#149 Neil Pasricha: Simple Rules for Happiness
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One of the models I've been using with my kids a lot these days on cultivating resilience, and I think you might find this interesting, is the philosophy of take more pictures. It's the philosophy of take more pictures.

Have you ever talked to a wedding photographer and you say to them, holy cow, like I was at that wedding too. How'd you get 50 amazing shots of like me and the bride or the bride and the groom or whatever, the groom and the groom, whatever, whatever. And they're like, oh, I took a thousand. Did you hear me clicking like the whole four hours? Click, click, click. I took like a thousand, 2000 pictures. Of course, I'm going to have 50 good ones.

And whenever I've had that sort of apocryphal kind of story happen over and over again, it makes me think of when I was a kid, Shane, and my dad got me a book of baseball statistics.

And as a baseball fan pre-internet, as a kid, we're the same age, this book of statistics is like, you know, you could spend days in this thing. But I started noticing something interesting, which is this. The guy that had the most strikeouts, Nolan Ryan, was also the guy that had the most walks.

You know, like, okay. The guy that had the most wins, Cy Young, was also the guy that had the most losses, Cy Young. You hear this story all the time in the news media, which is Tom Brady has the most completions. Well, he's just playing the longest. He just took more pitchers. He also has the most incompletions. You know, this guy's got the most Super Bowls. He's also got the most Super Bowl losses.

And so the philosophy I think that we've all experienced with the pandemic is we just took another pretty big picture. We just had another major life experience. All of us did. Those that are alive right now listening to this have had a major life experience. Add that to the camera roll of your life. And if you want to increase your resilience further, take more pictures. What in your life do you take more pictures in?

Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. This podcast is about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so that you can apply their insights to your life. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member-only episodes, access before anyone else, hand-edited transcripts, and other member-only content, you can join at fs.blog.com. Check out the show notes for a link.

Today I'm speaking with Neil Pasricha. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and has written numerous bestsellers on happiness, including The Book of Awesome, The Happiness Equation, Two Minute Mornings, and more. He's one of the most popular TED speakers ever, and after listening to a few minutes of this, you'll see why.

This is the second time I've had Neil on the podcast. The first was episode 72, and it's one of the most popular and downloaded we've ever done. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss gratitude, why we all feel so burnt out, where confidence comes from, the rituals, routines, and habits you can use to counter overwhelm and anxiety, the recipe for building resilience, and so much more. It's time to listen and learn. ♪

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that you see not only on yourself but on society from a happiness point of view over the

over the last two and a half years? Almost every indicator is ratcheted up. We're talking anxiety, I'm talking depression, I'm talking loneliness, I'm talking suicide. Start with anxiety. You know, we're now hearing that one in three college students have clinical anxiety. A lot of work is coming out from Jean Twenge at San Diego State University. Jonathan Haidt, who I know has been on the Knowledge Project, talking about the massive increases in anxiety, especially amongst teens, especially amongst teen girls.

So anxiety is ratcheting up. We've been more clinging to our phones over the pandemic. We've been sequestered and, you know, we're communicating that way. Depression rates also spiking. National Institute of Mental Health says that 43% of us are now saying that we have a form of depression. That's like almost half of us, Shane. Like that's,

Hi. Loneliness Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in the United States has written an HBR cover story talking about how our loneliness rates have doubled. That's not just over the pandemic, that's over decades. But very high rates of loneliness. He says that that's the next big epidemic coming. And when the Surgeon General announces a future epidemic, they're usually on point, right? It's like obesity and AIDS and loneliness.

And lastly, suicide. The CDC is now saying that suicide rates are around 14 per 100,000. Just to compare, murder rates are around 6 per 100,000. So we are two to three times more dangerous to ourselves than anybody else is to us. The CDC says they have not seen suicide rates this high since World War II. So how are we doing on happiness? You know, at a high level, using some of those indicators, the answer would be

Not great. I want to talk about all of these for a second. They were all trending that way before the pandemic and that amplified it. Why do you think it amplified it?

Daniel Gilbert wrote one of the foundational books in positive psychology, Stumbling on Happiness, which I'm sure is on this giant bookshelf behind us somewhere. And in it, he has a wonderful quote, which is this, if I can know everything there is to know about you, your gender, your nationality, your religion, your health, almost all of it falls away.

in the face of the strength of your relationships with your friends and family. And I think if we wanted to put a little pinpoint on what the pandemic has really done for a lot of us, it's just that

we aren't as connected and we haven't been able to be as connected with our friends and family. And that has taken a huge emotional and psychological toll on us. Did you find your friendship strengthened with some people? I know for like me, for instance, I wasn't as connected to as many people, but the people I did connect with, I started spending a lot more time with them. Our relationships deepened and developed.

Your bubble. Yeah, your bubble. I guess that was what everybody called it, right? Yeah, if you were lucky enough to have a bubble and if you were lucky enough to be bubbling with, you know, you've got kids, you've got a staff that you work with at Farnham Street, you have places that you are connecting with people. Not everybody has that. And so we

We turn to our devices, we turn to our screens and we get there. Well, we get there masquerades as deep, deeper social connection than it actually is. So what we are calling friends and what we were calling likes and what we were calling comments, you know, our brains are looking for a deeper connection than I think we can find online. And there's a lot of research to support that.

The classic being how do you feel after spending an hour on social media? Do we screw up like an entire generation of kids?

I think some researchers would say yes. You know, Jonathan Haidt had written that cover story in the Atlantic recently on how social media has fractured the mortar of society. And he puts in it some basic ideas that you think would become law by now, which is why is the minimum age of social media 12? You know, why is it not 16? Right? Why aren't the social media essentially tools, right? They're as baked into our society as water and power. Why don't they force breaks?

or interrupt your endless doom scrolling. So I think there's a real argument to be made, and I'm citing some of the stuff from the coddling of the American mind, that would say, yeah, we got to really, really take a hard look at what we're doing to ourselves and certainly our children when it comes to social media and cell phone access. I think that's a huge problem in the world today.

What are the counterbalances to anxiety? And then I sort of want to dive into also resilience. Have we become more or less resilient as coming through the pandemic and going through this experience? - Yeah, there's a lot there. Anxiety, resilience. And you and I were talking before we started recording about how both of us can feel anxious at times.

I believe it's 18% of people will say that they have a form of anxiety. I mentioned in college students it's even higher, one in three. I know for me, before I go to bed, Shane, honestly, what I do is I grab a cue card on my downstairs table before I go up to bed, and I grab a marker, and I force myself to just simply make a prioritized list of three things I'm gonna do the next day. So in my pocket right now as I sit here, I have the thing I wrote for today, right? Like the go to the gym, right? That's my basement.

have lunch with my publicist and have this podcast with you. There's three. And that's all I can do. I force it to down to three. I leave it on the downstairs table. And then when I go to bed at night and when I come downstairs the next morning, I put it in my pocket. And that somehow manages to relieve some anxiety the night before. In the morning, when I wake up,

I don't think we talked about this last time. I do a two-minute morning practice. So I grab a pen, piece of paper, or that yellow journal right behind you, and I simply write down three statements that pull anxiety out of me, right? They are, I will let go of...

I am grateful for and I will focus on. Those three statements act as a two minute investment in lowering my anxiety and helping me enter the day from a less jolted place than if I was waking up and looking at my phone. So I can go through the research on each of those statements, you know, if you want to, but really it's a two minute investment in a thousand waking minute day towards level setting your mental health before you begin the day.

Let's dive in on the focus aspect of that. It seems like people now more than ever, it seems, and I don't know the research, but like we're spending more time focused or like trying to focus, prioritizing, organizing, and less time actually doing the thing that we want to do through focus. Absolutely. You've probably heard and read the studies about how our attention spans are shrinking to that of goldfish levels, you know, and

And there's some studies that have come out and said, you know, we're spending 31% of our time today bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks as opposed to actually doing things. But people sometimes say to me, she's like, what does that even mean? Like book, I was like, have you ever, you know,

turned on Netflix at 9:30 at night and you call your partner downstairs, you're like, "Hey, let's see if we can watch an episode of something before we go to bed." Right? And your partner's like, "Yeah, yeah, sure." Well then, what are you doing at 10? If you're like Leslie and I, you're on Rotten Tomatoes looking at scores, you're on YouTube looking at trailers, and you have

not picked anything and you realize it's too late to start and we're doing that kind of stuff all the time. So we're falling into the traps and look all the apps and algorithms are designed to hook our attention so they're constantly pulling us through text alerts and notification away from the thing that we want to focus on into the thing that they want us to focus on and that's a huge problem because how many times you look at your phone and you're like why did I pick this up again? Or you're in your email and you get out of your email 20 minutes later and you're like

Wait, I came into my inbox to write, to compose a new message. Right. And all I've done is... Now I'm lost. Now I'm lost.

So, I think that we are seeing a dramatic shrinking in focus and part of the reason I outline at the top of my day one thing I'm going to focus on is because it helps force me to carve away all the would do, should do, could do things and come up with one thing I will do. And I will honestly tell you that some people will look at me and say, okay, Neil, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yours is probably like write a chapter or give a speech or whatever. Well, honestly, Shane, off

Often when I'm writing down on my focus on thing is the thorn in my side. I'm writing down the thing that is the most subtly aggravating to me if I don't do it. I'm talking like book the dentist appointment.

How often do you drive around with a little dash light on your car that's telling you to get an oil change and you let it go and but that's sitting subconsciously in your head. So often I use that focus to get something off my brain that I know will be sitting subconsciously in there otherwise. And it could be something small. It could be a loved one that you haven't called in a while. It could be special time with a child that you feel a little bit more distance from maybe because you've been busy working for the past week. So you want you say,

"Hey, I need to do a puzzle or play guitar or something with my oldest son 'cause we're having little spats and it's because we aren't connected." So I use the focus as a way to prioritize, not necessarily my work, but something that I think otherwise wouldn't get any focus 'cause it would fall away as it has been.

until I write it down. - And then do you do that thing first or do you just make sure you do that thing during the day? - I make sure, so the exercise of two minute mornings I do first and then

I think of that focus as a one item checklist that I love crossing off before the next morning, but I don't beat myself up. And if I happen to not do it, that will probably become my focus for the next day. Right? So how do you, how do you organize your day to get stuff done? Well, let's zoom up a level first. Let's talk year. Let's talk week. And then let's talk day. Because for me and Leslie,

I am a really big believer in family contracts. And when I say family contracts, people like back off, they get worried, they think I'm talking prenuptials and stuff like this. No, I'm just saying here we are sitting here today, most people listening to this will have a contract, a written contract in place with their employer of sorts.

Here's the terms of your working relationship. But when we sign that contract with our employer, we don't go home and say, okay, honey, okay, partner, love of my life, mom I'm living with, roommate I take care of, whatever it is, let's come up with the terms for our life. And so Leslie and I, whenever throughout my life,

career Shane, I have changed jobs and now I'm self-employed, but I'm talking really the 10 years I was working at Walmart. We come home and we sit down and we say, what works for us? So how do I design my day? Zoom up a level. We say, okay, Neil, you can go away four nights per month, four nights away from the house, four nights maximum for 10 months of the year. July, August for me is blacked out. That's 40 nights away from my house, about 10% of the year maximum. Then we have to have four family days.

per month. A family day for us, Shane, is a day where it's my wife, Leslie, me, our kids, and nothing else. No interruptions, no screens, no phones, no birthday parties, no visiting in-laws. It's just our family. We call that a family day and we have to have four per month. The reason it's not at a weekly level yet is because if I'm traveling one week, we can get two the next week or whatever. Okay? Then we have four NNOs and LNOs a month.

Okay, I'm Neil, so N-O is Neil's night out. And an L-O is Leslie's night out. It's important to add stories and culture to the relationship that we, you know, for us that come from outside. So we take a night off each about once a week. What's a night off?

You can do whatever you want. It's whatever you want. She might go get a massage. I might go see a movie by myself. I might go hang out with a buddy and whatever, go to the bar, whatever it is. But we have that built in. And then the last one is special time. I have to have a date night, four date nights a month, which may sound high and it's certainly hard to get. But if I don't, in my case, everyone's contract will look different. If I don't get four date nights a month with my wife,

We got no hope in running the rest of our lives, right? We have to be connected for us to be, we call it CEO of the family, that's Leslie, and CEO of the business, that's me. To do those two roles effectively, we need to be tethered. So this contract is at kind of a yearly level, but it governs our time by month, okay? Then, zooming into the week, one thing we touched upon in our last conversation was that I have a philosophy that everybody needs one untouchable day per week.

You mentioned that when you were working in corporate style work, you would block the mornings of your calendar. Yeah. Right? So I have a philosophy that one day per week you need to be untouchable. That is a way on a weekly basis. The untouchable day can move around, but it cannot be deleted.

So I have to block that 16 weeks in advance after my speaking calendar is blocked, but before my weekly calendar is filled in. And people say to me, "Oh yeah, I can't do that. You don't know my job." Well, try doing that for lunch. Try at least doing 12 to 1:00 PM. Leave the phone on your desk. Get outside, but plan some untouchable time in your week that you cannot be reached. That's super important.

Then on a daily basis, and I do believe at a high level, we overestimate how much we can get done in a day and we underestimate how much we can get done in a week. So I write those three things down and I do them the next day in any order that I want to. But primarily I try to do the hardest thing first. It's the classic squat first at the gym philosophy. If you hate squats, squat first. Well, if the three things I've written down on the day include

writing, then I'll probably write first because my ability to start writing at 3:00 PM stinks. So I have to just do the hardest thing first. So it's just tackling those three things. I govern myself with a monthly dashboard, which we could talk about if you wanted to separately. But for me, that's how I think about time on kind of an annual, weekly and daily basis. Okay. Tell me about this dashboard. So you're driving a car, right?

The speed is 60. Are you ever going 60? I mean, maybe you're from cruise control, but if you're like me, you're a bit below or you're a bit above. The speedometer is giving you an indicator of how to adjust your behavior to better fit into the guidance, right?

I think of my life having a dashboard too. Okay. So I draw a picture on a piece of paper at the end of every month I do this. I have a recurring calendar invite on the last day of every month. So, uh,

It just says dashboard and I draw it and it's a two by two and in the center I draw a circle and I write my ikigai. We talked about ikigai last time. I-K-I-G-A-I is the Okinawan term to describe the raising get out of bed in the morning and for those that may not be familiar, Okinawa was one of the eight blue zones discovered by Dan Buettner and a team of National Geographic researchers where the percentage of people who live over 100 is way higher than most other places in the world. They discovered that in Okinawa they don't have a word for retirement

Instead they have a word called icky guy. So you write that in the center It's kind of like your purpose and it can shift it could be hitting a deadline for me It's helping people live happy lives for my wife who might be teaching empathy to kids She's an elementary school teacher and she's raising our beautiful young kids, but you write that in the center That's your guiding force now on the top. I've got two boxes top left is strong core and

This is the stuff that pays your bills, Shane. This is the stuff you gotta do, Shane. This is for me, you know, writing one article, maybe publishing it at Harvard Business View or Fast Company or whatever, but submitting an article, like a complete piece of work. That's one thing I want to do every month. Second is writing one chapter, right?

The reason I've written 10 books and journals in the last 10 years is because every month I'm trying to write one chapter. So on a monthly basis, it doesn't seem like much, but it adds up over time to like whole full books, right? Helps that I'm writing about warm underwear coming out of the dryer and simple stuff like that, right? And then the third one, strong core, is for me giving four speeches per month.

So I end up doing about that many speeches per month. That's my strong core, that's the top left. And beside each of those at the end of the month, I just color them in green, yellow, or red. I don't judge myself with the red, but that's the goal, that's the dashboard. Top right for me is fastest learning. Like you, I like reading books. I have a goal of reading eight books per month, adds up to two per week. Doing two podcasts per month, I think we're on about the same schedule. Your show and my show, which you've been kind enough to come on.

And then I have one weird activity. I challenge myself from a learning perspective to do something outside of my comfort zone each month. It might be a concert in a faraway land. It might be going to something that somebody invites me that I have tickets for that I have never heard of. It might be going to a sushi restaurant if I've never had sushi before. It's just something different for me.

I have had sushi before. Bottom left, so those top two things are what I do. Bottom two is how I do it. So bottom left is best family and bottom right is best self. Bottom right best self is often read, but it's like 12 workouts, 12 cardio's, right? Like that kind of stuff, 12 meditations. Like that's my taking care of myself. And then bottom left is best family. This is some of the dash, some of the family contract stuff.

More than four family dates per month or equal to four less than or equal to four nights away Right and the time together I measure that or four end of those four LNOs I put on and I color these circles on my dashboard each month yellow green and red have I ever had a month that they're all green no, but if the top left is all green

and the bottom right is all red, well then guess what I'm telling myself? Next month I need to lean a little bit more into best self. Otherwise the strong core is going to fall off in six months. And if the family and the self is really going well, as it often is in the summer when we're really investing in the time with the kids and they're off from school, et cetera, et cetera. Well, look what's happened up top.

We got cash flow problems. So it's just a guidance system. - We need all of these things in life. And we so often forget that we focus myopically on one part of life, right? There's people who are workaholics and what ends up happening or you get stressed at work, your boss throws a project on your table. And on a daily basis, I mean, it doesn't accumulate into much, right? If you work late and skip a meal with your family,

then you're not losing anything but as those days turn into weeks and weeks into months and months into years well now you become disconnected and there's part of us i think that needs to be

Balance is the wrong word harmonized or mosaic, right? I think of it as mosaic where different things take on different shapes at different points in life and that could be on a daily or weekly monthly basis, but we all need to be We need to take care of ourselves because if we don't take care of ourselves, we can't work We can't take care of the people we love we can't do all the things we want to do. We can't live a long

and physically able life. - Absolutely. - But we also need things that we never talk about. Like we need to be, our relationships need to be strong, which takes work. You and Leslie work at your relationship. - Yeah. - Not a lot of people do that. - Yeah, well.

It's only come from the fact that we noticed that when we don't have date nights for a month or two Then you start having a little bit more arguments or you start having you lose sight of the deep tethering that you have in a place of love and you start becoming Transactional and then friction starts to occur so we think of those dates as an investment in the relationship and as you say they take certainly work and

But so many people just take their relationships, friendships, close relationships for granted. And they expect that if they reach out, the person's going to be there, but they don't do the investments.

the little date nights, the little things that sort of like water the grass. If you put it that way, like there's a patch of grass between you and I. And if we don't water it, it's going to dry out. And if it dries out, any little spark will catch it on fire. But if we water it, you know, we can go through wind and fire and it's not going to catch the grass on fire because we're good. But it requires this investment. And then the other thing, like I think there's more to life too, right? And that is,

And this is my sort of hypothesis and maybe relates to how work from home is affecting how people think. But we need to feel a part of something larger than ourselves. Absolutely. And that can be through work, but it's also in our community. Absolutely. And we're missing an aspect of this and sort of work from home if we don't get away from the screens. I think so.

- Completely. I have a model that I call the four S's that I think everybody needs to get out of a job. - Oh, tell me about this. - The four S's are you need, let's start with story. That's the first S. Do you feel part of something bigger than yourself? Do you mentally ascribe to the company's mission or purpose or high level reason for being? Is that something you can get behind? Is that something you feel attached to? And so let's start with that. You gotta have the high level purpose. Then social.

You're talking about work from home. And I think we're kind of netting out you and I on the same place on here. It's like, there's a reason that in a lot of engagement surveys inside big corporations, they ask, do you have a best friend at work? Yes or no? Because they have found that that is correlated with your engagement at the company. And you don't necessarily have a best friend at work when there isn't a Tuesday night social or the boss doing an AMA or the CEO having breakfast on Friday for anyone that wants to come. These things create a culture and the

they are invisible and they cannot be measured on a balance sheet. But when you don't have a place where people are together, you don't have a place where that can occur. So that social connection, we talked about the Daniel Gilbert quote from "Stumbling on Happiness", that's imperative. You have to have a connection to your friends. Your friends and colleagues have to feel like they're part of your personal community. So we've got two, story, social. Structure, every single week has 168 hours in it. You got 168 hours, I got 168 hours,

Warren Buffett has 168 hours, Oprah has 168 hours. You divide it by three, you got three buckets of 56. You're supposed to sleep eight hours a night. Eight times seven is 56. Meaning if you do that, if you actually do that job of sleeping eight hours a night, that's a whole bucket.

If you work eight hours a day, that's a whole bucket. Those two buckets pay for, justify, and create your third and final bucket, which you own. And if you have small kids like we do, maybe that's what that bucket's doing. But if you don't have small kids at home or you're doing something else, maybe that's your gym time. Maybe that's your video game time. Maybe that's your fancy football time, whatever it is. I think that structure is important for people. I don't think it's true that kids need schedules. I think it's true that everybody needs schedules. Yeah.

And then the last one is stimulation. This plays directly into the work you're doing at Farm Street. We are learning animals. There's a reason this podcast is called The Knowledge Project. It's popular because people get knowledge, presumably, when they listen to it.

So asking yourself, am I learning something new every day? Okay. So add those four things up, story, social structure, stimulation, those add up and into a satisfying career. And sometimes you're talking about being untethered from community or being untethered from, from, you know, the connection, inspect those four S's and see if you're getting them. And if not,

Can you figure out ways to kind of work those into your career or your day-to-day career? So I always thought the career thing, I always felt like you need to feel part of something larger than yourselves. And I was super fortunate in my prior career to do that. And now I feel part of something even more incredible in a lot of ways. But this morning, I went to the Boys and Girls Club social breakfast. And as I was driving... What took you there?

So one of my close friends is the chairman of the board. So Steve Bacta invited me as the chairman. I was like, sure, yeah, I want to go. This would be awesome. And for those that don't know, what is the Boys and Girls Club? It's a club in the community that helps kids that are sort of more at risk. Okay. Gives them resources, makes them feel part of something, helps them get more equal opportunity, right? Because not as much as we want equal opportunity, not everybody has equal opportunity.

All free and amazing and the people do incredible work. But as I was driving home I was like, you know what? I haven't done much of is that a part of my community and my community not as in my street but like my Ottawa community and then I was thinking like what what would more involvement look like and why has this been missing and What about that?

is missing. And I don't know if it needs to be a big part of my life or a little part, but I feel like the absence of it, like I felt the absence of it this morning when I was driving. Yeah. And they probably felt your presence and maybe you were invited partly to gauge or

feel your interest in getting more involved. And I do think energy operates at many different levels. It operates at universal levels, it operates at global levels, and it certainly operates at local levels. So energy you put into your community, you feel back the property tax that the small business pays from the hammer that you bought from the local hardware store is going to eventually pay for the flowers in your local park.

So we are a function of the microcosms we live inside and investing in your community. Well, so this is also interesting because during the pandemic, I went to sort of great lengths to support local businesses because I feel like I'm part of an ecosystem. And I want these businesses to thrive even during a pandemic, especially if they're sort of trying to pivot or operate differently.

And I believe we are part of an ecosystem, right? And if any part of that ecosystem suffers, we all suffer. And our business, we're fortunate that, you know, we're not client facing. We don't have to close our doors. We can still operate. We can still do things. We can still reach people. In a lot of ways, we had more of an impact during a pandemic when people had more time to listen to podcasts or read our work.

And we need the obligation, you know, we have a responsibility almost to be a good steward in this ecosystem. Absolutely. And that may be something I unconsciously recognized this morning is that giving back to the community not only helps other people have a more equal opportunity, which I firmly believe in. I don't believe in equal outcomes. I do believe in equal opportunity.

And I think we need to sort of get back to that. And anything that I can do to contribute to that makes me feel good as a person. And as part of the podcast, people realize it's two Canadians talking here. Probably. Okay. Well, something you said that I want to go back to, you said schedule. People need a schedule. Why? Why did you say that? Oh, why did people need a schedule? Yeah. Well, I think you had tweeted...

A year or two ago. It's a quote I'd heard other places, but you put your classic Shane spin on it. So I'm going to paraphrase it. So I'm like, show me your schedule and I'll show you your priorities. 100%. Right? And I think I had tongue in cheek replied to you on Twitter and said,

you know, I will have accomplished my true priorities in life when I don't have a schedule. And what I'm actually finding out as I raise children with my wife and I try to live an intentional life is, well, actually, you know what, Shane? I disagree with my previous self and I actually think I need habits and routine baked into my life because it actually makes me live a better life. So when I, look,

I told you in the bottom right corner of my monthly dashboard says 12 workouts, right? That would be three per week. Well, so what I do is I use an app called Trainiac. It's a live...

trainer, like a real human trainer, but it's in con groups with me. So they send me a video and then I have to do the thing. And you get to tell them how many you want. So I say, set it up for four per week. That way I'm yield managing up front, right? That way if I miss a quarter of my workouts, I still hit my goal of three. Well, what happens every morning when I do pick up my phone after I've done my two minute mornings, after I've done my...

you know, routinized breakfast. I've had the same thing for breakfast for 15 years, right? The same exact ingredients in my shake. I check the phone and it's a guy on a video saying, get down to the basement, Neil. It's time, it's arms day, man. Like, you know, pump that bicep. So I've got that routine. And if I didn't have that thing set up, I wouldn't do the workout. So that routine enables me to do the workout. And that's good because then I got energy for the whole day. You know the benefit of a workout?

You had Naval on here talking about how working out every single day was the single greatest thing he does to enable everything else. So what I'm saying is, there you go. I've inserted into my life like a system. You know, we don't rise to the level of our goals. We follow the level of our systems. I've inserted a system that is now baked in to my schedule in order to create a more effective me.

And I have a better day. And the headache that I woke up with because the baby was awake kind of gets knocked out in the morning. So that's coming after the routinized breakfast. That's going to be after the routinized two minute mornings. And now there you go. By scheduling those three things at breakfast in the morning, I have a better day. So I said that because I think if you don't have that kind of stuff, you're kind of wandering. What am I going to make for breakfast?

Yeah. What's in the fridge? You have to make all these decisions. Decision fatigue is a killer. And not only that, it takes willpower to make good decisions. It doesn't take a lot of willpower to follow a schedule, right? Because you've been taught our whole life, like, look at your calendar, follow the rules. Decision-making energy is a finite resource. And there's that great book called Willpower by John Tierney. And it's a finite resource. When it's gone, it's gone. And there's only two ways to replenish it, which is...

sleep and glucose, which is why at the front of the supermarket after making decision between 30 kinds of salsa and 12 kinds of eggs, you got a waffle of sugar. That's why it's there because your decision-making energy is low. When Leslie and I got married, we go to the department store and we get the tells on gun. We get to choose which kind of glasses do you want, honey? Which kind of plates? And at the end of the day, you're exhausted. You're choosing $300 ice buckets that you'll never use because your decision-making energy is zapped.

When I wrote the Happenings Equation, I did a study and I found out by my own research that we were making around 300 decisions a day. So by root, anything that you routinize, am I using that word right? I don't know. Anything that you put into a system enables you to have more cognitive load available for the rest of the day.

I think it even goes deeper than that because I think if you consciously, most of us fall into this, maybe we're unconscious about it, but if you consciously design your schedule and you create, I call them automatic rules for success, and you follow those rules because as Daniel Kahneman has said, it's easy to follow rules.

Even yourself you follow rules other people if you say it's my rule. They'll just leave you alone So what he said he's like his rule that he used as an example with me was I never say yes on the phone to an engagement He was prone to saying yes people call him all the time. They ask him to speak. He was saying yes. He Miserable yeah, and so the father of cognitive biases right couldn't say no on the phone to people he's got the same biology

Because he's like the same. So he's like, I just decided, I made a rule that I never say yes on the phone. And I was like, so what happened? He's like, well, after this, he's like, I would say I never say yes on the phone. I'll get back to you tomorrow. And he's like, I would only say yes maybe like one out of 40 times.

So I went from saying yes almost every time to saying yes to only the stuff I wanted to do. You sleep on it, you wait three hours, and it's a no or hell yeah. So I've given this a lot of thought. And I'm like, how do we design our lives in a way where it's not perfect? Like the young man knows the rules. The old man knows the exceptions, right? Like you should stop at a stop sign. If there's an ambulance behind you, you might go through it. But what are the rules that we should use? And they're all individually different.

but they're like prescriptions almost for success right like your rule may be that you start your your um breakfast in a certain way yeah for me i can't go to the gym four days a week i have to go every day i would find it harder to go four days a week

Do you go every day? So my rule is I go every day. I close my move ring. Oh my God. I close my move ring like every, I'm all 68 day move streak. Like it's crazy. But I go every day. Yeah, because otherwise you have to then get your momentum back up to start again if you have to take a break, right? Right. And on the days when I don't want to go, that's when it matters the most, going. But I would, like if I was doing four days a week, I'd be like, it'd be so easy for me personally to be, oh, I'll do it tomorrow.

You know, I don't feel like doing it today. So I'll just do it tomorrow and I'll make up for it. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I love that what you say about rules. I find that you can sometimes see this in people's out of office, you know, um,

Like I got an out of office yesterday from someone you've had on the show. I won't say their name so that I don't reveal they're out of office. And it just said, you know, classic out of office. Like, hi, I'm away from the office right now. I'll be back whatever it was, October 1st. I will delete my inbox at that time. So please email me again if it's important. I was like, yeah.

Well, that's a pretty clear rule. There is no receipt of any email received for a month or whatever it is baked into the out of office. I think that's a clever one. I think Tim Ferriss has gone to the record of saying the phrase blurb holiday has been effective when people were sort of incessantly asking him for blurbs for the books. The phrase, "I'm on a blurb holiday."

was a little bit nicer and clearer than saying, no, thank you. I don't want to say nice things about you particularly. You just say I'm on a blurb holiday. People respect that. It's a rule. Right. You know, I like that. I like that phrase rules. You know, I had that for years as, you know,

a much more novice investor than you are, I had decided long ago to put any extra money I had into an ETF that owned the total world equities, right? Pretty obvious, basic investment decision. But what I would do, Shane, is on the front of every month when I said to myself, okay, now's the time I'm gonna lop off the top of my checking account, dumping in the saves and throw it in the Vanguard total world equity index or whatever it is,

"Well, shoot, that price went up a couple of boxes. I think I'll just wait till next month." So I'm inspecting the price and trying to time the decision. When I changed it to a rule-based approach, i.e., if the number of dollars in checking account is over X, move to Y, the savings account. If the number of dollars in saving account is over Z,

move it to the investment. Those simple two rules avoided me from having to think about the investment timing, which of course was part of the principle of investing in an exchange traded fund to begin with. So what I'm trying to say is, yeah, now that I think about what you're saying, that rule enabled me to start not thinking about it or trying to time the market. - Well, we're our own worst enemy most of the time, right? But when you have willpower, when you're conscious,

at your best, you can set up rules that you know your best self wants you to follow. Another example is like, I don't eat dessert. I do, obviously, but like a lot of people that I know have like adopted this. Whereas if it's a choice,

then the choice becomes a negotiation at the table. You're with a group of people, it's like, "I don't want dessert tonight." And they're like, "Come on, just have a bite of cake. It'll be fun." And then you end up succumbing to this. But if you say, "My rule is I don't eat dessert," nobody's going to argue with you. And you don't even argue with yourself. Yeah, I think that works for some people. Would that work for you?

So on that one particularly, that would not work for me. What I've done instead is I've given myself a label. So this is taking your rules analogy and I'm taking it into a slightly different direction. So I say to Leslie and my kids and they all know this and people I'm with, I say, I'm a carb snob. That's what I say. I have labeled myself a carb snob.

Okay? You bring out bread at the restaurant, it's cold, there's no butter, I ain't eating that. You bring it warm, there's butter, it's delicious, well, I'm a carb snob and that's a pretty good carb, right? So on this diet part particularly, by giving myself a label of carb snob, I'm really only eating carbs when they're really, really, really yummy. But that's almost like a rule. But then you have a line, right? Because your rule is I'm not going to eat it unless it crosses this threshold. That threshold has got to be...

type and hot. Yeah, exactly. It's got to be delicious carb for me to want, for me to eat it. Do you have any other sort of rules now that you're thinking about it that sort of like put you... Well, you know...

on decisions, if we're making 200 or 300 decisions a day, we're right away, and those numbers are spiking because what is news media and social media and text alerts and notifications doing to us? We're forcing ourselves. Look at the front of everyone's phone. It's 16 little squares and all of them are yelling at you in the form of a red circle, right? Interrupted by the news feed on the left. If you swipe left, that's the baseline, how you get it, and the texts that come in. So,

Here's a rule. I have disabled, I've deleted all social media off my phone right away. Gone. No apps on my phone. Yes, I can still log in on a laptop, but it's really annoying, right? And I've deleted the email app off my phone. So if I want email on my phone, I have to log in through the clunky browser and to get through the big Gmail stop sign that says, are you sure you don't want to download the app? Yeah, I'm sure. You have to say, I'm not interested every single time. Right? And once in a while, they want to like check who you are again. So it's annoying. You got to click which things are actually like cranes.

or whatever, right? The only thing AI hasn't figured out is how to identify a crane for some reason, hilariously. And then on my phone, I've disabled all text alerts and notifications. So what I do is I have to click the green text button to then see if there's text waiting.

I do not get any text flashing on my screen anytime. I've also disabled the news media and news headline service that's built into the iPhone as well. So on my phone, I've taken a lot of steps to make the device, in my mind, a pull device. It is designed to be a push device.

And I've designed it to myself as a pull device, meaning that it serves me. I'm the master of that phone chain. And I have to do all these things. You have to spend like half an hour of work to get the thing to kind of do your bidding the way you want it to. That's so interesting because what you've done is you've taken your best self when you're feeling strong.

and you've created, you've taken discipline and you've created guardrails in the environment. So you've created an artificial environment where it's hard for you to violate that discipline even when you don't feel like it, right? So when you don't, you take in when you're strongest and when you have discipline and you turn that in

to an environment that will carry you even when you're not disciplined. Because now the friction is so high. I was walking here an hour ago down the street. There's a church just down the street from us here in Ottawa and it says in the front of the church,

Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted. I don't know if you saw it. It's just down the street from you. And I was like, oh my God, that's hilarious. I'm going to take a picture and post it on Twitter. And I was like, well, then I'll have to download the Twitter app. And then when I download the Twitter app, it's going to ask for my password. And it's going to send a code to my email, which I'm going to have to log into...

Forget it. And that saved me from scanning the Twitter feed, which is so sexy and addictive that I would have not been able to do what I wanted to do, which is spend the half an hour ahead before I saw you today preparing for the podcast interview I have tomorrow, right? Like that's how I wanted to spend my time. So the guardrails served me in that case. It can feel annoying sometimes. And there are failure points where you're like,

tired and lazy and bored and you download the app and you scroll and that's fine but if you label that a dopamine treat and are aware of what it is then at least you're living intentionally about it yeah so you're conscious about it

I want to go back to something we touched on at the very start, which is sort of resiliency and not only our individual resiliency, but our collective resiliency. And we had sort of, it was a two-part question. I think we went on the second part of the question. Good memory to call back to eight questions ago. I like that. Where are we on this resiliency? Like, are we more resilient because of this or are we less? And I sort of see pockets of both, to be honest with you. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, first of all, when we spoke on the Knowledge Project the first time, it was, we didn't know, but it was the eve of the pandemic. Yeah. Right. It was at the end of 2019.

my book on resilience that just come out, You Are Awesome. And I was talking about the models and frameworks I had in the book to try to cultivate resiliency in myself and in my kids. And I made the argument that, I actually made the argument in the introduction of that book, none of us have been through a pandemic or a war, or we haven't had a famine. And so a lot of us have thin skin. And I used examples and data to justify the fact that we have thin skin. Of

Of course, as always, using myself as a prime example, you know, the way you feel like hurt and damaged when you get a nasty email for days, right? Like, I was like, this is me. I've got thin skin, so I need to address this problem, right?

I talked a lot about, and we talked a lot about some of the models and tools to kind of cultivate that. Now you're asking, you know, post pandemic, 2022, how have we done? How are we doing? Hey, Neil, we're now through a pandemic or most of the way through, depending on where you are and your kind of experience today.

How are we doing? I will say A, there isn't too much recent data to go on. Even the data on resilience that we're looking at now, it's still 2019 kind of data, which shows that resilience is pretty low. And it comes back to some of what I was quoting before with the work of Jonathan Haidt.

and National Institute of Mental Health kind of statistics. But I will say one of the models I've been using with my kids a lot these days on cultivating resilience, and I think you might find this interesting, is the philosophy of take more pictures. It's the philosophy of take more pictures. And so...

Have you ever talked to a wedding photographer and you say to them, holy cow, like I was at that wedding too. How'd you get 50 amazing shots of like me and the bride or the bride and the groom or whatever, the groom and the groom, whatever, whatever. And they're like, oh, I took a thousand. Did you hear me clicking like the whole four hours? Click, click, click. I took like a thousand, 2000 pictures. Of course, I'm going to have 50 good ones.

And whenever I've had that sort of apocryphal kind of story happen over and over again, it makes me think of when I was a kid, Shane, and my dad got me a book of baseball statistics.

And as a baseball fan pre-internet, as a kid, we're the same age, this book of statistics is like, you know, you could spend days in this thing. But I started noticing something interesting, which is this. The guy that had the most strikeouts, Nolan Ryan, was also the guy that had the most walks. You know, like, okay. The guy that had the most wins, Sting.

Cy Young was also the guy that had the most losses. Cy Young. You hear this story all the time in the news media, which is Tom Brady has the most completions. Well, he's just playing the longest. He just took more pitchers. He also has the most incompletions. This guy's got the most Super Bowls. He's also got the most Super Bowl losses. And so the philosophy I think that we've all experienced through the pandemic is we just took another pretty big pitcher.

We just had another major life experience. All of us did. Those that are alive right now listening to this have had a major life experience. Add that to the camera roll of your life. And if you want to increase your resilience further, take more pictures. What in your life do you take more pictures in? I mentioned 10th book. Have they all been hits? No. But the only way I'm going to get to the next one that does well, if you even care about measuring success that way, that's a whole other topic when you talk about success, is could you just write another book?

Could you just take another swing? Could you just come up to the plate another time? And what in your life can you sign up for the most? You know, when I was a kid, my parents would let me quit. I was in Cubs. I quit. I was in baseball. I quit. I tried to run. I did the most one lessons of any kid. And they let me quit. And some people say, that's horrible parenting because they should force you to stick with it and plow through. Yeah, maybe. Or maybe they just let me take more pictures until I found the things I really liked.

And eventually kind of for me, that was, you know, things around cartooning and communication and writing and things I'm still kind of doing today. And I went to go deep on them because I was allowed to take more pictures. So what's the data say on resilience now? There ain't that much. What do I think personally? We've been through a lot. And what do I think is a model that can help us take more pictures? The wins pile up when you pile on the number of times you step up to the plate. One of the ways that I interpreted what I was hearing was

is that we've all just come through a pandemic and one of the things I try to teach the kids is how you talk to yourself matters. Your mindset matters. An optimistic mindset isn't going to make good things happen but a negative mindset is going to almost guarantee that negative things happen. Oh that's interesting. Say that one more time, that phrase. So an optimistic mindset, positive mindset doesn't necessarily make the future positive

but a negative one does make the future negative becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and so i've been telling the kids i was like hey you just came through a pandemic we haven't had one of these in 100 years so you've done something difficult that a lot of people can't do or a lot of people haven't done or a lot of people so like when we're doing things for the first time

they're anxious. They're sort of like going back to school, right? There's a little bit of anxiety, but that jumping off a cliff. - In person class. - Jumping off a cliff. Like we climbed up, we did cliff jumping and I'm like, dude, you've been through a pandemic. - Oh, you actually jumped off a cliff? - Yeah. - I thought you were using a metal pole. - No, like we climbed up, it's one way door, you climb up, I'm like, you're going down, I'm throwing you down or you're jumping.

those are the only two ways down because climbing down is not an option climbing down is like you're going to be in hospital why is climbing down a lot because the way that you climb up it's so slippery going down that if you even and was it a choice for them to go up yeah 100 yeah yeah but but when we're up there i'm talking to them i'm just curious everyone no no my parenting stuff get up there um but it's sort of like you've done hard things

And one of the things that I use with people and my kids especially is like, you've been through a pandemic. That is a hard thing. Absolutely. That hasn't been easy. It's had ups and downs and pros and cons, but you've done it. And anybody listening to this, you've been through a pandemic too, right? You don't have many listeners under three. You've done something difficult, right? So often we think that we can't do this. And resilience in part comes from knowing that you've done difficult things in the past, right?

and everybody's done something difficult here, but we don't think about it. It doesn't come top of mind. I do think that we have missed the conversation in society so far about this, the closure, the what's happened. You know, in corporate cultures, there's usually like a postmortem. There's a postmortem that we have. There's a huge missing conversation on like, because we've been reluctant to say it's over, right? I mean, I'm still wearing a mask to fly here today, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not like it's quote unquote over, but there's,

there needs to be a much more bigger conversation about the so what now what, how do we feel? Like that's the paper that goes in the filing cabinet for next time. We haven't opened the, peeled open that all the way yet. - But here's one aspect where I think we've done a major disservice to kids is we've,

told them, we've trained them that they don't have to do things they don't feel like doing during a pandemic. You don't have to do your homework if you didn't feel like doing it. Teachers gave you a free pass. Kids, obviously being kids, learn this, manipulate it to the T. And pulling, they're not very resilient now in that context, right? How do we pull that in? How do we rein that in?

And it's like, well, you can't stop working because there's a pandemic, right? Everybody worked at a grocery store, all the doctors, all the nurses, all the policemen, all the firemen, like they didn't get to work from home. They still had to keep going to work and their jobs became harder, not easier during a pandemic. And we tried to take kids and we tried to make their lives easier instead of just keeping it, I would say maybe not status quo was the option, but sort of we made it so easy for them

How you feel dictates whether you can do your homework or not. How you feel dictates whether you go to school or not. And I think that that did a disservice for their resilience. And one of the first sentences we said is anxiety rates in college students are one in three. And I'm talking clinical anxiety. Clinical diagnosed anxiety in college students are one in three. So if you don't get it down, you get it up.

And a lot of people are saying it's partly what you're saying, the softness or the lower kind of rules or standards or whatever. But also there's a lot of less free play. There's a lot less free play. There's a lot less time in nature. There's a lot less things that resilience has kind of created when you're perhaps in the woods and you fall off a thing and there's no one around or you're picking out worms. When we're inside systems that are really corralling our behavior, we have less ability to really kind of

go wide on kind of what is and could be. Johan Hari has written about this a lot in Stolen Focus. He's got a really wonderful chapter on what the decline of free play is doing to the resilience and anxiety levels of our kids.

So I go deep on nature a lot. I've gone deep into it from a happiness perspective. I believe that a word that we're not using enough in society is Shinrin-yoku, which is, you're like, no one uses that word. What are you talking about? Well, there's a guy over in Japan named Dr. Jing Li, Q-I-N-G, and his last name is L-I-L-I. And he's become the world's foremost researcher on Shinrin-yoku, which is literal translation chain is forest bath.

Forest bath, you know in Japan in the late 1980s There's a bit of a cultural crisis when a number of prominent executives drop dead in North America We've got the highest level word in North America for you know, working so hard as burnout burnout is nice over Well, they've got a word over there and I don't want to like this karashi I'm gonna butcher the Japanese word, but it means death by overwork Okay what he's put forward in a lot of his research and it's wonderful research is that by immersing ourselves in nature by immersing ourselves in nature

We actually do so much benefit to our mental health and our physiological health. We increase the production of NK, you know, cancer-killing cells. We increase our heart health. We reduce our anxiety. We reduce our stress levels. There, it turns out that there's a chemical that trees release, Shane, called phytoncides. Have you heard of this? P-H-Y-T-O-N-C-I-D-E-S. Phytoncides. When you're out in nature...

Not when you're on a treadmill looking at a picture of the Muir Trail. I'm talking when you're out in a natural bush, you're breathing in this chemical, which has been shown to reduce your cortisol levels. It reduces your cortisol levels. It reduces your anxiety levels by being out in nature. So part of the prescription I feel as we talk about resilience and we talk about our mental health, as we talk about our happiness, I think every single day,

- People gotta take two minutes of the morning, we talked about that on the three questions, I will let go, I'm grateful for, I will focus on. And they need to take an interjection sometime in their day to immerse themselves in nature. I say do it at lunch, 'cause I'm picturing people under,

fluorescent lights in clinical atmospheres. And I say, know where the closest bush is, know where the closest tree is, know where. If you can just reset your physiology and reduce your cortisol and adrenaline levels by taking some deep breaths in nature, you create more energy and more positive mindset for the afternoon.

And then we can talk about what you should do at bed. 'Cause I have some prescription thoughts on that too. - I wanna come to that, but hold on. There's three questions that I've already got three rabbit holes here. The first one is sort of, do you still have thin skin? You mentioned that earlier. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So part of the reason I wrote that book was because I had found

that I was suffering from anxious thoughts for days when I got, for example, a nasty email. And after one of my speeches, a guy ran up to me and said, "Neil, Neil, Neil, what's wrong with my son? He graduated from, he was a high school valedictorian. He graduated from Duke. He was the top of his class. And his first day at work, his boss sent him an email, you know, kind of saying, "You gotta do this better." And he called me crying from his bed saying he's not going back to work tomorrow. And when I heard that story, I didn't say, "Oh my gosh." Like,

you know, can you believe what a failure son is? I actually recognized myself in the story. Like I was like, oh yeah, that's a piece of work. So yeah.

The whole nature of the books I write is really like most self-help authors, and you know this, you're writing for yourself, right? And so when I put in practices in that book, like Two Minute Mornings, right? I talk a lot about journaling. I talk about dot, dot, dot, yet, adding a little sliver of light after you hear the door click in the frame.

I, when I'm at my best, use those models and systems to have thicker skin than I used to. And so I would say, yes, I've improved on that. But do I have thin skin? It's not a yes or no, black or white. I'm sure I could still get better. Someone could give me a verbal, hey, if this is on YouTube and the first comment's like, I hate that annoying brown guy's voice. Well, I'm still gonna feel that.

So I need to get better at avoiding the kind of nasty stuff online, I'm sure. We all do probably, though. But it's so weird because like your reviews overwhelmingly positive.

But I look at the ones that are negative, right? Exactly. And you remember those. The positive ones just sort of like bounce off of you. And we know that's biological. We've got amygdala, A-M-Y-G-D-A-L-A. It's one of the oldest parts of our brain. It's in one of the most central parts of our brain. It's about the size of a walnut. This thing secretes fight or flight.

you know, fight or flight hormones all day. We all have an amygdala. You don't want to take it out. It ain't going to be good for you. So you got to leave that thing in there. It's secreting fight or flight hormones all day. It's wonderful when a saber-toothed tiger jumps out of the bush and you got inside of whether to fight it or run away. It's not so wonderful when you get a needs improvement on your performance review and you think that you're getting chased by a saber-toothed tiger. It's not so wonderful when you get a headline saying like, don't eat this toxic vegetable and you click the link and it's like, you know,

Too many carrots has been shown to, you know, it's like we're falling into the trap that's a biological part of our brains. So of course, when I look on iTunes, I look at the reviews for three books, my podcast, and yes, there's 15 five-star reviews showing up. My eye and my brain naturally orient itself to the negative. And it's not even so bad as to know that my brain does that. It's also so bad, I believe, is to know that...

The algorithms inside social media and Newsmeet are designed to find and foster that. And what's even worse, Shane, is that that is now changing our behavior so that we, as people who are behaving in more and more digital environments, we are naturally becoming more extreme. We are naturally changing what we say online. We're now posting stuff that we know is going to be on the edges of the spectrum because it will get more reviews and more likes and more shares. So it's radicalizing us.

And we are, do you see anyone reviewing three stars? Do you see what I'm saying? You either got to be hyperbolically positive or hyperbolically negative. Otherwise, no one's going to read your reviews. It's astute to filter the Amazon reviews and find the three star reviews and read them. But we don't do that.

And if you look at what's at the top, it's the one star or the five star. We are doing that to ourselves at this point because it's how our things get read and noticed. We're talking these days in society about quiet quitting, the philosophy that you should do the minimum possible. We're talking about the great transition. We're talking about people sort of trying to

find a work that fits into their life, not try to fit their life into their work. And I think at a high level, these are net positives because perhaps through the pandemic, some people gained more clarity to themselves about what was important and they stopped following the hedonistic treadmill of trying to get straight A's and get into a Ivy League school and get the McKinsey job or whatever.

the consulting job and, you know, kind of be an endless super achiever. And they've taken a step back in the pandemic and they've said, well, wait a minute. I don't know if I want to be working 80 hours a week. I think I'd actually like to see my mom more. So you agree with quiet quitting?

Well, the way that I define it, and maybe my definition is different than others, is doing the amount of work expected of you and not going over and above for the sake of going over and above. However, if you're trying to get a raise, get a promotion, stick out, rise up, of course you're going to want to. You just posted a tweet. You said it was your most controversial tweet. I guess you got some sizzling responses. And some emails and sex and everything else. Is there emails and what? Texts? Texts, yeah.

So you want to say the tweet so I don't paraphrase it wrong? Oh, I just said the people who don't go back to the office are going to end up working for the people that do. Yeah.

The people that don't go back to the office are going to end up working for the people that do. Which I think means that on the philosophy of quiet quitting, you're implying that those who in general in life show a little bit more chutzpah and go for it a little bit at a higher level, work above and beyond, show up a bit early, show up, period, will actually be the ones that get raises and promotions. Well, let's break it down a little bit into human nature. Where does trust come from? A lot of trust is proximity.

Trust is consistency. I see you every day. I can consistently gauge how you're going to read. I might not like how you respond to something. Your learning goes up. But I know more about your life. I care about you in a different way. I know what's going on with your family. We have anecdotal conversations at the water cooler. I coach you. I mentor you. I'm invested in you. The people who are ambitious...

are going to be in the office and they're going to get promoted faster than it doesn't mean they work harder. It doesn't mean they work better. It doesn't mean they're more valuable. That wasn't what I said, which a lot of people read into.

But I just think based on my knowledge of human psychology, they're going to get promoted faster and they're going to have a better career. And you're talking about organizations that are in hybrid mode. If you're 100% in person or 100% remote, this idea doesn't hold weight. And then the other thing that I said is what's best for the person is not necessarily best for the company.

And what's best for the person is not best for their career. And this is a disentangling when it comes to quiet quitting. Quiet quitting, I hate that term. You want to do your job to spec? People have worked to rule for a long time. You can't work in an organization like mine because we're too small for that to happen. That doesn't work.

So you want to work for a big company and do that. I can see how you can sort of get away with that. But then you can't come and complain later that you're not developing fast enough. You're not getting as many opportunities. Absolutely not. I agree with that. Absolutely. Depends what you want. Depends what you want. Maybe there's... So give me the other side of this, though. Well...

We're talking right now in fall 2022, where we're in the dregs, we're in the trail, we're in the long finish of the pandemic. And what I'm arguing is that when we're

at home for a long period of time, I think that a lot of people have readjusted their life and have said that they may prioritize things a little bit different. If indeed you are saying, I want to be, I want to be home. I want to be, I want to see my mom more. I'd actually think I really want to live in Dallas because that's where my extended family is. Although my company is based in Rochester, whatever, whatever, whatever. Then yeah, it's great for some trendy news media buzzword to label that quiet quitting because it, you know, it's got alliteration. So it goes viral, but really odd.

What I'm saying is it makes sense, don't you think, that in the six months, 12 months, 18 months after a two year kind of major interruption like that, people take time and pause to reevaluate their values and what's important to them. And if they do that and they find that they want to spend more time with their family and they want to live in Dallas, they don't want to move out to Rochester,

That's going to look like they're not on the fast track anymore. They're not going to be a hypo. They're not going to be a level one. They're not going to be the top right quadrant of the nine box grid. They're not going to be the de facto incumbent to the VP and the SVP. So maybe they're okay with that.

Maybe they're okay with that. You mentioned Kahneman. He's the guy that came up with the $70,000 per year kind of famous study that that's all you necessarily need. So maybe we are, I hope, I think some of us will take this time to realize that I'm okay with a little less and a little bit more nature, time with my family, time to invest in my physical health. And for me, that means a longer, more intentional life. That's some people. Yeah, I'm all for that. As long as it's done consciously.

because i think what's happening is it's sort of unconscious for a lot of people in that sense yeah and it's also a moment in time we could be having this conversation in 2021 or 2023 and you know the culture will have shifted again and think of like junior people too like this whole work from home thing we could talk about for a long time but like two aspects i want to dive into one is government and how that's not a security violation like this isn't a field day for me

I'm way out of my element. Oh, from what I used to... Like somebody talking about verifying your social insurance number at home or having access to data. That's just like... It is always funny though when you're talking to someone professionally and you hear like a meow in the background or something. Yeah.

Well, it's just going to take an incident and then once there's an incident, nobody could have saw that coming. Well, I can see it coming right now. By the way, if I was a foreign adversary, I'd be like buying apartments or renting apartments next to key people because now I can get all the information over the phone. But the other thing is probably more applicable to everybody else.

Think of development, right? You hire a junior programmer. Junior programmer wants to become a senior programmer. Not only do we onboard into company culture, but we sort of like how we develop that person

is through these water coolers. It's like five minutes of somebody's time. It's getting to know other people in the organization. And that... It's invaluable and then calculable and priceless, the amount of conversation. When you're in a cafeteria at a company that was in person and is now fully remote and you cannot calculate how valuable it was to hear somebody in the line ahead of you that's in another function or department

talking about the project you think you're in charge of. And it turns out that it's happening in a different silo because two vice presidents left the meeting from the CEO and both of them were in charge of it. And now we've got a huge replication and duplication of work. And that kind of stuff is happening all the time. Nevermind what I talked about before with the four S's that you need to have social connection at your job. And you don't feel as tethered to the community of your work when you don't meet or see anybody ever.

Now, if Jason Free was on here, he'd probably disagree. So if Tony Luck was on here, he'd probably disagree. But that's my view. Neil Pass reach is landing on the Elon Musk side of things. I'm sort of on that side too. Generally speaking, I actually think a hybrid approach personally is the worst approach. Don't you think that's just like the office with three people lonely under a dim light in the corner? Like that's the worst. And I think it doesn't, yeah, you're not getting any of the benefits of fully remote or

being in the office. You're getting the worst of all worlds. I gave a speech a couple months ago down in New Jersey for a drug company and it was the first in-person event they'd had and they were ecstatic that there were lineups in the cafeteria. Yeah. They said, can you believe there's a lineup in the cafeteria again? Yeah, that's awesome. It's, now the food is fresher. Now the atmosphere is livelier. Now there's a live speech as opposed to everyone, you know, entering stuff in the Zoom chat.

Okay. Maybe we're aging ourselves here. I don't know. Well, as silly as it sounds, you know, I was hoping people would recognize that work fulfills... We need to work, right? We need to contribute to society. We need to contribute to our families. I believe that. And I believe without that, there's an element of life that's missing.

And I feel like we miss a part of that aspect of it if we're not in the office with people. And a lot of people right now, Shane, are in that zone where they're trying to evaluate whether this opportunity that they're doing today is as good or better than the one that they have, that they're considering. And for those people, I would say you need to do two tests. You need to do the deathbed test and you need to do the plan B test.

If you were considering, like I was in 2016 after I'd worked 10 years at Walmart, eight of which were overlapping with writing and speaking and stuff on the side, I was like, do I want to lean into this full time? It's number one, deathbed test. Which will I regret not doing more on my deathbed, right? You've probably heard of the five greatest regrets of the dying. Nurse Bronnie Ware, palliative care nurse, has summarized that 2,000 people dying. The number one regret of the dying is I wish I lived a life

that I wanted to. - True to myself. - Not the one that other people wanted me to. So the first thing is what will you regret not doing more? Right, for me at the time in 2016, it was like, I think I'll regret not leaning into this writer thing. Let's give it a shot. And the second thing is plan B. Okay, if it fails,

This is a risk tolerance question. You're the investor here. It's like, if it fails, what are you going to do? Just, it's maybe related to stoicism a little bit. Like mentally picture your worst case scenario and declare your comfort level with that. For me at that time, I'll use my personal example. I thought, well, I guess I'll have to knock on Walmart's door again or, you know, check around if anybody else wants someone to run leadership development. Could I do that? Would I be comfortable doing that? Yeah, I could. And so if you can wrap your mind around that,

depending on your risk tolerance. If you're like, I burned the boats and I'm okay, fine. But for me, East Indian culture, always have a day job. You need to have benefits, already failed by not being a doctor. Hey, for me, it's like, I wanted to have a plan B in hand, in my mental pocket before I made that leap. If you can do those two tests, deathbed test and plan B test, I think you're ready to make the decision. - Why do you think we're so, I mean, this gets into mimetic desire a bit,

But like why is it we're letting other people dictate the scoreboard of our lives? Yeah, so I started a blog in 2008 called 1000 Awesome Things. I was going through a divorce and the loss of my best friend and I could feel that processing my emotions through a positive oriented blog where I was counting down one awesome thing a day. I mean it's stuff I'm still writing about 15 years later. The new book, Our Book of Awesome is literally a bunch of awesome things.

I thought, "This is gonna feel good. This is good for me. I feel satisfaction when I do it. I post every single one at 12:01 AM." But then, Shane, back in 2008 when you got a WordPress blog, they all had a stats counter in the top right corner. Remember blogs with stats counters? - Yeah. - Right? It's equivalent of what follower counts are now on social media. So for those that don't know what I'm talking about, the blog said how many hits it had, right?

Well, I started getting addicted to that. Can I get 50,000 hits? Could I get a million? Could I get 50 million? Could I turn this thing into a book? Well, it's on the bestseller list. There's an extrinsic motivator right there, a bestseller list. It used to come out once a week. Now it comes out every hour on Amazon through the ranking. So what we've done is ratcheted it up. Well, could I make it a bestseller for two weeks? What about 10 weeks? What about 50 weeks? What about 100 weeks? And so I became addicted to the extrinsic motivators and I lost my intrinsic desire to write in the first place.

And guess what the research says? There's wonderful research from Teresa Amabile, who's at Harvard Business School. She's done research at Brandeis University, Edward Desi. It turns out that actually is what happens. It actually is what happens. When we are exposed to extrinsic motivators, they literally hide the intrinsic motivators in our brain. They asked groups of 11-year-old girls, two groups, one group, Shane, they said, hey, could you teach eight-year-old girls piano for half an hour?

you will experience the joy of teaching. You will have the pleasure of someone learning because of you. And they told the other group, "We're gonna give you two tickets to the movies, if you do it for half an hour." When they evaluated it afterwards, the ones that were given the extrinsic motivator of the tickets to the movies, A, stopped right at 30 minutes, to our point earlier, but a little bit of the above and beyond, they stopped right at 30 minutes. They were more frustrated with it. They had less satisfaction with it. And the people learned less from it.

Intrinsic motivators are what we need to value and prioritize and it's increasingly difficult. So part of the key to being happy is to constantly ensure that you are doing it for you. A key question to ask yourself in whatever work you're doing, I don't just want to confine this to like corporate work is, would I do this for free? Doesn't mean you should do it for free, but would you do it for free? Asking yourself that genuine question. If the answer is yes, it probably means that you have

some burning intrinsic motivation inside of it. So me right now, who was addicted to extrinsic motors made it before. I won't say I won't come clean and say I'm, I'm perfectly fixed. But when I launched three books in 2018, my podcast, I'm like, okay, uh,

Noella, who's working for me, I'm like, "Don't give me the password to Libsyn." Right, that's where the stats are held. "Don't give me the, if I ask you for it, don't tell me. "I don't wanna know the password, right? "Let me make this a purpose-oriented goal. "I wanna read 1,000 formative books for 15 years, right? "I don't wanna get obsessed with the stats. "I don't wanna see them. "I don't wanna get obsessed with them "because I'm gonna always lose. "I'll always be a failure."

It'll be a fraction of the knowledge project forever, right? And no, but you will look at it and you'll say, oh, I'm a fraction of person X or Y or whatever, right? I'm just saying extrinsically motivated rankings, algorithms, they make you feel like you're a loser all the time. The internet is a story that you think always, no matter how good our lunches that we eat today, someone's at a lobster buffet in the Maldives on the internet. And so the extrinsic motivator you're talking about control is we're letting them control us because they're fed to us all the time.

follower counts, likes, comments. You're always never as much as the next guy. - Yeah, and your reference group always changes so you're never at the, you're always above somebody. - Oprah's jealous of Justin Bieber. - Right, exactly. But why is it, and this sort of relates to life in general, right? Why is it that we let things that we can't control control us?

You write a book. You don't control if it goes on to sell a million copies or ten million copies. Or five copies. Or five copies. You wrote the book. I can control five. That's mom, dad, sister. The work is done. Pandemic. Another example. I don't control the government response. I don't control so much of this. And yet we let that control our happiness, our mindset, our motivation, everything.

Yeah. Well, we're animals, man. We got an amygdala in our brain looking for, you know, looking for problems everywhere all the time. We've been talking about this since like Marcus Aurelius, probably like a thousand years before that. That's not that much evolution though. You know, like...

We've got 3 million years of evolutionary history baked into the brains that we have. Probably a lot more than that if you think about dinosaurs being the same kind of forearms and legs on a thick body. We've got the same parts still. And those things will always be looking for problems. And sometimes when you look for problems, that's all you see. The extrinsic motivators are fed to us more and more because they know that we're addicted to them. And we have to design our lives so that we... Look, you are doing a great job of this. We're sitting in front of a bookshelf.

Period. Books. 57% of Americans read zero books last year. You're sitting in front of a bookshelf. I don't know how many of these you read, but even if it's a fraction of them, you're way ahead. 57% of people read none. You're on a podcast called The Knowledge Project, which means you're spending your time

Finding people to interview, researching, I'm assuming reading their books, researching stuff they've written and asking them the questions you want to. And then you're writing a blog, fs.blog, which is you're essentially exploring life, intentional living through mental models. So you have already designed a life where you can take a random morning and spend time at the Boys and Girls Club breakfasts

you know, and then hang out on a nice comfy chair and sort of talk about how the world is. You've designed that for yourself. You have created that for yourself. You've done that from corporate work and you've done that. And you're a very young person to have done that. So you have taken some of these

things that come into our lives and you've just been conscious of them you've been aware of them and you have designed your life around them and everybody can do that everybody can decide that they want to cancel the newspaper and magazine subscriptions and they should everybody should decide to unsubscribe from five emails tonight

And they should. Everybody gets to decide if they want text alerts and notifications enabled on their phone, and they want the news scroll on the side of their phone every day. And they should. Everyone gets to decide where they plug their phone in. You know, 95% of people right now are plugging in when their arms reach to themselves. So they wake up in the morning, the first thing they see is their phone, that jostling themselves, senseless. Oh, Neil, I can't get rid of it. It's my alarm clock. Have you heard of Walmart? It's 10 bucks, man. Get an alarm clock.

"Oh, well I'm very busy. My sister could call me at 3:00 a.m. I'm a very important person at work." No, you're not. No one's calling you at 3:00 a.m.

And if they are, you get a landline. The company will say, "Thank you for your 10 bucks a month. No one wants any of these things anymore." You give that number to your five emergency people, your sister, the boss, the direct report, the person that you're taking care of, the elderly parent, whatever. And you give that number. When you pay your $120 bill per month, 240 if you live in Canada, you say,

I'm paying for the privilege of not living a life where I'm jostled senseless by my phone before I go to bed on my phone when I wake up in the morning. The part of what we're talking about here is just taking steps to become aware of how our behavior is being led into these intrinsically motivated traps and just taking baby steps to design our behavior around them.

And we can do that. And we should do that because it leads to a happier life. I think it does. I also think that there's like a social signal thing. I watch parents on their phone, like around their kids at the park.

You know, it's like they're signaling to other parents that they're busy and they're important and they need to do something, but they're not present in the moment with their kids. And if you solve the maze backwards, which I'm a fan of, right? How do I let other people's hindsight become my foresight? Then you realize living a life true to yourself. What were the other ones? The other four, right? Spending time with family, but being present. That's part of it.

So like we're automatically opting out of that the minute we pick up our phone when we're with our kids. And nobody's perfect by any stretch at this. Yeah. But like even having the phone within reach. That's the thing. I don't have my phone on me. Neither do I. Of course, we're recording a podcast. No, but like if I put a phone just right there on the table, do you feel like you're important at that moment? No. Like unconsciously, you...

interpret this as like, oh, well, if that rings, I'm not important. Do you know that study that was done in Italy? No. They put two strangers in rooms together. So say we didn't know each other. We're in a room similar to this. And they had test group A

And in test group A, they put a notepad and a pencil in between them and they asked after 10 minutes for the people to go outside and tell the researchers how good was the rapport and kinship or relationship between you and that stranger you spent 10 minutes with.

And then they had test group B and they put a cell phone in between them. And it was not the cell phone of either person. It was not your phone or my phone. It was a dummy prop. It was just a phone. But the presence of that physical device that nobody could actually touch or do anything with because it wasn't even their phone dramatically reduced the scores on the connection, the kinship, the relationship. When you used to talk to the person beside you on the airplane, now you get up at the end of the flight, you're like, oh, I didn't even know.

there was someone there because I was tethered in as soon as I sat down. And so the presence of a device to your point is actually, I don't know if it's social signals, but I'm thinking it's certainly to save their connection. And the reason it's doing that is because what that device represents

And I'm borrowing the metaphor from brilliant Laurie Santos here. It represents a wheelbarrow beside you full of every movie that's ever been filmed, every song that's ever been sung, every letter you've ever written, every photo you've ever taken, every letter from every friend sitting beside you at the same time as whatever you're trying to do. And nothing is as important as all of that.

- Yeah, how do you compete with them? - So you don't bring the thing. So you give your phone to your wife, Leslie, on Friday night at five and you say, "Don't give this back to me until Sunday "when I gotta set my fantasy football lineup." And at least then I'm guaranteed 48 hours of no device in my presence. And it's about the location of your charger. I say this thing about 95% of people who inside their phone,

Not because I'm making that up, but because when I speak to audiences and I say, put up your hand if you sleep within arm's length of yourself, I'm telling you, Shane, 95% of people's hands are up. That charger should live in your furnace room, the dimmest cobwebby room of your house so that you add a 20 second frictional step

to getting it so that 11:15 when your resilience is low physiologically, your decision making energy is spent and you have the brilliant idea to send your direct report a nasty email, you don't. 'Cause we've all done it and you feel terrible the next morning but you just don't wanna take those 20 steps. So you don't do it.

So you create that little sense of friction and now you're going to bed in a better state I was talking with somebody last week who said that With back to school they made their kids put their phone in

in the kitchen. They're not allowed to take it to their bedroom. Yeah. And then they started doing the same thing. Yeah. Because they didn't want to be a hypocrite. Right? You have teenagers, you get pointed out all the hypocrisy. And they said they slept better. Yeah. And I was like, are you, like, for real on that? Like, how do you know you? And they were like, I feel better in the morning. I feel...

My next door neighbor's got four kids. Some of them are teens. She's got them devices. However, they're Wi-Fi only. They don't have data. And she unplugs her router every night at 10. So everyone's internet is just...

You know, and you know, there's a famous series of Will Ferrell commercials that anybody could Google on YouTube. I highly recommend them. They're called device free dinner. He did the series of spots for the website, which is another great website called common sense media. I don't know if you know, it's like the way I check to see if every book or movie that whatever my kids want to watch is like age appropriate or not. So it's a really wonderful service if you don't know it. And if you have kids and you're wondering if they should read Harry Potter five at age seven or whatever it is. Um,

He did this series of commercials where he plays the role of the dad. And he's like, you know, like, like, like, like, like, this one turns my face into a rabbit. And, you know, the family's just staring around at him like, who the hell is this guy? Yeah. But we laugh at that because we recognize ourselves in it. Yeah, yeah. It's hard. Like, it's hard balancing things, especially...

in some ways for you and I, where work and life bleed together in a way that is distinct from a lot of people, drives a lot of people nuts. Because I work seven days a week, but I don't work eight hours a day every day.

But like I'll work on the weekends. And you have one phone or two? One. Right. So everything's... And so everything blends together. And it's sort of... It works for me. I don't find it a problem. But sometimes I do have to like step out of a dinner and take a call or...

I don't try to orchestrate my life that way, but. - Just be cognizant of the issues of cell phone addiction. Let's just be aware of it. We're not talking about it like it's a problem. Look, we don't realize that everyone's addicted to coffee 'cause everyone's addicted to coffee. See what I'm saying? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - There's lineups at every coffee place. It looks like no one's addicted. It's not that big of addiction. Same with sugar or same, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But with cell phones, and there's a problem. They all start with the letter P. The first one, absolutely, we've been talking about is psychological. We compare our director's cut life with everybody else's greatest hits.

you're never as good as when I was in high school, same as when you were in high school, you could be the best basketball player on your team. You could see that guy and you just knew if you took 100 free throws in your driveway, you could probably be as good as that guy. Now there's a guy on YouTube

Throwing baskets behind his back from a half court with the blindfold on. I used to think I was good at Mario Brothers, so I saw someone beat it on YouTube in six minutes. The whole game. You see what I'm saying? So psychologically, you're always inferior. We're talking about resilience in kids. Well, one of the things we're doing is saying that they can never be good enough. It's just the nature of it. Psychological. Second one is productivity.

There's reports that say, we talked about this, 31% of our time on our phones is bookmarked, prioritizing and switching. The devices need to be turned into pull devices, not push devices. You get to control how the app is set up, what's on the front page. Some basic tenants are even just turning your screen to black and white, mixing your apps up so that it's not compulsively checking the buttons, right? That way that we kind of end up into these little habits. And then the third one I'll say is physical.

Research from Australia shows that if you expose your brain to bright screens within two hours, I'm sorry to say this, within two hours of bedtime, your brain does not produce enough melatonin overnight. That would be the sleep hormone responsible for giving you a deep, restful sleep. Which may be why we're all waking up at like 2 or 3 a.m. after three hours of sleep.

and having a hard time going back to sleep. And you know what they're actually also finding, Shane, is that the bright screen when it turns off gives you about an hour jolt of extra energy because apparently evolutionary biologists are saying when the sun went down, you needed to build the fire. You need to get the cave set up. So actually when the sun went down, when the, when the, you know, when the fantasy football app goes off in today's parlance,

you get an extra jolt of energy. And I noticed this because if I mistakenly look at my screen till right before bed, I'm lying in bed like this, like I'm on, you know, I'm like ready to build that fire instead of the cave, as opposed to falling into a deep slumber. - How do you balance that with success, with ambition, with drive?

So this is the story of my life, right? Like ambition versus contentment is the thing I've been exploring through my life, through my work for years. One thing that's helped me, I will say, is when I had the sudden insight that The Hurt Locker, do you remember this movie? Did you see that movie, Jeremy? So The Hurt Locker won Best Picture, right? It won Best Picture, Best Picture of the Year, right? Catherine Bigelow, The Hurt Locker. And I looked it up. It was 25 million at the box office.

Well, that same year, you know, Fast and Furious 7 had 800 million and it was not made for nothing. Right? It was not made for nothing. And I realized that

there's different types of success at play here. Let's just be very clear about that up front. There's a sales type of success and there is a social type of success. And this, by the way, this, this metaphor holds every year. It's like, you know, when moonlight wins best picture, uh, Alvin and the chipmunks, the squeak well is making 10 times more revenue at the box office. It holds in publishing as well, right? It's very rare. Look, Mark Manson's the first to say that when subtle art, not giving a fuck came out, uh,

It wasn't covered. It wasn't covered by anyone. It wasn't reviewed in the New York Times book review. It wasn't lauded by the critics. It wasn't. It sold 10 million copies. So separate those two out. There's sales success. There's social success. Okay? Then the third one I will say is self. Self-success. Intrinsically motivated. Are you happy with what you did? And by the way, a lot of what you do in life

has no sales or social component. The deck you're building in your backyard, the cake you're baking for your niece's birthday, these aren't things you're trying to sell or things you're trying to necessarily get praise for. I think of those three corners of a triangle as the success triangle or the three S's of success. And I think of them like an old school wobble board at the gym. Meaning, I don't know if you remember those old boards, you have to try to balance on it. Well, you can't get them all up at once. So,

One thing that helps me tone down my ambition a little bit is just deciding which type of success I'm going for with each project I do. Okay? Book awesome, going for sales. It's not gonna be in the New York Times book review, I'm sorry to say, you know? That was, we're going for, we're trying to sell a million copies of this thing. Let's sign every book in every bookstore, let's do every media, let's try to do whatever we can do to get this thing out there. Okay? That's what I'm going for sales. Three books, my podcast,

That's self. That's me orienting myself towards something I want to do. That's a life goal. I want to talk to interesting people about their formative books and I want to read those books in advance. I want to spend years of my life doing it. I don't think that's going to ever, you know, beat Joe Rogan on the charts.

arts, you know, and I have to remember that on the days and nights where I look at the one-star review about my squeaky voice and I look at the ratings and I'm like, oh, I slipped off the top 200 in arts. I can't even make the top of arts. Nevermind the whole thing. I'm like, wait a minute, why am I doing this again? And so be really clear about which type of success you want. And that model shame, I will argue holds true for any type of project you take on.

Okay, you're a marketing job. Well,

Self-success means your product is a hit, it's flying off the shelf. Social success means you're loved by your peers, you get a performance review that's promoted. Self-success is are you happy with it, right? If you're a teacher, right? Sales success is promotability to vice principal, to principal, superintendent. Social success is your work recognized, copied. Are you the teacher other teachers learn from? Self, are you happy with it? So one thing that helps me

tone down the contentment and ambition paradox a little bit is knowing and articulating to myself which one I'm going for on which project I take on. Because you're going to have to revisit it when you're upset about the other ones you're not doing. So success is

How do you compare projects where you have a name, so you sold a million copies of a book. Now your next book comes out, you're probably not going to sell a million copies. A million puts you in the top 0.001% of all books ever published. I love a quote by Diablo Cody, who you may or may not know is the former stripper who wrote the movie Juno.

which was nominated for best picture, right? That movie went to be nominated for best picture. It was her first movie, right? And I mentioned the former stripper because she's got an incredible memoir about her exotic dancing days in Minnesota, which is a wonderful read, uh, called candy girl. This is an aside for people this far in the list and that want a book record. There you go. Um, she was asked, okay, Diablo Cody, uh,

How are you going to top this? Your very first movie was not my best picture. And she said, the perfect answer, I'm not. And the fact that I did it the first time absolves me from the need to ever worry about it again. Oh, interesting. Opposite of what I would have thought. What would you have thought? That you'd try...

you would try to create something that was more successful and in the process destroy the art or reduce its impact. Well, uh, that would be what I would have thought. Well, I will also say that success in what, say you're going for the million books thing and you hit it. Okay. Which by the way, still a shock and surprise to me that my first book did so well. There was a lot of lucky bounces. There was a lot of, uh, you know, uh,

people way out of my range that said this is a book you should read etc etc but

It has partially, it's partially what enables me to have this conversation today because I'm now only writing what I want to write and I'm only working on the projects I want to work on because I have taken that goal off the table. It's not longer something I'm actually actively striving towards. I therefore get to focus on the art. And there's a wonderful essay written by David Foster Wallace, who I know you're a fan of because I can see string theory on the wall behind us. All those essays about tennis, which is a wonderful book.

Both Flesh or Not about Roger Federer is a doozy. And that essay actually opens the other book I want to recommend to people, which is called Both Flesh or Not and includes that essay, Nature of the Fun. What he says is, when you have achieved commercial success, your instinct is to try to follow it with further commercial success. That's why the Stroke second album sounds like Is This It? Yeah. Right? Right.

But actually what you're forgetting is that what made that thing successful in the first place was that you were actually only chasing fun Yeah, you're actually chasing fun. So if you want to make Hales of the thief, it's not quite as good as okay computer. So it's not gonna do as well But if you make kid a well, you're having fun There's no guitars of things released online like what a wild trip that was did it sell as much as okay computer? Probably not but

is damn good listen because it's something so different. And so I think your answer to how you follow up success is actually rooted in that essay, which is you go back to fun. You listen to Diablo Cody, recognize you don't have to chase that goal anymore and just lean into the fun. And guess what the ironic part about that is Shane?

That's more likely to cause future success. It sounds so simple. I bet you that's hard to do. Absolutely. Everything we're talking about is hard to do. Look, the goal is not to be perfect. The goal is to be better than before. With all of this stuff we're talking about today, these are models. These are systems. These are tools. These are happy habits. But if you just take one from the 38 we've talked about,

then you've improved, you know? Just one. The goal is not to be perfect. It's just to be better than before. Let's remember that above everything else here today. I want to switch gears a bit. For your 40th birthday, you, this is a contrast, but you went to a nude beach. Tell me. I can hear your judgment.

Not for me. Social mores have been passed. Well, it's so interesting. I mean, I've had body issues my whole life. Taking off my shirt and running has been something I've actually built up to and worked towards. How do you end up going on a nude beach? So I relate deeply to that. I relate deeply to body issues. I was the only brown kid in my class. I was the smallest kid in my class. I've got skinny wrists. I've got skinny...

I had thick Coke bottle glasses in a school where I was the only one of a different color and no one else had glasses, nevermind, you know, the buck teeth and all that. So I've had body issues my whole life too. And you know what? I would guess most people watching or listening to this too can relate to that. Well, I heard an old Brian Chesky quote, and I know you're a fan of his. And he said that when they evaluated what actually created memorable experiences on vacation at Airbnb. So founder and CEO of Airbnb was talking about, they did an analysis on,

What actually creates a memorable vacation? Well, it's when you do something inside your comfort zone, Shane. So I was like, wait a minute, I can just do that. Like, I can just do that without going on vacation. You could go on a vacation and sit in coffee shops and sit in a luxe resort and have no fond memories of your wonderful trip to Jackson Hole. Or you could stay in your hometown and go to somewhere you've never been before that feels like a big lurch.

and you will remember it forever because you pushed yourself. It's your climbing up the cliff thing, right? But what was happening for us was it was a way to grow outside of our comfort zone and you wrestle with body issues completely when you are naked in public. And what I did that day was I collected 10 smooth stones from the beach and I took them home as a way to kind of remember that experience but also to create for myself a rock clock

You've heard of the Long Now Foundation. You know about the 10,000 year clock that Bezos and the Long Now Foundation are stabbing to the side of a mountain to dong every 100 years or whatever to give us the idea and principle that what we're living in isn't, we're living in a long now. We should be thinking in terms of big 10,000 year kind of epochs. Well, for me, the 10 rocks represent a decade each of my life. They

They come from a day I did something far outside my comfort zone. Okay, so it sticks in my head and I hope to live to 106.

I have a calendar entry for my wife's 100th birthday when I'll be 106. So, you know, March 2nd, which is her birthday, that's the year that I'm 106. That's the day I plan to, you know, eventually take that pill and end it off, right? But what am I saying? 10 rocks that represent 10 decades. I keep four of the rocks at the front of my dresser. I keep the other six rocks six inches back.

It's a clock that I see every night before I go to bed. I move one rock up every 10 years. I create the same metaphor that the Long Now Foundation is creating in a mountain, but I don't live near that mountain. I'll never hear that clock and it's on my dresser. What is the power of that, Shane? No matter what happens in the day, no matter how high or how low it was, no matter what nasty email I got, what one-star review I read,

what person told me off, whatever happens, no matter what. Well, you look at the clock before bed, you're like, it falls away in the face of a rock representing the next 10 years of your life. Yeah. It's certainly not that important when you zoom up to even a week probably or a month probably or a year probably. Certainly not

The rocks so I use that rock as a visual clock on my dresser to glance at before I go to bed And I look forward to the day six years from now when I move the next rock forward Right because then I can actually pause and say hey what really mattered from the last ten years that I'm still thinking about right now Probably three things

I think we're on the cusp, just to take this and sidetrack for a second, of a huge jump in life expectancy. Yes. So I think you're 106, like you'd be 126 by the time...

You're going to need more rocks. Look, my father right now, as we record, is 77. He was born in 1944 in Amritsar, India, with probably a lifespan in the 50s and 60s. So he's living 10, 20, 30 years past his expected lifespan from the time of his birth and the places of his birth. And so, yeah, right now life expectancy is 30,000 days.

that's north american life expenses 25 000 days globally by the way which is 68 30 000 days from north america which is 83. so it's like we're living 30 000 days today if you want to work hard at it and you know i listened to your podcast with david sinclair like you know there's lots of ways we can invest in our longevity health span not not lifespan right then yeah it'd be wonderful because we're only here once and it's nice to you know to

take as much, give as much, live as much and have as rich and fulfilling and as giving of a life as possible. So that's by the way an argument towards having more kids. That's another thing that I, people say, why do you have so many kids? Right? People ask me this all the time. We have four boys. They're like, why do you have so many kids? I say the percentage of my life that's the hard part

The diapers, the potty training, the crying is reducing as a percentage of my total life. You ask anyone what the most pleasure parts are of having kids, oh, you don't have to take care of them your whole life. You just get the stories and the big table at Thanksgiving and you get the person giving you an idea that you haven't talked to and you get the Christmas cards. That percentage goes up. Because

Because the number of years you have to take care of a child, yeah, it may be going up a little bit, but it's not going up to 30 or 40 or 50 years. And if your lifespan goes up that much, you've just dramatically shifted the percentage. Coming back to the nude beach. You should go. No, this is not for me. Are you running with your shirt off? I am. I'm built up to this. This podcast, luckily, is not about me. It's about you. Okay. Stop talking about me.

- Yeah, that is a good way of flipping this around, right? That takes a lot of confidence to do this. What's the relationship between confidence and happiness? - Yeah, right.

Absolutely. And I think there is a relationship there. Absolutely. First, I just want to say for anyone that's wrestling with body issues like me and Shane and probably most people, I think that's most people, Shane. I don't think it's out of their... I really highly want to recommend the picture book, Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder, F-E-D-E-R. It is a wonderful book for all ages. We read to our kids probably once a week. So there's just a book record on body issues. Just beautiful. Confidence.

It takes confidence to go to a new beach. Uh, or maybe not caring, right? But, but here's the thing. I think that life is a river. It's a river and there's rapids in it. And confidence gives you a way to paddle through. If you think about it like a two by two matrix, um,

One axis, let's call it the bottom axis, is your opinion of yourself, low or high. That's the x-axis. The y-axis is on the left side and it's your opinion of others. It can be low or high as well. Well, if you're in the bottom left quadrant chain, and we are all in all of these quadrants some of the time, I just want to say that up front, it's not like you just live in one place. If your low opinion of yourself

and your low opinion of others, you're in the bottom left quadrant and you would be, I would declare you to be cynical. Cynical. On his last episode of The Tonight Show, Conan O'Brien said, please, I implore you, do not be cynical. It's my least favorite characteristic. And he ended the show on that note. Cynicism. Don't think great of yourself. Don't think great of other people. And we've all been there sometimes. Now, what if you think you're awesome?

High opinion of self, bottom right. But you don't think everyone else is that good. Low opinion of others. Arrogant. That would be arrogant, right? We've probably all caught ourselves thinking that way sometimes.

What if you're the opposite? You think everyone else is great. We've touched on this a few times in this conversation, but you think you stink. High opinion of others, low opinion of yourself. Well, that would be insecure. And again, we're all, when you get back a group photo, what do you do? You look at the picture of you and you're like, oh my God, look at my hair. Oh my gosh. My double chin. My double chin. Everybody else looks great. And they're all like, oh, sorry, I didn't notice your double chin. I've been looking at, I was looking at my fat thighs. Nobody cares.

Everyone's looking at their, that's insecurity. And we've all been there too. Well, what is confidence? My definition is a high opinion of yourself and a high opinion of others. So it may or may not take a trip to a nude beach to figure this out, but we're all beautiful slash we're all ugly. We're all beautiful. We're

We're all wondrous, beautiful beings of love and energy who get to exist right here, right now as animals that we've been for three million years. We came from the water. It's nice to go back to that water and remember that. And I think holding onto that two by two in my head has been helpful for me when I've caught myself dashboard-like swerving between the other three boxes. I just carry with me. How can I have a high opinion of myself and a high opinion of others? I'm prone.

as I'm sure a lot of us are, to those feelings of insecurity, then they flip-flop into feelings of

of arrogance, then they may be flipped to cynicism. If I can think great of myself and great of other people, then I navigate life with more confidence. It helps me be more intentional when I'm choosing which of the three forms of success I want on the project, and therefore I'm living a more intentional and happy life because I'm deciding how it goes. I'm being conscious of it. It's just about awareness at the end of the day. - It's so easy to forget that we're fucking alive.

We're fucking alive. Like how incredible, how statistically improbable, how, and we just can't take this for granted and we have to live our lives. How would you end this? I mean, we talked about a lot of negative stuff today, a lot of positive stuff. What would you, you put a billboard up, what do you want everybody to take away? Yeah, yeah. First of all, I just want to say,

Like, you're great at questions. You're questions. You're just like, the reason it's fun to have a rolling conversation with you is because you're just such a great conversationalist. Thank you for the opportunity and for the, uh,

privilege of talking to you today in this wonderful space with these people recording us in front of this beautiful community oriented towards learning. I really don't take that lightly and I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. Very generous of you. I think that the three words I would plaster on the billboard are remember the lottery. Remember the lottery because you know what? At the end of the day, we have to remember that we've already won.

There are 115 billion people, Shane, who have ever lived in the world. If you're watching or listening to this right now, you're one of the 8 billion people who are alive today. Which means, by de facto, 107 billion of the other people are no longer here.

That's a 1 in 15 lottery that you've already won. It means, in other words, that 14 out of every 15 people, 14 out of every 15 people will never see another sunset. They'll never have another bowl of ice cream. They'll never kiss their kids goodnight again. You won the lottery. You're already here. If you happen to have a post-secondary education of any kind, you're one of 6% of people in the world who does.

It's a gift to be educated. And if you don't, and you're listening to this, you do. Because you have wonderful conversations. I'm going to add nauseam on this show. So to get the gift of education is a whole other gift. If you make more than $5,000 a year, you're above the world average. If you happen to make more than $50,000, you're in the top 0.05%. You know, we talk about the 1% like they're other people. No, they're us.

We are. We're lucky. And if you happen to live in a country where you trust the water that comes out of your taps, where you feel safe when you walk out your front door, where you can marry who you want or live where you're pleased, you know, that collective set of freedoms is rare. If you happen to be, and I'm guessing the majority of the people listening may, and I know not everybody is, so I want to be careful, but I want to just say, keep going down that opportunity curve. It's a one in 15 chance that you're alive today.

It's a six out of a hundred chance that you might have an education. You're in the top 1% if you're making over X dollars a year. And we keep going down that curve, we're lucky to be here in an entire universe that we've inspected as far as we can with as many cameras we can point, every distance directed with shutters that we can open for a year and come back with pictures and galaxies and radio transmissions. This is the only place we've ever found in the entire universe where

Life can exist and we happen to be alive at a day and an age where we can talk, where we can interact, and we can communicate with each other across time, across distance, across psychologies and spaces and cultures and languages. You and I could be talking right now and someone could be watching this in

Urdu and we could have been dead for a hundred years and it would still be going because we get to be alive today. Let's remember the lottery, Shane, and no matter what else, let's remember that we've already won. That's a perfect way to end this. I think I'm super grateful that we met. I think I won the lottery when we met. Thanks. You're very sweet. Thank you for the opportunity. It's been a wonderful chat. I really appreciate it.

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