When enough is enough | Andy Johns (ex-FB, Twitter, Quora)

31:23And that identity is what is completely rewired when somebody goes through that four step process. And as a result, everything that's built on top of that identity, it doesn't necessarily have to change, but it might. That feels like a reason somebody wouldn't want to go down this journey of, I don't want to change everything about myself. Yes, yeah, it's and this is kind of the power of the human mind that works or what someone referred to as the ego. You know, it's as soon as the ego senses that something wants to challenge it and to undermine its authority, it finds a way to push it away. It finds a way to ignore it because it is a very difficult process.

32:12This is, I now understand what some philosophers described as death before dying. You know, in this process of change that I've been going through, it's been the death of Yolmi, the death of Andy whose identity was entirely attached to succeeding.

32:37And that old Andy doesn't want to let go. It's been around for a few decades. It believes that it's there to protect me. This is a survival mechanism that's somewhat gone awry within the context of modern life. And so it doesn't want to let go. But that's what I've been doing. That's the process I've been going through is slowly but surely finding a way to take my fingers off the steering wheel and to let that old sense of self die. And then in doing so, create the room for what's next, whatever that may be, and come three years into the process of discovering what that will be. So we'll see. Thinking through these four steps, suffering sounds like people just do that naturally, potentially.

33:32And I feel like it gets hard at the understanding the source of that suffering. I guess one is that true or do people try to resist that suffering and are just like, nah, it's okay, it's okay, and they wait and uncle it. I think you're pretty spot on with it. Yeah, this dips into a lot of the ancient Eastern spiritual traditions. Just this recognition that life involves suffering. One way or another, there's going to be suffering. I think that is there's two types of suffering. There's the necessary stuff for suffering. Like we're going to get old and our bodies are going to hurt and we're going to have physical ailments and two things.

34:13And shit's just going to happen. And we're going to lose the people we love, all of us. And the 80 to 100 billion homo sapiens that lived before us gone through the same thing. And so there is necessary suffering in life for the sort of mandatory suffering. And then there's the unnecessary suffering, which is the suffering that is almost entirely and I think the argument can be made that it's entirely made up in our minds. This is the superpowers of the human mind gone awry again sort of in the modern context. So there's going to be a lot of suffering one way or another. I think if there's a goal or objective, it's to minimize the unnecessary suffering.

35:02But the the seeking of the truth part is very difficult. It takes years. You know, I don't there's a reason that again in some of these spiritual traditions, let's take Buddhism, for example, there's a reason that there's so much structure and discipline and there's a daily method that they adhere to because it turns out it takes daily practice in the same way that if you want to get extremely fit and climb Mount Everest, you know, that's not something you do by just getting off the couch. It takes sort of a dedication to it. And I think that the seeking of truth takes that kind of dedication.

35:45And that's again why I believe that the first step is almost always suffering because to undergo that process and personal transformation, which can be very difficult and it can feel like you're in a life raft and you've just pushed away from the shore completely untethered uncertain where you're floating. In order to work up the courage to get to that point, things typically have to get pretty bad. You say, I can't fucking do this anymore. I'm not going to live like this. Something's got to change. And so so much of that seeking of the truth is actually at first driven by intense fear. Fear of going back to how bad things were and feeling that bad again.

36:28Eventually the process changes tone when you move past the fear stage and you understand yourself enough and then you start to look forward optimistically towards the future where instead of just being driven by fear, you're also pulled forward by a vision for the future that inspires you. So that eventually comes. But to begin with, yes, this process of discovering the truth is very, very, very, very difficult and requires a personal commitment. It's not something anyone else can do for you. With that context in mind that it's very difficult. I imagine many people listening are like, yes, I have a lot of suffering that I'm going through.

37:12Life is hard. Work is hard. Work is too crazy, especially product managers and founders that listen to this podcast. I know. To all the BP's of product out there, I'm so sorry. I've been in our shoes. And so with that, say someone wanted to go down this path and understand the truth of what is the source of this suffering that you even describe as like unnecessary and made up, what would the first couple steps be of knowing that it's going to take years, potentially, I've had actually tried to understand this. Commonly in the West, you know, the first step that makes a lot of sense is you turn to somebody who's trained in helping you figure out what those truths are, which is a therapist or a psychologist or psychiatrist or a counselor.

37:55Sometimes people turn to religious or spiritual leaders because they can be quite gifted in this as well. That's the most common step. That's the first step that I turn to when I was just completely stricken by panic and terrified that I might harm myself. I said, I'm going to figure out what the hell is going on because I can't live feeling like this. And all I need to do is reach out to a therapist. And that is a wonderful first start because if anything, they're not going to have all the answers, but they can act like a router, whereas they're helping you understand yourself and they're really understanding you.

38:33They're thinking about, okay, who might this person also benefit from speaking with? Let's route them to this person that specializes in body -based works, somatic work. Let's send this person to somebody that specializes in nervous system management through breathwork or other things. So, seeking the therapist is a pretty good first step. I need advice on how to figure out who the right therapist or wrong therapist is for you. I know you've actually shared somewhere on LinkedIn ones that there's also a lot of disagreement within the mental health community of what is the right approach and what's the right solution.

39:13Yeah, it's kind of like speed dating at first because I would argue that the most important factor is that you feel safe. You know, think of animals can teach us so much about what it means to heal ourselves. Think about magic going to the pound and you go in there and there's a bunch of dogs that have been picked up off the street or that have been abandoned and the vast majority of them, they're a nervous wreck, right? Their tail is down in between their legs, they're punched over and they might be shaking, right? Their nervous system is completely overwhelmed. That is not the time to teach a dog tricks.

39:58When the dog still can't come out of the corner of the kennel, it is not the time to teach it how to set. And once that dog can make it into the arms of an owner that it feels safe with and loved by, that's when you see the dog transform and change and that's when you can teach it a lot because it's open and receptive to it. So that's number one. In my advice is you know, speed date if you've got the opportunity to and try out a few therapists and just go based on intuition. What just feels right to you, right? And you're going to want to fall into that feeling of comfort. Now a quick asterisk on that, of course, if you're in real distress, if you're in a bad place, just see whatever professional you can as soon as possible.

40:52That's what I did. I was fortunate to wear the first one that I saw. It was also fantastic. I ended up seeing many other specialists over the years, but the first one she was wonderful. So yeah, it's essential that you feel comfortable with them. I would also say this one's a little controversial, but you're going to want a therapist that is at least as intelligent, if not more intelligent than you, because I think part of that openness to learning from them and to feeling somewhat comfortable, but also feeling inspired and kind of looking forward to it as if sometimes they say things that make you say, oh shit, wow, wow.

41:37I never thought of that. That was smart, right? Or that was a wonderful insight. I don't think if you respect their intellectual abilities, then it's going to be difficult for them to help you. They may not be able to communicate on the same way of length. So you really want to look for that intuitive feeling of something that is safe and comfortable, ideally, if you can find somebody with some intellectual horsepower that matches your own. Honestly, I think the rest after that is just implementation details. If someone maybe isn't ready for a therapist and that's something about that, just kind of holds them back.

42:16Is there another route that you would recommend people take for it? Was it just go straight to a therapist? Absolutely. If you're not in a state of distress, but you feel like there's something to be figured out, there's an ancient technology known as pen and paper. At the end of the day, the seeking of the truth involves the seeking of a deep sense of self -understanding. If you can get into the daily practice of being able to sit down with pen and paper and write to yourself, to ask yourself questions, to really sit there and evaluate the thoughts that are running through your head. It is possible for somebody to use the term, I won't get into it, but to reach some state of bliss or enlightenment or some real spiritual awakening, it is possible for somebody to do that entirely on their own with just pen and paper and a quiet room.

43:20I know people that are bright at a deep place of self -love and self -understanding through those methods. I know a lot of others, including myself, where the writing to others was really the writing to myself 15 years ago. It was a way for me to continue to understand myself more deeply. So I think pen and paper is deeply, deeply overlooked and underrated as process. And say you get a pen and paper, is there some sort of guide or framework or something you'd point people to you to think through what to think about and how to approach this? Yeah, there are different ways of doing it. Some advocate for a completely unstructured approach because what you want is you don't want to turn it into a sign that you kind of want to feel your way into it.

44:10If something is bubbling up in your mind, just spit it out. Don't analyze why it's coming up. Just allow it to flow. That method certainly works. Sit down with no agenda. And on some days you'll write one sentence and that's enough. And on other days you'll write 10 pages and that's also enough. There's some magic to allowing the human mind to just work and to not interrupt it through some analytical process. On the flip side, if you want a one thing you can do is I'd like to start with, if the goal is to understand oneself, then one of the quickest ways of doing that is to quickly write down a list of simple bullet points of the most recent situations you can think of where you became most absolutely reactionary and emotional.

45:10You could have been having a political conversation with somebody and they said something that really just you know you felt like you just wanted to reach out and strangle them. You could have felt deeply insecure in a social setting. Just run through those scenarios where something disrupted what might have been your current state of presence and calmness. And when you identify those situations where there was some strong reaction that is very revealing because that wasn't a conscious thought process that led to the reaction. That was a knee jerk reaction. That was a reflex. If there's a reflex, then there's something that's underlying the reflex.

45:54And the question then asks is why did that happen? And then from there it's kind of an unstructured process. Keep asking, keep digging, keep asking, okay, if this happened, why did that happen? Well, and then write a little bit. Well, is that really the reason why? Was there something else? Like just keep working at it until you hit the truth. And you'll know what the truth is because it always feels either deeply uncomfortable or it feels like an epiphany. Well, for you that was recognizing that it was about your mom. There were many parts of it. At its core, at first it began with with a simple truth, which was, I went into the therapist, I was describing what I was feeling, I was describing the uncontrollable thoughts and mental imagery that I was experiencing.

46:53My sleep disruption, my pounding heart, everything else. And she said, yeah, you're having panic attacks. And just knowing like, oh, there's a thing. And it's called a panic attack. And starting at that basic truth was enough in the moment to just take a little bit of the edge off. And so this journey along the way is like there are dozens of truths and then hundreds of truths. And then every now and then it's punctuated by the big, holy shit, I never saw that coming kind of truth. And it's kind of just what the experience is. You know, that I had many, many truths about myself that I discovered before I hit some of the fundamental ones that were at the core of my subconscious.

47:48Following in that thread, what are signs that you're in need of the sort of transformation versus work is just stressful. Things are hard. I have some challenging meetings, which a lot of people go through on and off. I've had a lot of this. What are signs maybe you're burning out or something that requires like, wow, I really need to dig a lot deeper. There are day -to -day stresses that are normal and we just have to put up with. But then there's the other stuff that's kind of the flashing red alarm. For me, and one of the research and literature supports this too is, again, you can go back to animals.

48:29It's like when they're fundamental functions when their core behaviors of diet, exercise, playfulness, socialization, sleep. When those things get disrupted, it's a sign that there is something going on here that you need to take a look at. And so the same is true with people. If you're sleep always sucks. If your relationships are constantly strained or frequently strained. If your physical health is failing, there are so many ways that can be measured. So there's really no excuse for that to say, like, oh, I just didn't know. I'd say it's to look at those things. When those are suffering or when they're really out of whack.

49:26It's undeniable that there is something that is detrimental to your well -being that's going on right now. And your body is telling you, like, stop. Something needs to change. So that is number one to look at. Look at the fundamentals. Reflecting on my own situation. I almost had a heart attack at 35. And I got the classic talk from a Stanford cardiologist saying, you're just going to be another 40 -something -year -old CEO with a broken heart.

50:01The years of really poor sleep, the number of teeth that I had broken that I had to fix multiple times because for years, my grinding was so bad that I had to now two times over, had to completely redo all the teeth, all my molars, and then most of the front teeth as well. And I just continued to move forward even though my body was, again, throwing out all the signals. And for anyone who's listening to this, especially for the folks who haven't, like, go get the book, The Body, or Keeps the Score by Düsseld Vanderkulk. You know, it's a, he's a expert clinician who's worked with trauma patients for decades.

50:45And the entire book is basically one big message saying, like, hey, when mental health presents itself, look to the body because it's the body that is keeping the score on the score. It's the body that's the scoreboard. And it's the body that is actually holding on to all of this shit you've been carrying for years. And eventually, the body breaks in the form of chronic disease and illness and so on and so forth. Today's episode is brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours. The best way to see what Miro is all about and how we can help your team collaborate better is not to listen to me talk about it, but to go check it out for yourself.

51:27Go to Miro .com, slash Lenny. With the help of the Miro team, I created a super cool Miro board with two of my own favorite templates, my one -pager template and my managing up template, that you can plug in play and start using immediately with your team. I've also embedded a handful of my favorite templates that other people have published in the Miroverse. When you get to the board, you can also leave suggestions for the podcast, answer a question that I have for you, and generally just play around to get a sense of how it all works. Miro is a killer tool for brainstorming with your team, playing out your strategy, sharing user, research findings, capturing ideas, giving feedback on wireframes, and generally just collaborating with your colleagues.

52:07I actually used Miro to collaborate with the Miro team on creating my own board, and it was super fun and super easy. Go check it out at Miro .com slash Lenny. That's m -i -r -o -dot -com slash Lenny. We've talked about the suffering step than the understanding the truth of what is going on. Say someone sits down in a room, writes out what's going on as a subpoignant, like, oh wow, it's really this moment in my childhood that really led me to need to achieve and do all these things. The next step is self -compassion and recognizing it's not your fault. That sounds very easy on the surface. I understand this is not my fault.

52:50I know it's not that easy. How do you go about actually deeply doing that steps? It's likely this deeply internalized self -belief, and you can think of that as one of the deepest groups in the neural pathways in your mind. That was a case for me. So deep that you don't even realize that it's there. It's omnipresent. It's going to take time to rewire that, because what you're effectively trying to do is take an internal narrative and edit and rewrite that thing. This internal narrative is probably at a foothold in you for years or decades. It's reasonable to believe or to understand that. If I have not had a high opinion of myself for 30 years, that's not going to change overnight.

53:50For some people, it kind of miraculously does. That's not the norm. For most others, including myself, it starts with that truth stage, because with truth is the awareness. I understand that I have a low sense of self -worth and I understand that it plays out in all these ways. I have the awareness of it that now when I'm doing something that is a conditioned behavior or a conditioned response, born out of that deep self -belief or that negative poor belief, then when I spot it, there's an opportunity for me to intervene. It starts in the simple ways. For example, I had a boss once where he would come over and he would give me praise all the time.

54:38He was wonderful human being and I think I was doing a good job. One day, he swung by and he said, hey, amazing job. My response was, oh, yeah, I did my best. Then he looked at me and he said, hey, say thank you or your welcome. That's it. When somebody gives you a compliment, just say thanks, accept it. It's become a pattern of mine now that if somebody gives me a compliment, I look them in the eyes and I say thank you. I really try and embrace that little moment because all of those ways where you identify these little patterns, you intercept them and you choose to make a change to how your condition to behave in that moment.

55:29If you do that consistently enough and you keep practicing it and you keep it up every day, then you're developing a new internal narrative through all those little actions and it accumulates in ways that are pretty powerful. Every now and then, there are things that you can do that are more of a brute force method of driving at home. Some may find it through a Vipassana retreat, a seven to ten day silent retreat, which is agonizing if folks haven't tried to be that quiet. Things bubble up. You confront the stuff in your mind that in our day to day is easy to just keep it under the hood. Some find that through psychedelics.

56:17Some find that through somewhat extreme physical feats. There was a period in time where I didn't realize this at the time, but not only was I building my career, but I was running Ultramarathons.

56:33Looking back at that, I was like, yeah, there I was, another desperate attempt to feel worthy, but I also recognized now that that was medicine for me. Me going out onto a remote mountain range for five hours every Saturday and just running well beyond the point of discomfort was consistently cathartic for me. I would cry at the end of almost every single one of those runs.

57:05It's just a recap. It's in those little moments. It's sometimes in those big moments too, but it begins with the awareness based on truth and then you work with. There are some famous figures that you can turn to. For example, Eckhart Toley. He wrote the power of now, which he's probably most famous for. He's a great Western spiritual teacher of Eastern traditions. He went through immense suffering himself. Actually, the suffering was so great that for him, it led to us somewhat sudden and spontaneous collapse of his sense of identity. Doctors would probably say psychosis, and what he actually had was spiritual liberation, liberation from his mind.

57:59But he describes it himself and reading his book and listening to some of his lectures and talking about his own journey. He wrote this at, I think, in the first chapter or the preface of the power of now, when he described the suffering that he was experiencing and the sudden collapse of his sense of identity and then waking up the next day and feeling this deep sense of peace and freedom for the first time in his life. But then his journey continued to unfold. He eventually started to research to try and understand what had just happened to me, what experience did I have, and sort of dot, dot, dot.

58:43Seven years later, he woke up one day and realized he was an all -spiritual teacher. Seven years. And it's not that the journey had ended. But to use a metaphor of two mountains and a valley, that first mountain in his life, when he got off of that mountain, and he entered this valley between the first mountain of life and the second mountain of life, the valley that he was in, that sat between the old sense of self, and then this new sense of self as a spiritual teacher, that valley was seven years for him. There are many other examples I can pull up like that, including Siddhartha Gautama, Lord Buddha, himself.

59:29That wasn't a couple weeks or a couple of months his journey towards liberation from his own mind. If I can recall, that was also a seven or eight year journey. So these big shifts on a cosmic universal scale, it's instantaneous, right? On the scale of... On the scale of... Yeah, on the scale of 13 billion years, it's instant. But from our perspective, it's not. It feels a lot longer than that. I want to close the loop on these four steps they shared. And the one we haven't talked about yet is the last one, which is building compassion towards others. How do you go about that just broadly? I know we're not going to solve that problem for people in a podcast.

1:00:14For me, my experience was that it kind of happened automatically. When you do the first three, it is the result. It's the thing that comes out of step number three itself. Because again, when you dig deep enough and you keep searching for the truth, you're like Captain Ahab going down with the white whale and Moby Dick, that is what that book is about. It's not about a fisherman going after a whale. This is the author himself through a story talking about his own journey of emotional and spiritual liberation. There are many people that would have been experts and historians that might disagree with that.

1:01:02And I would disagree with them. That is the story of seeking the truth at all costs to liberate oneself, including being willing to die for that whale metaphorically. Because at the end of the book, they don't really reveal, did Ahab actually go down with the whale and never come back? Maybe he didn't. Maybe he didn't. And so, when you have suffered enough and the search for the truth becomes the only thing that matters and that truth leads you to understanding that it's okay. I can accept myself for who I am. It's not all my fault. When that has been done in earnest and when you feel those moments of love for yourself, it suddenly changes how you see everybody else.

1:02:03For me, step four was the easiest because it just happened. It happened after eight years, nine years of my own on and off mental health journey, but it finally happened. People who are listening to this say they're a VP of product and they're like, I don't want to become a spiritual teacher. I want to stay on this path. I want to have a successful career. I want to continue to make a bunch of money. How often do you find there's a path to stay on that path with a rejigering of I .C. the world? Or does it, if you're suffering enough, does it almost always lead to something completely different in your experience?

1:02:45Again, it's a spectrum. What I've experienced is that the vast majority of people who feel some tug to undergo a process of change, I'd say 90, 95 % of the time, pretty confidently, I can say that those changes are more of the micro transitions. It's okay, let me change my job. Let me downsize my house. Let me break up with my partner. Still hard things. And for them, that may be all that is needed necessary. There's no moral judgment on my side about, everyone's got to dive into the deep end. That's certainly not the case and I'm not advocating for it. I honestly don't even know if it's a choice.

1:03:38There's a part of me that based on some of the experiences I've had sort of believes that it was somewhat preordained and that this was going to happen for me. But it's in the minority of cases where the radical transformation of one's sense of identity takes place. It's not common. My general sense is it's definitely less than 1 % of the population.

1:04:06I suspect that's just kind of the way things are. One of those ends up being Buddha and one of those ends up being Andy Johns. Another popular figure in Western spirituality is Payma Chogdran, she's got a lot of great books. One of them is titled When Things Fall Apart. So in the first books I read, When Things Fall Apart for Me. And the first story, actually she used to live in Berkeley, I think. American woman, she was married. First marriage didn't work out. She got married again. Second one didn't work out. It ended in somewhat sudden and expected in catastrophic fashion. And here she is with a few children and a broken heart again, a deep emotional suffering.

1:05:00And that suffering was so great that it led her to ultimately say, I must pursue these teachings and the spiritual tradition that I'm starting to wake up to in the Eastern traditions, Buddhism in particular, because she had suffered so much that she needed to find liberation from that. And in her case that even meant separating not all the time, but a significant portion of her time away from her own children, who if I recall correctly were sort of early teens, sort of time frame. But now I think that Paymatrachodron is the only female Buddhist non in all of North America and is a very well -known spiritual teacher.

1:05:51And I also thank her journey with some around seven or eight years. And again, that's just a valley between two mountains. truthfully, the journey continues for the rest of your life. But just another example I wanted to share. There are some obvious reasons why going down this path is difficult, why making change is hard. What else would you say holds people back for making a big change in their life? And maybe on the flip side is just how do you allow change to happen? A significant thing that holds people back from change is the inertia of civilization. Because we all experience a fundamental conflict in our life.

1:06:34Because when we're born, we have many needs, but there are two substantial needs that are immutable in everyone, especially children. The first need is the need for love, acceptance, and connection for mammals. We have one of the longest gestation periods of the entire animal kingdom. And even when we're born, we're helpless, we can't survive. We need nurturing for many, many more years afterwards in order to survive. And that goes hand in hand with our need for connection. So we're biologically hardwired to need to be accepted and connected. Because it's the most essential thing to survival, more essential than water.

1:07:30And so we're born with that need. Yet at the same time, we're also born as unique individuals. I read a study where the scientists sort of estimated the probability that two sperm or two egg would be genetically identical. And for context, I think the average man generates in their primes somewhere around between 10 to 100 million sperm a day. So we generate a lot of sperm in our lifetime. And the math that they came up with was that the probability of two sperm being identical is roughly 10 to the 15th power, which is a million times greater than the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And there's somewhere between 100 to 400 billion stars in the galaxy.

1:08:16So it's a million times greater than that. So all that is to say is when you are born, you are unique. There's never been a you before, ever. And it's going to be a really, really long time or another dimension before another one of you shows up again. And then further through the socialization of life, we all have unique experiences. And those experiences are passed through this unique prism of our own mind and genetics to where we're further accentuated as individuals. So we're born with this fundamental need to be connected and to be loved. But we're also born with this need to be ourselves and to express ourselves.

1:08:58What ends up happening though is the world that you're born into eventually conditions you will weigh from the unique individual that you were. And that is the function of society. Society operates because enough people choose to agree on the same beliefs and ideas around the style of education, of raising children, of city planning, of millions of things. And so society is the substrate of society or the adhesive of it is shared belief. And so that's why I say the inertia of civilization or I should have said the inertia of society is because you're born into a world that begins to condition you at a very early age to act a certain way and not act a certain way.

1:09:46Believe some things and don't believe others. Why am I a San Francisco Giants fan? Well, because I grew up in a Giants family. It's not like I was two years old and I picked a Giants. It doesn't work that way. What ends up happening then is it in this begins again really young you're two, three, four, five years old. The world around you, namely the adults in the world, start telling you who to be. And it begins to challenge or run into conflict with that individuality. But because our fear of not being accepted and loved is so great that what do we end up doing? We choose to push down our individuality in exchange for being accepted by the pack.

1:10:30Beginning with our parents and their friends and then our teachers and then our bosses and all of the other sort of dimensions of society. And so we lose who we were before the world told us who to be. Yeah, it's actually a Carl Jung quote, you know, the world will ask you who you are and if you don't know, it'll tell you. And so I would say that that is the number one reason why transformation doesn't take place. It's because a long time ago we made that exchange to forego or individuality in order to be accepted by others because of that deep primal need for love and acceptance. And in order to undertake that process of personal transformation, one of the truths you have to realize is that truth.

1:11:28That truth that you are in large part the way you are because of what the world told you to be. And it's making the choice consciously to then say, fuck that and I'm going to go against the grain and I'm going to now tell the world that I don't want its influence on me anymore. And I will like Moby Dick or like A have going down with the white whale, I am willing to die to return to my individuality and to break free and to be who I want to be in the face of the currents around us regarding the messages around how we should think live acting fuel. So that is the thing that prevents transformation.

1:12:18The simple thing is you could say fear. But what is the fear? That is the fear. It's to say I'm going to walk my own path now and I'm going to be who I want to be and I'm going to discover who I was before the world told me who to be. And by doing so I run the risk that I'm not going to be accepted anymore. That's terrifying. And because it's so terrifying, I imagine that's why the suffering is so important to really feel that because otherwise why would you go down that path? It feels very hard. Yeah, and that gets to my point earlier around I'm not entirely convinced that this is an act of free will on my part.

1:13:05There have been moments of me intervening and acting with free will. But I believe that there are also undercurrents that would fall into the realm of superstition for a lot of folks that this is the path that was laid out in front of me even before I was born. Kind of along those same lines you wrote in one of your writings that at the end of the day you're on your own to find what ends up alleviating your psychological suffering. Can you speak to that? Yeah, that really ties in with this point of the uniqueness of people. You have to find what works for you. For some people it's going to be the ice bath thing.

1:13:55For others it's not. Last year a quick anecdote, I spent a month working at an animal sanctuary in northern Thailand for abused animals and neglected animals. In this place is amazing. They take in anything and they say we'll find a way. That's what they do so they have hundreds and hundreds of animals including a large herd of elephants which is pretty amazing. There was a worker there who I met and just by the expression on his face I could tell that this was a liberated man. This was somebody who had figured out something that was contributing to his deep sense of peace. I wanted to talk with him.

1:14:46I said hey something tells me that you figured out the secret to life and I like to chat. We talked and it turned out that half the time he was a farmer. He had a small little farm and an acre up on a hill in the mountains and he'd work at his farm half the time and the other half he would then go and work at the animal sanctuary and he was a practicing Buddhist and one of the things he said to me really stood out he used a simple analogy. He said everyone's trying to make it the Bangkok. The problem is they're getting to Bangkok by following somebody else's road. The whole point is to find your own path to Bangkok and he was making that same point or a similar point of you've got to find your own way.

1:15:38That is the message and for me I take that as maybe the most fundamental message and looking back at the story of the original Buddha himself was sure the teachings, the traditions, everything that's formed around his teachings has power and merit to it but I look at what he did. He was born as a prince into a royal family. Something wasn't right and he was seeking the truth behind this anguish and this unfulfillment and there was something inside of him that said I must seek the answer because this can't growing up in this sheltered life as a prince this can't be the answer so he left it all behind including his wife and child and then he lived as an ascetic for for years, nearly dying close to starvation.

1:16:46He did that for years and eventually realized well that's not the answer either and then he sort of famously made his way to the Bodhi tree and sat under it and meditated for 40 -41 days. I can't recall what it was a long time and then he had his enlightenment and out of that came one of the teachings which is known as the middle way. It's not about being a prince, it's not about being poor, there's something in between. He found that was his path to Bangkok and you could walk that path and maybe it'll teach you something or it'll lead you nowhere because it's not your own path. I think that's the point.

1:17:32Andy, what a beautiful way to wrap up our conversation before we do. Is there anything else you want to share that you want to leave listeners with and then also I'm just curious how you're doing these days. Sure, sure. Well let me answer the first one. A message to leave to folks. I have to imagine that there's a lot of high performers, successful folks out there. Some of you you may feel like you're on the verge of answering a call towards a new chapter in life or towards finding a way out of whatever situation you're in that you don't want to be in anymore. The thing I guess I would say to you is that having undergone some change myself, all I can promise you is that it's going to be in some ways the best thing that's ever happened to you but also the worst thing that's ever happened to you.

1:18:30But those are the experiences that define a life. And if you feel that call inside of you to seek a new way of living, just know that you're not the only one out there doing it and that there are others out there such as myself and that I can always be reached. So I wish you a happy journey and just know that things are going to be okay. Now the second question, what am I up to nowadays? How are you doing on this journey? You know I'm good. I still have my ups and downs. I've I've arrived at an interesting part in my journey where it's something that I'm practicing now and I still don't quite have to hang a bit and I'll use one more metaphor.

1:19:25You know I think the way that I approached the first part of my life was as if life was a big mountain to be climbed where you know you're trying to head up at Bristol under this assumption that once you get to the top you're going to have this bliss that will sort of persist or that will make you feel that you had a life well lived and that that was the answer. But what I experienced was that once I got to the top of one mountain then I had to find the top of another and another and another and although you see and do some amazing things along the way at some point it's too exhausting. At some point you may really get yourself into trouble and you might not survive.

1:20:12The vast majority of people who die on Mount Everest actually die on the way down not on the way up. You don't save anything for the return home I think is the point. And instead of pursuing my life now as a mountain to be climbed in the hopes that reaching the top will make me feel good again. I'm instead trying to flip down river. So for example if you go whitewater rafting they'll give you a little safety crash course at the beginning. You know to say here's how you paddle and here's put your best on. One of the things I'll ask you is what do I do if I fall overboard especially if I fall overboard into the rapids or the cold water.

1:20:59And this is maybe the most important thing they teach because commonly what happens if you're in you know sizable enough rapids and you fall overboard the tendency is to freak out and to fight the current. And when people freak out in the water especially when the water is choppy that's when they get in trouble. The thing they teach you to do is instead you sort of go into mummy mode right you lay back you cross your arms across your chest and you stick your feet out like you're a mummy and you do the opposite of fighting the current. You allow the current to take you where it's trying to take you.

1:21:38And for me I actually find that I believe that that's a more fitting metaphor for life. It's possible that there's something amazing for us downstream. So long as we're willing to surrender and just let go to turn off the intellectual mind a bit to quit trying to plan as if you can predict the future. To quit thinking about all the edge cases and trying to optimize our life which I think is bunch of bullshit. It's possible that if you just relax and you instead pay attention to the signals around you you feel where the current is trying to take you. Maybe towards a potential life partner. Maybe away from an oppressive work environment.

1:22:27Maybe towards a place to live that is more common peaceful. Whatever it may be if you if you've really tuned in with yourself and pay attention to that current and you relax into it you'll arrive at a destination that you were meant for. And in a sense that's what I did that is sort of brought me to this conversation today instead of talking about investing in companies and what have you. I'm instead trying to connect with people on an entirely different level and help them make their own way downstream so to speak. So for me nowadays that's kind of how I'm living. At the moment I'm actually in Vietnam just got here about 10 days ago because it seemed like the current of life was taking me here right now.

1:23:24And it's likely that it's just the next lily pad towards wherever else I'm heading to but I guess I'm in the mindset now or I'm willing to just surrender and see how it unfolds. And the metaphor for that is they lost your luggage on the way to Vietnam and we had to push back this recording a week. Yeah that's right. That's right. Yeah my my luggage was half a world away from me and so when that happened you know what could I do I just said okay well I have shorts in a shirt on me that I can wear from the next three or four days and that's what I did. Amazing. Andy I think this might end up being one of the most meaningful episodes of the podcast.

1:24:04I think it's gonna end up being a Trojan horse for people are coming here for advice optimizing their product and growth and they'll updub rethinking their whole life. Hopefully in a good way maybe cost them suffering maybe help people through suffering. Thank you Andy so much for being here. Two final questions you said people could reach out if they're going down this path and maybe need some help or advice. So what's the best way for people to reach out and then how can listeners be useful to you? Sure a couple of ways. And you can find me on Twitter my username is clues .life so COUESDOTLIFE you can also find me on LinkedIn search for Andrew Johns you'll find me on there and you can check out my website clues .life it's a basic MVP but it's sort of the NART project that's in process and so those are a couple of ways that you can reach out and in terms of ways they can help you can't always tell who you're helping and when I sit behind my laptop and I write and I send my messages out into the world other than getting some thumbs up here and there you don't always know what impact you're having and sometimes it's good to hear you know because again for me this is part of me rewriting that internal narrative where I'm trying to do more work for the benefit of others as opposed to what it does from my bank account so you know if part of this message has been beneficial to you it would certainly put wind in my sales to hear that so that would be one way to hold.

1:25:50What a great answer. Yeah so let's blow up the YouTube comments and send you some DMs and LinkedIn messages if people find this valuable. Andy thank you again so much for being here. Well yeah I appreciate it man thank you. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.