LUKE BURGIS: Discerning What You Actually Want

20:29Michael:Oh, wow. I fulfilled that one. I fulfilled that. That's good. Oh, my gosh. It lasted longer than six days on your full focus planner. It sounds so great right now. You know, that's interesting just to think about how over time these things persist or not. Because I think a lot of times, you know, I was telling you before we started recording, Luke, that our audience, our community are people who are overwhelmed and overloaded. They just have too much on their plate and too much to think through. It's just a lot. And part of that, I just had this realization, is that we want too many things. Not that we don't, too many things that aren't the thick things.

21:06Michael:And that crowds out our schedule. I mean, if you think about it, too many things we're buying, too many things we're trying to fit into our schedule, too many things that are other people's priorities, too many things, just too many things. And if we were to slow that down and become more reflective, as you talk about a lot in your work, that we might feel a lot less overwhelmed and a lot less overloaded because we wouldn't be trying to fit so much in without being intentional about, should it even be there in the first place? Yeah. That's a good breakthrough. A lot of people go straight to productivity and organization and these kind of hacky strategy things before asking the most important question is, should I even be trying to integrate this at all?

21:51Michael:Yeah. I mean, the danger with mimetic desire for an ambitious person is that once you achieve a goal, you will immediately find another model. Because the world is filled of models of desire. And when you achieve your goal, you will either assume that you chose the wrong model or you chose the wrong goal because you're not going to be completely satisfied and you will have no problem finding another one. So one thing that I've learned is filtering things through my thick desires. Even when it comes to simple decisions like the request that I get to go do certain things, events, and speaking, one of my thick desires is spending time with my family.

22:31So I even filter those. And I say yes to way too many things. And I've just learned to filter that through that thick desire. Well, where is it? Can my family come? And it's just reoriented the way that I even make those decisions because I'm now connecting something that could be transactional to something that is a thick desire of mine.

22:55Can you talk a little bit about Tyler Cowen's idea of open tabs? And that is a metaphor.

23:01Michael:This is cool. Yeah, yeah. I really hope you don't ask me which tabs I have open right now. You know we're going to. You could ask us. I should have been prepared for that because I put it in the book. Well, my friend Tyler Cowen has one of his favorite interview questions is, tell me what tabs you have open on your computer, on your browser right now. And he asked that for a couple of reasons. One, nobody's really prepared for that question. So it gets them off script. If they came in with prepared scripts and things that they wanted to say, it gets them grounded in something concrete and real and daily life and usually leads to really surprising conversations.

23:41So he really likes that to throw people off a little bit. But now it's too late because he wrote about it. I've written about it. Now everybody knows, at least people, everybody read him and me. So he's going to come up with a better one. But it also, there's a huge difference between what we say we value and the way that the things that we say we pay attention to and what we actually pay attention to. And the browser tabs are a great example of what we actually pay attention to. I don't know about you, but I spend, you know, eight hours a day probably on my laptop and I spend a lot of time on those browser tabs.

24:13So it's just kind of a way to kind of cut through what people say versus what they're actually doing. And the tabs don't lie, just like, you know, the screen time on the phone doesn't lie.

24:21Michael:Okay. I really do want to know what are your open tabs? Give me a few. The reason this is so challenging for somebody like me, because I think I have, and I'm not making this up, probably 60 plus tabs open. What? Yeah. And so part of it is I see an interesting link and I don't want to forget it. So I click on it with the intention of coming back. And then periodically I go through and I say, yeah, I'm not really interested in that. I'm not really interested in that. And I just like Like close them down. So it's like a metaphorical open tab. It's not just, I mean, it's like something you want to think about later as in a metaphor of a thing you want to think about.

24:58Michael:And it's literally an open tab. Yes. But I will tell you the ones that are open and I'm using if you really want to know. Okay. I really want to know. Okay. So I've been working on this new webinar, this training. So that was probably the most persistent one that's open. Okay. There's usually some kind of AI thing. like I really want to go through Anthropics courses on Claude. Okay. Certification courses by the way. And so that's open. What else is open? It's hard for me to not censor myself and say well what's virtuous and what's not? Probably Facebook's open. Yeah. You know in one tab. Yeah.

25:33Those are probably the three I'm bouncing around with right now.

25:36Michael:You know what would be a good version of this question Luke is I'll tell you mine in a second because that's only fair. But yeah you're done right. It's only fair. is what are the last 10 topics of your Claude chat? You know, the topics of your Claude chat. Mine, which is really close to what my tabs would be. I have a whole medical project for my mother-in-law who's sick right now. And so I'm in that. Like I have a Kaiser Permanente tab open on my browser right now and a project in Claude. I have a dialogue going with Claude about long-term disability insurance. I was like, oh gosh, I have a friend who's about our age who is in a scary situation of being in the hospital and rehab for an illness for a long period of time in his 40s.

26:24Michael:And I was like, we don't have long-term disability insurance. I've never really thought about that. I probably should get that. I think I have some clothing tab open. I might need to dress for an event that I was thinking about. I think I also have Facebook open. Definitely have Google Drive open. Probably have Instacart open because I probably need something at the grocery store that I'm thinking about. but that's mine. Yeah. Well, there you go. Sorry to disappoint so many of you. Yeah. It's incredibly boring, but you know, true. I'm looking at mine right now and I've definitely got 60 plus open.

26:53Do you really? Top 10 sushi restaurants in DC. Okay. My wife and I have a date night coming up, all kinds of AI tools, an Atlantic article. Yeah. It's a total mess. I mean, it is, I just don't know how to actually close tabs. That's the problem.

27:06Michael:No, I will say my husband, Joel, he probably has a hundred tabs open. Yeah. He's told me that before. I don't even understand it. Like when I go into his office on his desk are probably 75 books, like on the desk itself, which is to say nothing of the thousands that are around him. The crazy thing about the tab thing is like, I literally could delete them all after I've opened them once and they're in my history. Yeah. But, but you don't want to forget, but I don't forget. So these are, so these are representative though, of the desires that we have at some level. I mean, we, we could probably tease out your list or my list or Luke's list, and they would tell us something about ourselves.

27:41They are. I mean, we live in this, I write in the book about this old vice called curiositas, the desert monks in Egypt in the third and fourth century wrote about this. And it's kind of a disordered desire for knowledge, right? It's like knowledge that we don't actually need, right? It's like sort of a rubber necking at the accident on the side of the road. That's not knowledge that is beneficial for us in any way to just see something on the side of the road or something like that versus the kind of knowledge that we want to acquire because it's actually leading somewhere. And obviously the internet has just made this particular challenge incredibly difficult, right?

28:20The amount of unnecessary things that I think that I need to know that I really don't need to know. Well, there's probably no better case for that than just the desire, which I have to keep up with the news. And it's just like, okay, so do I really need this? what does it do for me?

28:35Michael:Yeah. Really nothing. Ignorance could be helpful. This may be a left turn. Did you end up studying at the Vatican or going to work there? I entered seminary in my late 20s, Roman Catholic Seminary. When I was 29 years old, I walked away from not the company we talked about earlier, but a different one and studied philosophy and theology for five years. And three of those years, I was in Rome at the Pontifical North American College, probably 200 yards away from the Vatican for three years. Amazing. What did you take away from that experience that's informed your work today? Because I suspect it probably had a big impact.

29:10Yeah. I mean, having founded several companies and then going to school to study philosophy and theology, it's kind of a strange order to do things in, in this very intense way, right, where I wasn't in a relationship or anything, helped give me kind of a first principles look at, I mean, I started thinking about the nature of work. in a way that I never had before, right? And I'd never actually reflected on the question of like, what is work? Why do I work? Why do I like to work hard? What is it about me or the nature of what it means to be human that we work, right? So I asked all of these kind of very fundamental philosophical questions that really informed kind of the things that I'm doing today, the way that I'm approaching my work and priorities.

29:59And it also really gave me, I mean, to be very practical, I mean, living close to the Vatican in such a beautiful place as Rome also made me understand like how much I take for granted and how much we take for granted on a daily basis, right? And like how hard it is to exercise gratitude. I found myself like walking down the, in order to get back to my dorm room, I had to walk directly in front of St. Peter's almost every single day. And I would catch myself after about a year of living there, not even looking up and noticing it whatsoever. And I was like, it really takes some real practice to not take this place for granted and the amount of opportunities that I have here to just sink down and actually appreciate this.

30:41Well, where I wanted to go with that is I wanted to know if you could differentiate between sort of the Christian notion of vocation or calling. And when you talk about desire, how are those two related or are they? They're very deeply related. And I sort of equate thick desire and our thickest desire with our vocation. And when I say vocation, I mean a personal vocation, right? The way that each person, a calling is uniquely called to do something in this world, right? And that I think each person has an unrepeatable calling, something that only they can do with their unique history and situation and context.

31:21And I think our thickest desire is oriented towards the living out of a personal vocation, right? I mean, God's not here to play games, right? Our deepest desires are oriented towards the fulfillment of something that we're meant to do. So even though it's not really talked about in those terms in wanting, thick desires is a signpost to a calling which can be lived out in and through our work. But my understanding of a personal vocation is not something that work alone can completely satisfy for us. It's like it's something that we can live at every moment of our lives, right? Constantly being called so that we have the calling across every dimension of our lives, our family, our work, everywhere we go.

32:10We're in some sense living out our calling. I don't associate it with me doing one particular thing. Yes, sometimes I'm called to do some particular things, but I associate it with a thick desire to kind of be in the world in a certain way, something that endures and persists beyond any one particular season of life that I might have. Do you think that's something that we ought to be able to articulate what our calling is or be able to put it into words? Or is it more amorphous than that, more general? I think it's worth trying. I think it's worth trying to articulate things. We have language.

32:48It's how we make sense of the world, naming things, like naming the animals. There's something very, very important about at least trying to. And that's not to say that the way that we articulate it or try to describe it might not evolve. There's always something ineffable, I think, about a vocation or a calling. So we'll never be able to describe it fully. There's always something, I think, numinous or a bit mystical about it. But it's worth trying. And I don't think it has to be. It's not like an essay. You know, I had one person describe their sense of their personal vocation to me as living out the goodness of God.

33:28And they said, you know, anytime my whole life that I've encountered passages in the Bible, like the Good Shepherd, where God is spoken of as good, they've affected me in a very particular way. and anything that I've tried to do, manifesting the goodness of God has been something that has been a through line, a thread that's run through all of the different careers. And I thought that seems vague, but to him, he deeply believed that that was the way that he was sort of called. And it was as simple as that. You know, I think this topic of work,

34:00Michael:which we weren't really gonna talk a lot about today, but here we are, which I'm thrilled about. This topic of work for people, at least in America or in the West, you know, we think a lot about it as a thing we do to earn money. First and foremost, it's a way that pragmatically we're providing for our families or ourselves. And the notion of calling is not something that we talk about a lot. You know, I think we talk about living our best life, like in kind of a secular context, we talk about living our best life or being true to ourself or other things like that. But I think the Christian understanding of calling is so much deeper than that, so much more meaningful and satisfying.

34:38Michael:But how does one go about discerning what their calling is if maybe their orientation has been more pragmatic or more self-focused? In other words, not in relation to God as created to creator. I don't think there's any substitute to prayer and contemplation and meditating deeply on the movements within us as we go about doing different kinds of work, engaging in different kinds of relationships. There is some value to asking yourself, what would I be doing now if I wasn't being paid this much money? There's value in that. There's value in doing the deathbed exercise. What would I want to be investing in right now?

35:24What would I wish that I had been investing in right now. But I do think that meditating on what I would call the way that different things affect us at the level of thick desire is a very important tool of discernment. Does engaging in this particular work give me this enduring sense of joy and fulfillment, which come from God? Or does it give me a fleeting sense of satisfaction? and if you can find a pattern in those let's call them fulfillment stories over a long enough period of time you probably have the I would call them you know the marks of the Holy Spirit and you know probably a little sign of what you might be calling to do I mean the first time that I ever rolled up my sleeves and volunteered at a soup kitchen it was just an incredibly powerful experience to me I wasn't quite expecting it you know I was expecting like I signed up I'm going to volunteer.

36:21And then I just had to ask myself, like, well, what does that say about you, Luke? And I think if we can evaluate our experiences in terms of what they're doing to us in our interior life, we're constantly getting little hints and signs for what our personal calling might be. You know, it seems to me, you mentioned prayer, but I think of journaling as well, which is something I do coupled with prayer. But it's, you know, to take the time, it seems like such a luxury today and a very not popular practice perhaps, but just trying to sort your thoughts out by getting them on paper. That's been enormously helpful for me for discerning my own calling.

36:59But I also would say, and I wanted to know what you think about this, I think just as other people observe my life and see things that perhaps I can't see, you know, this could be a parent, it could be your spouse, it could be even your kids, even my kids.

37:13Michael:Even your kids. Even your kids sometimes. But how do you think about that too, sort of the external validation of what you think your calling is? Because I would never want to be the kind of person who appears on American Idol thinking that God's called me to sing. And Simon Cowell says to me, you need to sue your voice instructor because you have zero talent. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I wanted to be an NBA basketball player when I was a kid too, and have a decent little jump shot. Yeah, I mean, I do think that discernment is something that is done with others, you know, in community. So I'm Catholic and our idea of like, you go to the seminary and the discernment is not individual.

37:54You know, you can't raise your hand and say, ordain me now, it happens. The discernment is done as part of the community, you know, over a period of many years, right? And in some cases, it's like, you might not be called to be a priest. So, you know, it's critical. we all have blind spots. And I think one of the best things that I've ever done is join a men's group just to help talk through things or women's group for women listening. And there's been nothing more important in my life than to take the things that I'm wrestling with in terms of my own discernment. Should I work on this? Should I work on this?

38:29That to a trusted circle of men who know me well and can help me know when Luke is regressing back into the ambitious Luke that just says yes to everything, right? It's just critical to have that. So I would say, yeah, I think that oftentimes calling is spoken of in a highly individualistic way. And there's part of it that is, right? Because God speaks to us personally. But I think we need to take that to others because we exist in a social context.

38:56Michael:It's really wise. There's somewhere where courage Courage is wrapped up in all this. And you talk about Paul Tillich and the four forms of courage. Could you just elaborate on the role of courage in this whole conversation? I read Tillich for the first time just a few years ago. And I was struck that he was writing about courage back in the middle part of the century as corporations were becoming mechanized and he felt like people were becoming interchangeable. And he wrote a book called The Courage to Be. You know, the courage to be is just kind of an existential courage to show up and affirm existence and the goodness of being the goodness of the people around you, you know, even when it's hard, you know, just to kind of show up.

39:38We don't often talk about courage that way. Usually when courage is mentioned in the public square, we're talking about soldiers, you know, we're talking about a whistleblower. But he wrote about courage as really kind of a daily thing, right, as a daily thing to exercise. And I don't think that I have meditated on that nearly enough. And then in the book, he distinguishes different kinds of courage. And he said, there's the courage to be that's critical. It's kind of an existential courage. We need to exercise the courage to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, which might involve sacrificing our ego, the courage to take on a role, the courage to say yes to what someone is asking of us, even if it's not what we might have chosen.

40:22There's a courage to be a part of something bigger. And at the same time, there's the courage to be a part as oneself, right? So to be a part of something without sacrificing your integrity, right? And that is a second layer of courage that he articulated. And to be able to do both at the same time, which is essentially the subject of my whole book, right? The one and the 99. How are we both one and part of something bigger than ourselves is what I've called, you know, the courage to be in communion. And being in communion means, you know, learning how to be a differentiated self with a calling while also being part of something bigger and learning.

41:04And sometimes that creates a little bit of tension. And our instinct is to flee any form of tension or any anxiety. We just want to cut and run. And I think there's a lot to be learned for sitting in the tension to be a part and to be oneself. And in fact, the tension is a sign of health. Usually the tension goes away when we're dead. You know, in this life, there's not a perfect community. There will be tension. And how do we lean into that? And when don't we lean into it? Obviously, in some cases, like August Landmesser. That's so good because I think it's, there's 10 things to do one or the other.

41:37And like one of the most, one of the oldest philosophical problems is the one and the many. Right? And in Christian faith, and I didn't really mean this to be a Christian conversation so much, but this manifests itself in so many different ways, not the least of which is the doctrine of the Trinity. I'm Eastern Orthodox, so cousin to you. But very similar kinds of things. And I think there have been times in my life when I've been probably too isolated and probably times in my life when I've been too enmeshed in a community. And I like that differentiation between those two things that we have to hold in tension.

42:14It's not a tension to be resolved. It's just something to be lived. Yeah. And the Trinity is a communion of distinct persons. Yes. And where do we see that in the world? And which kinds of communities and groups flatten any kind of distinctiveness and which ones actually allow people to evolve and to be part of the whole or to be part of the body? without demanding that they be something that they're not or demanding that they sacrifice their integrity. So that's just this question of, there's so many books that have been written about how to find your tribe. And in my life, I've searched for my own tribes and I found a lot of different ones from work to seminary.

42:52And then I always realized that once I found it, it's like where the hard work actually really begins, where I need to learn how to be part of the tribe while also contributing myself and not fleeing from the responsibilities of having difficult conversations or existing in it in such a way where I'm not just completely conforming to the point of it being unhealthy.

43:22Michael:Luke, shifting gears a little bit, you talk about this kind of counterintuitive idea that rules or constraints for life are actually free. And you talk about the rule of St. Benedict as kind of an example of this. I think it's easy to think maybe even especially as we get older. I mean, in one way, this is true when we're younger, but I think as we get older, it's like, we want, we want to have autonomy. We think we've earned it. We don't necessarily want to live by rules. We think we've sort of paid our dues. Why should we reconsider that? And what are you really talking about for a professional who might be listening to the show?

43:58Michael:What would a rule for our lives look like? Yeah, I mean, living a rule of life often has to do with rules for resolving conflicts in relationships, for instance, whether that's your own marriage or in the workplace. And when we think of rules at work, we typically think of handbooks and policy manuals and operational things like the rule for getting X, Y, and Z thing done, right? That's how we think of rules. And I think it's given rules. And we learned rules get a bad rap. They get a bad rap in school. They get a bad rap in most workplaces with sort of a hall monitor way of enforcing rules. And I kind of wanted to go back to a deeper tradition.

44:37And I was like, well, what are some of the communities that have endured the longest in the world where people have to live together for a very long time and get along and grow in virtue? and what are the kind of rules that are concerned with virtue and the formation of the whole person and not just the execution of tasks and things to get done. And I found the rule of Benedict, which has been around for more than 1 ,500 years. If the Lindy effect means anything, the rule of Benedict is something that we should pay attention to. It's probably going to be around for another 500. And the rule is focused on the way that an individual monk can live in community with other monks.

45:14and the kind of rhythms that guide their life. Obviously, these are monks, so liturgical rhythms and the rhythm of prayer. So there are things in the rule, like when the bell rings, the monk must be obedient to the bell and drop whatever they're doing, even if they're not done, and make their way to the chapel for prayer. It's got all these interesting kind of rhythms of life. And a rhythm of life is very important, right? Even if you're not religious at all, just having a rhythm to your week is critical, right? It changes our relationship to time. It helps time slow down, gives it a different feel.

45:47And I read the whole rule. And I thought, you know, what this rule actually is about is how to be a self in a community and what to do when there is anxiety and tension and how to resolve those things in healthy ways, right? So it's a rule for relationships. And the Bible contains these kinds of things, right? I mean, if you have a problem with somebody, go to them directly first. you don't go tweet about it you don't put it on linkedin right go to them directly and then you go to the church and then you know so there's a there's a way of thinking about human relationships that i think the rule has a lot to offer us and i'm not suggesting that it'd be adopted as an organizational manual because we're not monks most of us listening i would assume but there's a lot of wisdom in it and i and i think developing a rule of life that is a layer deeper than the operational rules is critical.

46:41My wife and I kind of have one in our own family with our daughters. This is how we agree to handle situations when this is happening. When something gets thrown and a window gets broken, we're not just instinctively reacting. We have a process for dealing with that. And this is what the rule is all about. How does the abbot resolve differences and conflict among monks? What happens when a new monk knocks on the door and wants to join. Surprisingly, Benedict says, you should stand outside of the abbey for a few days before he's admitted entrance to test his desire. It's filled with these interesting anecdotes.

47:16So the rule has to do with these deep kind of human things. And I think we each probably need to write our own based on our own context. But I would encourage everybody to kind of think about what rules for dealing with conflict and anxiety in particular do I have in my own life? am I operating with intention or am I operating based on instinct in the moment? Because if it's the latter and we don't have something that's kind of a habitual kind of virtuous practice to fall back on, we can tend to make bad decisions. Well, it seems to me that those rules are inescapable. You know, if we don't, if we're not thoughtful and create our own rules, whether they're informed by our faith or something else, then we're just going to have these rules that are just kind of haphazard.

48:02Maybe we got them from our family. Maybe we got them from our society and our environment, but something's going to govern our lives one way or the other. Absolutely. And the family is the first place that we learn rules too. It's why they're so important. And yeah, they are going to govern our lives and it's worth actually naming the rules that govern our lives. Just like we talked about naming models earlier, you know, like what rules do I live by? And many of us have really never thought about that, but what is the rule, right? Is it my workplace conduct policy or do I actually have a rule that goes beyond that, that I try to live by myself?

48:38Michael:You know, what is interesting to me about this is that in a lot of ways, it's the antidote to decision fatigue. You know, if we think about the stress of these kinds of situations that you're talking about, the hardest decision, I mean, this is exactly why organizations have policy manuals. Because when an HR situation comes up, it's really hard to figure out how to handle it. Oftentimes, they don't present themselves neatly. There are all kinds of complexities. And you need a pre-planned response to the situation because it's too difficult. We know this. It's too difficult to be fair, to make good decisions in a highly stressful situation in a workplace setting.

49:18Michael:But we don't think about that with our lives, you know, where we have all these implicit rules like you're talking about. And I think what you're advocating for, Luke, is to make those explicit and really examine them so that, you know, this is like good dialectical behavioral therapy. You know, you pre-plan your responses to stressful situations so that you can handle them in ways that are functional instead of dysfunctional. And I love that. I haven't thought about it in that way before, but man, that's a big light bulb for me. Yeah. I mean, a simple rule that I have in my own workplace is like when there is maybe some tension or a difficult conversation needs to be had, we go to lunch right away.

49:58Just like, that's what we do. So I can sit there and ruminate on all the different ways to go about it. But just having actually a nice, generous lunch that gets us a little bit outside of the work context, it's just my go-to. It's worked for over a decade now. It's just kind of my go-to. So when I start, and I forget it all the time, and I'm like, and I come back like, Luke, remember, lunch. Like lunch is your go-to for this thing. And nine times out of ten, it just like leads to some kind of a little breakthrough. It just makes, or it makes the conversation easier. But it's just a little one that I have for myself.

50:31Michael:Smart. So good. Well, as we move through life, there are so many times when, you know, relationships are damaged or whatever. And the ability to repair those and move toward that other person is such an important life skill. It's kind of a meta skill. Yeah, kind of a meta skill. Well, Luke, I'm sad to say we're out of time. And this has gone very quickly. And I feel like you're a kindred spirit. But if you were to leave people with something that they could take away from this conversation that could measurably impact their life going forward, what would you say that is? I think one thing that anybody could do today or this week, similar to kind of naming models, is just make a list of the communities that you feel like you're part of that shape you in some way or that you shape.

51:20Make a list of all of them. And we're going full circle right back to the beginning of the conversation. And think about the ways in which you are part of those communities. How do you show up? Where do you feel tension? the one where you're sort of sensing kind of the the most tension do something this week anything right just one thing to show up differently within it so that you can learn something right the goal is not to leave right the goal is to just do one thing to show up as what i call in the book as a solid self with the maximum amount of integrity think ahead of time about how you're going to show up, anticipate why you might be feeling the tension.

52:01And it could be a very small thing, right? It could be the way that you respond to a message on Slack, right? I'm not suggesting, you know, show up to a board meeting and start jumping on the table here. But just one thing, right? How you can just change the normal script a little bit so that you can learn both more about yourself and more about that community and try to diagnose why you might be feeling that tension. And if you do that, it will probably lead you to the next step and you might be able to figure out how to be part of that community in a more life-giving way. One last question. Where would you suggest people start who want to learn more about you?

52:38I appreciate that, Michael. LukeBurgis.com, B-U-R-G-I-S. I think most of what I'm working on is there. And I'm the director of the Clooney Institute, so Clooney, C-L-U-N-Y.org. It was a famous monastery built in the 10th century that has inspired me in a variety of ways. So you can find me there too. Fantastic.

52:58Michael:Great. Well, thanks so much. This has been Rich. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

53:11I liked his demeanor.

53:13Michael:Me too. I found that he had very calming energy. He did. I felt so calm just talking to him. Yeah. But you could tell he's very thoughtful, very contemplative, which is so interesting. And the mix that I found fascinating was what he's drawn from Catholic tradition, and particularly monastic tradition on the one hand, but hardcore Wall Street business stuff too. Yeah. And I think that's such an unusual mix, but extremely helpful for people of us who are trying to navigate through the world. Well, I think it's easy. especially as high capacity people, as people who have goals, as people who want to have a meaningful life and achieve things, you can be successful at achieving things and then realize that you don't actually want the things you achieve and what a terrible place to find yourself in.

54:07And so I think this conversation about desire and sussing out what is truly the thing you're

54:15Michael:called to, what is it that are the thick desires of your life as opposed to the thin ones is very important, especially if you have means, especially if you have any level of autonomy in your life, there's a lot of options available to you. You're probably more subject to influence of these mimetic desires as he talks about them, you know, from outside of yourself than you might think, you know, you feel the need to keep up with other people or present a certain image or present success or pursue things because other people say they're good. And nobody gets to the end of their life and wishes they had done more of what other people thought was important.

54:53So true. I don't intend this as a promotion, but we've got a course called Life Focus that I think runs so parallel to this.

55:01Michael:Yeah, I thought the same thing too. In helping people figure out what their mission, what their values, what their desired future is. But the thing I love about that course and what I loved about it when we were doing it as a standalone event is that it gives people the space to push sort of the stop button and just reflect on their life, not only where they've come from, but where they're going and to live more intentionally. That was one of my biggest takeaways from what he talked about was just the need to slow things down before making decisions and see what sticks. You know, that idea that he was writing in his journal or his planner, some desire that he had.

55:39Michael:And the question was, is it going to be durable? You know, am I going to two weeks or two months later still want this thing? And if I don't, it's probably not worth having. And if we could just wait to take action, I say, this is two people who are, you know, action taking kind of people. And you guys are probably too listening. The older I get, the more I think there's so much value in slowing things down and sitting with things. And that oftentimes speedy decision-making is driven by anxiety in my experience, at least speaking for myself. 100%. And you can't make quality decisions when you're going at the speed of light.

56:17You have to slow it down and you have to think about it. And that's hard for me because I tend to be a very quick decision maker, somebody who's borderline impulsive, sometimes is impulsive. And I think just whether it's a big decision or a small decision, I'm trying to train myself to go, okay, that thing I want to order, how about if I just give it a week and see if it's something I still want to order or that event that I want to sign up for and attend, chances are 48 hours from now, I'm not going to feel the same way.

56:46Michael:You know, it's funny. I will often send myself links to things, you know, recipes, things I might want to order. Do you text yourself? I text myself. Me too. Yeah, I have probably hundreds of links that I've texted myself. You know how often I've gone back to look for a link? Zero? Zero. I'm not kidding you. Literally zero. I would have to say the same. What does that tell us? Now, the good thing is it gave me a thing to do. It made me feel like, okay, I'm not going to forget this. Kind of like we were talking about the tabs idea. It made it where I felt like I'm not going to not be able to find this again if I really want it.

57:20Michael:It's just that I never want it. And that is fascinating because how many ads for things do we see, for example, to buy or invitations are we given that we eventually say no to or whatever that mean nothing to us? No. No, because they're not organic to who we are. Yeah. They're externally imposed or solicited. And when we really sit with ourselves and reflect on what we want, that usually presents a lot different answer. Yeah. But we can't do that if we're just kind of moving through life so fast that we don't have time to reflect. I mean, one simple thing that Gail and I are trying to do at night now is just to sit down after work, usually outside when it's not so hot, and just have a glass of wine or whatever and just talk about the day and think about it and just be more intentional.

58:08Michael:Yeah. Well, hope you guys have enjoyed this episode. And I want to ask you to share it with a friend. If you've gotten value out of it, share it with somebody else. And if you feel so inclined, leave us a review on wherever you listen to podcasts, because that does help get visibility for the show and get this message of the double win out. So we'll see you next time.

58:33Thank you.