's going to carry the TV remote and the

1627
02:06:37.040 --> 02:06:44.800
Cheetos hashtag rest harder than me. We need to teach people to give themselves a fucking break.

1628
02:06:45.600 --> 02:06:52.080
And this is an odd thing to hold in both our hands at the same time. You do not want to have a

1629
02:06:52.080 --> 02:06:55.520
victim mindset. You want to have agency on the world. You want to enact stuff that's going on.

1630
02:06:55.520 --> 02:07:02.000
You want to make it and you're going to have to try really hard. And also you need to give

1631
02:07:02.000 --> 02:07:09.200
yourself a break. You have to know that if you nail your day, you don't just make it back to zero.

1632
02:07:09.200 --> 02:07:15.200
You got to plus 10. There's no arbitrary minimum level of productivity you have to achieve every day

1633
02:07:15.200 --> 02:07:22.800
in order to be worthwhile. Are you religious? And I ask this because you talked about the idea of

1634
02:07:22.800 --> 02:07:27.280
death and pursuit and you don't know how long you've got left. And I think it probably has to be

1635
02:07:27.280 --> 02:07:34.160
framed in the context of what you think happens thereafter. No, I wouldn't call myself religious.

1636
02:07:34.160 --> 02:07:39.840
Are you? The way that I look at it is if you look at our evolutionary history, we're meant to be

1637
02:07:39.840 --> 02:07:44.320
part of something. But if you look at the narrative of the last 20 years, that's given rise because

1638
02:07:44.320 --> 02:07:49.440
of social media. It's all about beer and boss remote work. I mean, we talked about the whole kids

1639
02:07:49.440 --> 02:07:54.960
think people are having less kids. So we're actually swinging away from dependency to independence

1640
02:07:54.960 --> 02:08:01.200
and freedom. And it appears to me that freedom and total independence will make you sick.

1641
02:08:02.400 --> 02:08:06.240
So naturally, I'm as low if you need to go. This doesn't feel right. I need to I need some

1642
02:08:06.240 --> 02:08:09.360
kind to belong somewhere. Think about this. Mazda's hierarchy of needs.

1643
02:08:10.240 --> 02:08:14.400
An existential crisis. You asking yourself the question of anybody that goes through this review

1644
02:08:14.400 --> 02:08:19.600
process, chriswellx.com, social review, anyone that goes through that and thinks, I don't know what

1645
02:08:19.600 --> 02:08:24.480
to do with my life. Think about how few people throughout human history have ever had to ask

1646
02:08:24.480 --> 02:08:29.680
themselves that question day to day, desperately just trying to cling on to existence.

1647
02:08:29.680 --> 02:08:35.520
Unsure whether or not the cold snap tomorrow is going to come into the cave and kill them all.

1648
02:08:37.040 --> 02:08:41.760
An existential crisis is a luxurious position to be in and it feels horrendous. How do you hold

1649
02:08:41.760 --> 02:08:46.080
those two things in your mind at one time? Like, you're telling me I'm blessed because I'm asking

1650
02:08:46.080 --> 02:08:53.600
myself questions that make me doubt the meaning of my life. Yeah. And maybe that's where religion is

1651
02:08:53.600 --> 02:08:56.240
is stepping in now to try and give people some guidance on that sort of stuff.

1652
02:08:57.680 --> 02:09:01.680
I saw a tweet that said, my parents had the problem of survival and I have the problem of

1653
02:09:01.680 --> 02:09:10.640
self-actualization. And I think sometimes sometimes I'm going to be careful what I say here, but I'm

1654
02:09:11.040 --> 02:09:15.200
saying, you know, they are both, they both come with their own challenges, I should say.

1655
02:09:15.200 --> 02:09:21.360
Absolutely. I mean, and there's this idea I had the other day of the shame of small fears,

1656
02:09:22.000 --> 02:09:26.240
which is what this is about. So I imagine explaining small fears to a caveman,

1657
02:09:26.880 --> 02:09:34.960
say, uh, Grook, I worry about sending this message. And Grook would respond,

1658
02:09:35.280 --> 02:09:41.360
will the enemy try and see the message? No. Will a saber tooth tiger smell the message?

1659
02:09:42.080 --> 02:09:47.520
No. Will it be etched on the wall for the rest of time? No, it's a little small rectangle.

1660
02:09:48.800 --> 02:09:53.840
Well, why are you worried? In case somebody doesn't like me or like what I say or I heard their

1661
02:09:53.840 --> 02:10:02.080
feelings, he just laughs in your face. And we have to accept the fact that the sort of fears we

1662
02:10:02.160 --> 02:10:09.520
have in the modern world are both smaller and more complex at the same time. Yes, they're not

1663
02:10:09.520 --> 02:10:15.040
about life and death, but our nervous system has been repurposed from bears to boundaries.

1664
02:10:16.320 --> 02:10:22.160
And it does not know the difference. It feels like you saying your truth saying, I don't think

1665
02:10:22.160 --> 02:10:26.480
that this job's working for me or you said something that doesn't land with me and you cross

1666
02:10:26.480 --> 02:10:31.040
the line, that feels like you're about to be rejected from the tribe, even if the tribe is now

1667
02:10:31.040 --> 02:10:41.360
just a WhatsApp chat. And this repurposing of our nervous system gives us the additional complexity

1668
02:10:41.360 --> 02:10:48.080
of the shame, because now we feel shame. Who am I to have this problem? Do I not know that across

1669
02:10:48.080 --> 02:10:52.800
the grand expanse of history, this is nothing? My ancestors would have dreamed to have had the

1670
02:10:52.800 --> 02:10:58.160
opportunity to have dealt with this problem instead of the one that they do. And yet you can't deny

1671
02:10:58.240 --> 02:11:01.520
the way that you feel. It's like one of the biggest lessons I've taken away from this year is

1672
02:11:02.400 --> 02:11:10.000
my emotions are legitimate. Like the way that I feel is the way that I feel. And denying myself

1673
02:11:10.000 --> 02:11:15.520
that is not helping anything at all. It's like you feel scared before you go out on stage

1674
02:11:16.320 --> 02:11:20.320
to go and give this talk in front of a few thousand people. You shouldn't be scared. No one's

1675
02:11:20.320 --> 02:11:25.440
going to come and kill you and you start shaming yourself for your fear. And then you become anxious

1676
02:11:25.520 --> 02:11:28.640
about your shame about your fear. And then bitter about your anxiousness about your shame about

1677
02:11:28.640 --> 02:11:36.640
your fear. And you've got this infinite regress of mean emotions. Like the first one wasn't me.

1678
02:11:37.200 --> 02:11:43.440
The first one was the situation. The second one was me, the third one and the fourth one. And now

1679
02:11:43.440 --> 02:11:48.800
I'm complicit in my own suffering. I've made myself, I've made myself suffer unnecessarily.

1680
02:11:48.880 --> 02:11:57.040
And this is why the spit and sawdust and caffeine and big dreams really, really important.

1681
02:11:57.040 --> 02:12:01.760
But it has to be married with some self-love. And maybe not in the beginning. Maybe if you're

1682
02:12:01.760 --> 02:12:09.920
trying to get the rocket ship off the launch pad, use what you have, including your self-hatred

1683
02:12:09.920 --> 02:12:14.160
and your need for validation from people and that chip on your shoulder from the kids in school.

1684
02:12:14.160 --> 02:12:18.320
But after a while, you need to accept that that is a toxic fuel if you use it for too long. But

1685
02:12:18.880 --> 02:12:21.280
when inertia is at its greatest, I think you have to use what you have.

1686
02:12:22.240 --> 02:12:26.160
I'm going to ask you a question and this is it. I just want to try and experiment here.

1687
02:12:26.160 --> 02:12:28.960
Can you think out loud when you hear this question?

1688
02:12:28.960 --> 02:12:32.960
OK. So I'm going to ask it immediately think out loud.

1689
02:12:32.960 --> 02:12:35.360
OK. Are you happy?

1690
02:12:37.120 --> 02:12:38.080
It's a complex question.

1691
02:12:38.080 --> 02:12:44.640
I have to work hard to be in a good mood sometimes. And I don't like the fact that I have to work hard

1692
02:12:44.640 --> 02:12:50.880
to be in a good mood. It feels to me like I need to stack the deck in my favor in order to be able

1693
02:12:50.880 --> 02:12:57.600
to do that. And I wish that I didn't. And yet, I'm really proud of all of the things that I've

1694
02:12:57.600 --> 02:13:04.720
done in order to be able to make my happiness increase. I have a set point. I had depression in my

1695
02:13:04.720 --> 02:13:10.400
20s. I've had a lot of anxiety as well. And I'm really proud of what I've done to overcome that.

1696
02:13:11.280 --> 02:13:14.400
You have to work hard to be in a good mood. Yes. Can you talk me through that? I've never

1697
02:13:14.400 --> 02:13:19.440
heard this before from you. OK. Well, this year has been a particularly difficult one for me

1698
02:13:19.440 --> 02:13:23.600
because I got kicked in the nuts by health. America's a wonderful country. But everything's

1699
02:13:23.600 --> 02:13:27.680
trying to kill you. The food system, the municipal water, the building materials, the air quality.

1700
02:13:29.360 --> 02:13:33.520
I lived in a house that had toxic molds. I got mold poisoning, which a lot of people in

1701
02:13:33.520 --> 02:13:38.400
America have. And it's so brutal. And it's done about the stuff. And I spent a long time, the best

1702
02:13:38.400 --> 02:13:44.560
part of two years with two jobs. One was the show. And the other was trying to fix my health. So

1703
02:13:44.560 --> 02:13:49.920
after all of this, all this big modern wisdom review thing, all I did, my only two goals for this

1704
02:13:49.920 --> 02:13:54.880
year at the start of this year were don't let the show drop and fix my health. That was it. It was

1705
02:13:54.880 --> 02:13:59.440
all I wanted. Nothing else. Don't let the show drop and fix my health. So I really was humbled

1706
02:13:59.440 --> 02:14:04.160
that kicked in the nuts so many times that they were too dimensional. They disappeared if you

1707
02:14:04.160 --> 02:14:11.520
looked at them from the side. It felt like a cosmic joke. It felt so unfair, like working so hard

1708
02:14:11.520 --> 02:14:17.040
to just operate. Going to bed at seven o'clock at night for six months, unable to sleep because I

1709
02:14:17.040 --> 02:14:20.880
was wide, but tired because my cord is always inverted, cord is always higher at night than it was

1710
02:14:20.880 --> 02:14:24.880
in the morning. So no matter how long I slapped, I was never able to feel rested in the morning.

1711
02:14:25.440 --> 02:14:31.760
And then dealing with it alone, dealing with it on my own and trying to go through complex

1712
02:14:31.760 --> 02:14:36.800
environmental illness, doctors and treatments and all of this stuff, that really made me

1713
02:14:38.320 --> 02:14:44.720
face a lot of the fears of insufficiency that I've had. I think every man knows reflection when

1714
02:14:44.720 --> 02:14:48.800
he's at his lowest. And I've been at some of my lowest points over the last 12 months.

1715
02:14:49.760 --> 02:14:53.840
So for me, the happiness thing has been like, I just need to get through today.

1716
02:14:54.560 --> 02:14:58.480
I just want to perform while on the show. I can't really think about the mood that I'm in

1717
02:14:58.480 --> 02:15:03.760
when I do it, because the mood that I'm in is just swimming in mal and collie. I don't feel very

1718
02:15:03.760 --> 02:15:10.400
good. It felt like my bed itself was slipping through my fingers. I think it was being ripped away

1719
02:15:10.480 --> 02:15:19.840
from me due to something that I hadn't done. It felt so unfair, so comically unfair.

1720
02:15:20.480 --> 02:15:25.440
I got literally like a personal curse that had been hit at me. And it was specifically on the

1721
02:15:25.440 --> 02:15:30.800
thing that I care about the most. It's a mold. There's typically lots of things, but three things.

1722
02:15:31.680 --> 02:15:37.760
Energy, mood and cognition. So it makes you tired all the time. It makes you low mood. And it makes

1723
02:15:37.760 --> 02:15:42.960
you forgetful. There was a day when I looked down and I forgot how to tie my shoes. Couldn't

1724
02:15:42.960 --> 02:15:46.640
remember how to put my shoelaces together in order to tie my shoes. I was forgetting words. I was

1725
02:15:46.640 --> 02:15:50.000
forgetting the names of people that I'd known. I was forgetting the names of friends, dogs and

1726
02:15:50.000 --> 02:15:55.600
stuff that I'd spent time with. And yeah, this year has not been a year where I've been trying to

1727
02:15:55.600 --> 02:16:01.600
maximize my happiness. It's warmer. I've been trying to survive. And I did it pretty much silently.

1728
02:16:01.600 --> 02:16:07.360
I did a video about it in maybe October time, something like that. But again, I want to keep my

1729
02:16:07.360 --> 02:16:14.880
private life private thing was important to me because I didn't want to have other people

1730
02:16:17.520 --> 02:16:22.000
being ill. Anybody that is dealing with an illness will know this.

1731
02:16:23.840 --> 02:16:28.720
Talking about your illness is kind of like having a birthday that what you get is

1732
02:16:28.720 --> 02:16:33.120
inundated with lots of messages from people who are all really well-wishing. But what it

1733
02:16:33.120 --> 02:16:37.760
results in is just a ton of admin and a load of guilt if you don't reply. So I didn't, I knew

1734
02:16:37.760 --> 02:16:41.120
that if I started talking about all of the stuff that I was going through, it would be great because

1735
02:16:41.120 --> 02:16:44.240
it would make other people that would deal with it feel less alone. But it would also be an additional

1736
02:16:44.240 --> 02:16:50.800
burden on me while I'm trying to fix myself. I've tried to sift through all of my friend knows how

1737
02:16:50.800 --> 02:16:55.840
to do a parasite cleanse using goat milk and you can pray to the full moon. I really appreciate

1738
02:16:55.840 --> 02:16:59.600
you caring about me so much that you've tried to link me in with this person. And sure enough,

1739
02:16:59.680 --> 02:17:05.760
this documentary that I put on the channel that people can go and watch came out and that happened,

1740
02:17:05.760 --> 02:17:11.040
mercifully I was a little bit further through the journey. But yeah man, like how do I optimize my

1741
02:17:11.040 --> 02:17:16.400
happiness? Is a luxury that a lot of people are in a position to do and that that was me this year.

1742
02:17:16.400 --> 02:17:21.680
I didn't have the spare capacity to optimize my happiness. And you still try hard to be, you still

1743
02:17:21.760 --> 02:17:25.040
have to put significant effort into be content happy.

1744
02:17:27.840 --> 02:17:35.200
Yeah, at the moment, yeah, I've been working hard on it, you know, happiness really only

1745
02:17:35.200 --> 02:17:40.960
exists when uncertainty isn't there. Very difficult to be uncertain and happy at the same time.

1746
02:17:41.520 --> 02:17:46.640
You'd even make the argument that humans never chase happiness directly. They always chase

1747
02:17:46.640 --> 02:17:52.800
certainty first because if you don't know how the future is going to pan out, how are you able to

1748
02:17:52.800 --> 02:17:56.640
be, especially if it's like chronic uncertainty, like you know, severe uncertainty, not just I don't

1749
02:17:56.640 --> 02:18:03.200
know who's going to win the sports game tomorrow. And for me, I didn't know if I was going to get

1750
02:18:03.200 --> 02:18:10.880
escape velocity to get out of this health stuff. And if that's the case, where am I driving my happiness

1751
02:18:10.960 --> 02:18:17.120
from? All I see is this endless stretch of work and discomfort and fatigue and tiredness and

1752
02:18:17.120 --> 02:18:24.080
solitude. And I feel bad for the guy that had to go through that this year, like I feel for him

1753
02:18:24.080 --> 02:18:30.720
because it wasn't, it wasn't easy and it was lonely and I'm really proud. I'm really, really proud

1754
02:18:30.720 --> 02:18:37.760
that I kept showing up. I didn't give up on myself. I had dead ends with regards to treatment,

1755
02:18:37.760 --> 02:18:46.800
with regards to testing. It was like months where I was going to bed at 7 p.m. waking up at

1756
02:18:48.560 --> 02:18:54.400
8 a.m. still tired, sleeping straight through. There's something interesting here because

1757
02:18:54.400 --> 02:18:58.560
the three areas that you said mold impacts are also the three areas that everybody kind of knows

1758
02:18:58.560 --> 02:19:04.320
you for. And that's kind of why I said personal curse. It felt like it felt like somebody had

1759
02:19:04.320 --> 02:19:11.760
designed a pathology just for me and it would hit it all of the places that I took my self-worth

1760
02:19:11.760 --> 02:19:16.560
from. Does it leave a question then, which is, if you take everything I value now that gives me

1761
02:19:16.560 --> 02:19:22.800
self-worth, what remains? Well, that was a question I had to ask myself this year. And what did remain?

1762
02:19:24.320 --> 02:19:33.200
Somebody who's kind, somebody who's genuinely kind and sensitive. And I always thought that

1763
02:19:33.200 --> 02:19:37.440
sensitivity was weakness, but it's not, at least not for me, somebody who is resilient

1764
02:19:39.280 --> 02:19:46.000
in a very normal way. So boring victories. It's something that I've had to learn to take pleasure

1765
02:19:46.000 --> 02:19:57.040
from this year. You know, is today the grandest accomplishment of your entire life? No. But you

1766
02:19:57.040 --> 02:20:02.240
went for a walk or you were kind to that person at the supermarket or you were gentle with yourself

1767
02:20:02.240 --> 02:20:10.720
when you became frustrated. And I had to get over the shame of small pleasures that somehow me feeling

1768
02:20:10.720 --> 02:20:16.320
proud about the way that I showed up in a tiny minute way that nobody else saw was sort of a

1769
02:20:16.320 --> 02:20:22.480
comment of the smallness of my life. Oh, you must not have a lot going on. Like how feeble, how

1770
02:20:22.480 --> 02:20:28.720
weak, how minuscule must your life be? That that seeing that golden retrieval was the best part of

1771
02:20:28.720 --> 02:20:38.320
your morning. And yet I realized that that was worth being happy about. And that denying myself

1772
02:20:38.320 --> 02:20:42.640
the opportunity to be happy about something small is basically holding my happiness hostage.

1773
02:20:43.200 --> 02:20:48.640
Like until the bank deposit is sufficiently large, the ledger doesn't kick in. Like I can't

1774
02:20:48.640 --> 02:20:55.200
pick up pennies. I can only pick up $100 bills. And it really fucking humbled me, dude.

1775
02:20:55.200 --> 02:21:01.120
Especially if you're flying high, you know, two years ago the show is just vertical. And it,

1776
02:21:01.120 --> 02:21:06.000
you know, numerically, it still is now. But it really, really felt like something had just come

1777
02:21:06.000 --> 02:21:13.440
in to bring my feet back down to earth. And I feel different to the person I was last year. But

1778
02:21:13.440 --> 02:21:19.040
I'm much more connected, I think, to a sort of truth. Alander Botan says the best man are those

1779
02:21:19.040 --> 02:21:24.320
who have been broken. And this year has definitely broken me. You're doing better now?

1780
02:21:24.320 --> 02:21:31.600
I am. Yeah. I am. If I was at three, 12 months ago, I'm probably at seven to an eight now. So

1781
02:21:32.880 --> 02:21:36.480
don't let the show drop and fix my health. Like I got close to doing both of those.

1782
02:21:37.200 --> 02:21:41.840
We've got to wrap up now. But I wanted to give you the chance to end this with any closing thoughts

1783
02:21:41.840 --> 02:21:45.920
that you might have for the listener that's gotten this far in this conversation. And who is really

1784
02:21:46.000 --> 02:21:50.240
the foothills of potentially a new version of themselves? And is there anything else

1785
02:21:50.880 --> 02:21:56.320
that you wanted to say? First off, congratulations for making it through all of this.

1786
02:21:56.320 --> 02:22:01.120
There's a lot of uncomfortable things to face with conversations like this. It really

1787
02:22:02.240 --> 02:22:08.240
forces you to reckon with parts of your direction. Like, fuck, I really don't want to have to

1788
02:22:08.240 --> 02:22:11.840
have that conversation. I really don't want to face that thing. There's a great quote from John

1789
02:22:11.840 --> 02:22:18.160
Paul Sartre. He said, I've led a toothless life. I have never bitten into anything.

1790
02:22:19.520 --> 02:22:25.040
I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on. And I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.

1791
02:22:28.240 --> 02:22:36.000
This idea of being shunted to the side of your own life, of being an NPC, a non-playable character

1792
02:22:36.000 --> 02:22:42.960
when you should have been the main character. You can be in service of other people,

1793
02:22:42.960 --> 02:22:47.680
but you can still have some sort of action that you take into the world. This deferred life thing

1794
02:22:47.680 --> 02:22:55.520
waiting for life to begin. It's a great time of year to question that assumption. What would

1795
02:22:55.520 --> 02:22:59.040
have to happen by the end of next year if you to look back on it and consider it a success? What would

1796
02:22:59.040 --> 02:23:03.680
I do to make 85-year-old me miserable? What would I, what would 85-year-old me wish that I did more of?

1797
02:23:04.400 --> 02:23:09.200
What are the emotions I'm unprepared to feel? What are the thoughts that I thought too many times

1798
02:23:09.200 --> 02:23:13.840
last year? If this was a movie and the audience was watching, what would they be screaming at the

1799
02:23:13.840 --> 02:23:22.960
screen telling me to do with my life? They're cool questions. They certainly help me. They help

1800
02:23:22.960 --> 02:23:25.040
me find directions, so I hope they've helped everyone else as well.

1801
02:23:26.800 --> 02:23:29.680
We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next. Not knowing who

1802
02:23:29.760 --> 02:23:33.360
they're leaving it for and the question left for you is quite relevant. What is the most

1803
02:23:34.160 --> 02:23:41.920
important component of human joy and endeavor that you believe must be preserved in priority?

1804
02:23:43.200 --> 02:23:44.000
Oh, wonderful.

1805
02:23:48.720 --> 02:23:57.120
I think agency. I think the belief that you have the ability to impact your surroundings

1806
02:23:58.080 --> 02:24:02.240
because the opposite of agency is you basically holding your hands up and saying I'm at the mercy of the

1807
02:24:02.240 --> 02:24:11.520
world. You happen to life. Life doesn't happen to you. Chris, thank you. You are going on tour

1808
02:24:11.520 --> 02:24:15.520
and you're going on tour next year in March, I believe, and you're going on tour in an area where

1809
02:24:15.520 --> 02:24:20.000
I know we have lots of listeners. Australia, New Zealand, Bali. So I'm going to link below a link

1810
02:24:20.000 --> 02:24:25.040
21 that wants to come see you on tour, but also highly recommend people go download the modern

1811
02:24:25.040 --> 02:24:28.640
wisdom annual review template. So I'm going to link that below as well. Look in the description,

1812
02:24:28.640 --> 02:24:33.600
it's all there. Is there anything else that if people, you know, your channel, people should go

1813
02:24:33.600 --> 02:24:36.000
subscribe to your channel if they've liked what they've heard today. Is there anything else?

1814
02:24:36.720 --> 02:24:42.240
I had an conversation with Naval Ravacant. Oh my god, I love that. It's the people always ask

1815
02:24:42.240 --> 02:24:45.120
what's the best conversation you've ever heard. And I say it's like trying to choose between a thousand

1816
02:24:45.120 --> 02:24:50.880
children. That was really special. And for people who know him, you should watch it again.

1817
02:24:51.600 --> 02:24:54.400
For people who don't know him, you should go and check it out. So we can link that below.

1818
02:24:54.400 --> 02:24:59.040
I highly recommend that. Yeah, honestly, the modern wisdom annual review template,

1819
02:24:59.040 --> 02:25:05.120
free copy it, use it. And that'll put you on my mailing list for a once a week newsletter,

1820
02:25:05.120 --> 02:25:09.280
which is a lot of the thoughts, a lot of the ideas that we've gone through today. I wanted to say

1821
02:25:09.840 --> 02:25:16.800
something to you before we finished up as well. No, it's a thank you. So I think people often

1822
02:25:16.800 --> 02:25:20.480
wonder about what's going on behind the scenes or what's somebody's like behind the scenes.

1823
02:25:20.480 --> 02:25:30.080
And I had a, I needed some advice from you. So I messaged you on Saturday afternoon on WhatsApp.

1824
02:25:30.080 --> 02:25:36.720
And within 30 seconds, you rang me and then put me in a group with like the guy that was able

1825
02:25:36.720 --> 02:25:42.320
to help with this thing. And then basically sort of carried us through this process for the next

1826
02:25:42.320 --> 02:25:46.800
couple of weeks and kept checking in with me. That was, that was very, very meaningful. And you

1827
02:25:46.800 --> 02:25:51.680
didn't need to do it. And I very much appreciate having you. I mean, you, you in my phone book is

1828
02:25:51.680 --> 02:25:55.840
like a fucking hidden weapon. You're kind of like the jocker willing to be able to get, you know,

1829
02:25:55.840 --> 02:25:59.600
stuff sorted. But I just wanted to say thank you for that because it was, it was really, really kind.

1830
02:25:59.600 --> 02:26:06.000
And yeah, it's, it's awesome to feel like people have got your back. And that made me feel like that.

1831
02:26:06.000 --> 02:26:10.880
I appreciate that. Yeah, you've earned that because you've done so much for so many other people.

1832
02:26:10.880 --> 02:26:15.760
And you've been so selfless in a way that I aspire to be like, I'm not very good at like

1833
02:26:16.320 --> 02:26:20.320
staying in touch and connecting and replying and stuff like that. But in those particular moments,

1834
02:26:20.960 --> 02:26:29.760
you know, I think we are a team. So, so I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Thank you, mate.

1835
02:26:33.520 --> 02:26:37.840
This is something that I've made for you. I've realized that the diaries here audience are

1836
02:26:37.840 --> 02:26:42.400
strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish.

1837
02:26:42.400 --> 02:26:47.680
And one of the things I've learnt is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel

1838
02:26:47.680 --> 02:26:52.720
incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of

1839
02:26:52.720 --> 02:26:57.760
Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into

1840
02:26:57.760 --> 02:27:03.680
tiny small steps. And we call this an R team the 1% and actually this philosophy is highly

1841
02:27:03.680 --> 02:27:08.720
responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish

1842
02:27:08.720 --> 02:27:14.400
any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries and we've released these last year and

1843
02:27:14.400 --> 02:27:18.960
they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back but also to

1844
02:27:18.960 --> 02:27:24.960
introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diaries. So now we have a better

1845
02:27:24.960 --> 02:27:30.560
range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some

1846
02:27:30.560 --> 02:27:35.840
motivation that I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once

1847
02:27:35.840 --> 02:27:41.520
again. And you can get yours now at the diary.com where you can get 20% off our Black Friday bundle.

1848
02:27:41.520 --> 02:27:43.520
And if you want the link, the link is in the description below.