BARRY SCHWARTZ: Stop Searching for the Best

25:11Monday for this suit, Tuesday for this one, Wednesday for this one, and so on. He says, how come? Obama gives him this look and says, Michael, do you have any idea how many decisions I make in a day? You want me spending my time thinking about what suit to put on?

25:32Michael:Wow. So I, you know, that was my attitude. I would wear any color at all as long as it was blue. It just made life easy. You know, it's like Henry Ford. You can have the car any color you want as long as it's black. Well, I'm colorblind. So I basically had a whole set of clothing that was just carbon copies that my wife passed judgment on to convince me that no matter what I chose, there wouldn't be a clash. So I didn't have to pay attention to whether this went with this because everything went with everything because everything was basically the same. And, you know, it freed me up from some amount of time and worry about what kind of an idiot I looked like when I went out into the world every day.

26:20That's great. So I sympathize with your friend who just wears one kind of shirt and one kind of pants every day in the summertime. Really makes sense.

26:28Michael:One of the things you and I have been talking about a lot, Dad, is that in this season of our lives, in our business, but also personally, that we're optimizing for peace. You know, that the thing that we value most is having peace. You know, there's a lot of ways to do life. There's a lot of ways to do business, many of them successful by various criteria. And from our perspective, the thing we want more of in our life is peace. And I see this as being intention with choice. you know, that there's some sort of tipping point with choice where too much choice and too many options tips you into a land that is not peaceful because it's actually stressful.

27:10Michael:You know, like when I walk into my closet and I see 40 different pairs of shoes that I have to choose from today, like it creates just little like micro moments of stress. And I think simplicity, I don't know that I'll ever be a minimalist, shall we say, that anyone that knows me would laugh at the idea of that. And certainly you, you know, neither of us will ever be accused of that. But I do think that part of the clarity that we need when we're looking at these things is what are we optimizing for? Are we optimizing for self-expression? Are we optimizing for telegraphing our identity? Or are we optimizing for margin?

27:46Michael:Are we optimizing for peace? And if we are, then we're going to have some trade-offs around simplifying because that's what clears the path for margin and peace, which in our world are the most valuable things that we're optimizing for. So I agree with you. I use slightly different terminology to capture what you're talking about. The trade-off I think we face is a trade-off between wealth on the one hand and security on the other. And wealth is about not not just material wealth, but wealth of experience. And to have a wealth of experience requires that there be lots of options. That's what it means to have a wealth of experience.

28:29But in that kind of world, the price you pay is that everything is less predictable and less controllable and less certain. And so you feel less secure. So what you're calling peace, I would call security. And so choice is a really good thing as long as there are constraints, as long as we can put kind of a bubble around the choice set so that we are not always uncertain about what tomorrow is going to bring. and we are not uncertain in every aspect of our lives. And I think people take security for granted in societies like ours. People take peace for granted in societies like ours until it's disrupted.

29:21And then all of a sudden they want to know why isn't somebody keeping things safe and secure and peaceful. Why is it that every morning when I wake up and I open the newspaper, I don't know what I'm going to see? So all of a sudden, I'm willing to pay a price to get more security.

29:40Michael:Yep. That's a good word. I just took it for granted and then it got blown up and I don't take it for granted anymore. And I think that the choice problem is one way of thinking about it is that we have unknowingly traded security for wealth, and we've gone too far, and now we want to backtrack. And the problem, of course, is that some of us are in a position to do this just as individuals. No matter what's going on in the world, you can build your little secure fortress. But others of us are pretty much at the mercy of what society offers us and expects of us. We would like to be able to count on getting the health care we need, for example.

30:24But in a society where you're essentially on your own when it comes to health care, you can't count on getting the health care you need. And you might be willing to settle for good enough health care that you could count on.

30:39Michael:Right. But there isn't something like that for you to settle on. So you're kind of on your own. And so there's a limit to how much we can do as individuals if society is not cooperating by offering us security and stability if that's what we want. It's fascinating. I'd like to shift the discussion a little bit to your book, Why We Work, and some of the issues you raise there. But you talk about the difference between jobs, careers, and a calling. And could you kind of tease that out a little bit and help us to understand it? and especially what calling's about. So in the literature, the research on workplace satisfaction, people have had for a long time made a distinction between work as a job and work as a career.

31:28And the essential difference between those two is that if you had a career, there was a trajectory. You were going somewhere. You weren't going to be doing the same thing day after day, month after month, year after year. Whereas if you have a job, that's exactly what you're going to be doing. Same thing over and over again. And what we did in this research is we introduced a third category borrowed from sort of the language of religion, which is that work could be a calling in the way preachers are called to be religious leaders, where it's not that you're going somewhere like with a career. It is that the work you do every day is meaningful and important to somebody.

32:14And the wonderful example of this that we focused on is hospital janitors. One of my co-authors did a research project on hospital janitors at a major medical center, academic medical center. And, you know, they have a long list of tasks that they have to accomplish in the course of their workday. 20 or 30 different things, and there isn't a single item on the list that even mentions another human being. It's all about mopping and waxing floors, emptying trash cans, changing bedding, and so that kind of stuff. They could just as well be working in a mortuary as in a hospital. But there are some janitors who, when you interview them, describe their workday, And it is full of interactions with patients, interactions with patients' families, interactions with nurses.

33:12You have a very heavy patient who needs to get turned so that the patient doesn't get bed sores. The janitor's in the room and helps the nurse turn the patient because the nurse can't do it on her own. So their job, as they see it, is to promote the mission of the hospital, contribute to the mission of the hospital, which is to ease suffering and cure disease. And they do whatever is needed in a situation to promote that mission, even if it involves things that are not a part of their job description. And that's the part of the job they get the most satisfaction from. And the reason they're able to do it is that they don't have supervisors looking over their shoulders all the time and telling them, that's not part of your job description.

33:58That's not part of your job description. Mop the floor. Empty the trash. So these are people who are called to ease suffering and assist in the mission of curing disease. And of course, they have a vital role to play, given how many people go into the hospital sick and come out sicker because of all the germs that are floating around. Being antiseptic is really important to the mission of the hospital. And if the janitors aren't taking their work seriously, the hospital will be a pit that you don't want to enter because you're as likely to come out worse as you are to come out better. So it's a very important part of the hospital's functioning, and you have to take it seriously whether somebody's watching you or not.

34:45So it turns out that many people wish their job was a calling, but at best, they think they have a career. It's comforting, I suppose, to feel like you're going somewhere and that your perks and your salary will go up and your title will become more prestigious. But if what you're doing at a high level in the organization is just as meaningless as what you were doing at a lower level, then the perks and the salary are just sort of consolation prizes for spending hours and hours every day doing something that doesn't make anybody better off. And they wish their work could be a calling.

35:25Michael:We speak to a lot of leaders, some in the nonprofit space, some in the for-profit space. Some of those people are business owners. Some of those people are leading a couple of people on a team within a larger company. How do you create the conditions where the people who report to you feel as though their work is a calling rather than just a career or a job? Well, there are two answers to that, I think. One of them is that you hire for what you don't know how to train and then teach what you do know how to train. Nobody that I'm aware of knows how to encourage people to treat the work they do as a calling.

36:09And so you hire people who already feel that way. And then you teach them how to be janitors and how to be nurses and how to be software engineers. We know how to teach people those things. We don't know how to teach them to really care about the work they do. And it's the effects of that work on other people. So that's one thing. Hire people who you think are called. And how do you tell that? You can't. I mean, it's full of error. I mean, how can you ever tell when you make a hiring decision that you've made a good decision? It's a complicated business and you're going to get it wrong. But I'm pretty sure that if you're not looking for that, you're not going to get it except by accident.

36:50Fair enough. And think about why. You hire a coder who's skilled, and that person is producing from day one. It's like a wind-up toy. Wind him up, sit him in front of a desk, and he's going to be producing the code you need immediately. You hire somebody who is called but isn't a great coder. You're going to have to teach that person a lot before that person actually makes a contribution to the organization. Are you willing to pay somebody for six months during which time that person's contributing nothing and learning the skills? Much better just to hire somebody who can hit the ground running.

37:30So, you know, I think all the incentives in organizations are in the direction of hiring people who can do the task rather than hiring people who want to be excellent at whatever task they have. And there's enormous pressure on companies, particularly publicly traded companies, to have bottom line results that will keep the shareholders happy. The last thing you want is a shareholder strike or a shareholder abandonment. And so all the pressure is on you to make hiring decisions and promotion decisions that will contribute to the bottom line immediately, short-termism. If you don't have a publicly traded company, you've got a lot more room to do what you think is right.

38:24You know, and there are great examples of this, but the reason they stand out is that they're so rare. The guy who started Patagonia, he did what he thought was right. And if you don't like it, don't buy my stuff, you know? And he took the millions and millions of dollars he made and devoted almost all of that fortune to what he cared most about, which is preserving the environment. He could do that. You know, there was nobody telling him what to do. Nobody threatening to pull the money away. Right now, there's an interesting conflict. I don't know how it's going to be resolved between Anthropic and ChatGPT.

39:04You know, Anthropic, the guy said, we think AI should not be used to guide unsupervised weapons, drones, unsupervised by humans. and we think it should not be used to violate the privacy of citizens. And if the Pentagon wants to use it for those things, we just won't sell it to you. And this was a stand that I suspect, whether you agree with it or not, it's a separate matter. But 10 years from now, when Anthropic is a public company, I can't imagine they're going to say that. because now there are bound to be shareholders who say the nerve of you, sacrificing my profit for your holier-than-thou stance about what should and shouldn't be done with your product.

40:00And ChatGPT seems much more willing to cooperate with the Pentagon, which basically said, listen, you sell it to us and we'll do whatever we want with it. And they may end up winning the battle, at least for government contracts, and the independence that Anthropic now has, it won't have in 10 years or 15 years. So the more you give up control of the company, the less able you will be to create an environment in the company where people feel called to contribute. And you saw this happen in Google. As Google has developed the workforce, despite the immense wealth that Google has, you know, they worry about profits and they worry about shareholder satisfaction.

40:49And, you know, their watchword when they started, don't be evil, now is just a laugh line at the company. So, you know, the things that you could do to encourage people to have callings, I think the folks who run companies are not willing for the most part to do.

41:16I agree with everything you've said, but I want to add a nuance to this. I used to run a large public company for a number of years, CEO of that company. And I took a lot of inspiration from Steve Jobs. And I don't want to let leaders off so easily. Because I think oftentimes leaders of these companies, whether public or private, don't do a good job in helping individual workers see the through line from how they're working. work matters to the larger mission of the company. And there's this famous story where Steve Jobs, as he was trying to recruit John Scully, which turned out to be a huge mistake, but he's trying to recruit John Scully, who was the CEO of Pepsi, to come to work at Apple.

41:55You may have remembered this back in the 90s. I think it was back in the 90s. I do remember it. And he finally said to John, he said, look, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water, or do you want to come help change the world? And that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. And he left a very prestigious job, John Sculley, where he was making a ton of money to come to Apple with a lot more risk because apparently that resonated deep inside of him. And I think that as leaders, this is a skill that we can develop. And that is, it has to do with our messaging. It has to do with our focus.

42:25And frankly, we've got to feel the calling ourself. If I don't feel called to the mission of full focus, I certainly can't articulate it to our employees and enlist them in that mission, but I think that's the exact - No, no, that's exactly right. You can't lie to people. Yeah. You may be wrong about whether the things you do are going to change the world, but you have to believe that the things you're going to do are going to change the world, at least a lot more than selling sugar water, which as we know is also changing the world, but not in a good way. But the Google people, their mission, the people who founded the company was to provide all the world's information to all the world's people.

43:07What could be a more noble aspiration than that? And you could see why talented folks would just run to join the company in this noble mission. I don't think that's their mission anymore. Their mission now is to make sure that all of the world's people see all of the world's advertisements. That's not quite the same thing. Yeah. It didn't have to be that way. Yeah. It would be interesting to see what happens to Elon Musk's companies. And regardless of what you think about him, I mean, his whole mission in life seems to be he wants to make humans an interplanetary species. And he's recruited like amazing engineers and they're doing amazing things because all of them want to participate in something that will create really a legacy like no other.

44:00All of that is true. But I want your listeners to understand that you don't have to be Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Imagine that you work retail. You're in a shop in the mall. People come into your shop. What is your job? Most people say, my job is to sell as much of the crap in this store as I can. That's why I'm here. But here's a slightly different perspective. Everyone who comes into my store has a problem, and my job is to help people solve their problem. And it isn't going to be a major problem that I'm going to help them solve. It's going to be a minor problem. But if I can do that, they're going to walk out with a better life than they had when they came in.

44:55And I get to do that for 200 people every day. Wow. Now, not too many people who work retail have that attitude. it's easy to imagine how different your experience as a shopper would be if when you walked into the store the people who tried to help you were there because they wanted to help you and not because they wanted to sell you and at the end of that day the people who work in the store would probably walk out feeling a lot better about how they spent their day than they currently do so it doesn't have to be Steve Jobs. It can be hospital janitors. It can be people who do retail. As long as you see the work you do in a certain way and the people who supervise you let you do the work in that way.

45:51Michael:That reminds me of, there was a video that Chick-fil-A produced probably 10 or 15 years ago. It's probably 15 years ago now. And I think it was called something, I'll try to link to it in the show notes, something like every life has a story or something. And it was basically a dramatization of people coming in and out of Chick-fil-A and they have these little word bubbles above the heads of the customers as well as the employees. And it was like, this man's wife was just diagnosed with cancer and he just left hospice to come get lunch, you know, after sitting by her bedside. Or this person was just fired from their job.

46:27Michael:Or this student just found out they were accepted to the college of their choice. Or, you know, this mother's, you know, finally you know, she was about to lose her mind with her toddlers at home. And so she, she wanted to get out of the house to get a break, you know, those kinds of things. And the point was that they're not just serving people chicken. They're meeting people in the context of their real life and giving them this human connection of, I see you. And I, I see that you're a real person with a real story. And I honor that. And we're going to have this maybe 30 second, one minute long connection, but it matters.

47:02It does. That's the point. But it doesn't only matter to the customer. Right. No, it matters to the employees as well. It matters to the employee too. And fast food is actually a great example. You know, a lot of people who eat fast food, the adults are working two jobs. Yeah. They're exhausted at the end of the day. Twice a week that they take the family out for fast food is just a chance for the parents to catch their breath.

47:28Michael:Yep. And you who works there can make the difference between whether this is a relaxing and satisfying experience or one where you're treated with contempt or complete lack of interest. It doesn't take a lot of work from the salespeople to make your experience a good one. But nobody takes that seriously as the mission of the job. The job is to sell burgers and fries. It is not to make people feel better at the end of the meal than they felt when it started. And that's where Chick-fil-A has just done such a great job because they have seen that gap and they've said, we can do that better. That's right.

48:11They were very effective hands. I remember them. And it's interesting that the versions of that that you see from other fast food are so completely generic. Right. You know, it's not acknowledging the customers as individuals. It's just that if you get something at Taco Bell, the taste of the food is going to put a smile on your face. Right. And that's going to happen to everybody who takes a bite out of one of Taco Bell's products. So it's really not acknowledging the humanness of your customers at all. You know, one of the things my wife got in the habit of doing as she was an advocate for her brother who was in the process of getting a liver transplant is she would begin to thank the providers at the hospital and the clinics.

48:56And she would just say, thank you for choosing your profession. I mean, even though, you know, just the.

49:01Michael:Could be the janitorial staff. Could be the janitorial staff. Thank you for choosing. Durses, yeah. Then she would add these words. She'd say, I want you to know it matters. It matters to us. Thank you. Yeah. And I think that just called for something in them, but it took the conversation and the exchange to a different level. I think it can. And so we have responsibilities as customers or patients or clients to let people know that this matters to us and then acknowledge when they do it well. Yes. When they show concern for our welfare and not just our diseased organs. That's right. So yes, we can help.

49:41But again, we can't treat this in a vacuum and act as if everyone is free to create the kind of work environment they want. There is pressure on people imposed from within the organization and from outside the organization. And I think it's a simpler world if you think it's all about maximizing profits and maximizing pay, because then you can do anything as long as it leads to that objective. When you're trying somehow to balance that with also enriching the lives of your customers and also your employees, well, now you're introducing complexities and trade-offs that the simpler model doesn't acknowledge exist.

50:27So you need to complexify your life to acknowledge what work can be. And the interesting thing to me is that what research has been done pretty much shows in almost every area that enlightened employers have companies that are more profitable than the unenlightened ones. And so by being a command and control organization, you're leaving money on the table. So even if you didn't care about the welfare of either your customers or your employees, and all you cared about was the bottom line, you would be an enlightened employer because that's the way to enhance the bottom line. But there's a kind of ideology that dominates so that people who should not be doing this are leaving money on the table as they run organizations.

51:21Michael:I want to ask you about AI and wisdom. A lot of your work has been around wisdom. And we are two people who are in many ways enthusiasts around AI. We use it. We love it. It helps us think better. It helps us come up with better solutions, et cetera. And we are, I'll speak for myself, deeply concerned and skeptical about the downsides. There are incredible upsides and there are incredible downsides and how all that shakes out is, you know, yet to be seen. One of the things though that I think is a threat as we go to AI more and more to problem solve is where does human judgment, where is human judgment needed?

52:08Michael:And where does wisdom get exercised? What is the place of wisdom? And I'd love to just hear your thoughts on that. As AI, again, it just gets better and better. You know, we're not getting a lot of stupid stuff out of AI anymore. If you know how to use it well, You're not getting a lot of stupid stuff. So what is your thought on that? This is a very complicated question. As you just said, I don't know how this is going to shake out. It is potentially an extraordinary improvement on lives, and it is potentially incredibly dangerous. But the one thing that's clear now is that it does not replace judgment.

52:48It assists judgment. And if you think you can just push a button and then do whatever the application tells you to do, you are likely to get yourself and probably other people into trouble. So you need to be judicious and knowledgeable in asking the right questions of AI and in interpreting the answers that you get to extract the kernels and discard the husks. And so, as is often the case, the more you know about a domain, the better AI is. Yeah. Because you can edit yourself what it's telling you because you know a lot. You go to AI because you're about to see the doctor about a potentially serious problem and you don't know anything.

53:43and chances are pretty good that you will just torture the doctor with questions that are the wrong questions and values that are the wrong values because of how you've been led by the software and you can't filter out. The main problem I see, yes, I wrote a whole book about wisdom with a colleague, but one of the points we make is that you can't teach people to be wise in a classroom. The way you become wise, the way you develop judgment is by making decisions, watching some of them fail, and learning how to make better and better decisions, more and more context-sensitive decisions as a result of correcting your previous errors.

54:32And so that means people need practice to become wise. And the more people rely on AI, the less practice they're going to get. So it is potentially the case that we will end up with people who know more and are less wise because of AI than the current set of people that we have. because they have offloaded the kinds of trial and error experiences that make them wise to the software partners that they have. I could be wrong. This is such a dynamic space and failures or shortcomings are probably correctable. So I'm optimistic that we will eventually figure out how to use it right. But my concern, and this is not a trivial one, is that the underlying profit structure of this field is almost certainly going to guarantee that companies are working not to maximize the quality of AI, but to maximize the return of their massive, massive investment.

55:48And so somebody is going to have to say, we have to keep the main thing, the main thing. And the main thing isn't profit. That doesn't happen with tech companies. There's only one tech enterprise I can think of that has managed to remain true to its mission over many years of enormous influence and growth. And that is Wikipedia. it's not perfect it was never perfect but it is as it's better now than it was and it's still trying to do the same thing that it was trying to do before it is not an accident that wikipedia is a non-profit organization it's the only one i can think of of any size and influence So how do we instill the commitment to mission that Wikipedia seems to have in Anthropic and in other soon-to-be-massive AI-generating companies or somehow bring it back in Google?

56:59You know, Facebook, I have different feelings about. I don't think Facebook ever had particularly lofty aspirations. In fact, it started about as low as you can get. And it's just proceeded. I'm not a big Facebook fan. Anyway, so I wish I could answer your question. But that real concern raised by your tying it to wisdom is the more we rely on it, the less practice we'll have in developing our own judgment and wisdom. Yeah. And that may be a problem. That's the net to crack. There's so much to say about this. And I feel like we could do a whole show on AI and wisdom. But you wouldn't want me on it.

57:37We might. We might. But at any rate, thank you so much for your time. You've been very generous with us. And I've loved this conversation. It feels like it's gone by in a blink of an eye. If people want to start digging into your work, where could we send them? All my books are on Amazon. I'm an old man. I don't have a website. I don't use. Kind of love that.

57:58Michael:Yeah, I love that too. There are a bunch of books. If you type my name into Google, you'll see them. If you type my name in on Amazon, you'll see them. And you should just read everything I've ever written. Done. Challenge accepted. What can I say? We will put links in the show notes to all of Barry's books so you can read them. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. My pleasure and thanks for being interested.

58:32Michael:Okay, so yet another trip to the confessional booth slash therapy room known as the Double Wind Show. So true. I mean, I think part of what makes this enjoyable for me, as opposed to the older format of what we did where it was just us talking, is I'm getting so many insights in real time and so much input. And it's challenging my life and my assumptions and how I live. And that was certainly the case in this interview with Barry. Yeah, he's so wise and also just fun. I mean, if you didn't watch the video, you may have missed this, but he's just like so animated and he just brought so much energy to the conversation.

59:11But let's start with the conversation around

59:14Michael:choices and the maximizers, the cost of being a maximizer. What do you take away from that? Well, this is my entire life. I don't have Maximizer in the StrengthsFinder sense as one of my top strengths, but I do think it's part of the operational software that I bring to my life. I'm trying to maximize everything, and I don't differentiate between the things that we're good enough is just good enough. I'm always seeking the optimal solution. So I told you that I'd been into AI deeply and I got into Vibe coding recently. And so I've learned to build applications, which I could have never done before Vibe coding, but now you just can describe it.

59:57And it does take some work. But I come up against a app that I don't like, that has got some annoyances with it. And I just think to myself, well, I could create something better than that. And I have. And so it's like, where does it stop? Because those things consume an enormous amount of time. And I read a thing yesterday, Megan, that I've got to send to you. It was a Harvard business study about how AI is not actually saving us time.

1:00:24Michael:Of course it's not. Because what we're doing is now we're finding more things to do with this enhanced capability that we have through AI. Yeah, our standards are increasing. And so we want to do more. I mean, I think this is the trend that we have seen historically with every major technological innovation that was meant to save time. It never does. It never does because we always figure out how to do more with it. You know, we're not satisfied. We're always optimizing. I was saying like four months ago that, you know, man, AI has saved me probably 10 to 15 hours a week. Well, yes, if you compare it to the things that I'm no longer doing that I was doing.

1:01:03Michael:Right. But now I'm doing 20 hours a week of more stuff that's higher level stuff that's more interesting that I think makes a bigger contribution. but to say that it's saving me my time is not entirely honest well first of all thank you for being honest well thank you for sharing um no seriously i think that's really helpful you know one of the things that i notice in myself is optimizing or maximizing things like perusing choices has a compulsive quality to it i find are you confessing here yeah so now we're back in the confessional booth. You're the priest this time. So we switched seats. But when I am tired, you know, what do they say in recovery?

1:01:48Michael:Lonely, angry, hungry, angry, lonely, tired. That's it. Any of those, I am more likely to start surfing for choices because it's like my brain thinks the discomfort I feel now will be solved by some new novel solution that's better than what I already have. Except inevitably it takes more time. It adds more complexity. It costs more money. Switching costs. Switching costs, all that stuff. It's always fool's gold. It's always a false promise. We've all had these conversations probably in the last few weeks where somebody says, you know, Hey, I'm using ChatGPT. And then somebody says, well, I'm using Claude.

1:02:28And so you go like, well, maybe I need to check on that. And then, so you go down a rabbit hole of trying to compare them. And I literally had this happen this morning.

1:02:36Michael:Yeah. You know, so I was looking at different vibe coding tools and I happen to use one called Replit, but I had a good friend that's using one called Base44. And I thought, well, maybe I'm missing something here. That's the feeling. Maybe I'm missing something here. And so I had perplexity, which I haven't used for a while, but it's actually very good research. I said, I want you to do a comparison between the four major vibe coding platforms so that I make sure that I'm on the right one? Well, first of all, if I quote, am on the right one, how long is that advantage going to last? And how much does it matter?

1:03:05Michael:And how much does it matter? Like what is the gain between the almost the best and the very best? Well, and I'm using 10 % of the capabilities of Replit right now. Right. It doesn't even matter. But it just becomes, I think it becomes this psychological salve for some kind of discomfort that we tell ourselves, if there's something missing. And if I can just solve the thing that's missing with the thing that I think is the plugging of the hole of the thing that's missing, then everything will be okay, except it never works. And there's no end to it. And it continues on and on. And I'm thinking so much about like, what is really creating overwhelm in our lives?

1:03:41Michael:And it's not just that we have too much work to do. I think we used to think that here, like at Full Focus. We used to think 10 years ago that the primary thing that was creating overwhelm and a lack of winning at work and succeeding at life was that you just had too much work to do and you weren't prioritizing the rest of your life. You know, that was kind of our hypothesis. And I don't think that's so much wrong as it is incomplete. I think now what we know is, like I said in the interview, there are all these sort of ambient forces in our lives that we can't control, like, you know, what's happening politically, economically, technologically, all these things that impact our lives very personally.

1:04:18Michael:So we can't say it actually doesn't matter to me. So I, you know, don't ever want to pay attention to it. It does matter to me. And I have no control over it. So that's one thing. But then it's these like real sneaky things. Like our affluence enables us to spend vast amounts of time curating our consumption in ways that are literally stealing our lives from us. And we don't even know. We're like, here's my hands. Put on the, you know, the, what is it? The shackles, you know, the handcuffs on. And like we got to reckon with that. Our consumption is creating overwhelm. Because then what happens is you go to your closet and you go, oh my gosh, I got to get rid of some stuff.

1:04:57Michael:And then we spend our weekends getting rid of the stuff that we bought on the front end. And now our lives become a lot of managing stuff. Well, and part of it is we get rid of the stuff so we can fill it with more stuff. Right. It's not like we're content to just, like my friend who had four different outfits, all the exact same shirt, all the same different pants. No, if I did that, if I whittled it down to that, I guarantee within three months, it would be an overflowing closet once again. And I think that's a metaphor for lots of parts of our life. We spend a lot of energy managing the stuff of our life if we're affluent in any way.

1:05:36Michael:And that doesn't mean people who have more money than you. That means you compared to anybody else in the world. We are all affluent if we're listening to this show in some way, right? It is a burden. It is a burden. I was just connecting the work in my mind as you were talking with Ian Cron's work. And what was the title of his last book? The Fix. The Fix. Yeah. And he talks about all of us have inside this deep - The ache. The big ache, maybe. The big ache. Yeah. We just want more. There's something that calls us to search because we don't feel satisfied. And it's a deep psychological, and I would argue, and I think Ian would argue too, a deep spiritual kind of crisis that characterizes our time.

1:06:19It's like we're made for eternity and our hearts know it and they're restless.

1:06:25Michael:We're restless for that, but we try to fill that hole with consumption. And I mean that more broadly than just buying things, but like this kind of, there's always something else out there better. And it's like, that doesn't fit the shape of the hole that is the problem. Well, and for the first time in history, we can actually fulfill a lot of those desires. Right. And that's what makes it so addictive. And particularly when you're getting dopamine hits from those things, whether it's buying that new shirt that you really like and it feels great the first time you wear it. It's like we're this relentless quest for more dopamine.

1:07:00And we become sort of slaves to our own hijacked psychology. I guess the only thing, I mean, I wish I had an answer to this, but I think the only thing is just increased self-awareness and being in community with people that have the same values and are willing to not hold us accountable in a shamey kind of way, but just call us to something greater than that.

1:07:22Michael:Well, I think increased disconnection is the other thing that we've got to have. We have got to take the umbilical cord that we've got plugged into these places like social media, you know, where we're seeing ads and things like that. We've got to unplug from those things because biology wins every time. We are no match for the dopamine engineers. I've said it on the show before, the Amish are not all wrong. And I'm not in danger of becoming Amish, but I'm telling you, there's some wisdom in just saying, okay, what are the limits with technology or something else? And I'm just content to be okay where I'm at.

1:07:59I don't have to have the latest iPhone, the latest, greatest Mac, whatever it is. And it's not settling to say that as Barry made clear.

1:08:07Michael:It's wisdom. That's right. Here's what I'm willing to commit to publicly before you and all the people still listening to us. It just got real. I'm going to go home and get rid of that computer bag that is sitting there still in the box. Sorry, Simon Sinek. I guess he won't be on our podcast anytime soon. Yeah. First of all, it's an incredible bag, but don't go check it out because I recommend it. We will not post it in the show links. And get rid of the other two so you don't feel the stress of, should I be using those? I wish I hadn't bought them. I probably need to use them, but are they the best?

1:08:35Michael:Like that's just an open loop, right? It's so true. Just one bag. And if you really feel the need in the future, like I bought in my quest for the best bag, I said, well, I need a bag for my laptop when I'm just kind of out and away and I don't really want to carry my... So I've got a few of those bags. Right. And they just take up space. And then if you get rid of them, you say, well, I might need it someday. Well, how about if someday you really feel the need for it, you can order one again? Maybe introduce like a waiting period, like they make you do for guns. You know, like you got to wait 48 hours or get a background check or something.

1:09:03Well, your mom keeps saying to me, she says, look, when you go to Amazon, put it on the wish list. At least that creates a buffer.

1:09:09Michael:Yeah. Just don't buy it. Put it on the wish list. And I guarantee you, probably if I did that, which I don't, but if I did that, I'll bet you in two days I'd forget about that thing and never get back to it. 100%. How often do you forget that you ordered something on Amazon? It shows up and you're like, I don't even remember ordering that. Oh, my gosh. That's embarrassing. Anyway, clearly we need more therapy and we're going to need to bring Barry back. Well, guys, I hope you've enjoyed this episode. And I know that we often ask you for a review, but I'm not going to ask you for that. I'm just going to ask you if this episode has meant something to you, if you've gotten value of it, I just encourage you to text a link to a friend.

1:09:45Just share it with them. I guarantee you, I'm going to be not only doing that with this episode, but I'm going to be re-listening to it because I've got some work to do.

1:09:53Michael:Yeah, same. Thanks for being with us, guys. We'll see you next week. See you next time.

1:10:03You