The Mindset That Unlocks Your Full Potential | Dr. Gio Valiante

24:20It was an epiphany. And then over the course of the next three months, he wrote two papers that led to the Nobel Prize. So he was stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck. The synthetic function of language, the process of trying to articulate his thinking led to the epiphany. Crick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA. It's the same thing. It was through the interactive process. There were four researchers on that team, but it was the interaction of problem solving that happened. And so if people are trying to elevate and realize the full expression of their talents and abilities, the first place you have to look, I said earlier, you have to look at your habits and your behavior.

25:02The reality is the first place you have to look is your systems and your environment, whether it's a place that has all the hallmarks of leading to excellence, which is honesty and truth-telling, which is challenge and skill development, which is no ceiling. And one of the hallmarks, by the way, of these, you know, Daniel Coyle articulated this in a really nice little book. He calls them talent hotbeds, right? They're places that tend to graduate a disproportionate amount of excellence. So, you know, great singers tend to come out of this little school in Dallas, Texas, around Dallas, Texas. For a period of time, great tennis players came out of Russia, great baseball players out of the Dominican Republic, great female golfers out of South Korea.

25:47If you look at the world of golf, you know, historically great golfers out of Texas and California, these great golf states. One of the hallmarks of talent hotbeds is what do people do with mistakes? And so by and large, the primary mechanism of suppression, why people don't achieve what they're capable of achieving has to do with how they're conditioned with dealing with mistakes and failure. But if you really want to be great, put yourself in an environment that allows you the freedom, yes, challenge and accountability and rigor and detail, but that's not over punitive of mistakes.

26:32Shane Parrish:When you're interviewing somebody, I want to know the signs of greatness and the signs of this person isn't as good as they think they are. What are the markers of, you know, Steve Cohen called you a canary in a coal mine, but also you have an incredible ability to identify talent in very short period of time. What are the questions you ask? How do you do that? Of all the variables that psychology measures, the two that I think are the most important are confidence and motivation, right? Confidence and motivation. People think it's intelligence, but it's actually not. So the story of intelligence is, you know, the way we define it is a very muddled story.

27:18So intelligence, this idea of IQ, which people still use as a marker of intelligence, IQ, meaning intellectual quotient, started, I think it was in the late 1800s in France, and Alfred Binet, the French government said, hey, listen, we need to be able to identify kids who are struggling in school. And if we can identify them early, we could do an intervention. That's all it was. So Alfred Binet went and did some studies, interviewed a bunch of people and came with this intellectual quotient, said, you know, if we measure here, these are the kids who will struggle in school. And when this research made its way to America, America did with it what Americans do.

27:55Let's commercialize it. So they started selling people on this idea that the higher IQ, the smarter you are. It's undeniably false. Higher IQ doesn't mean you're smarter. And then if people went just maniacal and intelligence tests, which is a multi-billion dollar industry, and that's why it stayed alive to this day. The SATs and the ACT and educational testing systems, multi-billion dollar industry. That's the reason the idea hasn't died. It's financially driven. It's a nonsensical idea now. You can argue that there is a thing called G, which is general intelligence. But again, so a Harvard researcher, kind of Howard Gardner, who started doing research in developmental psychology, then cognitive psychology, and he posited the idea that humans have what he called multiple intelligences.

28:42And it challenged the status quo of IQ. And what he says is human beings have individual autonomous intelligences. For example, verbal intelligence, mathematical intelligence. And all of these intelligences have their own characteristics. because interpersonal intelligence, which you're a genius at. What's interpersonal intelligence? Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to read someone else in real time, sort of sense where they're at emotionally, cognitively, and steer them. You know, great politicians have great interpersonal intelligence, great school teachers. The fourth kind of intelligence is called intrapersonal intelligence, the ability to know yourself.

29:21How smart are you actually if you have a perfect memory but have no self-awareness. Right. That's not intelligence. Gardner talks about bodily kinesthetic intelligence, the ability to know your body in space. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Martha Graham, the great dancer, knowing your body and to be able to have this proprio perception. Spatial intelligence that great architects have to see things dimensionally. Anyway, your question is, what do I look for when I'm screening people? Well, I want to understand what is the entire profile of this person. Where do they come from? What's their source of their motivation?

29:58How do they handle failure? I want to know the degree to which they tell the truth. Because in most cases, when people are having a conversation, particularly in an interview, they're presenting a version of themselves that they want you to see. But that's not the version of themselves that's going to show up in the workplace. So one of the most important questions is this. It's, tell me a time in your life where you had to work with somebody you didn't like. Could have been in elementary school, been middle school, been a project in college, your last company, somebody who you fundamentally disagreed with and then viscerally didn't like but had to work with.

30:42How'd you handle that? And if you ask a version of that question and you just sit back, that will reveal the kind of person they are. And it will also reveal how they will respond when faced with adversity in the workplace, particularly if you're in a hard industry where you're trying to solve hard problems. So how do you handle conflict? To what degree do you blame others? To what degree do you shut down? To what degree are you engaging? Research shows that companies that put brand management or image management over problem solving tend to deteriorate pretty quickly. So it has to be an environment or a culture where smart people are empowered to solve hard problems, but they care more, in your case, more about the mission than about the self.

31:31So I look for all of these things. And again, it depends on the role because a lot of people are capable or competent. But if you put the right person in the wrong role, they're never going to flourish. So it has to be a fit for the exactness of the role itself.

31:47Shane Parrish:Are there any other questions that come to mind that you think are particularly revealing about people? What is the biggest obstacle you've ever had to overcome in your life? and the follow-up there is, what resources did you lean on to overcome that obstacle? In other words, how did you overcome it? So people stop at what obstacle did you overcome? Where it becomes interesting psychologically is how did you overcome them? So going back to a really important interview question is, yeah, tell me the hardest thing you've ever overcome. And then what did you enlist? Did you go to other people? Do you have a network?

32:27What beliefs did you engage? It's really important to understand the method by which people overcome their obstacles. They have to rely on themselves. And this is what Tiger Woods was great at for a period of time. It's like, hey, here's what his self-talk was. You got yourself into this mess, now get yourself out of it. And that's the best version of Tiger. Obviously, we've seen some other versions of But the best version of Tiger is Tiger telling himself, you got yourself into this mess and I'll get yourself out of it.

32:55Shane Parrish:One thing I find with myself that I catch myself doing now that I never was even aware of until recently is shrinking the gap between where I am and what do I want to accomplish. So not the ultimate goal, but like the first step. So we often look at like the thing that we want to accomplish. I want to be X, Y, Z. I want to, and that the gap between where you are and accomplishing that thing just seems really big. Yeah. And I find that shrinking the gap, and I was talking with Dr. I think it was Dr. Emily Bacolatis on the show, and she gave the example of a marathoner. And I thought this was really apt, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, but she said, you know, when their legs start hurting and it's mile 11, like they're not thinking about the finish line.

33:41Shane Parrish:They switch their focus to the next stop sign, the next red light. And then you do that and then you do it and you do it. And all of a sudden you're back in your flow state. You're back in the state where you're either not feeling it or you've worked through the pain. So oftentimes people, the people like in golf, people don't call me when things are going well. You know, I've got an email that came in this morning for the first time in my career, I'm in a slump. You know, first time in my career, I'm in a draw. First time in I'm not making money. So these are the messages I get. How do you walk someone out of a draw?

34:11Let's say you're running$500 million and you're down, I don't know, let's call it, you know, let's say your limit's of$500 million. You know, the company's going to fire you, you know, if you're down 20 and you're down 15 and you don't have a lot of room to go. But like, you need to put on risk because scared money don't make money. So you need to put on risk. But you know, if you're wrong again, you're out of a job. The path to getting out of a draw, step one is to get in the habit of making money again. But like you don't see where people make mistakes is they look at the size of the draw and they start trying to make it all back in one swing.

34:53They just start panicking. And what people do in panic is they lose their rationality. They see threat instead of opportunity, all sorts of characteristics of a PM in a draw. And what I say is, we're not going to make it all back. Let's make$100. Let's make$100 this week. So bring down your risk and let's get in the habit of making money. And then it's like, but I'll never get out of this if I'm... It's like, no, I understand that. But what happens is, as Vince Lombardi famously said, winning is a habit and so unfortunately is losing. Well, so is making money. So is doing well in golf. A confident investor, when he looks out in the world, sees the world as a place of abundance, sees opportunity, sees the market as a place of abundance, sees opportunity everywhere.

35:38I don't have enough time to get to all the opportunity. I don't have enough capital. I need more money because there's so much money to be made in this market. When we lose our confidence, we see the market as a place of threat. Everything is dangerous. Landmines everywhere. And so you come off your ability to take any risk because all you see is danger. And so that's why you have to protect your confidence. Why is that? because fear distorts our ability to see the world accurately. Fear is distortive. Fear means danger is everywhere. At least we perceive danger everywhere. So the first thing I have to do with a PM is get them in a habit of making small dollars.

36:16Why? Because the biggest source of confidence is success. So if you get in the habit of making$100, well, next we make$1 ,000. Now you're confident again. Now you see opportunity. see opportunity, you start deploying capital into better opportunities. You're more patient when a move. So one of the characteristics of confidence versus fear is, you know, let's say you deploy money into an idea and that idea moves against you. Do you cut the position or do you put more money into it? Well, if you love the thesis and you love the work and you love the idea, you double down. You invest in an idea that's going against you.

36:51When you're scared, you see threat and danger. You pull out at the wrong time. You overtrade an idea. So you have to protect your confidence at all costs, confidence and motivation. But when you're scared, you never see that path. And so step one for anybody in crisis, honestly, whether it's a golfer, PM, people in private markets, venture capital firms, and it's what you said, alluded to earlier, runners, it's like, let's start finding small wins, things that we know we can, and then celebrate them because it changes the emotional profile. And you start stacking incremental small wins, and that leads to greatness.

37:29So yeah.

37:31Shane Parrish:Let me tell you about the best new product that I've used in the past five years. It's the Matic Vacuum. This thing vacuums, it mops. Matic does everything. Other robots bump into things, but the Matic sees things. It actually avoids the problems. and the Matic automatically adjusts between my carpeted surfaces and my hardwood floors. It's also super easy to schedule. I have it run every night while I'm in bed, and every morning I wake up to clean floors. Messes happen, and when they do, Matic rolls into action. Go to maticrobots.com today and put Matic to work for you.

38:11Shane Parrish:Ever hit 3 p.m. and feel like your brain just quit? For a lot of people, that's not caffeine or sleep. It's electrolytes. And water alone won't fix it. That's why I drink Element every day after lunch. Zero sugar, no dodgy ingredients, just a real dose of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. I know you're all thinking electrolytes are for athletes, but you don't have to be an athlete to benefit from it. And it tastes great. Stay sharp in the afternoon and grab a free eight-count sample pack with any purchase at drinkelement.com slash TKP. That's drinkelement.com slash TKP. Is there a difference between types of confidence?

38:58Shane Parrish:Like, we all know the person who's confident from arrogance. Yep. And then there's like almost a confidence from humility. There's different types of confidence. There are different flavors of confidence. So when we talk about the research on the self in modern times, there's three self-constructs. There's self-esteem, self-concept, and self-efficacy, right? In simple terms, self-esteem is defined as how do I feel about myself, right? My self-esteem is, my self-esteem is high or low, right? It's just an emotional feeling about oneself. And while it's important to have a healthy self-esteem, it's not empirically related to excellence in any way, shape, or form.

39:33Some of the highest performers don't feel good about their performance. They're the best in the world, never feel good about it. And then underachievers feel great about themselves, right? There's an overconfidence. They feel great about themselves no matter what. So there's self-esteem. The second variable is self-concept. And self-concept is how do I view myself? It's identity. When I look in the mirror, what do I see? That's somewhat related to performance. But then there's self-efficacy. And self-efficacy is essentially operationalized confidence. So here's what's known about confidence. There's two forms of it.

40:03Confidence has a personality trait. Some people are born. And if you talk to mom or dad, they're like, yeah, he's been that swashbuckling confidence. He's been that way his whole life. Whatever that thing is, he or she has always had it. So that's confidence as a personality trait. That doesn't necessarily do much in life. You have people who are failures who have it, people who are successful, and everyone in the middle. The way that modern psychology defines confidence is self-efficacy. Now, the beautiful thing about operationalized confidence is we can measure it. We know how the dominoes fall and we know what creates it.

40:42So, for example, this is another question I ask in almost every interview. Tell me something you think you're good at. So, you know, any listener is listening to this, is trying to be good at something. If I ask you, tell me something that you believe yourself to be good at. And then give an answer. And then if I deconstruct it and I say, tell me why you believe that, what you come to find, and this is true categorically across the human condition in every domain, it boils down to four kinds of experiences that that person has had. The number one experience is what's called a mastery experience.

41:17It's simply success and failure. Here's how many times I've done this and failed. Here's how many times I've done it and succeeded. But it's not arithmetical. It's the interpretation of success and failure. It's like when Michelle Kwan in the Olympics lost the gold medal to Tara Lipinski. The media said, Michelle, you just lost the gold medal. You must feel terrible. She's like, no, no, I didn't lose the gold. I won the silver. Both are objectively true. Michelle Kwan won the silver, but she did lose the gold. But the interpretation of it allowed her to protect her confidence. And guess what? Later that year, she won the world championships.

41:55So, right, the number one source of confidence, the first place the brain goes when it asks itself, hey, can I do this thing? It goes to prior experience. But what you have to be mindful of is the pain of failure hurts more than success feels good. So, what happens is we tend to index toward our failures, right? We bring the pain of the past, failures, to the moment. That's why most people are underconfident, right? Because the way the memory and the brain...

42:22Shane Parrish:Because they're remembering all of the things that they've done wrong, all the mistakes they've made. A hundred percent. Golfers always want to talk to me about their bad shots. Portfolio managers always want to talk to me about the money they've lost and what they didn't do. And it's like an anchor. It becomes an anchor. It becomes their ceiling, right? The second source of confidence is verbal persuasions. We're called verbal and social persuasions. It's the feedback we get from other people. You allude to that. Why do you think you're good at something? Because people have told me that. Here and again lies the bias.

42:51criticism hurts more than praise feels good. So if you just combine mastery experiences where failure hurts more than success feels good, verbal persuasions, criticism hurt more than compliments, over the course of the life cycle, people index toward the pain of their past failures and their criticisms. And they index toward that. And they start living their life in anticipation of indexing toward that. Third experience is called vicarious experiences. How do I compare to other people? We judge our abilities relative to other people. But when we see someone effortlessly do better at something we work at, that lowers our confidence called vicarious learning.

43:33And then the fourth source of confidence in the Bible, it's called physiological states. It's the butterflies in the stomach. Shane, why do you think you're great at interviewing? Because I can feel it. It's a feeling. But what you come to realize is that the butterflies that you feel when you're interviewing an important person that you feel great about, that gets you excited, those are the same butterflies that people feel when they choke, physiologically. It's the interpretation. so in aggregate confidence is is is amalgamation of prior success and failure what people communicate to us and whether we're good or bad how we compare ourselves to others and then how we feel about what we're doing so if you want to become great at something you have to understand if you're so you talked about people who are way over confident here's what here's what's known about confidence if this is your objective skill and ability measurable your verbal intelligence your mathematical intelligence, your skills as a hedge fund man or a moneymaker, as a podcast interview.

44:34Here's what I do. Well, I know how to construct questions. I know how to listen. I know how to follow up. I know this. Here's your skills. A little bit of overconfidence is a really good thing. Why? Because that takes those skills and abilities and it elevates them. You see opportunity. You take more risks. You put yourself in more challenging situations when you're a little bit overconfident. Where does it get dangerous?

45:01Shane Parrish:A lot overconfident. Too overconfident. That leads to slappiness, arrogance, laziness, self-delusion, deception, right? So you have to protect confidence. Now, here's what else happens when we lose our confidence. When our confidence is below our ability, we index toward that. So it doesn't matter how many skills and abilities you have. They're going to find a way to that belief. It happens all the time. And what's the primary mechanism of underachievement? People index toward their past failures. They index toward criticism, what other people are going to think about them. Now, where does this show up?

45:40If you look at the data on risk-taking in financial professionals, investment professionals, what you'll see is a curve that diminishes over time. It does the opposite of going, we lose our risk appetite as we get older. Why is that? The simple answer is, well, I've already made my money, so I don't want to put it at risk. That's not true. What actually happens is we accumulate, even though our skills get better, we're better than ever at what we've done, we've also accumulated enough failure that we don't want to feel that way again. So we lose our appetite for risk. This happens across every achievement domain.

46:16And so it goes back to the fundamental questions. How do you live at the tail end of the curve? You have to have a playbook for what you're going to do with mistakes and failure. Because the four sources of confidence, your prior experiences, the brain is going to experience failure more painful than success feels good. Well, you have to use and override, use your agency to flip the script on that. That's why visualization works when it works. That's why self-talk works when it works. Number two, verbal persuasions. You have to decide the degree to which you're going to care what other people think about you because that becomes your prison.

46:50If you go through life over-indexing and caring too much what people think about you, that's your ceiling. Physiological states. If you never want to feel uncomfortable, that's your ceiling. Vicarious experiences. If you are going to spend your life comparing yourself to others and instead of indexing toward your own full potential, that's your ceiling.

47:12Shane Parrish:You mentioned self-talk. Do positive affirmations work? They do. They work when they work, so long as they're not delusional. Now, why do they work? You know, people misunderstand the dynamic between cognition and language. People think that the words I use are a reflection of what I think, that I have a thought, and I use words, and that word describes my thought. That's not what actually happens. What actually happens, and it's a developmental thing, it happens early in life, language and thought are separate, right? Like they think of an infant, right? There's all this, they don't even have language yet, but then they start using words, you know, second, third, fourth year of life.

47:51And words are just random. But then words start to reflect thoughts. And then what happens is there's a blending where language and cognition become the same thing. That's why certain words are charged with emotion. That's the beauty of a great lyric in music or a great sequence of words. That's why in therapy or even in coaching, you're trying to give people a language that's empowering. When we're young, developmentally, the language that others use becomes our own internal dialogue, typically the parents. So how our parents talk to us becomes how we talk to ourselves or our teachers or our coaches.

48:28And if that's not functional and healthy and directionally accretive to success, that becomes our self-talk. And then we talk to our kids that way. And then all of it comes to generational trauma or generational excellence. So self-talk absolutely matters because of this interaction between language and cognition. Do affirmations work? Yeah. Where do we see this most prominently? In prayer. So think of it this way. This is incredible. So if you think of all the major religions, they've had several thousand years of trial and error to get it right. So whether you believe in God or not, or believe in a religion or not, these are institutions that have had several thousand years to get it right.

49:09And what do they all have? They all have prayer as some component of what they do. Why is that? If I sit down to dinner with my children, and every night I make them sit around and say something approximating grace, where they simply articulate the words, I'm thankful for the food before me. They're practicing the habit of gratitude. And so what happens in religious tradition is if you articulate the words, a profession of faith, say these words, just say them. I don't care if you believe it. The more you say it, invariably, the randomness of experience is like, oh, it is true. Then we start to believe the things we say.

49:47So self-talk absolutely matters. but not immediately. It doesn't work automatically. It's over the course of time. The process of articulating and using words carefully galvanizes the kinds of beliefs that lead to success, failure, happiness, or misery. Yeah.

50:03Shane Parrish:One of the other things you said that I want to come back to, because I think a lot of people live their life in a way that they don't want to be disliked by other people and it governs what they do. And so it's fear in a way, you know, but they're letting other people dictate their behavior and their choices. How do we let go of that? Well, do you know why that is? Why? Why do you think that is? Why do you think most people... I think there's an evolutionary component to it. So if I have to answer this, I mean, my guess would be that, you know, we grew up in tribes. Being excommunicated from the tribe meant death.

50:37Shane Parrish:We evolved over thousands of years with this in mind. You're not part of the tribe, you're out of the tribe. And if you're out of the tribe, you're dead. And so we have this mechanism that we hold on to that's rooted in our biology. Absolutely. And evolutionary psychology, which is another branch of psychology, has done really wonderful research in a packaging this, right? That belonging, part of a community is safety. To be excommunicated is death. Now, what happens is through natural selection, the brain does not evolve. Natural selection doesn't work as fast as changes in society. So I always say to golfers, your brain did not evolve for you to be a PGA tech golfer, a hedge fund manager.

51:12Your brain did not evolve with the intention of you being a professional investor. That's not how natural selection worked. It wasn't directional. So you're trying to do a hard thing with an imperfect instrument, which is the human brain. And this is the one thing that separates humans from every other animal on earth is we get to engage in abstract thinking. It's called metacognition, right? The ability to think about your own thinking. No other creature can do that. You get to think about your thinking and then make adjustments. So the beautiful thing about abstract thinking is it gave birth to this idea of forethought.

51:45It's, I can actually anticipate. If I want to be comfortable in 10 years, I save my money today. We anticipate a potential thing and it governs current behavior. No other creature can do that. That's the good thing is we get to anticipate and plan. Here's the bad thing. Forethought tends to lead to people over-indexing to the future. So essentially what we start asking is what if questions. What if this plane crashes? Oh my God. We know that people who are anxious live in the future. They create their own anxiety. What if the plane crashes? Portfolio meters, what if I lose all my money? What if I get fired?

52:25Golfers, what if I lose my credit? We camp out in the future and we go to worst case scenario. This is one of the weird features about the brain is I had a girl call me actually, I'll never forget it, the morning of her wedding, the morning of her wedding. She's a friend of mine in college. And she's like, I'm so sorry to bother you. I said, no, no, what's going on? I said, aren't you busy today? And she's like, yeah. She goes, Gio, what if I'm making a mistake? What if he cheats on me? What if he stops loving me? What if, what if? All these, and this is one of the tells, ask people, what are the what if questions you ask yourself?

52:56And what you come to find is people almost always go to worst case scenario. They bring that future state into the present moment. Then they start reacting as if it's real. I can't tell you how many hedge fund portfolio managers go through this. They could have made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in their life. They start losing a little money. Like, oh my God, what if I get fired? And for some reason, the story is always the same. And so when we talk about the powerful things about the brain, abstract thinking, forethought, hypotheticals, you have to learn how to leverage that to your advantage because the natural human default reactions, it's another one of the things that pushes us to the middle part of the distribution and presents us from overachieving.

53:34And so when we talk about evolutionary psychology and survival, the reason that I talk about forethought and abstract thinking is because it emerges at the same window of time, which is adolescence and middle school. So what you see out of adolescence.

53:54Shane Parrish:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. So we get to thinking hypotheticals and abstracts, and for the first time in our lives, This happens at every human being everywhere on earth.

54:27It's a universality of the human condition is we ask the most important question in human existence. Who am I? That question doesn't happen with young people because their identity is largely a part of their family. But we start having these, who am I? And that's where this process, Freud identified this process called individuation, which is where we separate from a family identity. And that's where the rebellion occurs, right? Because kids need to answer that question. And then what you also start to see is this need to belong, conformity. You see it all over middle schools and high schools, everywhere in the world.

55:05I need to be part of this group. I need to wear the right clothes. I need to make the cheerleading team or the football team or whatever. It's that need for belonging. There's two psychological insights that I think are probably the two most important that I've ever come across. us. And here's one of them. We try on different faces until we find a face of our own. But what drives that for, yeah, for a large middle period of life, middle school, high school, college, even it's called this extended adolescence, even in the 20s and the 30s, is this idea of I'm trying to find myself. And this used to be these, you know, go West, young man, and Jack Kerouac, you know, the open road.

55:45This used to be a healthy process where you go, the process of self-discovery was the search, the travel, the moratorium. There's this great line in the movie, A River Runs Through It, where one of the sons comes home from college and goes to his father, who's played by Tom Skerritt, and is like, so, son, you've had four years at college. What do you want to do? He's like, oh, I don't know. It's like, but you've had four years to know. And that's what college is supposed to be. College is, if you think about the university, the etymology of the university is the word universe. the university was first born to be a repository of everything in the known universe so it was a place you could come and there was civics there's mathematics there was theater there was astronomy there was there was language and you can come to a place of learning and the vehicle of that learning was critical thought in the pursuit of truth and so this need for belonging is born out of evolution and natural selection manifests most pronounced in adolescence, in middle school, and then in the healthy identity, you get to this place called an achieved identity, where you've tried on different faces, you've done a search, you've done exploration, you've tried different things, you've taken some risks, and then you finally come to this moment where it's like, I know who I am, I know the real me.

57:11That's not the real me. I won't participate painted that. This is who I am. And then what happens is you can then, you know, what Eric Erickson says is, when we talk about finding a partner to love in life, it goes psychological intimacy. You have all these people trying to find a partner. What Erickson says is you can't give yourself to someone if you don't have self to give. If you haven't developed a full sense of yourself, what are you giving to the person? So that's what we talk about. Work on yourself. Develop a healthy sense of self. Who am I? Like, solve for that and then go forth to your ultimate destiny in life.

57:49The second most important question. It's something I think about. Usually you have an idea. It's like a song. And you listen to it for a little while and then, yeah, I don't like it. I'm on to a new song. This is a question that has never left me because I see it every day in my work. It shows up all the time. and it's not even a question it's an observation a very keen observation by segment freud we spend our adult lives undoing the debris of childhood so just pause there for a minute and think about your life when you ask somebody why do you do what they do on a surface level they're going to give all these answers it's like oh because i love it oh no if you actually have deep conversations with them, what you come to realize is the fuel itself, the motivation, is rooted in experiences that they had in their youth.

58:42Lance Armstrong. Why? What gave it Lance Armstrong the fuel to ride his bike while he had cancer? What was he trying to overcome or solve for? Talk to him or read his book. The trauma of his youth. Tiger Woods, trauma in youth. They made fun of them. That's the fuel. Now, one of the things I often have to say, your parents did too good of a job. You're too well-adjusted, right? But that's not the case for most of us. Most of us are trying to solve for things that happened during those formative years. Here's where it gets dangerous. I had a Wall Street guy who I was working with. He was, at the time, his late 40s, had made$500,$600,$700 million.

59:26He was miserable. He was married with two kids. He was at before a.m. every day, worked relentlessly, family was falling apart, relationships weren't great, massive insecurity. Now, I'll never forget this. Through our work together, it was in our second year, he told me the story about a girlfriend he had in high school. He grew up, my client grew up really poor, with a brother, it was like a drug addict, in a very sort of low income, low SES family, dysfunctional parents, drug addict brother, and then there was him. High school, he had a girlfriend. She was the it girl of the town. Her mother, if I remember correctly, the mother drove a white Jaguar.

1:00:06She was on the tennis team, country club. So imagine a scenario where lower SES class gets to date the it girl. That validates you as a person, right? Because nothing else in your life is validating you. Then the time comes, it's almost like the archetypal movie, The Notebook, and she breaks up with him. And of course, he's like, but why? And the answer is the story we've seen in millions. And it's just like, you know, at the end of the day, it's like, mom and dad are never going to let this happen. You don't fit. Like, we don't belong together.

1:00:35Shane Parrish:It broke his heart. We come from different worlds. Come from different worlds. You can imagine the kind of pain, because that validates what he always thought about himself. Like, I'm a loser. I'm never going to get out of this mess. So what do you do at that point? Essentially, what he told himself is, no one's ever going to hurt me again because I'm too poor. Yeah. And he went to Wall Street, and he worked 20 hours a day, and he was relentless. And even people who worked with him was like, that guy's animal, relentless. And I start working with him because he knew something was broken. And it was his identity, by the way.

1:01:07So what happened was, going back to Freud's observation, we spend our adult lives undoing the debris of our childhood. He had never solved for that, even after the hundreds of millions of dollars. And we finally traced back that story. It was catharsis. And I remember having to say to him, I said, hey, you don't get a do-over. She's never coming back. And oh, by the way, look at your life.

1:01:27Shane Parrish:Yeah. And from that day forward, I have a text on my phone he had sent to me a couple years ago. He's like, his family was intact. His wife loved him again because he stopped trying to solve for the pain of an 18-year-old self. But most people never do the work to do that. Most people never do the work to go into their psychological cellars and try to understand the formative experience that put them on their path. And what happens is if you don't do that, you spend the rest of your life compensating for childhood insecurity. You make yourself miserable. You make everyone else miserable and you never become the fullest version of yourself.

1:02:07So what I would ask everyone to do at a certain point in their life is, you know, to what degree do you spend your life undoing the degree of childhood? As you look at kids, and this is, by the way, there's a whole nother level of dysfunction, and that's the billionaire class in those kids, which I've also met a lot of them, sort of the trust fund kids, the heirs and heiresses who've never had to earn money. You want to talk about an absolute disaster set up for life, it's because they never learned self-reliance. It imposes an identity, so they never actually become themselves. They have this, what's called identity foreclosures.

1:02:44Like, this is who you are. You're a Thurston. And all of a sudden they have crises later in life when they finally wake up, like, I never chose this life. So the poverty path or the wealth path lead to the same kind of dysfunction because there's no self-discovery in the identity. The best identity path is you do your own work, you try on different faces, and then you make a choice to who you want to become. But the convergence of those two observations, number one, we spend our adult lives undoing the debris of childhood. And that debris can come in the form of extreme wealth. It could come in the form of extreme poverty.

1:03:20It could come in the form of trauma. It could come in the form of living in a country club and becoming fragile and everywhere in between. And then the secondary thing is when you finally come to that awakening in that moment, you say, well, who am I? And who do I want to be? that opens everything up. And that defines most of humanity almost in every domain.

1:03:45Shane Parrish:That's a beautiful way to end this. We always end with the same question, though, which is, what is success for you? Success for me is, I think, a little bit different because I was successful pretty young in life. I had a real period of time. I graduated from Emory University, first in my class or top of my class. I was a young professor at Rollins College, the youngest professor at the time. I was one of the youngest to ever get tenure. I had a bestselling book. I was being celebrated by the sports world, Sports Illustrated. I had two jet skis. I had a house and an apartment. Materially, in the veneers of my life, I had one life, right?

1:04:26And I went to, I had my friends from undergrad, from the University of Florida. We had all gone to an Irish pub and just catching up with each other in life. One of my friend's girlfriends, who's now his wife, and we're all still really, really close, she's like, you're killing it. I want you. And she's like, we're so proud of you. She goes, you must be so happy. And Shane, it was like one of those moments in the movie where you hear the record scratch. Oh my God, I'm not that happy. I'm not. I have all of this stuff and I have all the superlatives. my life doesn't feel the way that people the way that it looks and even even you know the articles people writing about me young you know you know all these relationships flying and jets it looked great i wasn't happy so what i did is i i went to the dean at rollins college i said i need to take a sabbatical which i had earned at the time and so i went out to austin texas and i got a 1-1 unfurnished and i and i really needed to solve for this case and what came out of that period of moratorium and self-exploration.

1:05:26What I did is I went to a bookstore and I started buying books. You know who went through this was actually Michael Crichton, the great author and the great movie creator, Michael Crichton. He wrote a great book called Travels, which he articulated his own life journey. How did he become Michael Crichton? So he went through what I went through. It's like, you have all this material success, but you're not happy. So I went to a bookstore in Austin, Texas. I spent, I think at the time, it was like four or$500 on books, but I made it a point to buy books in everything outside of my area of expertise.

1:05:53I just had books. Just anything. And I loaded the apartment up with books. And I got privileges at the University of Texas because I was an academic that gave me a little office. And I spent four months in Austin, Texas, back when Austin was weird, right? The catchphrase of Austin, Texas in the 90s was keep Austin weird. It's where all the artists and creatives and poets and musicians went to have a little bit of a hippie journey. And I wanted to immerse myself in that culture. I was hanging out with a bunch of comedians. One of my best friends were at the time. They were stand-up comics. and what came out of that was my self-understanding that there are essentially four things that make me happy number one is working out i know i don't look like it but i work out every day i just love the process of working out in fitness number two is books working out doesn't cost money you know what else doesn't cost money if you have a library card or books yeah uh number three is having really good conversations with smart people.

1:06:51This. Like, I could do this all day, every day. Yeah. Right? That makes me happy. And then the fourth one's a little bit indulgent. It's, I love hitting golf balls. But like, not playing on it. Like, it's therapeutic for me. Getting lost, just hitting a ball at the repetition, almost like, you know, at the end of hitting balls for an hour. It's cathartic and therapeutic and it clears my brain. Those are the books, conversations, working out, and golf balls cost no money. So what I learned is, unfortunately for me, more money doesn't lead to more happiness. A certain level, like I want to be comfortable.

1:07:28And by the way, I love abundance for people who love money. So I want everyone to make as much money as I can, if that's important to you. What's important to me is if I have those four things, if hot water comes out of the shower when I turn it out in the morning for me a hotel is you know it's a bed it's four walls and it's like I don't need more incrementally more stuff doesn't lead to more happiness for me so happiness for me is essentially those things and then I added a fifth it's raising raising kids who are resilient who are not fragile who want to be global citizens who are lifelong learners and who are going to have the full expression of their talents in life and do what I hope to do, which is on some level, be a light in the world or the darkness, elevate others.

1:08:17And I know it sounds corny and cheesy, but on some level, make the world a little bit better place, ease others suffering because you can, and make the world a better place. And that's my definition.

1:08:30Shane Parrish:That's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate the time, man. This was awesome.