Unstressable with Corey Keyes - The Path to Flourishing

33:07If you leave it behind, I don't know what's left. Do you think your job is really interested in whether you donate money and are kind and compassionate unless it helps their bottom line? not sure i don't know yeah oh maybe we know of course the answer is a no uh you know it is if it wasn't tax deductible it wouldn't have been spent without mentioning you know i worked in many corporate structures in my life where there is a panic on the finance side that reminds all of the employees of the what did we call it the sharing program so basically that the company will donate the same amount that you donate to charity.

33:51So they double, right? And that happens really before the time of the end of the tax year. It's because like we really need to get rid of some money because it will improve our tax position. And you can't blame corporates for that. This is, corporates are organisms that are built for profit. So they perform for profit. It's incredible though, because we're aligned fully. Believe it or not, normally my very last chapter of every book is the chapter where I want people to really focus the most because if they made it all the way to the end of the book, then they're really ready for the tough one.

34:24And the tough one was spiritual stress, was the idea that we live in a world where you need to flourish, you need to sort of water both sides of you. And sadly, becoming a nun, you know, not following any religion is the trend because, right, like you rightly said, religion and all spiritual teachings by definition are there to make you a better person in terms of your morality. And by definition, that means that those who represent religion, if they don't perform on par with that moral standard, by definition, they shouldn't be, you know, representing that religion because they defy the very core of it.

35:06So because they don't represent it, they shouldn't be the measure for which you start to judge the religion. That's one side. The other side, of course, is a lot of people don't want to be controlled, don't want to be told what to do. And, you know, some religion institutions push so hard to try to make you perfect. Right. And as a result, people go like, I don't want any of that control. But the truth is, I always thought that don't kill your brother is a very good idea if told to my brother too. right it's like it's not like they picked me out and said don't steal they looked at everyone else and said don't steal because it would be really bad if i'm on i'm the only one that's not stealing right you know so so there is there is value in it vitamin s let's call it that that's i think interesting that you you bring it as the first one what other practices to flourish well the Another way in which you can take a stand in this world that I think seems to want to take away that person you want to be and replace it with something else is really working on connection.

36:17We're talking a lot about connection and relationships and problems of loneliness these days, and for good reason. But I make the point that there's three indicators in my conception of languishing and flourishing that are really important when you think about connecting better. And that is prioritize warm, trusting relationships. Yeah. If you don't, right? Quality. This is all about quality over quantity. The second is prioritize a sense of belonging. There is a place and a community for all of us. We haven't found it, or we need to work on all of ourselves to create a more inclusive space where people belong.

37:03And then the third is this sense of mattering, or what I call social contribution, that you're needed by other people. Because when we're needed, we feel necessary and we do good things. We feel like good people. And I remember reading the book Tribe by Sebastian Junger. He starts out the book, right? He says the modern world is hard on people because it makes us all feel from the beginning of our life unnecessary. And we need to fix that. So connections are where we feel necessary, needed, a part of something. And I just read a Deloitte consulting survey from 2023, and almost 50 % of employees said they don't have time for their family and friends.

37:59They don't have time. So, again, we're trading in the things we need to flourish because we don't realize we're giving our entire life to somebody or something else called the corporation or the job. And I'm not here to judge that we don't all need work. But who said that work required us to sacrifice everything, our well-being, our family, our friends, our belonging, our sense of mattering in our community? And it seems that we're just giving that away without even knowing it. I don't know, but it seems like it. So that's the second vitamin. And you take a stand and you say, in my life, I want on a regular basis to be around people, places where I belong, I matter, and where there's warmth and trust.

38:53I love that so much. When you think about the corporate world, I have to say this openly because I was a very, very senior corporate executive. I ran half of Google for a long time. And then I was the chief business officer of Google X. And I will tell you openly, it is not working. If you work in a place that doesn't contradict your moral compass, it's not working that actually takes away your ability to connect and find those beautiful, we call it vitamin C, trustworthy, trusting, relationships, loving that basically where you matter. it is overdoing working because at the end of the day i don't remember who said that you know work expands to fit the time available for it right and so from one side if you're just going to work in the morning and saying yeah i'm gonna leave at 9 p.m anyway you just find enough meetings to attend and enough emails to respond to.

40:00And 90 % of them are not that important. You could have skipped them. You just don't skip them because you're too serious about work, right? I think most people sadly define their life by their work, define their worth, the feeling that they matter by their work. And as a result, they end up running around like crazy and wasting so many hours that they could have saved, not because they have to go to work to make money to, you know, to put food on the table, but because they overdo that. And if they had chosen to prioritize relationships and connections on top of that, I remember vividly, I used to, when my daughter lived in Montreal and I was working between Dubai and California, the tech culture doesn't understand weekends and doesn't understand evenings and so on and so forth.

40:52And I would pre-plan times where I would fly to Montreal to be with my daughter. And sometimes you get a very high up CEO meeting or a very high up whatever, you know, head of state wants to discuss something. And my response used to be very, very cliche. Oh, I'm so sorry. I have an overlapping appointment at the time. Is there any possibility to find another time? And believe it or not, most of the time they'll say, sure, when works for you? And I'd say Monday at noon and they'll say, sure, Monday at noon works too. Right. But it's that intention that my connection health matters, that, you know, being with those that I love matters, that changes everything, I think.

41:39And I love the point you're making that in some workplaces and at some levels, the thought of rearranging an appointment or rescheduling anything because you want to be with family and saying it openly would probably not be as acceptable simple but what you said was i have an overlapping i didn't say you wouldn't say family because it's a remarkable thing for some reason some cultures are better at this and then others i remember in norway being there and sitting down about five o 'clock. I wasn't telling you. Yes, he said they were sitting down to talk about their tenure or promotion. And the man behind the desk said, well, we can do this tomorrow.

42:30Let's reschedule. And he said, well, why? Well, I have dinner and I have to go home and be with my family. That's more important. And I think this was an American talking to him. And he thought, oh, how rude. Why don't you just, I'm like, oh my God. How remarkable. How remarkable. Yeah. And I'm thinking to myself, you just reminded me as well of a study that I talk about in the book about three medical specialties that are very demanding. So they have a lot of challenge and a lot of demands. One of which is obstetrics and gynecology. And what the study found was it wasn't the level of demands or stress and adversity that you experienced that determined whether you languished or flourished.

43:24It was whether you worked in a supportive or unsupportive work environment. Yeah. So if you're working in a very demanding place, you can deal with it. If you have connections with your employees that are calm and pleasant and you get along. where your co-workers understand we all have bad days, where you have co-workers and bosses that say, I'll be there when you have a bad day and I know you'll be there for me as well. And then they have collegiality, trust, warmth, and all these other good things. It's not that people can't do hard. It's just that they can't do hard when there's no care or concern or warmth or relationships.

44:07So there are two sides to this, right? Because there is connection at work as well. When we wrote Unstressable the first time we had, we had three chapters we had to remove because the book was very, very long. But one of them was about stress at work. And at work, I've had 27 years in corporate America. So, you know, I'm like, unfortunately, soaking with the corporate politics and the corporate demands and the whole rat race. And I have to say, as I sat down to write, the one thing that made my departments a lot happier than other departments was that we treated each other as humans, not as colleagues, which is so different, right?

44:50So, you know, the primary basis for which you're dealing with someone who is in the legal department is he or she is a human who has children, who has interests, who may be having a bad day and so on and so forth. And you try to establish that human connection before the work connection. And that made a massive, massive, massive difference. But at the same time, I'll have to go back and say, I hosted here on my podcast, one of my dearest friends, Elizabeth Day, wrote a book called Friendaholic. And she was talking about, you know the concept of the Danbar numbers, right? That we, a typical human can only connect to, I think 150 people and that you can only have a very close network of five.

45:39And it's quite interesting that even though for most of us, if I told you who are your five, you'll very quickly remember the top three and maybe think a little bit to get to the fourth and fifth. But then when you measure the time you give to those five, as opposed to the time you give to the rest of the 150, you realize you're doing a very bad job at it, right? And I think that really, you want human connections at work, but you have to prioritize the connections to those who are closest to you. Yeah. It's interesting because I think at work, the more we understand that we have lives beyond work, we treat each other more human.

46:20I just watched a movie called Ghost Town with Ricky Gervais as a dentist. And his colleague, his character is this person who wants nothing to do with people when he's done with work. Or he doesn't even want to associate with his co-workers. And his co-worker just had a baby. And they're having a party in the office. And he invites Ricky, the character, to come. But Ricky doesn't. And he sneaks out of the office because when he's done with work, he wants to get the heck out of there. And the whole point of the movie is that he dies for about seven minutes and he can see all the ghosts in New York.

47:01He comes back to life. But all these ghosts are there trying to repair and finish up unfinished business with important people. and he ends up learning that relationships and treating each other human is the essence of everything but it takes work it takes time right that's why we can only have about five really close meaningful relationships it takes time it takes work and he didn't want to do any of that but that other character was so um open and wanted to be human at his workplace how how do you deal with emotions, Corey? So a big part of how we sort of languish is we get stuck in those cycles of, I don't want to call them irrational because I believe that emotions, if you trace the root of them are rational, but how do you deal with them?

48:02Here's where I think I've learned the most from a spiritual tradition it wasn't my yoga but being around people who were deeply involved in buddhism which buddhism sect did you study some of it was zen sodo zen and others but it was more than that there are several others that i knew people doing and i just love the fact that this reminds me of the rumi poem as well guest house you welcome them all in yeah because they could be there to do you a service and clear out. But you've got to, you can't resist because that's what acceptance commitment therapy makes very clear. If you try to suppress and resist, especially the negative stuff, you're not going to do well with the good stuff either.

48:51You're going to be very consumptive with the good stuff and try to be selective. But like Rumi says, welcome them all in because they're going to be there just as guests are. They're there for a day, and then they leave. Yeah. They're gone. And they might be there to teach you something. Always. Always, always. And our mindsets are so important. I love the research on mindsets. They're not the answer to everything. They're not the solution to everything. But boy, I've had to learn to keep my mindsets in check. Because when I was talking about this chapter in play, I found out that some people don't play because they think it's a waste of time.

49:34And when you see something as a waste of time, even if you do it, you won't get the joy. And it's amazing the mindsets we take to all emotions. We don't want the negative stuff. We just want the positive stuff. But some cultures in the Far East are encouraged. Well, you always have to be prepared. Every day is a mixture. Don't get too happy because you're going to also experience sadness and other negative emotions. So that's life. So I just love the point you're bringing out is that, and I had to learn this. I couldn't deny my trauma. I had to turn around and stop looking in my rearview mirror and deal with it.

50:18Because those negative things kept coming back, and I didn't want to experience them. And the more I pushed them the way, the stronger they got, and the more gravity they had on me. And every time I was flourishing, suddenly something would come along and boom, I would be totally derailed, off languishing again. And I would wonder, I'd look around and say, how did that happen? I wasn't prepared. Now I'm a little more prepared for it. You take the good with the bad and try to learn from everything. Yeah, I recall one of my favorite conversations on this podcast was Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, who wrote a book that was called The Gift of Anger.

51:09Now it's so clear to me, but when I had him on the podcast, I wasn't very well prepared. I hadn't read the book. And so my first question to him was like, how can anger be a gift? Like, what are you talking about? And he said, well, anger is an energy, right? You can use it to stand up and hit someone in the face, or you can use it to stand up and make a speech that changes the world. It's your choice. There is no polarity to the emotion. And I think when you're describing the good ones and the bad ones, there's really no polarity to the emotion. It makes you feel bad, or it makes you feel good, but in its pure form, it's just energy that is driving you to either learn something or change something or heal something, right?

51:52Exactly. And it's quite interesting how we, again, we wrote extensively about emotional stress in Unstressable and the idea that emotions don't speak as clearly as words. They're subtle, you know, they're blended. You have to really, really pay attention. And sadly in the real world, the modern world, we say, no, no, no, ignore them altogether, right? They make you weaker. They make you irrational. They make you unpredictable. but that's not true at all. Emotions are additional energies that make you much stronger, okay? If you understand the root of them, they make you even more rational, more driven, more focused because you know what is happening.

52:37It's just the reaction to them that can be negative or positive. You can let them hurt you or energize you. You can use them to hurt or to build, right? Yes. You can be reactive or you can choose to respond as well. And you've also reminded me of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who wrote about gut feelings. Yes. The ability to have these subtle emotions are a way of, it's not just feeling isn't just separate from thinking, it's primordial thinking. When you engage in feeling, you're giving your rationality a chance to succeed because you're reducing the amount of things from which you have to choose so that your rational mind isn't overwhelmed.

53:31Rationality without feeling is impossible. He makes the point because when you lose the ability to have these gut feelings, you make bad decisions because you're overwhelmed. realm rationality can't deal with it yeah so emotions do what you're talking about they steer you away from obvious bad choices and get that off the table and then give you a subset of all possible choices that are the most likely for success and your rationality then chooses i think people don't understand that the smartest part of who we are is our heart really i mean it's actually going back to religion, one of the most beautiful parts of the Islamic scripture, I don't want to quote it wrong, but it basically says something like those who lose their way do not have hearts that are pure enough to reason, which is quite interesting that reasoning is associated with the heart, right?

54:40In my mind, emotions are this very complex batch processing in the back end. For you to use reason and logic, you have to use your analytical brain, which is capable of crunching a reasonable amount of data, but not endless amounts of data. And you have to just use that data to make a decision. Your emotions are basically telling you, look, I don't have the time to explain to you how how many billions of gigabytes I have processed here, but this doesn't feel right. Okay. And I'm just giving you this piece of information. This doesn't feel right. So that you include in your rational thinking, trust it.

55:20Right. And when, you know, when we shut that down, we are so much dumber because we're not able to include the essence of a billion gigabytes of data processing that comes in the form of an emotion. And we shut it down. and you know like like the beautiful book the body keeps the score basically we shut it down we keep it in our body we push it down to our knees and then push it a little more so that we let more traumas and more emotions haunt us for a long time and that doesn't work at all no yeah no and i think the point of about emotions is so important and at the same time And it reminds me of a finding that I think will surprise some people that I talk about in the book.

56:09And that is we all tend to think that happiness is sort of the end goal and the gold standard. And I'm not against happiness. I'm not against the happiness report and monitoring people's feelings. But you can prioritize happiness in such a way that it has no connection to meaning in life and purpose and belonging and all those other aspects of functioning well. And in fact, I found that 22 % of college students are flourishing in terms of feeling good, but they're not functioning well. And they have five times the rate of mental illness. It's the young people who feel good about their life because they're functioning well.

56:52I got it. Yeah. Right. So we can also go to the opposite extreme where we don't push things away. We pursue happiness thinking it alone is where we want to be. But happiness is a result and should be viewed as a result of meaningful accomplishments, a result of a good life. You can't have it alone and untethered because if it is untethered to meaning and purpose and all those other things that go into flourishing. It's not a kind of happiness that's good for you. The happiness that's good for you comes along. I think it's a circular reference. It's a bit like all of the other emotions. Feeling unhappy is a signal that tells you you're not aligned, you're not in the right place, right?

57:38You're using happiness as a sort of a dipstick to tell you, no, no, we're okay here. is basically, you know, again, crunching all that's happening in your life. If you feel peaceful and contented and balanced, that basically is a good indicator that you're aligned, that you're doing well. And, you know, it is not a purpose. In my work, actually, I normally call it the means to a purpose, right? So it's almost like a lifestyle. You live peaceful and contented so that you can actually focus on the stuff that matters, such as living a life of purpose or being connected and so on. Can I ask you about play?

58:22I can't let that one go. I mean, you sort of hinted there. But once again, I think most people who know me closely call me his silliness, really. Like, you know, I'm such a kid and I really enjoy playing, You know, really playing as an adult, enjoying what I do in a way that is fun and interesting and challenging and so on. But a lot of people will say, oh, play is a, you're not serious, you're not reliable, you're not dependable. What's your view on that? Well, I think as two things happen when we become adults, especially it seems in this so-called modern world where we, time becomes commodified.

59:08modified, right? It's another commodity. And people will say time is money, literally. And so if you're not using your time for things that have value, value in an economic sense, you seem to be wasting your time as an adult. And yet we don't lose the need as adults for play, because play takes us out of that commodity of time. It puts us back just in the world where we do things because they're just fun. Just fun. And it needs to be there because we're also creatures that need to flex the muscle of our ability to imagine, right? We do that as children. we actually do play imaginary. As adults, our imagination gets translated into goals and things in the future.

1:00:07But in order to even dream a different future for yourself, you do have to be able to be childlike and imagine something that's not there. And so play is so important for us to continue to imagine better places and better things for us and the people we love. I found it interesting. I don't know if you remember. I talk about the guy who created pinball machines, the first one. And did you know that pinball machines were created during the Great Depression to help people feel a sense of accomplishment? Amazing. He was asked, what makes a game good? And he said three things. It provides people with a sense of accomplishment.

1:00:59It has cause and effects, which means it requires the player to use and develop skill in order to accomplish goals. And third, it makes people feel that what they do matters. He's talking about a game. And yet, what is he talking about? The recipe for success. We have to feel that we are the cause and effect of things, that we can accomplish things, and that what we do matters. Who would have thought? A silly game like pinball. Huh. But games and play do so much for us that we don't appreciate things like that. And they do that for adults, not just children. It's funny because we know for a fact that anything that was gamified when you were a child helped you learn more, helped you achieve more, helped you really connect deeper.

1:01:58I remember when my kids were studying chemistry, I used to make little songs about all of the elements. So my daughter would remember which was very, very, very funny thing in Arabic, but it basically is the symbols of hydrogen and so on and oxygen and so on. And so you can remember each of them properly. And as an adult, I gamify everything. I mean, I think there is no reduction in productivity. There is only a reduction of your perception of yourself if you have fun doing what you're doing. I don't understand why people would not have fun doing something difficult. Yeah, it's interesting because the point you're making here reminds me that somehow we do better when we forget about ourself.

1:02:50Yeah. Play kind of says, okay i i'm not going to be uh always monitoring myself because i'm going to be silly i'm going to laugh i'm going to do these things so you put that self in the background and suddenly you're engaged in the world in a way that's probably a lot more enjoyable even more creative and productive but you've got to put yourself and get yourself out of the way yeah the ego out of the way i agree 100 so what do we talk play has a lot in common with spirituality get the ego out of the way yeah so so how do you play i mean as a as a such an accomplished successful adult who's supposed to be the professor teaching all the students how do you play oh i i play i literally and truly love thinking about ideas because it's something that feels almost playful to me Yeah.

1:03:48I'm always imagining this and this going with this and this. And that's like what you did with kids. You would say, I could take a stick and it suddenly becomes a sword. Or I can take something and it becomes a hat. You can do that throughout your life when you're writing and thinking about ideas. But I also, we have a friend who's 81 years old. And every other Sunday, we get together at each person's place. we bring we have dinner and then we play dominoes and listen to old the music that we listened to when we were growing up yeah so we have all this music going and i'm sitting there doing this and we're playing dominoes we've had dinner and we've connected but we're also connecting but being playful as well as playing a game yeah and i'm i'm i'm glad and here here she is 21 years my senior eight it doesn't matter yeah when you're playing all of a sudden differences yeah don't matter she becomes childlike as in and i become childlike and my wife becomes childlike we're teasing each other we're making jokes we're listening to music and beautiful what a joy yeah this is this is what life is honestly i always try to distinguish between you know or make the point that to truly play, you have to disconnect from the results.

1:05:15There is that concept of finite and infinite games, right? So if you want to play a finite game where there is a winner and a loser and there is a challenge and a competition and all of that, you're eventually going to end up being too serious and too competitive and angry. And the trick is to, when you were saying ideas to play with ideas and imagination, you know, that becomes playful because it's disconnected from the outcome, right you're not you're not really looking for okay i'm going to think about ideas for the next seven minutes to write a chapter that's not what you're trying to do you're just really enjoying the process of pondering wondering you know going through like you know walking on a on a little river or lake when when you were younger without an aim you know you're just going down your mind stream without an aim i think that's something that a lot of people would benefit from can i ask a sensitive question.

1:06:10I don't think we ever flourish until we love ourself, until we accept ourself. And of course, feel free not to answer if you don't feel like it, but someone who grew out of a childhood like yours would constantly feel that, again, Hannah, my wife teaches me this, that the child blames themselves for the issues in the family. And so they sort of think about themselves as the reason that things go wrong. So they are bad. They are not doing right. They never, you know, they don't, they don't look at themselves and say, oh, I'm a very good person. They think of themselves as not a good enough person.

1:06:53Never good enough, right? First of all, you believe that flourishing does require that, that we accept ourselves. We accept others around us as well, but we accept ourselves first and foremost. And what's your path to getting there yeah to be totally transparent i struggled with that for a long long time yeah and here is where being a scholar has actually helped me because i write about the research on self-compassion in the book and it's remarkable to me how we have this mistaken belief about self-compassion is going too easy on yourself. And I always had this view that if you're going to do hard work and accomplish anything, you have to be hard on yourself when it doesn't work out or you won't get there.

1:07:46And it's just the opposite according to the self-compassion research. You have to be very kind and accepting of failure and imperfection And if you're going to stay motivated to grow is what they find. It's just the opposite. And so I have had to work on that. And it's a work in progress. It's a work in progress. The good news, Mo, if you're thinking about flourishing, I always want to remind people to flourish, you only have to have seven out of the 14 signs almost every day. And only one of them has to come from the emotional well-being, the six or more have to come from the functioning well.

1:08:36And you could flourish without being very accepting of yourself is my point. But I think it's going to be a kind of flourishing that you may have purpose and mastery and growth, but it may be a kind of flourishing that's a little more, you're harder on yourself. When you develop self-compassion, you have more acceptance of other people and their imperfections. And I think it's an easier form, a kinder form, a gentler form of flourishing. Now, I'm speculating, but my point is you could have high levels of several of the criteria, and it doesn't have to include self-acceptance to flourish. But it sure, at least to me, feels better when I'm kinder to myself, because I'm just as human as you.

1:09:34If we were honest, I could tell you all the imperfections and bad things I've done that I've had to work on, not just my perfections and good things I've done. We're all the same in that regard. Yeah. It's incredible, really. I mean, a bit of a blind spot for me because from a logical point of view, if you wanted a child to flourish, it definitely makes a lot of sense to encourage them and accept their mistakes as they learn, then to punish them and push them and tell them they're horrible at everything. Like, think about it. If you took any child in the world and kept saying, that's not good enough, that's horrible, why didn't you get an A plus?

1:10:21Eventually, they may eventually end up getting the A plus, but they will have destroyed all of their emotional well-being as a result, right? Very different than going to that child and saying, oh, fantastic, B, well done, you got to be, that's amazing. Next time we're gonna work together and do better. Let's, you know, let's try to, yeah. So, and one of my biggest, biggest attempts to explain it, even though I have never really managed to, is the idea that we don't have to be motivated by the negative, that we can equally be motivated by the positive, right? The idea of being motivated by the negative is to say, you're not good enough, so do better, is not different in terms of performance from you're very good, but you still can do better.

1:11:06Just the difference is one of them is gonna give you massive ease as you go through the process of doing better. And I just never understand that. And I completely understand again, because of Hannah teaching me, how something that you learn as a child is very difficult to erase. But it is shocking for me because if only people could see it, only people could see that, first of all, you're not worse than anyone. We're all the same, like you rightly said right now. And second, yeah, there is a much faster path to becoming better and better, which is self-compassion. It's quite interesting. Yeah, very.

1:11:49You reminded me of a beautiful way that the psychologist Carol Dweck tries to encourage growth mindsets in children and avoid this idea that you have a fixed potential and you're only good at one thing you have to find and you can't change. She always talked about this idea, you're not yet, you're not there yet. When you give feedback in that regard, you're not telling the children that they're good at only some things are bad at others, you're simply saying, like everyone else, you're a work in progress. And you're just not there yet. And isn't it a beautiful way to approach life? You will never be there yet.

1:12:35And then suddenly, you will come to the end of your life. And you will have been exploring life all the way. Just like that little girl I talk about, who talks about beautiful things are always around the corner waiting for you if you're just not there yet there's mystery there's still things to do and yet we we give this sense that the only way to get them to be smart is to say you have to be good at something you're not good at this and then once you've arrived you're there and that's it that's all to life exactly yeah once you've arrived that journeys end right it's ended that's all i'm good at that's all i'm good at i'm like no that's such a we're not there yet yeah and i i love that expression as a way of just approaching life i'm not there yet i just have so much work to do okay i'm gonna let my child come out now so people please don't uh switch off the podcast you see that you know when when children are sitting in the back seat and going like, are we there yet?

1:13:50Are we there yet? Yes. They are basically ignoring all of the beauty and all of the fun and all of the connection that can be had on the road to getting there, right? They're probably, we're probably driving through lakes and mountains and beautiful nature and we can stop on the way and have a snack and we can do this and we can do that. And it's so wonderful. The whole journey is incredible. And, you know, as incredible as getting there, the only difference is that every mile of that journey, you get to spend like a minute or two in it. And then when you get there, you're going to spend three, four days, wherever, you know, wherever you're going.

1:14:35And yet you ignore all of those beautiful miles that will never happen again, just with impatience to getting somewhere, right? And if that somewhere is like, I wanna be the best at everything, how stupid is that? Where's the fun of learning? Where is the fun of exploring? Where is the fun of enjoying? Where is the fun of laughing yourself at yourself with your mistakes? Where are the war stories that you can tell around about how stupid you were doing this or that? I find it quite shocking how we push ourselves just to get to a destination that is not really the big part of the journey. The big part of the journey is every mile on the way.

1:15:17Yeah. And that's why you remind me of one of the other vitamins, learning. Learning simply for the sake of something you want to learn and grow in it. Not because you need to do it work. And that it's the process that makes learning so exciting because we want to see ourselves grow. And the destination, for many things, there really is no destination. There isn't. There isn't, really, unless somebody else has some use of some stage in your life. And that's what we do with work. but really there is no end and that's the beauty of life because even after we're done here what we've learned in our spirit if we've done a good job it it lives on in other people so we're never done that's so beautiful that's the best way to look at it it's you know it's it really is i was i was just thinking that you know i waited for this conversation are we there yet are we there yet when when is when is it going to happen like you like you said before we started recording you know we kept missing each other and so on but then imagine if you get to that conversation you're like yeah i want to record the podcast so that my people i have an episode for people to listen to rather than just sit here and enjoy this fully you know exchange and connect and and learn about each other.

1:16:49And it's those encounters that make up life. It's not the podcast patched together and recorded and put out there. And yeah, we got a few tens of thousands of people more listening to it. That's not the point. This is the point, right? We have fed each other's souls. That's it. That's in the process. Cause the outcome, we know what that is already. It's an episode. But what happens in between, that's where we need to be. So everyone asks, are we there yet? Yes, we're right where we need to be. Exactly, we are here. We're right here. So beautiful. I love your vulnerability. I love your openness.

1:17:36I love that you put a lot of thought in what you teach. And I have to say, I love that you put a lot of emotion in what you stand for. This is really, really wonderful. It's been a very enriching conversation for me. I think people should probably rewind and listen to this again. There are so many little gold nuggets scattered across the path of this short journey that you and I spent together. I'm very, very grateful for your time. I'm very grateful for you sharing so openly and vulnerably. It's really been beautiful. And thank you, Mo. You're very good at the art. I'm very curious. I'm very interested.

1:18:14Yes, exactly. I think, and you could feel it. And together we made a moment. I believe that. I will say openly, Corey, I think I'm very blessed because, yeah, I mean, we don't monetize slow-mo. We're trying to find a way to monetize it for charity going forward. But you know what? I get paid for this job more than any other job because it's pure joy. Pure joy. Like I spend every day, at least once a week, with an incredible human being that has seen, you know, life through a very different path through the, you know, the landscape. And then I get that hour and a half of just one-on-one where they, like you did today, you enrich my life.

1:19:07It's an incredible experience. I don't think this, if capitalism understood, when you were talking about purpose. Capitalism understood that if this is your life and you just have enough to eat and enough, you know, a roof on top of your head, this is wonderful. This is in itself what the purpose of life really is all about, a deep connection with growth and learning and development. It's wonderful. Yeah, I can't agree more. You're the best. Thank you so much for your time. And for all of you listening, I am really, really grateful that you give me the opportunity to meet so many incredible human beings that I hope to always call friends and meet again and again and again.

1:19:52I am very grateful that you are supporting all that I'm trying to do to spread happiness and well-being. If you can, please do look at Unstressable. If you plan to order it at any point in time, please pre-order it. it will make a big difference to our positioning so that our mission of making a million people unstressable every year becomes a reality. There's nothing that matters more than the journey and the journey should be enjoyed by taking the time to observe all of the blessings and the beauty that you come across on the path. So take a tiny bit of time to slow down. I love you all for listening and I will see you next time.