Tim Urban On Procrastination, Changing Habits, And Slow Improvement

0:00My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner and honestly it's my favorite vehicle I've ever owned. Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded it up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota trucks are built for. Off-road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore. Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer.

0:29From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks, they're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. You hear that? That's not just a Toyota truck. That's the sound of no crowds. No alerts. No distractions.

1:11And no telling what you'll find next. You know, like a detour. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota trucks.

1:30Welcome 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.

2:24It wasn't a casualty of the pandemic in the true sense, but one of the things that I was looking forward to every year and I haven't done since the pandemic happened was I was in this sort of writer's group or mastermind. And this group was people like James Clear, Shane Parrish, who does Farnham Street, Steve Cam, who does Nerd Fitness, Eric Barker from Barking Up the Wrong Tree. I don't want to list everyone. It was a great group. And one of my favorite people in that group was Tim Urban. And the pandemic happened, so we couldn't do it for a year. And then some of us had kids, and we got busy, and we just fell out of the habit.

3:06And I do hope we get back into it. But today's episode was the longest conversation I've got to have with Tim since we would spend three or four days in this house in Arizona and just give each other feedback, kick around ideas, have long dinners. So it really felt like an awesome throwback and you get to listen to this one. Tim is a fascinating dude, way smarter than me. He's got a bachelor's from Harvard. He graduated magna cum laude, started an SAT tutoring company that was super successful. Like the idea that you'd be so good at the SATs, you could teach other people how to be good at them.

3:44It's incomprehensible to me. You've probably seen a million of his super viral blog posts and articles over the years. Actually, I was just talking to Paul Rabel, the great lacrosse player I'm working on this project with. And he was like, have you ever seen that woolly mammoth post from Tim Urban? Wait, but why? And we ended up having a big conversation about my favorite post from Tim. There's this one about like all the potential future options that are available to you. That like the past is limited, but the future has this unlimited potential. That's one of my absolute favorite ones. But my real favorite one from him is this apple theory about how there's the skin, the fruit, and the core of the apple.

4:27And some people, the skin's not so good. They've got this sort of rough exterior, but the fruit is good and the core is good. Some people, the fruit's okay, but the core is rotten. Some are rotten all the way through. It's a great example, I think, of what makes Tim such a smart thinker and an interesting dude. He just thinks about stuff differently, and he manages to express it, articulate it, illustrate it in a way that really sticks with you, that makes you think about things differently, that opens you up to something. And he talks about science, he talks about AI, he talks about space, but my favorite stuff is when he's talking about procrastination, about the writing process, about making stuff, about trying to get better as a person.

5:08that's what we ended up spending most of this episode about when he got off. He was like, you know what? Thanks for talking about it that way. Because his book is a bit controversial. His book is called What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. It's available only as an e-book on most major platforms and an audio book. It's not up as a print book yet, but it's brilliant, provocative. I don't agree with all of it. Not what I expected from Tim, but it's as always, you know, well done. And a lot to chew on. So we don't talk about the book too much here. If you've listened to Tim on other podcasts talking about the book, this is me talking to one of my favorite people, one of the most interesting people writing out there in the world.

5:52And I think you're really going to like it. You can check out the book at waitbutwhy.com. You can follow him on Instagram at Tim Urban. You can follow him on Twitter at Wait But Why. You can check out What's Our Problem, a self-help book for societies, anywhere you get your audio books or your ebook. books and you'll see, I think in this episode, why that book took him six years, his peculiar vices and virtues when it comes to creativity and as always, his unique way of thinking about this. So here is my conversation with Tim Urban, who I hope to see in person one of these days very, very soon.

6:29Enjoy.

6:59www.intelcore.com holiday deals and respond to holiday requests and customer questions and customers requesting custom things and plan the perfect holiday dinner for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, and Uncle Mike's carnivore diet. Luckily, you can get a PC that helps you do it all faster, so you can get it all done. That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Get yours before the holidays at dell.com slash deals. Terms and conditions apply. See Dell.com for details. You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits.

7:38This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities. Over 150 ,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to give more than$2.5 billion over the last several years, and research suggests that these donations will save over 300 ,000 lives.

8:25I myself am one of those donors. I donate to GiveWell every year. It means a lot to me. And you can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free. And thanks to the donors that sponsor this research, GiveWell doesn't take a cut from your tax-deductible donation to their recommended funds. And if this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year, or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under Podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Daily Stoic, and you'll get your donation matched.

8:58That's givewell.org. Code The Daily Stoic to donate or find out more.

9:07How old is the baby? The baby is seven weeks old. Oh, man. Well, good timing with the book launch. That was smart. Yes. No, so it was hilarious. She was supposed to come like two weeks after the book launch, And I was like, okay, I'll have two weeks to get my shit together and process everything and do my promo. I'll do all my podcasts. And then she came the day after Booker Watch, as it turns out. So I had one night in between these two projects. Well, I was thinking of you. I heard this expression. The expression is, a writer is someone to whom writing does not come easy. and I thought that that is the perfect description of you.

9:52There you go. That is definitely me.

9:58Yeah, really like, I don't know if anything that like I supposedly care about once it's actually the thing I'm supposed to do, I don't think anything has come easy. Like I always like I'm doing one activity, you know, one activity. And then I think I'm procrastinating on that activity with some other passion. And I'm like, oh, that's what I should be doing. And as soon as that's what I'm supposed to be doing, it becomes not easy. Yeah, it doesn't seem like any of it is easy for you. It seems like it's hard to be Tim Urban. In a very sort of first world privileged, nice way, it doesn't seem like it's easy to be Tim Urban.

10:36Yeah, well, my goal is, and I'm gonna all report back on this, but I'm doing another book now and I'm starting my own podcast and I'm like, I have a bunch of new projects, which I've been dying to start, but I've been stuck in this other book for a while. And I'm trying to reconfigure my life in a way that it isn't hard to be Tim Urban. It's nice to be Tim Urban, where it's like, I can, okay, this is fun. Why is it so hard to be Tim Urban? What gets in the way? um you know it's a uh it's a combination of um it's it's like there's some muscle that people like you have somehow you got it i don't know where and i don't have that muscle um where you can just um make a grown-up plan for yourself with no external person telling you you have to do it there's no teacher saying you have to be in class at this time and there's no parent saying that and you don't have a deadline.

11:31And you just do it because it's the right thing to do because it's the selfishly right thing to do. It's what you've chosen. It makes sense to do it. And that muscle for me is I resist. I just resist that usually. So procrastination, maybe perfectionism, these are kind of two sides of the same coin. But I will say that I also am someone who believes in growth. I think it's very easy when you've been somewhere for your whole life for when you're stuck in a long time habit to just think this is just to give up and say, this is just, that's just who I am. And, um, and I don't, um, and I, I don't believe that actually, because, um, habits are just kind of, um, it's, it's the automated software running in your head.

12:17And if you, you can train it differently, like a dumb dog. And, um, so I'm, I'm just, I'm using this transition period to try to like actively make some very like obvious changes and, you know, do better. So to, so to mix metaphors, you're, you're broken, but you're not fixed.

12:38Um, well, I would say I'm, I'm, I'm broken, but I'm fixable. Well, that's what I mean. So you're not fixed, like a growth or a fixed mindset, right? Are, are you capable of change? Not that kind of fixed. Yeah. Okay. Yes, exactly. Okay. You're being more clever than I realized. Yes, I'm broken, but I'm not fixed. Yeah. I just think about it. Humans are so plastic. I mean, think about humans who have had to, you know, my wife's parents grew up in Iran and that's where they thought they were going to live their whole lives. And they had family and life and careers there. And then they had to suddenly in 1979, move to the US within.

13:11It's like people can make giant, massive adjustments and we are survival machines, And so there's no reason I can't make some tiny, much easier life adjustment at any point in my life. I'm very convinced about that. So is the muscle that's not there for you, is it not there for you in all things or is it only in certain kinds of things?

13:40um it's it's there in the category of things where a it is is the thing i'm supposed to be doing it's the job it's not the procrastination from the job if i if i i'll be working on one thing and then suddenly i get excited about doing this chart showing how long you know history has been and i'll spend four deep focused hours doing it and then tweet it out right and because it's the thing I was supposed to be doing. So A, it has to be the thing I'm supposed to be doing. And B, it has to be something where no one else is involved. There's no other, if I have a collaborator, I don't, I'm much better about this.

14:14If I'm working with someone, it's a much better situation. You know, it's really when I'm really left to my own devices. And so then this other part of me kicks in. That's like, Ooh, this is hard though. Let's do it in a few minutes. You know, let's just not right now, not this exact moment. And then that goes on for five hours, you know, or, or I'll, you know, I'll get into research that I'm supposed to be doing, but I'll like then go way too far with it and end up watching like an hour and a half YouTube video about it that I really shouldn't do, but it's interesting. And, you know, so there's, yeah, there's a lot of like kind of compulsive parts of my personality that I think like take over.

14:53But it's, you know, and it's a source of misery. It's like when I, when I'm in better and more control on that, I'm like much, um, you know, and that's why for me having shorter deadlines, like having blog weekly blog posts was actually a good match for me or doing like a weekly podcast because then the misery is contained. I'll be miserable for three days. I panic monster comes in. I go and freak out and finish it. And now I'm so happy and so it was all worth it. When I publish something, it's always all worth it. Oh my God, this is so gratifying. I'm so happy it's done. And I'm so proud of this now so the goal is to just try to like change that equation a little to um to i think as a part of it again this is this it's this delusion where i you know i we are a mutual friend near y 'all right he and i would uh co-work together and near is very productive he writes a book and then he writes another book and then he writes another book and um and he also has a child and he's very you know he's he he's he gets his stuff done and i work with him and he we write for 45 minutes And he's like, okay, that's a good day.

15:51And he stops. Or maybe, maybe we could be like, oh, let's do a long one. He'll work for an hour and a half. And then he's like, okay, good long day. And I'm thinking that I'm going to write for eight hours today. But if I actually add up the time when I'm deep focused writing, it's probably less than Neil. The near is actually, actually deep focused writing. So it's this delusion that you can do more than everyone else. And actually you end up doing less than everyone else. And so like, it's just accepting reality, which is like, A, I'm not going to do more than two hours of deep focus writing on an average day.

16:21That's just not realistic. And B, that's a lot. If I just do that, if it seems like it's too good to be true, I can just do two hours? It's like, no. There's some kind of masochistic thing that's like, no, that's not hard enough work. And so it's a kind of a double delusion there. Yeah. Someone emailed me once and they said something about how we always seem to underestimate the power of consistent but average contributions or results. And so I think people would be shocked to hear that a writer might only work for 45 minutes or an hour a day because they also buy into the idea of eight hours or, you know, marathon sessions, but, but that can't be done consistently very well or very often.

17:15And meanwhile, if you, if you work 45 minutes a day, every day for a lot of days in a row, that actually does add up very quickly, whatever you're writing or tortoise. Yes. Be a tortoise. Writer should be a tortoise. Like if you think about it, you're trying to drive, If doing a book is driving from New York to LA, it's like if you actually think, if I want to spend 300 total days of work on this, which is like a little over a year weekdays, okay, 3 ,000 miles. I got to go 10 miles a day. And the problem is for a certain, for someone who, it's a very grown up thing to realize that I'm going from mile 340 to 350 today.

17:55And that is a success of a day. And that's the unit of a finished book in one year, right? But when I was writing short, you know, one week blog posts, there was this adrenaline where the thing I'm writing right now is going to be seen by all my readers in two dates. And it's going to be so exciting. And I can't wait to see what people think of this. And the adrenaline, it's like, this is, this is, you know, it's like the dumb part of your brain, that the kind of instant gratification, kind of unconscious primitive part of your brain, it thinks that can see the end there. And it's like, oh yeah, okay, I'm excited too.

18:28But when you're going from mile 340 to 350 out of 3000, that dumb part of your brain can't see LA, can't even understand that LA is going to happen. It just sees that this isn't exciting. Nothing new, my life won't be any different at the end of this workday. And so it can be very hard to actually, you know, that's where the resistance comes in. Like, what's the point even of going from 10 miles in this minute? It's like, it just feels so hopeless. But of course, it's not. Yeah, I find the other thing about so like, let's say you're working on a singular blog post, something you're going to publish in a few days, not only is there the validation, but there's also the sense of mastery or confidence that comes from like, you have the whole thing more or less in your head, right?

19:10You're like, I can, you can imagine it. It's a small, even if it's a 10 ,000 word blog post, you're doing it in short enough time and it's contained enough that you're like, I know everything that I think about this. Whereas a book or any kind of longer project, like starting a company, you actually don't, you don't know all the twists and turns of that road. It's impossible for you to have it all in your head at one time. And so the sort of fortitude to sit with the fact that actually all I know are the 10 miles in front of me and the sort of intellectual humility to stick solely with that, it takes a lot of discipline.

19:48It's easier to just do a lot of self-contained smaller things than to work on a component piece of a larger whole. yeah because um if all of the if you every day could be team up and be one big brain they could see the whole thing and they could see the whole project but but you're in one little slice and that's why you have to basically there's a lot of self-trust it's like the dumb part of your brain that that needs instant gratification and is not going to get it from you know this random tuesday of work needs to learn to trust like the smart part of your brain that can that understands that this is a big project and it will come together in the end.

20:29There needs to be some kind of like, yeah, like just like seeding of the authority to that part of your brain, which is what procrastinators have a hard time doing. They, they, they are just, you know, the, they're at the whim of this instant gratification monkey is like, as I would call it, like, but it's, but you know, all you have to do is just, I, you know, again, I'm great at giving advice to others. Like I can, you know, I just don't follow it myself very well, but that's what I would say to like a writer. I would say the difference between like, so just say there's two wannabe authors and they've never written, neither one's written a book.

21:03And then one starts just really, you know, light, just doing, you know, let's say one page three days a week. So four days does nothing. Three days, you know, wakes up in the morning, pulls their laptop on their bed and types for a half hour or an hour before they, you know, or maybe two hours before they get up and brush their teeth and do their thing. Right. and the other the other wannabe writer is just like that right except he doesn't do the three pages a week because he thinks oh it's hopeless you know what's the point of doing the page i don't even know so there it's like actually there's 112 waking hours in the week um the wannabe writer has all 112 the person who writes three pages a week maybe they have 106 or 108 of those and that's almost the same right they're living almost the same exact week except yeah Flash, two years later, and there's a 300-page book, a 300-page manuscript, and there's nothing.

21:57And it's like, you know, once you realize that, it's just like the idea that, you know, it's this idea that things compile over time. But it's just not intuitive. You know, our brains aren't really wired to think that way, to understand that. Because think about, you know, we're wired for being in a tribe sometime a long time ago. You just didn't have slow annual projects. That's just, that's not how it really works. I mean, maybe you're building a new hut and that's, but it's like you can see it in front of you. and you're desperate and there's panic. So you have to do some overriding of our intuition.

22:25You know, obviously writing is one place you can talk about this, but the other place where our sort of minds obviously fail us in this regard is like saving for retirement. Ramit, who we both know, talks about this a lot. You just have to make pretty consistent, automatic transfers or deposits in an account that captures the sort of compounding returns of the stock market, you don't have to save that much money for that long for it to start to get very powerful very quickly. But we're not good at it. We delay getting started. And then every year that we delay getting started, or every dollar that we don't contribute that we could have contributed because we did something else we weren't supposed to do, or we thought of a get rich quick scheme or something, it actually moves the goalpost further out of view, makes it less likely that we'll actually get where we want to go.

23:26That's a double whammy too, because you have the time component of investing a little now for long, far away, which is not intuitive. There's another not intuitive thing there, which is compound growth. We are not wired to understand to think exponentially, right? I mean, again, someone in 20 ,000 BC, there was really nothing exponential in their life. Everything was linear, right? So they think in straight lines. And of course today in advanced civilization, it's exponential curves all over the place. And we are so bad at internalizing that you have to kind of override our linear mind to see the power of that and to understand how that works.

24:02So when you do a book, because you do books, I feel like every time. Yeah. Yes, that's true too. It's like, Like getting your first 10 ,000 followers on Twitter, it's like each order of magnitude is an equal step. Getting from 1 ,000 to 10 is as hard as the first. Getting to 100, getting to a million. When you get to 1 ,000, you're actually like, in some ways, you've done one of the four steps on the way to a million or whatever. Um, and, um, and so, uh, you know, it doesn't feel like that at the time. Um, it, it, because again, you're thinking linearly, but, um, it's really more logarithmic in this case.

24:52Um, and a lot of people give up in that first thing before the hockey stick takes off because they just, they're, they're projecting, they're extrapolating the linear curve from where they're going and it doesn't look very good. Yeah. You have to, when they, when they talk about like trusting the process, right? Whether it's trusting the process of retirement or trusting the process of mastering a skill or trusting the process of turning around a sports franchise, I don't think we're good at comprehending how much trust is actually required. Right. Because there is that that early period where you're doing all the stuff right and you're gaining one follower a day or you saw the interest in your account.

25:34You know, you got a two dollar and seventy five cent interest payment. You're like, this is never going to get me to the point where I don't have to worry about money anymore. Or on a book, you're like, I worked all day and I am one page closer. Like, I can't do this, you know. But it's really the ability to sort of suspend disbelief, to leap into the dark and to hand yourself over to some process that people before you have been through, I think that's the main thing. Like people who have the ability to trust a process are going to be people who can take advantage of that process. But if you are ultimately cynical or, as you were saying earlier, if you don't believe you're capable of change, deep down you don't think it will work, you're probably not going to commit to said process to a level that actually lets you take advantage of it.

26:30So it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that regard. also it's it's uh it's it's not even quite as simple as like oh you made one page of progress or you know you you gain this much money um because sometimes you lose money you know in the stock market it goes down or you write a bunch of pages and you realize you realize that the last the whole last 20 pages and i'm cutting it it doesn't even it's not i don't like where i've been going with this and the point is again if you zoom out what you see is a stock market chart, both with your writing and whatever, it's going to go up and then it's going to go down, but it's going to go up over time.

27:07And so again, people really give up on those little downswings. And so much of life is a broadly upward moving stock chart that has lots of downs along the way. And it's hard not to lose your nerve in those downs because, again, the dumb part of our brain truly can't see more than three feet ahead of you. So you have to be able to, and you lose a lot of motivation. You know, it's very demotivating in those moments. And that trust in the process, I mean, I think once you've seen it work once, it's easier to work to have it, you know, trusted again. But a lot of, especially people who have never really, they've never been able to get themselves to do a big project.

27:47There's just no confidence in a process. And it's, you know, somehow you have to, David has to beat Goliath in that first time to see it work. And then they can at least give you that faith. Because, you know, you said, you said the words deep down you don't believe right and i think that yeah self-fulfilling prophecies are very real and it's like it's like um if you consider these two characters in your brain the kind of rational character that knows about exponential curves and understands that it's a process and has wants to have good work ethic and then the other part of your brain that can see two feet in front of you it needs gratification it needs adrenaline to do anything or panic and it's it's almost like you're not either of those, you're, it's like, they're, they're like in a gladiator pit, you know, battling and you're a spectator and you're watching.

28:33And it's like who, who you believe is going to win, you know, who you're, if you could bet who you're truly betting on with a rational bet, that's, that gives that character so much strength in your mind. And that's where your confidence is. So your confidence is that the, I'm confident that the monkey's going to win. And I'm, so I'm not confident that I'm going to do what I want to do. That monkey just got like Popeye spinach, you know, and it's like on steroids. And so that's why it's like, you have to somehow have David beat Goliath a few times. And now the better, the observer in the stands actually starts to think, I'm not sure it's a smart bet to bet on the monkey.

29:05They've lost three times in a row. I might bet on the other guy. And that's like, whoa, that's a totally different, like self-image. Your whole storyline is different in your head right now. And so, yeah.

29:20Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What 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.

30:05We 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. Toyota 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.

30:47Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. The world is full of tours. But you don't choose a Toyota truck to follow the beaten path. You choose it to find the places in between. The detours, where each adventure pulls you toward the next. And wrong turns turn out right. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota Trucks.

31:27I've said this before. I say I don't believe in myself. I have evidence. yes right but to get evidence in the first place is kind of a catch-22 it can be so okay so you are the opposite right you every time i finished like a page of the book you had another book out okay it's like one page for me and one book for you um and so and and just in general i've seen you do your thing where you'll like we'll have like you know you'll have 15 minutes in between two things and you'll just like open the laptop and knock out some edits in your book and for me it's like, you know, perfectionism. I'm like, no, no, no.

31:59I need like a five hour clear window and every single thing perfect, right? Of course, which is not a grown up way to think about it. So were you always like that? Or did you like grow into that person? Well, you know, it's funny. We always look at the people that are wired or act differently than us. And we think that it's somehow better, even though it comes with its own demons, right? Like I remember one time I was in my swimming pool with my wife. We didn't have kids yet, I was in the pool and we're sort of, we'd just gotten in and all of a sudden I'm like swimming around, like looking at it.

32:28There's something about it that was bothering me. Like I thought it was broken or I thought we could fix this thing. And then I was like, do you want to swim laps? And she was like, you know, we could just be in the pool. She was like, we could just be in the water. We don't have to like do anything. And so for me, it's usually the opposite problem, which is, I think I do. I think there's a certain part of me that's always been sort of wired towards doing stuff. And obviously that becomes self-fulfilling and you get momentum and then you believe in the process and it works. And it's a virtuous circle.

33:00But the vicious part of it is it makes it hard for you to not do stuff because you understand that not doing stuff is, there's an opportunity cost to not doing stuff or to not taking advantage of every moment or not being fully optimized. And so for me, like I'm in the middle of this right now, I was supposed to do, I'm doing this series on the cardinal virtues. So I did the first two books and then the next book was supposed to come out this fall and it's more or less done. And then I would be starting just about now, I would be starting the fourth book in the series. And I made the decision to kick that whole process out a year.

33:43And weirdly, like I have been dealing with a whole bunch of sort of existential issues stemming from the fact that when I wake up in the morning, I don't have a thing that I have to be doing to hit a deadline that I've given myself. And there's a sort of an unmooredness to that, that like clearly at some point I felt when I was younger and really didn't like that feeling and built a life around not ever having that feeling. And that's not healthy either. Yeah. I've, um, I was, I've always wondered if like, you know, I was, you know, people, you know, I was assumed, okay, if I dug into my, why I self defeat in this way, it must be some kind of like deep inner, you know, shame or self-esteem or something.

34:36And then I was thinking one day that I wonder if it's maybe the opposite, which is that, um, is that maybe there's some kind of like feeling that's that most people develop from maybe from their parents values of shame for not going outside all day or shame for not being productive. And that's like a stick that gets implanted in their head that hits them when they, you know, and they're scared of that stick. And maybe I lack that. Maybe it's like, I don't know, but hearing you say that, that thought back, like, you know, maybe, you know, So, yeah, like your thing to overcome would be, like you said, with the wife in the pool, which is like there's a dependency on the feeling that you're achieving something.

35:19There's some kind of emotional dependency there, which, again, serves you really well in so many ways. But it's interesting digging into what that is. Well, work for me, like sitting down and writing, in the flow state of writing, is a wonderful feeling. It's very soothing. And it's more or less in my control, right? Like the world is complicated. The world is unpredictable. The world is all of these things. But when I sit down and I have the material that I've researched, I get to move these things around at will. I get to live with these ideas and people and characters and concepts that I find very stimulating and meaningful.

36:04and I'm the master of my domain. I'm moving the words around on the page. I'm doing the thing that I'm really good at. I don't have to listen or do any other things. The volume on the inconveniences of life is turned down for that brief period. And so to not do that, either because I'm procrastinating or because I'm practicing self-restraint and I'm saying, hey, to do this sustainably over a long period of time, you have to pace yourself. There's distress in that. You're sort of willingly feeling a discomfort that's maybe akin to the discomfort you're feeling from actually concentrating. But at the core, I think, as humans, we try to stay in our comfort zone.

36:53Right. So we're actually maybe just both avoiding suffering. And it's like we're both doing the least painful thing. Right. And so the question is, and I probably believe, you know, rather than try to, you know, you know, it's like you can do, you can, if you want to change in life, you can do one of two things. You can try to go, you try to go for suffering. What's the most sufferable thing? Let me do that and train yourself to be more masochistic in a way. or you could try to reconfigure your psychology, reframe, change the way your schedule looks, change your reward structure such that you reconfigure what is the most suffering, right?

37:31So you can still, okay, let suffering be the runner. That's fine. But I'm going to like change the direction of the wind or something, you know? So yeah. Well, it's like discipline for some people is like buckling down and doing the thing. And then discipline for other people is like taking your foot off the gas, right? And not doing something. And I'm probably more in that second category than the first category. I mean, there's definitely things where I'm not that way, but it's just sort of understanding like, what is the harder thing for you? And then why is that the harder thing? And then do you have the resources or the willpower to go towards that thing?

38:08Because I think ideally, you want to be in control, not your desires or your aversions. The Stoics would say at the end of the day, those are the same thing, right? Like if you're repulsed by something or overwhelmingly attracted to that thing, in either case, you're not really in control. Some deeper part of it is - The electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field is driving you everything, yeah. Yes, and that's probably not good. Right, right, yeah. Yeah, I think I'm probably very, like, you know, I'm very much, like, inside the electromagnetic field. And that, you know, so that's, I guess I was saying that there's two ways.

38:54You can go towards the suffering. You can try to reconfigure the field direction that starts pulling you. Or, I guess what the Stoics would say is, no, no, no, you're not thinking big enough. You need to step, you know, ascend above the electromagnetic field where it's not, now you're in control. And you're, you know, which is, which is, yeah, that's really interesting. It can be hugely empowering, I imagine, if you can pull it off. Well, I was just thinking about something you said, though, about sort of building the muscle or having the experience with finishing projects, because I know you just became a parent.

39:25And one of my favorite Paul Graham essays, his kids are older. And he was talking about, you know, do you send them to college? How do you prepare them for the world? And he basically comes up with this idea that the most important thing you could give a kid are a series of projects. like things that they get really interested in, that they work on. And that becomes a microcosm of learning some of the lessons that we're talking about. So for one kid, maybe it's building model trains. For other kids, it's making the football team. For other kids, it's learning a foreign language. But I am a big believer in the idea of having projects because once you've done something, like you've built an audience or you've written a book or you've lost 200 pounds, or you've moved across the country, it doesn't matter what that thing is.

40:14If you've done stuff like that, then to me, that's the transferable skill where you're like, I leapt off the ledge, I felt the terror of falling down, and then I built the airplane and I didn't crash. The ability to see a process or a project all the way through, that's like the most valuable skill you can acquire as a person because that's the evidence that's the evidence you talked about right like yes it's it's and it is an interesting thing where when you haven't ever succeeded in something whether you've tried it or not even it just it's just again and says something about our nature it feels impossible right it feels like yeah you know oh that's one in a million or you it takes and just takes so much luck or whatever and there is you know it's the steve jobs you know quote about uh once you once you realize that the world around you is built by people no smarter than yourself and you can get in there and you can push things and something else falls out and you can change the change the shape of things your life is never the same again it's this it's this great epiphany and i i do believe that it's this it's this it's this um a combo of you know it's not necessarily that you realize that you're more powerful or you're more special than you you are it's that you realize that the world is not that awesome or impressive and that like yeah any game you want to get in and try to win you know like the other people who are currently winning it are they're just humans also but the same amount of time you have they have flaws also you know granted there's hardware games than others you want to you know be you know play in the masters and when they okay you know you're gonna have to you know but even there you know it's like i'm sure a lot of people that actually could have gotten there, just give up right away.

42:00That's impossible. You have to be so lucky. And it's like, well, it's actually, these other guys are there and they're just humans. They were just a baby with a bottle at some point. And, you know, they're not magical. You know, great. If you want to be in the NBA, okay, you need a certain height or whatever. But really for most things, I would give, you know, our careers as an example, like there's a lot of people out there with a ton of insight. They observe things. They have interesting ways of thinking about things. Their friends love hearing their way of thinking because they're so interesting.

42:25And that person like has everything they need to go and suddenly be a big time, you know, writer, author, whatever, whatever kind of thing. And they just, they have this, this barrier, this, where it feels like they just don't realize that it is totally doable. And so they don't even try it. A lot of, so many people don't even try it in the first place. But that's why the Paul Graham thing makes sense. You're teaching a kid early. You put your mind to something. You move, you go, you go in some ups and downs. You get experience going in the downs. And then, boom, look what happens at the end. You get there.

43:00Or you don't get there. And you realize that failing isn't – yeah, it's no big deal. Actually, it was kind of cool. It was kind of a fun experience. And now you're – so either way, it's got to be so useful. Yeah, I wrote about this in the Daily Dad a little bit. Everyone today is talking about this idea of nepo babies, and we're sort of all very upset and outraged at it. I wonder how much of the Nepo baby thing, like why do the children of successful people become successful in that chosen field? Obviously, there's genetic advantages. Obviously, there's relational advantages. But I wonder how much of it is like you saw your mom or dad do that thing and it made it very humanizing to you.

43:49You're like, yeah, dad goes to work at an NBA arena and that's a normal place to go to work. And there's a path to getting into that thing that isn't unattainable and crazy. When I was growing up, none of my parents' friends didn't have jobs. All my parents' friends had jobs. I didn't know a single entrepreneur. I didn't know a single creative person. So it wasn't until I went to college and then I met people like professors and writers and stuff and realized that these were just normal people and that it was a job, not unlike being a school principal or having a construction company or something, that it's just a job.

44:32And so I think one of the things that growing up the child of a person who is in an untraditional path like that is it becomes a lot more familiar to you and thus a lot less intimidating. And that's actually the real advantage more than money or genetics. Yeah, you're also just witnessing someone whose worldview is that society is my play thing. Society is my canvas. And like, and I'm like, you know, and like, I have fun with it. I go and like, I do my thing in society as opposed to someone who's cowering before society and thinking like, you know, the opposite of that attitude, I think as someone whose parents, which is a lot of parents around me when I grew up, they're very into prestige.

45:18And, you know, prestige is just another way of saying, like, you're getting a pat on the head from society. You know, you're treating society like this really important thing, big, scary thing to approve of you. And as opposed to thinking of society as my, like, my, you know, my playground. Now, let's get out there, you know, mess around with it. Totally different way. And so if you're, you know, if you're seeing, if you're around this, you know, the vibe of society is big and scary, you're just going to absorb that. And you're going to have to override that. One of the ways I overread, I remember reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and it was like mind blowing.

45:49It was actually a terribly written book. And it's like, you know, it's like run on sentences and it's like redundant. And it doesn't matter. The concept I had never heard. I was like 20. I remember reading it, and it was this idea that you can make money by just being creative and not having a job. And it was just – some people are just around that from the beginning. They're just, of course, and their parents are always – Paul Gramsciates. Imagine how ahead they are in this regard. They're just hearing from someone who's very wise in this. He's a great communicator, but B, he also, uh, his business, you know, his, his life has been in, in turning, you know, make, you know, teaching people how to make society theirs.

46:32So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's absorbing. It's not just watching them go into the arena or whatever, but it's like just thinking, you know, you know, you absorb so much from your parents, just osmosis just in, and I think, uh, yeah, I grew up in a suburb where everyone, everyone's parents were lawyers, doctors, teachers, um, and, uh, yeah, nothing else. That's what I think is so funny about that college admissions scandal, right? These were all extremely rich, extremely powerful families, most of whom had become extraordinarily successful through untraditional paths, right? Entrepreneurial, creative, acting, whatever.

47:07And the message they were sending their kids is that actually all of that is totally worthless. At the end of the day, society is a set of rules. It's this fixed competition with a fixed number of spots available if you want to do something in life. And these spots are so valuable that we actually have to cheat to get them. But if we don't cheat to get them, you will be a loser and nothing will happen for you, right? Which is like the exact opposite of their lived experience. And I think there's an irony in that these people so wanted to secure advantages to their kids, like a degree from Harvard or the networking that would come from this school or that school, when they already had given them the enormous advantage of showing them that the world is flexible and malleable and you can make your own path.

48:01And they are like, if you're a billionaire hedge fund manager, what kind of advantages networking-wise do you think your kid is going to get at Harvard? You can just introduce them to those people from your own life. The whole thing struck me as such a weird commentary on how humans can abandon the very thing that made them successful in the first place. well it goes back to again our wiring it's really intuitive to humans to be inside whatever game is being played around them and it doesn't you know and so those parents are talking to other parents and their kids want to hear and their kids want to hear and that's actually like and they you just even though they have every reason to see this this game is not what we should be playing you just get sucked in it's not even real it reminds me of like no but okay so i remember i was on a um i love traveling alone it's one of my favorite things just go on like a trip by myself and i meet people my this outgoing side of me comes out that's never out in the u.s and and i've made a ton of friends i'm still in touch with them whatever so i go on this one thing i was in some like canoe thing and i got three two two three day thing in like the amazon and there's a group of other you know backpackers there from like you know i don't know where they're from britain other places in europe and normally it's just very i just make friends with the European backpacker.

49:21Right away, we'd all be buddies, right? I don't know whether I was being annoying, or they weren't my type, or they hate Americans, or maybe it was in my head, but I felt not, I felt out-grouped. It was like maybe, I think it was four or five of them. I don't even know whether, I don't remember if they knew each other or not, but they weren't being very friendly. And so every part of my smart brain would say, well, all right, it's kind of interesting. Like, why are they being like, oh, I'm going to dig into my book on this trip instead. I thought I was going to be hanging out. I'll never see them again either way.

49:52Like, cool. I'll go see, you know, it is. And yet what happened was I got really upset about it. You know, I found myself really like feeling, and I felt like I was in middle school and I felt like, you know, and I was like, I was like, I was like, you know, wishing they would, they would be friendlier and invite me over to there. And I was like, what is this is absolute. How am I suddenly upset about being out group by four randos? I will never see again, who I just met. and it's the point is we are if there's and that's that's one of the games of course we are really susceptible to is the in-group out-group you know middle school game this is you know i think a lot of like political tribalism comes around you know from this it's like as soon as that game is being played around us it's like there's pheromones in the air and the dumb part of our brain wakes up and it's like i need to win this game and it can't see it can't zoom out at all and i feel like that's another version of what's happening here when suddenly everyone around you it's it's your you're worse as a family is about does your kid going you know maybe you're a big movie star, but you're a dumb movie star?

50:48Or do you have an actually smart family who's kinged those two? Suddenly, I'm stuck in this game. And it's like, it just makes no sense at all. So you have to ask, what game am I right now caught up in that I don't even realize makes no sense to care about? Yeah, this kind of relates to your thing about the mammoth, the woolly mammoth of caring what other people think. To be a person who didn't give a shit what other people thought for almost all of human history is a losing proposition. But in an artistic field, not caring what people think is how you break out, is how you do something unique.

51:26It's how you break through convention. And so it's very hard to turn off a piece of wiring that has been there since before we were even conscious of there being such a thing as that kind of wiring. This is like comedians. Think about what does a successful comedian do? Obviously, they have a knack for comedy. That's a big thing. But the other huge part of what they're doing is they realize that they find the things that everyone's thinking but no one's saying, either because everyone's scared to say it or sometimes just because everyone has that experience but they don't realize it's universal.

52:00And so when someone else says it, they say, oh my God, I did that too. And so what it is is this ability to know what everyone's thinking that no one's saying and understand that no one's actually offended by it. Everyone just thinks society thinks it's offensive, but it's not actually like actually. And then they go and say it out loud. And the audience is in stitches. They're so delighted that someone is saying this thing. And it's a reflection not on the comedian, but on the audience. Like, what? Why are we all so delighted to hear that? Because we're all scared to say this thing for some weird reason, because we're all weird conformist people who are terrified of being different.

52:41And so, yeah. Well, you know what's fascinating is we were talking earlier, like some people, discipline is doing stuff. And for some people, discipline is not doing stuff. What's interesting about the sort of nonconformity thing you just mentioned is that, and we both know some of these very successful, interesting people. Like most people sort of think like everyone else. And so there is a skill in thinking not like everyone else, right? Of sort of pausing when you're on the side of the majority and thinking differently. And then I think what's been interesting the last couple of years is watching some of the people who are really good at thinking differently.

53:16And this is how they built multi-billion dollar fortunes or totally unique or interesting companies, to watch them struggle to grasp fairly obvious or straightforward or common sense things that the majority of the people have come to see. I guess what I'm saying is sometimes that nonconformist person actually has to have the ability to turn off that nonconformity because what they're disagreeing about is, say, the existence of gravity. You know what I mean? They're outsmarting themselves, basically. The public is actually right here, or the consensus view is actually more or less correct here, and your contrarian thinking or your nonconformist thinking is actually getting you in trouble.

54:09And I don't mean trouble in the sense that some people disagree with you. It's just taken you further afield than you think you are because you're running the same playbook that served you well in the past, but it's actually screwing with your bearings in this case. Like an actual independent thinker, which is really hard to do. True independent thinking. It's not that everyone has influences, but you can observe and you can run with what you think. That person's going to sometimes come up with contrarian things that are going to shock everyone. And a lot of the other times they're going to come up with the thing everyone else has, because it's actually, it's not like the public's always wrong.

54:47And so what you're talking about is, you know, it's like when there's a contrarian position to be taken, there's kind of two kinds of people taking it. There's the independent thinker who happens to have come there for this particular topic. And then there's the person whose identity is being contrarian and who, uh, it's, they're not actually independent. You know, that's not actually independent thinking. It's, it's, it's more independent than a total conformist, but it is actually like you're in your own prison, which is that I can never conform because now my self-esteem is tied to being someone who doesn't conform.

55:18And that's not really great either. And you can, I think some people can start as the first kind and then get hooked on the feeling of, and it's a lot more fun to be right when everyone's wrong than it is to be right when everyone's right. But yeah, real actual independent thinking, you have to continue to kind of remove prison walls that your mind's going to put up because you're going to start to get like your ideas. You're also going to get attached to your ideas that were really brilliant, but maybe times have changed. So it's a continual struggle to just push down the prison walls and kind of humble up and continue to be truly independent.

55:53Yes. It's not just putting, I think Peter Thiel said this, it's not just putting a minus sign in front of what everyone else is thinking, because what if they're right? right yeah and there's um you know it's in some ways you end up and this is a little different but like i i've um i i learned a little bit about the flat earth society um yeah which is real and it's you know the people who there are you know at least when i checked last there were 10 000 members and counting and probably bigger now and the what you find is that they don't just believe the earth is flat they also believe the moon landing was faked and the jfk was uh you know an inside job and that and that um uh 9-11 was you know done by the americans and every single conspiracy that's out there they believe because right there they have a paranoid mindset that anything that the consensus believes is wrong which of course no one wants to be you know that's not a good thinker right and and um and so it's and then of course what you also find and this this is kind of a signal that something is wrong is that people who are super contrarian they end up with these pet theories though and they become the opposite of you know they having they have almost like an overload of skepticism but then they go flip the other way and have go completely gullible when it comes to their pet theories so the flat earther you can you can bring them up in space and show them the earth and they'll say oh this is a screen or you've drugged me or something There's nothing, right?

57:27But as soon as you say, oh, yeah, because ships, you shouldn't be able to see them there if the Earth were round. And the fact that without any – they don't do the math. They just say, see, there we go. More proof. They just believe whatever they do, right? So you see a lot of that. It's the same people who are uber contrarian are actually supremely gullible when it comes to things they do like. Right. And because there is usually not a lot of good evidence for what they're talking about, when a study that would otherwise be discredited or looked at weirdly or whatever, they need even the slightest veneer of sort of support or credentialism, right?

58:09So they'll jump all over some weirdo academic that thinks the same way they do, even if in every other aspect that person is a crazy person. This happens on all sides of the political spectrum. You don't like the other side, so then somebody agrees with you that the other side sucks. you're willing to overlook a lot of things about that person because it buttresses your side of the argument or it gives you some appeal to authority that you otherwise wouldn't have. Which isn't independent thinking. Your thinking settings are being configured based on the belief of the person you're hearing from.

58:52And so your skepticism filter opens up wide and then it It goes super tight. And it's not being based on any kind of good metric. It's just on this thing. So you've been basically, and this happens to all of us, your mind, your thinking process has been captured by an ulterior motive, which is to believe this thing and to not believe that thing. And you can't have two sacred motives. So as soon as that, if truth can be the sacred motive, but something in that case has come above truth, and now your settings all reconfigure around that sacred motive. so now suddenly believing this thing learning you know proving this thing correct is now the the the sacred uh yeah the sacred value and that so that's not independent either uh you know look actual independent thinking should not be that interesting a lot the person should say i don't know a ton because unless it's something really you know straightforward most things we just don't know that much as a species there's not enough evidence or you or there is but you have to put time it to really dig into the evidence.

59:52And so that's a sign of an independent thinker is they're often, they don't have an opinion. They're saying, I don't know. And someone who's, every opinion is really strong. There's a sign. There's some other proxy going on there for their beliefs.

1:00:07Human, your body has a performance superhighway, 60 ,000 miles of blood vessels that deliver oxygen and nutrients to every cell. This, of course, is your cardiovascular system. It's the foundational system that powers everything we do. Both elite athletes and longevity experts invest directly in the cardiovascular system because supporting healthy blood flow is critical for energy, recovery, mental clarity, and overall performance. That's where human comes in. That's human with two Ns. They started out of research at the University of Texas, near where I live, and have 15 years of experience making award-winning supplements for nitric oxide production and healthy blood flow now used by over 160 pro and college sports teams human cardiovascular health daily is a plant-based and made from clinically studied ingredients like grapeseed and seed kelp extract it supports nitric oxide production for healthy blood flow and energy while also supporting blood pressure and helping support the delicate interlining of your blood vessels just two capsules each morning will power energy and recovery while also playing the long game by supporting long-term vascular health and healthy aging.

1:01:18Human has an exclusive offer for our listeners. You can visit human.com slash stoic for an extra 15 % off your first purchase. That's enter code S-T-O-I-C stoic at checkout. That's human with two N's.com slash stoic for an extra 15 % off with code stoic at checkout. I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods and 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.

1:01:57They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one-stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards so you know it'll be delicious and good for you. You can also So order online for pickup and even delivery in select zip codes to skip the crowds. Shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market, your holiday headquarters.

1:02:22So let me ask you about the new book, because one of the things I was interested in, we were talking about projects earlier, like how do you know you finish a project, you trust, you have the evidence. But you're six years into this project. It's taken so much longer than you thought. it's turned into a bunch of things, gone in a bunch of different directions that maybe you didn't think it would go. How did you know not to quit? How did you know that you were heading in the right direction as opposed to stuck in a dead end?

1:02:57I'm not sure I even knew it was the right direction as much as... Well, first of all, There's just a lot of silly human things, like sunk cost fallacy. I don't know if I'm grown up enough to spend four years on a project and then throw it away. I just don't know if I can handle that. If I thought this thing was trash and I was like, this thing is actually just not, it's not what I want to do. Okay, I think in the end that would win out. But if I think something has potential, a lot of times I've learned from blog posts, I'll put something out that I think is awesome and it doesn't really pop and vice versa.

1:03:29I'll put something out that I think, oh, it's a cute thing and then, whoa, it went viral. And so I also just thought this certainly qualifies as the quality of any of those other blog posts, some of which surprised me. And so I felt it crossed the threshold where I was like, who knows? Let's put this out in the world and see what people think of it. So I don't think it was some fully binary thing. I think there would have been a pretty intense threshold to actually quit. because, you know, look, the worst case is this is what I've been thinking about for six years. And here's all the tools that I've been using.

1:04:07And I did a lot of, you know, what I use Twitter for is so many of the images in the book, I would just tweet out. And it's a way to throw it against the wall and see if it sticks and just see how people react. So most of the things, and they were pretty well tested. I'd run them by friends. And it was what I was thinking. And I was like, so if this is what I'm thinking, I don't have to, you know, I don't know whether people will resonate or not. But I want to, I want to, that's kind of what I do. I'll put out things I'm thinking. It doesn't, It's not an academic paper that has to be replicated.

1:04:32So there wasn't really much of a chance I was going to toss it. I did toss huge parts of it because it couldn't get that long. But the hard part was just when to stop adding in new things. And I will never do a book on current events again. Maybe an article on current events, and I'll do books on universal topics, evergreen topics. A book on current events is a nightmare because part of what makes it interesting, You know, someone's writing a sub stack on current events. It's great because they're the thing that happened yesterday. Okay, here's what I think. Now imagine that sub stack is a year delay.

1:05:05So it comes out in March of 24 about or, you know, April 24 for something. And they're writing about this last week. No one wants to read it. Right. So you have to. So that's one of the things I didn't do print book for that reason. And I might do print on demand now. But I was like, if I don't do print, I can have this one month old only. versus a year old, which is just not a good plan, or maybe not a year, it might have been nine months old. And so the hard part was, you know, like I almost, you know, I almost published this in 2020, and then George Floyd happens, and I'm writing about, you know, society politics, and it's like, it's just a seismic earthquake just happened in our society for lots of reasons, just one of those times when, you know, society's tectonic plates are pretty stubborn, and movements try to move them, and it's hard, and then something happens, whether it's a war or a giant protest movement or something.

1:05:57A 9-11 was one of these. It's an earthquake. The plates are moving. They're not going to be moving for long, maybe a couple months, and then they settle into a new stubborn equilibrium. It might last 10 years. So the Bush administration said, boom, let's start a war right now. The plates are moving. All this opportunity is there for movements, for politicians in this one moment, and it's also a danger. It's a scary time. The plates are moving. all the rules, desperate times, desperate measures, things go crazy. So anyway, there'd be things like that when I'd see an earthquake. And I'm like, well, the book has to – I can't have the book come out – the pre-earthquake book come out post-earthquake.

1:06:32So anyway, I finally decided, you know, things are going to keep moving, and that's okay, and I just need to publish. And so I just finally – and it's hard. It's hard finishing because I had to cut a lot, and cutting is nightmarish. But yes, finally it got out, And I think I feel good about the timing. I feel like, okay, it was and still, I believe, is an expression of the current moment. Maybe in a year, it'll now feel like a little dated. Right now, it feels like it's still on point. That is a weird thing that you learn. I think, who is the screenwriter? I'm forgetting his name, but there's a great, William Goldman, he said, nobody knows anything, right?

1:07:16Nobody knows anything about what is or isn't gonna work. And one of the things you learn putting stuff out there is that some of the things you had the most doubts about turned out to be fantastic and people loved them. And the thing you were most certain about didn't work at all. And there's some freedom in that, but it's also disorienting because now you don't know whether to trust your own doubts. I relate to what you're just saying. When I published Daily Stoic, I remember I sent it to my editor and I was like, it was all designed. It was all ready to go. I was like, can you look at this one last time?

1:07:51I don't think we should publish this. I was like, I'm not sure this is good enough to publish. It came together too quickly, too easily. I'm just not sure this is the right career decision for me. And that book changed my life. It sold 2 million copies. It's in all these different languages. It's been incredible. But I try to remind myself all the time that literally days before publication, I was like 51, 49, not publishing it. And that's helpful. But I guess it could also be dangerous because what if there was actually something I shouldn't publish? And now I'm like, oh, I'm going to hit publish because last time I thought that it turned out I was just having cold feet.

1:08:40So it's a weird feeling when you realize that you don't really know anything. Yeah, but I think that the best way you can do your thing in your one life and contribute is unless it seems really bad, throw it out there. and by the way you might not something might you know sell one tenth of that but but it really impacts the people who love it right maybe sometimes sometimes it's like a cult classic it says it doesn't go viral but it's deeply beloved by the people i have a few posts like that which are the ones that i feel like the super fans talk about always reference but they're not actually they didn't do very well and like you know as far as numbers and then other ones that were that were mega viral that i've never heard like a an actual like you know big time way but why reader mentioned because it's just not really you know so so so so i think there's you know there's if you put time into it you know there's something in there that someone will love but but i also like to think about the beatles like they put out 200 songs about and a hundred of them are bad i don't think people realize there's a great i think it's vanity fair article um that is that goes or maybe it's vulture it goes through um 200 ranking the beatles songs from worst to best in disguise of mine but he's really big beatles fan big music person and it's amazing how long you have to go before you've heard of the songs like you know i've you know you they wrote a lot of just bad forgettable songs and it's really like their top 70 their top 70 were good and it's really and what made them the beatles was like their top 20 or 30 were amazing but they put out 200 to find those and so i feel like the best thing you know if you take the big zoom out it's like, you know, rather than obsess over which finished projects are, put them all out, rough and dirty, make a new one.

1:10:30Don't, you know, don't be a perfectionist, make stuff, put it out. And you never know when you just strike magic and it's the right thing at the right time. And, um, yeah, I, I think that is kind of the mentality and this is, you know, and I say this to someone who did, so, you know, regularly starts a blog post and then says and goes the other way. But yeah, I think that you're remembered for your hits, and you've got to give yourself a lot of swings at the bat to get those. Which is, by the way, part of why I hate doing a six-year project. A six-year project blows, because it's taking a six-year swing of the bat.

1:11:12Well, it's also just like, I don't want to take it. I don't have enough time to take any six-year swings. It doesn't matter what it is. And so it's like, I feel like I should have a one-year limit on future projects, maybe two. Well, quantity is a way to get to quality. And that's really hard if you're a perfectionist or you have high standards. The idea that you have to accept that objectively, a good chunk of your stuff is not only not going to be as good as your other stuff, it might not be good at all. That is a hard bit of acceptance and realism that you have to come to terms with. Or just to think, I mean, Bill Belichick has lost a lot of Super Bowls, right?

1:11:59You tend to focus on when it works. Public failures. Yes. But ultimately, the only way you can win a Super Bowl is by taking a trip to the Super Bowl, right? And so if you focus more on like sort of getting in the ballpark and you get in the ballpark a number of times, chances are you're going to walk away with whatever that metric of success is if you do that often enough. Right. Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, if your general average work is is good right if you're putting out 10 bad things in a row well now you're going to lose people's trust um but then you probably honestly then you're putting you might not be i mean it depends that if you're really early then you might have a long way a lot of growth left but if you're just you know if you've been doing this for a long time you put a 10 maybe maybe you need to adjust what you're the medium or whatever but the point is if you're having a hit you know here and there and most things are you know a lot of things are pretty well liked some things are right Then you should just pump it out as long as your average is pretty good because you're going to get some hits along the way.

1:13:10And then the bad things won't be the norm. And so screw it. And I think it is actually a superpower to not be terrified of having a flop. I have a friend who is a stand-up comedian, and one of the things he did early is he just went out there and intentionally bombed. He just went out there and just made just really stupid jokes and long pauses, and people eventually were booing. And he just said, I want to feel it and realize the sky didn't fall on me. And now I can just relax. And it's kind of a superpower, I think, to accept that some of the things are going to be bad and that's totally okay.

1:13:43Yeah, I think about it. It's like as long as you're making contact with the ball, that's what you want, right? Sometimes it's going to go far over the back wall. Sometimes it's going to go high up in the air and someone's going to catch it, right? Sometimes it's going to go foul. But the important thing is that you're making contact with the ball consistently. And if that's how you're judging success, you're also going to probably have a number of home runs to show for that. And to go to what your comedian friend is talking about, if you're also aware that the worst thing that can happen is that you strike out or the worst thing that can happen is people are bored or they laugh at you or you get fired, you realize that that's not so bad either.

1:14:27So you're sort of open to the upside, but you've capped the downside. That's like the ultimate position to be operating from. You have to be able to, the human superpower is to realize that embarrassment isn't that big a deal because we really hate being embarrassed, publicly embarrassed. And doing something publicly, putting it out there, your art, your work, your thoughts, and people don't like it. It gets made fun of, whatever. People are writing mean comments. You know people in your life, your friends and family are seeing those, right? Everyone you know is seeing. It's a little embarrassing.

1:15:10It feels bad, right? And then you step back and realize, I'm a writer. My job is to put myself out there. This is going to happen. It's going to happen, especially if I'm trying to be bold and do different things. And also, if other people are seeing it, I don't care. Like it's like, it's like, it's part of a much bigger picture. And it's this amazing thing to realize like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It feels bad. But like there's so many people who do everything in their power. Number one priority is make sure that never happens. Make sure they're not publicly embarrassed ever publicly. They don't look bad publicly ever.

1:15:40They don't look like they made a mistake publicly. I mean, it's like, that is such a limiting thing. Yeah. I think self-consciousness is the enemy, right? Because it's the opposite of being present. it's usually rooted in fear or like a sort of a thirstiness like you really want validation or approval or a certain thing to happen it's very outcome dependent the the best position is where you're not thinking about that shit at all you're just thinking about what you're trying to do you know i one thing i've i've done that's been very one of the wise things i i do is When I get a flat tire or a fender bender, or I twist my ankle and need to be on crutches, something really annoying.

1:16:25And I'm like, wow, I still have to do all the things I had to do on my list. And now I also have this thing, right? It's so easy to just be like, the world has wronged me. This is now. I can't believe this. Or you can say five to 10 of these things happen every year. it is a hundred percent five to ten these things i just got one out of the way oh here we go here's one of those five to ten here it is i didn't know what was going to happen today but there's the flat tire at 2 a.m and it's just once you have that you said you suddenly shrug you put on a podcast to start changing your tire or you're waiting for triple a and it happens oh i got one out of the way so you can apply this as well too i put out a blog post and it's just being hated hated on right oh my god i read it they hate me this oh as a writer you think i'm going to go through a writing career and not have 20 or 30 of these?

1:17:14Oh, here's one. Here's one getting out of the way. So that zoom out and understanding the inevitability of this thing totally takes the sting away because it doesn't feel like something bad happened. I fucked up. I made like a, I wish I could go. It's like, well, yeah, but like, I've got to fuck up and that's okay. And so it's kind of baked in and then you don't care nearly as much. Well, there's a passage in meditations where Mark Surillos talks about this in regards to people. He goes like, look, is a world without assholes possible. He's like, no, obviously not. And then he's like, so when you meet an asshole, say to yourself, this is one of those people.

1:17:50This is one of that number, right? I was never, it was statistically certain that I would bump into this person. It was unavoidable. By the way, they're a minority. I know this statistically also. And now that I didn't, Because I wasn't telling myself that this was impossible or even unlikely, I'm not only less surprised, I get to say what you said, which is, okay, I've met one out of the 100, and now it's probably going to be a little while before I bump into the next one of these people. You also don't take it personally because you think this person has been being an asshole to everyone, not just me.

1:18:36and it's the same thing with by the way i'm a real a troll in the comment section sometimes you can click on their thing and see what other comments they've been making right on reddit or on my on discuss on on wordpress and so often oh they're shit talking 10 blogs right now right oh the last and then you suddenly don't care anymore because you say this isn't about me i did one of these people pass through you know and their ships no they got shit on this like they got shit it's not like oh my god i'm work why would i why would i engage it's nothing to do with me. It's nothing, you know, and, uh, and you just, yeah, again, that just, just all you're doing is, is yeah.

1:19:12And even to say to yourself, this person is doing their job, right? This person is a troll. This person is an asshole. That's their role out of a hundred people. Why would I expect them to be anything other than whatever they were apparently assigned by circumstances or their personality or whatever? This is what they do. My, and then you say to yourself, my job is to not be an asshole, right? So when I'm being an asshole, I'm neglecting my responsibilities. And when I'm being nice and when I'm being good and when I'm not treating people terribly, that's me fulfilling my job on this planet. And if we can kind of see people as being assigned to these roles, it does allow us to be, I think, a bit more accepting of the fact that they're not always going to be and do what we want them to do.

1:20:00And get rid of that, like this feeling this inane feeling that like i need to show them that they're wrong i need to punish them for i need to like come back with a snappy retort and it's like no i don't that is not the point here that's not the goal with this person um and and then what you're letting them do is do something much worse than be an asshole you're letting them become an asshole whirlpool that pulls other people into it now they're all acting like assholes you're letting them spread the the thing it's like no no quarantine the assholeness in that one person by shrugging and saying i guess this person is that person who's an asshole.

1:20:34Yeah. Don't let the son of a bitches turn you into a son of a bitch. I sometimes say, yeah. Yeah. So Twitter is really good at doing that, which is part of the problem. I think, uh, you know, I mean, yeah, it's just funny when you meet people, I'm sure you've experienced this where you've gotten, you know, negativity online. Uh, and then you meet people in person, uh, who know your stuff and just like, it's even people who don't like, you know, it's just, everyone is so civil and so kind and nice and normal in person. I'm not sure I've ever met someone who doesn't like my work in person. Like I'm sure they exist, but no one has ever told me to my face, yeah, that I suck.

1:21:14The worst thing I've heard in person pales in comparison to what I hear online every single day. Of course, or the people will be gentle about it. They'll say, I really, really like your stuff. Did you ever consider this aspect of it? Because I feel like maybe you skipped over that a little bit. And online, they're saying, this really shows the type of person that Tim is just as personal nasty. And it's the same. I'm sure some of those – there's something about being online that just – because a lot of what we've been talking about in this whole conversation is the dichotomy from what our stupid brains full fall for.

1:21:56and then when you can zoom out and see the truth, the real thing, what our smart part of our brains can see is real. And so this is another example where it's just like something about being online when you can just fall for the fact that you can think this is a non-human who is not a real person. And then in person, you're forced to zoom out and say, oh, this is a complete human being, here they are. Plus, there's just social etiquette. It takes a lot more courage to be a dick in person than it does behind the screen. Well, no, I think the new book is a great meditation on what happens when that is happening on the societal level.

1:22:36And I like the idea of a self-help book for the world. What do we collectively have to be thinking about in terms of our collective values or traits if we don't want to blow ourselves up or destroy each other? and I think it's very well done. And I'm sorry it took six years, but I'm also glad that it finally came out. Yeah, never again, but I'm happy it's done. Well, that's perfect. Let's not have that be the rule for the podcast. And when you come out to Austin sometime, let's do it again in person. Agreed, would love to.

1:23:15Thanks 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. And I'll see you next episode.

1:23:43Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like The Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you an ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free.

1:24:31No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. and you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.