How to Think Clearly When It Matters Most: Shane Parrish

0:02Shane Parrish: So you can think of positioning as, am I playing on easy mode or hard mode? I set my own scoreboard. It means I don't care what you think about what I'm doing. You need to narrow things down to two or three priorities. If building a relationship and maintaining that relationship with my partner matters to me, I should be able to see that in your calendar. So don't tell me your priorities, show me your calendar. Am I giving up what's really important to me going after something I don't really need? What if the problem isn't how hard you work in, but it's a position that you put yourself in? Our guest today is Shane Parrish.

0:39He's the founder of Farnham Street, one of the world's most widely read platforms on decision making. And he's the author of a brilliant book called Clear Thinking, which has quietly become essential reading for some of the most successful leaders, athletes and CEOs on the planet. Shane spent seven years working for a Canadian intelligence agency, you can't say which, making high stakes decisions that affected troops, governments and people's lives. That experience sent him on a decade-long obsession with one question. How do the best decision makers in the world consistently get better outcomes than everyone else?

1:16In this fascinating conversation, Shane gives us a masterclass in exactly that. How to manage your ego, how to protect your attention, how to water the most important relationships, and how to build a life that actually reflects what you say you value. Get ready to look at your calendar very differently after this one, as we welcome Shane Parrish to High Performance.

1:44Shane Parrish: So there's three components to clear thinking. Positioning, managing your default or the urges that get you in trouble or get most people in trouble. and thinking independently. And those three things work in concert. So you can think of positioning as, am I playing on easy mode or hard mode? And this is a great way to think about it because it's like, you're going to experience all these emotions. You're going to experience these defaults. We talk about four of them in the book, emotion, ego, inertia, and social. All of these things happen to everybody. And they tend to be situations that think for us unless we're consciously aware of them.

2:18Shane Parrish: And so to be consciously aware of them, to be in control of ourselves, one of the things that we can do is before we experience them what are the things within our control that put us in a better position to experience? So is that all the time? Are you doing that almost? I imagine you're some sort of expert at this by now so you can position yourself almost without thinking about it. Well I think it's just being conscious about how am I positioning myself? Am I putting myself in the best position possible to have the best day tomorrow? If I were to talk to you tonight and say what are the things that you can do tonight that are going to make tomorrow easier for you?

2:51Shane Parrish: and then you start thinking about that. Well, okay, well, here, I can go to bed on time. I can maybe not drink. I can work out tonight. I can meaningfully connect with my partner or my spouse. I can clean up the kitchen. I can read this book that I've been meaning to read that's going to affect how I perform at work tomorrow because it's on a topic that I do at work. Well, these are things 100 % within your control that you can do tonight to make tomorrow easier. And if you repeat that day after day, well, what happens? you start to be in an increasingly better position. And can you just confirm what you mean when you talk about hard mode or easy mode?

3:25Shane Parrish: Yeah, so maybe a good example of this is, and this will relate to everybody, but I'm going to tell a story about my son and you'll see how it applies to you and life. One of my kids came home. I have two teenagers, a 13 and 14 year old. Last year he came home with an exam and they do exams at that age in the school that they go to. And for anybody who has a teenager, he just shrugged his shoulders tossed me this exam that I have to sign and said I did my best and walked by, right? I remember playing sports as a kid. And I'm like, you know, most people quit sports because of the conversation the parents have on the car ride home.

4:03Shane Parrish: They don't quit sports because of their performance on the field. It could have been their worst game ever, but nobody quits because of that. They quit because of the conversation in the car. So I'm like, I'm not gonna talk about this. I'm gonna let his emotions and my emotions, because I was pretty upset too, simmer down a little bit, right? And so later on that night, I'm like, well, talk to me about what it means to do your best. Like walk me through this. I really want to know. I want you to be specific. He's like, okay, well, you know, the exam started at 10 o 'clock. I sat down. I looked at all the questions.

4:32Shane Parrish: I looked at all the points. I looked at how much time I had. I allocated my energy to the questions with the most points. I'm like, okay, you followed, you know, your test taking algorithm. And he's like, and I answered them to the best of my ability. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting. That is how most adults think about decision-making. That is how most adults think about life. But pause, bear with me. Let's rewind 72 hours here. What did you do leading up to this test? Did you fight with your brother in the morning? Yes. Did you eat a healthy breakfast? No. Did you go to bed on time the night before?

5:08Shane Parrish: No. Why not? I was cramming. Why were you cramming? I didn't study. Didn't study properly. So I looked at him and I was like, you chose to play on hard mode, right? All of these things are within your control. They're things that you know, if I sat you down and said, how do you prepare for this test? You know, you can do all of these things and they're all within your control. And if you do them, that doesn't mean the test isn't going to kick your butt. It doesn't change the fact you have to take a test, but it dramatically increases the odds that you're going to be successful on that test. And I think that's easy mode versus hard mode.

5:44And you use a great example in the book, Shane, around Henry Kissinger, about how he challenges people that talk about, I've done my best. Would you tell us a bit about that?

5:53Shane Parrish: Yeah. So I worked with a guy once, actually more than once, but I think we've all worked with somebody who sort of half-asses things. They sort of do the bare minimum. They're smart, but lazy. And those are the worst type of people to work with in some cases. In some cases, it can work for you. But I was working with this gentleman and he sent out this shitty draft about a presentation. And it sort of had enough in it that you could see he did a little bit of work, but it was maybe, I don't know, 50 % complete. And he sent it out to the whole team. And I was managing this team. I had just taken over and I was like, oh, this is like, I thought this guy, I had really high expectations for this guy.

6:34Shane Parrish: And so I see the team start replying with like, oh, change this slide to X, Y, Z. And I'm like, he's just getting everybody to do the work for him. And I was like, pause, nobody respond to this. I was like, before you send this out, I wanna know if this is your best work or not. And of course he didn't wanna admit that was his best work because it wasn't his best work. And then, so he went back, he went away for a couple of days, he did the exact same thing. And then he came back and then he submitted it again, just to me this time, not to the team. And I was like, is this your best work? And he said, no.

7:06Shane Parrish: And he went back for another couple of days. He did it again. Presentation polished, almost perfect by the end of it. And I was like, great. This is what I expect from you going forward. And that story I learned from Henry Kissinger. I remember reading a story about Kissinger in the 70s where a staffer gave him a memo. And he's like, is this your... He didn't even read the memo. He's like, is this your best work? And the staffer was like, no. He's like, well, go do your best work. Staffer comes back, gives him the new memo. And the same thing happens over and over again. And then finally, the staffer says, yes.

7:35Shane Parrish: He goes, okay, now I'll read it. Brilliant. And I was like, that applies to so many things. I want you to do your best work. We're hiring you to do your best work. We're not hiring you to half-ass it. We're not hiring you to just put in the motions. We're hiring you to go all in with us on what we're doing. And if you can't go all in with us, why am I going to go all in with you? And this is what people misunderstand about the workplace in reality. In reality, your boss is never going to go all in with you unless you're all in with them. and you're going to wonder why people are getting opportunities you're not getting.

8:06Shane Parrish: But if you treat it like a job and the person you're working beside treats it like a career, they're going to get opportunities that you don't get.

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10:12Well, that leads to that really interesting research. I think I've heard you talk about this, Shane, around whether you view your job as a job, a career, or a calling. I think it was a chat you had with Adam Grant and those that view it as a calling tend to get more opportunities because you're all in, as you say.

10:28Shane Parrish: You're all in. Well, how could it be otherwise? Imagine you're your boss and you have two people, maybe they're equally competent, but one person treats it like a nine to five transaction and one person treats it like a calling or all in, if you want to use that vocabulary. You're going to get the opportunities and the other person is not. It doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means, why am I going to invest in you? It doesn't make sense. So can you tell us, we've spoke about positioning, which is fascinating, but then you spoke about the defaults that can hamstring us. Would you tell us a bit about those four?

11:02Shane Parrish: Yeah, so there's four defaults mentioned in the book. There's emotion, ego, social, and inertia. And what these tend to be are situations that we're more prone, doesn't mean we won't think, but they're more prone to think for us or change how we think rather than us being in control about what we're thinking and how we're thinking. A great example of sort of emotion is fear, right? Fear prevents us from doing things. Fear of success and fear of failure, both of those things can cause us to stay in place. Ego, we want to be right. And when we want to be right, we have an idea and we're at work.

11:40Shane Parrish: What are we doing? We're trying to prove that our idea is right. And the more time and effort we try to spend proving that our idea is right, the less time and effort we spend listening to other people who might have a better idea. I have three words that I use that are sticky on my monitor just to remind me of this, which is outcome over ego. I can't change the fact I have an ego, but I can change how the ego manifests itself within me to the outcome. And if I can get the best outcome possible, that's great. And if I can tie my ego to that, even better. So can you give us an example of where you've remembered that mantra and how it has changed the course of a conversation.

12:16Shane Parrish: Yeah, because I always think that my ideas are right, right? Like, I mean, we always do. We put an idea on the table. You know, recently we were deciding whether we should do this FS Nourish thing. And we're doing a project. We hired a chef. We want to explore cooking through Farnham Street in a style that works with us. I'm curious about it. and one of the people that we work with, Vicky, had these very strong ideas on what we should do. And my intuition is like, I've done this. I've gotten this this far. I have a very strong intuition about what we should do too. But then I remembered, I'm not really open to listening to her at this moment.

12:55Shane Parrish: And I was like, I know I need to focus on the best outcome. Which of these things, if I step back and look at them objectively, almost like a director watching from a camera instead of being me watching from myself, which of these things is more likely to lead to success? And it turns out a lot of her ideas were much better than mine. And I was like, okay, let's run with them. And then what do we need to know to know if they're working or not? Because it's really important that we course correct quickly. Like what are the signs if we do this? Like what are the signs that it's an indication that it's right, going right?

13:26Shane Parrish: And what are the signs that would be an indication that it's not going right? And now we can have a conversation about it. And if we pre-decide what that is, it makes it really easy to have that conversation. We talked about this. We decided if we saw this, we were gonna have a conversation. We're not on the spot because this is what happens at work. Something will go wrong. People won't feel empowered to speak up because they don't wanna go against the boss. They don't wanna go against the wisdom of the organization, if you will, or the hippo, the highest paid person in the room. And so if you decide in advance, here are the things, here are the signs of success.

13:59Shane Parrish: and here are the things we're all going to look out for as a team. And if any of those things start going off the rail, now we're going to have a conversation about it. And now everybody has permission to have that conversation. You get to a much better outcome. I want to talk about the other two defaults, but you've made reference there to almost viewing yourself through the lens of a director rather than as a participant. And that's a really interesting idea that you spoke about elsewhere of sometimes imagining a TV crew are filming you. Would you tell us a bit about that? Yeah, so it's really hard to see a system that you're part of.

14:34Shane Parrish: And what that means is I think we all learned this in physics in grade nine, right? You stand on a train with a ball and the train is moving at 60 kilometers an hour. And you look down at the ball and it's how fast is the ball moving? And well, relative to you, it's not moving at all. But if somebody's watching the train, it's moving 60 kilometers an hour. And if you think about the source of all cognitive biases and almost all mistakes, they're perspective problems, they're blind spots. And so what can we do to remove our blind spots? We can see the world through somebody else's eyes. So see it through the observer's eyes, the train's moving 60 kilometers an hour.

15:08Shane Parrish: Right now we're moving 18 ,000 miles an hour around the sun, right? So if somebody was standing on the sun, they would see us and we would be moving faster than were even possible to move on earth. You want to get different perspectives on the problems. How do you get different perspectives on the problems? Well, you can ask people for different insights. You can do thought experiments where you see the problem through a different lens than what you're currently seeing it through. And one way to do that is a film crew. So you can imagine that there's a film crew following you around. They're documenting your success.

15:43Shane Parrish: You are successful. They're watching you. And you're showing them all the things that you do that lead to that success. while all of a sudden when you wake up, you're not dilly-dallying in bed. You're not doing an hour on TikTok all the time. And all these things you don't want the film crew to see, those are indicators of behaviors that you're doing that you might be ashamed of or might not be working for you in the way that you thought they were working for you. And it's just a different way to look outside into your life and get a different perspective on it. Social and inertia are the final two of these four pillars.

16:17Let's cover them.

16:18Shane Parrish: Well, so social is we tend to do what we've always done. And we also don't want to disappoint people. So we tend to best practices by definition are average. If everybody's doing them, then they're best practices. But we can't get fired for doing them. So we need to learn when to deviate from sort of the norms and create advantageous divergence. You want to diverge and you want to be right. There's no points for diverging and being wrong. And also, I don't want to let you down. So there's a lot of situations where I end up doing things that I don't want to do because I don't want to say no to you.

16:51Shane Parrish: You know, if we're on the phone and we can come back to this later, but if we're on the phone and you say, hey, can you do this thing for me? I might not want to do it. Most of the time I probably don't, but I'll say yes. How many, like this has got to happen to you. Well, I'm a people pleaser. So I want to know more about this one. So there's ways around this, right? And we can talk about that in a second, but that's a great example of a social situation that thinks for you, right? So you end up saying yes, even though you don't want to say yes. And then inertia. You stay in relationships that you, you know, they're too good to leave and they're too bad to stay.

17:24Shane Parrish: And you just sort of like end up in these things and you're doing them because you've always done them. You go to the same job you've had. A common one that applies to a lot of people is maybe you've worked 15 years in the same job and you don't want to leave because your pension is just around the corner or you have 15 years invested. You have a lot of sunk costs going into it. And so you keep doing these things even though they're not serving you. And you're not really thinking about it anymore. You sort of rationalize it away and don't think about it, but you're not really happy about it either.

17:54So you're making better decisions by keeping your ego in check and reminding yourself it's about better outcomes, not about being right. You're regulating your emotions to make sure they're not taking you down the wrong path. You're aware of the fact that lots of decisions we make just because that's the social way that they've been made for years. You're good at avoiding getting stuck in a rut. At the same time, you're checking whether someone is delivering their best work all the time. You're imagining there's a film crew on your shoulder to make sure you're living the best way. This sounds exhausting.

18:24Shane Parrish: It's not really exhausting at all. So the way that I think of it is your position determines whether all of those things are going to be on easy mode or hard mode. And what we're spending time on now is we're spending time correcting decisions. We're spending time making up for mistakes. We're spending time doing all of these other things. And when you start being more conscious about these things, you actually have more time because you make fewer mistakes. Most of our time at the office is spent fixing miscommunication problems. They're fixing relationship problems. They're fixing, you know, when our ego got a hold of us and we said something maybe we shouldn't have said, or we did something we shouldn't have done.

18:58Shane Parrish: And so you can recognize in the moment that these things are happening. The idea is to prevent these situations from happening in the first place. A great example is saying, yes, you're a people pleaser. So I was at Daniel Kahneman's apartment in New York, and he was on the phone with somebody and as he was about to hang up, he's like, my rule is I don't say yes on the phone. And then he hangs up. And I was like, hold on here. Whoa, tell me more about this. And he's like, oh, I tend to say yes because I'm a people pleaser, social, right? I want to please people. And I was like, you're a people pleaser?

19:33Shane Parrish: Like, this is crazy. Anyways, so he's like, I used to say yes like 80 % of the time. And then I end up spending all of my time doing these things that I didn't want to do. And so he's like, I devised a rule. And the rule is I don't say yes on the phone. And I was like, okay, so what happens? He's like, well, you know, the next day I go back and over email, I or my assistant, you know, politely sort of decline. You have these things. After I have a chance to think about it though, right? Like I don't need to decide on the spot. And he's like, I probably say yes, like 10 % of the time now. And I'm like, this is the most powerful thing you've ever done, right?

20:05Shane Parrish: Like I know you've studied, you've won a Nobel prize, but this is like, this is Nobel prize. And I was like, what other rules do you have? And he's like, none. And I was like, what? So I went away from that conversation. I'm like, how can I create these automatic rules for success to avoid situations or put myself in the best position possible in the moment? And I was like, you know what I'm going to try it with? I'm going to try it with working out. I don't know, but you guys, I don't like working out. I don't like sweating every day. I don't like doing this stuff. I mean, it's a grind. There's people there running, you know, they're full sprinting.

20:41Shane Parrish: They're not even sweating. I'm like barely moving. There's like drips of sweat. I'm like dying on the treadmill. And so I don't like it. I don't enjoy it. But I want to do it because I want to be healthy and I want to put myself in a good position. So I was like, what was happening was I was working at three days a week on the recommendation of a personal trainer. And I was following this workout regimen and I would wake up on whatever day and I was supposed to work out that day. And then I'd be like, oh man, I'm so tired. I didn't sleep well last night. I had a lot on my plate today. And then I would start negotiating with myself.

21:14Shane Parrish: And that negotiation would be, I will do extra tomorrow. These little lies we tell ourselves, right? And then tomorrow would come and inevitably I wouldn't do extra. I probably wouldn't even go to the gym. And so I went to the gym and I was like, I want to know all that. I scan my FOB every time I'm here. I want to print out of every day that I've been here. So I was supposed to be working out three days a week. I ended up in practice working out one and a half days a week. And I was like, oh, this isn't working. I'm going to create a rule. And that rule is going to be I go to the gym every day.

21:43Shane Parrish: I sweat every day. I say I go to the gym, but it's like I do a workout every day. It doesn't mean I'm at the gym. And ever since I've done that, it changed the negotiation with myself from am I going to work out today to how does that workout look today? And it's a very powerful and subtle change. Now, I might change the duration or scope of my workout. And that's entirely cool. I could go to the gym, just do squats and leave. I might just go for a 20-minute run. That's fine. That doesn't matter. Some days I'll go for 90 minutes. That's great. If I have more time, the better. But I go every day.

22:21Shane Parrish: And since then, I think it's been three years almost since I've done this or two and a half years. And I probably missed, I don't know, maybe 10 days over that period of time. so how do you get yourself to the point where that becomes a non-negotiable for you you make it a rule and so what do we know about rules we've been taught our whole life to follow rules we don't question them we just follow them i don't have to remind you every day to follow the speed limit you were taught this is your rule though so it's easy to break because you can just break your own rule no one will know it's your rule you'll know right but when you tell yourself it's a rule it has a different impact on you.

22:57Shane Parrish: Not only do you think differently, other people think differently. So going back to the social default again, if your rule is I don't eat dessert. Now think about that. You want to eat healthier. You go out with your friends. They're nudging you to eat dessert, to celebrate, to, you know, you can start your diet tomorrow. But if you say my rule is I don't eat dessert, all you have to do is say my rule is that. They'll push back a little bit the first time, then they'll stop pushing back. And you're not thinking. You're not using willpower in that moment. So the willpower is gone. So this is where we get into trouble is because we're relying on willpower and everybody eventually loses the battle with willpower.

23:33Shane Parrish: So you want to circumvent the whole problem. Ideally, you prevent the situation from happening. But if you can't prevent it, you can rewire your brain so that you just work around it. And the rules tend to work really effectively for 99 % of people. You create a rule. You've created it. You're powered for it. You don't have to create a rule for life. It can be a rule for a week. It can be a rule for a day. It can be, you know, I'm going to try this rule for 30 days and see what happens. You just need to follow your rule. And you've been taught your whole life to follow rules. You don't question rules.

24:04Shane Parrish: You just follow them. But we've never been taught how to take advantage of rules to get what we want out of life. And it's these ordinary moments that I want to sort of skip forward a little bit before we talk about how do we overcome some of these defaults. Because one of my favorite interviews that I've heard you do is with Carl Pilmer. Would you tell us a little bit more about that interview? So Carl Palmer went around and interviewed people near death. And he said, what would you like to teach people who have their whole life in front of them? What wisdom do you have that we can share with everybody else?

24:41Shane Parrish: And it was surprisingly common what people said, right? It was play by your own scoreboard. Make sure that you're playing your own game. You're not listening to other people about what they think is best for you. you're consciously doing what you think is best for you. Spend more time with family and friends because that matters way more than you think it does. And you won't realize that until you're basically in your 50s and 60s. When it's really a little later and harder to invest in those relationships, you can't really make amends at that point in time. You might be able to make it better, but you can't create that bond.

25:15Shane Parrish: And I think so often we just forget about these things. And these are the ordinary moments. We're taught to focus on who to marry, who to work for, what city to live in, and these big decisions, we tend to think we generally are rational about them. It doesn't mean we're perfectly correct about them, but it means we're directionally correct about them because we're thinking about them. But nobody's thinking about the ordinary moments, which is when I go home, am I fighting with my spouse about the dishwasher? Am I going to work and working my butt off each day? Because it doesn't matter if I pick the best job in the world or have the best boss in the world, if I don't show up, if I don't go all in, if I don't work my butt off, all of that gets multiplied by zero.

25:59Shane Parrish: The same as my partner. If I don't invest in that relationship constantly, what happens? Well, it just gets multiplied by zero. And my friend Peter Kaufman has this great analogy, which I find very visual and very useful, which is imagine a patch of grass between you and everybody in your life, Patch of grass between you and your kids, you and your partner at home, you and your parents. And if you water that grass every day and watering it looks like connection, watering it looks like time, watering it looks like whatever it looks like in the context of your relationship, but you have a general sense of what watering it looks like.

26:36Shane Parrish: Well, a spark, what's going to happen to wet grass? Nothing. Just dies. But if you don't water it, the grass starts to dry out. And if the grass gets dry, what happens with the spark. It starts a fire and you can feel this in households. I mean, we've all been at friends' houses where, you know, a little comment by a partner and then all of a sudden there's an escalation and a fight. That's dry grass. That's what happens when your grass is dry. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you keep your grass well watered when you're as busy as you are? Because I think I'm learning so many things here. The biggest thing I'm thinking about at the moment is I seem to spend my life at the moment saying to everyone, oh, I have no time.

27:17I'm so busy. Every day my wife works up and says, I'm so tired. Even though we're sleeping for six, seven, eight hours a night, you know, we're getting what you'd say is enough sleep. And every person we meet on the school run, I'm so exhausted at the moment. I feel like I've never been busier. And it feels to me like none of us are watering the grass around us. It feels like we're all thinking life is about these big decisions rather than trying to position ourselves in these ordinary moments. And therefore we're almost trapped in this constant cycle of having not enough time, feeling overly stressed, feeling undernourished and undernurtured by those around us.

27:49Is that fair? Totally.

27:51Shane Parrish: So how many priorities do you have? Loads. So if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority, right? So what's happening for you is if I can't distinguish my top two or three priorities from everything else, then that's how we tend to feel. So one of the symptoms... That's because I feel I have to give my everything to everything. Yeah, but you can't give your everything to everything. And when you try to give your everything to everything, the first thing to go is you. And what I mean by that is you start sacrificing your health, your sleep. You start sacrificing your mood, your workouts. You start sacrificing the core things that determine easier hard mode.

28:30Shane Parrish: So now all of a sudden you start playing on hard mode and then everything gets harder and harder and then it feels like a grind. And then you get set off by the slightest comment and all of a sudden what happens? You get multiplied by zero. All these things that you're trying to do and you're well-intentioned and you have all these interesting projects, but they can't all take the same weight on you. And if you're spreading your time, if you have 10 blocks of time a day and you spread them over 10 projects, that's one block of time a day per project. You're not going to move very fast. I mean, you're going to feel busy.

29:01Shane Parrish: There's lots of switching costs associated with that, but you're not going to get anywhere. And so what you really have to do in this case, and I'm an advocate of this, and there's no judgment for how other people choose to allocate their time. I think you need to narrow things down to two or three priorities. These are my focus. And if building a relationship and maintaining that relationship with my partner matters to me, I should be able to see that in your calendar. So don't tell me your priorities, show me your calendar. Because I think the answer is I just have to work harder. I have to get up earlier.

29:34I have to go to bed later. Do you know what I mean? Because you think that if you can pack more into a day, you can get more done. and therefore you can please more people.

29:41Shane Parrish: So I learned this working at the intelligence agency, right? This is what I thought. I could take on more projects. I could do more things. Just for context, I started working at a three-letter agency, the Canadian equivalent of GCHQ. How's that? So I started working for them two weeks before September 11th. September 11th happens. The world changes. I basically work with an incredible group of talented people. I don't leave the building almost for like seven years. And I say that a bit hyperbolically, but it wasn't far from the truth either. And so what was happening is I was sacrificing my health.

30:14Shane Parrish: I was sacrificing my sleep. I was being less productive. I was being, you know, not making the best decisions I could be making all because I wanted to do my best. And that was the story I was telling myself. And what I didn't realize, and it took me almost falling over basically with exhaustion. The moment of realization for me was I finally went on a vacation. I think it was 2007. And I went to Italy and I slept for three weeks. I barely left my hotel room. I slept 16 hours a day. And I was so exhausted and so tired. And I was like, what am I doing to myself? Like this isn't, what do I really care about?

30:49Shane Parrish: What do I really want to accomplish? How do I allocate my time to those things? So it's actually counterintuitive, but doing less leads to doing more because you know your priorities, you know your limits. These side projects, you know, the bottom seven projects for you, maybe if you have 10, they're nice to have. and if you want to allocate time to them, hire somebody and delegate them and sort of oversee them a little bit. So show me your calendar. What does it say? So the way that I choose to do this is a couple of folds. So one, not everybody can do this. When I worked at the intelligence agency, I used to block off an hour or two in the morning just for me and I couldn't do it when I first started doing this.

31:30Shane Parrish: I had to go six months out my calendar and I went six months out and I started blocking off an hour each day. I booked a meeting with myself so nobody could overbook that meeting. That was the most effective hour a day. I did more work in that one hour than I did in the other seven, eight, nine, ten hours at work. It didn't matter. That hour was mine. It was untouchable. And what would you do? What kind of questions would you ask yourself in that hour? Well, what's the most valuable opportunity I can work on right now? Sometimes that's an operation at work. Sometimes that's developing one of my employees.

32:02Shane Parrish: Sometimes that's just investing in myself and learning a new skill. Sometimes that's thinking about positioning myself for what I want to do next. The judgment of what to spend that time on is almost less important than you have it blocked off and you don't have to find the time. And so now I'm in much more control of my calendar. There's very few exceptions to this when I'm not traveling. I don't book anything before 12. So there's nothing in my morning. And what do I have all morning to do? I can focus on the biggest opportunity. I can focus on the thing that is most important on that given day.

32:35Shane Parrish: I can focus on the biggest project. I don't have to find time to work on these things. The time exists. And then how do I prioritize? Well, you can pick one priority at home and two priorities at work. That's it. What are the two critical things that you need to work on at work? What are the critical things that you need to do at home? And at home, it always involves investing in your relationship almost always, right? Am I making time for the people that I love? am I showing up in the way that I want to show up? So my calendar looks more like this, right? That many things on tomorrow. That's a day.

33:10Oh my God. So that is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. That's 14 things in the calendar for tomorrow.

33:19Shane Parrish: You just saw mine. I think the busiest day you saw was like three things. Three things. Yeah. Not a single one of those things is anything to do with what I really love, which is my wife and kids. Yeah. That's when you look at it like that, isn't it? It's something to reflect on, right? And a good thought experiment for people to do is sort of imagine you're 90 and you're in a coma at the hospital and you are near death and everybody is gathered around you and you can hear them, but they don't know that you can hear them and they start talking about you. And what is it that you want them to be saying?

33:53Shane Parrish: And then am I living my life in a way that is going to lead to people saying those things about me? or am I chasing things that I don't really want? Am I giving up what's really important to me going after something I don't really need? And so often this is the lessons for the living. And I mean, Carl didn't spell it out that way, but what you're doing is you're trading part of yourself today. You're giving up something you do want, which is that relationship with your wife and your kids. And you're sacrificing it for something you maybe do need, maybe you don't need. There's no judgment on my part about what people choose to do with their time.

34:29Shane Parrish: I just want people to be conscious about what they're doing. Why does it matter so much to you? Why did you decide this was your path? Well, I ended up making operational decisions that affected my team, my country, other countries, troops in theater, people's lives. And I wanted to make sure that I was making the best decisions that I could make. And so I just got really interested in studying how the best in the world seemed to consistently get better outcomes than the rest of us. And at first my thought was, oh, they're so much smarter than the rest of us. And the conclusion, the surprising sort of counterintuitive conclusion is that they're really good at positioning themselves.

35:09Shane Parrish: So they're never forced by circumstances into a bad decision. And if you think about that, they're basically almost always playing on easy mode. And if you hold up most people that we would think of as incredibly successful, like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Buffett, you know, the list goes on. They're always playing offense. They're always in a position where it doesn't matter if the stock market goes up or down, they can do something. They can take advantage of the situation. Buffett's a great example. Right now, Berkshire Hathaway is$150 billion on the balance sheet named cash. So the stock market goes up, he wins.

35:44Shane Parrish: Stock market stays the same, he wins. Stock market tanks, he's giddy. Because now he can deploy all this money. So no matter what happens, he's put himself in a position where success is almost inevitable. And I was like, whoa, what does that mean in the context of our lives? What is it that we're not doing? How is it that we don't think about this? Well, we're so busy trying to predict the future that we forget we can position for multiple possible futures. And I think that that's a really powerful counterintuitive insight that helps a lot of people. Would you say a little bit more about that?

36:16Shane Parrish: So we're trying to guess what's going to happen. We're trying to, I want this promotion. I want this sort of, this stock I'm going to go all in on. When we do that, we're really betting that we're right. And if we were right consistently about stuff, we would already probably be the world's richest person. And, you know, we wouldn't make mistakes at all, but that's not true. And what you can do is, I don't know what the future looks like. I don't know what tomorrow is going to bring, but I can position myself to take advantage of multiple possible scenarios. So like you can look at wealth building, right?

36:52Shane Parrish: Instead of picking an individual stock, Index funds work because we can't really consistently pick individual stocks as individual investors. And if we could, we would just pick the winners and ditch the losers, but we can't do that. So index funds, we know they work over time. So you can position yourself for a possible retirement or financial freedom. All you have to do, and we know this, it's historically proven, unless something changes in the future, which is really doubtful, but you're a wide range of scenarios. as this works, you get a mortgage rate and you happen to buy a house that's the most you can afford.

37:25Shane Parrish: Well, if you're on a variable rate, you're predicting the future is going to look a lot like the past. So you put yourself in a position where you unknowingly were predicting what the future looked like. Instead of maybe a fixed rate would have given you more flexibility or maybe not buying as big of a house so you have more margin of safety with whatever happens in the future. Whether you get laid off, whether interest rates go up or down, it affects you a lot less. Now you're positioned for multiple possible futures in a better way than you were before. And then you can adapt and take advantage of those situations.

37:59Shane Parrish: If you have cash on the sidelines and the stock market tanks, all of a sudden I can deploy that cash and then I can use that to my advantage. And just because a business is selling for 50 cents doesn't mean it's not worth a dollar. And it's unfortunate that other people are forced into selling those shares, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to buy them. So what you're moving on to here then, Shane, is almost like the way that we counter our defaults. Again, there's four that you talk about. The first one is having a level of self-awareness. So how can we start to improve their levels of self-awareness?

38:34Shane Parrish: Self-awareness is a big one, right? Can you openly acknowledge where you're strong, where you're weak, what you're prone to, what you're not prone to, the situations that keep getting you in trouble. A great example is I have a friend who occasionally gets lonely and they make really bad decisions when they get lonely. So they finally come to the conclusion, when I'm lonely, I do this. And I was like, hey, that's like Alcoholics Anonymous 101, right? Halt. Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. When you are any of these things, you make bad decisions. Call your buddy immediately. You can call me, right but you have to recognize first of all what's happening in this situation before you can do something about it yeah now i can do something about it so i can avoid this from happening i can schedule myself a little bit more i can join groups i can join clubs i can do all of these things but if i'm not aware about what's happening then we have problems how do we solve it it doesn't work i can come to you and tell you but you really have to have it on yourself you need the self-accountability self-awareness self-control all of these things in terms of how you go about doing things.

39:37Shane Parrish: And I think that you can get signals that things aren't working. And the signals that things aren't working in life are the story going through your head is, it's not my fault. It's the situation. I'm waiting for somebody to sort of see me for the potential that I have and give me the rewards that I deserve. These are indications that you're not self-aware about your contribution to the problem because there's always something you're contributing to the situation, no matter how big or small that's irrelevant. You're always contributing to it. So you have to start asking, what am I doing that's contributing to this problem?

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42:29So you spoke about that holiday in Italy where you decided 16 hours sleeping on a three week holiday is not productive and your story for seven years at the agency was I'm doing my best. I have to work hard. What was the story that you changed internally for yourself then?

42:47Shane Parrish: Well, I came back. I switched jobs almost immediately. I was like, I don't want to do that particular job anymore. It was too demanding in a way that I couldn't be happy in life and do that job. I could be great at that job, but I couldn't be great at that job and be happy in life. And that was what I sort of realized was like, I was trying to do too much. That job was great, but that job requires you going all in and I don't want to go all in anymore. So I'm going to give that job to somebody who does want to go all in. and they can put 100 % of their effort into it because that's what everybody I'm working with deserves.

43:20Shane Parrish: They deserve somebody who's going to put 100 % of their effort into that job and I've decided I'm not going to put 100 % of my effort into that job. But that requires the ability to step away from almost like the social pressures of being successful at a highly respected agency. Society would assume that you should be happy because you're professionally successful. Well, society tells us to be happy if we chase money, power, fame. But what we've learned through people near the end of life is that none of those things matter. The richest, most successful, most famous people are no happier and often more miserable, I know lots of them, than we are generally speaking.

44:01Shane Parrish: And I think the most important thing that we can do in life is pause. Wait a second. It's one thing to pursue these things. if I'm conscious about what I'm doing. I'm not saying don't chase money, power, fame. If that's what you want to do, go all in on it. But are you doing it because you want to? Are you doing it because somebody else told you to? And if you're doing it because society has told you those things are rewarded, those things are the things you need to chase, you're going to wake up one day and you're going to feel very hollow. And I think that you need to take control of your life.

44:34Shane Parrish: And what does that mean? I set my own scoreboard. I play by my own rules. That doesn't mean I'm not playing by society's rules in terms of like tax codes and speed limits and all of that. Like it's not a thing where you can go out and just break those laws. It means I don't care what you think about what I'm doing. When I quit the intelligence agency, every single person in my life told me I was crazy. Every single person from my parents who showed up at my door crying, literally crying. my mom in tears, you're throwing away the best job. You're throwing away your pension. You're throwing away, like, what are you doing?

45:13Shane Parrish: And I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. And I am the one in control of my life. I'm not going to do this because I'm guilted into it. I'm not going to do it because you feel I should be doing it. I'm going to do this because this is what I want to do. And if I fail doing what I want to do, that's a better place for me to be than succeeding at something I don't want to do. See, and I love that and I admire the courage to do it. And I know that we get a lot of listeners that want to set their own scoreboard. And I'm interested in how did you go about identifying what you were going to score your happiness against?

45:48Shane Parrish: Yeah, honestly, I just went for a walk one day and had a conversation with myself. And sort of I started reflecting on life and I started reflecting on what do I really value? And money wasn't part of it. Freedom of time was. And so if I want freedom of time and I want to control my own time and I want to be responsible for my own outcomes, I don't want to work in an organization anymore because I'm finding all these meetings and this bureaucracy just isn't serving me anymore. And other people have control of my time and they can usurp that and that's really starting to bother me. Well, that's not going to change.

46:19Shane Parrish: I can go to work and pound my head on a brick wall every day and hope that changes, but no matter what level I achieve in that organization, that would never change. What do people do if they're in the total opposite position of that? I'm thinking about someone who has bills to pay. They're in a job that they don't love, but they just can't take the risk of leaving that job or they've given up the career they love because they've had children and they feel that being at home with their children is the most important thing to them, even though a partner has died because they're not doing that thing that they used to love.

46:49Shane Parrish: Well, go back to positioning, right? So there's always something you can do today to put yourself in a better position for tomorrow. So if you're working at a job that you don't love, then one thing you can do, what is one skill I can learn that's going to put me in a position to have better options for jobs? Everybody thinks about leaving or quitting. And it's really hard to get that level of courage when you have a family and you have kids and you have... I had all of that. I just blew it all up. I was like, burn the bridges, got divorced, quit my job, cashed my pension in, was like, I have two years of money in the bank.

47:23Shane Parrish: Like, you know, Were you scared? Petrified. Yeah, totally. And, you know, you don't know how it's going to work out. This is why everybody was telling me it was the craziest thing ever. I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't care. Like, if I fail, I fail. And, you know, maybe I go back to the organization. You know, I felt like there's a pretty decent shot they would hire me again if I went back on bended knee. But there was no way in hell I was going to go back. That's why I cashed in my pension. And my accountant's like, this is the worst financial decision you can make. And I was like, but it's the best psychological decision I can make.

47:58Shane Parrish: But you're also saying people don't need to do that. Exactly. So you can just take baby steps, which is like, what is the one thing that I can do today to put myself in a better position? If my wife and my kids are more valuable, and I'm trying to work a job and I'm feeling tied up, what can I give up? And how do I allocate that time to my wife and partner? And if I can't do that, for whatever reason, you can't allocate more time to them. Can I allocate different time? Because often what we're doing is we're giving our worst time to our partner and our kids. And so what I mean by worst time...

48:29Shane Parrish: They get the scraps left over at the end of the day. A hundred percent. So can we get up early in the morning? So maybe instead of, you know, when the kids go down, we start cuddling and talking when we're both tired, we're both cranky and we both had a long day. Well, why don't we go to bed when the kids go to bed and let's get up an hour early and we'll spend the best hour of our day together. We'll invest the best hour of our day in our relationship. so I haven't changed the total amount of time but I've changed the outcome there's hope for us yet well Shane you use that phrase I think it's Jim Collins about like firing bullets not cannonballs which seems like a nice way of describing taking smaller steps rather than blowing your life off so you can take small steps you can cast a wide net see what works and what doesn't work and then if something's working double down on it and that's one way to do it often what happens in practice is that people do that, they'll take all these shots, but then they won't double down on it.

49:25Shane Parrish: They don't want to bet on themselves. They don't want to go all in. Go on, explain that. Yeah, so it's people, I think we just like searching for things too, right? And we're scared to commit to things. We're scared to commit and we're scared to go all in on things. And what we're really scared of is we're equally scared of failure and we're equally scared of success. And this sounds really weird. Why would we be scared of success? But one example I give in the book is sort of my parents and quitting smoking. What was really happening is that success meant changing their friends. Success meant getting rid of all the people in their life who smoked.

49:59Shane Parrish: What was holding them back? They didn't want to get rid of those people. They didn't have the willpower to go to those situations and not smoke. So success would mean getting rid of those people. And ultimately, that's how they ended up quitting smoking. So we're scared of failure, but we're also scared of success. And when we can identify that fear, it becomes really empowering, right? Because if I'm scared of failure, now I can think about this differently. Because am I scared of failure to reach the destination? Or am I scared of failure for the next step? And one of the examples that I use in the book of this is my son in cliff jumping.

50:32Shane Parrish: And so we climb up, he wants to go cliff jumping. I forget how old he is, but he's younger at this time. And his first cliff is 25 feet. It's a big cliff. And I'm in the boat going, are you sure you want to do this? Really? That's a pretty big cliff for your first jump. He's like, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, well, if you go up, you can't come down. Like I have to throw you in or you have to jump, but you can't climb down because it's way too dangerous. If you fall, you're going to end up dead or in the hospital. And so I was like, you literally have to jump. And he's like, yeah, no problem. So he gets up and he looks down and he's like, you know, his breathing changes.

51:06Shane Parrish: And I'm like, oh gosh. Okay, so let's talk about this for a second. Pause. Like let's get control of our physiological response, which is our breath. Now let's start doing two things, right? Let's think about all the hard things that we've done before that we've never done for the first time, like snowboarding is his example, right? Or wakeboarding. All these things that appeared really scary that he did that he enjoyed. So it's like, okay, I've done hard things before in the past. Now, let's change where we're looking. If you're looking down, I need the confidence to get to the bottom. That's very different.

51:40Shane Parrish: That's the confidence to get to the ultimate goal. That's very different than if I look to the horizon, which is I need the confidence to take one step. The rest will take care of itself. And so often what happens with this is that when we get scared, the fear is that we can't make the destination that we want to make. So what do we do? We don't do anything. We do analysis paralysis. We keep looking. We keep searching. We keep struggling. We don't move. We keep talking about doing things without doing it. But talking about something is not doing it. It's not the same thing. But we're getting rewarded for, it's almost as if we're doing it.

52:14Shane Parrish: but we're not actually doing anything. And so I call it first step confidence. You need the confidence or next step confidence to take the next step. And so if you want to leave your job, I don't need the confidence to be able to leave my job. I need the confidence to acquire the next skill I need to put myself in a better position for success. I need the confidence to just take one step forward. And maybe that's volunteering for a new role at work. Maybe it's getting myself involved in a different way. I need to shake things up and I need the confidence to do that. that doesn't mean I'm going to get a new job out of it.

52:45Shane Parrish: It doesn't mean all of these things. Stop. Forget about that. Just focus on what's right in front of you. Focus on your next step. The other thing I'd just like to mention before we wrap up with our quick fires is memento mori. The opportunity to change is right now. I think it's a really good way to wrap up. Why does it resonate with you? Well, it resonates with me because we only get one shot at life. We never know when we're going to die. I thought I was going to die two years ago. I had Lyme disease. I had facial paralysis. so I had Bell's palsy on one side of my face. I couldn't stand. I couldn't open my mouth.

53:18Shane Parrish: I was sleeping like 18 hours a day. I honestly just thought that was the end and nobody knew what was wrong with me and all my symptoms kept getting worse. I mean, when I standed, it was so incredibly painful. It was like, if I walked, I was fine, but if I stood still for 10 seconds, it was like somebody took a knife, stabbed the back of my knees and started scraping the knife down. I was in so much pain, I'd be crying on the floor. And I have a fairly high pain tolerance. Like, it was the craziest thing ever. And so you never know when life is going to be taken from you. And we only get one shot at it.

53:53Shane Parrish: And that doesn't mean go all in on today, because you have to, you know, imagine you're going to live to 120, but it means you're doing the things that you care about. And we don't need a near death experience to remind us of what matters as we've talked about today. You can start allocating your time more. It doesn't mean you're going to go perfect on it, but you can do more about what matters and less about what doesn't. Lovely.

54:20So our quick fire questions begin with the three non-negotiable behaviors that you and the people around you should buy into.

54:28Shane Parrish: Oh, that's a good question. Non-negotiable behaviors, do what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it. Don't talk for other people. So don't offer your thoughts on somebody else. Don't gossip. Don't do any of those things. The third one I would say is show up and go all in. So you don't just show up and go through the motions. If you're going to do it, dedicate yourself to doing it well. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received and why? When I was 13, I used this story in the book, my father saw me teasing somebody else at school with a group of people. I wasn't really teasing the person, but I was with the group.

55:14Shane Parrish: And he told me that I didn't have to do things that other people were doing just because other people were doing them. And no matter what happened, I was responsible for my behavior. And that piece of advice sticks with me all the time. Whether it's, you know, you're in control and it's not about not being there. It's also about not stopping it, right? So I'm in control of my behavior. I'm in control of my response. And that really solidified that for me. What's your biggest strength? What's your greatest weakness? My biggest strength is I go all in. It's also my biggest weakness. I mean, conversely, it can be both, right?

55:59Shane Parrish: It can be the both of those things. And I think by going all in, I'm relentless. So like during COVID, that's another period of my life where I was exhausted. I was falling asleep in like milliseconds. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I was out every day felt like a grind. And I could live the rest of my life that way. I wouldn't be happy, but I could. and I know I could do that because mentally I can just keep going. So it becomes that, but am I living in a way that is true to what I want, true to who I am? If you could go back to one moment of your life, what would it be and why? I think I would, if I had to go back, I'd go back like a minute from now because I really just want to go forward.

56:42Shane Parrish: I mean, everything that's happened to me in my life, good, bad, and there's definitely been a ton of struggle. And when I think about being a straight D student or I think about almost getting kicked out of school or I think about skipping school for seven weeks in grade seven, when I think about all the stuff that happened to me as a child, it's like, oh, if I could eliminate that maybe, but no, if I could eliminate that, I wouldn't be here today. That would have totally changed my path. So all of those are learning experiences for me. They're not all positive and that's okay. But can I take something away from them that I can use with my kids?

57:18Shane Parrish: Can I take something away from them that powers me? Can I go forward with those experiences? So I wouldn't want to change anything from the past. I think the one time that I would want to go back to is last October when my grandmother was dying and I was in the hospital with her and I was holding her hand. And I just would love like one more moment with her. Thank you. And the final question, your one golden rule. for living a high performance life. Be yourself. Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. Really enjoyed that, Shane.

57:58Damien, Jake, it's rude to be scribbling and noting things down and stuff while you're talking to someone, but I wish I had. It was a real eye-opener for me. The things that you think you're doing right so often, you don't even see that maybe they're either wrong or they're actually causing you sort of additional stress. And so I'm now thinking, imagine if I was able to actually position myself in the way that Shane described. Imagine what's available. Well, that analogy Shane uses of hard mode and easy mode is just such a brilliant question at any one time. Which mode are you playing the game in?

58:35I think the big thing that I've taken away from that conversation is that sometimes our decision-making is biological rather than conscious. you know like when Shane was talking about sometimes our ego gets in the way sometimes the people pleasing which I can recognize in myself that the social pressure that you tend to conform to rather than just say no I don't want to do it and I think when you recognize that the steps of being self-aware making sure that you're giving yourself time and space the rule setting there's just so many small steps we can take that we can take away and implement in our life.

59:12So it's not about anyone listening to this thinking, I've got to blow my life up, I've got to do anything radically different. It's just small, incremental steps you can take. I love the fact that what Shane is saying is, you know, just the positioning, the small things where you don't even realise, you know, you're having to make, you know, we always think that decisions are big moments, but I love the fact that he's saying the little moments in life are what really matters. What are the things from that? Because I'm always really interested in this, What will you change having listened to that conversation?

59:41Shane uses an analogy in the book that I think we didn't touch on in the conversation was about a lesson from Charles Dickens and Ebenezer Scrooge, where he talks about the ghost of Christmas future turning up and frightening Scrooge into changing the ghost of Christmas today. And I think when I think in terms of relationships, whether it's with my children, whether it's with my wife, whether it's with my immediate family, I don't feel I'm investing as much time in them. And I think I can bargain with myself and go, you know what, it's because I'm busy, I'm doing my best for them, I want to give them opportunities.

1:00:18But actually, the real value is spending the time with them, just listening to them, being around for them. So I think it's about learning to say no to opportunities that come in to be able to prioritise the things that really count. What about you? certainly when he mentioned what not just giving time to the people that matter what is the time like what's the quality of that time like you know my time with my family is at the end of a long day and I said to myself well I've seen them for two hours but what what's that two hours been checking my emails from work it might be time but is it quality time I think the other thing is this idea of positioning you know I feel like so often and I'm sure a lot of people listening will relate to this, I feel like I'm running through treacle because I never get the headspace to go, right, what does the next three or four days look like?

1:01:09And what can I do now to plan what I'm going to wear, how I'm going to travel, what goes in my bag on the start of the week to sort of look after me for the whole week? This idea of positioning is so hugely, like, life-changingly powerful. That is the big takeaway for me. Am I stumbling through every single week? Yes. And am I making excuses that I'm stumbling because I'm so busy? Yes. Am I therefore making hard decisions? Yes. So I need to change that and I resolve to do that. So Shane spoke about he doesn't take any meetings until 12 o 'clock. What one small step are you going to take? Well, that sort of scares me.

1:01:51Like I'm still so far away from being able to do it. I think, oh, I couldn't do that because I know that I would just start doing things. I think what I'm going to do is sit down with Harriet and look at each week and go right where do we find really great quality time you know when he said about what are people going to say about you on your deathbed I know for a fact Harriet and the kids will say he loved us but my god he worked hard and I don't want them to say the second part so love that well thank you mate no thank you I've loved that one I was really looking forward to Shane as I said at the start I enjoy his podcast.

1:02:28I've done a couple of his courses and I love his book. So it was a real treat. So thank you. Well, thank you to Shane for his time. This podcast really left a mark on me. That conversation he had with Jake about asking what he prioritises and then asking to see his calendar is a great example of where what we often say doesn't always match up to what we do. What I kept coming back to though is how deceptively simple his framework is and how ruthlessly most of us ignore it. Position yourself well, know your two to three real priorities, replace willpower with rules and stop giving the worst of yourself to the people who deserve the best of you.

1:03:11Like Shane said, if your priorities aren't visible in your diary, well they're not priorities, they're simply wishes. if this one's made you think why not consider sharing it with someone who really needs to hear it but listen we never take your time or your attention for granted thanks for joining us look forward to seeing you next time

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