Why Reflection is a Super Power | Lt Colonel Mike Erwin

0:00You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This 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.

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2:17Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

3:05Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So back in February of maybe the fall of 2019, I was invited to speak on a panel at the Naval Academy. That was my sort of first exposure there. Obviously, I'd heard about it. I knew about it. I knew Stockdale went there. And they invited me out to this little panel. And on that panel was a guy named Mike Irwin who had not gone to the Naval Academy. In fact, he went to West Point. But thankfully, they put their rivalries aside to put together this little panel. And I'd heard of Mike's work. He wrote this great book called Lead Yourself First.

3:49And he and I became friends. We talked. He did multiple tours of Afghanistan. He was a commissioned intelligence officer. He is now the founder of this thing called Team Red, White, and Blue, which helps American veterans by building a community for them. They do all these cool fitness activities and volunteer here and do awesome stuff. But a great dude, great writer, someone I've stayed in touch with ever since. He has another book out called Leadership is a Relationship, How to Put People First in the Digital World. But he told me he was going to be at Austin. He was giving a talk and I said, hey, come by and let's do the podcast, which we did.

4:31And I thought it was great. He gifted me some Neuromintz, which is, you've probably heard me take these. I'm a podcast like a bazillion times. I'm always exhausted because we have little kids and also just sitting there talking for an hour or two hours can be tiring. So that was nice. So thanks to the folks at Neuromintz. I don't know why you don't sponsor the podcast, but you should. I think this is a great conversation. I think you're really going to like it. Mike is currently a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves. He teaches at West Point as an assistant professor in leadership and psychology.

5:13He always writes interesting books. He makes a great follow on Twitter and Instagram at ErwinRWB. And just a great dude. I think you're going to like this interview. I'll just get right into it. Here we go.

5:42how's the running going it's good i i rolled my ankle really bad like what is that like two and a half weeks ago yeah and like it doesn't hurt when i run but it hurts like just sometimes right and so i'm i'm worried that i fucked it up yeah did something to like the yes something and then i'm i'm worried that i'm i'm uh i'm fucking it up like on an ongoing basis by like not stopping yeah but i probably i was so mad at myself too i went i went i was up really early i was running in the dark yep and i should have stopped i like i should have gone like this is not a good idea i'm gonna wait till it's light but i like was trying to cram it in yep and i literally made like two steps before i went down yep and it was so bad and then and then i was like i like you know you roll your ankle and you think like there's rolling your ankle and then there's like hurting your ankle yeah and so i was like oh i just rolled it and then i ran like five miles anyway yeah and then which was not smart yeah and then and then uh like the next day it was like i couldn't even get my shoe on yeah man that's bad yeah yeah it's the worst because like then you're like you said if you don't get to run then it's just totally messes with your energy and you're like your mindset and you're like, dude, I gotta find a way to work out.

6:58Yeah. And I think for me, it sometimes, not sometimes, very often it takes more discipline to be like, it's not smart to do this. I'm going to rest than it does to - Just power through. Yeah, yeah. Like the default is doing it, which is good. You wanna get to a place where the hard thing, the default is doing the hard thing. But then the problem is that can become its own bad habit. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Have you ever done rowing like on a concept to rower? Yeah. Like a, like a CrossFit rower. Yeah. I've gotten addicted to that in the past couple of years for like, anytime I hurt myself. Cause like I'm getting older, man, I'm 44, you know?

7:37And like, sometimes like I will have like an issue with my, my hip flexor all of a sudden from my run on a trail run, if you just extend too long and you know, cause I got like a nine tenths of a mile trail around my, around my, my farm and it's a lot of uneven stuff. And as I'm getting older, I'm just realizing, man, like sometimes I get tweaked something. And so rather than push it, like i'll just go to the rower for like a week i think ordinarily i would have just said like i think if i was i wasn't at home if i was in my own environment i probably would have been smarter first time i wouldn't have done it and then second i would have i would have said like okay i'm gonna swim later yeah but then it's like it's winter i'm not like swimming to me is the magical one because it's the lowest impact of anything i think what i i don't know like i can't i don't like treadmills the rower i'll do sometimes like as part of like a circuit workout but i can't I can't get myself I can't for whatever reason running has filled a place in my sort of you're right it's it's part of my like emotional regulation toolkit yeah and there I really haven't found anything that does the same thing for me yeah so like like when I I was doing jiu-jitsu for a couple years and I was finding that I still had to go running anyway yeah and And then I was like, I can't do two and a half hours of physical.

8:50I can't do both. Yeah. But Stokes would say you should be suspicious of anything that you can't not do. Yeah. But what if it's a healthy habit? I don't know. I struggle with it. Yeah. Yeah. I've gotten big into Jacob's Ladder. It's been like my big thing. So it's like at this angle, about 45 degrees. And it's just rung over rung and you just climb. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So low impact. But it gives me, I first learned about while it was deployed. on 09 and I got addicted to it because you can only do so much running around the airfield, you know, in Afghanistan. And so I would get into doing this thing.

9:24And so I bought one when I came home, didn't use it for like seven years. And then like, like literally this massive thing that takes up this room, you know, and I, when we would move, they'd have to pack it up and move it. And then I would, uh, finally during COVID, like, yeah, I just, when we moved out to the farm and all that, I just became addicted to it. And it's filled that void for me. When I did a talk at Alabama a couple years ago and they let i was like but can i use like the gym like i was like i want to use a football gym and uh and they had like literally everything you could possibly imagine and they had one of those and it was super cool and i was like i think i should get one of those they're not cheap no yeah they're like three grand i think is what they are now i don't know they used to be like strap yourself in right you strap something on here and then you can make it because some people like to go really high on the ladder yeah so that means you're going at a higher cadence um and then some people kind of you know bars on the side so i'll often just kind of hold on to the bars and you're just kind of you're more like walking up stairs yeah this feels a little bit more like bear crawling whereas this is here is like pure cardio um it's but it's like no impact um and it's like it gives you the same sort of like almost like because i'm a big believer like in running like the there's some sort of um psychological thing where like the cadence of the step yes like sort of like it's uh like i'm not someone who can sit and meditate very well but if i can get moving it slows things down and it it's part of it's it's part of like how i write it's how i think it's how i process stuff and so i yeah you have i have to get moving yeah um and yeah there's something about the repetitive rhythm like i remember reading an article in runner's world about this a long time ago where there's like some neuroscience guy came and talked about like the actual like the one two one two one two of running you know um is got something to do with like firing the brain to get it going and so anyways i get something similar out of the jacob slatter because it's basically i do about 90 to 95 feet per minute so you like it's you know every you know um basically like one and a half per second and so it's like cadence and so i think it unlocks some of the same sort of psychological things you know that i don't get from rowing rowing is right like you're pulling and i do about 26 to 28 strokes a minute and that's like more upper body but like i don't get the same rhythm of my feet moving i'm just making it up but if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint obviously we've been in boats for a long time but we've been walking around and climbing shit for as long as there have been humans and so it is going to something as fundamentally human as there is i i've talked about this before but like have you seen those footprints in white sands there it's like the oldest evidence we have of humans in the United States or in North America is just somebody walking.

12:01Right. And that's what we've been doing, you know, and then we've been running because people have been having to get from point A to point B a little bit faster than they would, or they've been running away from something. And so there's something fundamentally that goes to our sort of fundamental humanness in it, I think, and, and the nomadicness of us, I think. And then uh just like when you're meditating you can count your breath as a a way to force you to be present and i think your body is sort of counting you're you're you're feeling the jarring of the touch you know and it's it's sort of like a metronome or something that's a great yeah that's a great yeah metronome that's exactly it yeah so anyways it's pretty cool i mean if you never have like ever like given like a go like some people like they immediately do it like dude i'm did they do five minutes of it like i'm done no you're so like it's so exhausting i did it i loved it and then there was another machine if i was like designing a gym in my house i have a gym in my house but it's all like basic really basic stuff but they had one at this gym i went to in la a couple years ago that was it was just a rope yep like a rope and you just sit you can sit or stand and you're just it's just like you're just pulling an infinite rope down from the ceiling or something um and that was pretty i i liked that too it's just funny that you're spending you're spending thousands of to create the equivalent of a ladder or of a rope and you're just doing.

13:23Yeah. Yeah. That's so true. I mean, I think the biggest thing for me is I did a Jacob's ladder for like five minutes when I first got into it. That's hard. I can now go for an hour. It's crazy. Once you, once you build the muscles and all that and you get addicted to it, like you just go and at the time just like not stand still, but like, it's just so boring for you though. For me, like running on a treadmill gets massively boring. Yeah. Hate running on a treadmill. This is not. I don't know why. Because you can fall and hurt yourself. Exactly. And you can slow it down, right? You can go and you can go lower on the ladder or you can go higher depending on like how much tension there is there.

13:56But I don't know what it is about it. It's just it gets very rhythmic, you know, in a way that running does for me. So there's a very high correlation in my mind between in my experience between the Jacob's Ladder and running. So I don't get from from anything else. So, you know, I think there's I think there's something the rhythm and then also just the this is the sensation of traveling. distance like uh i can watch my son will be crazy and then if they get in the car when they're babies they fall right asleep but now and they're older like just you can tell just by looking out the window just being in a thing and the sensation of moving really really fast there's just something where like i'm meant for this this is what you know what i mean it sort of rolls you into a into a place that that the the mind is something it's less in charge but like the mind is not it's not sort of looping yeah or whatever yeah it gets in some of the that conscious pre-conscious unconscious mind all that stuff right of like there is like this part of the brain we know when we go to sleep that obviously works you know we don't know really what it is you know same thing like when you go below that level of extreme consciousness like there's something that gets going there that we can tap into so well so speaking of that it was in your book that i think i found one of my favorite quotes of all time it's from general mattis he was saying that the big problem for leaders in the information age is a lack of space and time for reflection.

15:21They don't have enough solitude. They're just sort of reacting in the moment. I think obviously an exercise practice is a way to sort of cultivate that space. But the problem is, yeah, we're just, we're too engaged and we're too focused on like, I got to do this thing right now. I got to think about it right now. I need more information right now. When really most of the time we already have everything we need to do what we need to do but we need to give it space to cook yeah totally i mean this is this is i remember when it's a funny story when we interviewed him for this uh he was actually the centcom commander at the time and so he was flying um somewhere between tampa florida mcdill air force base and he was going to the middle east and he gave us his time on like the the satcom sort of vote i mean like it was like and it was just so crazy because he'd be kind of coming in and out, but like the guy was so genuine in his intense clarity on the problem today with leaders that I see and not just junior leaders, but rising.

16:19Like he said, we'd see this out of his more senior leaders as a lack of time and a lack of preparation, uh, you know, to, you know, to actually unpack, uh, to unpack what is happening in your life. And you're, so you're in a leadership role and you have all these things going on and all this noise coming at you. And he's like, if you don't make the time to slow down and to reflect and to think about it. Like you said, you're a taskmaster. You're going from one thing to the next. And we're really good at knocking down targets and making a to-do list and doing all those things. But ultimately, if one of those things on the to-do list is not think and analyze what's going on and everything that's coming in my direction, then that's going to be a huge problem for you as a leader.

16:58You haven't done the pre-work, which is reading and thinking for years and years about all the things pertaining to what's going to pop up to you in an instant. And then, yeah, we have this, well, it's on my phone right now, or someone's asking my opinion about it right now. And we sort of flatter ourselves that it demands our response right now. We don't have the discipline to go like, I'm going to think about this for a second, or I need to run this by someone or through some process. And then so we make what feel like judgment-based decisions, but are fundamentally like emotionally based decisions.

17:37Yeah. I mean, this is the whole thing with, I remember when we unpacked this in doing some of our research, the example of when General Marshall brought in Brigadier General Eisenhower to the Pentagon, you remember, remember the story from the Eisenhower chapter, but, and he asked me basically said like on the heels of Pearl Harbor and says like, all right, Dwight, like, what do you think we should do? And, you know, he's a big expert, very comfortable thinking on his feet, but he had the discipline to know in the moment. I don't have a really good answer. So this is in the Pentagon. Can you give me a couple hours to go think about it and to come back with a cogent answer?

18:10Yes. Right. And I'm convinced I don't know. There is no sort of evidence that would suggest this. But I've got to believe that, you know, Eisenhower is such a fascinating story. Guy goes from carrying MacArthur's bags in the Philippines in 1935 as a major. So he goes from 04 to 010 in like seven years. I mean, it's a meteoric rise like almost like we've never seen in the military. But I've got to believe that it has to do with Marshall being so impressed when he brought him to the Pentagon. So I'm sure he brought a lot of like one star generals trying to sniff him out and figure out who is going to be the kind of leader that we need to lead us.

18:41You know, as we're now going to respond and get involved, probably in multiple theaters. And I'm convinced that that decision that Isar made of, can you give me a couple hours? He went in a separate room, thought, got his ideas straight, came back with some clear recommendations that that had to make a big impression on General Marshall. Right. Instead of just pulling an answer out of his ass. Right. Because because that's what the situation seems like. It's asking of him and to and to sort of control, I guess what they call the battle tempo to go like, hey, I'm going to step back and think about this because this isn't isn't actually a life or death moment.

19:16Right. Right. And it's so easy. Like I find, I find that like, when I give talks, you get on stage and someone asks you a question. Right. And so the social construction there is like, you asked me a question, I'm on stage. I have to answer that question. Right. And I have to say, I have to, I have to answer while there's cameras recorded, you know, I, in front of hundreds of people, I have to just rip out an answer about a topic that perhaps I've literally never thought about before. And because that's, even though I can get myself in serious trouble doing that, that is more comfortable than saying, I don't know.

19:54I have to think about it. Or even just the basic, what do you mean by that? Like, can you give me more information? What are you looking for? Right? And so it does. It requires a certain command of oneself to be able to resist the sort of being funneled towards a potentially, you know, imprudent or, you know, ill-considered answer or moment, right? Well, this is such an interesting thing that you said this because I'll never forget what I learned, like, up close and personal about just how important what you just said is. So when I was at West Point in 2011 to 2014, I had the incredible honor to essentially be the general's aide to Jim Collins.

20:34Yeah. And so when Jim Collins was he would come four times to West Point a year and he would lead seminars and I got to have a front row seat for that. And same thing. He would facilitate a lot of Socratic conversation and he would, you know, prompt the cadets to think about this or that. And the author of good to great for people who don't know. Yes, exactly. And so this is how like, you know, I had the forward to lead yourself first is like written by him, which is a funny story. Going back to your theme, one of your themes for this year about the discipline to say no. He basically said this is the last forward I will ever write for a book.

21:05He did it essentially as a thank you to me for all the work that I did for him as a planner at West Point. But I got to see him do this and cadets would at the end or sometimes even throughout, they would ask a question. And and he would not know like the immediate answer in the spot. And I'm not kidding you, Ryan. He would sometimes stand there in front of the room with awkward silence for 30 to 40 seconds. And I would look around the room because, I mean, this guy, he's been obsessed by studying leadership and he's got so much knowledge in his brain. It's unbelievable. And they would ask a question.

21:38He wanted to be super thoughtful in his reply. And I would look around the room and you would see some of the cadets being like, right now, should I not ask that question? Like, did I ask a really awkward question? and and then he would give this really cogent thoughtful answer and i just remember being really taken back by like hey here's one of the best in the world at this who got asked by a 22 year old cadet you know in a largely off the record conversation where like that and he's just sitting here just thinking through it before he gives a reply and that was a really important teaching moment for me of because i do i will often as an expert i'm very comfortable thinking on my feet and i'll sit there and say oh yes this question even this our conversation right When you ask someone a question, your ability to think on your feet is important.

22:20But at the same time, if you haven't done the work ahead of time and sometimes in the moment you don't slow it down, you can find yourself, like you said, saying something that's really not what you meant to say. Yeah, it's like, do you want to do you want to look stupid for 30 seconds? Or can you can and it doesn't seem like much, but that that really is an incredible barrier for people. and, or even just to be slightly uncomfortable for 30 or 45 seconds while you think of an answer. No. And so what we'd rather give a half-baked ill-considered answer than to sort of go, let me think about that for a second.

22:57Well, I want to go back to that Eisenhower example, because that's really interesting because he does ask for the couple of minutes or a couple of hours, but it's not like he then runs to the library to like learn on the topic, right? You You could argue that his ability to give an answer that Marshall then finds to be revealing or illustrative results in a handful of years earlier. Is it in South America, the Philippines? I forget. But he's studying under Fox Connor. And Fox Connor gives him, General Fox Connor gives him this sort of course. I think Fox Connor asked him a question. He realizes that Eisenhower is not particularly well read.

23:37He's basically only learned what he'd learned at West Point and his education had stopped there. And he sort of gives him this multi-year master class in history and military strategy and human psychology and philosophy. He's sort of assigning them books to read and then he's quizzing on them. that's that's what eisenhower is drawing on in those couple moments in those couple hours of reflection and solitude um it's not just oh let me step back and then my my you know my natural genius is going to do the heavy lifting there it's it's the pre-work that ultimately you're drawing on in these moments that that demand wisdom or or um you know uh insight yeah absolutely And when you think back to the fact that he, again, West Point class in 1915, literally he was a major at 20 years in.

24:25I mean, like I hit major because of like Iraq and Afghanistan. I hit major at 10 years. I mean, Eisenhower is still a major basically 20 years into his service. And then he just goes from there, you know, on to be the Supreme Allied Commander. It's just a fascinating journey. Like you said, like this does speak to the power of mentors and people who sit there and recognize like, hey, you've got a lot of potential, but he's a big extrovert. And so he was like a lot of extroverts. I'm an extrovert. Like sometimes you kind of can get by and rely upon your ability to think on your feet and your ability to connect with people.

24:54And you don't necessarily spend as much time as you can reading because that's a more introspective process. Right. And so that's one of the biggest things that that I learned, you know, in that whole process of working on the book with Ray, especially when unpacking Eisenhower and others is not just that you need to be read. We heard that from Mattis. We heard that from so many people about the importance of reading. but specifically with Eisenhower was that you can take that, uh, that knowledge. And if you can slow down your tendency as a big extrovert to just think on your feet and communicate on your feet.

25:23And sometimes that might be a five minute break. Sometimes it's, you know, multiple days, but we saw Eisenhower do this over and over again, whether it was like in North Africa, whether it was leading the D-Day, he would, he would get his ideas out of his head and he would put them down in a memo to himself. He would write and get his ideas out so that he was clear. And just seeing those examples, as you know, I mean, you talk about this so much, but the power of books and about history teaching us so we don't have to learn the lessons the hard way. I mean, that has prevented me so much heartache, I believe, by learning what I saw him do and some of the other leaders that we researched and profiled in Lead Yourself First.

25:56Yeah. Mattis has talked about this, that basically, especially in your line of work, especially in the military domain, he says it's unconscionable to learn by trial and error what you can learn by the experiences of others, right? So to go like, oh, I'm self-taught, or I learned on the job when your job is sending people into battle is to play fast and loose with other people's lives and their families. So I think we can see it so clearly there, right? To go relearn blunders that are well-documented is unconscionable for a general or a president, But the rest of life, you're still playing with people's time.

26:43You're playing with the best years of their life. I mean, imagine you're an NBA coach. Yeah. And you have not really studied coaching or human science. You haven't studied the thing. And so you get a 22-year-old kid and you waste a season of theirs, right? You burn them out. You're not able to reach them. You're not in a position to give them what they need. they'll never get that year back. Right. And so when you're in it's leadership is, uh, a lot is entrusted in you. Right. And so to not be as informed or as educated or, um, as well-versed in the stuff that you need to be well-versed in is, is, you know, it's irresponsible and it's, yeah, I talk about this so much.

27:28I mean, like, uh, and I'll actually show a picture in some of my talks and I'll give, um, where I show a picture of like the ramps dropping on D-Day and say, hey, good news for everyone here. Like, you're not making decisions. You know, should it be a three division or a five division assault and making decisions to send young men off on undoubtedly to some of them to their death? I was like, but like you were making, like you just said, decisions that impact people's livelihoods, that make the impact, their ability to reach their goals and their potential. And so don't underestimate the, as we say in the military, you know, the burden of command.

27:59Like the bottom line is like when you are, especially in a formal leadership position where you are given the leadership decision-making authority, then you should take that burden pretty heavily because you are going to make decisions, whether it's in business or whether it's in sports or the military. I don't care what the stakes are. The stakes are still high for other people's lives. And if you don't take that seriously and apply a decent amount of pressure to yourself to do the pre-work, to do the thinking, that's what Ray and I talk about in the book is like leaders have an obligation to do the hardest thinking for themselves.

28:28You can outsource it to consultants and you can outsource it to your staff, But ultimately, you need to own those decisions as a leader because other people's lives and livelihoods hang in the balance based upon the clarity of your decision making sometimes. Yeah. I mean, you think I was just thinking of sort of tech companies as you're talking about this. These are companies that sort of have their decisions have implications for society and the world. Right. Even just as simple as, you know, they dramatically over expanded during COVID and now they had to lay off lots and lots of people. So that's just a decision you make that had someone been more well-versed, better informed, better advised, maybe you wouldn't have made and someone wouldn't have moved across the country, left one job.

29:12People make decisions based on the things. And then obviously, you make decisions that ultimately affect the course of society or public opinion or how people read or consume things. And so, yeah, there's a lot of responsibility just in being a person who has a platform or a person who leads people or runs a company. Like very few of us are so insignificant as human beings that our decisions don't have consequences on other people. Even just think about like as a parent, right? If you decide not to study what it means to be a parent, if you have no understanding, if you're just sort of doing what your parents did or what other parents tend to do.

29:56Yeah. Or you're not dealing with like your own shit. Right. You're not dealing. You're not understanding yourself and your issues. Why do I get so mad about that? Exactly. Right. Those are things that your kid is going to be talking about in therapy 30 years from now. Yeah. And so, yeah, you have this sort of obligation to be informed and educated and have acquired as much knowledge as possible without direct experience so that when you get the direct experience, you can integrate it quickly. You can make the right decisions. You can learn from it. But it's adding to your store of knowledge, not starting your store of knowledge.

30:38thanks to toyota trucks for sponsoring this episode when i bought my ranch in 2015 out here in basco 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 in 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.

31:23We 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.

32:03Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a 8 Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is 8 Sleep's best product. I've used 8 Sleep for many years now. And it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing.

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33:47I love that. And just just riffing a little bit off what you said there. So I'm such a huge fan, obviously, of Daily Dad, right for that. Remember when you were at the Naval Academy Leadership Conference together, 2018, 2019, I can't remember. Time flies. But we were there, kind of said, Hey, what's the application of this for children? And obviously, part of the thinking there was like through parents. And so daily debt, I think was pretty nascent at that time. Maybe it was even just like, I think I just started in pilot mode. And I remember that was a really cool thing. Cause you know, I had, you know, co-founded the positivity product and I was starting to look at the implications of this stuff for kids.

34:19But one of the things that was really interesting for me in 2023, um, at our table, uh, at breakfast, uh, I've got five kids, my wife and I, we would do the daily stoic every, every single day. Now, was it over the heads of my four-year-old and eight-year-old? Yes. But the 10, 12, and 13-year-old, Eli, Adelaide, and Therese were able to start grasping the concepts as you went through. And I thought it was just a really interesting point about the role of how do we become better parents? Because I've actually found that in the conversations at the table, sure, for my wife and I to hear, and especially as so much of it ties to emotional regulation and control.

34:56But also, it was really cool to see kids start picking up on these ideas, you know, because as we know, kids are sponges and they listen and sometimes they're not picking things up like we think they are, but they were able to very slowly start to pick up on some of these key themes. And anyways, just, you know, as a, as a quick nod to you, I mean, like the application of certainly daily stoic to adults, but it's actually been a good way to kind of help a conversation with kids in a way that, again, even though they're not fully ready for it yet, they started to pick up. And by the end of the year, there was just like, the flash to bang was a lot faster in terms of them understanding the concepts.

35:33So that was pretty cool. You brought up something earlier that I think is important. You're talking about writing down your thoughts to figure out what they are, right? Writing the Daily Stoic made me understand stoicism much better, right? Because I had to write 366, essentially short essays based on stoic quotes. And then I made this decision that I was going to keep it going. So now I've been doing that every day for eight years. So I've written essentially eight books that are basically journaling prompts. Every morning I have to think about and articulate and rephrase some ancient idea that is not mine, but integrated into my own experience, my own reading, my own understanding, and then sort of put it back out.

36:19So the reason I decided to do Daily Dad was I got so much better as a person and then as a student of philosophy by this sort of forced practice, this daily practice of thinking about it, that I was like, oh, I'll just do that. I want to be better at being a parent. So it wasn't like, wasn't writing Daily Dad from the perspective of, I know so much, let me tell you, but that by studying and explaining what other people seem to have figured out, I'm getting it and I'm getting better as a result. And so when we think about sort of leading ourselves or getting better at something, the practice of writing and journaling to me seems like such a central practice.

37:00And it seems almost too simple and too basic to count as advice, but it's like where almost everyone should start. Yeah, absolutely. And it's really important. You know, you just said there, like, we think about, Hey, how do we get better in as a basketball player or a golfer, or as a runner? Like we clearly see the ways that we get better and all those things, but I've always been fascinated by the lack of resources, the lack of things out there to help people become better parents, you know, and it's arguably the most important job that you'll ever have. And when you think about how you do it, it's highly personal.

37:31Like you said, you have to unpack your past, you know, where you're currently at, where you want to go. So it's very complicated. It's also riddled with emotions because you often can't tell someone how to parent their child, right? Or like, you know, that's not usually met well. So it's very complicated, but without the resources and out in reading and investing in how to be a better parent. I don't know how people do it because the job is so difficult and specifically around the emotions. You know, you know, obviously I think about this a lot through the lens of character, the intersection of your thoughts and your feelings and your actions.

38:03And look, emotions are the one thing that, you know, make us different than AI and computers and machines and robots. So emotions are fundamentally what make us human. But the ability to control our emotions, as you write about, as you talk about so much is just so critical. And to me, while this is definitely applicable to me as a leader of team red, white, and blue and various organizations, like to me as a father, like that's way more relevant. And like the reminders and like the conversation that I have with myself about how to do that through a lot of this, you know, the stoic philosophy that you have just, just done such a great job of pulling together is super helpful.

38:41And I think that most people out there, I don't know, but would probably agree with me and say that like the application to our personal lives is even more important than anything that we're doing professionally. Yeah, it's it's very clear to me how fixing or working on yourself as a person will make you a better professional. Right. Right. It is less clear the other direction. Yeah. Right. So you can you can achieve all sorts of professional mastery, professional success. You can rack up so many gains there, but it doesn't change how you're going to deal with, you know, a toddler throwing a temper tantrum or traffic or, you know, bad weather or all the things that sort of frustrate us in life, right?

39:26Stress. And so you got to start. I mean, that's the premise of your book. You got to lead yourself first. You got to work on yourself first because that's the one common variable of all the situations that you're going to find yourself in. You're going to be there. And most of the time, as difficult as the problems of life are, I mean, Homer says this in the Odyssey, that basically we blame the gods, but the gods look down at us and laugh at how we make our suffering worse. You know what I mean? Like we, they give us problems, but, but then we make those problems worse, right? We're really the source of most of our troubles.

40:04and so understanding like okay i gotta work on this stuff if i want to be worthy of the responsibility that's placed on me as a parent or as a leader or you know as a citizen right you gotta you gotta work on your own shit yeah and i love this i'm smiling because i was talking to rachel about this earlier but it's so apropos because my flight last night i was i was like hey this is important i need to get to austin you know the night before get a good night's sleep and come in like that was like the best laid plans so my flight yeah i missed they they literally i uh our flights late coming out of rally i get into charlotte airport uh and i run from like one side to the other right being like i i think i got it yeah i get there 15 minutes early closed i'm like closed like and so i'm like okay not the end of the world they bump me to the next flight which is at nine o 'clock last night well then that turns into 11 30 and then when we're on the tarmac they have some issues right and now we take off from charlotte at 12 45 right And so my plan was to get here at 830 last night, get a good night's sleep, get all that.

41:04And now I have this other situation on my hands where I'm frustrated. Oh, by the way, I'm around other people who are now drinking to cope with their frustration. The cops had to come and take one person off the flight, one person they didn't let on the flight. This is just increasingly happens at the airport. So going back to the point about how you show up here, this is professionally. I'm in an important podcast conversation with you. but all these other things in my personal life and how I handled that had a big impact so I didn't get into 2 30 last night I got four hours of sleep right and now you have to sit there and emotionally one kind of keep it together but two also like all right well at the end of the day like you don't care right like hey we're here we're having the conversation doesn't matter whether I got in last night and I had you know eight hours of beauty sleep or if I got like four hours of sleep and so again just the application I just found it very interesting that here is like the stoic philosophy super applicable to my life right now as I'm in route in a traveling situation, this turn sideways to come sit down and be on the daily stoic.

42:04Well, no, I think about that all the time because I travel a lot and I'm like, okay, I'm now trapped in this metal tube. I'm not in control and I'm either going to get there or I'm not going to get there. Right. So like we can do to control that. When we think about stoicism, I think the thing that we dislike the most in the modern world is the idea of acceptance or resignation because that seems like weakness, right? But like literally no amount of me being mad at the flight attendant or loathing the airline or, you know, whatever it is, none of that is moving it one iota faster. But actually what it's doing is it's just pumping me full of adrenaline and stress instead of sleeping on the plane that I'm just sitting there doing nothing on instead of deciding to pick up.

42:52Like there's so many ways that I could productively use this time or at the very least, just not torture myself. Just get so angry. While I'm sitting there. Yeah, totally. And so it's fascinating the way that stoicism sort of, I think we think about it so often in these like big life changes, but it's also in the little moments of the decision to be like, all right, you know what I mean? I'm just going to sit here. And or that, all right, I'm going to talk myself down off this ledge, right? I think people think of the stoic as the person who's not affected by it at all. And if you're not affected by it at all, you'll probably never even pick up stoicism because you're good.

43:33It's actually for the person who is feeling it and frustrated and messed up by it that you need to sort of walk yourself through these kind of steps or these ideas so you don't take a bad situation and make it a lot worse. Yeah, absolutely. And I literally, that's what I did last night as I was going through. I was so frustrated, you know, and especially being frustrated by the person next to me who just had to like, you know, keep opening her mouth. And I just was like, oh, man, like, you know, and so I did what I could, you know, but it is like a bit of self-talk and a conversation with yourself that says, all right, what can I do in this situation to make it any better?

44:07Really not much. But like you said, I can do a lot of things to make it worse. I can lose my own cool and now make someone else mad at me or I can sit here and and stew on it and allow like the cortisol just surge through my body when I could read I could write I could just go to sleep right and and so it's just that whole notion of you controlling what you can't control and like those life gives us those opportunities every day and especially in the world while we're traveling and so to me again like I just found it very interesting that like as I was coming on the flight down here like that like I had these amazing opportunities to practice It's like what, you know, you spend so much time learning.

44:41And I know you talk about that so much. It's like great if you read about it and you learn about it. But can you actually deploy it? Can you actually bring it to life? Because if you can't, then that's great that you learned it and you read it and it's up in your brain. But if you can't actually bring it to life, then it's almost worthless. So we think of the Stoics as living so long ago that obviously they couldn't relate to our modern problems. But it's not like traveling was easier 2000 years ago. It was way worse. Right. There was, you know, like Seneca's writings, he's talking about the ship was supposed to leave at this time and then it's weather delayed.

45:12Right. Marcus Darius has this obscure reference at one point in meditations to like some customs or toll booth operator, you know, and it was probably some asshole giving him a hard time. Or, you know, there are stories about like Cato getting there. You know, he's traveling ahead of his traveling party, so they don't know who he is. and he's supposed to be received as this sort of dignitary, sort of given treatment befitting a Roman noble. And they're just like, don't care. So at the most basic level, they're experiencing all the things that we're experiencing now. And it's not like these things weren't frustrating or annoying.

45:50They were traveling because they had to go somewhere and they wanted it to go a certain way. And they didn't want it to take one minute longer than it needed to be. but it always does that's that's life and and i think my favorite quotes from mark surrealist he's saying like look basically it only harms you if it affects your character right and so okay like i was supposed to be traveling here i needed to get here this time if i don't make it by this time it costs me x amount of money or this person's gonna be mad at me i'm gonna miss this funeral there's all these things that you don't want to happen but they can happen um you You don't really have any control over that, but you do control whether you're going to be an asshole about it.

46:29Right. You control whether it's going to make you do something that you're later going to regret. And I think especially when I was younger and I had trouble, like I can just think of things where I was like, I took this out on somebody else or I didn't handle that with the sort of grace that I needed to handle. I couldn't shrug it off like and and you're not proud of that. And so I think it's also just thinking in this moment, like, okay, whether or not I make the thing or not, I can communicate effectively about it. Like I can give the people a heads up about what's happening. I can try to productively use this time.

47:07I can try, like, I think something, you know, so often we're just dealing with our own shit. we don't think about like, I don't remember when I learned this, but it's like when someone pointed out to me that flight attendants on most of the airlines only get paid when the plane is in the air. And you're just like, oh, you're also getting fucked by this situation. We're in the same boat. You know what I mean? And, and, um, that I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to see it that way instead of this more sort of emotionally cathartic way, but which is actually making me and the situation works.

47:40Yeah. I was talking recently to someone about this. It was kind of interesting, um, you know, in terms of selfless versus selfish, you know, this idea and sell, sell the word selfish, I think is pretty aggressive, right? You hear that word. That's the, that's a word that kind of hits hard. Right. But ultimately like when you do things, cause it's going to make me feel better to lash out or make me feel better to do this or that at the core, it's a bit selfish, right? You know? And, and I, when I, someone shared that with me, I was like, wow, that's a really thought provoking way to think about it.

48:11It's just it's an interesting lens when you sit there and you say, OK, so you want to say this or you want to react in this kind of way because it's going to make you feel better. Like ultimately, that's like you focusing on like what is going to make you feel better or make your situation in some way better. And ultimately, I just thought that was a really powerful lens to think about this is that I think most of us would like to think that we're servant mindset or that we're selfless, that we care about other people. in many ways, like when we allow our emotions to get the best of us and to take the driver's wheel, that that's actually kind of a selfish thing to do.

48:45I was on a plane the other day and, uh, it was obvious we're coming in for landing and then you could feel it on the plane. You know, you travel enough. You just get sort of a second sense for, for all the things that are happening. And it's like, okay, we're obviously circling the airport and they're not communicating about it. And then we sat on the runway for a while. Once we landed, they weren't communicating about it and we've been delayed. There'd been all these problems and I felt, I was so frustrated. I was like, they could have just communicated about this. They could have like respected my time more.

49:14I was thinking about all these ways that it was making me feel like as a paying adult customer, very sort of insignificant and like I didn't matter. And then I was like, I was like, wait, you know what? I bet my kids feel this way all the time, right? Because like somebody's just deciding when we're leaving and they're not communicating. And it was actually this moment where I saw a totally different perspective about a totally different situation. I was just thinking, you know what I mean? Like they tell you it's going to be 30 minutes. They know it's going to be 90 minutes, but they believe if they tell you 30 minutes, three times you'll be less upset, right?

49:52So it's sort of this patronizing, condescending, sort of dishonest thing because they think you can't handle it. I mean, parents do that to their kids all the time, right? They're prioritizing all these different things other than you. They're not communicating. You have no control over what's happening. Your plans are being taught. I was just like, oh, this is what it's like to be a kid. And so it was a frustrating, annoying situation, which caused a bunch of trouble for me. But what I took out of it was actually this more empathetic understanding of just life in general that I then have started to apply more as a kid.

50:27I go like, what would I want if somebody else was in the driver's seat of my life, how would I want them to treat and talk to me? And so it's changed how I think about that. So in that sense, I think when the Stoics say like the obstacle is the way, it's not that they mean that every, there was no way that I didn't fix that situation at all. Nothing changed about the travel delay, the getting screwed over, the fact that I'd had to pay extra, you know, none of that stuff changed, but what changed was me afterwards in future situations, that's what they're talking about. And that's the price you pay.

51:00And that's when you think about it, it's a pretty small price to pay for the learning. You know what I mean? Like I talk about this a lot with like, wait a minute, you go pay money to go run marathons or ultra marathons. You go pay money to be uncomfortable. It's like, yeah, man. Cause it's like the experience you're really paying for what you get out of it at the end, that feeling and how your mind has changed or how your confidence has changed. I'm doing the team RDB. We challenge every year, we challenge every veteran to do what we call BFG, you know, big fitness goal. And so choose something hard that the current version of yourself in the beginning of the year can accomplish, but by later in the year you can.

51:34And so, you know, I've run the JFK 50 miler five times in the past, you know, 15 years, but it's been five years, 10 years since I've done it. So I'm, you know, I've got to put in a lot of miles this year to get my body up to that place. But, you know, it's a really interesting thing, you know, when thinking about the power of, you know, those goals, you know, in our lives. And, um, right. You're not paying for the activity you're paying for the person you are after having done the activity. Exactly. And so that to me is worth it. So my point is like, you look at the costs and all the stress and all that, that, of that situation, but that teaching moment that you got from it, like you said, it's probably more than worth the actually monetary and time and energy, uh, that you committed, you know, or that was extracted from you in that particular situation.

52:17Sometimes it's just weird that like, We have to actually pay with our money or time to actually learn these lessons that then actually yield a huge return on investment in the rest of our lives. Totally. So how do you suggest that people get more of that sort of space for reflection and that sort of even keelness that I think a stoic aspires to? And then also I think all great leaders have. Like very few people are like, that is a great leader. Notice how erratic they are. Notice how emotional they are about things. You know, notice how anxious they are. Notice how they're always dwelling on the past or ruminating about the future.

53:00No, like what great leaders have is that sort of that calming sort of steady energy. Yeah. I mean, this is something that I think about a lot. I also because I'm, you know, some of my best friends are some of the most like elite military operators in the world. And so, like, I talk about this with them a lot, like when we were just having conversation about especially how do you keep your cool under fire? Right. Like in a situation where you're in a deployment situation where the stakes are life and death, you know, and so I learned a lot from those conversations with them. But certainly, like you said, we learned a lot from history.

53:31You know, to me, I think so solitude in the book, we really define it as it's a psychological state. So it's not a physical or geographical space. It's the psychological state where the mind is isolated from the input from other minds. Right. So it's whether you're reading the book or you're listening to the podcast or you're even like scrolling through something on social media in that moment. That's not solitude. But it is the moment you close the book or you hit pause on the podcast and you think about to yourself. What does that mean to me? You're ceasing inputs. Exactly. Right. And so you've taken the inputs.

54:02If you're thinking about the neurological, the 80 billion or so neurons in our brain are kind of firing and pinging as they're listening to something or reading something. It's hitting pause in that and saying, OK, what does that mean to me? What do I think about that? Yeah. And so for me, that's a big part of step one is understanding what we mean by solitude, because I think people believe that it has to be like you need to go deep out into nature or you need to go to a place where you're going to need like an hour or two hours of uninterrupted time. Like people like you and I, I think we often will get that from running or from exercise, which, by the way, is, I think, the best way objectively to get it, because not only especially if you're outside, you're getting the benefits of nature.

54:39You're getting the benefit of running or rucking or hiking or walking, you know, the ankle express, as I call it. Right. But you also have got the the motion. Right. We talked about earlier that that motion. So I think that's the best place on a walk or on a hike or on a run, you know, for us to be able to gain that clarity. But we think that it has to be that. And I think in the world today, in the information age where it's moving so fast and there's so much going on that it doesn't have to be these big moments. Like you can find the five minutes. You can find like the hey, after the call or after the meeting, I need to just go go for a walk or I just need to sit there and just like breathe.

55:14Right. And just give my brain a chance to hit reset. And so I think that when we don't have the bigger moments, the bigger solitude of going out in the nature or doing the hour or two hour long process. that we can find these three or five or 10 minute micro moments throughout the day. Yeah, right. It's like, what is your mind doing as you're getting your hair cut or you're taking a shower? Or yeah, I'm gonna take a walk. I'm gonna take a lap around the parking lot before I hop on this phone call. And you just sort of, I'm gonna think about it. I'm gonna mentally prepare for it. I'm gonna run through what I need to know, what's important to me here.

55:49I'm not just gonna go from one thing to another. Thing to the next, to the next, to the next. And I mean, I talked to so many people who are just like, they live their schedule from 8 a.m. until 5.30 p.m. Depending on what leadership they are, leadership role they're in. It's just back to back meetings. It's literally, I'm like, that hurts my soul. Like, I just cringe for you, you know? And especially when, if you have any kind of anxiety or worry. So you have an eight to nine meeting and then you have a nine to 10 meeting. So the last few minutes of the eight to nine meeting, you're like, is this going to end on time?

56:23How am I going to do it? And then the nine to 10 one, that transition period between activities, which we're not good at, but is you are creating needless amounts of your points of conflict, things that can go wrong, where you need everything to go right. And so you're just creating a kind of needlessly stressful day, which is obviously, as you go through that day, impacting your ability to integrate and retain information, to make decisions, to treat people well. You know, you're not Winston Churchill during the Blitz, right? Like, this doesn't need to, it is not life or death here. You're not Zelinsky, you know?

57:09But you have created an environment where I bet if you monitored their vital signs and your vital signs, it would be comparable. And it shouldn't fucking be.

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59:15The amount of stress that we allow to come into our lives, you know, that is, like you said, in some ways is definitely preventable. And this is one of the simplest ones of being like, like, no, just end the meeting five minutes early and say, hey, you know, I need five minutes before the next meeting. Like, do you really need to go all the way up until the buzzer? Yeah. And I think that some of these things we have just accepted as like, God, this is the status quo or this is what we do here. And it's like this is a big part of the message in the book is saying, look at all these things out there that objectively you step back and you zoom out and you say, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense.

59:47Yeah. Like, why are we doing it that way? And say, no, I'm going to make a change. Right. And we're going to communicate the reason why we're going to end every meeting here five minutes early so that you have that time to clear your brain. And like some of them might be good to go to the restroom or to go get a glass of water. But to get up and to walk into to spend time, like allowing everything that just happened to sort of filter out, we needlessly create this mentality. And sometimes people are almost like boastful about it. Like, yeah, look at my calendar. It's stacked all day long. I was like, dude, that is I'm I actually look at that and say, that's a problem.

1:00:21You're like, I'm not impressed by that. You think you're a powerful person, but you don't have one fucking minute to yourself today. You are not in charge. The calendar's in charge. Actually, your assistant is in charge. The coordinator is in charge. You are running from one thing to another all day. And how valuable could you actually be if you have to be used in all of these different ways, right? What I think you actually find is that great CEOs, great leaders, they're actually pretty chill because what they have effectively done is delegate and distribute downwards the things that they don't need to do.

1:01:07And we were talking about Eisenhower earlier. I told the story and he goes to the enemy. Eisenhower walks into the Oval Office having just been inaugurated and somebody hands him an unopened envelope. And he says, never do this to me again. This is what staff is for. And there is this sense, oh, he thinks he's too good for it. It's not that he thinks he's too good for it, although he is. But he's saying that actually you have to have systems, you have to have structure to protect the most valuable thing there is, which is time and space and perspective. And that takes, that's actually harder work than working hard all day.

1:01:44Way harder. Yeah. And I saw your post like right around the new year on this, because whenever I lead seminars on leadership and specifically the application of unpacking lead yourself first, the always the most applicable, the most people are like having aha moments is during the Eisenhower matrix and the Eisenhower box of right. Is it urgent or not? Is it important or not in terms of time? And I remember I was at West Point when I first learned about this from Tom Tierney. He actually replaced Jim Collins. Tierney was the CEO of Bain Consulting firm a long time ago. and he walked through, you know, because Covey had basically taken it and kind of brought it out to the business world, right?

1:02:18But ultimately, when you look to the credit, you know, Eisenhower, you know, is really the one, you know, to my understanding of this, who gets kind of credit for thinking about this two by two matrix. And like just giving people that that lens, those lenses to look at how they spend their time and how the world is, is often transformational. And I'm still shocked at how many people out there have never heard of the Eisenhower matrix, or they might conceptually understand it a little bit, but they don't really understand the application of all the things in life, for the most part, that make us happy, that make us successful, that give us the things that we're looking for in life are in that box too, that are important, but they're not urgent, right?

1:02:53It's our relationships, it's our self-care, it's how much sleep do we get? How do we eat? Do we exercise, right? It's our planning, it's our reading, it's our self-improvement plans. It's all of that is not urgent, but everyone knows it's so important. And I just think that's such an important thing to talk about. Speaking of presidents, like I'm fascinated by Jimmy Carter. because he has this reputation of not being a good president, although he actually does accomplish a shocking amount in one term. But he's probably the smartest person to be president in the 20th century. I mean, he's basically a nuclear physicist and probably the most fundamentally decent and honorable man to be president in the 20th century.

1:03:31And yet it doesn't go the way he wants it to go. And it doesn't, the reputation is the reputation. And so there's a lot of arguments about whether Carter was too idealistic. You know, the first thing he does is sort of pardon everyone pertaining to Vietnam. You know, he does the Panama Canal. He does all these things that are sort of politically unpopular that people think, oh, if he'd been a bit more pragmatic, he would have been more successful. And so it's this kind of tension, you know, should he have been a bit more Machiavellian? And they were saying like the one thing that would make Carter, the one argument that never worked on Carter was like, you should save that to your second term.

1:04:13He's like, it's impossible for me to not do something that I think is right later. And so it's always been framed as Carter was too moral, too decent, too idealistic to be an effective president. But the more I've been reading about it and the more I've been studying it, actually the fundamental flaw in Carter's administration is that he chooses not to have a chief of staff. Interesting. And in not having the chief of staff, he says, like, I'm the hub and there's all this spokes coming. And so he was just pointlessly bogged down in minutia. Like they would say, if you gave Carter something, he would read it.

1:04:52Right. And so people were not filtering reports. And they were saying not only would he read it, but he would give it back to you with like notes and grammatical corrections. So he's not, he's too bogged down. He's not seeing, he's not doing the thing that only the president can do, which is see big picture. And that he's just too involved in every, if you wanted to use the White House tennis court, it was an explicit set of instructions that you had to run that by the president. Right. And so you see, oh, it's actually all the other things may or may not be true. But the fundamental issue was that he made himself too much the center of things, that he didn't have enough time and space for reflection, for thinking big picture.

1:05:36He didn't have intermediaries that could handle things that he was not naturally good at. And so he's not leading himself. He's not having the leadership conversation with himself first. that says, hey, the president has to do the most important things. And then everyone else does the next most important things. And that's actually the flaw of his administration. The stark juxtaposition of Eisenhower and Carter, like you just talked about there. I mean, I'm West Point guy, right? So Army versus Navy, right? But you think about that. They both had come from the military. But that right there is a pretty stark.

1:06:11There's not the state. He doesn't. Maybe he's not in it long enough. Or maybe he was reacting against it. But yeah, that staff system, that hierarchy, the way things are supposed to operate, it doesn't work. And his hero is Admiral Rickover, who is this sort of famous micromanager who's involved in everything. And that maybe is necessary when you're overseeing a nuclear program, but the president's job is to see things big picture, right? And I think effective administrations understand what they're supposed to do and what they're not supposed to do, and also what other people are supposed to do.

1:06:54And if they're not doing them, they understand their jobs to hold those people accountable. It's not to micromanage or get involved in those things. Yeah, this is so interesting. I've seen a recent article talking about this a lot about the rise of the chief of staff. We've seen it even at Team Red, White and Blue. We've hired a recently retired Colonel Green Beret as our chief of staff. You see, as I'm the executive director of a staff of about 40, and you see how important that role is, right? Because there's all these people that have these various jobs going on and someone to be that filter.

1:07:27Right. And the danger, of course, is that you can get in a very filtered view of the world and you can be detached from reality. If you have a chief of staff whose mentality is like, hey, I don't want to let the CEO or the general or whoever see the ground truth. And we want to make sure that everything is being portrayed as being, you know, really well put together. But if you as long as you know, that is a potential downside. There's a reason why the chief of staff and what I'm reading and what I'm seeing with my own experience is like sort of a hot topic right now of saying like that's arguing.

1:07:57one of the most important roles in an entire organization to be able to coalesce all these things going on and then filter what does get to the chief executive or the person in charge. Cause like they can't, they just can't do it all. Yeah. I'm, uh, I'm reading this book now called the gatekeepers by Chris Whipple, which is about the chief of staff, uh, role in the presidency. So it's, it's like, I think it starts, maybe it starts with Eisenhower and it's all the chief of staffs up until Trump. And one of the chiefs of staffs is talking about, he's like, the chief of staff has to understand that the emphasis is on the staff part, not the chief part.

1:08:35If they think their job is to basically run things for the president, that they're the chief, they're doing it wrong. If they understand that they are fundamentally staff and their job is to manage staff, then they succeed in the role. And so the successful ones have been sort of the behind the scenes person and the unsuccessful ones have been the ones who try to sort of worm their way into pictures and decision making that sort of is acting not as a filter of people or information, but of like steering the president towards different decisions that they want them to make. But yeah, it's such an important role because as you become a leader or you become successful at what you do, then you have more and more inputs.

1:09:24Yep. More demands on your time. More demands on your time. More asks for mentorship. Yeah. And you have to figure out how can you do the thing that made you great in the first place or that you were hired to do in whatever role you are currently doing. And if you are too bogged down in all these other things, you're not going to be doing that. This is the thing I think about so much like from I keep telling people when I talk to especially high school students, I say when you go to college, like the most important class you can take is a philosophy class, you know, in my opinion. I think philosophy is so important and basically teaching you how to think and how to question and ask questions about the world.

1:10:00But like this is this is a big one for me. Like I think about this a lot of like when you know, when am I saying no? Because Jim Collins talked about this a lot. You know, he would say, how many people have a to do list or a calendar? Like everyone's hands go up. And how many of you have a stop doing list? You know, and like everyone's like looks around like, what is he talking about? I've never heard of a stop doing list. He's like, yeah, think about if you if you have all these things going on and then you have more and more things that come on your plate. Like if you don't stop doing things like something's got to give and you just are are unconsciously saying, well, I'm going to let whatever it is fall off the plate.

1:10:34Sure. But versus being intentional, saying, no, I'm going to stop this and that and this and that. I used to be on this board. I used to do this. I used to do that. I'm now going to consciously step aside from that so I can focus on this. And where I struggle with this, Ryan, is like, when is it is especially as a leader when you're entrusted to so much? When is it the selfless thing to do? Right. Even though I don't want to go do. I don't want to do this phone call. I don't want to work in this project. when is that actually like the selfless and the right thing to do versus lazy right versus what am I just using that as a cop out and saying like well I don't want to do that because like I'm protecting my time right and so this goes back to philosophy of like there's no good answer here I don't think there's no answer key we have to look at every situation and think through it and say well no this is actually when I should say yes I don't want to say yes but I know the right thing here to do is to say yes with my time because fill in the blank this person has done lots of things for me in the past right uh by me doing this it might open a door for our organization down the road and i just think that it is such a deep and really entrenched um topic that a lot of us don't give enough energy and time to think about you know how important that is no i i think you and i can relate to this and that we both have the sort of little farms and there's so much to do on it.

1:11:52Right. And, and, um, if your identity is tied up in being the person who does stuff for yourself, right. You know how to do things. You like doing those things. I I've, I've struggled over the last couple of years. So when I bought it, it was going to be this place that I get away from work and I do stuff with my hands and it's great. Um, but it's like, do I need to spend a half day of my life unloading hay off of a trailer with a tractor when I could pay someone$200 to do that for me. And, and, you know, there's that part of you that goes, my dad changed his own oil. I changed my own oil. And, and like, it doesn't say anything about you as a person one way or another.

1:12:34But if you have assumed the responsibility for stuff, or you've been hired to do certain stuff, you've got to be able to go, I can do that. Right. But I'm not going to put Plutarch has this great set of essays on leadership. And I think Princeton has a translation of it called how to be a leader but he says um a leader must be able to do everything but a leader must be able to do anything but can't do everything right and the idea is like i can do it and there's going to be times in and i will do it and certainly in the future when things are less busy i'll go back to doing it but that's a selfish decision for me to make right now to be like hey sorry i'm going to delay X, Y, or Z because I see myself as the kind of person that does X, you know what I mean?

1:13:23Or that, that can't, you know, some of these are more first world than others, but you're like, I'm not going to pay someone a hundred dollars or$200 to, to, to, you know, put chemicals in my pool every month or whatever. And, and, and you see yourself, you have this, this, you're not able to update your identity for the reality of the situation that you're in or the income bracket that you're in. And so you're trying to do everything or you're involved in everything. And what you're not doing is the most important things or the things that really only you can do because you have this sort of, sometimes it's masculinity, sometimes it's a bad leader that you worked for and you saw them do it, but you're not able to sort of go, what's actually the best use of my time and energy.

1:14:08Yeah. And it's such a dynamic shifting target because on some days, like you said, like you, you want to do that thing. You want to do that physical labor. Like it's good. It's good for you physically, mentally, et cetera. The whole thing. Right. You know? And, and so this idea of we have to make so many decisions and it keeps coming back to this idea of like why life is a thinking person's game, right? Like, and if you just kind of go through and say, Oh, well, that's the way it's always been, then sure enough, you know, you're going to keep making the same decisions as you always have without putting the time in.

1:14:37But sometimes what was a great decision literally last week is now not a good decision. Cause like the example of like moving hay or, you know, for us sometimes processing chickens on our farm, like there's a time like when I can get help. And if I can't get help and I have to do it like all on my own or whatever, that's a bad day. It's just gonna take literally all day. And so the juice is not worth the squeeze to do that. But if I were to do that, like the week before, like when I had help, all of a sudden it's, I'm building relationships, we're learning skills, We're teaching our kids how to do this.

1:15:06And my kids have a deeper appreciation for where their food comes from. All these benefits come from it. But like if you make that exact same decision, like one week later when you don't have help or I have a busy week of travel on the horizon and like I need to be focused on doing other things on the farm or other things with my family, then that's a terrible decision. Right. And so it's just the role of thinking and how important it is. Well, yeah, we think of wisdom as this sort of withdrawn, you know, like heavenly elevated thing. Right. And the best definition I heard of wisdom is that wisdom is knowing what's what.

1:15:39And so it's knowing when to do stuff. It's knowing how to do stuff. It's knowing why to do stuff. And that it's never the same one day to the next. It's that sometimes this is absolutely the right thing to do and the right way to do it. And then other times that exact same thing is the opposite of the right thing to do. And so to have that ability to go, okay, I have the time. This is good for me to do. And then it says nothing about me as a person to outsource that same thing down the road. Right. That, that, or, or, you know, people, people are afraid to say no because they don't want to seem rude or superior or any of these things and understanding that, no, it's really a matter of, is this a good thing to do?

1:16:27Yes or no. And then how other people interpret it or think about it is really not what matters. Or your own earlier or outdated assumptions about things also don't matter at all. And to be able to think of this thing anew in the context that it's in, that's the kind of practical wisdom that we're trying to cultivate. So, yeah, people think philosophy is like, oh, they know the answer to the trolley problem. Or they have these complex understandings of these really big ideas, which they may. But actually the philosophical person is the person who can go, you know, in the light of this or that. Yes.

1:17:04Here's how I think about this. Totally. Yeah. And it's just it's so funny just to think how important that skill is that you just define right there in life. and going back to the information age and the volume of just noise and information coming our way, like how hard it is to actually do that. Well, if you are constantly open to the barrage of input of ideas from other people, from other sources, from other people telling you what you, what you should do. Right. Um, and look, I think we all do. We want people to listen to our podcasts, to read our books, to, and to have those things guide and help people.

1:17:35Cause a lot of people are looking for what to do. Like, Hey, tell me what I should do, how I should, how I should live. And that's, I think, a very healthy thing. But ultimately, I say this a lot, no matter how many books you read, no matter how many podcasts you listen to, all the self-improvement things you do, you still have to, and this is the primary point of lead yourself first. You, in that moment, have to analyze all those things you've heard, all those things you've read, all the things you've listened to. You have to do the thinking that says, in this moment, these are the big decisions I'm going to make.

1:18:02And this is everything from parenting to homesteading to leading an organization to even just like how you show up in a given day when you go interact with people, like whether you're traveling or going out to a restaurant. And so all those things, I think, are shaped by a lot of that. Are we doing the analytical and the thinking work that it means to be a human? And we used to, as we talk about human beings, used to by default have so much sort of solitude and time to just think. that everyone pretty much kind of had to. Now, like there are so many people, I think that they don't have literally but a handful of minutes in a given day where they're actively thinking intentionally about these things because there's just so many things competing for their time and for their mental energy.

1:18:48Yeah, we talk about how, you know, discipline is a form of freedom, right? And if you're not disciplined, you're sort of a slave to all these different desires or temptations or, you know, what everyone else is doing. But you could also make the same argument about sort of wisdom or knowledge or education, right? If you don't know what's what, if you don't have a sense of context, if you can't integrate, analyze, understand information, then you're going to be not free. You're going to be a slave to inputs. You're going to be a slave to emotions. You're going to be a slave to impulses. You're going to be a slave to pressure or peer pressure.

1:19:28And you're not, you're not a whole range of options is closed off to you because you're just doing what feels good in the moment. You're just doing what somebody told you to do. You're just doing what you have always done. Right. Right. And so, so knowledge is freedom, not just in the sort of political sense, like, but, but in the very personal sense, if you don't know what's what, if you don't know about yourself, if you don't know about the world, if you don't know about people, if you don't know what's possible well then you're circumscribed insofar as what is possible to you because you don't fucking know yeah totally yeah that's so spot on that's really that's a really good like kind of like bring it together like the application of all these ideas because um it is life is complicated right life is very complicated and you start thinking about all the things going on at the at the strategic level the macro level of the world and what's happening in ukraine and the Middle East and like, and you look at economic policy and you look at all these things that, that I can't control a single one of those things, but all those things in some way, potentially shape and influence my life, you know, um, because of how it affects the tax code or how it affects, right.

1:20:39Whether I, you know, my son might go to get to, you know, get deployed into the future, you know? And like, sometimes like some of these things are very much driven by like the timing. I was listening to a great book the other day. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of the fourth turning. Um, but like the, these historians kind of unpack these things and like, whether you were 18 in 1944, or whether you were 17, right. Whether you were on the beaches in Normandy or, you know, you were fighting or you were back home and then never went. Yeah. Right. And so sometimes like life, like, uh, it just happens to you and it's completely, I saw this is from, it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan.

1:21:13A lot of people I knew they got out of the army in like early 2001 right and like it changes the course i mean these little decisions or not decisions but just circumstances determine the course of so when the stoics are talking about how we're you know we're not in charge or that there's this sort of logos this fate that's what they're talking it's not that we don't have free will but it's that what we choose is is so determined by these enormous macro events that most of us are completely ignorant of totally and so like that's the thing going back to leading yourself first and like knowing what's what is that there's a lot of complexity in the world around us.

1:21:47And no matter how much time we, there's no way we can possibly, I mean, I look around all these books, like you just, there's not enough time to be able to read about all the things, understand the neuroscience and the social psychology and history and sociology. And like the list goes on and on, but all the things. And so like, sometimes we're, um, I think we can have a sense of, well, I can't do it all. So like, what's the point, right. Right. Like, you know, and I, and I think that like my message, you know, on this with people a lot talking about leading yourself first when it comes to the solitude and the thinking and the reflection period of life is saying like, Hey, you're better off at least finding small moments and doing it in little bits to make sure you have enough time to think about all the macro events happening around you.

1:22:25And to me, that I think, you know, is something that, you know, is in our control for most people on most days. And if we can make that a habit, it can have a real big impact in terms of how we show up, right. For others as a leader, but really just as a human being.

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