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You know, Drew, usually we do some sort of cold open to these episodes, but I failed to think of one.

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We're getting kind of a trend.

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These like little medical open.

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Yeah.

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So we had, when you failed already, I'm just before we've even started, I'm just trying to be clever.

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We can't commit to a studio space.

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We had commitment last week or last month.

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Fortunately, we're lucky that we have such a great show.

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Well, if you remember all the bad luck we had during that show.

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Yeah, that's true.

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Good luck too.

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I guess some good luck.

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The change episode, God.

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Did you change?

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Well, that's- I have not changed.

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Well- I'm definitely the same.

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I mean, we can get into that, but yeah.

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For another podcast.

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I'm a little bit afraid of this one then.

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If it says I'm failure, we're talking about failure today.

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Yes.

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Okay.

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What's going to happen?

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I'm pretty sure whatever happens, it's not going to be my fault and I'm going to learn nothing from it.

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You better listen to this episode then.

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That's okay.

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Should I?

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You probably should.

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You probably should.

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That's actually what most people do is they learn nothing.

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That's right.

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Let's learn something.

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Okay.

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Yeah.

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Let's try to learn something.

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Without further ado, I'm going to read this intro that you put together and hope it doesn't fail spectacularly.

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You know the quotes.

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You could recite them in your sleep.

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Edison and his 10,000 light bulbs.

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Michael Jordan cut from his high school team.

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Fail forward.

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Fail fast.

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What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

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You've probably reposted one of these at some point on your Instagram.

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That's a little too close to home, Drew.

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You may even have one on a coffee mug.

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That I don't have.

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You tell your friends that failure is your best teacher.

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You tell your kids that mistakes are how we learn.

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You believe it.

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You would swear on it.

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So here's the question.

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The last time you actually failed, really failed at something, take a moment, think about it, something that you cared about, you failed in front of people whose opinion mattered to you, what did you actually do in that situation?

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If you're being honest, because if you are being honest, you probably didn't immediately extract the lesson.

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You didn't find the silver lining.

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You probably minimized it in the retelling.

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You built a version of the story for yourself where the market shifted or the timing was off or the other person screwed up and dropped the ball.

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You probably went a little quiet in the group chat.

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You checked days later whether anyone was still thinking about it, and somewhere, without ever really realizing it or announcing it to yourself, you made the next bet a little bit smaller as a result.

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You resized your ambitions so that that particular flavor of pain would never find you again.

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And at some point, at some ungodly hour of the night, you probably replayed it.

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The failure, I mean, not the lesson.

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On a loop, your body reacting like something was actually wrong.

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Obsessing over an email, a failed pitch, a faulty launch, a sentence you said three years ago that nobody else remembers.

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That gap between everything you believe about failure and everything you actually do when it shows up, that's not hypocrisy.

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It's not weakness.

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It's not an error.

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It is actually just a very human mechanism.

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And nobody has actually honestly explained it to you.

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Because here's the spicy take that Drew and I have learned from researching this episode.

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The entire modern conversation around failure is cope.

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The old culture that shames failure, well, it was always lying to you.

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It doesn't really matter that much.

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But the new culture that worships failure, it's running the exact same lie in reverse.

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And for once, we don't have to argue about this philosophically.

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We can just check.

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Because, as always, the Solve podcast brings the receipts.

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Because over the last two decades, that failure worship went fully mainstream.

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The conferences, the mantras, the keynotes, the measured share of people who are too afraid to fail to even try something rose by almost 50%.

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Perfectionism, tracked across three decades and the exact countries preaching embracing failure the loudest,

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hit the highest levels ever recorded.

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And in the lab, researchers can now watch in real time the human mind refusing to learn from its own mistakes.

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The single most repeated piece of advice in self-help, grow from your failures, turns out to be incredibly difficult for us to do.

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So today we're going to break down all of the reasons why we both worship and shame our failures, both in ourselves and in other people.

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We're gonna talk about how to actually learn from our failures and it's,

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It's really not as simple as you think.

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And along the way, we're also going to tell you a story about a conference founded to celebrate failure that...

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spoiler alert, ended up failing.

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We're going to talk about the two psychologists who drafted the most important theory of loss from a Jeep in an active war zone, while their own country's inability to admit failure got thousands of people killed around them.

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We're going to talk about the evolutionary reason a rejected email can produce the same physiological response as a threat to your life.

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We'll discuss a monk so tormented by his failures that he confessed them for six hours a day until his confessors had to start avoiding him.

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And whose eventual breakdown accidentally split Western civilization in two.

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We'll discuss one of the greatest athletes who ever lived, who stood at the very top of his sport and secretly hated it.

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and spoke the truest sentence ever uttered about failure, and his escape is actually how this episode ends and is completely mind-blowing.

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We'll discuss why the best golfers on earth have a deeply ingrained bias that costs them serious money, and why even when explained to them, they cannot stop it.

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We'll talk about the difference between quitting and failing and the five-question test that tells you whether you're quitting wisely or just fucking scared.

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We'll talk about why what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is true only the way a barbell makes you stronger, which is to say, it doesn't.

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Something else does.

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We're going to talk about all of this and much, much more.

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Because in this episode, we are going to argue that every piece of advice you've ever received about failure has been aimed at the wrong target.

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Avoiding it, bouncing back from it, even embracing it, all of it assumes that failure is an event outside of yourself, out there in the world.

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But it isn't.

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What we're going to discover is that it is a byproduct of your own arbitrary standards and values.

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The truth is, you will never avoid failure.

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you're only going to choose how you define it.

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And it turns out that there are better and worse ways to define it.

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And this episode is ultimately about that learning to choose.

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My name is Mark Manson.

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I'm the three-time number one New York Times bestselling author.

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And this is Drew Burney, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the man who ran a pre-mortem failure analysis on this very podcast episode and concluded that I was its top risk.

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And this is Solved, the most comprehensive podcast in the world where every episode we aim to solve one major life problem so you never have to deal with it again.

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That was a good one.

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That was a good one.

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You did not fail that.

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But before we jump into it, be sure to rate, review, or subscribe to the show.

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It is the best thing you can do to support us.

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We put a lot of work into these episodes, if you haven't noticed.

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So please show your support for the show without further ado.

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Our story starts in October of 2009 in San Francisco.

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There are about 400 entrepreneurs, software engineers, and investors attend a new conference that's built around one purpose, failure.

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Talking about failure, embracing failure, trying to make failure a little bit more acceptable in the mainstream.

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The conference was called FailCon.

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Now, the founder, Cass Phillips, she had spent years in Silicon Valley surrounded by startups that frequently failed.

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Yet every conference and event that she went to, everything was about hockey stick graphs and how everybody was succeeding and how everybody was getting rich and how everybody was going to be super successful.

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And she just recognized that that wasn't the actual experience of most startups.

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entrepreneurs.

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So at FailCon, everything was built around celebrating failures.

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At the beginning of the event, she would always ask the audience, how many people here have failed at some sort of business venture?

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And pretty much everybody's hand would go up.

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And then all of the speakers, their keynotes had to be about their failures and what they learned from their failures.

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And the conference was a huge hit.

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They did versions in like Tokyo and Dubai and London and all over the place.

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They had sessions on all sorts of topics from really practical kind of nuts and bolts startup scaling advice to philosophical discussions of like what is suffering and what is despair.

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And basically...

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FailCon kind of had a moment.

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You know, it got a lot of press, got a lot of attention.

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It was kind of a big thing in the early 2010s.

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But then in 2014, Phillips decided to shut it down.

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And the party line was that Phillips believed that she had achieved her goal, which was that she had made failure acceptable in the mainstream.

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But I don't really buy that, and I don't think anybody else really bought that either.

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Personally, I think FailCon probably failed for a simple reason, which is it's actually the same reason a lot of conferences fail, which is that it was specifically targeted towards people who don't have money.

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Like if you think about like a conference for people who have failing startups or have a recently failed startup, what do all those people have in common?

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They are probably broke or in debt.

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Yeah.

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And it's hard to build a thriving conference business on attendees that are broke or in debt.

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But there was actually a deeper structural problem with FailCon and the philosophy behind it.

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And I think this is the same structural problem.

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behind every inspirational story that we all hear about how somebody failed, you know, Michael Jordan failed so many times, or Steve Jobs failed so many times.

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And that is the issue of survivorship bias.

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So survivorship bias, it's a concept that originated with bombers in World War II.

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So the military, the U.S. military noticed that all of the bombers would come back with bullet holes in the same areas of the plane.

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And so they did the obvious thing that you would do if you didn't think about it very much, which is that they sourced more armor to reinforce the parts of the planes that they were in the same area.

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that had been hit with all the bullet holes.

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But surprisingly, this didn't prevent more bombers from being shot down.

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In fact, they saw no statistical increase in the amount of bombers that survived.

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So after a couple years of this happening, it was an analyst in the Air Force by the name of Abraham Wald that realized that people had it completely backwards.

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The airplanes that were coming back with bullet holes all in the same spots, you know, around the wings and the tail fin...

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Those were actually the places you didn't want to reinforce because those were the spots that the airplanes could survive being shot.

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Instead, what he pointed out is you wanted to reinforce all of the spots on the planes that didn't have bullet holes because the planes that got shot in those spots were the ones that didn't come back.

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This flaw in reasoning, this faulty assumption that we all kind of have around this, it is something that we do all the time.

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Survivorship bias, it infiltrates all sorts of things, especially in our industry.

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We look at a story like Steve Jobs and all the inspiration around all the times he failed or like Michael Jordan, how he got cut from his high school team, but those aren't really failures.

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I mean, there are literally millions of people who got cut from their high school basketball team

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and none of them became Michael Jordan, right?

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So that is actually not something that is worth learning from.

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Yet it's a huge part of his story, and it's a huge part of explaining why he is who he is.

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You see this happen with productivity a lot in our space, right?

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You've got some guy who's, I don't know, he writes like five books a year and has started six companies, and I don't know, he like wakes up at five and...

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eats an upside down waffle or something.

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And so everybody goes out and starts eating upside down waffles and thinks that that's going to make them as successful as this like random dude on YouTube.

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And the truth is, is that the defining variables of success are often hidden from us.

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They're not apparent.

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And the things that are apparent are actually quite common.

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We're just not aware of the thousands of other people that share that trait, but don't share the same success.

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Yeah.

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So it's really just like a big humble brag for a lot of these people, right?

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They're trying to pass these things off as failure, but really it's just part of their whole success story, which makes it still just another survivorship biased story of some kind, right?

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But we end up kind of fetishizing people.

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those failures that are just the bolt holes in the wings that on the planes that came back.

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Right.

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Right.

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And this is kind of where failure porn came out of.

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And this actually came from a guy, Jeff Lewis, who himself was a founder of this company called Founders Fund.

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But he wrote this post in 2014, same year that FailCon failed.

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He wrote this in the Washington Post and he coined the term failure porn.

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And he's got this great quote in it.

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It says, it's failure as fast fashion peddled by wildly successful people packaged for mass consumption.

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That's no more reflective of real failure than commercially produced pornography is of real sex.

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Very vivid, vivid example there, right?

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He has his own little kind of failure porn story around this too with his company.

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He was like $45,000 in credit card debt.

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He was going to pitch some people on his fund one day and didn't have like the 20 bucks to take a cab across town.

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So he had to walk on an empty stomach for 45 minutes.

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And it was like, he calls one of his coworkers and was like, I'm such a failure.

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This isn't going to work.

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And he got this pep talk from his

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coworker and everything went and did this pitch and they got funding and then turned it around and it was a multimillion dollar company.

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And, you know, that's a failure porn story.

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That's not, he's like the real failure would have been me just giving up there.

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This is just a low point in the story.

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It wasn't an actual failure.

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Yeah.

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And he said the problem with this is that we trivialize failure when we do this.

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Real failure.

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This article, I should go read it.

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It's actually full of these great little lines in it.

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It says, just as excessive consumption of pornography desensitizes a person to the joys of real sex...

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Excessive consumption of failure porn desensitizes a person to the horrors of real failure.

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So again, it's these survivorship bias stories.

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Yeah.

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Take away from the actual failures, the actual harm that's actually done by real failure.

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Well, it's funny because just in you recounting his story, I think you...

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You described exactly what's wrong with all of these stories, which is when you said it, you said he was broken and on his last legs and then he managed to get funding with his last pitch meeting or whatever and then went on to become successful.

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It's that went on to become successful.

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Yes.

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That's where actually all of the meat and valuable information is, but it's not nearly as exciting or interesting as the failure porn.

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00:15:20.265 --> 00:15:21.666
So the failure porn is what gets shared.

218
00:15:22.007 --> 00:15:22.127
And.

219
00:15:22.768 --> 00:15:27.323
it's funny too i was thinking like when we were prepping for this this episode i was thinking about the fail con thing

220
00:15:28.719 --> 00:15:31.662
I was thinking it would probably get really old fast.

221
00:15:31.982 --> 00:15:52.380
If you are a struggling startup founder working 60, 70 hour weeks, barely scraping by and year after year you get up and you hear these like the guy who started PayPal or the guy who started, you know, whatever, get up and tell you these, all these situations that they, they were in at one point at a certain point, it'd be like, okay, I get it.

222
00:15:52.820 --> 00:15:54.081
Like they struggled.

223
00:15:54.101 --> 00:15:54.201
Yeah.

224
00:15:55.155 --> 00:15:56.295
what did you do that worked?

225
00:15:56.435 --> 00:15:56.635
Right?

226
00:15:56.675 --> 00:15:57.376
Like, yeah, yeah.

227
00:15:57.396 --> 00:15:59.196
Like, I don't- It's not a complicated message.

228
00:15:59.216 --> 00:15:59.916
Yeah, yeah.

229
00:15:59.976 --> 00:16:01.177
I don't care what didn't work.

230
00:16:01.217 --> 00:16:02.417
Tell me what worked, right?

231
00:16:02.577 --> 00:16:03.037
Exactly.

232
00:16:03.057 --> 00:16:03.197
Yeah.

233
00:16:03.337 --> 00:16:03.678
Exactly.

234
00:16:03.858 --> 00:16:04.478
A quick pause.

235
00:16:04.698 --> 00:16:06.058
We'll be right back after this.

236
00:16:06.778 --> 00:16:09.339
This episode is sponsored by 80,000 Hours.

237
00:16:09.619 --> 00:16:12.680
There's a question I get asked constantly, especially by younger people.

238
00:16:12.840 --> 00:16:14.281
What should I do with my career?

239
00:16:14.501 --> 00:16:16.421
And most of the advice out there is useless.

240
00:16:16.661 --> 00:16:17.962
They say, follow your passion.

241
00:16:18.322 --> 00:16:19.042
Do what you love.

242
00:16:19.562 --> 00:16:19.862
Cool.

243
00:16:20.543 --> 00:16:21.123
Thanks, Boomer.

244
00:16:21.503 --> 00:16:22.043
Super helpful.

245
00:16:22.363 --> 00:16:27.304
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246
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247
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248
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249
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250
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251
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252
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253
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254
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255
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256
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257
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258
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This episode is brought to you by Momentus.

259
00:17:30.613 --> 00:17:32.415
This episode is about failure, right?

260
00:17:32.795 --> 00:17:34.937
And here's one that actually drives me crazy.

261
00:17:35.097 --> 00:17:36.198
The creatine market.

262
00:17:36.398 --> 00:17:39.621
Creatine is one of the most researched supplements on the planet.

263
00:17:39.922 --> 00:17:45.787
The science has been settled for years, and instead of using that as a starting point, most brands treated it as a finish line.

264
00:17:45.887 --> 00:17:51.973
They competed on flavors and packaging, while the powder inside often wasn't even what the label said.

265
00:17:52.253 --> 00:17:53.454
I take creatine every day.

266
00:17:53.735 --> 00:17:55.937
I'm creatine maxing like a good bro.

267
00:17:56.137 --> 00:18:01.262
And most people who know about it know about strength and recovery, but it also supports cognitive performance.

268
00:18:01.623 --> 00:18:05.006
I spend most of my day thinking and writing, speaking on camera.

269
00:18:05.246 --> 00:18:07.569
So the benefit does a lot of heavy lifting for me.

270
00:18:07.669 --> 00:18:10.772
And for a long time, I was buying whatever creatine was on the market.

271
00:18:10.972 --> 00:18:11.172
right?

272
00:18:11.192 --> 00:18:13.213
Like just the nearest bottle in front of me.

273
00:18:13.593 --> 00:18:15.614
But it turns out they're not all the same.

274
00:18:15.854 --> 00:18:28.160
Momentus manufactures their signature spec creatine in a pharmaceutical facility, verified through a six-stage testing process with four independent agencies, 10 times fewer impurities and two to five times tighter heavy metal limits.

275
00:18:28.481 --> 00:18:31.222
Plus they screen for PFAS and microplastics,

276
00:18:31.402 --> 00:18:33.602
which most brands don't even bother to try to do.

277
00:18:33.903 --> 00:18:37.403
Once I saw all of that, I couldn't go back to the generic on the shelf.

278
00:18:37.563 --> 00:18:40.884
And best of all, the powder mixes clean into your smoothie.

279
00:18:40.964 --> 00:18:42.284
There's no grit or clumping.

280
00:18:42.684 --> 00:18:44.525
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281
00:18:44.925 --> 00:18:54.207
So if you want to try Momentus Signature Spec Creatine, head over to livemomentus.com and use the code SOLVED for up to 35% off your entire first order.

282
00:18:54.527 --> 00:18:58.527
That's livemomentus.com, promo code SOLVED for up to 35% off.

283
00:19:01.488 --> 00:19:02.048
code solved.

284
00:19:03.228 --> 00:19:04.148
All right, we're back.

285
00:19:04.509 --> 00:19:05.069
Where were we?

286
00:19:05.249 --> 00:19:10.470
We've romanticized failure over the last 20, 30 years to the point where it's like, it almost doesn't mean anything.

287
00:19:10.650 --> 00:19:11.630
Why do you think that is though?

288
00:19:11.770 --> 00:19:13.110
Like, why do you think we romanticize?

289
00:19:13.230 --> 00:19:16.971
I think there's kind of a, um, a little bit of a self-attribution bias going on.

290
00:19:16.991 --> 00:19:21.391
So like your failures, you want to, um, kind of externalize them.

291
00:19:21.711 --> 00:19:21.932
Right.

292
00:19:22.012 --> 00:19:23.692
And you want to internalize your successes.

293
00:19:24.192 --> 00:19:26.092
And I think part of it is, is like, Oh no, look at me.

294
00:19:26.212 --> 00:19:27.412
I went through all of this.

295
00:19:27.472 --> 00:19:28.133
I failed all this.

296
00:19:28.173 --> 00:19:29.993
And I still came out the other side and look how

297
00:19:30.713 --> 00:19:31.714
Look how strong I am.

298
00:19:31.754 --> 00:19:32.274
Strong I am.

299
00:19:32.354 --> 00:19:32.855
Successful.

300
00:19:32.875 --> 00:19:34.396
Look how gritty I am.

301
00:19:34.436 --> 00:19:37.758
Look how, you know, I think there is kind of like a, it's a humble brag.

302
00:19:38.038 --> 00:19:39.379
We've talked on previous episodes.

303
00:19:39.980 --> 00:19:40.160
Yeah.

304
00:19:40.240 --> 00:19:45.324
How we, we tend to, our memories tend to package things in ways that like exalt ourselves a little bit.

305
00:19:45.484 --> 00:19:47.165
You don't want to attribute it to luck either.

306
00:19:47.185 --> 00:19:48.206
Remember the luck episode?

307
00:19:48.346 --> 00:19:50.448
Like, like you saying, oh, I got lucky in this.

308
00:19:50.488 --> 00:19:51.228
That doesn't feel good.

309
00:19:51.529 --> 00:19:55.732
When it's like, actually, yeah, a lot of other people did the exact same things as you and you came out on top.

310
00:19:56.312 --> 00:19:57.213
Maybe you just got lucky.

311
00:19:57.673 --> 00:20:00.415
Like instead you say, no, no, no, I went through, look at all the hardship I went through.

312
00:20:00.455 --> 00:20:02.396
Look at all this shit that I waited through.

313
00:20:02.416 --> 00:20:08.661
I actually went and researched how many other microprocessor companies there were at the same time as Apple.

314
00:20:08.681 --> 00:20:12.203
And there were like dozens, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens.

315
00:20:12.323 --> 00:20:13.844
And it was really interesting.

316
00:20:14.064 --> 00:20:15.646
They all failed and they all had like...

317
00:20:16.506 --> 00:20:19.309
similar stories and story arcs and made similar decisions.

318
00:20:19.409 --> 00:20:21.511
And the human mind thinks in terms of narratives.

319
00:20:21.911 --> 00:20:26.615
When you are constructing a narrative, you always need to have some sort of obstacle or setback.

320
00:20:26.915 --> 00:20:27.536
Yeah.

321
00:20:27.556 --> 00:20:28.837
The three acts of story arc.

322
00:20:29.077 --> 00:20:29.458
Yeah.

323
00:20:29.618 --> 00:20:31.599
It's just the way our brains work.

324
00:20:31.800 --> 00:20:40.667
I think it is very natural that we look at a highly complex long-term project or path and we just simplify it into...

325
00:20:41.688 --> 00:20:42.729
Yeah, I was down on my luck.

326
00:20:42.809 --> 00:20:45.010
All these things went wrong, but I fought through it.

327
00:20:45.050 --> 00:20:47.791
I learned, I survived, and now I'm successful, right?

328
00:20:47.831 --> 00:20:52.113
Like, that's just kind of, I think, our default narrative that we like to package around things.

329
00:20:52.213 --> 00:20:55.255
And also, like, narratives make things feel meaningful.

330
00:20:55.655 --> 00:21:01.138
Like, if I was really honest about my success and, like, the amount of luck and circumstance that was involved in it...

331
00:21:02.240 --> 00:21:03.742
It would feel less meaningful to me.

332
00:21:04.442 --> 00:21:10.749
And I do think that we are biased towards generating something that feels very meaningful and purposeful in our lives.

333
00:21:10.909 --> 00:21:11.049
Yeah.

334
00:21:11.069 --> 00:21:13.331
There's not a lot of lesson to be taken from luck, right?

335
00:21:13.391 --> 00:21:13.551
No.

336
00:21:13.571 --> 00:21:14.552
There's something we're just lucky.

337
00:21:14.592 --> 00:21:20.138
So we'd rather have a narrative that's a little bit cleaner and has some sort of struggle in it that we could identify with.

338
00:21:20.258 --> 00:21:21.680
Are you susceptible to failure porn?

339
00:21:21.820 --> 00:21:22.160
Oh, man.

340
00:21:22.440 --> 00:21:31.642
And that whole Michael Jordan story, man, especially when I was a kid, that was like, oh yeah, he's got all that grit and he won't give up, never give up.

341
00:21:31.702 --> 00:21:35.122
And he's just got to fight through all the failures and getting cut from the team, all of that.

342
00:21:35.282 --> 00:21:37.283
Oh, dude, I bought into that big time.

343
00:21:37.543 --> 00:21:39.603
In the 2010s, you really did see this too.

344
00:21:39.643 --> 00:21:40.623
You really did out there.

345
00:21:40.643 --> 00:21:43.144
It was like, no, no, no, it was like fail fast.

346
00:21:43.184 --> 00:21:46.504
What was the Facebook move fast and break things?

347
00:21:46.524 --> 00:21:47.164
Move fast and break things.

348
00:21:47.184 --> 00:21:47.705
That whole thing.

349
00:21:47.725 --> 00:21:48.925
Everybody got caught up in that.

350
00:21:49.105 --> 00:21:49.245
Yeah.

351
00:21:49.265 --> 00:21:50.085
How'd that turn out?

352
00:21:50.625 --> 00:21:51.105
Yeah, right?

353
00:21:51.506 --> 00:21:51.806
Right?

354
00:21:52.626 --> 00:21:53.407
It's very seductive.

355
00:21:53.787 --> 00:21:54.527
It's very seductive.

356
00:21:54.707 --> 00:21:55.168
Yeah, yeah.

357
00:21:55.448 --> 00:21:58.449
Everybody, especially Americans, we love an underdog too, right?

358
00:21:58.489 --> 00:22:01.811
So somebody who's down on their luck and down and out, no, they came back from it.

359
00:22:01.851 --> 00:22:03.232
That's a great arc.

360
00:22:03.472 --> 00:22:06.614
So I get asked all the time, would I change anything about subtle art?

361
00:22:07.034 --> 00:22:15.218
And generally my answer is no, but it's funny that this episode, it made me kind of think back to that chapter.

362
00:22:15.238 --> 00:22:15.819
I'm like, oof.

363
00:22:16.645 --> 00:22:19.026
Yeah, it was a little simplistic.

364
00:22:19.327 --> 00:22:25.750
The depth that we're going to go into in this episode is much more thorough than what's written there.

365
00:22:25.790 --> 00:22:30.533
I mean, I do think the general lesson is in that you do have to make mistakes.

366
00:22:30.553 --> 00:22:34.455
Like everybody makes mistakes, everybody fails, and that's the fuel for learning and growth.

367
00:22:35.396 --> 00:22:37.637
I do think that is true, but I also think that that is...

368
00:22:39.538 --> 00:22:41.119
bit of a simplistic way to look at it.

369
00:22:41.219 --> 00:22:46.221
There's a lot more going on under the hood than just simply like, oh, I tried a thing and it didn't work.

370
00:22:47.061 --> 00:22:48.882
What can I learn from it?

371
00:22:48.922 --> 00:22:55.105
That's our surface level experience, but there's some deeper questions in terms of like, how are you defining success and failure?

372
00:22:55.885 --> 00:22:57.666
Who are you choosing to be in that pursuit?

373
00:22:57.966 --> 00:23:01.408
Are you defining failures in ways that you are actually going to be comfortable with?

374
00:23:02.502 --> 00:23:04.044
Like that's actually way more interesting.

375
00:23:04.064 --> 00:23:05.825
And that's some of the stuff that we're going to get into here.

376
00:23:06.025 --> 00:23:12.732
What we're calling kind of the old way of looking at failure too, though, which was more just like, oh, you're a failure.

377
00:23:12.832 --> 00:23:19.759
Like people saying I'm a failure or taking it so personally or over identifying with it.

378
00:23:19.919 --> 00:23:20.820
Obviously, that's not good.

379
00:23:20.840 --> 00:23:22.522
We wanted to get away from that.

380
00:23:22.842 --> 00:23:25.525
What we're saying is maybe we overshot a little bit too far the other way.

381
00:23:25.625 --> 00:23:26.265
Yeah, yeah.

382
00:23:26.346 --> 00:23:29.629
Do we want to call this like a Hegelian synthesis, right?

383
00:23:29.749 --> 00:23:31.971
So aren't you excited for that?

384
00:23:32.011 --> 00:23:33.152
Do we want to call it that?

385
00:23:33.433 --> 00:23:34.213
Of course we do.

386
00:23:34.694 --> 00:23:35.335
Of course we do.

387
00:23:35.395 --> 00:23:36.316
This is solved.

388
00:23:36.816 --> 00:23:37.317
Okay.

389
00:23:37.397 --> 00:23:39.299
Where we over philosophize everything.

390
00:23:39.319 --> 00:23:39.419
Yeah.

391
00:23:39.559 --> 00:23:43.623
So I know what a Hegelian synthesis is, but why don't you go ahead and explain to everybody else what that means?

392
00:23:43.723 --> 00:23:44.183
Okay.

393
00:23:45.184 --> 00:23:50.885
George Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher, the idealist philosopher from the 19th century, he said a lot of things.

394
00:23:50.945 --> 00:23:55.967
But one of the things that stuck, interestingly, he didn't actually write it, but people later attributed it to him.

395
00:23:56.027 --> 00:24:06.489
So they call it a Hegelian synthesis, which is that basically thought and information progresses in a pretty standard pattern, which is that you have a thesis of how the world works or something that's true.

396
00:24:06.909 --> 00:24:11.150
You have an antithesis, which is the contradiction or an alternative hypothesis.

397
00:24:15.071 --> 00:24:16.733
of those two viewpoints.

398
00:24:17.114 --> 00:24:19.417
It's not that one of those two things is right.

399
00:24:19.437 --> 00:24:27.327
It's usually some synthesis of the two points of view that wins out and becomes the next thesis and develops its own antithesis.

400
00:24:27.447 --> 00:24:31.352
That was like the progression of history and knowledge in his view.

401
00:24:31.993 --> 00:24:45.661
The Hegelian dialectic of failure would be that the old school version of failure was that it was this horrible, shameful thing and that you should hide your failures from people and you should avoid trying anything that you're going to potentially fail.

402
00:24:45.681 --> 00:24:48.363
That's kind of like our default approach towards failure.

403
00:24:49.023 --> 00:24:57.889
The antithesis of that is that failure should be celebrated, that it should be encouraged, that we should support people in their failures, which –

404
00:24:58.849 --> 00:25:08.896
Sounds nice if you've got a startup and are trying to like find investors, but I don't know, like go talk to a meth head or like somebody in an abusive relationship.

405
00:25:09.036 --> 00:25:12.979
That's not a message you want to be generalizing out to the broader populace.

406
00:25:13.740 --> 00:25:22.846
So you could say that this podcast, we are attempting a synthesis of the two views, a more holistic view of failure.

407
00:25:23.727 --> 00:25:27.249
And how to approach it in your own life and how to benefit from it.

408
00:25:27.429 --> 00:25:39.396
The important thing here, the reason why we're kind of shitting on this positive view of failure is that the data is in and it doesn't really help.

409
00:25:39.596 --> 00:25:40.397
Mm-hmm.

410
00:25:40.922 --> 00:25:44.705
We've taken the last few decades to figure that out too, right?

411
00:25:45.265 --> 00:25:52.830
There is this kind of weird paradox where if you go and you talk to people, they'll tell you, just like in the business world, let's say, it's easier than ever to start a business.

412
00:25:52.991 --> 00:25:53.171
Right.

413
00:25:53.251 --> 00:25:56.273
And yet people are more afraid to start a business than ever.

414
00:25:56.573 --> 00:26:01.477
This is right after all of these, this 20 years of failure worship has come out of the culture.

415
00:26:01.557 --> 00:26:01.757
Right.

416
00:26:01.918 --> 00:26:05.641
And yet people are still more risk averse than ever.

417
00:26:05.661 --> 00:26:07.002
Still more risk averse than ever.

418
00:26:07.282 --> 00:26:14.969
Like just some stats, like basically one in two Americans say they would fear starting a business because of the fear of failure, because it might fail.

419
00:26:15.709 --> 00:26:16.510
Half of all people.

420
00:26:16.870 --> 00:26:25.741
Around the world, too, they've done these surveys every year, and the share of people agreeing that starting a business is easy, that climbed to almost 60%.

421
00:26:26.402 --> 00:26:33.972
And yet, again, almost one in two people all around the world say they're afraid of failing in one of these ventures, even though it's easier than ever.

422
00:26:34.412 --> 00:26:37.075
So the message didn't stick basically, right?

423
00:26:37.335 --> 00:26:40.979
You could actually argue that things got even worse.

424
00:26:41.359 --> 00:26:43.581
We didn't get more comfortable with failure, right?

425
00:26:43.822 --> 00:26:46.084
We probably got less than what actually happened here, right?

426
00:26:46.144 --> 00:26:47.145
What was actually going on?

427
00:26:47.605 --> 00:26:54.853
One of the big things that I found anyway, through all this is that perfectionism actually seems to be becoming more and more of a problem.

428
00:26:55.173 --> 00:27:03.055
If people were actually taking this to heart, if they were taking this advice, this failure worship to heart, what you would probably see is actually less perfectionism out there.

429
00:27:03.435 --> 00:27:06.336
We see the exact opposite of that in all these different studies.

430
00:27:06.376 --> 00:27:14.158
Now, before I jump into that, though, real quick, there's two different kinds of perfectionism that researchers kind of brought to broad buckets that they can sort it into.

431
00:27:14.218 --> 00:27:14.398
Right.

432
00:27:14.598 --> 00:27:17.018
One is what they call perfectionistic strivings.

433
00:27:17.318 --> 00:27:21.880
OK, this is when you hold high standards and you you are aiming for success.

434
00:27:22.260 --> 00:27:23.340
This is basically fine.

435
00:27:24.040 --> 00:27:31.186
Uh, as long as you don't like take it too far, you're really just like, I have high standards and I want to, I want to hit those, but you don't take it too personally when you don't hit them.

436
00:27:31.466 --> 00:27:31.626
Okay.

437
00:27:31.907 --> 00:27:42.355
Contrast that with perfectionistic concerns, which is the more kind of toxic form of perfectionism that people can have, which is basically you're holding yourself to a very high standard.

438
00:27:42.415 --> 00:27:46.979
And if you don't hit that, there's something very wrong with you or the world or whatever.

439
00:27:47.299 --> 00:27:47.500
Right.

440
00:27:48.220 --> 00:27:55.363
That is actually associated with more like mental health problems, even to depression, anxiety, less wellbeing that you have with that.

441
00:27:55.423 --> 00:27:55.643
Okay.

442
00:27:55.903 --> 00:28:10.868
What they found is if you kind of control for those concerns, if you, if you, if you can parse all of that out, if you just have this like striving perfectionism where you're like, I want things to be better and I'm going to aim for them and it's okay if I don't hit them, but I'm going to continue to aim for them and strive for them.

443
00:28:11.048 --> 00:28:11.949
That seems to be okay.

444
00:28:12.129 --> 00:28:12.849
That seems to be fine.

445
00:28:12.909 --> 00:28:15.370
It's when we get into that more toxic form of perfectionism that.

446
00:28:15.870 --> 00:28:18.092
that the wheels start to fall off a little bit, okay?

447
00:28:18.452 --> 00:28:27.360
When we actually look at the numbers too, over the last 20 to 30 years, across all the countries that celebrate failure the most, mostly the Anglosphere, right?

448
00:28:27.480 --> 00:28:32.724
United States, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, those places, we all celebrate failure a whole bunch.

449
00:28:33.044 --> 00:28:38.048
Perfectionism has actually risen and the toxic kinds of perfectionism have risen the most even too.

450
00:28:38.228 --> 00:28:41.971
They've done some studies from the late 2010s up to today

451
00:28:42.832 --> 00:28:44.834
And they see that this trend is just accelerating.

452
00:28:44.875 --> 00:28:45.836
It's not getting any better.

453
00:28:46.016 --> 00:28:54.626
They basically concluded that, and this is a quote, young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, they are more demanding of others, and more demanding of themselves.

454
00:28:54.646 --> 00:28:59.992
Like, people are holding us to higher standards, we're holding ourselves to higher standards, and we're holding other people to higher standards all at the same time.

455
00:29:00.293 --> 00:29:01.554
Like, all of that is going up when...

456
00:29:02.455 --> 00:29:04.337
really probably none of that is actually true.

457
00:29:04.357 --> 00:29:05.157
Okay.

458
00:29:05.198 --> 00:29:08.340
And yet that's against the backdrop of, hey, it's okay to fail.

459
00:29:08.380 --> 00:29:09.121
Go out there and fail.

460
00:29:09.161 --> 00:29:09.721
Nobody cares.

461
00:29:09.741 --> 00:29:10.562
Give it your best shot.

462
00:29:10.582 --> 00:29:12.303
Give it your best shot and it's going to be okay.

463
00:29:12.484 --> 00:29:20.170
And yet we have this rise in perfectionism and rise of these ungodly standards that we put on ourselves during that.

464
00:29:20.190 --> 00:29:21.171
So what's going on here?

465
00:29:21.631 --> 00:29:22.592
I hate to be that guy.

466
00:29:22.672 --> 00:29:22.912
Yeah.

467
00:29:23.473 --> 00:29:24.514
But I think it's the phones.

468
00:29:24.874 --> 00:29:25.575
You think it's the phones?

469
00:29:25.595 --> 00:29:26.335
I think it's the phones.

470
00:29:26.355 --> 00:29:27.016
You think it's the phones?

471
00:29:27.977 --> 00:29:29.478
The trend started before the phones.

472
00:29:29.498 --> 00:29:31.040
I think it accelerated with the phones.

473
00:29:31.460 --> 00:29:32.281
It could be the internet.

474
00:29:32.321 --> 00:29:44.252
I mean, the difference between, say, our adolescence and kids today, you know, when we were growing up, if you asked a girl out and she shot you down, nobody remembered, nobody saw it.

475
00:29:44.652 --> 00:29:45.113
I remember.

476
00:29:45.153 --> 00:29:45.413
I remember.

477
00:29:45.433 --> 00:29:45.834
I remember.

478
00:29:47.660 --> 00:29:48.541
Nobody else remember.

479
00:29:48.561 --> 00:29:49.081
Oh, okay, right, right.

480
00:29:49.101 --> 00:29:49.661
Nobody else saw it.

481
00:29:50.502 --> 00:29:58.386
You know, if you made a huge mistake in front of the class or you did something really embarrassing or you got kicked out of school or whatever, now everything is documented.

482
00:29:58.546 --> 00:30:03.889
There are consequences to every failure that exists today in a way that didn't exist before.

483
00:30:05.250 --> 00:30:09.391
I actually think that there's some usefulness of forgetting.

484
00:30:09.691 --> 00:30:17.432
I was reading about Walt Disney recently, and it was super fascinating in that he came from a family of failed entrepreneurs.

485
00:30:17.472 --> 00:30:19.753
And he himself was a failed entrepreneur.

486
00:30:20.293 --> 00:30:25.074
Today we know as Disney was like his, I think his third or fourth business that he started.

487
00:30:25.334 --> 00:30:29.475
And his father started a bunch of businesses that failed, and his uncle started a bunch of businesses that failed.

488
00:30:30.295 --> 00:30:42.237
And it was funny because what happened back in those days is you would start a business, it would fail, you'd go into a bunch of debt, and you'd just pack your shit up and go to the next town because nobody in the next town knew that you failed, right?

489
00:30:42.277 --> 00:30:47.378
And so you could start over, you could get new investments or get a new loan and start a new business.

490
00:30:47.918 --> 00:30:57.140
And so the Disneys would kind of like bounce from town to town around the Midwest, trying all these different ventures, watching them fail spectacularly, and then like...

491
00:30:57.901 --> 00:31:00.055
just kind of moving on and not having it...

492
00:31:01.302 --> 00:31:02.022
track with them.

493
00:31:02.062 --> 00:31:08.584
Whereas today, if something like calamitous happens at one of your jobs, it's going to be online forever, right?

494
00:31:08.604 --> 00:31:11.144
There's going to be a record of it potentially forever.

495
00:31:11.284 --> 00:31:20.287
People are always going to have access either to your old workplace or your old boss or your old LinkedIn profile or something you wrote like 14 years ago.

496
00:31:20.587 --> 00:31:24.728
It's like comedians getting canceled for tweets that they wrote in 2008.

497
00:31:24.748 --> 00:31:24.988
Yeah.

498
00:31:25.208 --> 00:31:30.429
You know, like it, there's just, there's a record today that follows you that didn't exist

499
00:31:30.909 --> 00:31:51.058
in previous generations, even if people are more accepting of failure in the moment, which I agree with you, I don't think they are these days, even if they were, the fact that that moment is now going to follow you for decades across your life means that you have to weight it so much higher than you would have otherwise.

500
00:31:51.318 --> 00:31:51.539
Yeah.

501
00:31:51.559 --> 00:31:54.540
I mean, I guess I do remember, you know, when social media started to be a thing and

502
00:31:55.700 --> 00:31:58.161
we had to be warned like, Hey, watch what you put online.

503
00:31:58.501 --> 00:32:03.422
Now think of, I mean, that's like, now you just don't even do it because you can't even help if it gets online or not.

504
00:32:03.462 --> 00:32:03.682
Yeah.

505
00:32:03.742 --> 00:32:17.825
I mean, I remember, so to your point about it being maybe before the phones, I remember when I was single in my twenties and it started to become a thing about like Googling the people you were going on dates with, because you would, sometimes you would find like some pretty crazy shit.

506
00:32:18.025 --> 00:32:20.205
I just imagine that that's like 10 X'd.

507
00:32:20.405 --> 00:32:23.048
These two researchers, Kieran and Hill, they give some other reasons as well.

508
00:32:23.328 --> 00:32:31.777
Well, like one of them being just kind of the structural competition, especially like in capitalist societies, like competition in the markets got so crazy.

509
00:32:31.818 --> 00:32:35.381
And that just kind of bled into all the other areas of life.

510
00:32:35.401 --> 00:32:35.962
Getting into a good idea.

511
00:32:35.962 --> 00:32:39.507
good university or something like that, that all of a sudden became super, super important.

512
00:32:39.567 --> 00:32:49.222
And like doing your, your application by committee, you know, and having your whole family or getting tutors or that really took off in the last, you know, 20 to 30 years as well.

513
00:32:49.262 --> 00:32:51.585
Like the competition, intense competition.

514
00:32:52.406 --> 00:33:17.069
around those sorts of things happened at the same time too they're talking about the collectivist institutions that we used to have where some of that would get diffused right some of that kind of tension of your failures or whatever and your church or your whatever communities you were in church temples whatever you were going to those are not you know it's it's much more individualistic like hyper individualism has contributed to a very competitive right life not just marketplace

515
00:33:17.870 --> 00:33:21.973
And people are by and large lonelier, so they have less of a support system, right?

516
00:33:21.993 --> 00:33:27.557
So they have fewer friends or family members close to them that they can rely upon if they do screw up or if something does go wrong.

517
00:33:27.837 --> 00:33:33.821
It's interesting because what we're talking about, it is not about people's philosophical acceptance of failure.

518
00:33:34.082 --> 00:33:38.425
It is more about the stakes that are involved, right?

519
00:33:38.465 --> 00:33:45.390
Like when you remove social and emotional safety nets, when you make everything more competitive and...

520
00:33:45.710 --> 00:34:02.060
And when you add a historical record that follows you for pretty much your entire life and you can't get rid of it, what that does is it just puts so much more importance on each action and behavior that in a way that did not exist certainly 30 years ago, but definitely not like 100 years ago.

521
00:34:02.180 --> 00:34:05.643
One other thing they bring up too is like anxious and controlling parenting.

522
00:34:06.323 --> 00:34:08.064
There's some debate around this.

523
00:34:08.144 --> 00:34:12.705
Their studies have been questioned a little bit, but you do see it on at least an individual level.

524
00:34:12.745 --> 00:34:17.667
Like kids who do come from households where the parents are very controlling and, you know, expect a lot.

525
00:34:17.847 --> 00:34:21.068
They have very high rates of this toxic perfectionism as well.

526
00:34:21.228 --> 00:34:23.809
Whether that's pervasive across the culture or not, I'm not sure.

527
00:34:24.269 --> 00:34:29.231
But that can definitely, if you're one of those people, that can definitely have a big, big impact as well.

528
00:34:29.391 --> 00:34:31.552
Shout out to all of our Asian listeners right now.

529
00:34:31.652 --> 00:34:32.092
Right.

530
00:34:32.152 --> 00:34:32.452
Yeah.

531
00:34:32.612 --> 00:34:32.932
Yeah.

532
00:34:33.272 --> 00:34:33.572
Yeah.

533
00:34:34.193 --> 00:34:36.253
So perfectionism is rising.

534
00:34:36.433 --> 00:34:36.953
We see that.

535
00:34:37.294 --> 00:34:39.234
It is really worse amongst young people too.

536
00:34:39.254 --> 00:34:40.515
This is where we have the most data too.

537
00:34:40.535 --> 00:34:44.376
We don't have as much data for older people, but it is worse amongst young people.

538
00:34:44.916 --> 00:34:50.258
Half of all teenagers all around the world, they fear judgment for failing in some way.

539
00:34:50.558 --> 00:34:56.000
They report that they say when they're failing, they worry about what others might think of them, which, you know, okay, that's teenagers.

540
00:34:56.060 --> 00:34:56.560
I get that.

541
00:34:56.660 --> 00:34:56.840
But.

542
00:34:57.040 --> 00:35:00.004
But the risk of the stats of risk aversion are so high right now.

543
00:35:00.024 --> 00:35:00.505
They're so high.

544
00:35:00.525 --> 00:35:01.366
They're accelerating.

545
00:35:01.386 --> 00:35:02.248
Like I was saying, right?

546
00:35:02.268 --> 00:35:03.670
Kids are not asking each other out.

547
00:35:03.690 --> 00:35:04.751
They're not taking risks.

548
00:35:04.771 --> 00:35:05.753
They're not going out.

549
00:35:05.773 --> 00:35:06.714
They're not having sex.

550
00:35:06.754 --> 00:35:09.598
They're not even learning to drive at the same rates that they used to.

551
00:35:09.639 --> 00:35:11.722
So it's, yeah, there's a lot of risk aversion going on.

552
00:35:12.082 --> 00:35:18.184
One really interesting thing we found though too, and a lot of people think that, well, I'm just not as good as these people.

553
00:35:18.224 --> 00:35:20.025
And so of course I'm afraid of failure or whatever.

554
00:35:20.305 --> 00:35:27.247
An interesting thing we found was actually that the fear of failure is oftentimes the worst amongst the highest achievers.

555
00:35:27.647 --> 00:35:36.130
So people out there who are actually already doing the straight A students, you know, the ones that are doing all the clubs, the ones that are out there achieving, looking like they're, you know, having a great time.

556
00:35:36.510 --> 00:35:40.011
They're actually the ones who are the most afraid of failure, which is...

557
00:35:41.289 --> 00:35:41.790
Fascinating.

558
00:35:42.010 --> 00:35:50.259
I feel like so many people use fear of failure as an excuse for not doing the thing, whereas it's like, OK, the people who are actually out there doing the thing and they're doing it well.

559
00:35:51.146 --> 00:35:52.766
are more afraid than you are.

560
00:35:52.886 --> 00:35:53.066
Right.

561
00:35:53.226 --> 00:35:54.827
And we're going to find out why that is here in a little bit too.

562
00:35:55.387 --> 00:35:57.487
What would you say is your relationship with failure?

563
00:35:57.507 --> 00:36:01.088
Because I know you've struggled with perfectionism quite a bit throughout your life.

564
00:36:01.328 --> 00:36:01.628
Yeah.

565
00:36:01.768 --> 00:36:07.410
I wanted to come in here and say, well, you know, like I don't, the failures I do have, I don't see them as failures.

566
00:36:07.450 --> 00:36:09.950
But then I think about the perfection.

567
00:36:10.030 --> 00:36:12.271
I have some talks of perfectionism.

568
00:36:12.431 --> 00:36:17.852
What it ends up doing is it makes you not take a lot of the risks that you would have

569
00:36:18.212 --> 00:36:20.633
want to take or just like, I don't know, go and find it out.

570
00:36:20.673 --> 00:36:24.135
Like I look, I don't know, I look at some of the stuff you do and you're just like, we're going to try this.

571
00:36:24.155 --> 00:36:25.635
And it's, that's didn't work.

572
00:36:25.655 --> 00:36:26.676
Let's just keep moving.

573
00:36:27.216 --> 00:36:30.157
You know, I don't think you're anyone to dwell on that.

574
00:36:30.278 --> 00:36:32.038
And I, I dwell on stuff, man.

575
00:36:32.378 --> 00:36:33.519
I dwell on stuff for sure.

576
00:36:33.539 --> 00:36:43.644
It does cost me a lot in terms of, yeah, in terms of the outcomes that I've, I've seen, I just haven't taken some of the bigger swings that I probably would have because of that.

577
00:36:44.024 --> 00:36:46.125
Do you think some of that is that you grew up

578
00:36:46.905 --> 00:36:47.646
with higher stakes.

579
00:36:47.706 --> 00:36:55.091
Cause like, I know like my wife grew up pretty poor and like, ah, the margin for error when she was young was just very slim.

580
00:36:55.211 --> 00:37:01.975
So, so she's developed, I think she has kind of evolved into a person that is just very wary of, of risking failure.

581
00:37:02.076 --> 00:37:02.376
Yeah.

582
00:37:02.436 --> 00:37:08.500
And I think if, if you do come from a back kind of background and the way you got out of it was by through performance, um,

583
00:37:08.640 --> 00:37:11.244
that puts a lot of weight on performance then, right?

584
00:37:11.444 --> 00:37:18.915
Like I got out of that through school and the activities that I was involved in that contributed to my education and all of that.

585
00:37:19.516 --> 00:37:22.460
And so you learn that, oh, in order to not,

586
00:37:23.271 --> 00:37:28.417
have to go back into that world or not be in a more precarious state, you have to perform.

587
00:37:28.958 --> 00:37:32.021
There's something you have to do or be or whatever it is.

588
00:37:32.682 --> 00:37:35.446
And that, yeah, I bet a lot of people can identify with that.

589
00:37:35.926 --> 00:37:36.607
I'm a weirdo.

590
00:37:36.787 --> 00:37:41.453
I'm definitely, I think I'm somebody that- Are in a lot of ways, Mark.

591
00:37:41.513 --> 00:37:42.194
You really are.

592
00:37:43.690 --> 00:37:46.133
I think this is one area where I'm not relatable.

593
00:37:46.413 --> 00:37:50.417
I think I'm really good with this just because, I mean, I'm not, I don't give a fuck, right?

594
00:37:50.437 --> 00:37:52.319
Like I just, I genuinely don't.

595
00:37:52.419 --> 00:37:54.581
Like it really, I mean, you've seen this for years.

596
00:37:55.742 --> 00:37:56.783
It really doesn't bother me.

597
00:37:57.103 --> 00:38:05.472
Like launching something that fails or putting something out there that bombs or, you know, saying something that gets me a thousand angry email.

598
00:38:05.512 --> 00:38:06.613
Like I'm just kind of.

599
00:38:07.629 --> 00:38:09.130
water off my back.

600
00:38:09.371 --> 00:38:15.456
And it's interesting because when I was younger, I spent a lot of time kind of thinking about where that comes from.

601
00:38:15.536 --> 00:38:18.438
And I've got all sorts of narratives and explanations.

602
00:38:18.839 --> 00:38:23.923
Growing up in kind of a weird environment that I always felt like a black sheep where I grew up.

603
00:38:24.143 --> 00:38:27.806
My dad's a lot more kind of rigid and perfectionist than I am.

604
00:38:28.527 --> 00:38:31.708
But my grandfather, I mean, you talk about not giving a fuck.

605
00:38:31.748 --> 00:38:33.909
Like, he started seven companies.

606
00:38:34.449 --> 00:38:37.189
He became a millionaire three times, went bankrupt three times.

607
00:38:38.170 --> 00:38:45.512
And according to my dad, he said, if you saw him, you would never know which end of the pendulum he was on.

608
00:38:45.692 --> 00:38:46.852
Like, you could never tell.

609
00:38:46.932 --> 00:38:47.752
It didn't bother him.

610
00:38:48.513 --> 00:38:49.253
He didn't care.

611
00:38:49.953 --> 00:38:51.413
And I've felt that way, too.

612
00:38:51.473 --> 00:38:54.374
Like, I've lost a lot of money on some stupid decisions.

613
00:38:54.554 --> 00:38:57.315
And it actually freaked me out how much it didn't bother me.

614
00:38:57.835 --> 00:39:06.819
Is there any area of your life where you identify a failure that either you did or didn't learn from or like, is there any particular area?

615
00:39:07.679 --> 00:39:09.360
I've thought about this in terms of regrets.

616
00:39:09.400 --> 00:39:12.681
So like, I generally don't regret many things.

617
00:39:13.482 --> 00:39:22.486
And, and what I, the thing I would point to the things that like, I do feel say dwell on, or I feel like some degree of shame or guilt.

618
00:39:22.766 --> 00:39:25.007
It's when I've, I feel like I've failed people.

619
00:39:25.047 --> 00:39:25.287
Yeah.

620
00:39:25.467 --> 00:39:25.707
Yeah.

621
00:39:26.147 --> 00:39:33.854
So if it's just me and if it's like just my money or my stuff, I really don't seem to care.

622
00:39:34.154 --> 00:39:35.215
Like I'm good.

623
00:39:35.495 --> 00:39:37.817
You know, I could sleep on this concrete floor tomorrow.

624
00:39:37.897 --> 00:39:38.838
Like it's fine.

625
00:39:39.119 --> 00:39:43.362
If I feel like I failed somebody I really care about, like that eats at me for a long time.

626
00:39:43.963 --> 00:39:45.184
We're going to get into some of that then.

627
00:39:45.204 --> 00:39:45.664
Uh-oh.

628
00:39:45.744 --> 00:39:46.985
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

629
00:39:47.005 --> 00:39:47.126
Uh-oh.

630
00:39:47.426 --> 00:39:48.046
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

631
00:39:48.066 --> 00:39:48.186
Uh-oh.

632
00:39:48.207 --> 00:39:49.908
Am I getting on the sofa this episode?

633
00:39:49.988 --> 00:39:51.309
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

634
00:39:51.710 --> 00:39:51.830
Ugh.

635
00:39:52.230 --> 00:39:52.971
I mean, yes, but-

636
00:39:55.163 --> 00:39:56.804
We'll get into why that might be, I think.

637
00:39:56.824 --> 00:39:57.064
Yeah.

638
00:39:57.264 --> 00:40:04.608
This hints at where we're going with this episode and that I don't actually see most of my failures as failures.

639
00:40:04.968 --> 00:40:14.252
The crux of what we're going to get into is that failure is actually more of a definitional problem than it is an actual problem.

640
00:40:14.713 --> 00:40:19.215
Like the fact that you are failing at things in your life is not really the problem.

641
00:40:20.613 --> 00:40:27.943
The real problem, if there is one, is how you've chosen to define failure for yourself and how you've chosen to measure yourself.

642
00:40:28.584 --> 00:40:32.509
And that's actually where we're going to end up going with this, starting with the next chapter.

643
00:40:32.609 --> 00:40:36.635
But to understand that and really have an appreciation for it

644
00:40:37.955 --> 00:40:56.871
We do need to get into some of the evolutionary mechanisms behind our sense of failure, the feelings and emotions that come along with it, the social repercussions that are associated with it, and why something like an embarrassing email or getting shot down by somebody you have a crush on.

645
00:40:57.772 --> 00:40:59.793
Feels like fucking death in the moment.

646
00:41:00.393 --> 00:41:03.474
Like, just makes you want to crawl in a hole and never come out again.

647
00:41:03.754 --> 00:41:04.834
Like, why does that happen?

648
00:41:04.874 --> 00:41:06.134
Why does it hurt so much?

649
00:41:06.274 --> 00:41:07.475
Why does failure hurt so bad?

650
00:41:07.495 --> 00:41:09.815
Why is it so hard sometimes?

651
00:41:10.235 --> 00:41:15.117
And the important thing is that the answer, it's not just your childhood.

652
00:41:16.037 --> 00:41:17.718
It's not a mindset.

653
00:41:17.878 --> 00:41:18.418
It's not...

654
00:41:19.638 --> 00:41:41.970
It's not about learning, you know, finding the silver lining and things like, sure, all of those things matter at the margins, but really we're going to go way back and we're going to go back 2 million years and, and look at some of the biological machinery that's going on behind the scenes and, and try to get a deeper understanding of why all these things happen.

655
00:41:42.870 --> 00:41:43.871
So stick around.

656
00:41:44.111 --> 00:41:47.332
But first, we're going to take a quick break, so don't go anywhere.

657
00:41:47.793 --> 00:41:50.434
This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

658
00:41:50.714 --> 00:42:02.699
Now, in my time, I've started a few businesses at this point, and every single time, there is this point where you go from being excited about your idea to staring all of the logistical and administrative pains in the face.

659
00:42:03.099 --> 00:42:06.380
It's that phase where most new businesses go to die.

660
00:42:06.700 --> 00:42:11.022
The idea was great, but you got buried in the operations before you ever made the first sale.

661
00:42:11.562 --> 00:42:17.726
Nobody starts a business because they're passionate about shopping cart software or payment processing or refund rates.

662
00:42:17.966 --> 00:42:20.328
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663
00:42:20.528 --> 00:42:27.212
You duct tape together a website builder, a payment system, some inventory tracker and an analytics tool that your buddy swore by.

664
00:42:27.433 --> 00:42:32.856
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665
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Now, Shopify exists, so that never happens.

666
00:42:35.658 --> 00:42:40.342
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667
00:42:40.542 --> 00:42:49.389
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668
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669
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670
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671
00:43:07.021 --> 00:43:09.842
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672
00:43:10.062 --> 00:43:17.066
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673
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674
00:43:17.906 --> 00:43:21.388
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675
00:43:21.688 --> 00:43:24.250
That's shopify.com slash solved.

676
00:43:25.197 --> 00:43:27.359
This episode is brought to you by AG1.

677
00:43:27.579 --> 00:43:32.984
We like to picture failure as one dramatic moment, the big blowup that detonates in your face.

678
00:43:33.204 --> 00:43:37.948
But usually it's the 20th morning in a row that you meant to get your act together, but didn't.

679
00:43:38.129 --> 00:43:41.211
The basics let you slide because nothing was technically on fire.

680
00:43:41.512 --> 00:43:45.055
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681
00:43:45.415 --> 00:43:49.558
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682
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684
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685
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686
00:44:07.689 --> 00:44:09.790
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687
00:44:10.270 --> 00:44:13.891
I assume most supplements are 90% marketing and a really nice label.

688
00:44:13.971 --> 00:44:28.474
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689
00:44:28.694 --> 00:44:32.355
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690
00:44:32.835 --> 00:44:46.288
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691
00:44:46.729 --> 00:44:47.870
That's solved.deals.ag1.

692
00:44:54.421 --> 00:45:02.890
So the modern research on why failure and loss hurt so much begins in 1969 in Israel.

693
00:45:03.190 --> 00:45:04.271
It's Hebrew University.

694
00:45:04.511 --> 00:45:10.618
Daniel Kahneman is a new professor, and he invites Amos Tversky to give a guest lecture to his professor.

695
00:45:11.238 --> 00:45:12.158
psychology students.

696
00:45:12.658 --> 00:45:17.439
And at the time, Tversky is a bit of a celebrity academic in Israel.

697
00:45:17.679 --> 00:45:19.420
He's considered a genius.

698
00:45:20.280 --> 00:45:23.481
He was a very famous paratrooper in one of the recent wars.

699
00:45:24.361 --> 00:45:26.021
He's generally beloved by everybody.

700
00:45:26.301 --> 00:45:33.823
And he gets up in front of Kahneman's class, and he starts lecturing about how people's guesses are actually often statistically accurate.

701
00:45:34.023 --> 00:45:40.184
That if you ask somebody to estimate a large number across the population, that people

702
00:45:40.364 --> 00:45:43.245
people's intuitions are surprisingly good at this.

703
00:45:43.745 --> 00:45:48.907
Now, Kahneman is watching him lecture about this, and he is thinking to himself, this is total bullshit.

704
00:45:49.427 --> 00:45:54.209
Because Kahneman was also a veteran, but he had worked in the psychological unit.

705
00:45:54.389 --> 00:46:05.474
So he had watched as IDF analysts had made confident predictions, created statistical models, come up with all sorts of plans, and been horribly wrong about every single one of them.

706
00:46:05.674 --> 00:46:08.955
He had actually seen the opposite, that people's intuitions were...

707
00:46:09.555 --> 00:46:11.738
absolutely terrible at predicting the future.

708
00:46:12.058 --> 00:46:22.109
So he politely lets Tversky finish his lecture and all the students leave and he walks up to him afterwards and in classic Israeli fashion, he's like, I think you're wrong.

709
00:46:24.283 --> 00:46:25.964
This is a bunch of bullshit.

710
00:46:26.625 --> 00:46:28.166
And the two begin arguing about it.

711
00:46:28.527 --> 00:46:31.850
And as they're arguing, finally, they just kind of look at each other and agree.

712
00:46:31.890 --> 00:46:34.492
They're like, well, then let's study it and figure this out.

713
00:46:35.252 --> 00:46:41.358
So they plan to do some experiments together and thus begin probably the most fruitful research partnership ever.

714
00:46:41.918 --> 00:46:43.419
in the history of the psychological field.

715
00:46:44.260 --> 00:46:47.163
They would go on to publish dozens and dozens of studies.

716
00:46:47.443 --> 00:46:53.988
They would revolutionize not just the field of psychology, but also behavioral economics.

717
00:46:54.529 --> 00:46:55.850
They would win a Nobel Prize.

718
00:46:56.170 --> 00:47:03.116
Their influence in how we understand human thinking and human decision-making really can't be overstated.

719
00:47:03.436 --> 00:47:08.241
Now, their method was really interesting, which is that they would kind of just sit around together,

720
00:47:09.475 --> 00:47:15.021
And they would spitball hypothetical situations to each other, like little thought experiments.

721
00:47:15.681 --> 00:47:18.124
And the reason they did this was to test each other's intuition.

722
00:47:18.164 --> 00:47:26.732
So they would ask each other things like, let's say 600 people have a terminal illness, and you have enough money to finance one of two medical programs.

723
00:47:27.413 --> 00:47:33.518
The first medical program is guaranteed to save 200 of the 600 people, but you're going to lose 400 of them.

724
00:47:33.918 --> 00:47:41.264
But the second medical program, you have a one third chance of saving all 600, but a two thirds chance of all 600 dying.

725
00:47:42.485 --> 00:47:43.366
Which one would you choose?

726
00:47:43.846 --> 00:47:45.828
I would probably go with the guaranteed 200.

727
00:47:45.848 --> 00:47:46.088
Yeah.

728
00:47:46.208 --> 00:47:46.508
Yeah.

729
00:47:46.929 --> 00:47:47.769
I probably would too.

730
00:47:47.869 --> 00:47:51.973
It just instinctively feels better for some reason.

731
00:47:52.013 --> 00:47:52.213
Right.

732
00:47:52.713 --> 00:47:55.275
And they notice this pretty much universally.

733
00:47:55.315 --> 00:48:02.461
Like almost everybody picks the first medical program, even though mathematically they have the exact same risk profile.

734
00:48:02.481 --> 00:48:02.601
Okay.

735
00:48:02.621 --> 00:48:02.821
Right.

736
00:48:02.861 --> 00:48:03.082
Yeah.

737
00:48:03.102 --> 00:48:03.402
Yeah.

738
00:48:03.422 --> 00:48:03.642
Yeah.

739
00:48:03.682 --> 00:48:03.842
Yeah.

740
00:48:04.062 --> 00:48:04.202
Yeah.

741
00:48:11.368 --> 00:48:13.649
feel pretty strongly about the first program.

742
00:48:13.969 --> 00:48:25.796
So they had another little fun thought experiment where they would present students with a situation where you could flip a coin, and if it came up heads, you would make $1,000, but if it came up tails, you would lose $1,000.

743
00:48:25.856 --> 00:48:26.236
Sure enough,

744
00:48:28.197 --> 00:48:29.918
Pretty much all the students turn this down.

745
00:48:30.439 --> 00:48:33.521
But what was really interesting is they changed the offer.

746
00:48:33.601 --> 00:48:34.622
So you flip a coin.

747
00:48:35.182 --> 00:48:38.384
If it lands heads, you get $1,050.

748
00:48:39.085 --> 00:48:42.287
If it's tails, you only lose $1,000, right?

749
00:48:42.307 --> 00:48:44.608
So the expected value is actually positive.

750
00:48:44.989 --> 00:48:48.811
If you had infinite money, you should flip that coin as many times as you possibly can.

751
00:48:48.831 --> 00:48:49.232
Every time, yeah.

752
00:48:49.812 --> 00:48:54.459
Interestingly, pretty much all the students still turned down the opportunity to flip the coin.

753
00:48:54.900 --> 00:49:05.235
So time after time after time, they started to notice a pattern, which was that people tend to weigh losing something more than they value gaining something.

754
00:49:05.616 --> 00:49:11.959
They even did another little thought experiment with this is that they took one group of people and they put a coffee mug in front of them.

755
00:49:11.979 --> 00:49:14.581
They said, how much would you pay for this coffee mug on average?

756
00:49:14.621 --> 00:49:16.682
And let's say that people said five bucks.

757
00:49:16.962 --> 00:49:22.005
Then they would take another group of people and they would give them the coffee mug and say, how much would you sell this for?

758
00:49:22.585 --> 00:49:26.427
And people wanted to sell it for more than they were willing to buy it for.

759
00:49:26.747 --> 00:49:26.907
Right.

760
00:49:26.927 --> 00:49:30.569
They valued losing the thing more than they valued money.

761
00:49:30.869 --> 00:49:52.715
gaining it in the first place and this was really driven home for them because in 1973 israel was invaded by all of its arab neighbors uh and they were called into active duty in what today is known as the yom kippur war and what was interesting is that both of them as they were riding off to the front when they started looking at all of the intelligence failures

762
00:49:53.395 --> 00:49:58.257
and the military failures that happened leading up to that war, they kept seeing the same pattern.

763
00:49:58.537 --> 00:50:10.782
Intelligence agencies that didn't want to risk losing too much, so they papered over evidence of an impending invasion with different narratives or different stories.

764
00:50:11.182 --> 00:50:17.365
People who looked away from potential catastrophe because the loss of being wrong about it

765
00:50:17.925 --> 00:50:25.109
would have been so catastrophic for their career or, you know, for whatever, their platoon or their agency or whatever.

766
00:50:25.529 --> 00:50:28.631
Now, this phenomenon eventually would become known as loss aversion.

767
00:50:28.811 --> 00:50:38.397
And Kahneman and Tversky's big contribution was that they found pretty consistently that the ratio of how people weighted loss versus gain of the same thing was,

768
00:50:39.343 --> 00:50:47.367
was roughly two to one, that people generally experience the loss of something as twice as bad as the benefit of gaining the same thing.

769
00:50:47.687 --> 00:50:59.913
And if anybody who's been competitive in sports or tried to win at anything, like everybody knows that the pain of losing is significantly more severe than the joy of winning.

770
00:51:00.733 --> 00:51:01.953
And it lasts much longer.

771
00:51:02.534 --> 00:51:07.655
Now, they eventually kind of bundled up a lot of their experiments, and they broadly called it prospect theory.

772
00:51:08.455 --> 00:51:11.636
And they would go on to win a Nobel Prize for it in 2002.

773
00:51:12.056 --> 00:51:14.637
Unfortunately, Tversky did not survive that long.

774
00:51:14.697 --> 00:51:23.500
But Kahneman has always insisted that the work was theirs together and has always given him credit for all of the work that they've done together.

775
00:51:24.220 --> 00:51:34.546
But it raises a really interesting question, which is that if loss aversion is very much just baked into our psychology, it seems to be hardwired in all of us.

776
00:51:35.166 --> 00:51:35.847
Why is it there?

777
00:51:36.287 --> 00:51:41.070
What are the circumstances in which we evolved that loss aversion would make sense in nature?

778
00:51:41.210 --> 00:51:42.310
It's kind of cruel, right?

779
00:51:42.330 --> 00:51:42.591
Right.

780
00:51:42.711 --> 00:51:47.333
And as we're going to find out that you can't train yourself out of it, you can't convince yourself.

781
00:51:47.353 --> 00:51:49.475
Like being aware of this does not change.

782
00:51:49.495 --> 00:51:49.635
Mm-hmm.

783
00:51:50.275 --> 00:51:52.357
the fact that it exists inside of your brain.

784
00:51:52.697 --> 00:51:58.261
It's pretty much a fundamental aspect of how we perceive risk and loss in our lives.

785
00:51:58.821 --> 00:51:59.882
So then the question is why?

786
00:52:00.502 --> 00:52:01.223
Why, Drew Bernhe?

787
00:52:01.743 --> 00:52:02.304
Just tell me why.

788
00:52:02.584 --> 00:52:04.025
It's very cruel, like I said, right?

789
00:52:04.085 --> 00:52:07.868
It seems like a very cruel thing of the universe, I guess, to deliver us this like...

790
00:52:08.328 --> 00:52:11.591
Pain hurts so much more than gaining something.

791
00:52:11.731 --> 00:52:15.134
You know, something good is not as equal as something that is equally bad.

792
00:52:15.154 --> 00:52:20.598
Like we're just, we experience pain so much more vividly and acutely than we do of gaining something, right?

793
00:52:20.678 --> 00:52:21.259
Why is that?

794
00:52:22.199 --> 00:52:24.681
If we look at, if we kind of step back a little bit.

795
00:52:25.482 --> 00:52:28.383
There's this really interesting study done on capuchin monkeys.

796
00:52:28.423 --> 00:52:28.743
Okay.

797
00:52:29.043 --> 00:52:33.765
You know, those capuchins are like the little, you think of the like little grinder, you know, like those little monkeys.

798
00:52:34.225 --> 00:52:35.086
You with the little symbols?

799
00:52:35.106 --> 00:52:35.926
Yeah, with the little symbols.

800
00:52:35.966 --> 00:52:36.326
Okay.

801
00:52:36.366 --> 00:52:36.986
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

802
00:52:37.026 --> 00:52:37.486
I like this.

803
00:52:37.606 --> 00:52:37.887
Right.

804
00:52:37.907 --> 00:52:38.027
Yeah.

805
00:52:38.067 --> 00:52:40.087
They're cute little monkeys, but they're smart too.

806
00:52:40.127 --> 00:52:40.407
Okay.

807
00:52:40.508 --> 00:52:42.808
But we diverged from them about like 40 million years ago.

808
00:52:42.848 --> 00:52:44.009
We're like a common ancestor.

809
00:52:44.029 --> 00:52:44.329
We haven't.

810
00:52:44.829 --> 00:52:46.310
have one of those for a very, very long time.

811
00:52:46.370 --> 00:52:51.353
But you can train them to operate in somewhat of an economy, right?

812
00:52:52.034 --> 00:53:03.522
This one researcher, Keith Channey's from Yale back in the 2000s, he trained these capuchins to basically trade aluminum coins that he made for apples and fruits like that, right?

813
00:53:03.562 --> 00:53:03.742
Yeah.

814
00:53:04.302 --> 00:53:05.723
And they figured it out pretty quick.

815
00:53:06.143 --> 00:53:08.544
They showed them that there was market fluctuations.

816
00:53:08.564 --> 00:53:14.106
Like some days apples would cost this much or this much, and the capuchins would participate in this economy.

817
00:53:14.146 --> 00:53:15.487
So they were smart enough to even do that.

818
00:53:16.327 --> 00:53:22.269
What they found out too is they kind of set up this experiment where you could test loss aversion.

819
00:53:22.990 --> 00:53:27.171
So they had one of the experimenters go, and they would offer them one apple.

820
00:53:27.472 --> 00:53:30.873
Every now and then they would give them two apples for the same coin, for the same aluminum coin.

821
00:53:31.333 --> 00:53:32.735
And monkeys figured this out.

822
00:53:32.775 --> 00:53:33.195
Okay, fine.

823
00:53:33.415 --> 00:53:40.181
So you got another researcher that would come in and would show them, present them two apples, but would sometimes take one apple away.

824
00:53:40.922 --> 00:53:46.427
But on average, they were always getting the same number, like 1.4 apples or something like that on average, right?

825
00:53:46.547 --> 00:53:48.729
For every time that they would give them one of these coins.

826
00:53:49.650 --> 00:53:52.332
Even those monkeys, though, at that point, they preferred the first person.

827
00:53:53.490 --> 00:53:56.532
Who would guarantee them one and sometimes give them an extra one.

828
00:53:56.632 --> 00:53:56.832
Yeah.

829
00:53:56.972 --> 00:53:59.974
They didn't like the one who would give them two and then sometimes take one away.

830
00:54:00.154 --> 00:54:00.374
Right.

831
00:54:00.394 --> 00:54:08.740
So even in that context, like this monkey that we haven't shared an ancestor with for 40 million years has loss aversion.

832
00:54:08.940 --> 00:54:14.743
They would rather take that sure gain rather than have something that would be taken away from them.

833
00:54:14.863 --> 00:54:15.003
Yeah.

834
00:54:15.023 --> 00:54:15.304
Okay.

835
00:54:16.164 --> 00:54:21.347
It is about 71% of the trades, about 70% of the trades shook out like that.

836
00:54:21.788 --> 00:54:24.609
And they've actually shown this in other primate species too.

837
00:54:24.769 --> 00:54:25.810
One's even closer to this too.

838
00:54:25.830 --> 00:54:32.914
So chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, they all show this, what they call endowment effect, which is basically what you're talking about.

839
00:54:32.934 --> 00:54:37.978
It is when you have something, you would prefer to hang onto it rather than trade it for something else.

840
00:54:38.398 --> 00:54:43.341
Even if that other thing might be a little bit more valuable, you're going to take the sure bet more likely because you don't want to,

841
00:54:43.641 --> 00:54:44.781
experience that loss.

842
00:54:44.921 --> 00:54:45.122
Yeah.

843
00:54:45.262 --> 00:54:45.522
Okay.

844
00:54:45.862 --> 00:54:51.263
So it seems to be very, very ancient hardware that we have like in the mammalian brain.

845
00:54:51.404 --> 00:55:02.267
And in fact, it is what the neuroscientific studies that they've done on this have found very ancient parts of our brain that are involved with this very deep mammalian structures.

846
00:55:02.287 --> 00:55:05.468
It kind of splits in these like two systems.

847
00:55:05.508 --> 00:55:11.210
You have a system that evaluates subjective value of whatever it is in the environment that you're hanging on to.

848
00:55:12.110 --> 00:55:19.658
And then the systems associated with like negative emotions and both of these fire up whenever we're experiencing a loss like this.

849
00:55:19.718 --> 00:55:24.102
And so it's, and then it's very ancient, these very ancient brain systems that are in like all mammals.

850
00:55:24.463 --> 00:55:26.505
So it seems to be very, very hardwired into us.

851
00:55:26.845 --> 00:55:26.985
Now,

852
00:55:27.981 --> 00:55:29.442
the question you asked was why?

853
00:55:30.322 --> 00:55:31.342
Why would it be that way?

854
00:55:31.762 --> 00:55:41.965
And if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, most of our history as a species has kind of, we've been living on the edge of survival, right?

855
00:55:41.986 --> 00:55:43.806
We're on the margin of survival.

856
00:55:44.066 --> 00:55:50.048
On that margin, if you get a windfall of some resource, food or whatever it is, that's kind of nice.

857
00:55:50.088 --> 00:55:52.369
It's gonna get you through another month or two, maybe at the most.

858
00:55:53.229 --> 00:55:57.492
If you lose something in that same environment, though, you could be dead next week.

859
00:55:57.852 --> 00:55:59.133
There's an asymmetry going on there.

860
00:55:59.293 --> 00:55:59.473
Right.

861
00:55:59.713 --> 00:56:01.094
You lose something, you're dead.

862
00:56:01.134 --> 00:56:02.355
If you gain something, eh.

863
00:56:02.635 --> 00:56:03.316
You live a little longer.

864
00:56:03.336 --> 00:56:04.436
You live a little bit longer.

865
00:56:04.656 --> 00:56:05.337
Yeah.

866
00:56:05.357 --> 00:56:13.042
So there's an asymmetry there where the loss is much more significant in terms of your survival than a gain would be in that situation.

867
00:56:13.402 --> 00:56:16.543
Kahneman and Tversky figured out is that that's about a two to one ratio.

868
00:56:16.723 --> 00:56:16.943
Yeah.

869
00:56:17.064 --> 00:56:23.706
And so that's why you would have this bias towards wanting to hang on to things and not lose them.

870
00:56:24.066 --> 00:56:24.306
Right.

871
00:56:24.587 --> 00:56:32.890
The problem comes in is that we're using this ancient evolutionary hardware on modern problems that don't have those same types of consequences.

872
00:56:33.030 --> 00:56:33.270
Right.

873
00:56:33.310 --> 00:56:33.530
Right.

874
00:56:33.690 --> 00:56:37.492
So, like, if you're going to lose 50 bucks or something like that, that's going to be the, like...

875
00:56:38.672 --> 00:56:46.558
emotionally the same as gaining $100, the valence there is completely skewed, when that doesn't really have a whole lot of bearing on your life now.

876
00:56:46.678 --> 00:57:03.131
Or like you're looking at your quarterly reports at your job or something like that, and if you see the loss on there, you're registering a loss in your brain using that ancient hardware and that ancient software going on, and it's registering as, oh, this is a threat to my survival, when it's really not.

877
00:57:03.991 --> 00:57:09.237
So that's the theory, the evolutionary mismatch theory anyway, is that we're applying these in all these wrong ways.

878
00:57:09.357 --> 00:57:14.542
I think it's exacerbated by the fact that you could probably answer to that in modern life.

879
00:57:15.959 --> 00:57:19.022
the gain of something is worth more than the loss of the thing, right?

880
00:57:19.042 --> 00:57:21.163
Like if you just think about money, right?

881
00:57:21.203 --> 00:57:23.885
Like the more money you make, the easier it is to make more.

882
00:57:24.026 --> 00:57:24.266
Yeah.

883
00:57:24.426 --> 00:57:25.587
That's pretty well established.

884
00:57:25.867 --> 00:57:29.330
Like financial wealth compounds in all sorts of different ways.

885
00:57:29.830 --> 00:57:39.538
Whereas like losing money, I mean, sure, you can go broke, but like you can't really, I mean, you can go into debt, you can declare bankruptcy and kind of start over.

886
00:57:39.718 --> 00:57:44.202
I would argue that the asymmetry today is actually the other way.

887
00:57:44.602 --> 00:57:45.083
I feel like,

888
00:57:45.783 --> 00:58:07.979
probably people who are very intelligent risk takers, financial risk takers, whether it's traders, finance people, entrepreneurs, even executives at large corporations, they probably have gotten good at fighting against their loss aversion, leaning against it, not listening to it.

889
00:58:08.906 --> 00:58:12.928
Yeah, it's easy to do this in terms of business and stuff like that.

890
00:58:12.948 --> 00:58:16.030
We also do it in a lot of other areas of our life, though, too, right?

891
00:58:16.790 --> 00:58:21.113
A breakup hurts a lot more than getting into a new relationship feels good, right?

892
00:58:21.753 --> 00:58:22.493
I think that's a big one.

893
00:58:22.513 --> 00:58:28.056
I think there's a lot of people who are like, oh, I took this for granted, and then I lost it, and then all of a sudden you feel all this weight coming down on it.

894
00:58:28.096 --> 00:58:29.737
That's loss aversion.

895
00:58:29.937 --> 00:58:32.519
You took the relationship for granted or something like that, and then...

896
00:58:33.359 --> 00:58:35.341
Once it's gone, then it hurts so much.

897
00:58:35.421 --> 00:58:36.202
That's loss aversion.

898
00:58:36.522 --> 00:58:37.823
That also is loss aversion.

899
00:58:37.843 --> 00:58:39.765
Or losing a job too.

900
00:58:39.865 --> 00:58:42.827
Just like you're saying, that's probably a good thing in this.

901
00:58:42.867 --> 00:58:45.009
You'll find a better job or there's more jobs out there, right?

902
00:58:45.029 --> 00:58:46.490
Yeah, but it still feels worse.

903
00:58:46.510 --> 00:58:48.472
It stings more than it is any gain.

904
00:58:48.512 --> 00:58:49.433
And anybody will tell you this.

905
00:58:49.473 --> 00:58:54.357
Anybody who's acquired any sort of success will tell you this, that the losses hurt more than the gains.

906
00:58:54.397 --> 00:58:56.439
The gains are never as good as you think they're going to be.

907
00:58:56.839 --> 00:58:57.540
That's baked in.

908
00:58:57.640 --> 00:58:58.420
That's hardwired in.

909
00:58:58.460 --> 00:59:00.202
And we can't get around it.

910
00:59:00.442 --> 00:59:07.907
I think probably the most interesting example of loss aversion that I found was there was a really interesting study done in 2011 on golfers.

911
00:59:08.388 --> 00:59:09.348
Great title of a paper.

912
00:59:09.528 --> 00:59:11.290
It's called, Is Tiger Woods Loss Averse?

913
00:59:12.050 --> 00:59:15.292
And basically it's these two guys, Pope and Schweitzer.

914
00:59:15.773 --> 00:59:23.758
They, they analyze two and a half million putts on the PGA tour, over 400 different pros, 239 tournaments.

915
00:59:23.898 --> 00:59:27.280
It's actually a really interesting way that they set up the study.

916
00:59:27.320 --> 00:59:27.481
So,

917
00:59:28.121 --> 00:59:34.227
For people who don't play a lot of golf, there are things called birdies, which is kind of the equivalent of gaining a point.

918
00:59:34.307 --> 00:59:38.631
And then there are things called par, which is not losing a point.

919
00:59:38.831 --> 00:59:40.933
You stay at the same number.

920
00:59:41.654 --> 00:59:45.397
So you could view putting for a birdie as putting to gain a point.

921
00:59:45.617 --> 00:59:47.659
And you could view putting for par as...

922
00:59:48.607 --> 00:59:49.828
putting to not lose a point.

923
00:59:49.848 --> 00:59:50.829
Not lose, okay, all right.

924
00:59:50.849 --> 01:00:03.239
So what these researchers did is that they took the exact same golf courses, they took putts of the exact same distance, same exact location, but different players in different circumstances, either birdie putts or par putts,

925
01:00:04.019 --> 01:00:07.200
And they analyzed all millions and millions of putts.

926
01:00:07.220 --> 01:00:11.102
They analyzed the distance, location, direction, everything, apples to apples.

927
01:00:11.762 --> 01:00:16.584
And they found a significant difference in terms of the accuracy of birdie putts versus par putts.

928
01:00:16.704 --> 01:00:18.985
So birdie putts, they go in 83.5% of the time.

929
01:00:19.005 --> 01:00:19.906
Par putts go in 88% of the time.

930
01:00:23.741 --> 01:00:24.321
Which is crazy.

931
01:00:24.441 --> 01:00:24.641
Yeah.

932
01:00:24.741 --> 01:00:26.222
Like there shouldn't be any difference.

933
01:00:26.242 --> 01:00:26.462
Right.

934
01:00:26.702 --> 01:00:26.922
Right?

935
01:00:27.342 --> 01:00:28.563
So you're saying, hold on.

936
01:00:28.583 --> 01:00:30.864
So you're saying like, let's say it's a birdie putt at 10 feet.

937
01:00:31.104 --> 01:00:31.284
Yes.

938
01:00:31.304 --> 01:00:32.985
And it's a par putt at 10 feet.

939
01:00:33.525 --> 01:00:34.445
In the same direction.

940
01:00:34.465 --> 01:00:36.046
Same direction, same spot, same everything.

941
01:00:36.086 --> 01:00:36.346
Yes.

942
01:00:36.586 --> 01:00:38.787
They're more likely to make the par putt than the birdie putt.

943
01:00:38.827 --> 01:00:39.147
Correct.

944
01:00:39.207 --> 01:00:39.467
Okay.

945
01:00:39.547 --> 01:00:39.727
Okay.

946
01:00:39.747 --> 01:00:39.847
Okay.

947
01:00:39.907 --> 01:00:44.949
And the argument, the conclusion is that players are paying a lot more attention.

948
01:00:44.969 --> 01:00:46.190
They're much more focused.

949
01:00:47.110 --> 01:00:48.091
They take more time.

950
01:00:48.371 --> 01:00:49.372
They're much more diligent.

951
01:00:49.772 --> 01:00:51.533
They're much more careful with their swing.

952
01:00:51.813 --> 01:00:53.434
They're afraid to lose a stroke.

953
01:00:53.454 --> 01:00:54.895
They're afraid to lose.

954
01:00:54.915 --> 01:00:55.035
Okay.

955
01:00:55.055 --> 01:00:58.077
So they put more effort into the par putts than they do the birdie putts.

956
01:00:58.257 --> 01:00:58.758
Interesting.

957
01:00:58.838 --> 01:01:00.259
And then that shows up in the result.

958
01:01:00.459 --> 01:01:00.839
Okay.

959
01:01:01.299 --> 01:01:03.541
So they're loss averse in that situation.

960
01:01:03.561 --> 01:01:04.441
They are loss averse.

961
01:01:04.702 --> 01:01:05.042
Okay.

962
01:01:05.482 --> 01:01:11.464
So what's interesting is that the loss aversion, it mellowed as the tournament went on.

963
01:01:11.544 --> 01:01:13.705
So like golf tournaments, they go on for four days usually.

964
01:01:14.285 --> 01:01:21.068
And the further you get into the tournament, you're no longer really playing against the course, which is what you do on day one.

965
01:01:21.408 --> 01:01:22.628
You're playing against the other golfers.

966
01:01:23.069 --> 01:01:29.271
By day four, you know how many strokes behind you are the person in front of you, how many strokes ahead you are of the person behind you.

967
01:01:29.951 --> 01:01:37.340
And so what you see is the loss aversion stops showing up with birdie and par putts, and it starts showing up with their placement on the scoreboard.

968
01:01:38.221 --> 01:01:38.621
Interesting.

969
01:01:38.641 --> 01:01:45.209
So the standard changes, the relevant metric changes, and their behavior changes because of that.

970
01:01:45.470 --> 01:01:45.730
Yes.

971
01:01:46.230 --> 01:01:47.812
And this is a nice little metaphor of...

972
01:01:48.513 --> 01:01:50.856
how we're gonna approach failure throughout this episode.

973
01:01:51.156 --> 01:01:52.598
Loss aversion never changes.

974
01:01:53.198 --> 01:01:57.263
What you are loss averse to changes based on your definition of failure.

975
01:01:57.503 --> 01:02:03.990
So when the definition of failure is bogeying on a hole of golf, you experience loss aversion there.

976
01:02:04.330 --> 01:02:09.576
But when that definition of loss changes to falling behind the guy ranked behind you,

977
01:02:10.637 --> 01:02:13.239
then that becomes what you become loss averse to.

978
01:02:13.379 --> 01:02:14.220
Oh, interesting.

979
01:02:14.320 --> 01:02:14.721
Okay.

980
01:02:14.941 --> 01:02:15.881
That's fascinating.

981
01:02:16.282 --> 01:02:16.542
Okay.

982
01:02:16.602 --> 01:02:16.842
Okay.

983
01:02:16.862 --> 01:02:18.444
So that's, that's all well and good.

984
01:02:19.484 --> 01:02:22.687
We don't want to fall behind the leaderboard in golf.

985
01:02:23.207 --> 01:02:26.430
We want the best treats that we can trade for all of that.

986
01:02:26.590 --> 01:02:34.937
Like, why does it hurt so bad when there really isn't anything being lost or like there's no physical damage, like physical pain makes sense, right?

987
01:02:34.997 --> 01:02:35.277
Yeah.

988
01:02:35.497 --> 01:02:36.118
And like damage.

989
01:02:36.438 --> 01:02:37.499
And like a golf game, right?

990
01:02:37.539 --> 01:02:40.260
Like you lose a golf game, nobody died.

991
01:02:40.480 --> 01:02:40.620
Right.

992
01:02:40.640 --> 01:02:43.301
Like nobody's going to die, but like people get really upset.

993
01:02:43.341 --> 01:02:43.481
Right.

994
01:02:43.661 --> 01:02:43.981
Why?

995
01:02:44.181 --> 01:02:44.361
Yeah.

996
01:02:44.562 --> 01:02:45.662
Why do they do that, right?

997
01:02:46.202 --> 01:02:50.564
There's something inside of you that is treating that as some kind of injury of some sort, obviously.

998
01:02:50.704 --> 01:02:51.605
But what is that?

999
01:02:51.665 --> 01:02:51.825
Like-

1000
01:02:52.745 --> 01:02:55.347
what is being injured throughout all of this, right?

1001
01:02:55.367 --> 01:02:59.230
Well, it turns out there was this researcher in the 90s, Mark Leary.

1002
01:02:59.570 --> 01:03:02.692
He came up with this idea of what he calls the sociometer, right?

1003
01:03:02.812 --> 01:03:07.275
And it's really what it is, is it's tracking your status within a social group.

1004
01:03:07.635 --> 01:03:16.101
So, you know, in our evolutionary past, we grew up in these small groups and letting someone down, failing something, that actually, that had real stakes to it, right?

1005
01:03:16.441 --> 01:03:18.263
And so you would lose status.

1006
01:03:19.183 --> 01:03:24.670
in that situation if you were to fail other people, especially in that situation.

1007
01:03:24.710 --> 01:03:29.016
And losing status meant you could be left alone, which meant you could die, right?

1008
01:03:29.316 --> 01:03:31.619
There was like real stakes involved with this.

1009
01:03:31.979 --> 01:03:34.402
So it's not this like cold calculation that we're doing either.

1010
01:03:34.422 --> 01:03:34.522
It's,

1011
01:03:35.163 --> 01:03:35.963
It's got to hurt.

1012
01:03:36.283 --> 01:03:36.644
Yeah.

1013
01:03:37.004 --> 01:03:41.586
It has to hurt for you to be motivated to not want to fail and not want to let other people down like this.

1014
01:03:41.726 --> 01:03:42.126
Yeah.

1015
01:03:42.146 --> 01:03:43.706
Again, this is what he called the sociometer.

1016
01:03:44.026 --> 01:03:48.808
It comes back to the fact that like pain at the end of the day is an evolutionary tool.

1017
01:03:49.008 --> 01:03:55.771
It's a nudge towards behavior that's going to help you survive and replicate or at least helped us survive and replicate for hundreds of thousands of years.

1018
01:03:56.051 --> 01:04:00.313
And so in this case, it's like, okay, even if it is an arbitrary game, even if it is just something.

1019
01:04:01.193 --> 01:04:29.782
as simple as like who can carry the biggest rock or whatever in their caveman days stuff like that mattered because it indicated who was the most reliable who was going to help the tribe the most who could save your life when you needed it uh who could hunt the biggest game when it came down to it and then status began began to become attached to that and so we have this like internal measurement gage inside of our head at all time trying to gauge how much status do we have with the group

1020
01:04:30.642 --> 01:04:32.783
And it happens like almost automatically too.

1021
01:04:33.423 --> 01:04:40.987
Even if you don't know the people around you, if there's any sense of there's a status thing going on, you latch onto that and you try to figure out exactly where you're sitting within that.

1022
01:04:41.348 --> 01:04:45.849
which is really interesting set of studies that was done by Leary and others, too.

1023
01:04:46.690 --> 01:04:54.712
That was they brought people into the lab and they had strangers were assigned to these meaningless groups.

1024
01:04:54.792 --> 01:04:59.914
There wasn't really any meaning to them, but they were told that they would either be included or excluded by the group.

1025
01:05:00.594 --> 01:05:06.296
OK, just people would be like people are either going to accept you or deny you based on just some arbitrary criteria, whatever it was.

1026
01:05:07.036 --> 01:05:09.278
Even that the people who you never met.

1027
01:05:09.618 --> 01:05:09.818
Okay.

1028
01:05:09.838 --> 01:05:10.579
These are strangers.

1029
01:05:10.659 --> 01:05:11.620
People had never met before.

1030
01:05:12.080 --> 01:05:12.901
You'd never meet again.

1031
01:05:13.261 --> 01:05:23.029
Tasks that you were doing within this group that didn't matter if you were excluded or included, like had a had an effect on how you felt about yourself in that situation.

1032
01:05:23.529 --> 01:05:24.790
Yeah, that's how ingrained it is.

1033
01:05:24.831 --> 01:05:26.512
And you could tell your status from that.

1034
01:05:26.832 --> 01:05:31.856
If you told them, if you told the people that this was just random, like your status is just decided randomly, it didn't matter.

1035
01:05:32.176 --> 01:05:40.342
But if you said there's other people judging you based on this, people you didn't know, again, would never interact with again, doing tasks you never, that don't mean anything.

1036
01:05:40.482 --> 01:05:41.663
That's how innate it is.

1037
01:05:41.683 --> 01:05:42.363
It's so funny.

1038
01:05:42.744 --> 01:05:45.305
So have you ever, have you ever like volunteered for a psych study?

1039
01:05:45.626 --> 01:05:45.786
Yeah.

1040
01:05:45.906 --> 01:05:46.106
Yeah.

1041
01:05:46.186 --> 01:05:46.446
Yeah.

1042
01:05:46.466 --> 01:05:47.847
So I used to do it in college a lot.

1043
01:05:47.927 --> 01:05:48.107
Yeah.

1044
01:05:48.188 --> 01:05:50.049
And I would do anything for 10 bucks back then.

1045
01:05:50.109 --> 01:05:50.349
Exactly.

1046
01:05:50.369 --> 01:05:50.929
Exactly.

1047
01:05:50.990 --> 01:05:51.370
Exactly.

1048
01:05:51.730 --> 01:05:56.912
And I remember I used to go in and it was always really funny because, yeah, they just put you in a room of strangers.

1049
01:05:57.272 --> 01:05:58.752
You have no idea what you're there for.

1050
01:05:58.852 --> 01:06:00.112
You have no idea what you're going to do.

1051
01:06:00.233 --> 01:06:03.293
Like, they come in and they ask you to do, like, some very random thing.

1052
01:06:04.194 --> 01:06:10.315
And I'm just thinking back and imagining, like, walking into that room with, like, five or ten other people.

1053
01:06:10.856 --> 01:06:14.797
And then having the researcher just look at me and be like, who here wants Mark to stay?

1054
01:06:14.897 --> 01:06:16.857
And, like, nobody raises their hand.

1055
01:06:17.177 --> 01:06:18.858
I would be so fucking pissed.

1056
01:06:19.058 --> 01:06:21.720
I would be like, fuck all you people.

1057
01:06:21.880 --> 01:06:22.480
Fuck you.

1058
01:06:22.540 --> 01:06:23.501
Who do you think you are?

1059
01:06:24.001 --> 01:06:24.201
Right?

1060
01:06:24.241 --> 01:06:27.003
And it could be who cares what the reason is for it, right?

1061
01:06:27.023 --> 01:06:31.266
Like, it's just imagining that happening is enough to, like...

1062
01:06:32.179 --> 01:06:34.520
Yeah, I can imagine the emotion that would come up.

1063
01:06:34.840 --> 01:06:39.962
Importantly, in these studies too, what they found is that it's really the exclusion.

1064
01:06:40.002 --> 01:06:42.323
It's this loss aversion going on again, okay?

1065
01:06:42.884 --> 01:06:49.767
Because when the same was true when you were included in the group, they found the people who were, yeah, oh yeah, you were accepted into the group and you're good.

1066
01:06:50.487 --> 01:06:51.047
They felt fine.

1067
01:06:51.107 --> 01:06:52.228
They're like, okay, fine, whatever.

1068
01:06:52.648 --> 01:06:59.652
It's when you're excluded that the pain really came in, that that was measurable and they got a measurable response from that, that people would just felt worse about themselves.

1069
01:06:59.672 --> 01:07:03.675
That sociometer really took a hit only during the exclusions.

1070
01:07:03.775 --> 01:07:05.355
It's a threat detection system.

1071
01:07:05.395 --> 01:07:07.857
It's not a bonus reward system or anything like that.

1072
01:07:08.177 --> 01:07:09.898
You don't get to feel good because you get included.

1073
01:07:10.179 --> 01:07:12.040
You only feel bad because you're excluded.

1074
01:07:12.220 --> 01:07:13.922
It's loss aversion is what it is.

1075
01:07:14.542 --> 01:07:15.843
But it's at the social level.

1076
01:07:15.963 --> 01:07:20.347
Losing social status is really the measure that hurts the most.

1077
01:07:20.547 --> 01:07:21.628
You know what this reminds me of?

1078
01:07:22.068 --> 01:07:24.350
You didn't go out to many nightclubs, did you?

1079
01:07:24.791 --> 01:07:25.571
I was not a clubber.

1080
01:07:25.771 --> 01:07:26.492
Good for you.

1081
01:07:26.532 --> 01:07:26.712
Yeah.

1082
01:07:26.772 --> 01:07:27.753
Good for you.

1083
01:07:27.773 --> 01:07:29.554
The biggest waste of fucking time and money.

1084
01:07:29.594 --> 01:07:30.055
Yeah.

1085
01:07:30.575 --> 01:07:30.795
Ever.

1086
01:07:30.995 --> 01:07:32.336
I went to way too many clubs.

1087
01:07:32.456 --> 01:07:50.001
And a lot of nightclubs, especially in big cities like New York and London, they have a setup where it's like you have the VIP section, right, where you have to pay a ridiculous amount of money to basically sit at a table behind a velvet rope where it's just as loud and shitty as the people on the other side.

1088
01:07:50.021 --> 01:07:50.861
An arbitrary standard, yeah.

1089
01:07:50.881 --> 01:07:52.061
It's completely arbitrary.

1090
01:07:52.562 --> 01:07:56.883
And it was funny because I remember when I was young and broke and I used to go out to clubs all the time,

1091
01:07:57.623 --> 01:07:58.604
You know, I would sit there.

1092
01:07:58.624 --> 01:08:04.568
I'd be like one of the cattle herd, like crammed into the middle of the bar, waiting 20 minutes to get a drink.

1093
01:08:05.343 --> 01:08:13.328
And I would look over at the VIP area, and they all have their own waitresses, and the waitresses are super hot, and there's champagne bottles and sparklers and everything.

1094
01:08:13.908 --> 01:08:16.950
I'd be like, man, it must be so cool to be in there.

1095
01:08:17.231 --> 01:08:19.472
It'd be so much nicer, so much easier.

1096
01:08:19.532 --> 01:08:20.693
You could talk to people.

1097
01:08:20.713 --> 01:08:21.813
You can meet a bunch of girls.

1098
01:08:22.334 --> 01:08:24.415
And I used to think that for years in my early 20s.

1099
01:08:24.515 --> 01:08:31.700
And then I remember once I got a little bit older and I got some money, I went out to a couple clubs, and I bought VIP tables for me and my friends.

1100
01:08:31.720 --> 01:08:32.180
Yeah.

1101
01:08:32.540 --> 01:08:35.881
I just remember sitting there and being like, this is so dumb.

1102
01:08:35.901 --> 01:08:37.642
This is so fucking stupid.

1103
01:08:37.762 --> 01:08:38.182
Exactly.

1104
01:08:38.402 --> 01:08:40.543
I just wasted so much money for nothing.

1105
01:08:40.763 --> 01:08:41.143
Exactly.

1106
01:08:41.223 --> 01:08:41.663
Nothing.

1107
01:08:41.783 --> 01:08:42.043
Yeah.

1108
01:08:42.284 --> 01:08:44.204
So getting included had almost zero benefit.

1109
01:08:44.224 --> 01:08:44.784
Zero benefit.

1110
01:08:44.845 --> 01:08:45.125
Yeah.

1111
01:08:45.185 --> 01:08:45.745
Zero benefit.

1112
01:08:45.765 --> 01:08:46.925
Being excluded hurt like hell.

1113
01:08:46.985 --> 01:08:47.205
Yes.

1114
01:08:47.265 --> 01:08:47.545
Yeah.

1115
01:08:47.766 --> 01:08:47.986
Yeah.

1116
01:08:48.166 --> 01:08:51.427
That's exactly the sociometer's mechanism there.

1117
01:08:51.467 --> 01:08:51.667
Yeah.

1118
01:08:51.927 --> 01:08:59.333
And again, it just comes back to that whole loss aversion thing, like losing status with our evolutionarily ancient brains that we have.

1119
01:09:00.114 --> 01:09:04.358
That signaled literal death at one point in our evolutionary past, right?

1120
01:09:04.458 --> 01:09:04.698
Yeah.

1121
01:09:04.998 --> 01:09:09.582
It's just being kind of hijacked now in a lot of these situations.

1122
01:09:09.602 --> 01:09:14.606
That's a perfect example of when it's being hijacked in a way that's screwing you over, basically.

1123
01:09:14.666 --> 01:09:16.168
And there's a lot of places that...

1124
01:09:17.203 --> 01:09:39.478
we'll mess with you you know different status games and um you know airlines do this right with their statuses and points and you know do you get the premium economy seat or did you get a free upgrade to like the you know special extra legroom seat you know and it's and people love it it really taps into something extremely primal in us yeah yeah it does even if it's super arbitrary like you're saying yeah

1125
01:09:39.818 --> 01:09:42.540
So, yeah, there's another thing, too, like you've kind of been hinting at.

1126
01:09:42.580 --> 01:09:44.201
You can't really talk yourself out of this.

1127
01:09:44.361 --> 01:09:44.541
Yeah.

1128
01:09:44.561 --> 01:09:46.342
You can't reason your way out.

1129
01:09:46.522 --> 01:09:49.684
Even if you know about it, it really doesn't change a whole lot.

1130
01:09:50.264 --> 01:09:53.986
One of these studies that they did as well was they had participants.

1131
01:09:54.006 --> 01:09:56.888
They would speak into a microphone and just talk about themselves.

1132
01:09:57.428 --> 01:10:00.370
And then they received feedback from a quote-unquote stranger.

1133
01:10:00.390 --> 01:10:04.873
It was just the researchers, basically, that either accepted or rejected their stories.

1134
01:10:04.893 --> 01:10:05.733
Like, this was a good story.

1135
01:10:05.753 --> 01:10:07.875
This wasn't a bad story that you just told about yourself, right?

1136
01:10:07.895 --> 01:10:08.555
Yeah.

1137
01:10:08.635 --> 01:10:12.857
The rejected participants, they would dismiss these impressions.

1138
01:10:13.318 --> 01:10:13.658
Whatever.

1139
01:10:13.718 --> 01:10:15.799
These people, I don't care about these people.

1140
01:10:15.819 --> 01:10:16.579
It doesn't matter.

1141
01:10:16.939 --> 01:10:17.920
Somebody I don't know.

1142
01:10:18.280 --> 01:10:21.502
But when they measure their sociometer status kind of thing.

1143
01:10:21.522 --> 01:10:22.462
How they felt about themselves.

1144
01:10:22.502 --> 01:10:25.544
How they felt about themselves later, it actually still went down no matter what.

1145
01:10:25.564 --> 01:10:25.884
Wow.

1146
01:10:25.904 --> 01:10:29.526
Even if you had that self-talk, like we always say, oh, just screw them.

1147
01:10:29.546 --> 01:10:30.567
They don't know what they're talking about.

1148
01:10:30.587 --> 01:10:31.687
It's like the comment section.

1149
01:10:31.707 --> 01:10:33.168
Yeah, the comment section.

1150
01:10:33.328 --> 01:10:33.628
Dude.

1151
01:10:34.009 --> 01:10:34.769
It digs at you, doesn't it?

1152
01:10:35.029 --> 01:10:35.509
It still digs at you.

1153
01:10:35.529 --> 01:10:36.290
I mean, it's what...

1154
01:10:37.761 --> 01:10:42.727
It's so funny because it's like, I know it doesn't matter, but it's like, it's still, it still just sucks.

1155
01:10:42.787 --> 01:10:43.068
Yeah.

1156
01:10:43.328 --> 01:10:43.608
Yeah.

1157
01:10:43.769 --> 01:10:45.030
And you were like good feedback.

1158
01:10:45.050 --> 01:10:46.112
You're like, oh, that's, that was nice.

1159
01:10:46.212 --> 01:10:46.833
Yeah, exactly.

1160
01:10:46.873 --> 01:10:48.374
Like there'll be hundreds and hundreds of comments.

1161
01:10:48.394 --> 01:10:49.456
But you'll hang on to that one.

1162
01:10:49.476 --> 01:10:49.596
Right.

1163
01:10:49.616 --> 01:10:52.580
And then one person like makes fun of my hair or my shoes or something.

1164
01:10:52.600 --> 01:10:54.422
And I'm like, oh, fuck you.

1165
01:10:55.623 --> 01:10:56.824
Joey Baloney, 648.

1166
01:10:56.965 --> 01:10:57.345
Right.

1167
01:10:57.425 --> 01:10:57.685
Yeah.

1168
01:10:57.986 --> 01:10:58.626
What do you know?

1169
01:10:58.686 --> 01:10:58.886
Yeah.

1170
01:10:59.307 --> 01:11:01.669
People that you don't know will never interact with again.

1171
01:11:01.689 --> 01:11:02.029
Yeah.

1172
01:11:02.169 --> 01:11:03.270
And arbitrary standards.

1173
01:11:03.430 --> 01:11:03.631
Yeah.

1174
01:11:03.671 --> 01:11:03.871
Yep.

1175
01:11:03.931 --> 01:11:05.272
Fucking mammalian brain.

1176
01:11:06.313 --> 01:11:07.174
Can't get away from it.

1177
01:11:07.374 --> 01:11:07.634
Yeah.

1178
01:11:08.295 --> 01:11:08.435
No.

1179
01:11:08.575 --> 01:11:09.576
Well, exactly.

1180
01:11:09.596 --> 01:11:13.960
You know, when somebody rejects us for something completely arbitrary, right?

1181
01:11:13.980 --> 01:11:15.341
Like, and we're not actually losing it.

1182
01:11:15.361 --> 01:11:17.343
You know, it's like we lose a golf game or we lose...

1183
01:11:17.843 --> 01:11:23.868
you know, Joe Blow next to us that can carry a bigger rock or, you know, run faster than us.

1184
01:11:23.888 --> 01:11:25.209
Like, why do we feel so bad?

1185
01:11:25.229 --> 01:11:26.549
Like, what is actually being harmed?

1186
01:11:26.990 --> 01:11:29.652
It was funny because when you said that, the first thing that came to my mind was the ego.

1187
01:11:30.292 --> 01:11:33.515
And it's interesting because if you actually go back to...

1188
01:11:34.275 --> 01:11:34.976
Freud's theory.

1189
01:11:35.316 --> 01:11:39.159
You know, we've done a whole episode on, on the ego unsolved.

1190
01:11:39.440 --> 01:11:41.061
People can, can go back and listen to it.

1191
01:11:42.082 --> 01:11:48.127
The TLDR is that Freud's original theory about the ego has just been completely butchered over the years.

1192
01:11:48.227 --> 01:11:52.951
And, and people have a very, almost like a cartoonish understanding of what, what the ego is.

1193
01:11:53.031 --> 01:11:53.132
And,

1194
01:11:53.692 --> 01:11:55.454
the purpose it serves us psychologically.

1195
01:11:55.795 --> 01:12:04.746
The real understanding of the ego, Freud's actual explanation of what the ego is, ties in perfectly with the sociometer theory, right?

1196
01:12:04.786 --> 01:12:07.930
Like, Freud's argument is that we have two primary...

1197
01:12:08.831 --> 01:12:10.534
incentives in our lives.

1198
01:12:11.195 --> 01:12:14.820
One is our instinctual urges and just base drives.

1199
01:12:14.840 --> 01:12:19.887
And then one is the culture and social influence around us, right?

1200
01:12:20.408 --> 01:12:22.852
We want to satisfy our urges and needs.

1201
01:12:23.673 --> 01:12:34.696
But we also want people to approve of us, people to like us, to have social status, to fit in the cultural norms, social norms, to be seen, you know, to be respected and admired and all those things.

1202
01:12:35.356 --> 01:12:39.917
And the ego is the self-definition that balances those two things.

1203
01:12:40.057 --> 01:12:41.438
The ego is it is the.

1204
01:12:42.778 --> 01:12:56.868
The bundle of narratives we tell about ourselves that exist to help us both get our fundamental needs met and satisfy our urges, but also do it in a way that doesn't make everybody hate us, doesn't get us kicked out of the tribe.

1205
01:12:57.483 --> 01:13:01.266
Yeah, I had a psychology professor explain it really well one time, I think.

1206
01:13:01.366 --> 01:13:07.711
So you have your urges and your base desires and everything like that, and you have society's expectations on top of you.

1207
01:13:07.991 --> 01:13:10.933
And then the ego comes in and says, wait, I have a plan.

1208
01:13:11.814 --> 01:13:14.716
I thought that was a really good way to say what the ego is.

1209
01:13:14.736 --> 01:13:15.336
I got it, guys.

1210
01:13:15.396 --> 01:13:16.017
I got this.

1211
01:13:17.418 --> 01:13:19.539
But what's interesting about the ego is that it is we...

1212
01:13:21.100 --> 01:13:38.073
protect it as if it's part of ourselves right like and when the ego is threatened or attacked we feel the same physiological response that we do if our body is threatened or attacked and so when we talk about failure failure of social status failure of like losing the respect and admiration of others

1213
01:13:38.853 --> 01:13:41.594
It very much is a threat to the ego, right?

1214
01:13:41.634 --> 01:13:48.597
Because it is a threat to our self-understanding of how we feel about ourselves and how we see ourselves.

1215
01:13:48.817 --> 01:13:51.579
And sure enough, you see this in the research as well.

1216
01:13:51.599 --> 01:14:00.783
Like people will experience the pain of failure, even when they're alone by themselves, even when nobody's around and nobody can see what happened or what they're doing, right?

1217
01:14:00.823 --> 01:14:07.486
Like we still, even if you're alone in your room, trying to do a thing that you think is important, when you fail at it, you're going to feel like a loser.

1218
01:14:07.506 --> 01:14:07.606
Yeah.

1219
01:14:08.226 --> 01:14:13.907
And the reason is, is because that sociometer, it doesn't turn off when you're by yourself.

1220
01:14:14.507 --> 01:14:16.008
It still exists within you.

1221
01:14:16.248 --> 01:14:21.269
And you are always using it to gauge what your relative social status is to other people.

1222
01:14:22.029 --> 01:14:37.432
And even when you are doing things by yourself, you are still measuring your ability to do those things against that sociometer of like the standard that you have set for yourself based on the people around you, based on society at large, based on whatever culture you exist within.

1223
01:14:38.564 --> 01:14:45.967
Now there's a word here that we've been dancing around, and I've intentionally wanted to dance around it, and that is self-esteem.

1224
01:14:46.508 --> 01:14:51.410
Like another way to think about what this internal sociometer is, is self-esteem.

1225
01:14:51.430 --> 01:14:53.851
I mean, one day we'll do an episode on self-esteem.

1226
01:14:53.871 --> 01:14:54.691
Oh, we definitely should.

1227
01:14:55.052 --> 01:14:59.814
And we will talk about all of the ways that it got butchered and mangled over the decades.

1228
01:15:00.434 --> 01:15:09.441
But it is, I think most people conceptualize self-esteem as something that exists independently and internally on your own, right?

1229
01:15:09.481 --> 01:15:15.246
Like when people say, oh, you just need to have better self-esteem or like, oh, we just need to improve her self-esteem.

1230
01:15:15.947 --> 01:15:24.754
It is often said in a way that if you just felt good by yourself on your own, then everything would be fine.

1231
01:15:25.094 --> 01:15:28.076
But the truth is, is that self-esteem is intimately connected

1232
01:15:29.237 --> 01:15:31.098
to how you're seen by others, right?

1233
01:15:31.138 --> 01:15:40.364
Because ultimately, the way you feel about yourself is a response to how you predict other people are going to feel about you based on what you can do.

1234
01:15:40.724 --> 01:15:44.147
So we're tying together a whole bundle of psychological concepts here.

1235
01:15:44.247 --> 01:15:45.868
But the point is, is that...

1236
01:15:46.969 --> 01:15:59.699
Failure hurts regardless of whether you actually lost something or not, whether it's a tangible thing you lost or just some abstract arbitrary measurement that you failed to live up to.

1237
01:16:00.560 --> 01:16:04.823
It hurts whether you agree with the people judging you or not.

1238
01:16:05.844 --> 01:16:09.587
It hurts whether you're even with other people or not.

1239
01:16:10.833 --> 01:16:13.174
And it hurts whether it even makes sense or not.

1240
01:16:13.534 --> 01:16:31.802
And like you said, the reason it hurts in all these circumstances is because it identified as a threat prevention system, as a way to protect yourself and to keep you in good graces with the people around you and to keep you competent and living up to expectations that other people set for you and that you've set for yourself.

1241
01:16:31.922 --> 01:16:33.263
We still haven't defined failure yet.

1242
01:16:33.303 --> 01:16:35.404
And a lot of that is because it doesn't really matter.

1243
01:16:35.984 --> 01:16:37.226
What the definition of failure is.

1244
01:16:37.706 --> 01:16:39.028
If you lost something.

1245
01:16:39.668 --> 01:16:40.970
Either tangible or abstract.

1246
01:16:41.530 --> 01:16:42.652
It's going to feel bad.

1247
01:16:43.112 --> 01:16:43.753
No matter what.

1248
01:16:44.233 --> 01:16:45.535
You could be fucking Steve Jobs.

1249
01:16:46.256 --> 01:16:47.577
And you wake up.

1250
01:16:47.998 --> 01:16:49.039
It's going to feel shitty.

1251
01:16:49.539 --> 01:16:49.760
Right?

1252
01:16:49.820 --> 01:16:50.901
Warren Buffett wakes up.

1253
01:16:50.921 --> 01:16:52.062
Sees he lost a bunch of money.

1254
01:16:52.463 --> 01:16:53.904
It's going to feel really shitty.

1255
01:16:53.924 --> 01:16:54.965
And it's going to feel worse.

1256
01:16:55.606 --> 01:16:57.608
than making that same amount of money.

1257
01:16:57.868 --> 01:17:05.756
It doesn't matter who you are, what situation you're in, how smart you are, how many ways you rationalize the importance of the failure, how many lessons you gain from the failure.

1258
01:17:06.497 --> 01:17:09.520
It is going to suck always, all the time.

1259
01:17:11.362 --> 01:17:12.563
It's just fascinating.

1260
01:17:12.664 --> 01:17:13.504
I don't know.

1261
01:17:14.371 --> 01:17:38.452
kind of sick yeah it's cruel yeah it's really cruel like our minds are just set up to be kind of cruel to ourselves and it we we create these egos right and these egos are what is reflecting back on us that we that hurts us too like it's the target of our pain but it's also our own creation and it is the whole purpose of the ego is to be hurt right right because by being hurt

1262
01:17:39.032 --> 01:17:42.735
the ego is signaling to us that our livelihood is under threat, right?

1263
01:17:42.755 --> 01:17:44.076
So we construct our egos.

1264
01:17:44.096 --> 01:18:02.212
We create all these narratives about who we are and what we can do and who's going to like us and who's not going to like us so that all those narratives can fail us and be threatened so that we can get really upset and anxious and freak out so that we behave in more adaptable ways that promote our survival.

1265
01:18:02.392 --> 01:18:04.073
And I guess there's one or two ways you could look at that.

1266
01:18:04.093 --> 01:18:05.314
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, but

1267
01:18:06.154 --> 01:18:09.559
That could either be the best realization you have of this whole episode.

1268
01:18:09.859 --> 01:18:10.120
Yes.

1269
01:18:10.781 --> 01:18:11.802
Or the worst, right?

1270
01:18:12.443 --> 01:18:13.465
Depending on how you look at that.

1271
01:18:13.525 --> 01:18:13.765
Yes.

1272
01:18:14.166 --> 01:18:16.810
You have to define yourself in some way or another, right?

1273
01:18:17.170 --> 01:18:18.732
We covered that in the ego episode.

1274
01:18:19.253 --> 01:18:20.115
You have to...

1275
01:18:21.156 --> 01:18:28.398
pick some self-definition and whatever self-definition you choose is going to be the definition that fails at some point.

1276
01:18:28.538 --> 01:18:40.541
And it is that failure that is evolutionarily useful because as soon as it fails, that is what motivates you to change your behavior and act differently in the future, which is of course your way of learning, right?

1277
01:18:40.921 --> 01:18:46.142
So the learning is generally it's going to happen, you know, unless there are times where you can kind of

1278
01:18:46.782 --> 01:18:47.482
live in denial.

1279
01:18:47.602 --> 01:18:48.203
Sure, sure.

1280
01:18:48.223 --> 01:18:53.025
You know, Freud had his defense mechanisms, which I think, in many ways prevented learning.

1281
01:18:53.045 --> 01:19:00.509
I think they were defined in such a way that it was like, there were ways that people protected their ego in a way that prevented them from having to learn, right?

1282
01:19:00.529 --> 01:19:08.693
So it's like, you, you develop a strong sense of denial, or you project your own flaws onto other people as a way to protect your ego.

1283
01:19:08.713 --> 01:19:11.514
And because you're protecting your ego, your ego never gets harmed.

1284
01:19:11.554 --> 01:19:13.675
And because it never gets harmed, you never have to learn and grow

1285
01:19:15.796 --> 01:19:21.861
This comes back to the fact that it's just like growth is fundamentally rooted in pain.

1286
01:19:22.401 --> 01:19:23.442
Failure is inevitable.

1287
01:19:23.582 --> 01:19:31.508
No matter how you define your goals, your aims, your identity, you are choosing the future ways in which you are going to fail.

1288
01:19:31.748 --> 01:19:38.092
And so the game is not necessarily learning from failure because as long as you're just honest about failure, that's going to happen anyway.

1289
01:19:39.125 --> 01:19:43.047
The game is not avoiding failure because that's impossible.

1290
01:19:43.607 --> 01:19:49.629
The game is choosing the right goals and identity so that you have good failures.

1291
01:19:49.669 --> 01:19:51.630
So that pain is worth it.

1292
01:19:51.850 --> 01:19:52.430
Yeah.

1293
01:19:52.450 --> 01:19:52.751
Okay.

1294
01:19:53.051 --> 01:19:53.271
Right?

1295
01:19:54.051 --> 01:20:01.994
So a very crude example, if I define myself as a family man, right?

1296
01:20:02.414 --> 01:20:05.436
That is a self-definition that I'm going to fail at at some point.

1297
01:20:05.476 --> 01:20:05.696
Yeah.

1298
01:20:06.016 --> 01:20:07.917
And each time I fail at that, I'm probably going to...

1299
01:20:09.297 --> 01:20:15.183
become better in my relationships, become more loving, better with intimacy, better with communication, and become a better family man.

1300
01:20:16.064 --> 01:20:22.450
If I define myself as a meth head, I'm setting myself up for a series of failures that are not going to help me very much.

1301
01:20:22.650 --> 01:20:29.696
I'm being very inefficient in sourcing meth in downtown LA right now.

1302
01:20:29.737 --> 01:20:31.839
Whereas if you define yourself as a family man...

1303
01:20:32.399 --> 01:20:39.526
That pain is very informative and will guide you along the way into becoming closer in line with your values or what you actually want to be.

1304
01:20:39.947 --> 01:20:41.648
And something that's very chosen and intentional.

1305
01:20:41.769 --> 01:20:42.109
Correct.

1306
01:20:42.189 --> 01:20:42.469
Okay.

1307
01:20:42.509 --> 01:20:50.718
Before we can even talk about growing from failure, which we will talk about that towards the end of the episode, we have to talk about...

1308
01:20:51.809 --> 01:20:53.890
What are we, how are we defining ourselves?

1309
01:20:53.950 --> 01:20:57.992
Because the way we define ourselves defines what our failures are going to be.

1310
01:20:58.052 --> 01:20:58.272
Right?

1311
01:20:58.393 --> 01:20:58.613
Right.

1312
01:20:58.953 --> 01:21:02.695
I'm not a golfer, so I don't give a shit if I miss a par putt.

1313
01:21:03.615 --> 01:21:07.377
Tiger Woods probably gives a lot of shit if he misses a par putt, right?

1314
01:21:07.797 --> 01:21:09.058
So for me, it's not a failure.

1315
01:21:09.518 --> 01:21:09.998
I don't care.

1316
01:21:10.179 --> 01:21:10.459
Right.

1317
01:21:10.879 --> 01:21:16.202
Tiger Woods, it's like, it probably feels life or death to him at certain points.

1318
01:21:16.422 --> 01:21:16.642
Yeah.

1319
01:21:17.199 --> 01:21:19.200
I brought this up several times in the change episode.

1320
01:21:20.401 --> 01:21:22.322
I kept saying, you know, pain is a great teacher.

1321
01:21:23.582 --> 01:21:27.384
And I think this is a little bit where rubber hits the road with it.

1322
01:21:27.624 --> 01:21:30.106
Pay attention to what's causing you pain.

1323
01:21:30.726 --> 01:21:34.348
And if you like dig underneath of it, I think we're going to talk about this a lot going forward.

1324
01:21:34.368 --> 01:21:36.629
But if you dig underneath of that, is that pain worth it?

1325
01:21:37.069 --> 01:21:40.171
Is that pain really what, like the family man versus the meth head, right?

1326
01:21:40.271 --> 01:21:41.932
Which one of those pains is a better pain to have?

1327
01:21:42.092 --> 01:21:42.332
Yes.

1328
01:21:42.532 --> 01:21:43.753
Like, I think that's what I was trying to get at.

1329
01:21:43.773 --> 01:21:44.533
What would you rather fail at?

1330
01:21:44.833 --> 01:21:46.674
That's kind of what I was trying to get at in the change episode.

1331
01:21:46.694 --> 01:21:47.715
Like pain is a great teacher.

1332
01:21:47.775 --> 01:21:48.556
Like, listen to it.

1333
01:21:48.576 --> 01:21:49.477
Don't, don't avoid it.

1334
01:21:49.757 --> 01:21:52.559
Cause the chapter of my book is called failure is the way forward.

1335
01:21:53.219 --> 01:22:02.567
And this is why that just feels very surface level, you know, at this point, because it's, yeah, it is the way forward, but it's, it's the way forward for what?

1336
01:22:03.207 --> 01:22:03.427
Right.

1337
01:22:03.987 --> 01:22:04.348
Okay.

1338
01:22:04.508 --> 01:22:09.691
Like if, if you are failing at something that is a waste of your time, it's probably good.

1339
01:22:09.711 --> 01:22:10.191
You're failing.

1340
01:22:10.211 --> 01:22:11.572
You probably don't want to move forward.

1341
01:22:11.812 --> 01:22:12.712
And you see this a lot.

1342
01:22:12.752 --> 01:22:20.116
Like we're going to talk about quitting later and what the difference is between quitting being a success and quitting something being a failure.

1343
01:22:20.716 --> 01:22:25.199
And I think a lot of it has to do with understanding, like, is something worth failing at?

1344
01:22:25.539 --> 01:22:27.400
Is something worth failing?

1345
01:22:27.640 --> 01:22:40.044
pursuing in the first place because if it's not worth pursuing in the first place then failure like failing at that thing is a good thing you should i should hope that i'm not very good at being a method okay

1346
01:22:41.614 --> 01:22:42.334
I would hope so too.

1347
01:22:42.494 --> 01:22:47.117
Unfortunately, I'm prodigious at acquiring meth on the streets of LA.

1348
01:22:47.597 --> 01:22:50.838
I just appear to be like Isaac Newton.

1349
01:22:52.799 --> 01:22:53.539
And yet here you are.

1350
01:22:53.699 --> 01:22:55.160
Yet here I am talking to you.

1351
01:22:55.840 --> 01:23:01.303
What are some good ways that you define failure for yourself throughout your life?

1352
01:23:01.663 --> 01:23:03.344
And what are some bad ways?

1353
01:23:03.404 --> 01:23:10.007
Professionally speaking, I guess I haven't been fired from really any jobs that I think of, but I've definitely failed.

1354
01:23:10.027 --> 01:23:10.327
Not yet.

1355
01:23:10.487 --> 01:23:11.248
Yeah.

1356
01:23:11.288 --> 01:23:12.068
Right.

1357
01:23:14.270 --> 01:23:15.291
We'll talk about that.

1358
01:23:16.292 --> 01:23:19.735
But when I have like, I've gone into something and I didn't, it just didn't work or I quit.

1359
01:23:19.795 --> 01:23:20.856
You know, I left grad school.

1360
01:23:20.896 --> 01:23:22.597
Like I've talked about that plenty of times before.

1361
01:23:22.697 --> 01:23:23.998
I never saw that as a failure.

1362
01:23:24.539 --> 01:23:25.900
I did really see that as, Oh, uh,

1363
01:23:27.281 --> 01:23:30.042
The pain I was experiencing during that was pain I really didn't want.

1364
01:23:30.062 --> 01:23:30.922
So I'm getting the hell out.

1365
01:23:31.142 --> 01:23:31.362
Yeah.

1366
01:23:31.382 --> 01:23:32.842
So I think that was a healthy way to see it.

1367
01:23:33.323 --> 01:23:43.945
Every time that I have, though, like an unhealthy way to see it has always been it's someone else's standard or someone else's definition that I have not lived up to.

1368
01:23:44.105 --> 01:23:47.626
And I probably felt that sting that we're talking about, the sociometer sting.

1369
01:23:47.826 --> 01:23:48.566
Yeah.

1370
01:23:48.586 --> 01:23:54.968
And not really paid attention to why and just felt bad and just externalized all of it, thought that I was just a failure and...

1371
01:23:55.708 --> 01:23:57.349
Like, how can I live up to this, that, the other thing?

1372
01:23:57.429 --> 01:24:02.971
It was always some external standard usually that I was failing to live up to.

1373
01:24:03.131 --> 01:24:04.732
I think that's a big difference for me anyway.

1374
01:24:04.752 --> 01:24:05.132
I don't know.

1375
01:24:05.572 --> 01:24:06.693
I definitely relate to that.

1376
01:24:06.973 --> 01:24:10.854
When I think about it, I think about my early dating and relationships.

1377
01:24:11.034 --> 01:24:19.178
I was very superficial in that I viewed my success at dating really just in terms of how many...

1378
01:24:20.018 --> 01:24:22.639
women I went out with and how many I hooked up with.

1379
01:24:22.860 --> 01:24:34.486
And what eventually happened, and I wrote about this in my dating book many years ago, what eventually happened is I realized that I was putting so much time and effort into pursuing women that I didn't even actually enjoy being around.

1380
01:24:34.706 --> 01:24:36.066
It was because of what you're saying.

1381
01:24:36.127 --> 01:24:44.171
It's like I had kind of downloaded this lame cultural script of what a successful dating life as a young man was.

1382
01:24:44.711 --> 01:24:50.559
and I was trying to live up to that, regardless of how much I actually enjoyed the company of the women I was seeing.

1383
01:24:50.919 --> 01:24:59.951
And as soon as I flipped the standard of success from, I guess, hooking up with lots of girls to like,

1384
01:25:00.962 --> 01:25:07.185
being happy and enjoying the women I spend time with, it completely changed everything, right?

1385
01:25:07.286 --> 01:25:10.948
And then it changed the nature of the failure, right?

1386
01:25:10.968 --> 01:25:18.232
So it was like, before, if I went on a date with a woman and she didn't call me back, that felt like a catastrophic

1387
01:25:19.632 --> 01:25:22.113
evaluation of my worth as an individual.

1388
01:25:22.533 --> 01:25:36.198
Whereas like when I shifted the metric to just like having a happy, good relationship with somebody and I went on a date with a woman and she didn't call me back, it was like, oh, well I guess we wouldn't have been happy together.

1389
01:25:36.258 --> 01:25:38.479
Good thing she didn't call me back, right?

1390
01:25:38.499 --> 01:25:40.760
Like it's no longer a failure.

1391
01:25:41.160 --> 01:25:46.422
Like texting her a million times and like manipulating her to go back out with me would have been the failure.

1392
01:25:46.742 --> 01:25:48.103
Because it would have made us both miserable.

1393
01:25:48.626 --> 01:25:48.846
Right.

1394
01:25:48.946 --> 01:25:53.728
And some people would say, oh, you're diluting yourself and you're inflating your own ego or whatever.

1395
01:25:53.748 --> 01:25:54.908
And you're diluting yourself.

1396
01:25:54.948 --> 01:25:56.749
Well, you're diluting yourself either way.

1397
01:25:56.949 --> 01:25:57.269
Yes.

1398
01:25:57.349 --> 01:25:57.569
Right.

1399
01:25:57.609 --> 01:25:59.950
There's a delusion on either direction.

1400
01:26:00.050 --> 01:26:00.870
On every vector.

1401
01:26:01.090 --> 01:26:07.313
You may as well choose the one where it's telling you a better story and giving you a better outcome and is aligned with what you actually want.

1402
01:26:07.353 --> 01:26:12.834
Not what other people are telling you and all of those arbitrary standards that you're putting on yourself.

1403
01:26:13.115 --> 01:26:14.155
You just make yourself miserable.

1404
01:26:14.455 --> 01:26:14.755
Yeah.

1405
01:26:14.815 --> 01:26:28.218
And it's, I think that the point that came up in the research too, is that you're going to feel bad when other people judge you, whether you agree with them or not, whether you even care about them or not, it's just going to feel bad no matter what.

1406
01:26:28.458 --> 01:26:31.239
So you might as well pick the thing that's going to make you happy anyway.

1407
01:26:31.479 --> 01:26:31.679
Right?

1408
01:26:31.719 --> 01:26:34.100
Like you're going to get criticized no matter what you do.

1409
01:26:34.160 --> 01:26:37.160
So you might as well do what's best for you.

1410
01:26:37.240 --> 01:26:37.500
Yeah.

1411
01:26:37.760 --> 01:26:38.381
No, that's totally true.

1412
01:26:38.401 --> 01:26:39.221
I guess I get that.

1413
01:26:39.241 --> 01:26:39.821
Like, um...

1414
01:26:40.929 --> 01:26:46.275
I don't know if I, I don't get a lot of overt signals, like from my family, you know, like I'm not, I'm not married.

1415
01:26:46.295 --> 01:26:46.856
I'm in my forties.

1416
01:26:46.876 --> 01:26:47.296
I'm not married.

1417
01:26:47.316 --> 01:26:48.618
I don't have kids and all that kind of stuff.

1418
01:26:48.898 --> 01:26:50.740
And I come from a pretty traditional family.

1419
01:26:51.401 --> 01:26:52.483
Newly single ladies.

1420
01:26:53.664 --> 01:26:55.126
Well, talk about a failure.

1421
01:26:57.028 --> 01:27:17.611
the world i don't know if we have time in this podcast another episode that's another episode i see that too because i will tell myself i'm like well i don't care what they think and it's like i actually do you do but when i sit down and think about it i'm like not but i'm still okay even though that that it kind of gets at me a little bit i'm like i'm still okay with like my choices and the way i've done this and

1422
01:27:18.593 --> 01:27:19.254
Yeah.

1423
01:27:19.414 --> 01:27:23.316
It's funny because, yeah, things like that, they never stop getting to you.

1424
01:27:23.596 --> 01:27:24.617
It's like the comments, right?

1425
01:27:24.657 --> 01:27:27.999
I get asked all the time by younger influencers, creators.

1426
01:27:28.019 --> 01:27:29.200
They're like, when do you stop caring about it?

1427
01:27:29.220 --> 01:27:30.381
I'm like, you never stop.

1428
01:27:30.501 --> 01:27:30.721
Yeah.

1429
01:27:31.321 --> 01:27:32.202
You just get better at it.

1430
01:27:32.242 --> 01:27:32.462
Yeah.

1431
01:27:32.522 --> 01:27:33.723
It's like public speaking, right?

1432
01:27:33.763 --> 01:27:37.045
You never stop being nervous before you go speak in front of an audience.

1433
01:27:37.425 --> 01:27:40.427
It doesn't bother you as much as time goes on.

1434
01:27:40.447 --> 01:27:42.148
You get desensitized to it.

1435
01:27:42.288 --> 01:27:42.568
Yeah.

1436
01:27:42.608 --> 01:27:44.069
I think that's more of what happens.

1437
01:27:44.089 --> 01:27:45.250
Yeah, I think that's where I'm at with it too.

1438
01:27:45.350 --> 01:27:45.590
Yeah.

1439
01:27:45.750 --> 01:27:45.991
Yeah.

1440
01:27:46.031 --> 01:27:46.271
Yeah.

1441
01:27:46.711 --> 01:27:55.916
Well, believe it or not, we're going to go even deeper on this, which is way deeper than I think anybody asked for when they started this episode.

1442
01:27:55.956 --> 01:27:57.617
But this is why we're here.

1443
01:27:57.977 --> 01:27:59.518
Let's get weird.

1444
01:27:59.558 --> 01:28:01.399
We go way too deep and get weird.

1445
01:28:01.439 --> 01:28:02.399
Yeah.

1446
01:28:02.519 --> 01:28:06.882
So in the next chapter, what I'd like listeners to do is think about.

1447
01:28:07.822 --> 01:28:11.706
One of the largest failures that they have experienced in the last few years.

1448
01:28:12.507 --> 01:28:20.715
And take a moment and think about what are the assumptions or yardsticks that they are using to measure that failure?

1449
01:28:20.835 --> 01:28:26.000
Like what's the underlying assumption or value that defines that failure?

1450
01:28:26.520 --> 01:28:28.001
In many cases, I think people...

1451
01:28:28.642 --> 01:28:35.468
don't realize that they didn't actually accept the terms of their failure.

1452
01:28:35.488 --> 01:28:39.211
Like they just kind of inherited it from the people around them.

1453
01:28:39.451 --> 01:28:40.872
So that's the first thing I want them to do.

1454
01:28:40.972 --> 01:28:47.097
But then I want them, as we go into the next chapter and we start talking a little bit more deeply about

1455
01:28:47.818 --> 01:28:57.472
This identity stuff and how we're measuring ourselves and the ego and where all this stuff comes from in the first place.

1456
01:28:58.153 --> 01:28:59.274
And does any of it matter?

1457
01:28:59.294 --> 01:29:02.639
I want them to keep that in mind as we work through it.

1458
01:29:03.360 --> 01:29:09.062
So as you know, for many months, we've been joking about doing an episode on religion, religion solved.

1459
01:29:09.822 --> 01:29:13.063
And surprisingly, a lot of people in the audience have encouraged us to do it.

1460
01:29:13.103 --> 01:29:30.108
So this next chapter, it's going to be we're going to dip our toe in the water and we're not going to get religious, but we are going to use two of the world's most prominent religions as a way of of investigating how we define failure and how we define ourselves in the first place.

1461
01:29:30.722 --> 01:29:31.342
Hold that thought.

1462
01:29:31.542 --> 01:29:33.544
We've got a quick message from our sponsors.

1463
01:29:34.364 --> 01:29:36.385
This episode is brought to you by Macrofactor.

1464
01:29:36.686 --> 01:29:37.346
Quick confession.

1465
01:29:37.546 --> 01:29:41.528
My relationship with food tracking has usually been the same story.

1466
01:29:41.729 --> 01:29:42.529
I get motivated.

1467
01:29:42.669 --> 01:29:43.510
I download some app.

1468
01:29:43.570 --> 01:29:46.011
I spend four days meticulously weighing chicken breast.

1469
01:29:46.151 --> 01:29:49.753
And then life happens and I forget the app exists until my pants stop fitting.

1470
01:29:49.973 --> 01:29:52.115
Rinse, repeat for basically a decade.

1471
01:29:52.215 --> 01:29:55.217
Which is why I've partnered with Macrofactor for the next stretch.

1472
01:29:55.337 --> 01:29:59.239
Because it's built different than the calorie counting apps that I've used in the past.

1473
01:29:59.439 --> 01:30:07.023
Most of those apps give some generic macro target on day one and then just expect you to follow it forever, regardless of what your body is actually doing.

1474
01:30:07.124 --> 01:30:08.905
But macro factor doesn't do that.

1475
01:30:09.165 --> 01:30:11.766
It's a nutrition coach that actually reads your data.

1476
01:30:11.826 --> 01:30:17.970
You log your weight and your food, and every week it looks at what really happens to your body and adjust your targets accordingly.

1477
01:30:18.450 --> 01:30:22.513
So there's no guessing, there's no static plan that stops making sense three weeks in.

1478
01:30:22.673 --> 01:30:23.954
My goal right now is pretty simple.

1479
01:30:24.074 --> 01:30:30.659
Build a little muscle, stop white knuckling my diet, and actually understand what my body's doing instead of vibing off a number I pick on a whim.

1480
01:30:30.820 --> 01:30:34.402
I'll be using Macrofactor to get me there and reporting back on how it goes.

1481
01:30:34.963 --> 01:30:41.468
So if you want to try it yourself, click the link in the description and use the promo code MARK for a 14-day free trial.

1482
01:30:42.048 --> 01:30:44.428
This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth.

1483
01:30:44.909 --> 01:30:47.409
Now, I need to tell you something a little bit embarrassing.

1484
01:30:47.689 --> 01:30:48.869
I have become a sheets guy.

1485
01:30:49.109 --> 01:30:53.970
I spent most of my 20s sleeping in hostels and guest houses across Asia and South America.

1486
01:30:54.310 --> 01:30:55.630
I did not care about bedding.

1487
01:30:55.990 --> 01:31:00.051
If it was flat and roughly horizontal, I would figure out a way to sleep on it.

1488
01:31:00.231 --> 01:31:05.152
But now, I'm that guy who will have an entire deep dive conversation with you about sheets.

1489
01:31:05.492 --> 01:31:07.192
And it's entirely Cozy Earth's fault.

1490
01:31:07.352 --> 01:31:10.913
Cozy Earth sent me their sheets and I put them on expecting nothing because, I mean...

1491
01:31:11.393 --> 01:31:12.334
Come on, they're sheets.

1492
01:31:12.494 --> 01:31:13.595
How different could they be?

1493
01:31:13.895 --> 01:31:17.418
But you climb in and it immediately feels completely different.

1494
01:31:17.678 --> 01:31:23.563
They're made from viscous from bamboo, so they're soft and lightweight in a way that makes your old sheets feel like a sleeping bag.

1495
01:31:23.983 --> 01:31:27.226
And if you've been in LA this summer, you know that the humidity has been insane.

1496
01:31:27.586 --> 01:31:30.368
With regular sheets, you wake up at 3 a.m. sticking to everything.

1497
01:31:30.488 --> 01:31:35.032
But these are breathable and they naturally wick away moisture so you don't wake up feeling clammy.

1498
01:31:35.312 --> 01:31:38.393
So if you're a sheet snob like me, check out Cozy Earth.

1499
01:31:38.593 --> 01:31:44.336
Besides, they come with a 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty, which for sheets is absolutely insane.

1500
01:31:44.476 --> 01:31:48.857
But I bet money that you'll end up keeping them that long and maybe even packing them for vacation.

1501
01:31:49.298 --> 01:31:54.320
So if you want to try them out, head to CozyEarth.com and use my code SOLVED for up to 20% off.

1502
01:31:54.520 --> 01:31:57.781
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1503
01:31:58.141 --> 01:32:02.523
And if you see a post-purchase survey, please be sure to mention that you heard about Cozy Earth right here.

1504
01:32:07.045 --> 01:32:13.349
So we have now managed to get two hours into a podcast about failure without actually defining failure.

1505
01:32:14.049 --> 01:32:18.312
And there is actually a very good reason for this, which is that failure is completely relative.

1506
01:32:18.652 --> 01:32:21.394
It's failure compared to what, right?

1507
01:32:21.594 --> 01:32:26.257
What is the standard or expectation that you're setting that is defining your failure?

1508
01:32:26.817 --> 01:32:30.640
So it is actually difficult to define failure without first...

1509
01:32:31.460 --> 01:32:34.721
looking at the standards and expectations we set for ourselves.

1510
01:32:35.181 --> 01:32:41.643
And it turns out that those standards and expectations are very deeply linked with how we see who we are.

1511
01:32:42.203 --> 01:32:48.765
And the best vehicle to explain this phenomenon and this experience that we all have, I actually think is...

1512
01:32:49.918 --> 01:32:53.241
one of the most popular religions in the world, which is Buddhism.

1513
01:32:53.481 --> 01:32:57.185
I'm going to tell briefly the story of the Buddha again.

1514
01:32:57.205 --> 01:33:06.053
I'm going to tell it with a little bit of a twist in a way that I think will help us understand failure and loss on a deeper, more profound level.

1515
01:33:06.533 --> 01:33:07.794
So for people who don't know...

1516
01:33:08.715 --> 01:33:12.020
The Buddha was born a prince to a very wealthy family.

1517
01:33:12.400 --> 01:33:17.407
And the Buddha's father was apparently a very bold and ambitious man.

1518
01:33:17.427 --> 01:33:24.117
And when his son was born, he decided that he wanted to create an environment that his son would never know lack.

1519
01:33:25.139 --> 01:33:28.061
would never know pain, would never know loss, would never know failure.

1520
01:33:28.681 --> 01:33:34.504
And so he contrived everything in his son's environment to fulfill every wish, every desire.

1521
01:33:35.204 --> 01:33:40.587
So supposedly, as the myth goes, as the Buddha grew up, he never wanted for anything.

1522
01:33:40.808 --> 01:33:43.529
Anything he wanted at any time, it was immediately given to him.

1523
01:33:44.169 --> 01:33:46.230
And he never had to deal with any problem.

1524
01:33:46.531 --> 01:33:50.613
He never had to take responsibility for any struggle, any outcome.

1525
01:33:51.293 --> 01:33:52.154
Everything was just...

1526
01:33:52.994 --> 01:34:14.311
easy peasy lemon breezy now interestingly this became very dissatisfying for him i think he probably intuited once he became an adult that this was kind of an empty life like it was just this hedonic treadmill of indulgences and and ever escalating novelty and at a certain point he decided that he wanted to actually experience the world

1527
01:34:14.971 --> 01:34:20.452
And so late one night, he snuck out of the palace and he encounters four different people that all of them shock him.

1528
01:34:20.953 --> 01:34:23.873
So the first one is an aging and withered old man.

1529
01:34:24.113 --> 01:34:28.715
He had never seen somebody old before, and this kind of freaked him out.

1530
01:34:28.995 --> 01:34:35.496
The second thing he saw was a deeply sick person, someone riddled with disease and deeply suffering because of it.

1531
01:34:36.097 --> 01:34:38.537
The third thing he saw was a corpse on the side of the road.

1532
01:34:38.557 --> 01:34:40.818
He had never seen anybody who was dead before.

1533
01:34:41.798 --> 01:34:51.904
And then the last thing he saw was a wandering ascetic, which was at the time, it was a monk that gave away all possessions and just kind of wandered around, took a vow of poverty, I suppose.

1534
01:34:52.344 --> 01:34:53.965
Now, all these things completely shocked him.

1535
01:34:54.425 --> 01:34:57.567
Like he had never been exposed to anything like this in his life.

1536
01:34:57.987 --> 01:35:00.028
And it kind of gave him a wake up call.

1537
01:35:00.068 --> 01:35:01.069
And he realized, you know what?

1538
01:35:01.129 --> 01:35:02.290
I got to get out into the world.

1539
01:35:02.950 --> 01:35:08.053
I need to learn and understand everything that's going on that I haven't been exposed to before.

1540
01:35:08.073 --> 01:35:08.253
Yeah.

1541
01:35:08.393 --> 01:35:11.415
So soon after, he planned to exit the palace for good.

1542
01:35:11.656 --> 01:35:12.716
He had a wife and a child.

1543
01:35:13.277 --> 01:35:15.739
He left them in the middle of the night without saying goodbye to them.

1544
01:35:16.539 --> 01:35:22.083
And he decided to wander the wilderness as an ascetic himself.

1545
01:35:22.223 --> 01:35:23.544
He gave up all possessions.

1546
01:35:24.065 --> 01:35:26.026
He took a vow of poverty.

1547
01:35:26.446 --> 01:35:29.849
He supposedly lived on like a single peanut each day.

1548
01:35:29.869 --> 01:35:30.870
He basically...

1549
01:35:32.242 --> 01:35:37.385
intensely suffered intentionally for an extended period of time.

1550
01:35:37.605 --> 01:35:40.868
Intentionally suffering isn't really satisfying either.

1551
01:35:41.108 --> 01:35:46.331
It's just kind of another form of indulgence, just, you know, with a different flavor, I suppose.

1552
01:35:47.292 --> 01:35:51.294
And so eventually he came to the conclusion that like, this wasn't really leading anywhere either.

1553
01:35:51.715 --> 01:35:58.059
And so that's when he went and sat underneath the Bodhi tree and he decided that he was not going to get up until he had a better idea.

1554
01:35:58.819 --> 01:35:59.960
And that's when he became enlightened.

1555
01:36:00.415 --> 01:36:07.521
I find this story interesting because earlier we were talking about kind of the Hegelian dialectic, the thesis, the antithesis, the synthesis.

1556
01:36:07.882 --> 01:36:13.547
I think we could look at the Buddhist story of kind of an example of that dialectic at work, right?

1557
01:36:13.607 --> 01:36:17.490
So you have this prince who's born into a life of luxury.

1558
01:36:17.871 --> 01:36:20.613
He has zero problems, zero failures, right?

1559
01:36:20.673 --> 01:36:24.276
That's kind of our natural instinct is to avoid any loss or failure.

1560
01:36:25.277 --> 01:36:27.599
That is not satisfying because you don't grow.

1561
01:36:27.980 --> 01:36:29.821
You don't have accountability for anything.

1562
01:36:29.901 --> 01:36:31.663
You don't have any repercussions for anything.

1563
01:36:31.683 --> 01:36:32.664
You never have to change.

1564
01:36:32.864 --> 01:36:33.985
And that's not living.

1565
01:36:34.065 --> 01:36:34.826
That's not a life.

1566
01:36:35.366 --> 01:36:35.567
Right.

1567
01:36:35.607 --> 01:36:37.508
So he becomes dissatisfied with that.

1568
01:36:37.589 --> 01:36:40.351
And then he goes to the other extreme, which is he seeks out failure.

1569
01:36:40.411 --> 01:36:41.372
He seeks out pain.

1570
01:36:41.452 --> 01:36:42.913
He seeks out loss.

1571
01:36:43.454 --> 01:36:46.777
And he tries to indulge and optimize that.

1572
01:36:46.897 --> 01:36:52.659
that suffering to achieve some degree of enlightenment or self-empowerment.

1573
01:36:52.919 --> 01:36:55.439
And he realizes that too is a dead end.

1574
01:36:55.660 --> 01:37:02.221
That is just another form of self-indulgence, and it is also an unhealthy relationship with failure and loss.

1575
01:37:02.762 --> 01:37:07.383
And so the synthesis that he arrives at, I guess you could say under the Bodhi tree, is that

1576
01:37:08.877 --> 01:37:11.859
Everything is a sense of loss.

1577
01:37:12.079 --> 01:37:14.261
Everything is an eventual failure.

1578
01:37:14.741 --> 01:37:25.128
Because the moment you attach yourself to any thought, any desire, any identification, you are defining the terms of your future failure.

1579
01:37:25.508 --> 01:37:33.374
Because nothing lasts, and because nothing lasts, anything that you attach yourself to is destined to fail you at some point.

1580
01:37:33.634 --> 01:37:37.877
From a Buddhist perspective, every time you say, I am, and then finish the sentence,

1581
01:37:38.637 --> 01:37:45.263
you are committing a very subtle act of self-harm because you are setting the standards and expectations by which you're going to measure yourself.

1582
01:37:45.443 --> 01:37:49.466
And by definition, every measurement and standard you set for yourself is one day going to fail you.

1583
01:37:50.107 --> 01:37:56.432
So as soon as you define yourself in any way, shape, or form, you are also defining the terms of your future failures.

1584
01:37:56.952 --> 01:38:01.576
So in this sense, failure is not only inevitable, it is inevitable.

1585
01:38:01.972 --> 01:38:07.194
fundamental part of our consciousness and the way we experience the world.

1586
01:38:08.114 --> 01:38:17.198
Now, the Buddhist response to this is that you just shouldn't define yourself at all, that you should let go of all attachments, all standards, all expectations.

1587
01:38:17.998 --> 01:38:20.079
And this is a pretty radical idea.

1588
01:38:20.159 --> 01:38:27.942
I mean, this ultimately is the realization that the Buddha came to sitting underneath the Bodhi tree and became the foundational premise of

1589
01:38:29.543 --> 01:38:30.524
philosophy of Buddhism.

1590
01:38:30.924 --> 01:38:41.372
But I do think there is a lot of wisdom in that, of at least defining yourself extremely loosely and not being too invested or too attached to any single definition of self.

1591
01:38:42.032 --> 01:38:51.699
Because the more invested you are in any definition of self, the more you bank your self-esteem or how you feel about yourself on any single narrow definition, the more vulnerable you're making yourself.

1592
01:38:52.580 --> 01:39:12.207
for when the eventual failures do occur i'm not really going to recommend that everybody goes full buddhist and just like sits in a corner and stares at a wall and tries to let go relinquish every single form of identification and attachment in their lives i don't think that's necessarily practical in 2026

1593
01:39:13.648 --> 01:39:18.012
But I do think it's an incredibly important principle to understand.

1594
01:39:19.013 --> 01:39:29.461
And I think as a mental exercise, it is useful for people to kind of explore this idea that a lot of their self-definition and a lot of the...

1595
01:39:30.222 --> 01:39:38.268
Standards and expectations that they've invited into their lives are completely arbitrary, are completely self-defined, and don't necessarily need to exist.

1596
01:39:38.368 --> 01:39:43.991
Like you can kind of just stop measuring yourself in certain ways, technically, whenever you want.

1597
01:39:44.092 --> 01:39:44.312
Right.

1598
01:39:44.532 --> 01:39:44.752
Okay.

1599
01:39:44.772 --> 01:39:46.713
So you're advocating for Buddhism light?

1600
01:39:47.174 --> 01:39:47.414
Yes.

1601
01:39:47.534 --> 01:39:49.115
It kind of sounds like a diet Buddhism.

1602
01:39:49.195 --> 01:39:52.857
So this kind of leads to the four noble truths of Buddhism, right?

1603
01:39:52.897 --> 01:39:57.701
Like the first noble truth being life is suffering or some sort of dissatisfaction that's just inherent in life.

1604
01:39:58.383 --> 01:40:02.824
The second noble truth, I think, was that we create a lot of that suffering, though, too.

1605
01:40:02.844 --> 01:40:20.448
And this is kind of what you're getting at, is that these attachments that we have or these identities that we identify with or these things that we call ourselves, that creates some sort of inevitable future failure that you're talking about that will generate more suffering for us if we hold on to them so tightly.

1606
01:40:20.808 --> 01:40:25.470
So you're not advocating necessarily going and sitting under the Bodhi tree and reaching full enlightenment.

1607
01:40:25.530 --> 01:40:27.130
Although if you can, great, right?

1608
01:40:27.670 --> 01:40:41.784
But just being aware of that, being aware of those attachments and the failures they're setting you up for is something that can be useful for us because we can not attach to them so tightly if we're more aware of them.

1609
01:40:41.824 --> 01:40:42.385
Is that what you're saying?

1610
01:40:42.405 --> 01:40:49.832
Whenever we pursue something or we're interested in something, I think we're psychologically predisposed to only see the upside of the success of that thing.

1611
01:40:51.073 --> 01:40:54.158
while we tend to ignore the inevitable failure of that thing.

1612
01:40:54.198 --> 01:40:55.580
The inherent inevitable failure.

1613
01:40:55.620 --> 01:40:56.101
Okay, yeah.

1614
01:40:56.721 --> 01:41:00.988
And what's funny too is like, I think it's really important for the listener to get this too.

1615
01:41:01.008 --> 01:41:04.473
Like this isn't just about trying to achieve something and failing.

1616
01:41:04.533 --> 01:41:05.214
Like it's not like...

1617
01:41:06.235 --> 01:41:08.856
like trying to lose some weight and not quite losing it.

1618
01:41:08.976 --> 01:41:14.317
Like sometimes the failure is precipitated by succeeding at the thing, right?

1619
01:41:14.337 --> 01:41:19.178
So like, let's say I want to become a parent and I want to, I want to parent a child.

1620
01:41:19.598 --> 01:41:30.721
Well, if I parent successfully, I'm going to raise a healthy independent adult who's no longer going to need me around anymore, which it means like being a successful parent means you no longer have to parent somebody.

1621
01:41:30.801 --> 01:41:33.021
So, so even success can hold the seeds of failure.

1622
01:41:33.481 --> 01:41:33.922
Correct.

1623
01:41:33.982 --> 01:41:35.222
And you're just kind of screwed either way.

1624
01:41:35.462 --> 01:41:35.842
Correct.

1625
01:41:36.182 --> 01:41:36.402
Yeah.

1626
01:41:36.523 --> 01:41:36.783
Okay.

1627
01:41:36.883 --> 01:41:42.188
And this is like, and I mean, this is what is so powerful about the first noble truth is like everything is impermanent.

1628
01:41:42.228 --> 01:41:43.169
Every single thing.

1629
01:41:43.209 --> 01:41:44.370
Nothing lasts.

1630
01:41:44.711 --> 01:41:53.419
Everything goes away at some point and it goes away whether you succeed at it, it goes away whether you fail at it, it goes away no matter what.

1631
01:41:53.560 --> 01:41:57.584
So anything you attach yourself to, anything you define yourself by-

1632
01:41:58.848 --> 01:42:05.291
you are tacitly signing up for the thing that is going to eventually disappoint you or the thing that you're eventually going to grieve.

1633
01:42:05.672 --> 01:42:11.535
I mean, that sounds kind of dark and sad, but like it's inevitable, right?

1634
01:42:11.675 --> 01:42:14.596
So it's not necessarily a sad thing.

1635
01:42:14.616 --> 01:42:20.819
So the question then becomes what is worth doing even though you know you will probably lose it one day, right?

1636
01:42:21.239 --> 01:42:25.622
It is, I think for many people, it's like being a parent is worth it,

1637
01:42:26.262 --> 01:42:29.105
even though they understand that one day they're not going to be a parent anymore.

1638
01:42:29.285 --> 01:42:31.307
I think about this, you know, with marriage, right?

1639
01:42:31.367 --> 01:42:36.772
There is going to come a day where either my wife or I die before the other one, right?

1640
01:42:36.973 --> 01:42:43.018
And it's still worth doing, though, even though you know that that is going to eventually happen.

1641
01:42:43.179 --> 01:42:48.224
It becomes a very useful compass for people to think about what they invest themselves into, right?

1642
01:42:48.804 --> 01:42:58.311
Because, you know, last chapter, we both gave some examples of like very superficial things that we pursued really just to kind of like win a little bit of status and approval from others and how empty that is.

1643
01:42:58.751 --> 01:43:06.897
I think this is kind of the rubric for how do you pursue something that is really worthwhile over the long run?

1644
01:43:07.097 --> 01:43:11.538
You know, the third noble truth is that it is possible to escape suffering, right?

1645
01:43:12.099 --> 01:43:14.399
Even if you lose something, even if you fail at it.

1646
01:43:15.260 --> 01:43:17.400
And then the fourth noble truth is how you do that.

1647
01:43:17.500 --> 01:43:20.962
The eightfold path, what they call this is how you live to in order to do that.

1648
01:43:21.102 --> 01:43:23.162
Again, what you're saying is you don't have to sit under the Bodhi tree.

1649
01:43:23.422 --> 01:43:23.642
Yes.

1650
01:43:23.722 --> 01:43:24.763
And become enlightened to do that.

1651
01:43:25.183 --> 01:43:27.884
Is this what they mean by I'm kind of becoming an amateur Buddhist?

1652
01:43:28.004 --> 01:43:28.424
Okay.

1653
01:43:28.524 --> 01:43:30.925
I've been looking into it before this episode even started.

1654
01:43:30.985 --> 01:43:31.145
Yeah.

1655
01:43:31.645 --> 01:43:32.966
Is this what they mean by the middle way?

1656
01:43:33.566 --> 01:43:36.889
I don't know if I completely understand the middle way in Buddhism.

1657
01:43:37.489 --> 01:43:38.590
Do you know about this at all?

1658
01:43:38.730 --> 01:43:39.371
It's very similar.

1659
01:43:39.451 --> 01:43:40.952
It's very Aristotelian.

1660
01:43:41.072 --> 01:43:45.495
It's like any pursuit, you will kind of naturally be...

1661
01:43:45.755 --> 01:43:48.357
There's a magnetic pull towards either extreme.

1662
01:43:48.797 --> 01:43:56.462
There's always a tendency of you should try to go out and make all the money, or you should just never not care about money at all.

1663
01:43:56.502 --> 01:43:59.485
Where it's like, actually, the way of non-attachment is...

1664
01:44:00.205 --> 01:44:02.627
understanding that money matters, but it's also not everything.

1665
01:44:02.767 --> 01:44:02.907
Right.

1666
01:44:02.927 --> 01:44:04.108
So there's always kind of this.

1667
01:44:04.748 --> 01:44:05.089
Okay.

1668
01:44:05.609 --> 01:44:06.910
The virtue is found in the balance.

1669
01:44:07.310 --> 01:44:08.371
That's the Aristotelian view.

1670
01:44:08.391 --> 01:44:10.332
But in the Buddhist view, it's the middle way, which is.

1671
01:44:10.653 --> 01:44:10.893
Yes.

1672
01:44:11.193 --> 01:44:14.055
How you become non-attached is seeing both of those simultaneously.

1673
01:44:14.255 --> 01:44:14.475
Yeah.

1674
01:44:14.515 --> 01:44:18.378
And we talked about this a little bit in the values episode where it is.

1675
01:44:18.398 --> 01:44:18.658
Yeah.

1676
01:44:19.779 --> 01:44:26.202
Actually, a highly functional person, you have a almost like a balance of power of values within you.

1677
01:44:26.222 --> 01:44:33.105
Like you have this tension between all the different things that you value in your life and you often have to make compromises between them.

1678
01:44:33.885 --> 01:44:39.368
Whereas like an unhealthy individual is when one value kind of takes over and becomes a tyrant and unlocks.

1679
01:44:39.928 --> 01:44:44.353
Every other value or thing of importance has to be sacrificed to that single value.

1680
01:44:44.373 --> 01:44:46.876
Like that's, that's where dysfunction comes from.

1681
01:44:46.916 --> 01:44:48.537
That's where imbalance comes from.

1682
01:44:48.577 --> 01:44:52.722
And, and Aristotle would say that would, that would mean living unvirtuously.

1683
01:44:52.962 --> 01:44:57.126
And then a Buddhist would say that you have become attached to, to something and, and.

1684
01:44:57.847 --> 01:44:59.789
And that is the root of your suffering as a result.

1685
01:44:59.949 --> 01:45:00.189
Right.

1686
01:45:00.269 --> 01:45:00.590
Okay.

1687
01:45:00.890 --> 01:45:10.859
There's kind of two other principles that I think are worth touching on that kind of flow out of this idea that failure is an inevitable side effect of just setting standards or expectations for yourself.

1688
01:45:10.879 --> 01:45:14.663
So the first one is that failure is relative and it's relational.

1689
01:45:15.003 --> 01:45:17.225
There's never just failure in a vacuum.

1690
01:45:17.305 --> 01:45:19.207
It's always failure compared to what?

1691
01:45:20.480 --> 01:45:22.922
What is the expectation or standard that you have set?

1692
01:45:23.522 --> 01:45:27.344
And then what is the gap between what happened and that outcome?

1693
01:45:27.585 --> 01:45:39.272
I think everybody has had a series of these experiences throughout their lives where like something has happened to you and it initially felt like a failure because it didn't meet the expectation you had in that moment.

1694
01:45:40.052 --> 01:45:46.037
But then as you kind of processed it and thought about it, you suddenly realized like, wait, this is actually a really good thing.

1695
01:45:46.457 --> 01:45:48.078
Oh, I'm actually glad this happened.

1696
01:45:48.118 --> 01:45:49.460
This isn't a failure at all, right?

1697
01:45:49.500 --> 01:45:51.421
Like we've all had that experience before.

1698
01:45:51.701 --> 01:45:55.664
I think one of the most profound and world-changing versions of this was...

1699
01:45:56.485 --> 01:45:57.305
Alexander Fleming.

1700
01:45:57.805 --> 01:46:03.207
So Fleming was a biologist and he was studying bacterial cultures and he went on vacation.

1701
01:46:03.647 --> 01:46:08.988
He accidentally forgot to seal some of the bacteria that he was studying.

1702
01:46:09.108 --> 01:46:14.129
And so I guess the Petri dishes became overgrown with mold while he was gone.

1703
01:46:14.469 --> 01:46:18.990
So when he came back, the specimens that he was studying were ruined by a bunch of mold.

1704
01:46:19.150 --> 01:46:23.832
And so by the standard of a biologist studying bacteria, he had actually failed spectacularly.

1705
01:46:23.852 --> 01:46:24.892
He had destroyed...

1706
01:46:25.852 --> 01:46:29.194
dozens of samples by leaving them out and not protecting them appropriately.

1707
01:46:29.474 --> 01:46:37.119
But what he noticed after he kind of cleaned everything up is he noticed that where the mold was, bacteria wouldn't grow in its place.

1708
01:46:37.820 --> 01:46:40.422
And this eventually led to the discovery of penicillin, which is...

1709
01:46:41.285 --> 01:46:42.486
derived from a form of mold.

1710
01:46:42.746 --> 01:46:47.290
And penicillin has arguably gone on and saved probably more lives than maybe almost anything.

1711
01:46:47.390 --> 01:46:48.791
The first antibiotic, yeah.

1712
01:46:48.871 --> 01:46:50.493
It's the first antibiotic.

1713
01:46:50.513 --> 01:46:54.956
I mean, it's like saved hundreds of millions of lives, maybe even a billion lives, who knows?

1714
01:46:55.156 --> 01:46:57.118
And this was discovered as a failure.

1715
01:46:57.318 --> 01:46:58.259
It was a form of failure.

1716
01:46:58.459 --> 01:47:03.123
But if you move the goalposts, it's actually one of the greatest successes in human history.

1717
01:47:03.403 --> 01:47:04.965
this sort of stuff happens everywhere.

1718
01:47:05.025 --> 01:47:12.694
I mean, I see it like in our business, this industry, podcasting, online content, media, everything, it is changing so fast.

1719
01:47:13.015 --> 01:47:17.200
I mean, how many times do I change our business strategy?

1720
01:47:17.240 --> 01:47:17.400
Yeah.

1721
01:47:18.341 --> 01:47:20.604
By the end of the month, I'm not even sure what we're measuring anymore.

1722
01:47:20.944 --> 01:47:23.325
Sometimes, yeah, because we have to.

1723
01:47:23.645 --> 01:47:25.186
Yeah, sometimes I feel bad for the team.

1724
01:47:25.226 --> 01:47:27.787
I feel like the team gets whiplash because it's like every other quarter.

1725
01:47:27.807 --> 01:47:30.107
I'm like, OK, guys, we're changing everything.

1726
01:47:30.127 --> 01:47:31.888
We're going to look at something completely different now.

1727
01:47:31.988 --> 01:47:38.491
But what happens so often is it's like you define standards and expectations for the quarter for the year.

1728
01:47:38.671 --> 01:47:44.213
And then you get to June and you're like, oh, this actually isn't what we should be optimizing for anymore.

1729
01:47:44.233 --> 01:47:44.333
Yeah.

1730
01:47:44.933 --> 01:47:49.075
We need to change our definition of success, and that means we need to change our downstream strategy.

1731
01:47:49.255 --> 01:47:51.697
And you run into this in romantic relationships as well.

1732
01:47:51.757 --> 01:48:03.903
I would say the majority of fights within a romantic relationship is the downstream result of either two people having different expectations about certain things or one person fighting.

1733
01:48:04.583 --> 01:48:10.144
failing to shift their expectations about something based on new evidence or a new experience.

1734
01:48:10.644 --> 01:48:11.725
So failure is inevitable.

1735
01:48:12.305 --> 01:48:14.285
Failure is relative and relational.

1736
01:48:14.545 --> 01:48:17.506
And the last one is that failure is therefore arbitrary.

1737
01:48:17.926 --> 01:48:19.447
It is a made-up concept.

1738
01:48:19.807 --> 01:48:24.608
The idea that Alexander Fleming failed as a biologist is a completely made-up definition.

1739
01:48:25.008 --> 01:48:28.489
The idea that a golfer failed because he missed a putt

1740
01:48:29.469 --> 01:48:30.510
is completely made up.

1741
01:48:30.750 --> 01:48:38.775
Putting a ball in a hole 400 yards away, like this is a completely arbitrary construct that a bunch of people came together and just agreed was important.

1742
01:48:39.436 --> 01:48:41.317
And it's not real.

1743
01:48:41.677 --> 01:48:44.299
Back to the Buddhist view, it is illusory.

1744
01:48:44.479 --> 01:48:46.620
Everything is illusory, right?

1745
01:48:46.780 --> 01:48:47.121
It's like...

1746
01:48:48.200 --> 01:48:50.582
this podcast success is illusory, right?

1747
01:48:50.942 --> 01:48:59.768
Whether we get a quarter of a million downloads or half a million downloads or a million downloads, whether that is success or failure, it's an arbitrary number that we make up.

1748
01:49:00.148 --> 01:49:03.070
And we make it up so that we can either feel good or bad about it.

1749
01:49:03.862 --> 01:49:05.043
what we did and what happened.

1750
01:49:05.823 --> 01:49:11.308
At any moment, we can decide to measure success in a different way and then feel differently about ourselves.

1751
01:49:11.828 --> 01:49:25.818
And so this raises the question of like, if you are feeling like a failure in your life, if you are feeling like you are consistently failing to measure up to some standard or expectation, where did that standard or expectation come from?

1752
01:49:27.279 --> 01:49:28.260
When did you adopt it?

1753
01:49:29.041 --> 01:49:31.022
Like who says that you have to have it?

1754
01:49:31.502 --> 01:49:31.923
You don't.

1755
01:49:32.917 --> 01:49:33.057
Right?

1756
01:49:33.097 --> 01:49:37.979
Like I think we adopt so many of our standards without realizing that we adopted them.

1757
01:49:38.000 --> 01:49:42.922
And then we have them for so long, we assume that they are capital T true.

1758
01:49:44.523 --> 01:49:50.326
When really it's just another arbitrary narrative that we decided to identify with.

1759
01:49:50.506 --> 01:49:50.686
Yeah.

1760
01:49:50.706 --> 01:49:50.846
Yeah.

1761
01:49:50.866 --> 01:49:52.186
You see this all the time, right?

1762
01:49:52.206 --> 01:49:56.048
Like people are, oh my God, I'm like 35 and I haven't bought a home yet.

1763
01:49:56.248 --> 01:50:01.491
Or, and it was like, okay, what, what standard are you, you should have a home by 35 or whatever it is, you know?

1764
01:50:01.531 --> 01:50:07.795
Are you measuring yourself by like the boomers who could just houses were practically handed out on a street corner?

1765
01:50:07.935 --> 01:50:12.718
Or are you measuring yourself by 21st century standards where there's not enough homes anywhere?

1766
01:50:12.838 --> 01:50:13.059
Right.

1767
01:50:13.079 --> 01:50:15.140
So it's like, what are you measuring by?

1768
01:50:15.340 --> 01:50:17.462
It's just kind of like the water we swim in, though, a lot of times.

1769
01:50:17.502 --> 01:50:17.662
Right.

1770
01:50:17.682 --> 01:50:19.163
We're just like, this is what people do.

1771
01:50:19.203 --> 01:50:19.883
And so we do it.

1772
01:50:20.263 --> 01:50:24.406
Not realizing that just that's setting us up for a lot of that suffering and anguish that the Buddhists talk about.

1773
01:50:24.426 --> 01:50:27.028
Like you're attaching to something and you don't even know what you're attaching to.

1774
01:50:27.348 --> 01:50:29.491
If you choose something and you fail by it, that's one thing.

1775
01:50:29.551 --> 01:50:34.518
But when it's just kind of handed to you and you're just doing it blindly, that's kind of another level of suffering too, I think.

1776
01:50:34.738 --> 01:50:39.144
I do want to note one thing though, because what we are talking about right now, I think is...

1777
01:50:40.268 --> 01:50:57.319
a very profound realization for people when they first have it, you know, whether it's when they go to therapy or, you know, when they meditate for the first time or whatever, like the first time you kind of realize this of like, oh my God, I bought into all these scripts without really realizing I bought into them and they are arbitrary and I don't have to accept them.

1778
01:50:58.340 --> 01:51:02.884
It is a very, very powerful personal experience that I think most people go through.

1779
01:51:03.184 --> 01:51:15.113
There's a little bit of pushback I want to put out there, which is that once people realize this, there's a tendency to think, well, we can just define anything however we want, right?

1780
01:51:15.133 --> 01:51:20.557
Like we can, don't tell me what tall means or what rich means or what poor means.

1781
01:51:20.617 --> 01:51:25.941
Like I can just decide what anything means myself and then you can't tell me whether I'm right or wrong.

1782
01:51:26.121 --> 01:51:40.672
So while that is philosophically true, I think for a society to function well and a culture to be beneficial for the majority of people within it, people do have to come together and agree on some terms and definitions.

1783
01:51:40.912 --> 01:51:45.036
If everybody has a different definition of everything, then you can't coordinate.

1784
01:51:45.176 --> 01:51:49.179
And if you can't coordinate, then you don't get the benefits of...

1785
01:51:50.301 --> 01:51:51.805
being a social species, right?

1786
01:51:51.825 --> 01:51:56.758
You don't get all the good things that come with being part of a larger social group.

1787
01:51:57.087 --> 01:52:01.111
So again, from my amateurish Buddhist understanding, I think they address this as well.

1788
01:52:01.432 --> 01:52:05.796
They distinguish between the relative and the ultimate, I think is what they call it.

1789
01:52:05.816 --> 01:52:06.757
They're just different names for it.

1790
01:52:06.777 --> 01:52:12.843
But the relative is like the world that we have to navigate and live within and try to be in harmony with one another.

1791
01:52:12.863 --> 01:52:13.924
And that's kind of what you're talking about.

1792
01:52:13.944 --> 01:52:17.628
There's actually, hold on, you know, you can't just be making up all the rules all the time.

1793
01:52:17.668 --> 01:52:18.870
We all have to agree on a few things.

1794
01:52:18.890 --> 01:52:20.311
That's what they call the relative relationship.

1795
01:52:20.391 --> 01:52:23.253
kind of this human world that we have to interact with each other.

1796
01:52:23.273 --> 01:52:28.518
Whereas the ultimate, like you're saying, the philosophical truth is actually, no, these are all arbitrary and made up.

1797
01:52:28.538 --> 01:52:29.879
And there's a recognition of that.

1798
01:52:30.119 --> 01:52:33.061
I think, again, that kind of comes back to that middle way though, recognizing both.

1799
01:52:33.442 --> 01:52:35.964
Again, this is my amateur Buddhist understanding.

1800
01:52:36.004 --> 01:52:36.984
I think that's accurate.

1801
01:52:37.285 --> 01:52:45.071
And I think a good example of this is imagine there's a golf tournament with a bunch of PGA pros and all the PGA pros come together and they're like,

1802
01:52:45.191 --> 01:52:47.633
you know what, this whole golf thing, it's totally made up.

1803
01:52:47.753 --> 01:52:49.295
I'm going to change the definition of a birdie.

1804
01:52:49.395 --> 01:52:50.916
I'm going to change the definition of a driver.

1805
01:52:50.936 --> 01:52:52.478
I'm going to change the definition of a sand track.

1806
01:52:52.498 --> 01:52:53.679
This isn't a par four, it's a par six.

1807
01:52:53.739 --> 01:52:57.703
Yeah, it's like every individual golfer is like, well, you can't tell me what a birdie is.

1808
01:52:58.123 --> 01:52:59.124
I have my own definition.

1809
01:52:59.164 --> 01:53:00.786
You can't invalidate my truth.

1810
01:53:00.866 --> 01:53:03.028
It's like, okay, well, now the golf game means nothing.

1811
01:53:03.658 --> 01:53:03.818
Right.

1812
01:53:03.838 --> 01:53:12.904
You you completely you've like destroyed the entire activity because there is no definitional agreement across like what certain terms are.

1813
01:53:13.145 --> 01:53:20.410
You don't want to be so attached that you forget that this is all just a bunch of made up stuff and you don't necessarily have to buy into everything.

1814
01:53:20.930 --> 01:53:28.055
But at the same time, you can't just tell the world to fuck off and imagine anything that's true for yourself.

1815
01:53:28.215 --> 01:53:30.276
Anything you feel like is true for yourself is true.

1816
01:53:31.407 --> 01:53:33.207
that's not really going to be helpful either.

1817
01:53:33.347 --> 01:53:35.728
That's a form of attachment itself, right?

1818
01:53:35.868 --> 01:53:37.268
It's attachment to yourself.

1819
01:53:37.388 --> 01:53:37.628
Right.

1820
01:53:37.668 --> 01:53:39.269
Attachment to your own definitions.

1821
01:53:39.329 --> 01:53:39.589
Yeah.

1822
01:53:39.789 --> 01:53:53.232
To kind of wrap this all up, if I had to define what failure is, I would say really what we do is we define success as an arbitrary and temporary arrangement of certain standards and circumstances.

1823
01:53:53.972 --> 01:54:00.894
And then failure is just the moment that reality fails to live up to that circumstantial arrangement.

1824
01:54:01.995 --> 01:54:05.479
And on a long enough timeline, the failure rate of everything is 100%.

1825
01:54:06.240 --> 01:54:12.968
So there is no arrangement of circumstances that you or I could imagine that will...

1826
01:54:14.328 --> 01:54:14.988
Always exist.

1827
01:54:15.268 --> 01:54:21.530
Western psychology, too, has also kind of come to the same conclusion around this whole attaching to identity thing and all that.

1828
01:54:21.670 --> 01:54:31.812
But when it comes to like well-being, for instance, Jennifer Crocker back in the 2000s, she came up with this idea of like self-worth and identity.

1829
01:54:32.492 --> 01:54:36.113
The moment that you decide your worth depends on any domain in your life.

1830
01:54:36.193 --> 01:54:37.573
Again, it's kind of like that attachment.

1831
01:54:38.093 --> 01:54:42.579
That is just setting you up for where the failure is going to be the most destructive in your life, right?

1832
01:54:42.659 --> 01:54:52.871
So if you say my job is the thing that, you know, that defines myself worth the most or my relationship or whatever it is, you know, my whatever hobby you have or whatever.

1833
01:54:53.471 --> 01:55:17.696
talent or anything like that that's going to be kind of the ground zero for any sort of like damage or any sort of uh threat to that is going to hurt the most uh and the more you you you double down on one or you single out one area of your life or anything like that the more risk you're setting yourself up for you actually wrote an article about this a long time ago right that um diversify your identity diversify your identity right yeah right

1834
01:55:17.996 --> 01:55:23.979
The identity side, too, there's other researchers who clear back in the 80s, like they were thinking about this, too.

1835
01:55:23.999 --> 01:55:32.844
Like if you define yourself through fewer and more concentrated roles, the blast zone for any of those when it does get inevitably does get blown up.

1836
01:55:33.124 --> 01:55:39.147
These people, they suffer more from like anxiety, depression, all the well-being metrics you can think of basically.

1837
01:55:39.167 --> 01:55:39.287
Yeah.

1838
01:55:40.627 --> 01:55:48.789
concentrating your identity or your self-worth in any one of these areas is going to lead to catastrophe 100% of the time at some point.

1839
01:55:48.889 --> 01:55:53.150
There's a tendency to, for people to be like, we'll just succeed at it all the time then.

1840
01:55:53.190 --> 01:55:58.030
Well, again, there's an inevitability of the impermanence of it at some point.

1841
01:55:58.311 --> 01:56:02.571
These like fixed labels even too, maybe it's not a domain in your life, but it's just a trait that you have.

1842
01:56:02.591 --> 01:56:06.012
Like I'm talented, I'm smart, I'm beautiful, whatever it is, right?

1843
01:56:06.472 --> 01:56:10.093
Any one of those is going to fail you at some point and attaching too hard to them

1844
01:56:10.974 --> 01:56:12.716
The Western psychology bears this out, too.

1845
01:56:12.736 --> 01:56:16.000
It took them a couple thousand years to catch up to the Buddhists, but they figured it out, too.

1846
01:56:16.201 --> 01:56:21.808
So if we haven't lost all the people yet who got turned off by the religion, just know that there's actually some science behind it, too.

1847
01:56:22.069 --> 01:56:23.390
We still have a chance to lose them here.

1848
01:56:23.511 --> 01:56:24.011
Oh, yeah, yeah.

1849
01:56:24.051 --> 01:56:24.672
No, no, no.

1850
01:56:24.692 --> 01:56:24.912
Yeah.

1851
01:56:25.033 --> 01:56:25.533
Oh, for sure.

1852
01:56:25.794 --> 01:56:27.316
Because we're not done with the religion yet.

1853
01:56:27.616 --> 01:56:31.558
But yeah, but if you think about this, though, like you could even put all three of these together.

1854
01:56:31.598 --> 01:56:34.759
Like think of somebody who is like nothing but their job title.

1855
01:56:34.879 --> 01:56:35.139
Right.

1856
01:56:35.759 --> 01:56:40.701
And so they stick their self-worth on that domain, whatever they're in finance or they're in, you know, whatever.

1857
01:56:40.881 --> 01:56:42.702
They identify with that so much, too.

1858
01:56:42.842 --> 01:56:44.163
Like that's their identity.

1859
01:56:44.563 --> 01:56:49.485
And they believe that their talent or their intelligence or whatever is what makes all of that possible for them.

1860
01:56:50.165 --> 01:56:52.386
What happens when they get fired or there's a market crash?

1861
01:56:52.666 --> 01:56:54.826
You remember seeing this back in like 2008, right?

1862
01:56:54.866 --> 01:56:57.387
The financial crash, like people committed suicide.

1863
01:56:57.407 --> 01:56:57.567
Right.

1864
01:56:57.647 --> 01:56:58.727
Every, yeah.

1865
01:56:58.867 --> 01:57:03.368
Every massive market crash, there's a bunch of Wall Street guys that off themselves.

1866
01:57:03.568 --> 01:57:03.948
Yeah.

1867
01:57:04.048 --> 01:57:05.209
That's their sole identity.

1868
01:57:05.509 --> 01:57:07.909
They based it on their intelligence that I'm a really smart person.

1869
01:57:07.929 --> 01:57:10.990
So I'm going to go into finance and I'm going to stake my whole identity.

1870
01:57:11.010 --> 01:57:13.051
I'm a finance guy and I make a lot of money.

1871
01:57:13.091 --> 01:57:13.811
That's who I am.

1872
01:57:14.391 --> 01:57:16.952
That's an obvious example, but it happens all the time.

1873
01:57:16.972 --> 01:57:22.774
Yeah, there was an interesting news story about a guy who killed himself in New York a number of years ago.

1874
01:57:22.834 --> 01:57:24.074
And I remember reading about it.

1875
01:57:24.094 --> 01:57:31.297
And I think this is like, because everybody hears that there's always a bunch of Wall Street people that end up committing suicide after a financial crash.

1876
01:57:31.337 --> 01:57:36.979
And I think that's what they don't realize is that people in finance, it's not just the money.

1877
01:57:37.179 --> 01:57:40.140
In a lot of cases, it's their sense of competence.

1878
01:57:40.380 --> 01:57:41.480
It's their sense of self-worth.

1879
01:57:41.921 --> 01:57:42.081
But...

1880
01:57:43.041 --> 01:57:48.347
People don't understand that if you're a really successful guy in finance, you're not just investing your own money.

1881
01:57:48.427 --> 01:57:50.228
You're not just investing your company's money.

1882
01:57:50.609 --> 01:57:52.551
You're investing your family's money.

1883
01:57:52.651 --> 01:57:54.032
You're investing your friend's money.

1884
01:57:54.092 --> 01:57:55.474
You're investing your neighbor's money.

1885
01:57:55.814 --> 01:57:56.955
That literally is your identity.

1886
01:57:56.995 --> 01:57:57.916
It is your identity.

1887
01:57:58.117 --> 01:58:00.679
To all those people, those people, that's what they see me as.

1888
01:58:00.799 --> 01:58:01.060
Right.

1889
01:58:01.200 --> 01:58:06.065
And it's like if the market starts crashing, it's like the guy across the street's banging on your door being like...

1890
01:58:06.465 --> 01:58:07.305
Did you get out in time?

1891
01:58:07.325 --> 01:58:08.065
Did you get out of time?

1892
01:58:08.085 --> 01:58:14.507
And if you lost everything right now, you have to go to all those people you love and care about in your life and tell them that you lost all of their savings.

1893
01:58:14.547 --> 01:58:14.807
Yeah.

1894
01:58:14.927 --> 01:58:17.047
So for us to sit here and say, well, I would never do that.

1895
01:58:17.087 --> 01:58:20.368
Well, we don't have your identity wrapped up like they did.

1896
01:58:20.588 --> 01:58:20.868
Yeah.

1897
01:58:21.168 --> 01:58:21.468
Okay.

1898
01:58:21.588 --> 01:58:22.389
But have you ever done this?

1899
01:58:22.429 --> 01:58:23.989
Have you ever sticked your identity on too much?

1900
01:58:24.009 --> 01:58:26.450
I feel like you're, you kind of spread out quite a bit.

1901
01:58:26.870 --> 01:58:28.270
Are there certain things?

1902
01:58:29.748 --> 01:58:30.168
I don't know.

1903
01:58:30.268 --> 01:58:31.729
I don't think I'm very diversified.

1904
01:58:31.749 --> 01:58:32.169
Oh, you don't?

1905
01:58:32.249 --> 01:58:32.509
Okay.

1906
01:58:32.669 --> 01:58:32.949
I don't.

1907
01:58:33.009 --> 01:58:33.269
Okay.

1908
01:58:33.409 --> 01:58:33.749
I don't.

1909
01:58:33.949 --> 01:58:35.910
Yeah, I'm definitely more focused these days.

1910
01:58:35.950 --> 01:58:38.511
I think when I was younger, maybe it was a little more diversified.

1911
01:58:38.571 --> 01:58:43.352
But yeah, these days, dude, I'm becoming so boring and repetitive.

1912
01:58:43.852 --> 01:58:44.392
I work.

1913
01:58:44.712 --> 01:58:46.513
I hang out with the same five people.

1914
01:58:48.496 --> 01:58:51.338
hang out with my wife and I play some video games.

1915
01:58:51.378 --> 01:58:52.178
Like that's kind of it.

1916
01:58:52.198 --> 01:58:52.318
Yeah.

1917
01:58:52.338 --> 01:58:52.578
Yeah.

1918
01:58:52.798 --> 01:58:54.499
That's kind of, that's kind of all I've got.

1919
01:58:54.519 --> 01:58:56.200
So if one of those legs got knocked out.

1920
01:58:56.680 --> 01:58:57.040
Oh yeah.

1921
01:58:57.181 --> 01:58:59.502
I mean, you would be devastated.

1922
01:58:59.522 --> 01:58:59.802
You think?

1923
01:59:00.002 --> 01:59:06.305
I know I haven't done anything and I don't think I will do anything that could potentially get me canceled, but like, Oh yeah.

1924
01:59:06.465 --> 01:59:13.949
You know, if, if I got canceled, if my career got massively jeopardized, yeah, it would be, it would be a deep, deep cut.

1925
01:59:14.149 --> 01:59:14.390
Yeah.

1926
01:59:14.510 --> 01:59:14.930
For sure.

1927
01:59:14.990 --> 01:59:16.651
Like there's a lot of my identity.

1928
01:59:16.671 --> 01:59:16.771
Yeah.

1929
01:59:17.351 --> 01:59:17.671
I bet.

1930
01:59:17.731 --> 01:59:19.974
Well, and there's a lot, a lot of people depend on you too.

1931
01:59:20.654 --> 01:59:20.994
Yes.

1932
01:59:21.435 --> 01:59:22.736
I can sympathize with that.

1933
01:59:22.956 --> 01:59:23.917
I could definitely see that.

1934
01:59:24.137 --> 01:59:24.237
Yeah.

1935
01:59:24.257 --> 01:59:24.598
I don't know.

1936
01:59:24.618 --> 01:59:26.920
I feel like as I get older, I've, I've loosened a lot of those.

1937
01:59:26.960 --> 01:59:27.981
I've talked about this before.

1938
01:59:28.001 --> 01:59:30.904
Like I've always, I had that identity as like, oh, I wanted to be the smart guy.

1939
01:59:30.924 --> 01:59:33.506
That was kind of like me getting out of certain situations.

1940
01:59:33.526 --> 01:59:37.229
Like being smart is going to get me out of these situations and it'll get me things that I need.

1941
01:59:37.269 --> 01:59:37.329
And

1942
01:59:38.485 --> 01:59:40.808
you know, satisfy some of those basic needs that I had.

1943
01:59:41.348 --> 01:59:43.971
And that worked for a long time, but then I started to see it fail.

1944
01:59:44.652 --> 01:59:49.537
And I think luckily I kind of like have slowly loosened my grip on that.

1945
01:59:49.777 --> 01:59:51.679
It used to be like any slight to my intelligence.

1946
01:59:51.699 --> 01:59:52.880
I took it very, very personally.

1947
01:59:52.960 --> 01:59:53.180
Right.

1948
01:59:53.200 --> 01:59:58.746
And that's another thing you'll see with somebody who over identifies with something is that they take it everything very personally around that domain.

1949
01:59:58.926 --> 02:00:00.187
I still have plenty of attachments.

1950
02:00:00.248 --> 02:00:00.528
Sure.

1951
02:00:00.768 --> 02:00:06.275
We're going to talk later about what are good things to identify with, like what are good failures to sign up for.

1952
02:00:06.315 --> 02:00:13.464
And I think that's an example of a bad failure to sign up for because it is based on metrics outside of yourself, right?

1953
02:00:13.484 --> 02:00:15.406
Like you're, you're, you're essentially basing your...

1954
02:00:16.027 --> 02:00:22.051
how you view yourself on the perceptions of others or the ability of others.

1955
02:00:22.711 --> 02:00:23.992
It came into stark contrast too.

1956
02:00:24.012 --> 02:00:28.815
Like when I go to grad school and everybody's smart around you, that doesn't mean anything anymore at that point.

1957
02:00:28.835 --> 02:00:30.937
So you're like, well, I got to find something else, I guess.

1958
02:00:30.957 --> 02:00:33.058
I had the same experience in music school.

1959
02:00:33.138 --> 02:00:33.398
Yeah.

1960
02:00:33.519 --> 02:00:33.859
Oh, right.

1961
02:00:33.879 --> 02:00:34.059
Yeah.

1962
02:00:34.079 --> 02:00:36.420
It was my whole identity when I was a teenager.

1963
02:00:36.440 --> 02:00:38.342
And then I went to music school and I was just...

1964
02:00:39.345 --> 02:00:40.186
Yeah, everybody's talented.

1965
02:00:40.466 --> 02:00:40.947
Everybody.

1966
02:00:40.967 --> 02:00:44.870
And half the guys in my class were so much better than I was.

1967
02:00:44.910 --> 02:00:48.314
And it just, man, it was a brutal hit to the ego.

1968
02:00:48.514 --> 02:00:50.876
Like I said, I feel like I have fewer and fewer identities.

1969
02:00:50.956 --> 02:00:53.018
Maybe it's because I'm an amateur Buddhist too.

1970
02:00:53.038 --> 02:00:54.259
There you go.

1971
02:00:54.279 --> 02:00:57.222
You are getting pretty deep down the meditation rabbit hole.

1972
02:00:57.242 --> 02:00:58.503
Oh man, we'll get into that.

1973
02:01:00.305 --> 02:01:01.486
So if we haven't lost...

1974
02:01:02.307 --> 02:01:04.048
everybody with the religious talk yet.

1975
02:01:04.408 --> 02:01:05.289
There's still time, Drew.

1976
02:01:05.569 --> 02:01:07.430
There's still time to fail in this chapter.

1977
02:01:07.690 --> 02:01:14.194
I want to pivot to Christianity because I think there are some really interesting concepts in Christianity that...

1978
02:01:15.133 --> 02:01:19.815
I have a lot to say about failure and the management of failure and atoning for failures.

1979
02:01:20.095 --> 02:01:30.019
As an atheist, I personally would characterize Christianity as a very efficient atonement technology or set of practices.

1980
02:01:30.660 --> 02:01:34.982
The same way I think Buddhism is a set of practices to loosen the...

1981
02:01:35.942 --> 02:01:39.685
the ties of identity and like loosen that identification with things.

1982
02:01:39.965 --> 02:01:50.072
I've come to appreciate Christianity as, as a set of practices to help one manage the inevitable fallout of our failures and, and disappointments.

1983
02:01:50.172 --> 02:01:50.552
Okay.

1984
02:01:51.453 --> 02:01:53.355
I'm interested to see where you go with this.

1985
02:01:53.515 --> 02:01:55.436
So I actually want to start with the definition of sin.

1986
02:01:55.476 --> 02:01:59.039
So, I mean, as we've talked on this podcast before, I grew up in the church.

1987
02:01:59.099 --> 02:02:00.380
I grew up going to church all the time.

1988
02:02:00.540 --> 02:02:00.940
Yeah, same.

1989
02:02:01.280 --> 02:02:02.621
Very, very familiar with the Bible.

1990
02:02:03.042 --> 02:02:11.068
One of the concepts I always hated when I was younger was this concept of original sin, which is this idea in Christianity that...

1991
02:02:12.056 --> 02:02:18.401
People are born sinful and you can only be redeemed by coming to Jesus and asking for forgiveness.

1992
02:02:18.681 --> 02:02:22.964
As a teenager, I thought this was the most fucked up thing that you could tell people.

1993
02:02:23.384 --> 02:02:31.370
You're essentially telling people that there's something inherently wrong with them and there's nothing you can do to fix it other than pray to God and pray to Jesus.

1994
02:02:31.590 --> 02:02:36.614
And yeah, I think on one level that is probably not the best message to be disseminating.

1995
02:02:36.694 --> 02:02:37.114
It is...

1996
02:02:38.563 --> 02:02:40.564
Well, let's just say it's a little culty.

1997
02:02:43.226 --> 02:02:54.534
But as I've gotten older and I've done a little bit of a deeper research into some of these things, and especially prepping for this episode, I came across some things that made me think about original sin in a little bit of a different way.

1998
02:02:55.095 --> 02:03:04.201
So the first thing is that I think the popular contemporary idea of sin is that you did something wrong, that you are a bad person, right?

1999
02:03:04.241 --> 02:03:06.463
Like we think of sin, like if I say the word sin,

2000
02:03:07.811 --> 02:03:08.472
What do you think of?

2001
02:03:08.892 --> 02:03:12.298
I've like, you know, fornication and stealing something.

2002
02:03:12.338 --> 02:03:12.658
Yeah.

2003
02:03:12.678 --> 02:03:12.959
Yeah.

2004
02:03:13.059 --> 02:03:15.042
They hit it like violence, hitting somebody.

2005
02:03:15.623 --> 02:03:16.063
Murder.

2006
02:03:16.103 --> 02:03:18.307
Like, yeah, all the horrible things that people do.

2007
02:03:18.347 --> 02:03:18.547
Yeah.

2008
02:03:18.667 --> 02:03:19.990
Like I almost equate it.

2009
02:03:20.030 --> 02:03:21.872
It's like it's like crime essentially.

2010
02:03:21.933 --> 02:03:22.113
Right.

2011
02:03:22.133 --> 02:03:22.814
Right.

2012
02:03:22.994 --> 02:03:31.401
What's interesting is that sen, if you look at the origins of the word sen, it actually, it comes from an ancient Greek word that was used in archery.

2013
02:03:32.021 --> 02:03:39.887
And the word sen was the word that described an arrow that missed the bullseye.

2014
02:03:40.408 --> 02:03:46.072
So like the gap, I guess that gap in which you missed, that was the sen, right?

2015
02:03:46.092 --> 02:03:47.253
It didn't hit where you were aiming.

2016
02:03:47.513 --> 02:03:48.134
Exactly.

2017
02:03:48.254 --> 02:03:49.014
So it is...

2018
02:03:49.775 --> 02:04:04.162
Interestingly, the origination of the word sin is much more attuned and aligned with the idea of failure or missing expectations of trying to live up to some sort of standard or outcome and just falling short.

2019
02:04:04.362 --> 02:04:15.068
And so the idea of original sin, if you take all the things we just discussed about Buddhism, that no matter how you define yourself, you are also defining your future failures.

2020
02:04:15.088 --> 02:04:19.030
You're defining all of the standards and outcomes that you're going to fail to live up to.

2021
02:04:20.542 --> 02:04:31.544
and how that's inevitable and unavoidable and there's nothing you can do about it because it is just an ingrained piece of your psychology, you could call that original sin, right?

2022
02:04:31.704 --> 02:04:35.885
It's like we are all born with this sense of self that we can never fully live up to.

2023
02:04:36.125 --> 02:04:40.827
The only way to atone for that is through some radical form of self-forgiveness.

2024
02:04:41.347 --> 02:04:42.427
That understanding...

2025
02:04:44.394 --> 02:04:46.655
of Christianity, I was like, oh.

2026
02:04:46.675 --> 02:04:47.796
It's a little more palatable.

2027
02:04:48.056 --> 02:04:48.736
Tell me more.

2028
02:04:48.756 --> 02:04:49.597
OK, OK.

2029
02:04:49.617 --> 02:04:50.677
This is way more interesting.

2030
02:04:50.957 --> 02:04:58.001
I think the backbone of Christian theology, there is a very manipulative culty way of looking at it, which is kind of what I described earlier.

2031
02:04:58.041 --> 02:05:12.127
But I also think there is kind of a profound psychological way of looking at it as well, which is that we are all hampered with this kind of inherent sense of guilt and shame of the fact that we

2032
02:05:13.702 --> 02:05:24.872
We'll never be able to fully live up to the standards we set for ourselves, that no matter what we pursue in our lives, it is going to slip through our fingers at some point, that the failure rate of everything is 100%.

2033
02:05:25.192 --> 02:05:29.115
It is always going to be difficult to deal with that and wrestle with that.

2034
02:05:29.256 --> 02:05:35.001
Whether or not anything is our fault, we are always going to wrestle with certain feelings of guilt and shame around that.

2035
02:05:35.901 --> 02:05:38.564
And what is the cleanser of guilt and shame?

2036
02:05:38.645 --> 02:05:43.770
It is a radical form of compassion and forgiveness for ourselves.

2037
02:05:44.111 --> 02:05:50.377
If Buddhism nailed the psychological explanation of why we struggle so much with

2038
02:05:50.998 --> 02:05:59.243
feelings of inadequacy and anxiety and failure and doubt and all these things, I think Christianity nailed the solution, right?

2039
02:05:59.303 --> 02:06:03.306
Which is kind of this radical self-compassion or this radical self-forgiveness.

2040
02:06:03.586 --> 02:06:09.950
What's also super interesting about Christianity is that it has this baked-in mechanism of confession.

2041
02:06:10.989 --> 02:06:16.011
Which I guess in some ways you could say it was like the predecessor of therapy, of talk therapy.

2042
02:06:16.031 --> 02:06:16.291
Yeah.

2043
02:06:16.531 --> 02:06:17.051
Yeah.

2044
02:06:17.251 --> 02:06:20.352
Which I never really thought about before until we worked on this episode.

2045
02:06:20.372 --> 02:06:20.952
I was like, huh.

2046
02:06:21.932 --> 02:06:22.273
Interesting.

2047
02:06:22.293 --> 02:06:24.073
We didn't just invent therapy out of nowhere.

2048
02:06:24.133 --> 02:06:27.394
Like we've actually, the church has been doing this for like 2,000 years.

2049
02:06:27.574 --> 02:06:32.756
There's a funny story around confession, which is that Martin Luther, the...

2050
02:06:34.418 --> 02:06:38.881
the guy who kicked off the Reformation, apparently he was such a neurotic mess.

2051
02:06:39.301 --> 02:06:45.225
He was a monk in a monastery in Erfurt in the early 1500s when he was younger.

2052
02:06:45.385 --> 02:06:58.193
And apparently he was such a neurotic, self-loathing mess that he would catalog and document all of his failings with such minute detail that his confessions would often last up to six months.

2053
02:06:58.853 --> 02:07:00.754
five, six, seven hours at a time.

2054
02:07:01.314 --> 02:07:12.740
And it got to the point where like every thought that he had that was wrong, every like minute, tiny mistake that like eventually one of the confessors, one of the priests like pulled him aside and was like, look, man,

2055
02:07:14.138 --> 02:07:15.819
you don't really have any problems.

2056
02:07:16.080 --> 02:07:22.324
Like, he's like, I'm talking to people who like fucking killed somebody, like cheated on their wives.

2057
02:07:22.785 --> 02:07:27.348
You're coming in and telling me that you feel bad because like the rice was undercooked last night.

2058
02:07:27.368 --> 02:07:36.475
You know, like it's, they had a little bit of a come to Jesus moment, no pun intended, of like, of like, dude, you don't really have any problems.

2059
02:07:36.535 --> 02:07:40.558
You're kind of just making this shit up and you're abusing yourself.

2060
02:07:40.858 --> 02:07:48.964
I don't remember exactly what the confessor told him, but there is a great line in there about how forgiveness is not merely this external thing that happens to you.

2061
02:07:49.304 --> 02:07:56.289
It is part of it is learning to develop a tolerance and an understanding of your own shortcomings.

2062
02:07:56.770 --> 02:07:58.971
So if you think of confession in terms of

2063
02:07:59.799 --> 02:08:05.641
being a technique or even a technology, right, for alleviating the guilt and shame of failure.

2064
02:08:06.522 --> 02:08:09.943
I think there's actually a really interesting kind of scientific explanation for this.

2065
02:08:10.263 --> 02:08:21.788
And I'd put therapy in the same category, which if you go back to the sociometer theory that we talked about last chapter, right, that we are, there's like something innate within each of us that we are always subconsciously measuring ourselves as.

2066
02:08:22.668 --> 02:08:25.809
and how much value we have relative to the tribe.

2067
02:08:26.269 --> 02:08:31.371
And that a lot of what we experience as our self-esteem is a reflection of that sociometer, right?

2068
02:08:31.671 --> 02:08:39.754
If you fail at something and then you go talk to somebody else about it, one of two things is going to happen, and maybe both.

2069
02:08:41.174 --> 02:08:48.697
First thing that's going to happen is if that person listens to you, empathizes with you, and accepts you despite your failure, then...

2070
02:08:49.735 --> 02:08:52.156
That probably repairs your sociometer.

2071
02:08:52.336 --> 02:08:56.058
It reassures you of like, okay, I have not lost status with the tribe.

2072
02:08:56.598 --> 02:08:57.558
I'm not a total loser.

2073
02:08:57.598 --> 02:08:58.919
I'm not going to get kicked out tomorrow.

2074
02:09:00.400 --> 02:09:00.820
Thank God.

2075
02:09:01.280 --> 02:09:01.720
I'm okay.

2076
02:09:01.980 --> 02:09:04.962
The second thing it can do is that it can alert you...

2077
02:09:05.834 --> 02:09:13.461
to whether you had an unhealthy or an inaccurate expectation or outcome that you were working towards, right?

2078
02:09:13.861 --> 02:09:19.867
Because if you think about like part of the value of therapy or just talking to anybody is the empathy that you get, right?

2079
02:09:19.907 --> 02:09:21.808
That there is a certain amount of healing in that.

2080
02:09:22.809 --> 02:09:28.654
But another aspect of it is like beating yourself up over something and then you go talk to somebody and they're like, well...

2081
02:09:29.435 --> 02:09:31.916
Why are you beating yourself up over that?

2082
02:09:31.956 --> 02:09:33.396
Like, why is that success to you?

2083
02:09:33.476 --> 02:09:34.356
That doesn't make sense.

2084
02:09:34.916 --> 02:09:36.316
My definition is completely different.

2085
02:09:36.336 --> 02:09:37.437
Goes back to the definitions.

2086
02:09:37.597 --> 02:09:37.797
Right.

2087
02:09:37.817 --> 02:09:39.097
And then you hear their definition.

2088
02:09:39.117 --> 02:09:41.557
You're like, oh, I was being crazy.

2089
02:09:42.178 --> 02:09:43.958
This is like, that's completely off base.

2090
02:09:43.998 --> 02:09:45.818
I should have seen it this way the entire time.

2091
02:09:45.858 --> 02:09:52.960
So I think the magic of what Freud called the talking cure, I think, is largely...

2092
02:09:53.900 --> 02:09:55.662
It's a combination of both of those things.

2093
02:09:56.102 --> 02:10:08.713
It is seeing that you are not going to be socially punished, that you're not being ostracized, and then also having the ability to recalibrate your expectations in such a way that the failure maybe doesn't look like such a failure anymore.

2094
02:10:09.013 --> 02:10:16.237
Again, if we haven't lost the people who are turned off by the religion, that bears out in the psychological research as well.

2095
02:10:16.257 --> 02:10:17.017
And you're right.

2096
02:10:17.097 --> 02:10:18.758
You've made the parallel with therapy.

2097
02:10:19.098 --> 02:10:20.119
That's exactly what it does.

2098
02:10:20.159 --> 02:10:23.501
And then it's not only that, but just disclosure in general.

2099
02:10:23.861 --> 02:10:29.164
Any distressful event, maybe it's not a failure, just anything that's bothering you and getting it out there.

2100
02:10:29.864 --> 02:10:33.466
it seems to have some sort of beneficial effect all across the board.

2101
02:10:33.747 --> 02:10:35.027
And it's not just catharsis.

2102
02:10:35.067 --> 02:10:37.269
It's not just getting it off your chest, too.

2103
02:10:37.669 --> 02:10:40.691
There is some form of processing, which is exactly what you're talking about.

2104
02:10:40.711 --> 02:10:43.693
Like there has to you can't just vent to somebody like venting is fine.

2105
02:10:43.733 --> 02:10:44.013
Sure.

2106
02:10:44.433 --> 02:10:47.835
But there there has to be some sort of like processing that happens with it.

2107
02:10:48.056 --> 02:10:56.061
Penny Baker back in the 90s, he did all this research on this and did this whole meta analysis around it and kind of like basically the form of the confessional.

2108
02:10:56.921 --> 02:11:00.344
where you have an audience and it's not, you're not just doing it to yourself.

2109
02:11:00.945 --> 02:11:01.645
Journaling is good.

2110
02:11:01.986 --> 02:11:06.309
Processing on your own is good, but actually putting it out there precisely because of what you're talking about.

2111
02:11:06.690 --> 02:11:08.692
Like that sociometer theory that we have.

2112
02:11:08.972 --> 02:11:14.256
It's like we have to, in our minds, put ourselves back into the group and be okay and accept it in some way.

2113
02:11:14.557 --> 02:11:18.000
When you think about this, a friend comes to you and they're like, oh man, I feel awful about this.

2114
02:11:18.600 --> 02:11:20.041
Usually what you're like, you're like, dude, like,

2115
02:11:20.946 --> 02:11:21.787
Take it easy on yourself.

2116
02:11:22.167 --> 02:11:26.370
And that has a lot of reparative effects that we've seen.

2117
02:11:26.570 --> 02:11:29.532
There's also the cost of like not disclosing things too.

2118
02:11:30.233 --> 02:11:32.915
If we keep all of that in, you end up doing it.

2119
02:11:32.935 --> 02:11:35.377
That's where the rumination often comes in, right?

2120
02:11:35.397 --> 02:11:38.459
That's where the open loops stay open and you can't quite close them.

2121
02:11:38.499 --> 02:11:41.661
And so there's always that going on in the background of your mind.

2122
02:11:42.482 --> 02:11:43.983
There's a physical aspect to it too.

2123
02:11:44.043 --> 02:11:45.064
Body keeps the score.

2124
02:11:45.084 --> 02:11:47.606
Vessel van der Kolk, a lot of that is real.

2125
02:11:47.867 --> 02:11:51.590
There's all sorts of effects of not disclosing versus disclosing.

2126
02:11:52.351 --> 02:11:53.812
Again, though, it's not just the catharsis.

2127
02:11:53.832 --> 02:11:56.094
There's got to be a processing element to it.

2128
02:11:56.434 --> 02:12:09.566
From what I recall, a lot of Pinabaker's research on journaling in particular found that journaling was most beneficial when you specifically journaled about something that bothered you.

2129
02:12:10.146 --> 02:12:13.067
Like you couldn't just sit down and just dump all your thoughts and ideas.

2130
02:12:13.087 --> 02:12:21.150
I mean, I'm sure there's some value in that, but like it was specifically when you journaled about some issue in your life that was really eating at you.

2131
02:12:21.391 --> 02:12:24.152
That is when you saw the benefits of it.

2132
02:12:24.312 --> 02:12:29.114
And it wasn't just the facts of what's eating you too, but the emotions and the integration between the facts and the emotions.

2133
02:12:29.194 --> 02:12:29.934
This is what happened.

2134
02:12:29.954 --> 02:12:31.054
That's a very important part of it.

2135
02:12:31.114 --> 02:12:32.215
This is how I felt about it.

2136
02:12:32.755 --> 02:12:42.444
And then there were continued, if you did it over several sessions too, and the story developed over time and you were able to integrate it and tell a more coherent story over time about that, that helped a lot too.

2137
02:12:42.864 --> 02:12:44.586
You can do that a lot better with someone else.

2138
02:12:44.606 --> 02:12:54.675
And I think that's why therapy works for some people, for a lot of people around something that you can, you can tell a coherent story about and eventually make sense of both the factual and the emotional side of it.

2139
02:12:54.715 --> 02:12:55.075
So, yeah.

2140
02:12:55.295 --> 02:12:57.377
In the case of confession and the church.

2141
02:12:58.318 --> 02:13:01.179
The power is that radical forgiveness, right?

2142
02:13:01.199 --> 02:13:04.219
It's like you go sit with the priest or whatever.

2143
02:13:04.259 --> 02:13:06.420
You tell the priest all the awful things that you've done.

2144
02:13:06.440 --> 02:13:12.841
The priest consoles you, reassures you, and says, you're forgiven.

2145
02:13:12.941 --> 02:13:13.762
God still loves you.

2146
02:13:13.842 --> 02:13:14.542
Jesus loves you.

2147
02:13:14.602 --> 02:13:15.142
Whatever, right?

2148
02:13:15.162 --> 02:13:18.703
There's probably some sort of cleansing effect that comes with that.

2149
02:13:19.043 --> 02:13:19.923
It's closure to it, yeah.

2150
02:13:20.083 --> 02:13:24.564
The other thing that I thought about while you were talking is when we hold things in,

2151
02:13:29.026 --> 02:13:32.749
They seem to kind of drift and they drift into like irrational areas.

2152
02:13:33.310 --> 02:13:35.972
And it's only by like saying it out loud.

2153
02:13:36.673 --> 02:13:39.515
I mean, I, I, I'm sure you've had this experience a million times, right?

2154
02:13:39.535 --> 02:13:42.738
Where it's like, you've thought, you've like thought something, you're really anxious about something.

2155
02:13:43.319 --> 02:13:46.241
And then you like, just go to say it out loud.

2156
02:13:46.321 --> 02:13:49.884
And as soon as the words come out of your mouth, you're like, wow, I'm being ridiculous.

2157
02:13:49.905 --> 02:13:50.085
Yeah.

2158
02:13:50.425 --> 02:13:50.645
Yeah.

2159
02:13:51.046 --> 02:13:51.306
Yeah.

2160
02:13:51.646 --> 02:14:01.275
Like what's really interesting about that too, is that they, they do find that the, the listener in that situation, if they have two qualities, it tends to do the best as well.

2161
02:14:01.535 --> 02:14:03.237
One of them is compassion, which you've already said.

2162
02:14:03.557 --> 02:14:05.499
The other one is being assertive though, too.

2163
02:14:06.080 --> 02:14:12.906
So this, I have a, I have a friend in particular when I am thinking those kinds of like crazy thoughts or whatever, I'll call her up and she's like, she'll sit and listen.

2164
02:14:13.046 --> 02:14:15.348
And then she'll immediately come back to me and be like, what are you like?

2165
02:14:15.669 --> 02:14:16.790
This is why this is crazy.

2166
02:14:17.350 --> 02:14:21.311
So there's a compassionate, and this is the confessional is set up like this, like priests were there.

2167
02:14:21.391 --> 02:14:26.372
They were trained to be like this, be compassionate, know that we're all sinners, quote unquote sinners.

2168
02:14:26.472 --> 02:14:26.712
Right.

2169
02:14:27.012 --> 02:14:31.814
But then also they have a code by which they live and they say, this is, this is how you should go about it.

2170
02:14:31.834 --> 02:14:33.454
So there's an assertiveness to it as well.

2171
02:14:33.794 --> 02:14:34.874
So you're, you're absolutely right.

2172
02:14:34.914 --> 02:14:45.897
Like, it's like, yeah, getting out loud, you might hear it yourself, but someone else could reflect back to you how crazy it is too, and be assertive enough where they can be like, look, I get where you're coming from, but at the same time too, you're being fucking stupid.

2173
02:14:46.057 --> 02:14:46.277
Yeah.

2174
02:14:46.437 --> 02:14:46.638
Yeah.

2175
02:14:46.658 --> 02:14:46.918
Yeah.

2176
02:14:46.958 --> 02:14:47.198
Yeah.

2177
02:14:47.278 --> 02:14:49.180
Like that's actually very, very valuable.

2178
02:14:49.220 --> 02:14:52.464
So it's not, again, it's not just catharsis and getting it out there.

2179
02:14:52.484 --> 02:14:52.664
Right.

2180
02:14:52.684 --> 02:14:56.168
There's some sort of reflection and, and processing that has to happen around it.

2181
02:14:56.208 --> 02:14:56.368
Yeah.

2182
02:14:56.728 --> 02:15:05.597
I remember I met a woman years ago and I remember she came up to me after an event once, this was like a kind of a business event.

2183
02:15:05.617 --> 02:15:05.838
Yeah.

2184
02:15:06.358 --> 02:15:13.624
And she told me that she really wanted to start a family, but she felt like she couldn't until she was professionally and financially secure.

2185
02:15:13.944 --> 02:15:15.846
And she was just afraid that she was going to run out of time.

2186
02:15:16.546 --> 02:15:19.288
And this, it was a conference with like a lot of successful people.

2187
02:15:19.348 --> 02:15:20.829
So I was just, and I kind of looked at it.

2188
02:15:20.870 --> 02:15:22.951
I'm like, you're probably fine.

2189
02:15:22.971 --> 02:15:25.053
Like in my head, I'm like, she's probably fine.

2190
02:15:25.173 --> 02:15:30.837
So I was like, okay, when would you be financially and professionally successful enough to, to be able to comfortably have a child?

2191
02:15:30.857 --> 02:15:30.957
Yeah.

2192
02:15:30.978 --> 02:15:31.678
Where's your standard?

2193
02:15:31.698 --> 02:15:32.619
Where's your definition here?

2194
02:15:32.659 --> 02:15:34.300
And her definition was a million dollars a year.

2195
02:15:34.320 --> 02:15:34.781
Okay.

2196
02:15:34.801 --> 02:15:35.021
Okay.

2197
02:15:35.581 --> 02:15:36.881
She thought that was bare minimum.

2198
02:15:36.961 --> 02:15:37.302
Okay.

2199
02:15:37.382 --> 02:15:38.242
To like raise a kid.

2200
02:15:38.262 --> 02:15:38.742
To raise a kid.

2201
02:15:38.782 --> 02:15:38.902
Okay.

2202
02:15:39.082 --> 02:15:42.583
And it's always tough because you like, you don't want to like laugh in people's faces.

2203
02:15:42.643 --> 02:15:44.804
But you know, I remember I was like, okay, that's interesting.

2204
02:15:45.204 --> 02:15:47.205
Why, why a million?

2205
02:15:47.445 --> 02:15:49.105
And then she started going through all the reasons.

2206
02:15:49.125 --> 02:15:52.046
She was like, well, you know, either my husband and I would, we'd want to quit working.

2207
02:15:52.066 --> 02:15:52.887
We'd want to have a nanny.

2208
02:15:52.927 --> 02:15:55.127
We'd want to like go to a private school, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

2209
02:15:55.487 --> 02:16:03.810
And I was like, okay, everything you just described like that you're maybe at like 300k, maybe at most, like if you're in a,

2210
02:16:04.010 --> 02:16:05.072
really expensive neighborhood.

2211
02:16:05.652 --> 02:16:07.555
Where's this other 700K coming from?

2212
02:16:07.655 --> 02:16:11.401
Like, I actually tried to do the math with her and it just kept coming up so short.

2213
02:16:11.641 --> 02:16:18.351
I told her, I was like, it's clear that this is, there's a lot of fear here and you are...

2214
02:16:19.052 --> 02:16:27.977
overcompensating with an extremely large number in your head and you were defining success as this absurdly large number to compensate for that irrational fear that's going on.

2215
02:16:28.177 --> 02:16:29.818
I was like, where do you think that fear is coming from?

2216
02:16:29.838 --> 02:16:41.025
And sure enough, it turned out she grew up very poor and was like, you know, father went broke when she was young and the family, you know, like lived in a car for a couple months and had...

2217
02:16:41.665 --> 02:16:43.686
this like torrid story from her past.

2218
02:16:43.867 --> 02:16:45.268
And I was like, got it.

2219
02:16:45.488 --> 02:16:45.808
Okay.

2220
02:16:46.008 --> 02:16:53.553
That's so it's the extremity of the number is, is it's proportional to your internal emotions.

2221
02:16:53.613 --> 02:16:55.455
It's not, it has nothing to do with the spreadsheet.

2222
02:16:55.615 --> 02:17:01.899
I was like, first of all, that's completely understandable given where you come from, but you should listen to this spreadsheet.

2223
02:17:02.199 --> 02:17:02.359
Yeah.

2224
02:17:03.440 --> 02:17:07.884
That's an arbitrary standard she adopted without knowing it.

2225
02:17:08.185 --> 02:17:09.446
Yeah, that's crazy.

2226
02:17:09.466 --> 02:17:13.329
And so yeah, reflecting it back to somebody and hopefully seeing it right in front of your face.

2227
02:17:13.429 --> 02:17:19.415
It was funny too, because I remember asking her, I was like, how many people do you know who have had kids and don't make a million dollars a year?

2228
02:17:19.575 --> 02:17:20.936
And she was like, oh, everybody.

2229
02:17:21.056 --> 02:17:21.556
Yeah, 100%.

2230
02:17:21.596 --> 02:17:23.658
And I was like, how many of those kids are fine?

2231
02:17:24.699 --> 02:17:27.402
And she was just kind of like, oh yeah, good point.

2232
02:17:28.868 --> 02:17:29.048
Right.

2233
02:17:29.329 --> 02:17:29.529
Yeah.

2234
02:17:30.109 --> 02:17:30.690
But it's funny.

2235
02:17:30.710 --> 02:17:33.073
I mean, your brain plays tricks with you, right?

2236
02:17:33.233 --> 02:17:36.677
And it's coming back to that Buddhist point of the attachments, right?

2237
02:17:36.717 --> 02:17:46.169
You know, it's like that attachment is probably deep seated in her from a very young age of like this intense anxiety around money and an overcompensation around money.

2238
02:17:47.419 --> 02:17:50.722
And it's probably been there for so long that she like forgets that it's there.

2239
02:17:50.802 --> 02:17:54.166
She doesn't realize, you know, people don't really talk about money a whole lot.

2240
02:17:54.266 --> 02:18:00.172
So like she doesn't have people to measure herself against, or maybe she only hangs around people who are super rich.

2241
02:18:00.212 --> 02:18:08.480
And so her measurement of what's acceptable is like gotten completely out of whack and she doesn't realize it because she's not confessing.

2242
02:18:09.078 --> 02:18:10.439
you can get attached to independence.

2243
02:18:10.459 --> 02:18:13.000
You can get attached to non-attachment even too, right?

2244
02:18:13.460 --> 02:18:13.700
Yes.

2245
02:18:13.720 --> 02:18:16.142
Like that's always one of my favorite ones that I point out in myself sometimes.

2246
02:18:16.202 --> 02:18:18.763
And it goes kind of similar to that story.

2247
02:18:18.783 --> 02:18:22.485
Like when I was growing up, I just realized so many different situations where it's like, oh, I'm on my own.

2248
02:18:23.125 --> 02:18:28.107
And so like independence became a value of mine or like a standard by which I measured a lot of my life.

2249
02:18:28.788 --> 02:18:30.809
And then I see it start failing as I get older too.

2250
02:18:30.829 --> 02:18:31.449
That's another one.

2251
02:18:31.609 --> 02:18:35.511
Like with the being smart thing and the independence thing, then it starts failing you too at some point.

2252
02:18:36.111 --> 02:18:40.555
when I was younger and I was really into Buddhism and meditation, I started to notice that.

2253
02:18:41.055 --> 02:18:45.819
So some of, some of the retreat centers and stuff that I used to go to, like the, the hardcore regulars,

2254
02:18:46.935 --> 02:18:49.276
There was a little bit of a status game among them, right?

2255
02:18:49.296 --> 02:18:58.381
You know, so you kind of hang out with these people after a retreat and, you know, they'd be like bragging about the month of silence that they did or how they were meditating three hours a day or whatever.

2256
02:18:58.421 --> 02:19:03.404
And, you know, it just kind of became another dick measuring contest to see who was going to get enlightened first.

2257
02:19:03.464 --> 02:19:05.965
And I'm like, this is just the same thing.

2258
02:19:06.085 --> 02:19:08.767
Like, this is another version of attachment.

2259
02:19:09.225 --> 02:19:09.966
I just heard this.

2260
02:19:10.066 --> 02:19:11.767
I think this is the term used for that.

2261
02:19:11.867 --> 02:19:12.508
Zen stink.

2262
02:19:13.028 --> 02:19:13.729
Isn't that what they call it?

2263
02:19:13.769 --> 02:19:14.349
Zen stink.

2264
02:19:14.629 --> 02:19:21.555
I think it is where it's like, oh, look at how quickly I'm becoming enlightened or on the path to enlightenment or whatever it is.

2265
02:19:21.655 --> 02:19:21.775
Yeah.

2266
02:19:21.795 --> 02:19:22.696
They call it Zen stink.

2267
02:19:22.956 --> 02:19:24.097
But it's a real problem.

2268
02:19:24.117 --> 02:19:24.617
Yeah, for sure.

2269
02:19:24.657 --> 02:19:24.837
Yeah.

2270
02:19:25.077 --> 02:19:28.980
It's, I mean, and it goes back to like the sociometer follows you everywhere.

2271
02:19:29.501 --> 02:19:34.144
It is human nature to, no matter what environment you put yourself in.

2272
02:19:35.125 --> 02:19:39.226
You will start measuring yourself against the people in your environment.

2273
02:19:39.346 --> 02:19:40.826
Your brain is a big comparison machine.

2274
02:19:40.866 --> 02:19:41.086
It is.

2275
02:19:41.206 --> 02:19:42.167
Basically, it's what it is.

2276
02:19:42.207 --> 02:19:42.427
Yeah.

2277
02:19:42.467 --> 02:19:42.947
Yeah.

2278
02:19:42.987 --> 02:19:43.847
No matter what it is.

2279
02:19:43.927 --> 02:19:45.047
No matter what the comparison is.

2280
02:19:45.507 --> 02:19:54.710
So at the end of the last chapter, I asked the listener to think about a major recent failure and kind of consider where they got the definition of that being a failure.

2281
02:19:55.210 --> 02:19:56.110
I think with this chapter...

2282
02:19:57.330 --> 02:20:00.891
Really what to think is, first, where did that definition of failure come from?

2283
02:20:00.911 --> 02:20:01.932
Did it come from themselves?

2284
02:20:01.952 --> 02:20:03.432
Did it come from somebody outside of them?

2285
02:20:03.792 --> 02:20:07.174
Were they aware that they were accepting that definition, that expectation?

2286
02:20:07.454 --> 02:20:10.855
And then I think the second piece would be, what is their mechanism for

2287
02:20:12.512 --> 02:20:16.794
finding atonement or finding compassion or forgiveness for that failure.

2288
02:20:16.994 --> 02:20:18.575
Who have they shared their feelings with?

2289
02:20:18.915 --> 02:20:29.260
And if they have shared the failure with somebody, I'm curious if they ended up finding out that their expectation or their metric was maybe a little bit out of whack, a little bit irrational.

2290
02:20:29.640 --> 02:20:33.042
But the point of all of this is that failure is inevitable.

2291
02:20:33.882 --> 02:20:36.323
Failure is relative and relational.

2292
02:20:37.384 --> 02:20:39.124
And failure is arbitrary.

2293
02:20:39.144 --> 02:20:40.045
It's self-defined.

2294
02:20:41.362 --> 02:20:42.823
But it's also guaranteed.

2295
02:20:43.183 --> 02:20:48.546
It's a structural, fundamental part of our psychological machinery.

2296
02:20:48.947 --> 02:21:02.915
It is the inherent price that we pay for caring about anything, for pursuing anything, which I think makes us land with a much better question than we probably started this episode with, which is that it's not about how to fail less.

2297
02:21:03.836 --> 02:21:07.238
It's about figuring out what is worth failing for.

2298
02:21:08.483 --> 02:21:12.366
What is worth doing despite the inevitability of failure happening?

2299
02:21:13.287 --> 02:21:15.909
And that is what we're going to get into in next chapter.

2300
02:21:16.229 --> 02:21:16.870
Hold that thought.

2301
02:21:17.070 --> 02:21:19.072
We've got a quick message from our sponsors.

2302
02:21:19.612 --> 02:21:21.474
This episode is brought to you by Notion.

2303
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There's a lot that AI can do right now.

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A lot.

2305
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And look, I run an AI company and I think about this stuff all day, but I keep coming back to the same thing.

2306
02:21:30.821 --> 02:21:33.042
I've never built anything that mattered by myself.

2307
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Books, the podcast, purpose, all of it came from being in a room with people who gave a shit and figuring it out together.

2308
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Best work still comes from people thinking as a team, which is why my team uses Notion.

2309
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2313
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2314
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2315
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2317
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2318
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2319
02:22:23.917 --> 02:22:27.141
That's notion.com slash solved to try Notion today.

2320
02:22:27.362 --> 02:22:29.444
And when you use our link, you're supporting the show.

2321
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This episode is brought to you by Quo.

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2324
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2325
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2326
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2327
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2328
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2329
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2330
02:22:56.774 --> 02:22:59.815
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2331
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2343
02:23:48.565 --> 02:23:51.488
So there are two ways that we can fail at something.

2344
02:23:51.928 --> 02:23:55.451
And the first generates information and self-improvement.

2345
02:23:55.871 --> 02:23:59.335
The second generates judgment and self-loathing.

2346
02:23:59.815 --> 02:24:01.997
And it's a very subtle difference between the two.

2347
02:24:02.477 --> 02:24:05.080
Now, my favorite memoir ever written...

2348
02:24:05.820 --> 02:24:07.442
is actually Andre Agassi's.

2349
02:24:07.562 --> 02:24:08.563
I'm not a tennis fan.

2350
02:24:08.583 --> 02:24:12.588
I could probably count on one hand how many tennis games I have watched in my entire life.

2351
02:24:13.329 --> 02:24:16.332
Andre Agassi's memoir is fantastic.

2352
02:24:16.573 --> 02:24:17.354
It's so good.

2353
02:24:17.874 --> 02:24:19.756
The opening line is, I hate tennis.

2354
02:24:19.776 --> 02:24:20.417
I hate tennis.

2355
02:24:21.278 --> 02:24:26.821
Which is like from the first sentence, you were like, okay, I need to know more, right?

2356
02:24:26.841 --> 02:24:28.102
You're just absolutely hooked.

2357
02:24:28.402 --> 02:24:36.407
What's great about the book, other than his incredible self-awareness and self-disclosure, is he had a crazy life.

2358
02:24:36.587 --> 02:24:41.250
So for people who don't know, Andre Agassi, he's one of the best tennis players who ever lived.

2359
02:24:41.770 --> 02:24:45.752
His father was an Iranian immigrant, came over to the U.S. in the 1970s.

2360
02:24:47.373 --> 02:24:56.158
He was a former professional boxer and he decided before Andre was born, he decided that his son was going to be the number one tennis player in the world.

2361
02:24:56.358 --> 02:25:00.120
So as soon as Andre could walk and hold a racket, he was playing tennis.

2362
02:25:00.500 --> 02:25:02.701
Now, Andre's father was such a psycho.

2363
02:25:02.801 --> 02:25:06.263
He took one of those tennis ball machines that like shoots balls at you.

2364
02:25:06.823 --> 02:25:13.666
And he modified it himself to shoot balls harder and faster at Andre than any human child could hit it.

2365
02:25:13.947 --> 02:25:17.008
He wanted other kids to feel easy compared to the ball machine.

2366
02:25:17.088 --> 02:25:23.171
And then once he modified the ball machine, he forced Andre to hit 2,500 balls a day.

2367
02:25:24.311 --> 02:25:32.495
And his reason for it was that if you did 2,500 balls a day, that was 17,500 balls per week, which added up to a million balls per year.

2368
02:25:32.615 --> 02:25:33.636
And he told Andre...

2369
02:25:34.381 --> 02:25:37.148
that if he hit a million balls a year, he would be unbeatable.

2370
02:25:37.408 --> 02:25:38.952
Andre was seven when he did this.

2371
02:25:38.972 --> 02:25:39.273
Yeah.

2372
02:25:42.492 --> 02:25:53.296
And sure enough, 22 years later, he had eight Grand Slam titles, an Olympic gold medal, a career golden slam, and was widely considered one of the best tennis players in the world.

2373
02:25:53.456 --> 02:26:06.522
Now, what's interesting in the book is he talks about his ascendance and his achievement of all of his goals in a way that is a little bit counterintuitive from the outside, but I think makes sense based on all the science and research we've been talking about in this episode.

2374
02:26:06.682 --> 02:26:09.783
So for example, when he became the number one ranked player in the world, he was a

2375
02:26:09.983 --> 02:26:33.956
in the world and i think it was 1990 he said that he wasn't happy about it in fact he actually just got more anxious and worried because now he had something that he could lose and when he won his first grand slam title he won wimbledon in 1992 he also said that he was wasn't that happy he was mostly just anxious that he was going to have to defend his title the next year and

2376
02:26:34.376 --> 02:26:38.521
And so each accomplishment he added to his belt, it didn't make him any happier.

2377
02:26:38.561 --> 02:26:43.446
It actually made him more miserable because he was afraid of losing what he had already accomplished.

2378
02:26:44.047 --> 02:26:46.370
This is loss aversion in action.

2379
02:26:46.750 --> 02:26:50.454
The more you raise the stakes, the more asymmetrical things.

2380
02:26:51.055 --> 02:26:52.495
the downside becomes, right?

2381
02:26:52.535 --> 02:26:54.336
You have more to lose than you do to gain.

2382
02:26:54.876 --> 02:27:00.158
So therefore, it becomes a lot more difficult to be excited and happy to gain more.

2383
02:27:00.478 --> 02:27:06.680
So this pressure built and built and built, and Agassi kind of imploded in the mid-90s.

2384
02:27:06.700 --> 02:27:09.901
He went through a little bit of a crisis, a career crisis.

2385
02:27:09.941 --> 02:27:11.321
He started playing terribly.

2386
02:27:11.341 --> 02:27:13.402
He had drug problems.

2387
02:27:13.442 --> 02:27:13.782
He...

2388
02:27:14.322 --> 02:27:17.343
you had personal life problems, became kind of a mess.

2389
02:27:17.923 --> 02:27:20.664
And he had to start over from the bottom.

2390
02:27:20.764 --> 02:27:26.165
He actually had to kind of go to the equivalent of the tennis minor leagues to like get back on the saddle.

2391
02:27:26.485 --> 02:27:34.267
And what's interesting is that when he started the second time, he made an agreement with himself, which is that it wasn't going to be about the titles.

2392
02:27:34.327 --> 02:27:36.608
It wasn't going to be about winning all the matches.

2393
02:27:36.668 --> 02:27:38.628
It wasn't going to be about being ranked number one.

2394
02:27:39.048 --> 02:27:39.769
He made tennis...

2395
02:27:41.308 --> 02:27:43.129
a vehicle to some other goal.

2396
02:27:43.569 --> 02:27:57.494
So he had started a foundation and he realized that the more he won at tennis, the more he was able to provide resources and attention and donations for his foundation, the foundation actually became the goal.

2397
02:27:57.514 --> 02:27:59.595
It became the thing that he identified with.

2398
02:28:00.573 --> 02:28:03.054
And the thing that he defined his success and failure by.

2399
02:28:03.714 --> 02:28:10.555
And interestingly, as soon as tennis became the instrument to that new goal, he quickly ascended again.

2400
02:28:10.875 --> 02:28:13.256
And he won the French Open in 1999.

2401
02:28:13.556 --> 02:28:15.717
He became the number one ranked player again.

2402
02:28:15.737 --> 02:28:19.858
He kind of had this big comeback in the late 90s and early 2000s.

2403
02:28:20.358 --> 02:28:22.678
And interestingly, he was able to enjoy it this time.

2404
02:28:23.218 --> 02:28:28.920
He was able to be satisfied with each victory because the point of the victory was not the victory, right?

2405
02:28:30.980 --> 02:28:53.503
the the what we talked about last chapter about how some definitions of success are self-defeating in that once you achieve them they go away if your goal is to be the best player in the world as soon as you become the best player in the world you there's nothing else to win there's only something to lose and that's incredibly demotivating makes you even more anxious and more neurotic and just absolutely miserable

2406
02:28:54.267 --> 02:29:04.295
Whereas if you're trying to achieve some other goal and tennis is the instrument to achieve that goal, then being number one in the world is just a better way to achieve that other goal.

2407
02:29:04.455 --> 02:29:05.876
It's not the point in and of itself.

2408
02:29:06.176 --> 02:29:12.120
Now, these two approaches, these two periods of Agassi's career, I think are good examples of what...

2409
02:29:13.161 --> 02:29:34.668
healthy failure and unhealthy failure end up looking like an unhealthy version of failure is when you take some arbitrary metric outside of yourself and you decide to base your identity and your self-esteem on it and that ultimately ends up being self-defeating because you are basing yourself worth on something that you actually don't have control of whereas when you take some metric that you do have control of

2410
02:29:35.580 --> 02:29:43.387
you know, the quality of your relationships, your contribution to society, your ability to help other people, that is something you do always have control of.

2411
02:29:43.867 --> 02:29:55.537
And so the inevitable failures that come along with it, they happen in a way that is much more healthy and able to be integrated into your future actions and behaviors.

2412
02:29:56.037 --> 02:30:00.021
So it turns out what Agassiz's career shows us is kind of a

2413
02:30:01.582 --> 02:30:09.067
what the psychological research shows us is that there is a healthy way to pursue success and to handle failure.

2414
02:30:09.367 --> 02:30:12.389
And there is an unhealthy way to pursue success and handle failure.

2415
02:30:13.129 --> 02:30:21.895
And as we discussed in the last two chapters, it has less to do with work ethic, how hard you're trying, how smart you are, how talented you are.

2416
02:30:21.955 --> 02:30:23.356
And it has everything to do with work ethic.

2417
02:30:23.936 --> 02:30:26.018
which definitions you've chosen for yourself.

2418
02:30:26.299 --> 02:30:33.867
Yeah, this really does map like really well onto the research that was going on for the last 40 years, like even in the middle of when Agassiz was going through this.

2419
02:30:34.327 --> 02:30:38.952
You can categorize goals kind of based on how you define competence of those goals.

2420
02:30:39.312 --> 02:30:44.698
And these were studies that were done over the 80s and 90s for the most part that came up with this framework and it continues on to today.

2421
02:30:44.778 --> 02:30:44.999
But...

2422
02:30:45.819 --> 02:30:53.206
Essentially, you can have mastery goals where competence of the goal or the mastery of the goal is the reference point is yourself.

2423
02:30:53.927 --> 02:30:54.288
Right.

2424
02:30:54.308 --> 02:30:57.731
Or like it's your own past performance compared to your current performance.

2425
02:30:57.851 --> 02:30:58.071
Right.

2426
02:30:58.191 --> 02:30:58.411
Right.

2427
02:30:58.672 --> 02:31:01.975
You could also conceptualize this as task driven.

2428
02:31:02.335 --> 02:31:02.495
Right.

2429
02:31:02.816 --> 02:31:05.398
So the success means just getting better at the thing.

2430
02:31:05.859 --> 02:31:06.059
Right.

2431
02:31:06.319 --> 02:31:06.499
Yeah.

2432
02:31:06.780 --> 02:31:08.581
Contrast that with performance goals.

2433
02:31:08.601 --> 02:31:09.382
Right.

2434
02:31:09.562 --> 02:31:19.109
which are the competence, the reference point for a competence in that is comparison to other people or some extra standard like we've already talked about, right?

2435
02:31:19.149 --> 02:31:20.270
This is very ego-driven.

2436
02:31:20.550 --> 02:31:20.750
Yeah.

2437
02:31:20.870 --> 02:31:28.535
Success means that you are demonstrating superiority over other people or over some standard that's external to you, okay?

2438
02:31:28.675 --> 02:31:32.378
So you can already see like what we've talked about where this is probably headed, right?

2439
02:31:32.898 --> 02:31:35.921
Now, one detail about the like performance goals

2440
02:31:37.121 --> 02:31:42.586
is that your ability is judged kind of by your effort to outcome ratio.

2441
02:31:42.786 --> 02:31:46.849
If you don't try very hard and you succeed, you're like, oh, look, you're really good at that, right?

2442
02:31:47.529 --> 02:31:48.510
Your performance is really good.

2443
02:31:48.530 --> 02:31:49.371
You're a good person at that.

2444
02:31:49.611 --> 02:31:56.937
But if you try really hard and fail, well, that's a verdict on you and your abilities, you as a person at that point, right?

2445
02:31:57.377 --> 02:31:59.258
So what's interesting about that is a lot of people...

2446
02:32:00.249 --> 02:32:11.727
When they have these performance goals or when they conceptualize goals in terms of performance and these external standards or comparing themselves to others, they will withdraw before they even start because they realize that.

2447
02:32:11.747 --> 02:32:15.493
They're like, oh, if I fail at this, it's a verdict on me, so I'm not even going to start.

2448
02:32:15.673 --> 02:32:17.114
That's why so many of us do this.

2449
02:32:17.375 --> 02:32:20.578
We don't even start because that's how we're looking at the goal itself.

2450
02:32:20.738 --> 02:32:20.978
Right.

2451
02:32:21.098 --> 02:32:22.019
You talk about this all the time.

2452
02:32:22.039 --> 02:32:23.681
You've always talked about how competitive you are.

2453
02:32:23.701 --> 02:32:24.021
Yeah.

2454
02:32:24.061 --> 02:32:26.163
But you talk about how you're competitive with yourself.

2455
02:32:26.523 --> 02:32:26.684
Yeah.

2456
02:32:26.704 --> 02:32:33.730
That's what you've tried to do anyway is turn that competition inward, which I think is kind of part of the part of the unlock here.

2457
02:32:33.750 --> 02:32:33.950
Yeah.

2458
02:32:33.991 --> 02:32:34.511
A little bit.

2459
02:32:34.551 --> 02:32:34.811
Yeah.

2460
02:32:34.911 --> 02:32:35.092
Yeah.

2461
02:32:35.132 --> 02:32:37.093
I mean, you see this a lot in sports psychology.

2462
02:32:38.034 --> 02:32:40.477
There's all these behind the scenes documentaries and stuff for like.

2463
02:32:40.997 --> 02:33:05.272
NFL players and NBA players and all this stuff in it and you can see that like all these psychological findings have have absolutely infiltrated the sports world because all the players say the same shit they're like it's ultimately it's just it's a competition with ourself man scoreboard doesn't matter scoreboard there's all these old sayings uh that have become really popular like the the scoreboard will take care of itself you know do your job the scoreboard doesn't matter you know all these things I guess kind of heuristics and mechanisms to get

2464
02:33:05.872 --> 02:33:15.256
the athletes to turn their, their yardstick internally and just try to be as good as they can possibly be and be better than they were the day before.

2465
02:33:15.436 --> 02:33:18.898
And then understanding that if they do that well, consistently, you know,

2466
02:33:19.419 --> 02:33:22.300
they will win games and championships as a side effect.

2467
02:33:22.360 --> 02:33:22.600
Yeah.

2468
02:33:22.820 --> 02:33:23.160
Yeah.

2469
02:33:23.220 --> 02:33:27.461
I mean, every professional sports team has a sports psychologist on, yeah, on these days.

2470
02:33:27.521 --> 02:33:33.883
I'm probably collegiate teams at this point too, but yeah, you make an important point there too, is that these are, they're situational states.

2471
02:33:33.903 --> 02:33:34.883
You can change this.

2472
02:33:34.983 --> 02:33:35.183
Yeah.

2473
02:33:35.263 --> 02:33:39.144
Like if you do have this orientation, that's more performance driven, you can change it back to, um,

2474
02:33:40.805 --> 02:33:43.507
more of a mastery goal orientation.

2475
02:33:43.887 --> 02:33:45.228
Could go the other way as well, though, too.

2476
02:33:45.308 --> 02:33:46.529
It's very situational based.

2477
02:33:46.569 --> 02:33:47.370
I've even figured this out too.

2478
02:33:47.390 --> 02:33:59.779
This guy, John Nichols, kind of figured this out that if you introduce things like rankings, public comparisons, the evaluative pressures will tip towards more of the performance and ego driven goals that you have, right?

2479
02:34:00.119 --> 02:34:01.840
Where you think about social media, right?

2480
02:34:02.321 --> 02:34:04.162
This kind of tips us all over into that.

2481
02:34:04.442 --> 02:34:26.532
performance driven goals just just by nature of being in it right there's kind of some parallels with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation here too right which we don't got to get too deep into but you know it's um kind of the same thing like if you if a kid just likes school and then all of a sudden you want to reward them for getting good grades like by paying them or rewarding them somehow it turns it into more of a performative thing yep right and

2482
02:34:26.832 --> 02:34:32.196
And you can go from them just doing it because they enjoy it to them now having to perform.

2483
02:34:32.637 --> 02:34:34.898
And we see this in lots of different areas.

2484
02:34:34.939 --> 02:34:38.501
But it is situationally dependent, but we can use that to our advantage as well.

2485
02:34:38.621 --> 02:34:41.644
Just like you're saying, you can turn that competitiveness back on yourself.

2486
02:34:41.884 --> 02:34:49.628
And I think the key here, the mechanism that's going on here is that when you pursue performative goals, you're tapping into that sociometer.

2487
02:34:49.989 --> 02:34:56.752
And as soon as you tap into the sociometer, you're getting your self-esteem involved in a way that you can't really win long term.

2488
02:34:56.953 --> 02:34:58.173
You end up like Agassi, right?

2489
02:34:58.193 --> 02:35:00.955
It's like the more you win, the more you have to lose, right?

2490
02:35:01.255 --> 02:35:04.257
If you become king of the mountain, like there's only one way, which is down.

2491
02:35:04.277 --> 02:35:04.597
Yeah.

2492
02:35:05.277 --> 02:35:19.902
Even if you succeed at those performative goals or performance-based goals, the success generates more anxiety for the inevitable failure, which just makes that inevitable failure that much more harrowing and difficult to deal with.

2493
02:35:19.922 --> 02:35:26.404
Whereas if you turn it inward and focus on the mastery goals, understanding that the performance will happen is a side effect.

2494
02:35:26.584 --> 02:35:32.566
If you're only competing against yourself, then you don't have to face that self-judgment to nearly the same degree.

2495
02:35:32.586 --> 02:35:34.467
You're not getting the sociometer involved.

2496
02:35:34.767 --> 02:35:35.047
Yeah.

2497
02:35:35.167 --> 02:35:35.548
As much.

2498
02:35:36.048 --> 02:35:45.996
I think also what you're kind of getting at a little bit here too is what they developed later in this kind of series of studies as well, which is there's another modifying kind of component to this.

2499
02:35:46.016 --> 02:35:51.521
So you have the mastery, which is more self-referential, and you have the performance goals, which is other referenced, right?

2500
02:35:51.741 --> 02:35:55.043
But then you also have like, what's your reference towards success?

2501
02:35:55.924 --> 02:35:58.706
Is it towards success or is it towards avoiding failure?

2502
02:35:58.726 --> 02:35:59.087
Okay.

2503
02:35:59.107 --> 02:36:00.087
So they call that approach.

2504
02:36:01.328 --> 02:36:03.129
which is approaching you approach success.

2505
02:36:03.169 --> 02:36:07.750
You want to succeed versus do you want to avoid failure?

2506
02:36:07.990 --> 02:36:09.490
There's two different orientations.

2507
02:36:09.510 --> 02:36:13.111
So you could have like, it gets nerdy here a little bit, but there's like a two by two matrix now.

2508
02:36:13.131 --> 02:36:17.852
You can have a mastery goal or a performance goal, or you can have an approach or avoidance orientation towards those.

2509
02:36:18.093 --> 02:36:18.393
Okay.

2510
02:36:18.633 --> 02:36:24.394
So there's like four different configurations and we can kind of go through these, but don't get too bogged down in the matrix of it.

2511
02:36:24.414 --> 02:36:27.135
But just the configurations actually do,

2512
02:36:27.995 --> 02:36:29.516
have some real world consequences here.

2513
02:36:29.536 --> 02:36:36.162
So like the mastery, if you have a mastery goal orientations and you're approaching success, that's kind of considered to be the healthiest.

2514
02:36:36.902 --> 02:36:39.664
So you are self-referenced and you want to improve.

2515
02:36:39.684 --> 02:36:46.130
You just like doing the thing for doing the thing and you're competing against yourself maybe, or at least comparing yourself to a past version of yourself.

2516
02:36:46.690 --> 02:36:50.073
And you're approaching it as in, I want to succeed.

2517
02:36:50.093 --> 02:36:51.133
So am I getting better?

2518
02:36:51.554 --> 02:36:52.835
Is this actually working?

2519
02:36:52.875 --> 02:36:54.376
Did I learn anything from this?

2520
02:36:54.416 --> 02:36:54.816
There's that

2521
02:36:57.117 --> 02:37:00.098
You can also have a mastery avoidance orientation as well.

2522
02:37:00.118 --> 02:37:04.959
This is like, I would say like a lot of like really old professors, you know?

2523
02:37:05.239 --> 02:37:15.021
They're like, they've gotten to, they've developed all these theories or they've thought about, you know, all these things for so long and they know all this knowledge but they don't wanna like lose their rank within their field.

2524
02:37:15.261 --> 02:37:17.681
And so they don't take any risks or anything like that.

2525
02:37:17.701 --> 02:37:18.762
They're avoiding failure.

2526
02:37:18.782 --> 02:37:20.102
It's that loss aversion again.

2527
02:37:20.622 --> 02:37:22.322
And then you get into the more performance driven ones.

2528
02:37:22.342 --> 02:37:24.463
So like performance approach,

2529
02:37:25.443 --> 02:37:29.446
which I think is probably what Agassi started out as.

2530
02:37:29.526 --> 02:37:30.226
He was performing.

2531
02:37:30.506 --> 02:37:37.571
He didn't like tennis, so he was performing based on someone else's standards and comparing himself to other tennis players, but he wanted to succeed.

2532
02:37:37.591 --> 02:37:38.771
He was very, very competitive.

2533
02:37:39.132 --> 02:37:47.237
But then once he got to that top position, that changed into performance avoidance, where he was, again, didn't like tennis,

2534
02:37:48.440 --> 02:37:52.865
was comparing himself to all the other people around him or his father's standards or some external standard.

2535
02:37:53.366 --> 02:37:55.408
And he didn't want to lose that spot so bad.

2536
02:37:55.568 --> 02:37:55.808
Right.

2537
02:37:55.868 --> 02:38:00.153
So he was just trying to avoid failure at a certain point, which is like the worst place to be.

2538
02:38:00.213 --> 02:38:07.721
Like, yeah, you're you're just you're you're so focused on some external standard of some kind that you don't even again, you haven't questioned maybe.

2539
02:38:07.741 --> 02:38:07.841
Yeah.

2540
02:38:08.682 --> 02:38:11.082
And you just don't want to lose whatever it is you have around it.

2541
02:38:11.202 --> 02:38:15.363
It's like you're holding onto something so tightly, you don't want to lose something that you don't even want in the first place.

2542
02:38:15.543 --> 02:38:15.883
Yeah.

2543
02:38:16.183 --> 02:38:23.785
The effect of the loss aversion is that the higher you scale any sort of mountain, the stronger the gravitational pull of the failure avoidance.

2544
02:38:24.025 --> 02:38:25.645
You see this in business all the time, right?

2545
02:38:25.705 --> 02:38:29.566
Companies, they get to a certain level and then they just stop taking risks, right?

2546
02:38:29.586 --> 02:38:33.506
Because it's, you know, the executive leadership are like, well, we don't want to fuck up our bonuses.

2547
02:38:33.546 --> 02:38:35.106
So like, let's just keep doing the same thing.

2548
02:38:35.347 --> 02:38:38.307
There's actually a great book written about this called The Innovator's Dilemma.

2549
02:38:38.427 --> 02:38:48.536
Yeah, it's about all the examples throughout history of large companies that actually invented technology like 10, 20 years before they became popular.

2550
02:38:49.397 --> 02:38:56.063
But they didn't want to take the risk of investing in that new technology because it could potentially I mean, the most recent and perfect example is the fact that.

2551
02:38:56.623 --> 02:39:08.746
Google actually invented ChatGPT five years before OpenAI did, but they actually kept it concealed and didn't develop it because they were afraid that it would interfere with their Google search.

2552
02:39:09.186 --> 02:39:17.048
And so that's like a perfect example of failure avoidance undoing the possible benefits of pursuing mastery over something.

2553
02:39:17.248 --> 02:39:18.548
At the scale of an institution.

2554
02:39:18.588 --> 02:39:18.868
Yeah.

2555
02:39:19.148 --> 02:39:19.328
Okay.

2556
02:39:19.348 --> 02:39:24.990
So yeah, at the individual level though, what are the real consequences of the fear of failure, right?

2557
02:39:27.010 --> 02:39:34.674
If you think about it, they've kind of studied this a little bit too, but you're not actually afraid of the practical consequences necessarily.

2558
02:39:34.694 --> 02:39:38.816
I mean, you might be afraid, yeah, I'm going to lose my job or, you know, you'll lose the material aspects of it.

2559
02:39:38.916 --> 02:39:39.156
Sure.

2560
02:39:39.396 --> 02:39:42.358
But what it really comes down to is back to that sociometer.

2561
02:39:42.698 --> 02:39:51.123
You're actually afraid of devaluating your rank, let's say, or your estimate of yourself within a group.

2562
02:39:51.783 --> 02:40:00.708
Of having that uncertain future of losing others, losing interest in you within whatever social circle you run.

2563
02:40:01.508 --> 02:40:05.491
Essentially, it's the feeling of shame that you're afraid of.

2564
02:40:05.751 --> 02:40:05.971
Right.

2565
02:40:06.211 --> 02:40:07.312
That's really what we're afraid of.

2566
02:40:07.332 --> 02:40:08.573
We're afraid of feeling shame.

2567
02:40:08.853 --> 02:40:09.554
Yeah.

2568
02:40:09.594 --> 02:40:17.761
Because that is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves within this ranking sociometer type thing that we've been talking about.

2569
02:40:17.801 --> 02:40:18.061
Right.

2570
02:40:18.582 --> 02:40:18.862
And it's.

2571
02:40:20.403 --> 02:40:28.847
interesting, and this kind of ties in with the loss aversion, like the side effect of that fear of shame is that we start exaggerating the second and third order effects of something.

2572
02:40:29.128 --> 02:40:29.948
So it's like...

2573
02:40:29.968 --> 02:40:31.109
Blows it way out of proportion.

2574
02:40:31.269 --> 02:40:31.509
Right.

2575
02:40:31.529 --> 02:40:36.011
So you start imagining things like, well, I'm afraid of not being home enough or whatever.

2576
02:40:36.191 --> 02:40:39.873
And then you start thinking through what are the consequences of that failure?

2577
02:40:39.893 --> 02:40:45.456
It's like, oh, well, Junior's going to become a drug addict and he's going to drop out of school and he's going to end up in jail.

2578
02:40:45.496 --> 02:40:48.458
And it's like all this catastrophized stuff that...

2579
02:40:49.178 --> 02:40:57.784
is not realistic whatsoever, but it is accurately reflects the emotional intensity of that fear of failure.

2580
02:40:58.344 --> 02:41:08.070
This comes back to just a truth about human psychology, which is that we always feel first and then we justify the feeling with a narrative later.

2581
02:41:08.531 --> 02:41:14.675
And so if you have this deep-seated fear of failure and fear of shame because of some failure in your life,

2582
02:41:15.555 --> 02:41:22.877
the narrative you create around that failure will match proportionally to how afraid you are of it.

2583
02:41:23.358 --> 02:41:35.081
And this is also why the exercise of, in a few episodes, we've talked about the exercise of negative visualization, like the stoic practice of actually writing out the worst case scenario and how you would handle it.

2584
02:41:35.561 --> 02:41:40.523
Because that exercise is so useful because what you realize when you actually start writing out, like, okay,

2585
02:41:40.963 --> 02:41:44.824
If I'm not home enough or I don't hang out with Junior enough, like what is realistically going to happen?

2586
02:41:44.844 --> 02:41:49.386
You start writing it out and you realize like, oh, I'm being completely unrealistic right now.

2587
02:41:49.566 --> 02:41:49.826
Yeah.

2588
02:41:50.026 --> 02:41:52.407
I'm blowing things out of proportion.

2589
02:41:52.647 --> 02:41:52.847
Yeah.

2590
02:41:52.887 --> 02:41:57.309
But we blow it out of proportion because, again, of that evolutionary mismatch we have.

2591
02:41:57.689 --> 02:42:01.530
Because losing statuses would be so catastrophic and insane.

2592
02:42:02.532 --> 02:42:04.777
in a small group of tribal people, right?

2593
02:42:05.178 --> 02:42:06.301
Actually, you should overweight that.

2594
02:42:06.361 --> 02:42:10.490
But really, yeah, if you sit down and think it out, it's honestly not as bad as it is, right?

2595
02:42:10.730 --> 02:42:11.312
Rarely, yeah.

2596
02:42:11.730 --> 02:42:14.892
That said, though, okay, so we talked about this in the shame episode a lot, too.

2597
02:42:15.072 --> 02:42:20.575
Like, shame kind of has a less unhealthy cousin, right?

2598
02:42:20.795 --> 02:42:21.536
And that's guilt.

2599
02:42:21.896 --> 02:42:22.076
Right.

2600
02:42:22.476 --> 02:42:27.319
Guilt and shame, we talked about this a lot in the shame episode as well.

2601
02:42:27.819 --> 02:42:35.464
The definitions are very important because of where you place the attribution for the bad feelings, right?

2602
02:42:35.484 --> 02:42:35.624
Mm-hmm.

2603
02:42:36.224 --> 02:42:41.446
Basically, guilt is kind of what we say is when you did a bad thing, right?

2604
02:42:41.886 --> 02:42:43.707
Shame is when you are something bad.

2605
02:42:44.067 --> 02:42:44.267
Right.

2606
02:42:44.387 --> 02:42:44.707
All right.

2607
02:42:45.387 --> 02:42:56.572
And we usually go straight to the shame or a lot of people who are more shame prone, at least, will go straight to the shame again because of that fear, that loss aversion of loss of status, that sociometer fear that we have.

2608
02:42:56.872 --> 02:42:57.092
Right.

2609
02:42:57.692 --> 02:43:04.833
But while guilt doesn't exactly feel very good, we at least can feel like we can do something about it in a lot of these situations, right?

2610
02:43:05.334 --> 02:43:08.514
Roy Baumeister did a lot of this work in the 90s around guilt.

2611
02:43:09.434 --> 02:43:12.055
It's a relationship maintenance emotion.

2612
02:43:12.475 --> 02:43:15.996
You feel guilt about something, it motivates you to go do something about it, right?

2613
02:43:16.276 --> 02:43:17.616
You go repair that relationship.

2614
02:43:17.636 --> 02:43:18.716
You go apologize.

2615
02:43:19.196 --> 02:43:20.977
You go make it right in some way.

2616
02:43:21.537 --> 02:43:23.777
Shame, on the other hand, is like a withdrawal.

2617
02:43:23.837 --> 02:43:24.797
It's kind of the opposite.

2618
02:43:27.758 --> 02:43:33.140
from, um, from the group or from any social situation because you're so afraid of losing face in that situation.

2619
02:43:33.180 --> 02:43:33.440
Right.

2620
02:43:33.500 --> 02:43:33.660
Yeah.

2621
02:43:34.160 --> 02:43:38.942
So they have, uh, they both feel shitty, but one of them is actually like more productive.

2622
02:43:39.042 --> 02:43:39.262
Right.

2623
02:43:39.482 --> 02:43:44.543
Shame is much more calibrated towards those social consequences, not the actual harm done.

2624
02:43:44.563 --> 02:43:46.744
Whereas the guilt is like, Oh, I actually did something wrong.

2625
02:43:46.764 --> 02:43:47.884
I need to fix this.

2626
02:43:48.084 --> 02:43:48.344
Right.

2627
02:43:48.625 --> 02:43:49.605
My sense is that.

2628
02:43:50.125 --> 02:43:58.596
these kind of more mastery related goals, the consequence is more likely to be guilt over failure because you're not measuring your self-worth.

2629
02:43:58.636 --> 02:44:04.844
You're kind of you're managing to leave the sociometer out of it to a large extent, not completely, but to a large extent.

2630
02:44:05.164 --> 02:44:08.568
So when you do fail, you just kind of feel bad and you're just like, ah, man, I.

2631
02:44:09.289 --> 02:44:28.178
fucked it up i should have didn't take advantage of my my situation whereas if it's a performance related goal and you're you're basing yourself worth on hitting some sort of arbitrary external metric that other people are measuring that's when you invite shame into into the equation precisely and i imagine agassi

2632
02:44:29.545 --> 02:44:30.706
It's early on.

2633
02:44:31.066 --> 02:44:43.677
First of all, he's raised by a fucking crazy father who basically inculcates him from a very young age that you're only as valuable as your tennis ability and you're going to be the best in the world.

2634
02:44:44.077 --> 02:44:45.478
Completely performance-driven, yeah.

2635
02:44:45.518 --> 02:44:51.022
Completely performance-driven, and then he develops a personality of a person who's like...

2636
02:44:51.803 --> 02:44:58.771
His feeling about himself is completely proportional to how he's performing on the court, which is not a healthy version of self-esteem.

2637
02:44:59.172 --> 02:45:00.713
Of course, everything collapses.

2638
02:45:00.754 --> 02:45:01.474
He falls apart.

2639
02:45:01.574 --> 02:45:09.303
And as soon as he loses the world number one or he loses a few big matches, his whole life comes apart because it's just his self-worth comes apart.

2640
02:45:09.864 --> 02:45:17.830
Whereas the second version, Agassi 2.0, it's much more mastery driven and there's more guilt associated, right?

2641
02:45:17.850 --> 02:45:28.719
Because it's like Agassi version two, if he loses a big tennis match, he feels bad because that's an opportunity that he could have leveraged to help his foundation, which is his real goal.

2642
02:45:28.759 --> 02:45:30.460
That's how he's actually measuring success.

2643
02:45:30.901 --> 02:45:32.962
So maybe he feels guilty about that.

2644
02:45:33.022 --> 02:45:34.844
Maybe he feels like he could have done something better.

2645
02:45:34.924 --> 02:45:36.585
Maybe he feels like he could learn something from it.

2646
02:45:36.885 --> 02:45:38.006
Whereas Agassi version 1.0,

2647
02:45:39.167 --> 02:45:41.769
It's like if he loses a big match, it's like, oh, I'm a piece of shit.

2648
02:45:41.869 --> 02:45:42.530
I'm worthless.

2649
02:45:43.230 --> 02:45:44.071
I'm such a loser.

2650
02:45:44.791 --> 02:45:45.832
I can't believe this happened.

2651
02:45:46.352 --> 02:45:46.593
Right.

2652
02:45:46.713 --> 02:45:49.114
And then he goes and does a bunch of drugs.

2653
02:45:49.355 --> 02:45:49.935
Yeah.

2654
02:45:50.275 --> 02:45:50.415
Yeah.

2655
02:45:50.455 --> 02:45:52.097
He was addicted to meth at one point, wasn't he?

2656
02:45:52.117 --> 02:45:52.257
Yeah.

2657
02:45:52.497 --> 02:45:53.257
That's insane.

2658
02:45:53.778 --> 02:45:55.079
One of the top tennis players in the world.

2659
02:45:55.119 --> 02:45:59.142
And he gets addicted to methamphetamine because precisely of what we're talking about here.

2660
02:45:59.282 --> 02:45:59.462
Yeah.

2661
02:45:59.482 --> 02:46:00.443
Like he was so ashamed.

2662
02:46:01.804 --> 02:46:24.080
of who we become right and by the way for everybody listening we did a full solved episode on shame last year it's about four hours long it's actually one of our i think it's our most popular episode interestingly might be at this point yeah yeah i think it's it is it is the most popular solved episode i believe it is august september of 2025 so go check that out on the feed if you want to

2663
02:46:24.742 --> 02:46:27.164
Get the full download on shame.

2664
02:46:27.544 --> 02:46:32.347
I think there's an interesting relationship between guilt and shame in the concept of achievement.

2665
02:46:32.567 --> 02:46:37.351
I think with each emotion, achievement serves a very different role, right?

2666
02:46:37.391 --> 02:46:40.993
With guilt, achievement, I think, can be very healthy.

2667
02:46:41.033 --> 02:46:41.954
It alleviates guilt.

2668
02:46:42.014 --> 02:46:43.135
Like you said, guilt is...

2669
02:46:43.975 --> 02:46:44.997
It's action oriented.

2670
02:46:45.037 --> 02:46:47.480
It's like, okay, I didn't do the thing I was supposed to do.

2671
02:46:48.161 --> 02:46:49.463
So let me go fix that.

2672
02:46:49.583 --> 02:46:51.425
Let me, let me be better next time.

2673
02:46:51.465 --> 02:46:55.030
Let me learn from this so that I don't feel guilty again.

2674
02:46:55.050 --> 02:46:57.213
Like guilt is a very practical emotion.

2675
02:46:57.353 --> 02:47:00.618
It's a, it's a very corrective emotion in terms of.

2676
02:47:01.218 --> 02:47:02.079
of what we do.

2677
02:47:02.160 --> 02:47:07.386
And so it's anytime it comes up, there's usually a lesson underneath it that we can implement.

2678
02:47:07.846 --> 02:47:09.789
Shame is a completely different ballgame.

2679
02:47:10.189 --> 02:47:20.642
And what's interesting is that I think people try to alleviate shame with achievement, but it backfires because what happens is, is the more you try to perform your way out of shame, the more you try to perform your way out of shame,

2680
02:47:21.724 --> 02:47:23.426
the more you just reinforce the shame.

2681
02:47:23.526 --> 02:47:39.439
If I have a deep-seated shame that I'm a fundamentally broken person and the only thing that is going to make me okay is if I get more views on YouTube, then pursuing more views on YouTube is not going to make me feel better about myself.

2682
02:47:39.519 --> 02:47:41.641
It's just going to keep feeling like it's not enough.

2683
02:47:41.781 --> 02:47:44.823
It's like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

2684
02:47:44.903 --> 02:47:45.444
Like, it's just...

2685
02:47:45.924 --> 02:47:57.935
The more I pursue it, the more I feel worthless, the more I feel like it's not good enough, the more I feel like I have to pursue it further, which is why I think shame drives a lot of addictive, compulsive sort of behaviors.

2686
02:47:58.516 --> 02:48:03.200
And so the trick is to find a way to convert the shame into the guilt.

2687
02:48:03.541 --> 02:48:09.686
And I think a lot of that is a perspective shift, which is that understanding that, first of all, your failures don't make you a bad person.

2688
02:48:10.847 --> 02:48:17.012
They make you a good person who maybe did the wrong thing or who messed up in some shape or form.

2689
02:48:17.652 --> 02:48:22.775
not to bring Jesus back into it, but there's an old Christian saying of love the sinner, hate the sin.

2690
02:48:23.295 --> 02:48:26.177
Um, I think there's a lot of wisdom to that, right?

2691
02:48:26.197 --> 02:48:29.139
Like that is kind of the conversion move between the shame and guilt.

2692
02:48:29.839 --> 02:48:32.701
We did, uh, our change episode back in June.

2693
02:48:33.361 --> 02:48:42.807
And I personally think that's one of the best episodes we've done because what I love about that episode is that we, we really got finally detailed about, uh,

2694
02:48:43.487 --> 02:49:10.958
human personality and what are the aspects about ourselves that we cannot change and what are the aspects about ourselves that we can and how people tend to get both of those things wrong like people tend to think the things that can be changed are the things that can't and so they feel shame around it they hate themselves for it and then they also assume that things that can't really be changed are things that they can and so they just kind of bang their head against the wall constantly trying to change them i think there's a lot of value in

2695
02:49:11.658 --> 02:49:15.739
I think people who are struggling with this, you can probably get a lot of value from that episode, first of all.

2696
02:49:16.419 --> 02:49:21.160
But also understanding that, like, what aspects of yourself are changeable?

2697
02:49:21.820 --> 02:49:32.523
And that ultimately, whatever the bad behaviors you feel awful about, they are likely not an inherent part of your nature or who you are.

2698
02:49:33.003 --> 02:49:34.123
They are very likely...

2699
02:49:35.254 --> 02:49:38.559
bad adaptations that were misused in a new environment.

2700
02:49:38.659 --> 02:49:45.849
So what I mean by that is that generally speaking, it's like people's patterns that cause bad behavior or problems in their lives.

2701
02:49:46.169 --> 02:49:51.236
They are leftover patterns from previous eras in their life where that pattern evolved from

2702
02:49:51.877 --> 02:49:53.579
to actually serve them really well.

2703
02:49:53.820 --> 02:50:02.109
It's like a childhood habit that helped them get through their childhood and adolescence, but now as an adult, it's backfiring and screwing up all their relationships.

2704
02:50:02.510 --> 02:50:11.080
But because they've had that pattern for so long, they think that's an inherent part of who they are when really it's just a pattern of behaviors that they picked up.

2705
02:50:11.620 --> 02:50:14.004
very early in their life and they never learned how to put it down.

2706
02:50:14.224 --> 02:50:22.697
So the move from shame to guilt, I think, is A, first having some compassion for yourself, understanding that failure is inevitable.

2707
02:50:23.218 --> 02:50:26.703
Everybody screws up everything at some point.

2708
02:50:27.424 --> 02:50:36.932
That doesn't necessarily make you a bad person and that a lot of the patterns and behaviors behind that failure aren't necessarily permanently who you are.

2709
02:50:37.353 --> 02:50:39.655
They are just patterns you picked up along the way.

2710
02:50:40.095 --> 02:50:51.925
And then B, taking that yardstick and instead of applying it to yourself being worthy of others, try to just apply it to yourself personally.

2711
02:50:52.365 --> 02:50:54.067
being worthy of yourself, right?

2712
02:50:54.107 --> 02:51:12.561
Like it's learning how to take the sociometer out of the equation and recognizing that you don't necessarily have to try to live up to everybody else's standards and arbitrary metrics because they are just as arbitrary as ones that you would come up with for yourself.

2713
02:51:13.041 --> 02:51:18.566
You said something in the change episode too that applies here and I think sums this up pretty well and brings Buddhism back in too.

2714
02:51:18.606 --> 02:51:20.668
So we get a little Jesus and Buddha here.

2715
02:51:20.848 --> 02:51:21.309
Fuck yeah.

2716
02:51:21.429 --> 02:51:28.695
You made the point that you're, I think it was a meditation teacher of yours would say you're perfect just as you are, but you can always be better.

2717
02:51:28.855 --> 02:51:29.056
Yes.

2718
02:51:29.676 --> 02:51:36.121
And I think that's getting at that too, where we have those inherent characteristics about ourselves that we can't change.

2719
02:51:36.421 --> 02:51:37.462
You're perfect just as you are.

2720
02:51:37.762 --> 02:51:37.982
Yeah.

2721
02:51:38.082 --> 02:51:41.004
But you can always be better because we have these adaptations.

2722
02:51:41.084 --> 02:51:44.887
We have all of these arbitrary things that we've set for ourselves.

2723
02:51:45.447 --> 02:51:48.169
And so there's the difference between guilt and shame too.

2724
02:51:48.550 --> 02:51:48.730
Yeah.

2725
02:51:49.130 --> 02:51:51.992
You don't have to be ashamed of who you are, but you could also be better.

2726
02:51:52.012 --> 02:51:52.533
Use guilt.

2727
02:51:52.553 --> 02:51:53.033
Use guilt.

2728
02:51:53.273 --> 02:51:57.654
You know, in those situations where you have failed yourself or failed others and make it right.

2729
02:51:57.674 --> 02:52:07.417
And I think what I talked about on that episode, and it really applies here, is that you need both sides of that statement to be a whole healthy person, right?

2730
02:52:08.057 --> 02:52:18.200
If you only believe that you're already perfect as you are, then you're going to turn into a narcissistic twat and be self-absorbed and just really impulsive and do whatever you want.

2731
02:52:19.020 --> 02:52:21.101
If you only believe that you can always be better...

2732
02:52:21.786 --> 02:52:23.667
then you're going to be guilt-ridden, shame-ridden.

2733
02:52:24.107 --> 02:52:28.690
You're going to constantly be beating yourself up over small failures and infractions.

2734
02:52:29.210 --> 02:52:39.355
It is the marriage of those two perspectives simultaneously that I think creates a healthy individual, understanding that you're fine.

2735
02:52:39.375 --> 02:52:40.916
You're a human.

2736
02:52:42.308 --> 02:52:44.989
And you are just as fucked as all the other humans.

2737
02:52:45.349 --> 02:52:51.290
Like we're all struggling and we're all failing at pretty much everything that we're trying to do in various capacities.

2738
02:52:51.731 --> 02:52:52.591
But that's okay.

2739
02:52:52.811 --> 02:52:55.391
That is being human.

2740
02:52:56.252 --> 02:52:59.913
And trying to be better is the whole part of the game.

2741
02:53:00.213 --> 02:53:01.033
That is the whole game.

2742
02:53:01.273 --> 02:53:03.535
But doing it with self-compassion, right?

2743
02:53:03.635 --> 02:53:10.939
That's kind of what I think what we're dancing around here is for a long time I was very, I'd hear the word self-compassion and be like, ooh, this is going to... Touchy-feely.

2744
02:53:10.979 --> 02:53:12.080
It's touchy-feely.

2745
02:53:12.320 --> 02:53:13.901
You're letting yourself off the hook.

2746
02:53:13.921 --> 02:53:15.743
You're, you know, this is getting into...

2747
02:53:16.423 --> 02:53:17.083
oh, it's okay.

2748
02:53:17.143 --> 02:53:18.584
You know, you don't have to do anything.

2749
02:53:18.624 --> 02:53:21.885
You're perfect as you are going a little too far that way.

2750
02:53:22.206 --> 02:53:24.847
But that's actually, that's not what it is.

2751
02:53:24.887 --> 02:53:26.747
This is kind of like the middle way, right?

2752
02:53:26.807 --> 02:53:32.670
This self-compassion that we're talking about, recognizing that there are things you could change about yourself.

2753
02:53:32.690 --> 02:53:33.770
There are things you could do better.

2754
02:53:33.790 --> 02:53:35.431
Of course, we all can though.

2755
02:53:35.891 --> 02:53:39.513
And that's part of the self-compassion is just that recognized shared humanity, right?

2756
02:53:39.533 --> 02:53:44.255
But there's also like an underlying, like you also don't have to change anything too at the same time.

2757
02:53:44.763 --> 02:53:47.686
Ultimately, it is about how you feel about your failures.

2758
02:53:47.926 --> 02:53:58.618
In Subtle Art, I wrote the reason self-esteem, I think the self-esteem movement kind of failed as a movement is that it tried to improve how people felt about their successes and the best aspects of themselves.

2759
02:53:58.978 --> 02:54:04.624
When really the proper measurement of mental health is how do you feel about your failures and shortcomings?

2760
02:54:04.884 --> 02:54:06.686
And I think self-compassion is a much better...

2761
02:54:07.667 --> 02:54:12.151
measurement of that implicit in it is that you are failing at all times.

2762
02:54:12.951 --> 02:54:15.773
So the question is, is what is your relationship with that failure?

2763
02:54:15.873 --> 02:54:19.416
Is it, is it that of mastery and guilt?

2764
02:54:19.837 --> 02:54:34.968
Cause you didn't, you know, take advantage of your opportunity or, or maximize your, your situation, or is it that of like self-loathing and shame where you try to shrink from the world and, and hide from the world because you feel fundamentally inadequate and,

2765
02:54:35.368 --> 02:54:39.790
It is that balance of recognizing and owning the failures, but also being okay with them.

2766
02:54:40.590 --> 02:54:41.590
That is the way forward.

2767
02:54:41.770 --> 02:54:42.631
A great book on this.

2768
02:54:43.651 --> 02:54:48.732
Like the person who wrote the book on it, Kristen Neff, wrote the book called Self-Compassion about this, right?

2769
02:54:48.773 --> 02:54:49.713
And she goes into like...

2770
02:54:50.393 --> 02:54:51.614
what all this entails and everything.

2771
02:54:52.094 --> 02:54:55.677
One of the things she talks about it in a lot is she cheated on her ex-husband.

2772
02:54:55.697 --> 02:55:00.141
I think it was, um, and had a lot of shame around that for a very long time.

2773
02:55:00.301 --> 02:55:01.962
It just felt like she was a bad person.

2774
02:55:02.583 --> 02:55:04.064
Eventually came around to say, no, no, no.

2775
02:55:04.104 --> 02:55:05.765
I just, I ended up doing this bad thing.

2776
02:55:06.165 --> 02:55:06.366
Right.

2777
02:55:06.746 --> 02:55:09.288
Uh, and, and kind of converting that into guilt and being like,

2778
02:55:09.728 --> 02:55:10.849
I can do better in the future.

2779
02:55:10.989 --> 02:55:11.590
I'm okay.

2780
02:55:12.070 --> 02:55:12.610
It's all right.

2781
02:55:13.131 --> 02:55:14.312
Eventually got there, right?

2782
02:55:14.632 --> 02:55:27.001
She talks about how self-criticism really kind of escalates that shame more, whereas the self-compassion, what you do want to cultivate, is kind of what you use to convert that into some form of actionable guilt, I guess.

2783
02:55:27.501 --> 02:55:28.602
Both of them feel shitty.

2784
02:55:28.702 --> 02:55:30.964
Again, neither of them feel good, right?

2785
02:55:30.984 --> 02:55:31.965
But just one of them has...

2786
02:55:32.565 --> 02:55:32.925
And out.

2787
02:55:33.565 --> 02:55:35.466
One of them has a direction you can point yourself.

2788
02:55:35.786 --> 02:55:40.848
And she kind of talks about these three components that you can kind of cultivate for more self-compassion.

2789
02:55:40.928 --> 02:55:43.709
One of them being self-kindness rather than the self-criticism.

2790
02:55:43.929 --> 02:55:44.169
Right.

2791
02:55:45.469 --> 02:55:51.751
One, another one I mentioned already was a common humanity, like recognizing, like we've just been talking about, we're all kind of fucked up.

2792
02:55:52.011 --> 02:55:52.151
Right.

2793
02:55:52.171 --> 02:55:53.092
We all have these.

2794
02:55:54.032 --> 02:55:55.953
these major shortcomings.

2795
02:55:56.013 --> 02:55:56.253
Yeah.

2796
02:55:56.353 --> 02:55:59.855
Original sin if you want to or life is suffering from the Buddhists, right?

2797
02:55:59.935 --> 02:56:01.595
Like we all have that.

2798
02:56:01.816 --> 02:56:02.036
Yeah.

2799
02:56:02.316 --> 02:56:06.958
Recognizing that helps be a little bit kinder to yourself too.

2800
02:56:07.158 --> 02:56:16.862
Yeah, and I think that's kind of a natural outcrop of shame is that one of the defining aspects of shame is that you feel like I'm the only one who's like this.

2801
02:56:16.882 --> 02:56:17.162
Yes.

2802
02:56:17.262 --> 02:56:17.442
Right.

2803
02:56:17.863 --> 02:56:19.083
Everyone else is normal.

2804
02:56:19.143 --> 02:56:19.343
Yeah.

2805
02:56:19.523 --> 02:56:20.604
I'm fucked up.

2806
02:56:21.144 --> 02:56:22.745
Which the reality is that

2807
02:56:24.042 --> 02:56:24.844
We're all fucked up.

2808
02:56:24.864 --> 02:56:26.266
It's a little bit narcissistic even too.

2809
02:56:26.326 --> 02:56:26.646
It is.

2810
02:56:26.726 --> 02:56:27.087
It is.

2811
02:56:27.147 --> 02:56:27.728
It really is.

2812
02:56:27.768 --> 02:56:28.028
Yeah.

2813
02:56:28.169 --> 02:56:31.955
And it is interesting that, yeah, both religions have kind of a...

2814
02:56:33.297 --> 02:56:54.918
a counterpoint to that is like a fundamental basis right it's the buddhists believe that it's like yeah everybody suffers all the time which implies your your suffering is not special at all right christianity says we're inherently of sin we're flawed essentially we are always off target which is

2815
02:56:55.899 --> 02:56:58.880
Basically saying that it's not giving you permission to fail.

2816
02:56:58.940 --> 02:57:00.881
It's just saying that it's inevitable.

2817
02:57:00.981 --> 02:57:01.201
Right.

2818
02:57:01.221 --> 02:57:05.303
So there's not, there's nothing uniquely wrong with you because we're all in the same boat.

2819
02:57:05.423 --> 02:57:05.603
Right.

2820
02:57:05.843 --> 02:57:18.508
Kind of touches on her third component of it too, which was mindfulness over over identification with whatever you did, like the, the shame basically saying, I am this bad, horrible, terrible person that's over identifying with it.

2821
02:57:18.548 --> 02:57:18.748
Yeah.

2822
02:57:19.008 --> 02:57:21.611
There's a better way to do it, which is to be mindful of that.

2823
02:57:21.631 --> 02:57:22.913
You're like, oh, no, no, no, no.

2824
02:57:23.053 --> 02:57:27.318
I'm actually separate from this bad thing that I did in some way, shape or form.

2825
02:57:27.499 --> 02:57:29.781
I don't have to over identify with that.

2826
02:57:30.002 --> 02:57:30.242
Right.

2827
02:57:30.342 --> 02:57:35.488
And and she says you could do it best through mindfulness, which I mean, sure, I would agree to.

2828
02:57:35.508 --> 02:57:35.609
Yeah.

2829
02:57:37.130 --> 02:57:39.351
You talked about my meditation practice lately.

2830
02:57:39.451 --> 02:57:49.016
This is a big thing around it is not identifying with your thoughts, with your emotions, with your failures, with whatever is going on, with any sort of identity that you have.

2831
02:57:49.716 --> 02:57:54.118
Being able to say like, oh, that's not real.

2832
02:57:54.558 --> 02:57:55.639
In a sense, it's not real.

2833
02:57:55.759 --> 02:57:55.959
Yeah.

2834
02:57:56.179 --> 02:57:56.399
Right?

2835
02:57:56.439 --> 02:57:59.481
We go back to that relative versus ultimate thing I was talking about.

2836
02:58:00.021 --> 02:58:01.924
Yes, relatively speaking, you might have let someone down.

2837
02:58:01.944 --> 02:58:02.605
You might have screwed up.

2838
02:58:02.625 --> 02:58:03.566
You might have failed somehow.

2839
02:58:03.626 --> 02:58:06.811
But ultimately, that's not actually who you are.

2840
02:58:07.377 --> 02:58:16.939
Yeah, a really common meditation practice that I've seen taught in many places is that as you're meditating and as identifying thoughts arise, reframe them in your own head.

2841
02:58:17.019 --> 02:58:23.561
So, for example, if you say, like, I am tired, you reframe it in your head as I am experiencing tiredness.

2842
02:58:23.641 --> 02:58:23.881
Right.

2843
02:58:24.081 --> 02:58:28.902
Or if you have something like I'm, I don't know, you're thinking about something that happened.

2844
02:58:28.923 --> 02:58:30.043
You're like, I am a bad friend.

2845
02:58:30.063 --> 02:58:30.343
You're like...

2846
02:58:31.023 --> 02:58:34.066
I'm somebody who behaved badly with a friend, right?

2847
02:58:34.086 --> 02:58:40.091
Like it's just, you keep removing the, the, I am this of it and you replace it with like this happened.

2848
02:58:40.291 --> 02:58:41.552
And it creates that separation there.

2849
02:58:41.692 --> 02:58:42.733
So you're just like, oh, okay.

2850
02:58:42.753 --> 02:58:45.195
This is just something that's feeling like thoughts, feelings.

2851
02:58:45.215 --> 02:58:45.916
Yeah.

2852
02:58:46.016 --> 02:58:47.257
all of that, they're temporary.

2853
02:58:47.318 --> 02:58:50.281
Again, the impermanence of everything comes back to that as well, right?

2854
02:58:50.321 --> 02:58:50.461
Yep.

2855
02:58:50.701 --> 02:58:55.807
Another really good meditation practice though is what they call meta or loving kindness.

2856
02:58:56.608 --> 02:59:01.153
And it's really interesting because the way they do it is they'll start you out with, you know,

2857
02:59:01.693 --> 02:59:07.799
think of someone very close to you that you love and adore and just have no ill will towards, you know, send them love and kindness.

2858
02:59:07.819 --> 02:59:09.540
And this is getting touchy feely really quick.

2859
02:59:09.580 --> 02:59:11.782
I know, but look at you, Drew.

2860
02:59:11.802 --> 02:59:16.527
But the, the, the point of doing that is then you think of like somebody like an acquaintance.

2861
02:59:16.887 --> 02:59:17.087
Yeah.

2862
02:59:17.267 --> 02:59:17.467
Okay.

2863
02:59:17.487 --> 02:59:20.050
Now wish them, you know, happiness and all of that.

2864
02:59:20.430 --> 02:59:23.532
Okay, now think of somebody that's maybe a little bit difficult to get along with.

2865
02:59:24.092 --> 02:59:26.633
Find a way to then wish them that.

2866
02:59:27.113 --> 02:59:30.815
Eventually, you go back to yourself, though, which is, for a lot of us, that's the hardest one.

2867
02:59:30.875 --> 02:59:31.115
Right.

2868
02:59:31.475 --> 02:59:36.118
But after practicing it on other people, just like if a friend comes to you, right, and they're like, I'm having...

2869
02:59:37.018 --> 02:59:38.780
I'm feeling shameful about something I did or whatever.

2870
02:59:38.800 --> 02:59:39.840
And you're like, no, it's okay.

2871
02:59:39.860 --> 02:59:42.042
And you walk them through, you're not a bad person.

2872
02:59:42.082 --> 02:59:44.264
It's a, you know, you did a bad thing, but that's okay.

2873
02:59:44.304 --> 02:59:45.205
You can make this right.

2874
02:59:45.685 --> 02:59:59.296
You can point that back at yourself and eventually get to that self-compassionate place where you are separate from a lot of those things, where you can see this as, oh, this is something I can move on from, something I can change, something I can convert to guilt if I need to.

2875
02:59:59.537 --> 02:59:59.837
All right.

2876
02:59:59.997 --> 03:00:01.238
It's, I know.

2877
03:00:01.318 --> 03:00:01.979
Kumbaya, Bernie.

2878
03:00:02.019 --> 03:00:02.419
Bernie.

2879
03:00:02.699 --> 03:00:03.079
No, no, no.

2880
03:00:03.119 --> 03:00:04.380
You know what?

2881
03:00:04.580 --> 03:00:08.362
Honestly, the Waking Up app from Sam Harrison, we got to deal with them.

2882
03:00:08.582 --> 03:00:11.703
And I was a paid member before we even had a partnership with them.

2883
03:00:11.723 --> 03:00:12.323
We both were.

2884
03:00:12.424 --> 03:00:13.084
Yeah, we both were.

2885
03:00:13.244 --> 03:00:13.844
Friend of the show.

2886
03:00:14.184 --> 03:00:14.905
Friend of the show.

2887
03:00:15.605 --> 03:00:16.745
It's a fantastic app.

2888
03:00:16.806 --> 03:00:20.547
And there's no of the mysticism and religion if you're not into that.

2889
03:00:20.867 --> 03:00:23.849
There's a really great introductory course that he does.

2890
03:00:24.789 --> 03:00:35.135
And it will walk you through like how to meditate just what we're talking about this mindfulness and separating from your thoughts and motions and all that that teaches some meta even to in introductory course.

2891
03:00:35.835 --> 03:00:43.120
This has been just indispensable invaluable for me over these last this last year or two honestly that I've been getting more into this and.

2892
03:00:43.820 --> 03:00:54.181
It really does, like, when you do separate from those thoughts and emotions in a way and you see them for what they really are, like, it just takes so much of the sting off of it.

2893
03:00:54.261 --> 03:00:54.422
Yeah.

2894
03:00:56.161 --> 03:00:56.862
I'm not enlightened.

2895
03:00:56.962 --> 03:01:03.428
I'm not going to say that by any means, but I would say I've reduced my suffering by quite a bit just from that.

2896
03:01:03.628 --> 03:01:08.312
So you can go to Manson.deals slash waking up and you can get a free trial for that.

2897
03:01:08.612 --> 03:01:09.854
And yeah, get started on that.

2898
03:01:09.874 --> 03:01:12.476
Like I said, the introductory course is fantastic just to start with.

2899
03:01:12.896 --> 03:01:14.277
He really knocked it out of the park with that.

2900
03:01:14.298 --> 03:01:14.458
Yeah.

2901
03:01:14.598 --> 03:01:14.798
Yeah.

2902
03:01:14.838 --> 03:01:17.479
But then there's all sorts of, there's talks on there about meditation.

2903
03:01:17.499 --> 03:01:19.140
There's way more meditations around it.

2904
03:01:19.160 --> 03:01:21.402
There's lots of meta meditations if you want to get into that.

2905
03:01:21.522 --> 03:01:22.902
Like, it's worth it.

2906
03:01:23.303 --> 03:01:23.703
All right.

2907
03:01:24.343 --> 03:01:26.404
Join Drew Birney on his path to enlightenment.

2908
03:01:26.464 --> 03:01:26.965
That's right.

2909
03:01:28.406 --> 03:01:28.746
All right.

2910
03:01:28.806 --> 03:01:30.427
So we've established...

2911
03:01:31.463 --> 03:01:35.646
how failure is arbitrary, relative, purely definitional.

2912
03:01:36.026 --> 03:01:40.469
We've now talked about how there's kind of two ways we respond to failure.

2913
03:01:40.509 --> 03:01:42.230
There's like the shame-based response.

2914
03:01:42.270 --> 03:01:43.611
There's the guilt-based response.

2915
03:01:44.152 --> 03:01:51.877
Obviously, we want to try to convert our failure responses more to guilt because that's what opens up the opportunity for improvement and growth and change.

2916
03:01:52.457 --> 03:01:56.420
So in the next chapter, we're going to finally get into the nuts and bolts of like

2917
03:01:56.740 --> 03:01:58.461
How do you actually grow from failure?

2918
03:01:58.521 --> 03:01:59.862
How do you learn from failure?

2919
03:02:00.322 --> 03:02:02.063
How do you change from your failures?

2920
03:02:02.443 --> 03:02:04.184
Turns out there's three different types of failures.

2921
03:02:04.704 --> 03:02:07.326
Each way that you learn from them is slightly different.

2922
03:02:07.646 --> 03:02:08.726
We're going to get into all of that.

2923
03:02:09.047 --> 03:02:13.429
And we are officially done with all the Jesus and Buddha kumbaya bullshit.

2924
03:02:13.469 --> 03:02:14.970
So stick around.

2925
03:02:17.248 --> 03:02:21.351
But before we keep going, let's take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

2926
03:02:21.832 --> 03:02:23.893
This episode is brought to you by Purpose.

2927
03:02:24.314 --> 03:02:30.479
We've been talking about failure this entire episode, and I want to talk about what most people actually do when they fail at something.

2928
03:02:30.679 --> 03:02:35.523
They open a chatbot, type out the whole thing at midnight, and it says some version of, that sounds really tough.

2929
03:02:35.723 --> 03:02:37.745
You're being so brave by reflecting on this.

2930
03:02:37.885 --> 03:02:39.246
And then they feel better for about an hour.

2931
03:02:39.466 --> 03:02:40.167
Nothing changes.

2932
03:02:40.527 --> 03:02:45.211
Because the tool was built to make them feel good, not to help them figure out what went wrong.

2933
03:02:45.371 --> 03:03:09.731
purpose is the first ai that is built to do the opposite it learns your personality your values and the patterns you keep repeating especially the ones that keep landing you in the same place and when you fail at something it doesn't tell you that you're handling it beautifully or that you're so brave it asks what part was actually in your control what you should do differently and then gives you the next step not a 10 item plan that you'll forget by thursday one simple thing

2934
03:03:10.231 --> 03:03:11.232
And then it checks in later.

2935
03:03:11.413 --> 03:03:22.146
If anything in this episode hit close to home and you want something that helps you actually learn from your mistakes instead of just processing your feelings about it forever, go to mark.deals slash purpose and start for free.

2936
03:03:22.446 --> 03:03:24.288
That's mark.deals slash purpose.

2937
03:03:24.949 --> 03:03:26.872
This episode is brought to you by waking up.

2938
03:03:27.212 --> 03:03:29.255
So we've spent this whole episode talking about failure.

2939
03:03:29.715 --> 03:03:33.339
And honestly, the failure itself is usually over pretty fast.

2940
03:03:33.600 --> 03:03:37.464
What lasts is your mind replaying it on a loop for the next six months.

2941
03:03:37.744 --> 03:03:39.887
The conversation you should have handled differently.

2942
03:03:40.107 --> 03:03:42.750
The problem you saw coming and avoided it anyway.

2943
03:03:43.150 --> 03:03:48.697
Your brain will construct an entire courtroom, put you on trial, and find you guilty every single night at 2 a.m.

2944
03:03:49.057 --> 03:03:52.679
Drew and I both use waking up and we're using it long before it sponsored the show.

2945
03:03:52.799 --> 03:03:54.760
It's the meditation app built by Sam Harris.

2946
03:03:54.880 --> 03:03:59.422
And it's the only one either of us has stuck with because it's the only one that treats you like an adult.

2947
03:03:59.602 --> 03:04:03.684
There's no soothing voices telling you to picture your problems as a leaf on a stream.

2948
03:04:04.044 --> 03:04:06.405
It actually teaches you how your mind works.

2949
03:04:06.765 --> 03:04:14.469
It gives you guided meditations, lessons on consciousness, philosophy, conversations with people who've spent their entire lives studying this stuff.

2950
03:04:14.869 --> 03:04:16.030
There is no fluff.

2951
03:04:16.470 --> 03:04:19.792
And if you want to keep losing the 2 a.m. trial, that's your call.

2952
03:04:20.173 --> 03:04:22.494
Or you could learn how the courtroom got built in the first place.

2953
03:04:22.674 --> 03:04:25.697
Waking Up is giving Solved listeners a free 14-day trial.

2954
03:04:25.837 --> 03:04:29.179
So go to solved.deals.wakingup to get started.

2955
03:04:29.399 --> 03:04:31.721
That's solved.deals.wakingup.

2956
03:04:36.436 --> 03:04:46.846
In the mid-1990s, there was a first-year PhD student at Harvard named Amy Edmondson, and she was studying medication errors that happened in hospitals and among medical teams.

2957
03:04:47.727 --> 03:04:51.611
And she was working with some very prestigious people in the field.

2958
03:04:51.991 --> 03:04:53.232
Her thesis posited...

2959
03:04:54.193 --> 03:05:05.023
a pretty reasonable hypothesis, which is that the teams that had the best teamwork and communication probably committed the fewest errors and had the best outcomes in patients in the hospital.

2960
03:05:05.303 --> 03:05:07.265
And so she spent tons of time studying this.

2961
03:05:07.305 --> 03:05:09.126
She spent hundreds of hours in the hospitals.

2962
03:05:09.206 --> 03:05:13.150
She studied eight different nursing units and worked in two different hospitals over this period.

2963
03:05:13.830 --> 03:05:16.553
And then the data came back completely wrong.

2964
03:05:17.153 --> 03:05:19.576
In fact, it came back backwards.

2965
03:05:19.596 --> 03:05:20.076
Right?

2966
03:05:20.260 --> 03:05:24.863
It was the medical teams that had the most errors were the highest performing.

2967
03:05:25.784 --> 03:05:27.125
Now this freaked her out.

2968
03:05:27.265 --> 03:05:29.647
She wrestled with a great deal of shame.

2969
03:05:29.987 --> 03:05:30.807
She started to think,

2970
03:05:31.952 --> 03:05:33.173
Maybe I don't know what I'm doing.

2971
03:05:33.753 --> 03:05:36.315
Maybe I don't know how to do research.

2972
03:05:36.555 --> 03:05:37.896
Maybe I screwed up the data.

2973
03:05:38.337 --> 03:05:39.377
What am I doing here?

2974
03:05:39.758 --> 03:05:40.498
I'm a fraud.

2975
03:05:40.678 --> 03:05:41.239
I'm a fake.

2976
03:05:42.119 --> 03:05:42.780
Everything is wrong.

2977
03:05:43.280 --> 03:05:44.681
Fortunately, she stuck with it.

2978
03:05:44.901 --> 03:05:46.102
She went back to the data.

2979
03:05:46.242 --> 03:05:47.864
She spent some more time analyzing it.

2980
03:05:48.124 --> 03:05:56.129
And then she came to a profound realization, a realization that is kind of like a sister realization of the survivorship bias we talked about in chapter one.

2981
03:05:56.970 --> 03:06:01.332
And that is that it wasn't that the best medical teams committed more errors.

2982
03:06:01.872 --> 03:06:04.973
It's that they felt free to report more errors.

2983
03:06:05.433 --> 03:06:07.374
It's the teams that were screwing up the most.

2984
03:06:07.794 --> 03:06:11.295
They were the ones that weren't even surfacing the mistakes that they were making.

2985
03:06:11.315 --> 03:06:13.856
They weren't even aware of the mistakes they were making in the first place.

2986
03:06:14.276 --> 03:06:20.545
Whereas the best teams had the most awareness over their mistakes, and so they were reporting them more often.

2987
03:06:20.945 --> 03:06:31.619
So what she realized is kind of this paradoxical effect, which is that the people who tend to learn the most from failure are the ones who confront the most failures.

2988
03:06:32.320 --> 03:06:40.162
And the people who learn the least are the ones who find ways of avoiding or just simply being oblivious of their failures in the first place.

2989
03:06:40.582 --> 03:06:45.223
Now, she would go on and develop the concept of psychological safety in teams.

2990
03:06:46.063 --> 03:07:01.027
This has been shown in a bunch of research to actually be one of, if not the most important trait of successful teams is that people feel a psychological safety to fail, to make mistakes, to correct each other or to point out errors in each other's work.

2991
03:07:02.327 --> 03:07:14.926
The thing that you would intuitively guess or point at, if you were to guess like what makes for the best performing team, you would probably assume the same thing she assumed, that they have great communication, that they collaborate super well, they have the best ideas.

2992
03:07:15.817 --> 03:07:24.022
When at the end of the day, it's like, no, actually, they are the most honest about their failures, not only to themselves, but to each other.

2993
03:07:24.723 --> 03:07:35.890
And I think the psychological safety piece of it is crucial because as we've talked about throughout this episode, our failures hurt so much because of the social repercussions that they have.

2994
03:07:36.630 --> 03:07:43.095
But if we are surrounded by people who are accepting of those errors, that gives us the permission to openly face them.

2995
03:07:43.395 --> 03:07:49.180
Edmondson, she actually later on in her career in 2023, she wrote a book called The Right Kind of Wrong.

2996
03:07:49.800 --> 03:07:52.703
And it was the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, actually.

2997
03:07:53.383 --> 03:08:05.862
And basically recaps her entire career around studying this type of thing and studying failure in teams, but also within individuals too, like creating psychological safety within yourself could be argued to be a very important thing too.

2998
03:08:06.043 --> 03:08:08.827
Admitting your mistakes, being honest about them, all that sort of thing, right?

2999
03:08:09.127 --> 03:08:15.592
She identified three different kinds of failures, three different kinds of errors that can occur.

3000
03:08:16.072 --> 03:08:18.474
And each one of them kind of demands a different response.

3001
03:08:18.534 --> 03:08:22.657
Even though we kind of treat failures kind of all the same, you need to learn the same lesson from all of them.

3002
03:08:23.037 --> 03:08:24.558
She said, no, that's actually not the case.

3003
03:08:24.578 --> 03:08:29.602
There's different kinds of failures and some we can learn from and some we can't really learn a whole lot from.

3004
03:08:29.642 --> 03:08:30.943
So we should just move on from them.

3005
03:08:31.063 --> 03:08:31.303
Right.

3006
03:08:31.383 --> 03:08:36.468
The three types of failures, there was basic failures, complex failures, and then intelligent failures.

3007
03:08:36.848 --> 03:08:37.049
Okay.

3008
03:08:37.069 --> 03:08:41.453
So basic failure is basically just it's familiar territory.

3009
03:08:41.793 --> 03:08:43.575
You've done this thing a million times, just something.

3010
03:08:44.156 --> 03:08:44.896
You just did it wrong.

3011
03:08:45.017 --> 03:08:47.199
The ball got dropped somewhere, somewhere along the way.

3012
03:08:47.319 --> 03:08:48.140
Right.

3013
03:08:48.300 --> 03:08:54.866
In a hospital setting and even in individual settings, though, she's like usually what the fix is, is like a checklist.

3014
03:08:54.926 --> 03:08:55.147
Right.

3015
03:08:55.707 --> 03:08:57.888
Like just make a checklist if you drop the ball here.

3016
03:08:57.908 --> 03:08:59.729
Set up some sort of system.

3017
03:08:59.769 --> 03:09:03.431
Set up some sort of forcing function that just forces you to make sure you do this every time.

3018
03:09:03.751 --> 03:09:07.013
There's no real lesson to be learned here from these types of failures, right?

3019
03:09:07.273 --> 03:09:09.114
Just fix it, move on, just don't do it again.

3020
03:09:09.254 --> 03:09:11.075
That's the lesson basically from those, right?

3021
03:09:11.255 --> 03:09:13.316
Then there's what she called complex failures.

3022
03:09:13.477 --> 03:09:15.978
There's usually kind of multiple causes or sources.

3023
03:09:16.018 --> 03:09:25.463
Maybe there's multiple people involved or multiple steps in a process that you forgot to order something or a delivery got delayed or whatever it is, right?

3024
03:09:25.703 --> 03:09:30.269
In an institutional setting, it's usually just there's a lot of moving parts, lots of people.

3025
03:09:30.549 --> 03:09:33.994
And usually what it is, it's a reflection of the system that you have built for it, right?

3026
03:09:34.154 --> 03:09:37.919
You need to have a system in place to make sure it doesn't happen again.

3027
03:09:38.460 --> 03:09:40.883
Some sort of robust system or a more robust system.

3028
03:09:41.063 --> 03:09:41.543
Yeah.

3029
03:09:41.664 --> 03:09:45.006
Or like a system that like flags issues before they happen.

3030
03:09:45.066 --> 03:09:46.567
It surfaces issues before they happen.

3031
03:09:46.607 --> 03:09:46.808
Yeah.

3032
03:09:46.908 --> 03:09:47.468
Something like that.

3033
03:09:47.488 --> 03:09:47.688
Okay.

3034
03:09:47.988 --> 03:09:53.953
You could even say in this too, like on the individual level, there's a parallel here with like any kind of relationship, right?

3035
03:09:53.993 --> 03:09:55.855
Maybe it's a romantic relationship or something where...

3036
03:09:56.791 --> 03:09:58.212
There's so many moving parts to that.

3037
03:09:58.272 --> 03:09:59.893
There's different communication styles.

3038
03:09:59.913 --> 03:10:03.236
There's maybe different goals that are even going on.

3039
03:10:03.856 --> 03:10:06.999
But you would maybe have some system in place for that relationship.

3040
03:10:07.339 --> 03:10:09.000
You're going to get too technical and nerdy about it.

3041
03:10:09.080 --> 03:10:12.303
But, you know, like successful couples usually have regular check-ins.

3042
03:10:12.323 --> 03:10:13.203
You know, that's a system.

3043
03:10:13.464 --> 03:10:16.126
Or like certain communicative habits, right?

3044
03:10:16.186 --> 03:10:16.566
Okay, yeah.

3045
03:10:16.766 --> 03:10:20.509
People never break up for one reason, or they rarely break up for one reason.

3046
03:10:20.649 --> 03:10:24.032
Even if somebody cheats or something, it's usually the cheating is not...

3047
03:10:24.712 --> 03:10:25.913
Didn't happen in a vacuum.

3048
03:10:25.953 --> 03:10:28.756
There's like a whole history of things that led up to the cheating.

3049
03:10:28.856 --> 03:10:29.197
Yeah.

3050
03:10:29.377 --> 03:10:39.827
I know people who have gone so far as to actually formally introduce systems into their relationships with like different, like I know a guy who has a fucking notion for his marriage.

3051
03:10:39.847 --> 03:10:41.148
You told me about this before.

3052
03:10:41.208 --> 03:10:41.809
That's okay.

3053
03:10:41.929 --> 03:10:42.770
Okay.

3054
03:10:42.890 --> 03:10:44.991
And they have monthly goals, quarterly goals.

3055
03:10:45.331 --> 03:10:47.032
I'm all about regular check-ins.

3056
03:10:47.072 --> 03:10:47.512
Don't get me wrong.

3057
03:10:47.552 --> 03:10:47.993
Hey, it's a lot.

3058
03:10:48.073 --> 03:10:48.413
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

3059
03:10:48.473 --> 03:10:49.153
Whatever works.

3060
03:10:49.213 --> 03:10:49.673
That's true.

3061
03:10:49.713 --> 03:10:50.714
Whatever floats your boat.

3062
03:10:51.334 --> 03:10:52.275
They seem very happy.

3063
03:10:52.495 --> 03:10:52.955
Okay.

3064
03:10:53.135 --> 03:11:01.980
It is interesting to see relationships as a complex system, whereas a basic failure is, oh, I forgot to take out the trash because I was tired.

3065
03:11:02.380 --> 03:11:02.640
Whatever.

3066
03:11:02.840 --> 03:11:08.062
There can be some learning done in a complex failure, but generally it's just like more about prevention, right?

3067
03:11:08.102 --> 03:11:11.704
Like preventing things from getting worse than they were or repeating the mistake again.

3068
03:11:11.844 --> 03:11:12.684
Improving the system.

3069
03:11:12.965 --> 03:11:13.365
Exactly.

3070
03:11:13.385 --> 03:11:13.545
Yeah.

3071
03:11:13.705 --> 03:11:15.766
The last type was intelligent failures, though.

3072
03:11:15.906 --> 03:11:19.327
And these are more like she treats these more like experiments.

3073
03:11:19.808 --> 03:11:20.108
Okay.

3074
03:11:20.408 --> 03:11:22.449
This is where you're actively trying to learn something.

3075
03:11:22.809 --> 03:11:23.911
whether it fails or not.

3076
03:11:23.951 --> 03:11:26.634
And failure is almost kind of besides the point at this point, right?

3077
03:11:26.854 --> 03:11:30.759
There's a few criteria, she points out, that create an intelligent failure.

3078
03:11:30.799 --> 03:11:34.164
One of them is new territory, something you've probably never done before, but you're trying it out.

3079
03:11:34.344 --> 03:11:37.228
So you set out to learn something absolutely new.

3080
03:11:37.608 --> 03:11:41.233
So again, failure is kind of beside the point at this stage.

3081
03:11:41.413 --> 03:11:51.166
You are actually setting out to gain something at some future time, at least, to have some sort of gain, some sort of credible opportunity that you're looking to capitalize on.

3082
03:11:51.306 --> 03:11:52.548
OK, you're not just doing this on a whim.

3083
03:11:52.908 --> 03:11:53.549
It's intentional.

3084
03:11:53.689 --> 03:11:55.812
You also have a prediction about how this is going to go.

3085
03:11:56.553 --> 03:11:56.913
All right.

3086
03:11:56.933 --> 03:12:01.178
It's not like you have a guess of like, if I do this, then this will happen.

3087
03:12:01.378 --> 03:12:11.108
The intelligent part, I think, is really in this last component that she describes, which is keeping it as small as possible because it's unknown territory, because there's all this uncertainty around it.

3088
03:12:11.268 --> 03:12:15.312
You keep the stakes kind of small in order to learn something very specific.

3089
03:12:15.832 --> 03:12:22.638
You try to blow this out of proportion and you don't actually learn a whole lot because you don't actually know what went right and what went wrong or if it was just luck.

3090
03:12:22.859 --> 03:12:25.001
Again, she treats these more as experiments.

3091
03:12:25.021 --> 03:12:26.602
And this is really what she says.

3092
03:12:26.722 --> 03:12:28.424
This is the repeatable thing we want to do.

3093
03:12:28.784 --> 03:12:31.647
This is the kind of failure we actually want to actively engage in.

3094
03:12:32.027 --> 03:12:35.508
Whereas the other two, like basic failures, mitigate those as much as possible.

3095
03:12:35.568 --> 03:12:36.909
You're not going to learn a whole lot anyway.

3096
03:12:37.429 --> 03:12:39.030
Minimize them, move on.

3097
03:12:39.450 --> 03:12:41.191
Complex failures, kind of the same thing.

3098
03:12:41.291 --> 03:12:43.191
Optimize your systems, have good systems in place.

3099
03:12:43.211 --> 03:12:44.772
They're complex, so you have to.

3100
03:12:45.272 --> 03:12:47.673
But otherwise, it's more about prevention than that.

3101
03:12:47.893 --> 03:12:52.255
Intelligent failures are where we really can potentially learn the most.

3102
03:12:52.355 --> 03:12:52.575
Yeah.

3103
03:12:52.915 --> 03:12:53.435
It's interesting.

3104
03:12:53.455 --> 03:13:07.521
Tim Ferriss has a heuristic around decision-making that is kind of similar to this, where he says that when choosing what to try to do, ask yourself which failure produces the most information, which is really interesting if you think about it.

3105
03:13:07.761 --> 03:13:11.663
I've ended up running these through a lot of my own decisions where I'm like, okay,

3106
03:13:12.588 --> 03:13:13.869
I'm going to try to do this thing.

3107
03:13:14.690 --> 03:13:27.681
It has like maybe a 10% chance of success, but by failing at it, I'm going to learn so much about myself, about the team, about my abilities, about what I like, what I don't like that it's probably still worth doing anyway.

3108
03:13:27.841 --> 03:13:28.061
Okay.

3109
03:13:28.081 --> 03:13:29.262
So just to recap real quick.

3110
03:13:29.282 --> 03:13:32.405
So the basic failures don't require a whole lot of response.

3111
03:13:32.645 --> 03:13:37.349
The complex failures get your systems in place, surface the problems as quickly as possible.

3112
03:13:37.369 --> 03:13:38.030
Okay.

3113
03:13:38.190 --> 03:13:40.931
increase the number of intelligent failures, just like you were talking about.

3114
03:13:41.051 --> 03:13:41.572
You're good at it.

3115
03:13:41.592 --> 03:13:42.332
You do this all the time.

3116
03:13:42.432 --> 03:13:43.672
You do this in the business all the time.

3117
03:13:43.692 --> 03:13:44.573
You're just like, we're going to try this.

3118
03:13:44.913 --> 03:13:46.514
And then two weeks later, you're like, it's not working.

3119
03:13:46.534 --> 03:13:47.034
Let's move on.

3120
03:13:47.074 --> 03:13:47.514
Let's stop.

3121
03:13:47.594 --> 03:13:49.035
But we learned that it didn't work.

3122
03:13:49.095 --> 03:13:49.775
This thing doesn't work.

3123
03:13:49.795 --> 03:13:50.475
This thing doesn't work.

3124
03:13:50.495 --> 03:13:50.956
This thing doesn't.

3125
03:13:51.056 --> 03:13:51.856
Oh, this thing kind of works.

3126
03:13:51.876 --> 03:13:52.436
Let's go with that.

3127
03:13:53.217 --> 03:13:56.738
And it is, it's usually small little things that we're doing that we're pushing the envelope.

3128
03:13:56.938 --> 03:14:00.880
I do want to go back and double click really quickly on the basic failures.

3129
03:14:01.620 --> 03:14:03.981
You said they don't, there is no response.

3130
03:14:04.261 --> 03:14:05.442
What's implied in that is

3131
03:14:06.122 --> 03:14:06.842
don't dwell on it.

3132
03:14:06.902 --> 03:14:07.062
Yeah.

3133
03:14:07.182 --> 03:14:07.523
Okay.

3134
03:14:07.543 --> 03:14:11.524
Like a lot of people will sit and dwell and they'll be like, oh my God, I'm such an idiot.

3135
03:14:11.564 --> 03:14:12.445
Why did I do that thing?

3136
03:14:12.725 --> 03:14:17.047
I can't believe I, or they searched for the lesson and the lesson is you just, you were tired.

3137
03:14:17.107 --> 03:14:17.427
You were tired.

3138
03:14:17.447 --> 03:14:17.567
Yeah.

3139
03:14:17.587 --> 03:14:20.048
You just dropped the ball this one time.

3140
03:14:20.068 --> 03:14:21.909
There's not a big lesson to be a clean firm.

3141
03:14:21.929 --> 03:14:22.629
So just move on.

3142
03:14:22.669 --> 03:14:22.909
Yeah.

3143
03:14:23.189 --> 03:14:24.571
Okay, so that makes a lot of sense.

3144
03:14:24.871 --> 03:14:28.675
And it's good to know what kind of failure we're dealing with when it happens.

3145
03:14:29.336 --> 03:14:32.999
What about this idea that failure makes us more resilient, that it makes us stronger?

3146
03:14:33.280 --> 03:14:35.182
I'll punch into one study that was done in 2010.

3147
03:14:35.402 --> 03:14:39.506
And what they found was that previously successful founders, okay, they,

3148
03:14:40.267 --> 03:14:41.148
They'd had a business.

3149
03:14:41.168 --> 03:14:45.410
They succeeded with it, probably sold it, had some sort of exit, went on to found a new company.

3150
03:14:46.070 --> 03:14:48.992
Their second venture succeeds about 30% of the time.

3151
03:14:49.452 --> 03:14:51.954
A little bit surprising, but it's only about a third of the time, right?

3152
03:14:52.554 --> 03:14:57.757
But if you look at first-time founders who've never started a company before, they succeed about 21% of the time.

3153
03:14:58.077 --> 03:15:00.739
Now, again, these are venture-backed, so they're pretty – they're vetted –

3154
03:15:01.259 --> 03:15:25.910
select these are the best of the best of the best right yeah if you have started a business before and failed that business then try to start another one it what they found in this study anyway was you would succeed about 22 percent of the time so there's really not a whole lot of difference between a first-time founder and somebody who's failed once and tried to start again they're basically the same have about the same hit rate in venture-backed capital anyway interesting that kind of tells us in that situation anyway

3155
03:15:26.940 --> 03:15:30.005
that they didn't learn a whole lot from their failures, right?

3156
03:15:30.025 --> 03:15:33.169
I mean, like they're gleaning more from their successes there.

3157
03:15:33.189 --> 03:15:37.315
Like the successful people are gleaning more from their successes than the failures are from their failures, right?

3158
03:15:37.476 --> 03:15:41.542
The success seems to transfer more than the failure does in that situation.

3159
03:15:41.842 --> 03:15:47.025
I'm not saying obviously there are people who like learn a lot from failures and the intelligent failures are the best ones and all of that.

3160
03:15:47.065 --> 03:15:47.305
Right.

3161
03:15:47.525 --> 03:15:52.668
I'm not so sure how to completely generalize that, but it is an interesting little fact there.

3162
03:15:52.868 --> 03:15:57.510
And especially in the entrepreneurial and venture backed world.

3163
03:15:57.690 --> 03:15:57.930
Right.

3164
03:15:58.030 --> 03:15:59.951
Where failure is celebrated so much.

3165
03:16:00.031 --> 03:16:00.271
Right.

3166
03:16:00.331 --> 03:16:00.792
Worshipped.

3167
03:16:01.112 --> 03:16:03.153
It doesn't seem like there's actually that much of an effect.

3168
03:16:03.373 --> 03:16:07.054
In business, there are almost an infinite number of ways to fail.

3169
03:16:07.955 --> 03:16:11.376
In most markets, there are only a handful of ways to succeed.

3170
03:16:12.276 --> 03:16:18.879
So it actually makes sense that you would learn more from your successes than your failures because it's like each individual failure- You only found one way to fail.

3171
03:16:19.139 --> 03:16:19.799
Right.

3172
03:16:19.839 --> 03:16:22.980
There's thousands of ways you can fuck up.

3173
03:16:23.200 --> 03:16:26.841
Whereas there's really only a handful of ways that you can succeed.

3174
03:16:27.802 --> 03:16:31.063
I'm trying to think if that generalizes to other things.

3175
03:16:31.223 --> 03:16:31.443
Like,

3176
03:16:31.703 --> 03:16:45.302
I'm not sure, but there is one little thing they found in this too, was that kind of goes along with that, which is one of the skills that seemed to be repeatable, which kind of goes against everything I've ever heard too.

3177
03:16:45.462 --> 03:16:46.443
It was market timing.

3178
03:16:47.044 --> 03:16:47.384
Oh yeah.

3179
03:16:48.165 --> 03:16:55.949
So if you know that market really well, like you said, you've succeeded in it once, you can time it again for whatever shift in that market there is.

3180
03:16:56.529 --> 03:16:58.070
Like that's a transferable skill.

3181
03:16:58.310 --> 03:16:58.490
Yeah.

3182
03:16:58.510 --> 03:16:59.711
You could say market knowledge.

3183
03:16:59.791 --> 03:16:59.971
Yeah.

3184
03:17:00.251 --> 03:17:00.531
Yeah.

3185
03:17:00.871 --> 03:17:03.232
Which is, yeah, it's down, that's downstream market knowledge.

3186
03:17:03.272 --> 03:17:03.873
Yeah, for sure.

3187
03:17:04.113 --> 03:17:07.615
I think one of the reasons purpose has been so successful in our space

3188
03:17:08.645 --> 03:17:10.606
is that I've been doing this for 20 years.

3189
03:17:10.786 --> 03:17:13.448
I know this market, this industry, like the back of my hand.

3190
03:17:13.708 --> 03:17:14.528
It's been interesting.

3191
03:17:14.548 --> 03:17:16.289
All of our competitors come from other markets.

3192
03:17:16.409 --> 03:17:20.952
And so I see them making what are, in my opinion, pretty large missteps.

3193
03:17:21.272 --> 03:17:25.834
I think it's likely we're either close to being the market leader or currently the market leader.

3194
03:17:26.414 --> 03:17:29.936
Yet we were started comparatively on a shoestring budget.

3195
03:17:29.976 --> 03:17:31.857
Some of these companies raised tens of millions of dollars.

3196
03:17:31.997 --> 03:17:32.257
Yeah.

3197
03:17:32.518 --> 03:17:32.718
Yeah.

3198
03:17:32.758 --> 03:17:33.218
That's wild.

3199
03:17:33.438 --> 03:17:34.279
But I think it does.

3200
03:17:34.299 --> 03:17:37.381
It speaks to the fact, too, what it is, is market knowledge.

3201
03:17:37.841 --> 03:17:41.524
I'm trying to think of that if that applies to relationships as well.

3202
03:17:41.904 --> 03:17:46.867
Everybody says, like, the divorce rates 50 percent, which, by the way, has not been true in 30, 40 years.

3203
03:17:47.488 --> 03:17:49.429
It's more like 30, 32 percent.

3204
03:17:49.549 --> 03:17:53.212
But what's interesting is most of the divorces come from the same small group of people.

3205
03:17:53.352 --> 03:17:56.154
If you've been divorced once, you're actually way more likely to be divorced.

3206
03:17:56.434 --> 03:17:56.754
Right.

3207
03:17:56.914 --> 03:17:57.815
in future marriages.

3208
03:17:58.376 --> 03:18:01.981
And so it also makes me wonder if- That's an interesting parallel.

3209
03:18:02.081 --> 03:18:04.063
You just found another way to fail a relationship.

3210
03:18:04.083 --> 03:18:05.285
You never found the right way to do it.

3211
03:18:05.465 --> 03:18:05.786
Exactly.

3212
03:18:05.806 --> 03:18:06.727
Because there's one way to do it.

3213
03:18:06.807 --> 03:18:10.191
And there's like that classic Tolstoy quote, every happy family is the same.

3214
03:18:10.251 --> 03:18:12.274
Every miserable family is miserable in its own way.

3215
03:18:12.534 --> 03:18:14.255
Meaning there's lots of ways to be miserable.

3216
03:18:14.275 --> 03:18:16.216
There's a lot of ways to fail a relationship.

3217
03:18:16.236 --> 03:18:17.677
There's a very narrow path.

3218
03:18:17.697 --> 03:18:21.080
There's really just only a couple of ways to have a successful one.

3219
03:18:21.160 --> 03:18:21.280
Yeah.

3220
03:18:21.300 --> 03:18:25.002
And if you figure that out early, it's easier to repeat, I think is the point from that.

3221
03:18:25.082 --> 03:18:25.823
So, yeah.

3222
03:18:26.143 --> 03:18:29.105
It's just that does failure make you stronger?

3223
03:18:29.145 --> 03:18:32.247
That question is like asking, do dumbbells make you stronger?

3224
03:18:32.267 --> 03:18:34.749
It's like, well, it kind of depends on how you use them, right?

3225
03:18:34.769 --> 03:18:34.889
Right.

3226
03:18:34.929 --> 03:18:35.089
Right.

3227
03:18:35.349 --> 03:18:39.192
Not only that, there's actually a really interesting kind of parallel with like working out with this.

3228
03:18:39.833 --> 03:18:41.274
It's this concept of hormesis.

3229
03:18:41.954 --> 03:18:42.255
Okay.

3230
03:18:42.635 --> 03:18:51.823
And hormesis is when a stressor is, it's harmful at very high doses, but it's very ineffectual at very, very low doses, kind of an inverted U curve to it.

3231
03:18:52.163 --> 03:18:56.927
That's kind of what we see with failure is the same thing as like as working out, right?

3232
03:18:57.047 --> 03:19:02.091
You lift just the right amount of weight at the right time and the right dosage, right?

3233
03:19:02.191 --> 03:19:02.771
It helps you get stronger.

3234
03:19:02.791 --> 03:19:03.792
It helps you get stronger.

3235
03:19:03.832 --> 03:19:05.932
If you overdo it or underdo it, you don't learn anything from it.

3236
03:19:05.952 --> 03:19:06.093
Yeah.

3237
03:19:06.353 --> 03:19:15.816
And they've identified these like four moderators that determine whether or not you will learn from adverse events or failure in your life too.

3238
03:19:16.016 --> 03:19:16.957
The first one is dosage.

3239
03:19:16.997 --> 03:19:20.338
Like I said, like how much are you actually exposed to the failure?

3240
03:19:20.618 --> 03:19:21.618
Again, if it's too much.

3241
03:19:22.299 --> 03:19:23.099
You get overwhelmed.

3242
03:19:23.119 --> 03:19:25.160
You're overwhelmed and you just give up.

3243
03:19:26.000 --> 03:19:28.701
If you don't get enough, you're not pushed in the right direction, right?

3244
03:19:28.721 --> 03:19:34.942
It's coming back to that balance that you need to have some sort of motivation, but not too much so that you quit.

3245
03:19:35.162 --> 03:19:35.502
Right.

3246
03:19:35.762 --> 03:19:42.484
There was this one research in the late 2010s, Wilson found what they called the 85% rule.

3247
03:19:42.744 --> 03:19:44.344
The optimum error rate is about 15%.

3248
03:19:44.664 --> 03:19:49.225
So you're succeeding about 85% of the time, but failing about 15% of the time.

3249
03:19:49.566 --> 03:19:53.406
Again, if you're just succeeding all the time, you're not getting a whole lot of error signal and correction signal.

3250
03:19:53.546 --> 03:19:55.587
If you're failing all the time, you're probably just going to give up.

3251
03:19:56.047 --> 03:20:01.288
So, but it was just interesting to find that there's actually like a number they can put on it, about 15% failure rate.

3252
03:20:01.508 --> 03:20:02.269
You learn the most.

3253
03:20:02.549 --> 03:20:05.269
You also, just like when you're lifting weights, though, too, you need recovery.

3254
03:20:05.329 --> 03:20:07.130
That's the second moderator.

3255
03:20:07.390 --> 03:20:08.730
This is something I learned recently.

3256
03:20:08.770 --> 03:20:14.672
My knee is, I've been trail running and went way too hard and went to the PT and he's like, well, how much you rest in?

3257
03:20:14.692 --> 03:20:16.492
And I told him and he's like, that is no, dude.

3258
03:20:17.012 --> 03:20:21.075
He's like, no, no, but I was running way too, way too frequently, way too much.

3259
03:20:21.196 --> 03:20:21.876
Yeah.

3260
03:20:21.896 --> 03:20:22.697
Same thing with failure.

3261
03:20:22.857 --> 03:20:26.860
After a failure, you need a point to recover and process that.

3262
03:20:27.020 --> 03:20:29.782
If it's an intelligent failure, you need time to be able to process that.

3263
03:20:30.123 --> 03:20:36.748
Another one is whether or not this failure was survivable to your identity.

3264
03:20:36.808 --> 03:20:39.050
How big of a hit did you take to your identity?

3265
03:20:39.430 --> 03:20:47.691
Going back to what we talked about in that chapter on over-identifying with your goals or even making some part of your life, your entire identity.

3266
03:20:48.412 --> 03:20:51.992
If you take a hit to that, like how much does it actually drain?

3267
03:20:52.112 --> 03:20:54.213
How much of a hit do you actually take to who you are?

3268
03:20:54.413 --> 03:21:00.494
Yeah, the defense mechanisms will kick in and you'll ignore the data in front of you to preserve your ego.

3269
03:21:00.534 --> 03:21:02.614
The ego is a hell of a drug, right?

3270
03:21:02.714 --> 03:21:07.795
It will come in and it will try to defend itself and try to survive over learning anything.

3271
03:21:08.235 --> 03:21:14.443
And then the last moderator is very intertwined with this intelligent failure type of thing, which is extraction.

3272
03:21:14.504 --> 03:21:17.628
Like, do you actually sit down and learn from it?

3273
03:21:17.948 --> 03:21:22.814
If you're too ego-driven around it, if you're too performance-driven around it, you don't sit down and learn the lessons.

3274
03:21:22.834 --> 03:21:23.896
You just try to save face.

3275
03:21:23.916 --> 03:21:24.797
You just try to...

3276
03:21:25.718 --> 03:21:29.401
make yourself look good from the failure or whatever it is, you're not going to learn a whole lot.

3277
03:21:29.881 --> 03:21:33.163
That goes back to the whole psychological safety thing that Edmondson found.

3278
03:21:33.303 --> 03:21:37.606
She found it in institutions, but like I was arguing, I think you have to have it with yourself as well too.

3279
03:21:37.666 --> 03:21:42.349
Like, is it okay for you to sit down and be honest with yourself about this failure that you had?

3280
03:21:42.549 --> 03:21:45.191
You do have to take the time to actually extract the lessons from it.

3281
03:21:45.431 --> 03:21:50.635
You have to be able to surface those and be self-aware enough to surface the lessons from the failure to learn something from it.

3282
03:21:51.113 --> 03:21:51.934
So that's really useful.

3283
03:21:52.294 --> 03:21:55.118
Dosage, recovery, survivability, extraction.

3284
03:21:55.598 --> 03:21:57.420
There are a few techniques we can apply as well that

3285
03:21:58.582 --> 03:22:03.244
help mitigate failure and also help prep us beforehand to make sure that we learn from it.

3286
03:22:03.744 --> 03:22:21.953
One of them is the premortem, which is a practice where you sit down before you start working on a new goal or new project, or you take the team before you start on like this quarter's initiative or whatever, and you actually take like an hour and you write out, if this is to fail, what will have caused it?

3287
03:22:22.233 --> 03:22:26.195
And you come up with as many ideas as possible of what those potential failure points are.

3288
03:22:26.635 --> 03:22:33.598
And you write them out and you think of the catastrophic failures, the mild failures, the systemic failures, the complex failures.

3289
03:22:34.118 --> 03:22:37.700
And then of course, the basic failures, like where are the places that you can just potentially screw up?

3290
03:22:38.340 --> 03:22:46.884
And then once you've mapped out all of the potential failure points, that can allow you to start planning to prevent those from happening in the first place.

3291
03:22:47.344 --> 03:22:54.647
So it can reinforce your plans going into whatever project you're doing to make sure that the failures don't happen ahead of time.

3292
03:22:54.847 --> 03:23:08.313
The other thing that you can do, so there was some research pretty recently in 2022 around looking at how people are able to properly extract the lessons from failures after the fact.

3293
03:23:08.573 --> 03:23:15.537
One is called loss framing, which is take whatever you lost from the failure and actually quantify it.

3294
03:23:15.617 --> 03:23:15.937
Try to...

3295
03:23:16.437 --> 03:23:18.540
list out all the things that it costs you.

3296
03:23:18.761 --> 03:23:26.952
This could be how much money you lost, how many hours you spent, how many clients you missed out on, how much revenue was lost out on.

3297
03:23:27.333 --> 03:23:29.536
There's something about quantifying things.

3298
03:23:29.576 --> 03:23:31.980
And it's interesting because this works in reverse as well.

3299
03:23:32.000 --> 03:23:32.140
Like

3300
03:23:32.420 --> 03:23:38.821
when you quantify things in your life, you kind of objectify it and it allows you to kind of separate yourself from it a little bit.

3301
03:23:39.081 --> 03:23:42.342
That's a little bit of a hazard when you do that to the good things in your life.

3302
03:23:42.622 --> 03:23:47.223
But if you're evaluating the bad things in your life, you can actually use that to your advantage, right?

3303
03:23:47.303 --> 03:23:54.925
So if you're super upset that something didn't go your way, if you actually sit down with a spreadsheet and calculate, okay, what did I actually miss out on here?

3304
03:23:55.545 --> 03:23:59.366
Oh, it was like 500 bucks in like 12 hours of my life.

3305
03:23:59.466 --> 03:23:59.726
You're like,

3306
03:24:00.966 --> 03:24:02.647
okay, that's not that bad, actually.

3307
03:24:02.767 --> 03:24:04.048
Like, I think I'm going to be fine.

3308
03:24:04.429 --> 03:24:11.734
The nice thing, too, is that by quantifying that failure, it gives you a better sense of how to move forward or how to correct it moving into the future.

3309
03:24:12.014 --> 03:24:19.400
And again, like we talked about earlier, like what often happens is that something feels catastrophic, and then when you actually write it out, you're like,

3310
03:24:19.820 --> 03:24:20.140
Oh, okay.

3311
03:24:20.160 --> 03:24:21.200
That actually isn't that bad.

3312
03:24:21.861 --> 03:24:23.721
Like I'm being a little bit of a drama queen right now.

3313
03:24:23.901 --> 03:24:30.423
The second technique that these researchers identified is something called corrective feedback, which is really just simple.

3314
03:24:30.583 --> 03:24:37.925
Like what are the tangible steps and processes you can do the next time that will prevent that failure from happening again?

3315
03:24:38.005 --> 03:24:41.406
So it's essentially the postmortem rather than the premortem.

3316
03:24:41.486 --> 03:24:42.887
It's like, okay, this is what happened.

3317
03:24:44.107 --> 03:24:46.688
If we did these things in hindsight, it would have prevented it.

3318
03:24:46.788 --> 03:24:50.669
So let's make sure that those things are implemented going into the future.

3319
03:24:51.249 --> 03:25:02.732
But ultimately, to bring this all back to the definitional problem of failure in the first place is that our ability to manage the failure is largely going to be dependent on how we define our expectations in the first place.

3320
03:25:03.192 --> 03:25:14.480
And so the four moderators that you mentioned are a huge part of that is like simply setting our expectations appropriately so that we are pursuing something that is the manageable challenge.

3321
03:25:14.500 --> 03:25:26.549
It is something that is both achievable, but also difficult, something that we can recover from something that is not threatening to our ego identity and something that we can definitely learn and extract information from after the fact.

3322
03:25:27.610 --> 03:25:30.492
If you line up your goals to match your.

3323
03:25:30.797 --> 03:25:35.962
those factors after the fact, then you are setting yourself up for good failures.

3324
03:25:36.282 --> 03:25:38.304
As we've established, those failures are inevitable.

3325
03:25:38.705 --> 03:25:42.949
So we might as well line ourselves up to have the failures that we're going to benefit the most from.

3326
03:25:43.149 --> 03:25:49.495
You've kind of mentioned this a few times on various episodes that we've done about some of your relationships, I guess.

3327
03:25:50.055 --> 03:25:55.401
I think there's like a kind of a crude pre-mortem, post-mortem thing you did when you got with your now wife.

3328
03:25:55.861 --> 03:25:57.203
You were like, okay, I'm not going to...

3329
03:25:57.283 --> 03:26:00.106
If this ends, it's not going to be because of all these dumb reasons from before.

3330
03:26:00.206 --> 03:26:00.546
Yes.

3331
03:26:00.626 --> 03:26:03.169
So there's a little bit of a post-mortem, pre-mortem thing going on there.

3332
03:26:03.209 --> 03:26:04.370
That's a really good catch.

3333
03:26:04.471 --> 03:26:06.353
I had not thought about that.

3334
03:26:07.253 --> 03:26:11.637
We're talking about businesses and money and all this stuff, but it applies in a lot of other areas too.

3335
03:26:11.738 --> 03:26:11.998
Yeah.

3336
03:26:12.118 --> 03:26:15.761
I screwed up so many of my early relationships for very stupid reasons.

3337
03:26:16.021 --> 03:26:24.830
And the only agreement I made with myself when I was dating my wife was just, if this ends, make sure it's not for a dumb reason.

3338
03:26:25.430 --> 03:26:25.850
That was it.

3339
03:26:26.050 --> 03:26:26.210
Yeah.

3340
03:26:26.230 --> 03:26:33.252
Like I said, like there's a crude pre-mortem kind of type of thing, but also there's a post-mortem kind of looking back analysis that you did as well.

3341
03:26:33.272 --> 03:26:35.373
You're like, oh, I messed up this, this, and this.

3342
03:26:35.573 --> 03:26:40.895
This relationship failed because of whatever trait that I have that I don't want to have going forward.

3343
03:26:41.235 --> 03:26:41.495
Right.

3344
03:26:42.355 --> 03:26:44.576
And you turn that into also a pre-mortem as well.

3345
03:26:44.736 --> 03:26:45.636
But this brings up.

3346
03:26:47.232 --> 03:26:52.134
an important facet of this failure, which is when is it okay to quit?

3347
03:26:52.854 --> 03:26:53.454
Ah, okay.

3348
03:26:53.474 --> 03:27:00.577
Like when is quitting failure and when is quitting actually just being smart and not banging your head against the wall?

3349
03:27:00.757 --> 03:27:02.618
There's been some interesting research around this too.

3350
03:27:02.638 --> 03:27:04.539
There was this Karsten Rorsch

3351
03:27:06.000 --> 03:27:12.907
I believe this is back in the early 2000s, identified these like, okay, there's two capacities that we have when we're looking at quitting.

3352
03:27:13.347 --> 03:27:14.568
There's goal disengagement.

3353
03:27:14.608 --> 03:27:16.130
So that's quitting, basically.

3354
03:27:16.170 --> 03:27:17.411
Like when do you disengage?

3355
03:27:17.451 --> 03:27:19.653
Like there's a skill around when to quit, right?

3356
03:27:20.174 --> 03:27:22.777
But there also has to be a skill of reengaging.

3357
03:27:23.197 --> 03:27:25.579
And is that reengaging with the same goal or a different goal?

3358
03:27:25.659 --> 03:27:27.341
There's like a whole skill set around that too.

3359
03:27:27.361 --> 03:27:27.461
Yeah.

3360
03:27:28.382 --> 03:27:30.824
They're kind of, they're two independent skills as well.

3361
03:27:31.084 --> 03:27:31.404
All right.

3362
03:27:31.844 --> 03:27:34.186
One doesn't necessarily follow the other and vice versa.

3363
03:27:34.226 --> 03:27:34.446
Right.

3364
03:27:34.566 --> 03:27:40.209
People who can do these both very well, they know when to quit and they know when, where, where and when to re-engage.

3365
03:27:40.509 --> 03:27:44.612
They seem to have the best outcomes around mental health, wellbeing, happiness, all of that.

3366
03:27:44.832 --> 03:27:45.733
Again, they're independent though.

3367
03:27:45.753 --> 03:27:49.595
They don't, just because you have one doesn't mean you have the other necessarily.

3368
03:27:49.935 --> 03:27:57.942
What they've also found too is that that's why this whole like never give up kind of ethos that's out there in the culture is actually terrible advice.

3369
03:27:58.102 --> 03:27:58.262
Yeah.

3370
03:27:58.522 --> 03:28:03.346
Because actually the best advice is, yeah, give up smartly and then re-engage smartly too.

3371
03:28:03.787 --> 03:28:06.069
Like know when to pivot or whatever you want to call it.

3372
03:28:06.449 --> 03:28:08.831
That's actually the best way to do that.

3373
03:28:08.851 --> 03:28:11.793
But like how do you go about doing that is the whole question.

3374
03:28:11.833 --> 03:28:12.834
How do you define smartly?

3375
03:28:12.854 --> 03:28:13.174
Exactly.

3376
03:28:13.195 --> 03:28:13.635
Exactly.

3377
03:28:13.895 --> 03:28:18.739
Annie Duke, who we had on the Luck episode last time, she has a whole book on quitting.

3378
03:28:18.939 --> 03:28:20.240
And it's fantastic, actually.

3379
03:28:20.641 --> 03:28:22.182
Everybody should go out and read that one.

3380
03:28:22.742 --> 03:28:25.365
She gets very in the weeds about certain things, but then she talks about relationships.

3381
03:28:25.385 --> 03:28:26.305
She talks about careers.

3382
03:28:26.346 --> 03:28:28.587
She talks about all different areas of life, okay?

3383
03:28:28.928 --> 03:28:32.491
She says something along the lines of quitting on time is usually too late.

3384
03:28:33.451 --> 03:28:33.751
right?

3385
03:28:34.091 --> 03:28:37.272
It feels too early, but usually you're actually too late when that happens.

3386
03:28:37.712 --> 03:28:52.414
There were some studies she talked about, one in particular where people were going through big life changes and having to make decisions about something and it involved quitting, changing a career, leaving a relationship, those sorts of things like big life decisions, right?

3387
03:28:52.694 --> 03:28:59.236
They found these people while they were still deliberating on this, whether or not, followed up with them like six to 12 months later, something like that.

3388
03:28:59.596 --> 03:29:00.836
The people who quit

3389
03:29:01.807 --> 03:29:08.674
pretty much right away, were much happier six to 12 months later than the people who hung on for longer.

3390
03:29:08.874 --> 03:29:14.080
A lot of times what they would do too is like, what's the, what's the chances of this working out versus not working out?

3391
03:29:14.320 --> 03:29:19.926
If you're at 50, 50, you're usually actually at more like 75, 25, like you should quit at that point.

3392
03:29:20.046 --> 03:29:21.406
We hang on for a little bit too long.

3393
03:29:21.466 --> 03:29:23.487
Again, it goes back to that loss aversion thing.

3394
03:29:23.727 --> 03:29:27.388
That's what she found in that book though, which I thought was just a fascinating thing.

3395
03:29:27.408 --> 03:29:29.148
It's like when you're like, ah, yeah, I don't know.

3396
03:29:29.208 --> 03:29:29.828
Maybe I should quit.

3397
03:29:29.848 --> 03:29:30.448
Maybe I shouldn't.

3398
03:29:30.869 --> 03:29:31.469
It's a toss up.

3399
03:29:32.229 --> 03:29:35.130
Most likely you should probably just go ahead and quit at that point.

3400
03:29:35.610 --> 03:29:36.050
And I've seen this.

3401
03:29:36.070 --> 03:29:40.751
A lot of my therapist friends like work with people who are, you know, they're really unsatisfied in their jobs.

3402
03:29:40.771 --> 03:29:43.031
And they're like, man, if this person would just quit their job.

3403
03:29:43.411 --> 03:29:45.192
And I've told them, I'm like, oh, you should get that book for them.

3404
03:29:45.212 --> 03:29:49.213
And like, that's a little too on the nose, giving them a book called Quit, you know, and telling them what

3405
03:29:50.233 --> 03:29:55.758
But I think there's something to that where intelligent quitting feels like quitting too early a lot of times.

3406
03:29:56.119 --> 03:29:58.561
We probably should quit a lot more than we do.

3407
03:29:58.961 --> 03:29:59.162
Right.

3408
03:29:59.302 --> 03:30:03.506
But it goes back to that loss aversion that we hold on to, that bias that we hold on to.

3409
03:30:03.746 --> 03:30:06.629
It's interesting that the conventional wisdom is always to stick to it.

3410
03:30:07.189 --> 03:30:07.790
Yeah, stick it out.

3411
03:30:07.850 --> 03:30:12.334
Whereas it sounds like the actual research suggests that people should quit more often.

3412
03:30:12.354 --> 03:30:12.975
Yeah, yeah.

3413
03:30:13.815 --> 03:30:14.496
relationships too.

3414
03:30:14.516 --> 03:30:16.217
A lot of people are like, ah, they've gone through this.

3415
03:30:16.817 --> 03:30:17.337
Should I stay?

3416
03:30:17.417 --> 03:30:17.938
Should I go?

3417
03:30:18.138 --> 03:30:20.940
If you're at that point, most of the time, it's probably time to go.

3418
03:30:21.100 --> 03:30:22.601
There's some cost fallacy, right?

3419
03:30:23.281 --> 03:30:31.126
People, especially you get five years into a job or eight years into a relationship and it feels like you're throwing away all that time if you don't stick it out.

3420
03:30:32.086 --> 03:30:34.208
So there's a lot of biases against quitting.

3421
03:30:34.508 --> 03:30:35.828
What are the questions or the

3422
03:30:37.527 --> 03:30:40.351
the ways we can determine whether it's time to quit something or not.

3423
03:30:40.571 --> 03:30:45.017
So Rorsch actually had these like five questions you should ask on whether or not you should quit.

3424
03:30:45.197 --> 03:30:45.418
Right.

3425
03:30:45.618 --> 03:30:53.508
The first one being attainability, like honest appraisal, like, is this actually something you have the time, the resources and the willingness to like stick out?

3426
03:30:53.849 --> 03:30:54.249
If not,

3427
03:30:54.950 --> 03:30:55.852
move on, right?

3428
03:30:56.172 --> 03:30:56.994
That's a pretty simple one.

3429
03:30:57.294 --> 03:30:58.116
Simple, not easy.

3430
03:30:58.436 --> 03:31:01.762
Because it's a lot of people, I mean, I do this too.

3431
03:31:02.003 --> 03:31:04.247
A lot of people are not honest with themselves.

3432
03:31:04.667 --> 03:31:07.172
How much time and energy they're going to put into something.

3433
03:31:07.948 --> 03:31:13.810
Like there are many things that if I spent 12 hours a day, every single day, I probably could accomplish.

3434
03:31:14.370 --> 03:31:15.050
But am I?

3435
03:31:15.670 --> 03:31:15.830
No.

3436
03:31:16.170 --> 03:31:18.251
I was just talking to a friend recently and she's like, you know what?

3437
03:31:18.331 --> 03:31:21.712
I really want a clean house, but I just know I'm not going to do it.

3438
03:31:21.752 --> 03:31:23.172
I know I'm lazy, so I'm not going to do it.

3439
03:31:23.333 --> 03:31:23.493
Yeah.

3440
03:31:23.693 --> 03:31:24.953
I was like, okay, good on you.

3441
03:31:25.033 --> 03:31:25.233
Yeah.

3442
03:31:25.453 --> 03:31:25.693
All right.

3443
03:31:25.993 --> 03:31:28.134
The next one, the reversal test.

3444
03:31:28.294 --> 03:31:28.554
Okay.

3445
03:31:28.574 --> 03:31:31.215
So imagine succeeding fully right now.

3446
03:31:32.490 --> 03:31:34.893
Again, being very honest with yourself, would you still want it?

3447
03:31:35.454 --> 03:31:40.120
Or is it more just like this kind of nebulous idea that you have that you might want it?

3448
03:31:40.401 --> 03:31:44.105
It separates us kind of from like, is this goal the wrong goal?

3449
03:31:44.766 --> 03:31:47.129
Or is it the setback that's going to hurt more?

3450
03:31:47.390 --> 03:31:50.174
If you fully succeeded in it, would you actually still want it?

3451
03:31:51.063 --> 03:31:52.424
That's a hard one to imagine as well.

3452
03:31:52.444 --> 03:31:54.105
You mean still want it after succeeding?

3453
03:31:54.125 --> 03:31:54.346
Yes.

3454
03:31:54.486 --> 03:31:54.666
Yeah.

3455
03:31:54.766 --> 03:31:55.727
Like still want to do it?

3456
03:31:55.807 --> 03:31:56.047
Yes.

3457
03:31:56.467 --> 03:31:56.667
Yeah.

3458
03:31:56.687 --> 03:31:58.229
Would you, would you want to continue doing that?

3459
03:31:58.289 --> 03:32:01.511
Which like, for example, Agassi, if you had asked him.

3460
03:32:01.851 --> 03:32:02.232
Yeah.

3461
03:32:02.732 --> 03:32:05.354
If you were the best player in the world, would you still want to play Tennessee?

3462
03:32:05.374 --> 03:32:06.435
Would immediately say no.

3463
03:32:06.555 --> 03:32:07.416
At one point he would say no.

3464
03:32:07.436 --> 03:32:07.676
Right.

3465
03:32:07.776 --> 03:32:10.459
Then we go back to the approach versus avoidance thing as well, too.

3466
03:32:10.559 --> 03:32:13.783
So are you moving to something better or are you just trying to avoid failure?

3467
03:32:14.023 --> 03:32:22.733
Like if you set a goal out, are you just trying to fulfill some external goal where you're not going to be seen as a failure or you're actually trying to learn something and get better?

3468
03:32:23.153 --> 03:32:26.116
Again, turning that back on yourself and competing with yourself and improving yourself.

3469
03:32:26.837 --> 03:32:28.399
versus just trying to avoid failure.

3470
03:32:28.539 --> 03:32:30.241
The advisor test, I kind of like this one too.

3471
03:32:30.461 --> 03:32:32.984
It's like, would you tell a friend to go after this?

3472
03:32:33.264 --> 03:32:38.170
Like if a friend came to you and said, gave you all the information that you have in front of you, said, I want to do this.

3473
03:32:38.250 --> 03:32:41.294
This is how much time, money, resources, energy I'm going to put into it.

3474
03:32:41.574 --> 03:32:43.256
Would you tell that same friend to do it or not?

3475
03:32:43.578 --> 03:32:45.300
That's, I think, another tricky one too.

3476
03:32:45.320 --> 03:32:46.000
It's a tough one.

3477
03:32:46.100 --> 03:32:47.742
It requires a lot of honesty.

3478
03:32:48.363 --> 03:32:50.825
The last one, the cost of the information.

3479
03:32:50.845 --> 03:32:56.310
So is continuing still the cheapest way to learn something in this situation?

3480
03:32:57.091 --> 03:32:59.113
Or do you already have the lesson?

3481
03:32:59.413 --> 03:33:02.155
Are you actually going to learn something out of this and get something out of this?

3482
03:33:02.916 --> 03:33:06.239
Or do you already know this lesson and it's just kind of like a waste of your time?

3483
03:33:06.439 --> 03:33:08.421
The through line through all of this really though is...

3484
03:33:09.640 --> 03:33:12.285
that rational quitting, it's kind of a directional thing.

3485
03:33:12.385 --> 03:33:15.630
Rational quitting is, it's approach motivated.

3486
03:33:15.670 --> 03:33:17.092
So you're trying to succeed.

3487
03:33:17.112 --> 03:33:18.355
You're trying to figure out something.

3488
03:33:18.375 --> 03:33:19.316
You're trying to learn something.

3489
03:33:20.648 --> 03:33:23.049
It's honest and it's attainability.

3490
03:33:23.429 --> 03:33:26.370
You could actually probably do this or you're willing to do it anyway.

3491
03:33:27.251 --> 03:33:28.731
And you're going somewhere with it.

3492
03:33:28.751 --> 03:33:29.612
That has direction.

3493
03:33:30.212 --> 03:33:35.214
Again, you're learning, you're pushing something into new territory and learning something new about yourself.

3494
03:33:35.354 --> 03:33:37.615
Fear quitting on the other side, it's avoidance motivated.

3495
03:33:37.655 --> 03:33:39.616
You're just trying to avoid failure.

3496
03:33:40.785 --> 03:33:42.065
You're trying to avoid discomfort.

3497
03:33:42.625 --> 03:33:49.747
And really the only, maybe the only successful route to it is exiting it, is failing it to begin with.

3498
03:33:49.807 --> 03:33:52.988
So those were Rorsch's kind of five criteria anyway.

3499
03:33:53.148 --> 03:34:07.992
I have another one that I used to ask people way back in the day when I coached people, which is I used to call it the desert island test, which is if you could do it, but you had to do it on a desert island and nobody would know about it, would you still do it?

3500
03:34:08.012 --> 03:34:08.112
Yeah.

3501
03:34:08.732 --> 03:34:13.096
And I like that one because it sorts out the people who are externally motivated.

3502
03:34:13.136 --> 03:34:16.318
They're like really chasing that social validation, that social approval.

3503
03:34:16.458 --> 03:34:18.740
Because in a lot of cases, people are like, no, actually I wouldn't.

3504
03:34:19.521 --> 03:34:20.782
Which then tells you something.

3505
03:34:21.422 --> 03:34:23.184
You're not actually doing it for the thing itself.

3506
03:34:23.524 --> 03:34:28.068
I think the other interesting question around this that I've heard recently...

3507
03:34:28.348 --> 03:34:32.171
So there was an interview of Elon Musk a few years ago, and they were talking about...

3508
03:34:32.191 --> 03:34:34.393
I mean, the story of SpaceX is just like...

3509
03:34:35.213 --> 03:34:36.754
absolutely ridiculous.

3510
03:34:37.034 --> 03:34:39.615
He was so close to bankruptcy multiple times.

3511
03:34:39.995 --> 03:34:53.100
And it was interesting because the interviewer asked him, he said, looking back, what do you think if you were to run the SpaceX experiment a hundred times, how many times would it have succeeded?

3512
03:34:54.120 --> 03:34:56.003
And I forget what he said, but it was a very low number.

3513
03:34:56.163 --> 03:35:01.271
It was like, you know, he was like maybe three or four times out of 100, it would actually have worked.

3514
03:35:01.491 --> 03:35:07.420
And then the interviewer said, at the time, what did you think the likelihood was that SpaceX was going to succeed?

3515
03:35:07.540 --> 03:35:08.161
And he said 10%.

3516
03:35:09.581 --> 03:35:14.563
which was a little bit shocking because most entrepreneurs are like delusionally optimistic about themselves.

3517
03:35:15.243 --> 03:35:21.606
And then the interviewer said, well, if you only thought it had a 10% chance to succeed, why did you still do it?

3518
03:35:22.246 --> 03:35:28.569
And he said something really fascinating is he said some things are worth doing even if you expect them to fail.

3519
03:35:28.849 --> 03:35:30.391
which I never really thought about before.

3520
03:35:30.951 --> 03:35:32.733
That's a very different way to look at things.

3521
03:35:32.853 --> 03:35:33.214
Yes.

3522
03:35:33.654 --> 03:35:33.855
Right?

3523
03:35:33.875 --> 03:35:39.441
Like what in your life is worth doing, even if it is overwhelmingly likely that it's going to fail.

3524
03:35:39.681 --> 03:35:42.184
It's hard to think of- That's hard to come up with something, yeah.

3525
03:35:42.244 --> 03:35:43.605
More than like one or two things.

3526
03:35:43.685 --> 03:35:43.866
Yeah.

3527
03:35:44.166 --> 03:35:44.967
In terms of like-

3528
03:35:46.372 --> 03:35:58.601
a litmus test of what you're willing to fail at and what failures are tolerable and what failures are worth it and what failures you can learn from, I think that's a pretty powerful question.

3529
03:35:59.461 --> 03:36:02.784
And again, to bring back the Agassi example, right?

3530
03:36:02.844 --> 03:36:10.109
Like Agassi 1.0, if you asked them, if you knew you were going to fail at your tennis career, would you still do it?

3531
03:36:10.149 --> 03:36:11.010
Is it still worth doing?

3532
03:36:11.030 --> 03:36:11.270
Yeah.

3533
03:36:11.670 --> 03:36:14.551
chances are I'm pretty sure he would have said, absolutely not.

3534
03:36:14.811 --> 03:36:17.112
There's no way I would do this if I, if I thought I was going to fail.

3535
03:36:17.572 --> 03:36:21.313
Whereas Agassi 2.0, if you asked him, he probably would have still done it.

3536
03:36:21.773 --> 03:36:21.973
Right.

3537
03:36:22.033 --> 03:36:28.955
Cause he's like, look, this is, this is my best route to do the thing I really care about, contribute to the thing I really, that really matters to me.

3538
03:36:29.155 --> 03:36:34.577
The tennis is just, it's a side effect of what I actually care about, which is really interesting.

3539
03:36:34.917 --> 03:36:35.197
That is,

3540
03:36:36.257 --> 03:36:38.478
Do you have anything like that in your life that you can think of?

3541
03:36:38.738 --> 03:36:41.659
I think it can also be applied backwards too, I guess.

3542
03:36:41.679 --> 03:36:44.341
So like you can look back and say, well, that was still worth it even though I failed.

3543
03:36:44.401 --> 03:36:46.282
That's a little more common, I think.

3544
03:36:46.762 --> 03:36:48.743
The thing that comes to mind immediately is my marriage.

3545
03:36:48.763 --> 03:36:49.063
Yeah.

3546
03:36:49.243 --> 03:36:56.666
That is a hurdle you kind of have to cross to get into a marriage because it is like when you get married, like it is something that you think about.

3547
03:36:56.686 --> 03:36:58.847
It's like, are we going to go to the distance?

3548
03:36:58.927 --> 03:37:00.368
Is this going to end in divorce?

3549
03:37:00.568 --> 03:37:04.710
Like even this business, if I knew it was going to fail...

3550
03:37:05.920 --> 03:37:07.521
I would probably still do it.

3551
03:37:07.541 --> 03:37:08.802
I would do it much differently.

3552
03:37:08.822 --> 03:37:09.243
Ah, right.

3553
03:37:09.303 --> 03:37:09.543
Okay.

3554
03:37:09.563 --> 03:37:09.763
Yeah.

3555
03:37:10.003 --> 03:37:10.363
Yeah.

3556
03:37:10.864 --> 03:37:11.624
Ah, that's a, yeah.

3557
03:37:11.704 --> 03:37:12.825
I would do it differently too.

3558
03:37:13.086 --> 03:37:14.827
It's more common for us to apply this backwards.

3559
03:37:15.067 --> 03:37:17.589
I think where it's like, Oh, it failed, but I think it was still worth it.

3560
03:37:18.029 --> 03:37:19.591
That's a little easier to see sometimes too.

3561
03:37:20.091 --> 03:37:22.713
I don't want to get too far into it, but yeah, I am newly single.

3562
03:37:23.994 --> 03:37:28.057
And, and so I had a relationship that failed, uh, yet another one in my life too.

3563
03:37:28.217 --> 03:37:30.519
It's a long string of them that I have not learned a lot from.

3564
03:37:30.659 --> 03:37:32.000
I think sometimes I, I,

3565
03:37:32.360 --> 03:37:33.941
Not like you were having- I'm sure you have.

3566
03:37:34.121 --> 03:37:34.821
I've learned plenty.

3567
03:37:34.841 --> 03:37:35.442
I've learned plenty.

3568
03:37:36.322 --> 03:37:43.125
But going through this breakup, leading up to it, it was a lot of emotional turmoil going on.

3569
03:37:43.285 --> 03:37:47.807
And the breakup itself, we dragged it out over a couple hours and all this, right?

3570
03:37:48.527 --> 03:37:55.010
But I did say at one point, there are people who don't get the chance to have their heart broken like this.

3571
03:37:56.471 --> 03:37:57.311
And that's what I mean.

3572
03:37:57.652 --> 03:37:58.312
That was worth it.

3573
03:37:58.852 --> 03:37:59.813
Like, this sucks.

3574
03:38:00.113 --> 03:38:00.573
Yeah.

3575
03:38:01.093 --> 03:38:02.314
terribly sucks.

3576
03:38:02.414 --> 03:38:02.694
Right.

3577
03:38:03.034 --> 03:38:06.475
But some people don't even get the chance to feel this shitty.

3578
03:38:06.675 --> 03:38:06.895
Yeah.

3579
03:38:06.935 --> 03:38:07.495
You know what I mean?

3580
03:38:07.535 --> 03:38:09.576
Like, that's a weird way to put it, I guess.

3581
03:38:09.756 --> 03:38:14.117
And it's a, again, it's a backwards looking kind of a version of this.

3582
03:38:14.217 --> 03:38:16.418
But yeah, I'm looking back and I'm like, that was worth it.

3583
03:38:16.598 --> 03:38:20.339
I did learn a lot from this and I'm still taking a lot of lessons from it.

3584
03:38:20.499 --> 03:38:24.480
But it kind of took that to get there too for me.

3585
03:38:24.640 --> 03:38:25.020
So yeah.

3586
03:38:25.280 --> 03:38:29.402
I do think relationships, romantic relationships, or to me, that's kind of

3587
03:38:30.722 --> 03:38:36.845
Maybe the most obvious category of a lot of them or most of them, even when they don't work, they tend to be worth it.

3588
03:38:37.065 --> 03:38:41.467
But yeah, there are a lot of things in life that, yeah, they're not worth it if they don't work out.

3589
03:38:42.507 --> 03:38:49.050
And I think maybe the value of that question is spot those things beforehand and just don't get too invested.

3590
03:38:49.370 --> 03:38:51.851
The Buddhists had that one figured out, like don't get too attached.

3591
03:38:52.011 --> 03:38:53.552
Yeah, there's something to it.

3592
03:38:53.692 --> 03:38:55.833
What's your big takeaway from this episode?

3593
03:38:56.413 --> 03:39:02.096
I think one of the most eye-opening sections for me anyway was definitely like the mastery versus performance goals.

3594
03:39:02.216 --> 03:39:09.520
Even though I kind of knew that, I've heard about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation a lot before, and I know all of that, but really seeing that put...

3595
03:39:10.633 --> 03:39:14.198
like front and center, a mastery goal being something that's like, no, no, no.

3596
03:39:14.258 --> 03:39:15.940
It's like compare yourself to yourself.

3597
03:39:16.421 --> 03:39:17.562
We've said it many times before.

3598
03:39:17.582 --> 03:39:18.683
You've said it many times before.

3599
03:39:19.224 --> 03:39:25.552
Put that right next to the performance goals though where you put all of this together where the measurement is external to you.

3600
03:39:25.852 --> 03:39:26.893
Again, I knew all of that.

3601
03:39:27.034 --> 03:39:29.377
I knew I've known all of that, but kind of putting that

3602
03:39:30.360 --> 03:39:36.986
all together like this in this packaging that we had really showed me the areas of my life where I'm still doing that.

3603
03:39:37.006 --> 03:39:40.629
And I didn't think I was, but I probably am in a lot of different ways.

3604
03:39:40.649 --> 03:39:43.612
So that was good to just kind of do a quick inventory.

3605
03:39:43.652 --> 03:39:44.453
Is this a mastery goal?

3606
03:39:44.493 --> 03:39:45.393
Is this a performance goal?

3607
03:39:45.433 --> 03:39:46.114
Is this a mastery goal?

3608
03:39:46.154 --> 03:39:47.075
Is this a performance goal?

3609
03:39:47.315 --> 03:39:48.156
There was a lot of clarifying.

3610
03:39:48.496 --> 03:39:55.039
Around this recent relationship that ended, I think there was some performance goals around that too for me that I had to really come to terms with.

3611
03:39:55.059 --> 03:39:55.439
So yeah.

3612
03:39:55.639 --> 03:39:59.201
In the realm of relationships, performance goals are like very corrosive.

3613
03:39:59.361 --> 03:40:01.762
Like they really, they backfire entirely.

3614
03:40:01.962 --> 03:40:04.443
Well, and they're very hard to see too.

3615
03:40:04.583 --> 03:40:08.705
There's a social script for you or here's the thing you're supposed to do.

3616
03:40:08.725 --> 03:40:09.625
And you get validated for them.

3617
03:40:09.845 --> 03:40:10.345
Exactly.

3618
03:40:10.505 --> 03:40:16.188
It's what other people look and see to judge whether your relationship's working or not.

3619
03:40:16.228 --> 03:40:16.368
So-

3620
03:40:16.628 --> 03:40:32.934
I thought there was a lot of interesting research around you feel the sting of failure, even if you don't agree with people's judgments of you, even if you don't know the people, even if you're alone, even if there aren't people around you, like it still stings in every circumstance.

3621
03:40:32.954 --> 03:40:34.355
I thought that was really fascinating.

3622
03:40:34.495 --> 03:40:37.916
There are a lot of research tidbits in this one that I wasn't aware of prior.

3623
03:40:38.716 --> 03:40:43.058
But I think for me, you know, I mentioned at the top of the show that there's,

3624
03:40:43.178 --> 03:40:53.304
I think subtle art really kind of gave failure a kind of a conventional mid 2010s, you know, failure is the way forward, you know, stick it out, learn from it.

3625
03:40:54.184 --> 03:40:55.365
Don't, don't take it personally.

3626
03:40:55.385 --> 03:40:59.087
Like all, all, all the kind of the generic advice that's pretty common these days.

3627
03:40:59.367 --> 03:41:00.508
I was just very satisfied.

3628
03:41:00.528 --> 03:41:01.148
Yeah.

3629
03:41:01.228 --> 03:41:03.028
with how deep we got with this one.

3630
03:41:03.389 --> 03:41:15.471
Again, we tend to think of failure and success as this binary thing that we imagine that there are people out there that are just successful at everything they do, or they're successful at the vast majority of the things that they do.

3631
03:41:15.531 --> 03:41:30.415
But the slippery definitional nature of failure and the relativity of it and how it is very uniquely tied to our self-definition and our expectations for ourselves and how it's universally experienced.

3632
03:41:30.455 --> 03:41:30.675
You can

3633
03:41:31.916 --> 03:41:43.747
you can take whatever person you think is the most successful at whatever you want to point out, the majority of that person's experience is probably going to be a failure, which is fucked up, right?

3634
03:41:44.047 --> 03:41:50.894
It's almost like our conventional notions of success are almost like these surfaces that we can only see on other people, we can never see on ourselves.

3635
03:41:51.434 --> 03:41:54.998
And the internal lived experiences of this constant

3636
03:41:55.518 --> 03:42:03.250
everlasting cycle of failures and processing those failures, learning from those failures, moving on from those failures.

3637
03:42:03.431 --> 03:42:04.993
So I really enjoyed the

3638
03:42:06.174 --> 03:42:08.115
kind of the philosophical depth that this got to.

3639
03:42:08.155 --> 03:42:09.556
Yeah, yeah.

3640
03:42:09.897 --> 03:42:12.398
I actually didn't expect it to go there.

3641
03:42:12.719 --> 03:42:18.243
I'm glad we finally did our little religion section, you know, to keep the people happy.

3642
03:42:18.423 --> 03:42:23.506
But yeah, this one was much more of an intellectual kind of thing for me.

3643
03:42:23.646 --> 03:42:28.610
As you pointed out, I think I tend to handle failure pretty well in my life.

3644
03:42:28.850 --> 03:42:34.271
So there were fewer like ahas for me, but some fun, fun intellectual adventures.

3645
03:42:34.371 --> 03:42:36.672
You've been talking about this for a long time too, defining your own metrics.

3646
03:42:36.912 --> 03:42:38.032
You've been talking about that for a long time.

3647
03:42:38.052 --> 03:42:38.912
That was in the subtle art.

3648
03:42:38.932 --> 03:42:40.272
That was an old blog post you did.

3649
03:42:40.292 --> 03:42:41.453
You've been talking about this for a long time.

3650
03:42:41.493 --> 03:42:43.313
So I think you've had a lot of time to internalize it.

3651
03:42:43.493 --> 03:42:52.595
And I actually think some of the frameworks in this episode, I think probably did a better job of explaining or grounding those ideas than, than the book did.

3652
03:42:53.015 --> 03:42:55.316
Well, I guess it's time to quit.

3653
03:42:57.177 --> 03:42:57.997
Quit the episode.

3654
03:42:58.017 --> 03:42:58.617
Let's quit it.

3655
03:42:58.797 --> 03:42:59.598
It is time to quit.

3656
03:42:59.938 --> 03:43:01.018
Intelligent failure here.

3657
03:43:01.058 --> 03:43:02.059
Intelligent failure.

3658
03:43:02.199 --> 03:43:04.640
We will see how this one does, and then we will learn from it.

3659
03:43:04.780 --> 03:43:06.601
That is all for today's episode, everybody.

3660
03:43:06.641 --> 03:43:08.622
Thank you for listening, for sticking with us.

3661
03:43:09.062 --> 03:43:15.845
As always, you can get a free PDF guide with all of our research, references, citations, exercises, everything.

3662
03:43:16.865 --> 03:43:17.486
Totally free.

3663
03:43:17.507 --> 03:43:18.809
You can review it whenever you want.

3664
03:43:18.849 --> 03:43:21.234
Go to solvepodcast.com slash failure.

3665
03:43:21.995 --> 03:43:22.656
Check that out.

3666
03:43:23.097 --> 03:43:26.183
Sign up for the newsletter so you can get notified when the next episodes come out.

3667
03:43:26.283 --> 03:43:26.904
And please...

3668
03:43:28.092 --> 03:43:32.975
Follow us, give us a review on whatever platform you're listening to this on.

3669
03:43:33.095 --> 03:43:34.916
It's the best thing you can do to support the show.

3670
03:43:35.197 --> 03:43:36.277
Here's a challenge for you guys.

3671
03:43:36.938 --> 03:43:42.882
Go find your friend that is the biggest failure in your life and send them this episode.

3672
03:43:44.563 --> 03:43:47.024
And then tell them, I think you need this.

3673
03:43:49.206 --> 03:43:49.986
Let us know how that goes.

3674
03:43:50.006 --> 03:43:52.047
Let us know how that goes in the comments.

3675
03:43:53.288 --> 03:43:54.749
All right.

3676
03:43:55.129 --> 03:43:55.750
Thank you, everybody.