Shane Parrish on Defining Identity and the Path to Wisdom (PT 2)

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2:30Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:20Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I was raving about Shane Parrish, whose work I have linked to many, many times over the years. I believe he's even in the Daily Dad book. He's just a thinker, a friend, a really smart dude whose work has influenced not just me, but millions of people. In the way that stoicism has sort of become popular with all these different groups. Shane's work has become particularly popular sports teams with money managers, with hedge fund folks. Just anyone who's making decisions for a living is probably a reader of Shane's book. Shane has a history in the intelligence community.

4:02And then he's just a super well-read and smart dude. We're in a writing mastermind together. Anyways, I don't need to get into it. If you haven't read his new book, Clear Thinking, Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results, you must. And then his great mental model series is super popular. We carry those at the Painted Porch. We can almost never keep them in stock. So I'll link to both of those in today's episode as well. And we did this talk back, I guess, in early November at the Painted Porch. I wanted to do it in person. I said, look, you're going to do a million interviews for the book.

4:38You're going to do a lot of remote ones. Please come out and do this one in person, which you did. I had a great conversation, and I think you're really going to enjoy this. You can follow him on Twitter, at Shane A. Parrish. You can follow him on Instagram, at Farnham Street. And of course, you can follow the Knowledge Project podcast, and you can read his blog, Farnham Street, which I have read for over a decade also. Enjoy.

5:09In the book, you're talking about how we are products of our environment or our peers. And you have this quote from Epictetus, which is a great one. He's talking about how if you have a lit piece of coal, if you put an unlit piece of coal next to it, it'll either extinguish the lit piece of coal or be lit by the lit piece of coal. The idea that we are products of our environment strikes me as a very critical stoic idea. I think it's stoic. It's been true pre-stoic, right? Like, so we are always, our environment influences us in so many different ways. And we tend to think of environment as physical, like the coal piece from Epictetus.

5:56But our environment is also our mental environment. Our environment is like who we hang around with. our environment is so many different things that we don't think about. And so part of the book is how do we shape our environment to make our desired behaviors, our default behaviors? Sure. And you can do that if you think like one level, it's like, okay, well, if you're prone to coming home and eating a bag of chips, if you create friction, you don't have chips in the house. Well, you can still get chips, but now it's a lot of work to do. You can do that through, that's a physical sort of solution or, you know, not having your phone while you're doing writing, you leave it in a different spot.

6:36Now you've created this physical solution. If you're friends with people who read a lot, you will read more, right? Because you're wanting to participate in what's happening around you and it becomes normalized and positive and negative environments can normalize positive and negative attributes in a person. So if you want to run, join a run club. But the flip side that a lot of people don't think about is like, if you want to quit smoking, that means you're going to have to change your friends. Yes. Because you are not, I mean, eventually everybody loses the battle with willpower. Yeah. And if you're hanging around people who smoke, you're going to smoke again.

7:13Yeah. And so my parents went through this and it was actually like, oddly, a weird fear of success quitting smoking that was sort of subconsciously getting in the way because Because success at quitting smoking meant they had to give up every friend that they had. And they had to create new friends. And they had to go into a new environment. And so it wasn't that they didn't want to quit. And they weren't consciously thinking about this. But the same thing happens. Like if you're hanging around with people, your friends are sort of like, let's say they're lazy. They watch Netflix all night. And you start going to the gym.

7:47Yeah. Right? Well, now not only are you going to have a new set of friends because you're not going to want to do the same things that they're doing. but you're also going to create a bit of, I don't know, animosity. It's inherently judging or implicating that there's something wrong with the way that you used to do it and therefore the way they are currently doing it. And that creates a tension or an isolation. And then you can also, so these are examples of people in your life, but if you think of creating artificial environments, you can do it through software, you can limit your time on whatever, but you can also create artificial rules for yourself, which become environmental in a way.

8:24And one of the rules I talk about in the book is working out every day. So I got up this morning, like 5.30, I'm like down at the gym and I'm working out because I work out every day. When I would try to work out three days a week, I would negotiate with myself. Because you can push it till tomorrow without saying I'm not going to do it, right? Which is the most insidious thing. What Mark Serio says, you could be good today. Instead, you choose tomorrow. When you have habits that are, sometimes I do this, it allows you to honestly lie to yourself, right? Like logically lie to yourself. Cause you're not saying I'm never going to do it.

8:58You're saying I'm doing it tomorrow, which could be true versus if you go, I never, I don't smoke anymore. Every time you smoke, you're, you're violating that. Whereas if you say I only smoke sometimes, well, then when you want to do it right now, you're saying this is one of those times. So it's okay. So I went to the, I was doing that, right? The little voice in my head starts negotiating with myself and is like, oh, you have a long day today. You'll do extra tomorrow. And I was trying to go three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And I went to the gym just for information. And I was like, how often have I been here in the past year?

9:31Cause they get the fob, right? They gave me my swipe data and it was like 1.5 times a week approximately. And so when I created the rule, you can change duration, you can change scope, but you go every day. You sweat every day. You don't even have to go to the gym. You can go for a run. You can do something physical hard. Sometimes you're just in your hotel room doing pushups and sit ups and like, that's OK. You check that box. But that's an example of how you can shape your environment. Yes. Using a rule or an automatic rule in this case to change your desired behavior to the default behavior.

10:03Epictetus is less politically correct encapsulation of the sort of you become like the people you're around line. And he says, and I think it's okay because he himself had this. He said, if you live with a lame man, you will learn how to live. Basically, you will unconsciously pick up their habits, their, in this case, disabilities, even though you yourself don't have one, right? And that's true. You pick up the limiting beliefs of the people around you. You pick up good habits of the people around you. You're unconsciously absorbing all this stuff. So you can't really stop that. But you can decide what you put yourself around.

10:41So if like the news negative, most of it, a lot of it not true, a lot of it not a value, you can't watch the news and filter it, right? No one has the ability to be the sieve that separates the good stuff from the bad stuff. You have to say, I don't watch television news and then not watch television news. And I get my information from these preferable sources. You have to create, you shape the physical, mental, spiritual environment. and so willpower is not at stake. So we often don't think about that, right? The information we let into our head, whether it's from people in our lives or people we follow on Twitter or whatever it is, that information becomes, I guess, seed for future thoughts.

11:26However, what we don't think about is like the person who's into the Epictetus quote, like if there's an idiot filtering information for us, then we're getting information from an idiot it by definition. And so we're eventually, right. So like who's doing the filtering and you think about news and I know we both have similar thoughts on sort of news, but if you have a journalist writing about 30, 40 different subjects a year, how accurate is that information going to be versus somebody who's living it and in, you know, writes on the same thing over and over again. And so you think about the high quality sources of information you have and whether those people should be listened to or not.

12:09Yeah. One of the things I took from the book, and I've taken this from your writing over the years, is what most great investors have in common is that they have rules. And those rules supersede biases, emotions, bad habits. So like you tell the story in the book of this guy, here's this great pitch, and it seems interesting. He trusts the but his rule is I don't invest in things that I don't know about. Now, this may cost him that great investment. It did. But it saves him. Yeah, totally. The things where he has no idea, even less of an idea, and it's less spent. So you kind of have these rules.

12:49And if you have rules about, hey, once I get home in the evening, I don't leave the house again. Or I make it home in time for bedtime with my kids. Or I don't drink in bars alone. You know, I don't I don't do like you come up with these rules that keep you out of trouble or keep you on the straight and narrow that you want to be on. There's going to be there are going to be times where it feels like an exception to that rule would be smart, pragmatic, valuable. and it's true in that case. But what you're missing is the obscured savings of all the other times that you don't even understand it saved you from.

13:33So you can use rules to prevent you from doing something poor. And then another example in the book is you can use rules to put yourself in a position to play on easy mode or hard mode. And the position that you're in, this is something that I think a lot of people underappreciate about thinking, and about decision making is the position you're in at the time you make a decision dictates whether that's an easy decision or a hard decision, what options are available or not. So a genius in a poor position is still going to do poor. And an ordinary person in a great position is going to do really well.

14:09And this sort of dawned on me with one of my kids who came home with, you're not at the teenager phase yet, but he walks home and he got this really bad mark on an exam. And he shrugs his shoulders and he like hands it to me and he knows I have to sign it. And he's like, I did my best. Like, oh God. And so later on that night, I walked up to him and I was like, well, what does it mean to do your best? Like walk me through this. I mean, it sounds pedantic, but like step by step. Well, I sat down at 10 and like, I looked at all the points on the questions. I allocated my time accordingly and I filled them out to the best of my ability.

14:45And I'm like, oh, you think about this the same way a lot of adults think about decision making yeah i showed up at this the decision my best when i it was in front of me yeah but i'm like let's rewind 96 hours here yeah right did you study no did you stay up late the night before yes why did you stay up late because i didn't study and i decided to like start cramming at 10 30 at night right did you eat a healthy breakfast no why not because i got up late did you fight with your brother yes why because i got up late and we were like conflict in the bathroom And I was like, so you chose to play on hard mode.

15:18And I use hard mode, easy mode with the kids. But like that is an example of poor positioning and how that impacts your decisions. And so one of the counterintuitive insights about thinking and decision making is that the best in the world are rarely forced by circumstances into doing something they don't want to do. And the way they do that is they're always operating from a position of strength. Yeah. you're basically what you're teaching your kid there is downstream consequences which we were talking about but you're going hey you're seeing this test as the test itself yeah and actually the failure of the test was determined by the decisions you made the day before and the week before and the month before and so it's it's insufficient and it's it's it's self-deceiving to say i did my best yes you did your best with what you were able to bring to the table but you could have brought a lot more to the table.

16:11And I think you can also go as a parent. I could have intervened earlier and been helpful to you. So we're both sharing this, right? But you're saying basically, if we had made better decisions earlier, you would have been set up for success. My wife and I talk about that all the time. By the time there is the tantrum or the fight or the problem, a bunch of decisions have been made that made that more or less likely. And your job as a parent is not just to go, what you're doing right now is not okay. Your job as a parent, just like your job is as a leader or your job as a person with yourself, is to set people and things up for success, right?

16:55To set yourself up. When you step in front of the mirror and you don't like what you see. Well, you didn't set yourself up to like what you see because you were making bad decisions for the previous six months. And this is what I think most people who've tackled this subject, which we talked about earlier being hard, is the way that they approach it is here's how to be more rational. Yeah. And that is there's books filled with how to be more rational and, you know, fill out spreadsheets and do all this stuff. And nobody does that in the real world. And it's not that we're incapable of being rational.

17:28It's that we're put into situations that are predictable where we're not going to be rational. We're going to react without reasoning. And that we don't think about sort of the 96 hours before the moment. And I think of positioning and preparation is two different things. Preparation is I know the future. I can anticipate it. And I can sort of like have a big dramatic influence over it. Like I can anticipate my boss's retiring in four months. So I'm going to prepare to take on that role. That's different than positioning, which is like, I might lose my job tomorrow. How do I save money? How do I develop the skills that are going to help me land another job?

18:05I don't know what the future holds, but no matter if I do both of those things, it's only good news for me. I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. and then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner, Whole Foods Market has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department.

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19:12What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. and by we I mean not just my wife but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck.

19:54Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course this is stoicism too because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Yeah, it's like you're like, hey, I want to be smarter.

20:31I want to make better decisions. You're reading a decision making book or you're cramming your brain with all this knowledge. But it's like, well, what if you just focused on being less stupid? and one of those ways might be like sleeping well or drinking less or whatever right so you're making it doesn't seem like it pertains to how do i make sure i don't blow this important decision about whether i go this way or that way and actually the best way to do that would have been to go to bed earlier the night before or or to not be one of these people that's like burning the midnight oil and then taking Ambien to go to sleep and then uppers to be like, you're expecting a rationality that is physically impossible in your case.

21:15You're playing on hard mode. Yeah, exactly. Yes, you're playing on hard mode. So you can't change the fact that you're going to encounter these circumstances, but you can change the person that you bring to the circumstances. And you do that through simple things like no judgment if people want to drink or, but don't do it on a day before you have a big presentation, right? Like you're just putting yourself in a position where there's no points for difficulty in any of this stuff yeah yeah nobody is judging nobody is going hey actually i need to grade them on a curve because i know all of these factors were they were drinking last night you got into a fight with their like whatever did you make the the game was on the line and the ball came in your hands did the shot go in or not they don't they don't care like oh well you know he's been dating a lot and so he's been staying at home.

22:02It's like nobody gives a shit, right? And so you have to make decisions that set you up for success. And this is where it gets super interesting because it's like, A, it's controllable. I don't need somebody else to tell me. I can look at the things in my life where I can do simple things that will compound over time. And my position just gets increasingly strong. And now I'm creating contrast with other people. That contrast gives me more opportunities. and those opportunities turn into a cumulative advantage. Yeah, it's like, look, I'd like to eliminate my temper. I'd like to control my emotions.

22:39These are impossible things to ask of yourself. So what you're really asking is like, I want to make less emotional decisions. I want to say less things that I regret, right? Your problem with your temper or your emotions is really what the consequences of those are. So then if you put a simple rule and you go like, Like, you know, hey, I don't respond to emails right away. Or I'm going to tell this person I'm going to wait 24 hours. Like by putting in a buffer, you're just ensuring that most likely that emotion or that heat of the moment will have lessened with time. So you create these rules or these practices.

23:16It would be easier. It would be wonderful if you could just magically turn these negative things off. Probably unlikely. what you want to do is set aside practices or systems that mitigate or lessen the potential influence that those things are going to have on you in the big moments. And I think mutual friend Belichick, who's like, you have to avoid, they're doing a terrible job of it this year, but you have to avoid losing before you can win. And I think that we don't think about that. And if you look at some of the exemplars that we hold up as, I don't know, captains of industry, if you will, you know, sort of like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Warren Buffett, they just don't really lose that much.

23:59And they're never in a position where they're scrambling for survival. I mean, Carnegie made most of his fortune in the 1870s after the financial panic when he bought out his partners at the steel mill because they were levered. And he didn't know steel was going to become what Carnegie Steel became. But that's how he got this advantage from it. He just avoided losing. And how did he avoid losing? Well, he didn't lever himself up to the hilts. And he didn't know that there was a, this is the interesting thing. He didn't know there was a financial crisis coming. He just knew that financial crisis come.

24:33I can't time it. Nobody's going to give me a warning. They're not going to tell me to go home and be like, Hey, you got, you got two weeks. But it's like that with life, right? With relationships, with emotional, with financial, with losing your job, you often don't have that sort of warning. And so you always, I don't think you have to be prepared. I think you have to be positioned to sort of pivot and have a lot of optionality with what's going on so that it's not the end of the world and you can take advantage of the situation. I think about that on a very simple level. Like why do CEOs, you know, very busy, important people, like why do they work out very early in the morning?

25:10The reason they work out very early in the morning is because days are unpredictable. so something could intervene that prevents you from getting to the gym at four or could intervene from you getting to the gym when you get free right and so if i run in the morning and i cross it off the list there's no chance of it not happening because it already happened i start i did it first i cross it off so like for me i i try to work out usually in the mornings uh i try to do my writing before I do other things. I front load the stuff. So then I am less exposed to the volatility or the unpredictability of the day.

25:50I already got it done. So everything else I get done is extra as opposed to, well, I'm going to do these other things that are less important first. And then when I get around to it, I'm going to do these other things that are actually important. And so thinking about it that way, that doesn't seem like much like, oh, they work out in the morning or work out in the morning. It doesn't seem like a great insight, but it's actually a statement of priorities. And also it's a hedge. There's a humility to it. There's going, hey, the days tend to get away from us. We are not in control. Life tends to intervene.

26:23So when it is in my power, I get it done. I cross it off first. And therefore, I am less at the mercy of events. I don't, I don't, I can't argue with any of that. I think that that makes a ton of sense, right? So I don't work out usually in the morning. I have to work out every day. So this was the time today. I usually work out at like noon. So it's a transition between first part of my day, which is like all blank, no meetings, work out at noon, and then it's all, and I find I'm better in these meetings, more attentive, more alert, less prone to sort of the emotional ups and downs of whatever's going on if I've worked out.

27:03And so I'm putting myself in a better position to handle them. I'm not changing the fact that they're coming. And if I rely on willpower, which would be like for me going at five or four or six or whatever time, I'd find it much harder to go on a consistent basis because that was what I was doing before. And then that little voice in your head starts chirping and negotiating with yourself about do extra tomorrow. You don't need it. You're tired. And when these days turn into weeks and weeks into months, like that becomes your position. That becomes your, your sort of like the state that you're operating in.

27:39I interviewed this novelist, Philip Meyer, and he was saying, he's like, you got to be really aware of what you give the best part of your day to. Yeah. Right. And so it's like if the stoic observation in Seneca goes like, why are you giving philosophy the leftover you. You know what I mean? Like your work, you're doing all this other stuff, and then you go, oh, if I have a few minutes at the end, then I'll do it. You might not. What do we do with most lives? We give our kids, our partner, the worst part of ours. The leftover, right. After the end of the day, when you're tired, when you're frustrated, when things have accumulated, you've been texting or you're not setting yourself up for success, Right.

28:22And it's better to get it, get the win and then have extra as opposed to do all these other things and then hope it goes exactly as you want it to go. And the other thing we don't do, if you think of positioning, positioning also applies to your relationships with people. If you and your partner are investing in your relationship and something happens, but because you've been investing in it, my friend Peter Kaufman has this expression. He's like, imagine a patch of grass between you and your partner. And if you water that grass every day and a spark falls on it, it's just going to go out. But if you don't water that grass, it's going to dry out.

29:02And then that spark turns into a fire. and it's like, well, what is investing? It looks boring, right? Like it's like date nights. It's like communicating with each other and connecting. It's talking about each other's day, all the stuff that you're like, oh, in the moment, these things I can easily let slip by and not do. And I don't think of them and how they aggregate to the position I'm in when there's inevitable sort of trouble in our relationship, which is going to come. We know it's going to come, but we can change the position we're in when it does come based on how we act and what we do today.

29:36Who is Peter Coffin, by the way? Because you probably think I mean, or you mentioned him in like 50 foot now. Yeah, he's the CEO of a company called Glen Arrow in Glendale, California. Okay. And he became a good friend over the last, I don't know, five, eight years. And just through many conversations with him, a lot of these ideas are his in terms of the biological connection between us being self-preserving and territorial. And he's got a unique way of insight. So a lot of the conversations that we've had crop up in the book with sort of how he approaches things or thinks about them. And I find them really advantageous to, you know, what are you thinking?

30:18No, no, interesting. Yeah. It seems like you got, like, I'm fascinated by this relationship between Seneca and his friend Lucilius. yeah like seneca's letters are the letters he and his friend are writing back and forth and they're not like oh today i had you know dinner and they're like it's this kind of ongoing accountability relationship that they have with each other seneca says the point of it is like they they should each be trying to give each other like one thing a day right and so the letters that survive are obviously the better things but he's like oh i learned this or i saw this and he's basically saying like the path, the wisdom, the path to being a philosopher is like just acquiring like one thing a day.

30:58And so having these kind of these intellectual relationships where you're sharing things, you're kicking things back and forth, you're going, hey, I'm doing this or I thought about this. And then it's just the accumulated wisdom or insights that come from that exchange. It's so valuable to us as a person. I mean, it was so valuable then that 2000 years later, we're still like, we're basking in the glow of the, of the fire that the friction between Seneca and, and, and Lucilius, you know, kicked off. Yeah. But I think it's really important that we have those relationships. What I love is sort of getting able to talk to these people is amazing and it's by-product of having a platform and, but when things triangulate and across different industries and across different people and across different generations.

31:49Oh, this person's talking about this. It's the same as this, which is the same as this. There's a lot of signal in that now that I've triangulated it across. Identifying patterns. Right. And so the idea with the book was like, what can I triangulate? What can I pull out from what I've learned over the past 15 or 20 years on this particular subject? And how do I reconcile the language? Because the language is always different between everybody. Right. But they're talking about very similar, the same things. Well, a good example of this is inside companies is like reports. People are tasked with spending a lot of time organizing information, putting it into graphs or in presentations or reports or whatever.

32:28And then very rarely is the leadership who is asking for that information, evaluating how much and where they're using it. And so like, I think it was the founder of Patagonia had some rule about how a report should take 15 minutes to make and five minutes to read. Right. And so I whenever I get information or reports, I go like, how long does this take you to make? Because like I'm sensing that you are putting more into it than I am putting into into getting something out of it. And so to go like, hey, only give me the information that I'm actually going to use. And by the way, like, think about information that I would use, like, seek out information that I'm going to, like, like, so when I do a podcast, I have someone sort of prep stuff for me.

33:17It's like, you giving me their bio, like, I'm not going to ask them about where they went to high school. So don't give me that information. But you tell me that, hey, they actually just had a cancer scare, that might be something like, I, every time I train someone new to do the job, because it's usually kind of an entry-level job. I'm going, think about a context in which this could conceivably come up. And if you can't think of that context, it's worthless information. And the fact that you put it together, I'm not giving you credit for how long the email you sent me is. I'm only gonna think, hey, I formulated a lot of questions based on the information you gave me.

33:57Or we talked at length about information that I got from that report. And this is true also for sales. Like just having you're paying someone to spin their wheels and then you're not. Well, it's make work. It's not visible to you. And there's a judgment problem, if you will, which is like you want somebody to apply judgment and how you respond to them applying that judgment is going to dictate whether they apply judgment or not. This is why most organizations work on policies and procedures, because if I follow the policy, even though I know it's wrong, you can't hold me accountable. Whereas if I'm applying judgment on a daily basis and it's very subjective, well, now there's a fear involved in that.

34:40And you also get to a map territory problem with reporting, where you're reporting what the map is, but what you want to see is what the territory is. You want to touch the medium. Sure. You want to see if the road moved. You don't want to just see here's the map from like five years ago. Yeah. And so you might be looking at all these variables while your business is going off the rails. And you can't tell because you didn't anticipate some of the variables or how they interact where you want that person to apply the judgment to be like, hey, this is not looking right. Like we want to talk about this.

35:13Yeah. And this is why a lot of businesses go off the rails. Their metrics are going well, but their territories are roading. And then what happens is the CEO, the manager, the team leader, if they're not touching the territory and they're only touching the map, they don't know the morale. They don't know what's happening in the factory floor. They don't know. Even if they see the metrics, they don't really know what's happening in the business. Right. Yeah. And conversely, like managing up is important, right? So if you're an employee, you have to have the sort of theory of mind, the empathy to be able to go.

35:45My boss is doing this presentation. And he's asked, he or she has asked me to, you know, do X, Y, or Z for that presentation. How is what I'm doing, giving them actionable, how is this fitting into, first off, what are they actually doing? What does that look like? And then you back out what you do from there, not, well, it was easiest for me to put it in this Excel document or what, like, right? Like you're not thinking about the context in which you are trying to provide help or service or value. And so it's unlikely that what you're doing is of service or value. And the artists make this mistake all the time.

36:20Authors sit down and they write a book that's interesting to them, but they haven't stopped and thought about the person who's picking up and reading it. What problem is it solving for them? How are they engaging with it? How are they discovering it? How are they hearing about it? What is the reaction they're having to the tech? All these kinds of understanding that ultimately it's not what it is to you. It's what it is to them. Like you're making it for someone else. If you're not making it for someone else, be honest with yourself that this is a personal project. But by definition of signing with a publisher or an art gallery, you are making this for an audience.

36:58So you have to at some point consider that audience and their needs or you are hoping to hit a target that you do not see. Yeah, I think that's true, right? Like you should be doing that with everything that you're doing, though. But the risk that people don't want to do with that is, and I talk about this a little bit in the book with identifying the most important thing, is you're putting yourself in a position where you could be wrong. So I'm going to exercise judgment. I'm going to try to give Ryan above and beyond what's expected. Well, now I might be wrong. And I don't want to put myself in that situation because we're not used to operating in those environments where we can be wrong.

37:37And it sort of goes back to a little bit of what we talked about earlier, but having the strength to be in a position where you can handle it emotionally if you are wrong or you as a boss can give feedback and be like, oh, I love that you did this. I see the extra effort. We got to turn it like five degrees to the right here or something. i although i have found again to go to managing up i have i have never experienced as an employee or a boss a problem where the person asked too many questions about what you wanted do you know what i mean like when you're like hey can you do this like there's this famous scene in the office where jim is asked uh to to make a rundown for the new boss He's like, can you give me a rundown on your sales?

38:24And he doesn't know what a rundown is. And it's funny because he can't figure it out. But it's like at no point does it occur to him to go, what is a rundown? Yeah. Right. As as if the boss would be upset. Right. Because he doesn't he doesn't want to admit that he doesn't know what a rundown is. And that is, I think, an encapsulation of where sort of ego and insecurity causes so many problems. You you can't learn what you think you already know is Seneca or is Epictetus design. But also you can't learn what you're afraid to ask about. Right. And so like as a as a person who is working with other people, you're very you're much more likely to get in trouble or to cause problems by what you don't ask for specificity or further instruction about than you are to ask too many questions to dial in exactly what they're looking for.

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41:42There's no last minute trips to the store. Plus, the meals are delicious and easy to make. The best way to cook just got better. Go to HelloFresh.com slash stoic10fm to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. One box with active subscription. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only varies by plan. That's HelloFresh.com stoic10fm to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. So that's another example from the book, right? When our ego is in charge and our ego is in charge when we respond there. Yeah. Because we're responding by not asking the question about like, what does this mean?

42:19Or, you know, I forgot. You want it more like this? Do you like it long? Do you like it short? Do you want an email? Do you want an attachment? That's our ego at work, right? And we don't want to admit that we might not know something. And so in those situations, we're more prone to reacting, not reasoning. Yeah. So how do you put yourself in a position? And if you're a boss, how do you put your employee in a position? Yeah. Right. So that comes to a little bit of psychological safety. But it comes to your relationship with that person too in terms of is this a transaction? Is this more than that?

42:53How are we operating together? How much time have we spent together? So you can put yourself in a position where people will feel more comfortable. It doesn't mean they're going to do it, but it does make it a lot easier to do the desired behavior in the moment, which is admit. And you can do that as a boss. You can model that, which also helps with the psychological safety and the positioning. Keep going. Yeah. So I just think it's like, it's really interesting to think about, you think about emotion and you think about ego and you think about social defaults and inertia. And these are situations that just tend to think for us.

43:27And yes, we can have willpower and we can be like, I recognize I'm getting angry. I'm going to leave the room. And that might work like 20 % of the time. But are there other things that we can do to avoid that? Like turning off the computer at night, you know, after a long day, when I'm more prone to sort of like these outbursts, not drinking, sleeping well, working out. Yes, yes, yes. We're putting ourselves in a position where we can deal with that anger in a different way. But you can think of something like that, where we can put ourselves in a position where people are not afraid to ask, we're creating a culture for a company where we're creating a culture for our relationship, where you feel safe to do that.

44:03But it's always funny, right? When it's like admitting that I have dyslexia, like five minutes ago it's like people don't want to people don't want they're like oh i didn't want to bother you right or i didn't right or i didn't want to look dumb and it's like how do you think you look now how do you think how do you think this thing i've been waiting three weeks for coming in not the way that i want it is do you think that's like like so so it is funny the way that we don't want to do like a small hard thing. Yeah. It's first order. To avoid a much more hard thing later. Well, it's first order negative, second order positive, right?

44:41So if we do the first order negative thing, which is like admit we forgot it, we don't know. Bad delivering bad news. Right, right. But the second order to that is super positive because now you get a report that nails it. You know, you get what you want in the end. You prevented the bad outcomes. So we're only thinking at the first level. And if we think two or three levels deep, we would rationally come to the conclusion that this little pain now is worth going through because it's going to save us this big pain later. Totally. But again, that comes down to being more rational. We know how to think like that.

45:18And so the example that I sort of use with people is if you're in a fight with your partner and you're arguing about the dishwasher and it's like slowly escalating and i'm watching i tap you on the shoulder and i'm like ryan do you want to put gas or water on this situation you're going to be like water yeah but what i've done because you're it's not that you're not rational yeah i interrupted this sort of response that you're having where you're you're reacting without reasoning and so you say in the book you say that's something you ask your kids which i thought was great you're saying like is the behavior you're doing making the outcome more or less likely i say that to my son it's like okay look we took the ipad away and you want the ipad back you freaking out and acting insane and hurting your brother saying what you're doing this do you think that's making me more or less likely to give it to you later and then how do you think it's a it's it's changing my understanding or the relationship of the ipad in our house as a whole right yeah and so the ability to sort of go hey think about the think about the choices that you're making right now and how they pertain to where you want to be or what you want is is a super important skill the ability to interrupt like to interrupt a cycle or a downward spiral is like the master skill, right?

46:45The ability to deal with frustration, to catch yourself, to not make a bad situation worse. I mean, if you can just start figuring that out at seven instead of starting at 27, you know, when it's been a continual problem, it's just an enormous advantage. So I do this with the kids too, right? The first mistake doesn't kill you. It's like the cover up that kills you. So it's like, are you lying to me? You have a pivot point here. I know what's happened. They don't know that I know. But I'm like, the choice you make right now is going to make this situation better or worse. And you choose. And then you can literally see them thinking about it.

47:26And they're like, what are the odds I get away with this thing? And then they ultimately almost always tell me the truth. And it's the same with us. The first mistake doesn't do us in. It's always the second, third, fourth mistake. Because what happens after the first mistake, make another mistake. Well, what's really happening is our positions eroding. It's increasingly becoming harder and harder and harder to get the desired result that we want. And then it becomes impossible at some point. It's kind of like playing Tetris, right? You make one mistake, it's like, oh, shit. Yeah, you can maybe pull out of that, but you can't make five mistakes.

48:00It's not salvage. And then you need just the perfect piece, right, to start getting out of this. And you can think of that sediment or accumulation like that i try to tell myself that too i go like when have you ever faced serious consequences like like you're afraid to tell me the truth as if like i'm beating you you know what i mean as if like i i'm this cruel like authoritarian dictator it's like dude the stakes here are so incredibly low and the upside is hot like yeah like but but it's it's almost just a natural human thing to just like you i realized like what we realized like going like okay actually objectively he must understand the stakes here are pretty low like he's not choosing between if i tell him the truth i'm i'm not gonna get to do like so it's what's actually what is the factor then that's acting on his logic it's shame so it's an internal feeling and going oh okay so yeah so this actually has nothing to do with us this has something to do with you so now how do i talk to you and present it to you in a way that your shame is not triggered and how do i give you an awareness that shame is part of the equation for you so you're aware that you have that bias or that tendency and then you don't let it take you to a place where you know it doesn't work out for you yeah i think that yeah there's nothing to say to that going back to the gas water thing just for a second i find with the kids i never i rarely tell them what to do there's like an exception to that But like when they get, because I have two and they're 14 months apart.

49:32So they like. Very close. Yeah. And I just like interrupt them and I'm like, gas or water? That's great. So good. And in that moment, I never tell them to choose water. Sure. But it's obvious. It's rhetorical. No, sometimes I actually choose gas. Like they're like, okay. No, no. But I mean, the answer is obvious, right? Like we know, we don't always do it, but we know we don't want to make a bad situation worse. But from a parenting perspective, it's been helpful because they actually call each other out on it in a weird way because they're like – It's a great little mantra, sure. They're sort of like young teens and one of them will like punch the other one lightly and then be like gas or water sort of thing.

50:09But when we're out in public and they're doing something that's escalating, I can just say water. And I don't have to like point out. I don't have to embarrass them. I don't have to call them out. And then it's a cue for them to be like, this is not getting me the outcome that I want. this is not moving me closer to the things that i want i'm going to take a different path here and try to well it's not to mix metaphors but gas or water is an off-ramp right like i don't just because it started to go this way doesn't mean i have to continue i can go the other direction i can stop i can interrupt and the ability to do that is kind of a superpower yeah i i think like it's great too one of my kids came home the other day he skipped his extracurricular activities and he has to do these as part of school.

50:52And he's like, oh. So they're not extracurricular. Well, it is. It's just part of his school, right? And he came home and I was like, what are you doing home? And he's like, well, it was confusing. I thought I sort of like got kicked out of this class, but I wasn't quite sure. And I'm like, you need to decide in this moment, is this getting you closer to your graduation or further away? And then you need to go back to school and you need to fix this. And he's like, what? I was like, put your uniform on, get your butt back to school and like fix this situation. And he's like, I don't know how. I'm like, well, what outcome do you want?

51:23Who do you need to talk to? And what do you think you should say to them? And then he's like, okay, I'll do that. Yeah, or even just to go, hey, I did this thing. I don't know how to fix it. I need help fixing it, right? As opposed to I'm going to either persist in the air or I'm going to let shame make me hide the air to be able to go like, I worked myself into a corner. Like think about how often this happens in companies, right? Like you make a mistake, you make a bad call and then you're just sitting on it or you're hoping it magically resolves itself when actually intervention at some point could have saved you.

51:57How often does it like magically save itself? Never, it never does. It never does. So you end the book with a kind of a memento mori, right? I like the Scrooge example. I think that that's like so pressing for people, right? Which is like, if you let society unconsciously tell you what to pursue, what happens. And you think you want money, status, power. And who do we know that got all of those things? Well, fictional character Ebenezer, I know lots of real life people who get the same thing. And then what do they want at the end of their life? They just want a do-over. We talked about this at the beginning because the way that they accomplish these things is mutually exclusive from living a life of meaning, mutually exclusive from the type of person that they want to be, the type of person they want to be remembered for.

52:44And I sort of think about, okay, well, you can imagine your death, right? And so close your eyes. You're sort of in the hospital. It's your last night. You're in a coma. You're surrounded by people. And what are they saying about you? And what do you want them to be saying about you? And now look at how you're living your life. And are you living your life in a way that is most likely to lead to that outcome? Or are there changes that you need to make? And again, no judgment about But what people pursue, I really, you know, I love the fact that people pursue different things. What I really want is for people to be conscious of what they're pursuing and the way that they're pursuing it.

53:23Yeah. I mean, it's funny how timeless that sort of exercise or that insight is. I mean, A Christmas Story is what, mid-1800s? Yeah. In meditations, Marx says he does this thought exercise to himself. He's like, consider your life is over. He's like, you've lived your whole life. You just found out you've died. and then he's like okay now take what's left and live it properly yeah i love the like his implication is you're you've died take stock or you're dying or you've died take stock of your life and then he says now take what's left and live it properly the implication being you can't possibly do that exercise and be fully satisfied with the choices you've made the direction you're going the the assumptions you're uh you're believing it's but when you look at the present moment in light of or from the point of view of a dying person, you immediately go, I'm fixing this, this, this, and this.

54:17And you have the chance to do that right now because you're not dying, but you could, you're not dying. And so you have the chance to course correct before it's to it. And what you're really doing is you're changing your perspective, right? And your perspective - Presuming way out. So what you see is what you get. That's our default perspective, but you change your perspective, you change your lens into the situation. Now, all of a sudden, you can see things you couldn't see before. That can also apply to so many other aspects of your life. And decision making gives you different lenses into a problem to think like, how would Ryan think about this?

54:49What would Ryan see? What would Ryan consider important? But importantly, you can also, it doesn't have to be about death. You can be like, if I were to take over my life today, I fired myself. I'm starting from scratch. A new management comes in tomorrow morning. What's working? What's not working? What am I going to do differently? And now I've changed the perspective on the situation that I'm currently living. And so you can think forward in terms of like death, but you can also think in the present moment about like, what are the things that I'm wasting time on that are ineffective that I would really be like, if I think Rogan had that thing about a video camera following him around all day or something.

55:27And if a video camera was documenting your success, what would you be proud of them seeing? And what would you want to hide from them? And if you're trying to hide something from them, then maybe that's an indication that you shouldn't be doing that or you should limit your time. You're not going to want them to record you flipping through Instagram for an hour every night on the couch. You're going to be like, no, because that doesn't lead to success, right? They're documenting your success. And so I find those really interesting perspective changes, not only for how you're living life and where you're going, but also for the present moment about what am I doing?

56:03What can I do differently tomorrow specifically, not in terms of my relationships or the destination, but in terms of my actions about other things? Like what am I doing that's a waste of time? What would I cancel? Which projects would I take off my plate? No, and I think that's what philosophy is. That's what sort of what you talk about at Farm Street is just those shifts create changes in behavior and perspectives that make you better. And they doing them often, doing them consistently over a long period of time has the ability to transform your life because the impact might be small in each individual instance, but cumulatively the impact is very, very large.

56:44Totally. And that's what we miss, right? Because we're looking for these big impacts, these big wins, these overnight successes. And I have a saying, which is a lack of patience changes the outcome. And so when we know how to get the outcome and we try to get it quicker than is otherwise natural, we change the fact that we're going to get the outcome or we dramatically reduce the odds. And if you think of financial freedom being an example, we know from history, the most likely path to financial freedom is to save more money and to invest that money, dollar cost average it into a low cost index fund, and then wait a really fucking long period of time.

57:25And we all know that works. And then we all try to outsmart it. And most of what we're doing when we try to outsmart it is not necessarily to get a bigger pile. It's to change the timeline under which that happened. So it's like, I'm going to go all in on Bitcoin. Why are you doing that? I'm just going to make a lot of money and then I'm going to get out and I'm going to change my behavior and do the other thing. But now I don't have the patience. So it's the lack of patience that sort of changes that outcome. Well, awesome, man. This is great. Thanks, dude.

58:02Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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