#714 - Shane Parrish - How To Become A Clear Thinker
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What's happening? People, welcome back to the show. What my yesterday is shame parish is the founder, forum street and x canadian intelligence agency Operated and an author. Our lives are mediated by our thoughts. The more accurately that we can make decisions, the Better and happier our existence will be.

Therefore, IT makes sense to spend some time learning about how to think more clearly and frameworks to keep us rational expect to learn, if it's truly possible to think independently, what IT takes to become a clear thinker. The most common pitfalls, holding you back from seeing the world accurately, how to build more strength in your mind, how to Better manage your weaknesses, strategies to become an effective decision maker, to biggest lies that people follow when they make goals for their lives, and much more. But now, ladies and gentleman, please welcome shame parish.

Do you think that it's possible to truly think independently?

I do. But I think you have to rewind a little bit and set the circumstances for what creates independent thought. It's not just the idea that you need to have that different and independent thinking for IT to be valuable has to be divergent thinking.

So IT has to be advantage divergence. You have to go against the crowd and you have to be right. It's not enough to just go against the crowd. So what sets us up to be able to think independently is a really interesting question. And a lot of IT is your ability to withstand pain.

Can I look like an idiot in the moment to become Better in the end? And I, can I financially do that? Can I mentally do that? How can I emotionally do that? There's a hope, I think, there is into that, that people don't think about.

Am I in a position where failure is going to make a huge difference in my life on this particular thing? And if I am, that makes IT harder to think independently. This is why a lot of people who work for bigorre animations tend to just go with the flow and say what they need to say, whether they are doing that consciously or unconsciously.

It's because, hey, if I stand out, if on the top poppy and I lose my job, well, i'm in financial trouble. So it'd be interesting to see an organization we see some of this in tech actually, where people have enough money that they could lose their jobs and IT wouldn't financially sort of determine the rest of their life. And those people are able to speak up more about what they think is right, what they think they should do.

Um and I would imagine that IT is a really good scenario to create that psychological safety to where you feel like you're not going to be punished to think independently. And so if you think of uh, clear thinking, the books that I wrote, I sort of the three overarching teams to IT. One is how you position yourself determines whether you're playing on easy motor, hard mode.

How do you manage the urges? This is too. How do you manage the urges to get other people into travel, including the social? And three, how do you think independently? And I think you need the first two in order to think independently. It's sort of like the natural follow on to the first two.

Talk to me about easy, modern, hard mode. Then people use this on the internet all the time. But I think your conception is a little bit different.

Yeah, I was thinking about this. My son really solidified IT for me. He came home and he, he's a teenager.

And any of you who have teenagers, the story of make sense, but I think IT perfectly and capsule tes, what I mean by easier heart and he hands me this exam and you know, he's got a really bad grade on IT and he just sort of looks at me, shrugged shoulder, says, I did my best and for anybody who's played sports like me, uh, during high school, you know, that's not the moment to talk to them. Most people quit sports on the car right on the way home. They don't quit because their performance on the field stock.

They quit because the conversation with their parents or their friend's parents in the car right on the way home. So I was like, i'm going to let this dissipate, right? He's emotional right now.

Let's let us go. I was quite emotional tools like what happened here. Later on that night, I walk up to him on my, hey, talk to me.

But this, you said, you did your best. What does IT mean to do your best? That was, like, go through IT in detail.

He's like, well, you know, I I SAT down at ten and I read over all the questions, and I checked how many points for each question. I allocated my time appropriately, and I answer them the best I could. I did my best.

I was like, wow, you think of this. Like adults think of this. This is really interesting.

So you think that that point forward, from the point that you SAT down, that's the point where things matter was like, let's rewind ninety six hours here. Did you study? Not really.

I crammed the night before. Did you sleep ball? No, I was apply studying.

Did you a healthy breakfast? No, I didn't. Because I got up late. Did you fight with your brother? yes. Why did you fight with your brother? Well, because I got up late on the second wear in the bathroom at the same time.

And, you know, I didn't sleep, so my temper at the best of me and we started, you know, shouting at each other like, okay, so you chose to play on hard mode. That doesn't mean you don't get a test. But what are the things you could have done to put that on easy mode? Well, you could have studied every night for four nights leading up to the test.

You could have eaten healthy. You could have got a good sleep. These are all things within your control. And those things determine whether you're playing on easy mode, hard mode.

And if we think of that sort of in life, we can think of IT in positioning, right? Do you have low dead? Do you have high that? Are you exposed to variable interest rates? Have you maxed out sort of the amount of money to your paycheck or you're spending at all every week? Are you investing in your relationships with your partner, your kids, your employees, your customers? Are you sleeping well? Are you eating healthy? All these things position you to put you in a position to manage these sort of things.

They come along in life and they come along to anybody. IT doesn't matter if you have the best idea in the world from the stock market perspective, if you have no money in your bank account to take advantage of IT, you might as well not have that. A and you know, if you sleep and you eat healthy and you invest in your relationships well, the inevitable emotional upset downs, the inevitable anger that people go through, the highs and lows, you're in a much Better position, a much stronger position to go through those.

Think, imagine there's a patch grass between you and your partner. And if you water the grass every day, what's going to happen when a Spark lands on IT? It's just going to go out.

But if you don't water that grass every day, it's gonna dry out. Happens all the sudden you have a fire between the two of you, and then you have to take all this time and energy and try to fix that fire, if you can. And all that time and energy comes to the expensive, furthering ing your relationship, doing the things you want to be doing, working on the things you want to be working on. And we don't think about IT like that.

yeah. So in some ways, could you replace the word positioning with preparation? IT seems like a large amount of IT. Is preparation .

sort of preparation, to me, implies that you know what's going to happen. Where is positioning is I am prepared for multiple possible futures because i'm not trying to predict the future. So when I use the word positioning, i'm being a bit more vegan because I want to account for things that I can't anticipate, whether preparation, if I know I want a promotion in six months and I know that job is coming open well, now I can prepare. And that is a form of positioning, but it's not the only form of positioning. yeah.

Do I think when me, when I first started this podcast, two thousand and eight, I got inter to F S. Stop blog, I think, that year, and started reading a lot of the the stuff that you are writing about. And I think there was a period, at least in my life, and I knowing a lot of my other friend's lives, where we believed if we could just wrote, recite the top ninety one mental models from fs stop blog, that we, all of our problems in life would be fixed, that IT was just simply a matter of knowing the definitions, and we didn't integrate them somewhere down the line. And your first two books s were first few books actually serious of books.

What kind of about breaking down these thinking tools? IT seems to me that at least in my life, and perhaps in yours as well, does this pivot or maturity, or kind of like ascendants from just looking at rules and the thermal dynamics of how our mind works into something kind of more integrated and holistic and and it's do with how does this fit into the various institutes of life and what are the urges that get in our way. They don't fit, you know, being angry doesn't fit within the little like you're just angry or europe.

T you hungry? Are you tired? whatever? Uh, have you noticed this in yourself, this sort of development over time from A A more kind of desperate to a much more integrated viewpoint? When IT comes to thinking tools.

I love the word that you just use their integrated because that's how I think of IT and I think of we wrote a series of books, their front street, uh, called the great mental models. And the idea was to take they want to won that you would have learned in most university inductive trial classes, and put IT out there for people easily accessible, easily digestible and in more plane language than you would here in university.

How do you use those ideas and how do you think? right? The first book of that was general thinking tools, which is like, what are the the tools that we can use sort of think through problems in a three dimensional way.

And I think that those are important lenses into a particular situation. If you think of decision making specifically, the source of all problems and decision making is blind spots. And if you can put these lenders onto a situation, you reduce your blind spots.

You're never going to eliminate your blind spots, but you'll reduce them. And that is one part of life, right? So eliminating these point spots, another part of life is dealing with our emotional self and dealing with social situations and dealing with anger.

And these things variably happen to us. And we can change the fact that we're going to happen, but we can change how we respond. And all the mental models in the world, they're gonna give you confidence.

And all the mental models in the world, they might help you see something, but they could also create this paralysis where, you know you you sort of look at the situation, you overanalyze that you don't actually take action. And and so I don't want people to think that that is the ball and and all is one component in a mosaic that leads to the overall image. And that component can shrink or expand depending on the problem at hand and probably a particular moment in your life.

But it's still an important component and never goes to zero. And I sort of think of work life baLance that way too. I don't think of IT in terms of baLance. I think of IT.

What are the integrations that I need in life and what size do they need to take rate now? And if you think of IT in terms of a moee, well, you can have your relationship, you can have your work, you can have your health, you can have all these things and they can never go to zero. But that might mean that you're prioritising different things at different points in time.

Like with my kids, you know, I went up to them. I'm like, k, we're launching a book. It's gonna really busy for a few months and then it's onna go back to Normal uh bit for a few months.

Work is gonna take a bigger shape and bigger form that IT has in the previous few months, and then afterwards it's gonna shrink back down to where IT was before. And I think IT also gives us a language to think about the inevitable upson downs and flows of life. Sometimes things are more important doesn't mean that our partners is not the most important thing or kids aren't the most important thing. But sometimes we just got a buckle down and do what supposed to do at work.

I need A A mental modeler of a meme to remind me that things don't last forever like i've got. This is kind of like short term as and I suppose you know you're in a period of a heavy work like that and IT takes more effort than IT probably should for me to remind myself, this isn't forever. This is just going to happen for a little bit of time and it's period, zed, and then we can get out of that near the site.

And I know that you're unhappy because you're not spending enough time in the gym or your diets been all over the place, so you're sleep been all over the place, so you feeling a little bit more stress or a little bit worried about the future like this isn't going to happen forever. But there is such a mio pia around what is now is what will continue to be. And god, this going to be my life.

So definitely taking that sort of broader, holistic longer term view and looking to integrate things, I think makes a hell of a lot of sense when IT comes to clear thinking, you've broken down a broken down a bunch of enemies of clear thinking. And I think it's a nice conception because in order for us to think clearly, we first need to get past the things that stop us from thinking clearly. It's all well and good having, as he said, all of the tools in the world.

And i'm going to do my decisions in this way and i've got the mental models. But if there's something that stops you from being able to access that state IT game over, you ve mutilate ed by zero. So what are the main enemies of clear thinking?

yes. so. So before I get to the enemies, just to backtrack one little step, here were animals, right? And so we tend to exhibit the same thing that animals get, which is we're instinctive and more responsive.

And the question becomes, what are the scenario that lead us to think less, to react more, to react with reasoning? And do those scenarios get us in trouble? And sort of the four that I came up with the book or were emotional or ego driven social uh and ritual or nursia and I think you know a great example of social for G I I think emotion, ego, sort of.

Um people understand what they mean, but what do I mean by social situations? Well, not only group think but I mean we don't want to to disappoint other people right in part because we are uh animalistic. And one of the the biological tendencies of animals is that we're self preserving.

And so the ability to get along with other people, the ability to say yes, the ability to try and be like, or at least not hated by our tribe is really important to us. It's literally engrained in our biology. So we end up saying yes to things that we don't wanna say yes to you.

And I got this sort of done to me through two people. One, Peter cohen, who has been a great friend and given me a lot of ideas that appear in the book. But I was in Daniel comments and house in york, and he answered the phone.

And at the end of the call, he said to the person, my rule is, I don't say yes on the phone. I'll have to get back to you tomorrow. And he hung up the phone.

I was like, wow, what is that your rule? What are you talking about here? And he's like, well, I found i'm a pleasure.

Er, I really end up saying yes to things that I don't want to do and I was like, I think we're all sort of like that to a degree, some more than others but yeah, we all end up saying, yeah, i'll have a coffee with you in six months, but I ouldn't do IT today to more, right? And then six months rolls are on. You're wondering why your calendar has this in IT.

You're like, oh, god, I don't want to do this. I don't I don't even like this person. Why did I say yes to this? So so we all end up in these social situation and you're not thinking in that moment, right?

You're just saying yes because you're instinctive desire to please somebody. So here's an example of an ordinary moment and the subtitle the book is turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. Here's an example of an ordinary moment.

You end up saying yes to something you don't anna do and IT ends up having this cost on you not all in time, but mental threads you got to keep track of. We scheduling all of these things. And so I was like what he mean by rules.

And he is like what the rule I just used. A rule is like, we've been taught her whole life to follow rules. So I thought, well, i've just create a rule. And if I tell people my rule, they don't argue with IT.

And I was like, Daniel, like this is, I know you've won a nobel or IT noble Price, but do this is probably the most profound thing you've ever really done in a practical way. This is like, and on what other rules do you have? Is like, not enough.

Is like, oh my god, this the most powerful thing in the world. So he created a rule to take away these default and rewire his brain in this moment. So is unconscious response he doesn't have to consciously process.

That is now the one that he want. So he turned his desire behavior into his default behavior with a role and gets around the social situation that generally causes us to do things we don't want to do. I think that's incredibly powerful.

Or one of the problems that you have is and I certainly notice this from my time learning and be listening to people in your podcast and everything over the last few years, all of these concepts are fantastic. But when IT comes down to tactically, how this grows corn for me, like how does this actually show up in my life? For instance, is IT your rule about always pay invoices as soon as possible? Is that your one? yes.

So that rule that you wrote in your news letter three years ago, four years ago, maybe something like that absolute game, not that I wasn't doing IT already. I think I kind of intuited that if you pay people as quickly as possible, your partners, your contractors will always prioritize your work because they know that they're going to get head straight to and you've got to pay them eventually in any case. So why not pay them as soon as the invoice comes in? And that as a rule is so good.

I don't know whether IT it's not got the same kind of like keystone change as something like conmen talked about, but those tactical justifications for things are such huge game changes. So my favorite one that I use is whenever I think about a friend, I always text them and tell them whenever i'm thinking about a friend, if some memory pops up from a business partner from back in the day, or someone that I saw a couple of months ago, someone that I saw yesterday, i'll just text them, hey, man, thinking about you hope everything's good or do just remembering that time that we did X, Y and red like sending my best. That has been the best trigger for keeping on top of friendships and for making other people in my life that I care about feel good because they know that I think of them and you're already thinking about them. So why not tell them like that's just it's a free gift that you can give them so that's another trigger of mine that i've used from not saying yes on the phone, paying voices immediately, texting friends when you think .

about them yeah the last thing the world needs is another book on thinking is just intellectual mastership. IT has to be practical and applicable in real life, and IT has to help people in scenario that are difficult to be able to help them.

So in the book, there's a lot of safeguards and a lot of rules around, uh, here are things that you can implement that the tRicky part is on giving you examples, but you really have to take what are the desired behaviors I have and how do I create default around these desired behaviors, that sort of what the book lays out. But I mean, I can't create that map for you. I can give you practical ones that work on thousands of people and work with thousands of people, but the best ones are gonna be very specific to you with.

The most powerful one to me is work out every day. My rule is I work out every day. The duration ation can change. The scope can change. The fact that I sweat does not change.

I might be in a hotel room and just doing you know a couple hundred pushups and set up and that's my worker for the day. That's all I can fit in because i'm traveling and there's a lot going on. But I used to do this thing where I was like, I know work for three days week and then you know, i'd wake up and i'm like, i'm tired and busy.

I got a lot going on today. All worked at the end of the day, five o'clock comes around six thousand like, man, I don't feel like we're going and then you lied yourself this little voice in your head comes in. It's like a we'll make up.

We'll do extra tomorrow. And so uh, tomorrow never comes IT just doesn't work that way. Tomorrow is where dreams die. I went to the gym and I was like, you have my fob. Give me my stats.

For the past year, I won to know every time I swept in because I was trying to go three days ago. Turns out I was going about one and a half days a year and I was like, exactly right, some lying to myself and then I created this role. Or i'm like, i'm just going to sweat everyday. Uh, and I I think I will miss water two days. Since then, it's been a few years.

I feel health, give me some of the other safeguards s, give me some of if you were to create your like highest leverage tactical implementations, what do you think would make that criteria?

This is where becomes dependent, right? So for me, the most important ones are specific to me. So no meetings.

Before twelve, I don't take meetings any morning. Why do I do that? Because the most valuable time of my day is the morning.

And you know, not going to argue, but morning people at nine people, the most valuable time for me is is the morning. And I never want to be in a position where I have to search for time to work on the most valuable thing. So I just block off every day.

Every day. I have a block of time from whenever I leave the house, whenever I get up, whenever the kids go to school till twelve o'clock. And that time is secret.

IT doesn't mean that IT never gets interpreted, but it's incredibly rare that that time that gets interpreted. Why do I do that? That allows me to work on the most important opportunity at hand.

IT allows me to learn and develop and make myself more valuable in the future. And that allows me to just, you know, I need to break today, I need to go for a walk. I just don't need to do anything, and I don't feel guilty about any of those things.

Uh, I invest in an index fund every month. That's a rule too and it's just a no brainer. It's like that, you know we know how to get rich.

Uh, you save more money than you make and you invested your dollar cost average IT into an index fun and you wait up a long period of time. And a lack of patients changes the outcome for most people because they get bored of that and they think they are smarter than that. So then they start going all in on different investments.

So they start doing all these things. So you devise these rules that help you avoid the things that you want to avoid IT. And i'll give you an example for organizations, because these aren't sort of just for you as an individual.

So organizations have problems. They need to solve these problems. What is one of the most common reasons we don't solve problems.

We go to these meetings with people, and we work with smart people that are all taibi people that all want to demonstrate value. That's how IT works. We go to a meeting.

We're like, what's the problem and how do we solve IT? And somebody throws out a problem definition, and, you know, that sounds reasonable and that sounds accurate. And then what do people do? They jump in.

They started solving this problem. Nobody actually paused. Have been like, hey, is this the actual problem? And now the sudden we're running we're running to solve this this problem that, you know, it's probably close to the problem, but not the real problem.

And that causes a lot of stress and anxiety and lost time, but IT causes IT later. We don't see at the moment because solving the wrong problem that just keeps cropping causes a bunch of communication, causes people to be frustrated. Those are all problems in the future to solve.

For right now, we're just solving this problem. We all feel good, we all feel reinforce. but. What can we do differently that will lead to a Better outcome or more likely to lead to a Better outcome?

We can break the problem definition from the problem solution meetings into IT doesn't mean you take more time. You can have a half our problem definition meeting. You can have a half our problem solution meeting.

But what you really want to do is make sure you are solving the right problem. So that's a safeguard that you can implement at work. We're going to break these meetings into. Ideally, you have a night in between them, but you don't even need to do that. You can have one of the morning, one of the afternoon if you need to solve IT for whatever reason.

On the same day I work in Operations, we to separate them by a day all the time, unless there is an urgent situation where we actually needed to do something in the next few minutes. And that is, those are very esoteric, specific decisions. Another safeguard you can put in place is that committees don't make decisions.

People do. Somebody has to sign their name to the decision that one thing single handedly will change a lot in your organization, because the person, the person who has to sign their name to a decision takes the process a lot more seriously than the person who is part of a group. What happens in groups in practice, right? In the real world, what happens when groups make decisions? Well, if the decision is correct, everybody takes credit for IT.

And if the decision is wrong, everybody tried to talk them out of that. So there's no, there's no advantages, there's no accountability, there's no responsibility. It's just a big mess. Everybody's always right all the time.

Regardless spoke, you need people to sign their name to a decision, because the person who signs their name to the decision also has to be the person that comes up with the problem. Now, all the sadness care, i'm putting my name on this. literally.

I would have people sign their name to decisions. Hi, joe, you know, whatever, or jane, whatever, decide that I want you to say that. I want you to say a lot because I want you to care and I want you to put your pride in your reputation and I want you behind this.

And if you're not behind IT, I want to know you're not behind IT. Why render you behind IT? What's going on here? I want some insight. And I think that this single handle changes. If you look at all the organizations that we think of as disfunctional, they're all decisions by committee. And if you look at all the organizations that we think of as successful or or at least um doing above average, I can almost guarantee you when you drill into IT, people are making decisions. Individuals are making decisions.

One of my friends a has an idea about, everybody needs to own a process. So there is something end to end, and there is somebody that is accountable for making sure that the way that this gets finished is on that one person. And IT IT feels like exactly the same here that you know uh particular piece of content goes out and is a mistake that's being made and oh well, you know like is IT the editor or is IT the strategist or is IT the the producer or is IT the the fact checking guy like you know all the way down, people hiding groups um yeah having that accountability, having that increase and accountability is a big difference? No.

is just going to say think about another example of like where that would make a big difference is if you work for a large of organization, you have to fill these forms to justify expenses for these forms to justify travel, and you find these forms tedia asking for information that IT already has, or you have to fill at the same information multiple times.

Imagine how different that would be if somebody's name was on that form, if somebody had pride in that form, if somebody took ownership over that form, all the sudden everything would be streamline. You would just ask the things that you need to ask. You would get in, adapt as quickly as possible.

And you would not try to interpret the working time of the person filling out the form. You get away with all of that stuff. You get away with all the bullshit because nobody's names on this form. Nobody is accountable for this form at some department somewhere. And most people don't even know which department IT is.

Yeah, okay. So people need to build more strengths in their thinking. What are the component parts of how people should become stronger thinkers?

Well, I think the real thing you need to do is get out there in the world, learn by doing, uh, develop all of the the ideas of what what, what can I do to put myself in a position to play on easy mode. But the most important thing is, is a little chapter in the book on confidence and actually doing things. It's one thing to think you know about something is one thing to chat about IT.

A lot of the world is filled with people who lack the confidence to take action. And so we just sit there analyzing over and over again or or expecting to have the confidence to get to the outcome instead of the confidence of the next step. But it's really important that we ve focused around next step confidence.

What does that mean? I don't need the confidence to get to the end goal. I need the confidence to take the next step. And that action will create momentum and that momentum will create its own conference.

Yeah I mean, trying to create confidence without any degree of evidence is asking for delusion.

Other things we can do to build strength that are sort of knowing ourself, right? We have to understand where we're strong, where we're weak. Most people try to fix their weaknesses. I think you should just amplify your strength if you aren't at all.

You want to be a little bit well around IT, but you really want to be really, really good at a couple things that other people can be really good at and and you have to be accountable to yourself about your mistakes, learning from your mistakes, accountable about your actions, your responses, the things that you do. That's where we start, starts from a foundation of IT doesn't matter where I am today. IT doesn't matter where I am on this grid.

I am in charge of my trajectory. IT might not be my fault where I am IT could be pure luck. IT could be, you know, was born into a bad house or bad situation or bad country.

IT doesn't matter. It's a responsibility to take control of that trajectory at some point, and that point is today. And what are the things that I can do, the little things that I can do to position myself for tomorrow?

What you mean when you talk about self control in a discipline and doing hard things in resilience, that kind of buzz ds that get thrown around and off a lot? What self control mean in the clear thinking framework?

Well, the idea around self controller is you set of up out of these emotions, sick at other people, into trouble. And you can do that. A variety of you is one like, let's consider you're angry.

Well, I can recognize that i'm angry and not respond. And on a good day, I might be able to do that twenty percent of the time. Now if i'm position to plan on easy mode, I got sleep.

I'm eating healthy. I'm exercising well. I can probably recognize that i'm angry like forty percent of the time now.

But what do I do with the rest of the sixty percent of the time? How do I avoid these situations? Well, if I know somebody makes me angry.

Self control is also not about control in the moment. It's like, I don't want to hang out with this, but i'm not going to put myself in that situation to begin with. Why would I tempt myself? The self control is about designing your environment in a lot of ways.

And your environment is not just your physical environment, is your mental environment. The information you consume, the people that you are around, you create these sort of rules, which are a form of our official environment that sort of put you on the right path. And I think those are really things that we can do that are tangible, that make IT a lot easier.

You can also set rules. I don't send emails past nine because I ve noticed in the past all the emails I sent past nine, you know have had a couple of glass of one. Maybe there a little more liberal than I want.

And you know that's a form, but that's a form of like how we can deal with this. Or you know, if you have an iphone, you can sort of set IT. You know, if you find yourself lost in this world of instagram, hopefully not tiktok. That thing is like imported fennell. I think it's did.

Did I?

yes. Well, I do not want to send anything to be I yes, or for an intelligence agency and that is one up that I will not even allow in my house. Um and you can read into that what you want, but this is definitely digital fatal um I you know and you can set time limits on so you know I part of being accountable and being responsible and and take ownership is not necessarily in the moment I I can do that in the moment when i'm strong to prevent me from doing something I want to do in a moment or a week. So on I wake up, you know, I decide in that moment, I don't want to use in screamer. I want to use in scream last, or I want to use my phone less well, I can set a timer on apple for all these apps, and I can change the passport I can give you to somebody else. I can set this environment up in a moment where I feel strong, so that in a moment where i'm weak, IT changes my desire behavior to the default behavior.

What have you come to learn about how people can cope with risk? You know, the fear about making a decision, the concern about, is this going to be right? And oh my god, what happens if if this goes a different way? And i've done the preparation, but sometimes even doing a lot of preparation can make you feel like you have got a greater sense of concern, all of the different ways that this could go wrong. What have you come to learn about coping with risk?

I think the biggest thing that people don't understand is what they're afraid of. A lot of people are afraid of failure, and just as many people are actually afraid of success. And I think afraid .

of I had this, I had this get sad a lot. And I never actually too sure what people mean when they say.

that's what do you mean? sure. Let's look at two examples on my parents. They wanted quit smoking. They tried for years to quit smoking, and they weren't successful because quitting smoking meant changing their friends. So yeah, they wanted to quit, but they didn't wanted change their friends.

And so successful they had to change their fw, consider somebody who wants to go to the gym and get in shape. Another example. Success means i'm not drinking with my friends anymore.

I formal success means i'm going to feel left out. Success means i'm gona have to change my friends. Probably that's an that's an interesting .

conception. So it's not necessarily that people have a problem with the actual success itself, but the downstream from that success, there are externalities that they don't like the idea of having to deal with.

Yeah, they're not even conscious. My parents weren't conscious of the fact that they weren't thinking, oh, you know, to actually quit smoking, we need to change our friends. They're thinking, you know, willa wer will take care of the former.

I can hang around people who smoke and choose not to smoke, but eventually everybody loses the bottle with. So if you want to go somewhere, you're going to have to change your first group if you want a promotion. Well, a lot of people don't necessarily what holds them back from going for that promotion even though they want to.

And what it's subconscious, i'm not saying it's a conscious conversation with your mind is like now i'm gonna be different from my peers. And we all know that we want people to be successful, but we don't want them to be that much more successful than us. Everything is relative to us.

This is how individuals thing. So like, yeah, i'm rooting for a quest, but I only wanted to be, you know, five percent Better than me because the minute or six percent Better than me, fuck you, right, you know and we can be friends anymore. And and these thoughts really hold people back in a lot of ways and and failures.

Another one, right? We we don't want to do something different than the crowd because we don't want to stand out and then you have to dive into, why don't I want na stand out? Is that because i'm emotionally not capable of handling? What people are going to say about me is because i'm financially not capable of losing my job.

What's really holding me back from taking this risk, and you really have to start asking yourself these deeper questions about what is holding me back. And is that a valid reason not to do this thing that I want to do? And I think, you know, I know a lot of people who work for organizations.

I have a friend who who just know implemented this thing at work and they don't do themselves any favor. Ready saved this company about twenty million dollars a year, uh, in expenses through through something he didn't. He took a big risk by doing IT and they didn't like a two thousand dollar about us.

It's like, so what I was talking to him and he's like there's an a simec to the successes, two inside organizations where if i'm wrong, I went, have lost my job. I'm right. I saved the meta na money and my reward was like to grant and that, to me, explains why things rarely change without a crisis.

The new manager comes in, recognizes everything has been dis functional before and all the sudden, yeah, i'm gonna change IT, but they just change IT like maybe five percent. You know, it's enough to say they're doing something different but not enough to actually create a different result. And that's why things stay the same. There's an a imedi yeah what's .

that rory sutherland insight about? No one gets fired for hiring mckinsey where, you know people will happily fail in very boring and Normal ways but much more fear succeeding in adventures in different ways. Because if you just follow the blueprint, well, we follow the blueprint. It's like you do the blueprint failed the last four black friday in a row like, yeah, no but you know, I work this time yeah, yeah, yes. This time the same thing is going to have a different outcome ah .

but what's the most powerful algorithm we've ever seen in the world? IT is literally evolution. And evolution is blindly trying things over and over again and doubling down on what works and then blindly trying things over and over again with failure being part of the process.

Failure is okay. You just have to be mentally resilient to IT, financially resilient to IT, to put yourself in a position where you can take these rest that you won a take. And I think for a lot of people, it's not financial.

I think for a lot of people, they don't anna put their thoughts out in public. They don't want people criticising them. They don't.

And why is that they are they not capable of handling that? You know you and I I mean, we probably both get, uh, hate mail the first few times you get that I really hits you and then eventually you sort of build up this muscle too at a little bit. You like, go okay yeah that one yeah heard that one before.

Uh you know come up with that's really a good point if it's a novel, if it's a novel insult on the internet time oh, wow, like this that was so that was new. But yeah, you are right. One of the interesting things is you in summer regards, you see how how much more of thinking there is across an entire culture.

That being said, maybe there, maybe everyone is picking up on the same thing and you actually are addict, or you can't pronounce the word fragile, or you are like, you know, I mean, like there is one thing everyone is able to see. But now I don't disagree. I like and then .

think about success just going back to the group for a second. If i'm in a group and you know, we're all slightly overweight and lazy and you start going to the gym and losing wait and start taking up a side hostel, what how does that make me feel about myself now? And IT makes me feel really bad about myself because i'm seeing all the things that I could do and all the things that maybe at some level I wanna do, but all the things that i'm not doing and you're reminding me of those things.

are you familiar? Imagine you must have spent an awful lot of time on the insel and black pillow forms that must be wear. All of your best ideas come from. But if if you do ever stumble upon this, there's something called ascending.

And ascending is moving out of the world of the in celebration and into one where interactions with the woman mostly, and maybe sex and maybe relationship become possible for you. And ascending in most of the black pill communities is very, very heavily discouraged. And for instance, you might think that would be a girl gave me her number today, and I posted this in the in cell forum, but it's something so small, like the beast at starbuck is.

Eyes linger on me for slightly longer than I thought. Maybe this suggested that he was interested in me. Even that tiny little glimmer would be seen as the early stages of ascending right, like stage zero attention. That's very, very heavily discouraged. And one of the reasons that I think this is the cases if everybody agrees to wallow in their own self pity and despondency and the lack of ability to change their situation, no other person in the community is given the potential of hope.

And that means that no one has to face the fact that maybe I could do something to change this if everybody is completely locked in to this behaviorally genetic determinism world of you are A A dead end, and nothing is ever going to change about this. You does the degree of comfort to that, right? Because things can't change.

They couldn't change. They'll never gonna. This is the way that they are. But as soon as you see somebody that potentially lays out the option to change this, oh god, maybe maybe that means that I could could change to. And as soon as you posit an ideal, you begin to compare yourself to that ideal. And almost always you find yourself lacking.

Yeah, you create A A contrast.

Correct correct. What about so like trios ing priorities and working out what we actually wants to want in life, allocating that time, prioritizing everyone has more things that they can do. Do I want to start up that pottery side business? Or do I want to get in really good shape and competing cross fit? Or do I want to start a family or move to a new country, or whatever?

How do you think of what of the tools that you ve come to use when prioritizing and entries ging what you can do in life and then implementing that, your time management? What have you relied on that? A couple .

of things. The example are using the book, that is, you've got what society told them to want, who wanted to be the most respected wealth est, you know, well known person in their community. All things that we want, you listen to that you like, yes, I want that.

And IT was even as a screw. And what did screw want at the N. D, wanted to do over? And I think that that's an important lesson for all of us. And and score is a fictional character but I met many billionaires who I think feel the same way and I think that that's one reason philanthropy becomes such a large part of a lot of people's lives, at least publicly, is almost to repent for some of these uh the way that we've require their wealth and so I think about a couple things. One being do a thought experiment.

Close your eyes you can do IT as you're listening rate now not if you're driving though please don't close us of your driving and imagine you're ninety five and you're on your last night, you're in the hospital and you're in a coma but you can hear what everybody around you is saying and everybody y's gathered to sort of wish you would do and what are they saying about you? Are they saying the things that you want them to be saying about you? And that tells us people about your behavior.

They're not going to be talking about your work priorities, your twitter followers or your bank account or anything like that I going to be talking about. Did you show up where you a good person, where you the biggest fan, were you supportive, where you win win? Did you love them? Did you respect them? And are you living your life in a way that makes people want to to say that about you? And do you want to? And i'm not advocating that that is the only approach to life.

Just be conscious about how your living life i've seen too many people wake up at the end of their worklife and try to develop relationships with people they thought were their friends will end to discover they were transactions and why were they transactions? Because the way they got to the top was mutual, exclusive from relationships of meaning. IT was sharp elbows.

IT was stepping over people. IT was, uh, doggy, dog. And if you're consciously doing that, you're pursuing that to get to this end. And that's the end you want to get you great.

Uh but I think there's a Better approach, which is can I get to that and and be win, win? Can I get to that and and build people up? Can I get to that and and be the type of person that I want my kids to see me as? And a lot of people think you can do that and maybe you can just be conscious about how you're playing the game. And then in terms of I think the point of that is to make sure that what you want in the end is worth wanting in the first place.

Well, that's the what you want to want thing.

right? Yeah, it's one thing to get what you want, but it's another thing totally to want what's worth getting and that sort of the end to the book because I think that summarizes a lot of why we're trying to think clearly to begin with. It's like do you are do you want to get to this destination? There's the path your on think about IT evaluated.

Like is that where you really want to go? And then I think on a workshop, you know, society just tells us to say yes to everything going back to that social defauts. We want to be the person who's busy.

We want to be the person who talks about ten projects. We want to be the person who who takes on everything and overcomes the world. And the reality is you can probably handle two, three priorities.

You need to cut everything else. And IT sounds really harsh. But you, you know, in order to go further and go faster, you really just have to do less.

And we live in a world where doing less allows you to do a little bit more quality in what you are doing. And we live in a leverage world where that little bit of difference in more quality creates a huge distribution and outcomes. IT creates massively nonlinear outcomes. If you can be one percent Better at the thing that you're really good at to begin with, it's gonna. Be this proportionately rewarded in the world that we live in for most people.

One of my friends says it's narcissisti C2Believe tha t you can do two thi ngs in bea t a p er son who 's jus.

t doi ng one tot ally. And even if you think about IT, like if you're starting from a higher base, could be luck, could be an eight skill, could could be talent. They're starting from a lower base.

They're still eventually gonna pass you. You can't compete with somebody who's all in on one thing. And this is why being all in on one thing is so successful. And there are certain things you you sort of have to be all in on IT in order to be successful.

But you can't sort of go online and be like, o, i'm going to a half write a book or you know, i'm going to a half asked the side project and i'm gonna go compete with shop of fight. No, like if you wanna do this thing, you have to burn the bridges, you have to go all and you have to sink the ship, you have to leg you land on the beach, and they're only path out of success and you can accept failure. And that doesn't mean that you won't fail, but that means you're really going .

to enjoy the ride yeah what what are some of the other maths that you think society tells people about what they should want in life? You know, for talking about not just being able to get the thing that you want, but to want the thing that you can get until I actually work out what's worth wanting. What do you wish if you could strike through a bunch of things that people typically think that they want? What would they be?

Just eliminate everything the digital fennell tells us to what? right? So like, your car doesn't matter the size, your house doesn't matter, travelling on private airplanes doesn't order. I mean, jeff bezos uses the same pocket iphone that you do. What's different between you and him is his ability to leverage.

And I I think we have all of this stuff within our we have all the things we want write in front of us, and we need to be driven to go after things because individually, that might make us unhappy to go after that new car, to go after that house, to go after these things. But collectively, IT actually moves the world forward. This is how we get innovation.

This is how we get failure, is how we learn this, how we progress. Fob site is everybody wants the outcome, man, you got ta want the process. It's the process that's worth wanning, the process of how do I make money and how do I build this business, you know, how do I do this? That's what I want to be focused on.

How do I yeah Better this? How do I make a Better ad? How do I make a Better email?

How do I create a Better thought? How do I become more useful? How do I treat my customers Better?

How do I serve them Better? How do I get my food one percent Better? How do I make sure my bathroom in my restaurant are always clean?

These are the things that you need to be driven to do. These are the things that make a difference. And there are actually the things that end up making you happy. At the end of the day, you have to make money as a business because that's going to enable you to do all these things.

But if your goal is to buy a new car, buy a new house or do all these things, you're never gonna happy because you're going na get a new house and then your reference points going to change. You're going to start comparing yourself to people with bigger houses. Now you don't want a bigger house, and you might drive you to do these things and you might be successful at them, but you're not going to be happy. You really have to enjoy the ride, enjoy the process.

I wrote in my newsletter today something that might relate to this. So I really do. You know, doping is not about the pursuit of happiness. IT is about the happiness of pursuit, and that Robert suppose y so true, so much of life and enjoyment is about the anticipation of things coming. In fact, the anticipation is often actually more enjoyable than the experience.

Ten ferris used to buck weak long holidays, years and years in advance, so he could get as much enjoyment out of the anticipation as possible. This puts a new perspective on its not the journey is the destination, that actually is no destination. Each arrival to destination simply marked the beginning of another journey toward the next destination.

Morgan housel told me that when he went on holiday recently, after months of planning and organizing ing to get there, he finally arrived. And one of his first thoughts was, wow, we should told to come back in next year. IT would be great if we could come back in next year. So literally, during the opposed enjoyment of the destination, Morgan was already captured by the law of the next journey. How absolutely tragic and hilarious.

Yeah, there's a lot of wisdom in that you know we're just caught up and not the right thing and changing a focal. And we talked about next step, confidence and that sort of the same thing.

If you think about IT just applied differently here, which is the next step is, how do I get Better at the process? How do you become a Better person? How do you become more useful? How do the next step is not sort of the ultimate things that those lead to? I mean, all of that will take care of itself if you love the process.

Yeah one of the I can't remember if it's you I can't remember IT to you a ryan holiday who said something about um if you get bored with the process, you negatively affect our trajectory. I feel like that .

was you yeah yeah I don't know all the things i've said, but that sounds like something I would say yeah.

where are we? Let me find IT. I'm going to be able able to pull IT up pretty quickly. IT was you? congratulations. You are. You actually didn't say IT, but I think the most scalable way to keep on doing anything is to actually enjoy the things you're doing. And one of the most reliable ways to hate the thing you're doing is to pile turns and turns of other things on top of IT, like there's fewer, more enjoyable experiences then only having a small number of things to focus on and getting really good at them. And there are a few are more unenjoyable experiences trying to spin a shit on the plates and not getting a Better at any of them.

I think most people are in the later category. They are not the former. We talked about this before we started recording about consistency. I think a large part of what creates gulfs and outcomes are differences, and outcomes between people is their ability to be consistent.

The professional can do IT on the days they don't feel like IT, or is the amateur only does IT on the days where they feel like IT. And if you have ten or twelve plates spinning at one time, well, I don't feel like doing that. One thing that I know is important, I just gonna go to another plate and IT becomes like an excuse not to, you know, you progression ate by doing more. You actually progressive ate doing the thing that you're supposed to be doing.

That's gonna a difference. Yes, I am thinking about how know I asked you a question or you're run about prioritizing and triaging ing the things that you do in life. But if you have fewer things to do in life, there's less prioritization or trios needed.

Well, I just have the small number of things to do. So maybe one of the best ways to actually fix the prioritization problem is to only do the number of things in life that contribute in the highest form possible. You know, the greg mclean thing of less, but Better, right? Not the trivial many, but the vital few.

And then if you do that, you'll find your mark insistent even on the days you don't feel like IT, because the distractions are earn as easily available from a project perspective.

I've got bored with this one thing. Let me just task switch to the other. I find that I will fix that problem, that difficult problem I need to overcome manua. But for now, I these emails to be answered or there's whatever to be done.

I saw this thing with my my son last study is get exams. This week. He gets to a really hard part in science, uh, studying and he immediately switches to studying french.

And I was like, what are you doing? You have your science test tomorrow and he's like, yeah, but you know french. I need french too.

And i'm like, what's going on here and then sort of rewound and and the thing that he was trying to study in science, he didn't quite understand. So what he was doing is exactly what we do is adults. Just go to switch to this other project is a little easier, uh, and hopefully this problem will solve itself. But the problem doesn't solve itself, but just grows.

Chain parish ladies and gentle man, where should people go? They wanted check out all of the stuff that i've been obsessed from you over the last few years, and also pick up the book.

where do you want them to go? Uh, you can go to F S. Stop blog. Uh, you can google shame perish.

Or you can pick up the book, clear thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary outcomes. Thank you so much. Chris.

I preciate you go check out. The knowledge project is where I first learned about a ton of interesting guests on this podcast, like, really suttons change. I appreciate you. I'm excited to see what you do next one, you've been very formative in my thinking journey from total idiot to adult infant or whatever I am now. Yeah, bong, may you continue coming up with interesting insight.

So happy to your successful. It's amazing when I come across you online, I see how you blown up. I just makes me feel really good.

I appreciate you. Thank you.

cheers.