Overcoming Distractions: The Key to Personal Success

here we are again hard things are hard that's why they're hard another episode the biggest risk to your future

isn't your competition it's the distractions you insist on keeping in your life rather than doing the things

you know you should be doing but aren't people delay doing things they don't like for longer than it takes to do

them there have been so many times in my life where I I knew I needed to do something and then I filled all this

extra time not doing that thing and then the moment I did it I was like wow that took way less time than I thought it was

going to take and not only that it took way less time than it took me to delay to actually get to this point and if I

had only started with just doing what I was supposed to do I could have done four or five other things that I was

also supposed to do by this exact same point and so thinking about it from that perspective I've tried to elate as much

time between I think I should do this thing and beginning doing it and I think you get this positive reinforcement

cycle that occurs every time you start I call it pulling the thread it's like I just need to start pulling the thread

and then all of a sudden what feels really unknown becomes very tangible and you're like oh I understand the six

problems I have to solve to do this big thing but now I know the problems and then it feels like you can you can wrap

your arms around it and then you can start taking it one bite at a time the same thing works in Reverse as well that

when you put something off it makes putting it off more Manana Manana Manana I used to define Power by the

distance between thoughts and reality um meaning if you think about somebody

who's omnipotent so if God or the god figure would be omnipotent as he thinks things are so there's zero space between

thoughts and reality and so if we want to be more Godlike in our lives the distance that we can shrink between

wanting to do something or thinking something should be done and it being done is a direct indication of our

personal power in our lives and so that has helped me basically think don't be a powerless

[ __ ] like just shrink the shrink the Gap and I think that's why a lot of my my little like personal hacks of waking

up and then trying to shrink the time between when I wake up and when I start working and shrinking the time between

one task and the next task like you don't need to take 30 minutes of getting ready to start working like you can just

start working because as soon as you get into it you start pulling the thread and you're like oh here it is and all of the

time that I was getting ready to work I was just using up my best brain power time on things that truly don't move the

needle at all yeah I came to call that the productivity rain dance that you sort of do this weird sacred ritual

beforehand and we've spoken about this before but it's you know there are certain things that you can do that will

make uh success or productivity or focus more likely and better that doesn't mean that you should disregard them that over

Reliance on them makes very fragile um unrobust way to get into working I would delineate the difference between

preparation and routine and so if I'm preparing for a presentation for example I might assemble my notes I might read

some stuff about the audience ahead of time I might read about whoever's you know doing the the event and learn more

about that I see that as preparation for the thing which I still see as work and I think some people I made a post about

preparation is like everything I put a lot into preparation they're like oh see you have a morning routine I was like no

no no I don't need to to you know stand on one foot and do 17 cold plunges and write six affirmations because none of

those things are directly related to the work that I'm going to do and so for me if it's basically preparation is just a

stage of the work and so if I need to prepare to work then that's fine as long as it's related to the work that I'm

going to be doing well we spoke about this yesterday the difference between focusing on inputs and focusing on

outcomes if you optimize for outcomes the inputs are always optimized but if you optimize for inputs you go what did

I actually get done at the end of the day so the person that does do the productivity reain dance and it takes

ages and everyone's done this everyone's got a blank piece of paper in front of them and they end up washing dishes that

they never use you know the the weirdest tasks become alluring because of that focusing on outcomes I so we when we

brought this up it was perfect cuz I had a whole thing that I was wanted to talk to about this so I'm a b big proponent

of something I call the rule of 100 and I'm not the one who invented this but it's basically 100 primary actions so I

talk about this within the context of advertising so you make a 100 minutes of content you do 100 Outreach if you're

doing outbound you do you spend $100 a day on ads you or and if you've already spent the money on ads then you're doing

a$1 100 minutes a day of writing ad copy looking at other people's ads looking for Hooks and then trying to create more

advertisements for your business and the rule of 100 for most people takes about 4 hours a day is and the thing is is

that that's pure inputs not output but I've already taken the time to Define what those inputs are that create the

outputs but later on in the book $100 million leads um I talk about the rule of 100 on steroids which is something

that I learned from a guy who owned 13 or 14 really successful gyms and he called it open to goal and he said yeah

yeah yeah he said my managers work open to goal and I was like what does that mean it's like so they work open until

they hit their goal and so sometimes that means they hit their goal by noon and they can cut out or that means that

they have to go from 5:00 a.m. until midnight that night because that's how long it took them to hit the goal and so

I've seen this across a lot of high Achievers across domains so like I'll keep shooting free shots until I hit a

100 free free shots I will uh run until this happens I will practice my presentation until I do zero mess ups

right or whatever that that output is that you want for quality or quantity and

I think that you have to first figure out what the input is that most closely correlates or tracks with the output you

want and then you jam as much as you possibly can into inputs because if I said hey go get me 10 customers somebody

yeah exactly you freeze because it's like what do I do and so then normally people start they skew like Behavior

skew so it's all over the place it's scattered it's shotguns sprays and then they eventually figure out one thing

that works and then it's like once you hit that then you just Jam that button as hard as you possibly can and I think

that I've been disproportionately successful in different domains of My Life by ruthlessly focusing on one input

I mean even when I was a kid when I play video games it's like if you find a a spawn point for zombies right before the

end of the level I would just sit there for like eight hours and just wait for the troll to come up and just slice them

again and get my my little diamonds and put it in and I would just do that for hours because I was like oh I got to

level up my Avatar um but I think I play the game of business the exact same way Andy Groves says there are so many

people working so hard and achieving so little and that's the lack of correlation between inputs and outcomes

yeah I think the vast majority of business own I'm obviously I come from the business perspective the last vast

majority of business owners um work a fair amount they just work on the wrong stuff and they do it the wrong way and

so they get so little for their effort that they wonder when they're at home empty-handed in bed why isn't this

working when I am working but if you define work at least the way I do which is um output so I Define work by output

and in order to get output it's volume times leverage so how many times you do the thing times how much you get for

each time you do it and so that is the do you work smart or do you work hard it's you do both you do as many reps as

you possibly can and you are you do it with the most leverage possible so if I make 100 phone calls The Leverage that I

can have there would be how skilled I am so if I make 100 calls I might get 10 times more and so I worked more I had

more output than somebody who has less skill but the only way you get skilled is by doing more inputs by working more

and so it's this virtuous cycle of doing more and getting better and then you get more for what you do yeah magic you're

looking for is in the work you're avoiding all the time every single time that there is we're not making progress

in this way what is the highest pain task that's in front of me that I've put off the most it's always that one it

always is you know after you spend enough time thinking about work and deconstructing the way that you piece

your day and your life together you sometimes believe that the answer is is still out there and what you actually

realize is that you've already learned it and it's like it's that quote or that Insight or that book it's one of the

first books you read because all of the big insights from productivity and personal development are the lowest

hanging fruit they're the ones that are repeated across the most books because they're the most reliable scalable and

robust it's like I don't need to be looking out there for most of the new insights they're just [ __ ] that I

already learned yeah we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught it's one of my

favorites bad things don't come in threes bad things happen people don't know how to cope and they allow one bad

thing to snowball into more bad stuff sucks the only thing worse is letting one bad thing ruin many good things I'm

glad you found that one um that was one on that list of things that uh you know quotes I had gone more viral um the

amount of I think it happens more when you're younger but you know girlfriend breaks up with you okay then you go into

work and you sulk because you're distracted and then you don't do the same level of effort and you're not

enthusiastic and then all of a sudden your work suffers and you get you get put on a pip or you get fired and then

now you're fired and you don't have a girlfriend and then you start gaining weight and you stop going to the gym and

all of a sudden you're like man bad things happen in threes it's like no bad things happen all the time and they only

become interrelated if you let it affect your behavior and so I think the equal opposite of that is thinking okay this

bad thing occurred what can I do to decrease the likelihood something else bad occurs in the meantime and then

boiling everything down to activities or the actions that I have to take and I think about that actually a lot which is

how like if you think about from the power perspective of okay something bad happens how much will affect my behavior

well the person who is indestructible would have something terrible happen and then nothing thing with change and I I

love that or they get better exactly yeah that's anti fragility right yeah the um the Sword of Gryffindor it only

drinks in that which makes it stronger ah [ __ ] Harry Potter reference weren't expecting that um yeah the

people don't know how to cope thing especially with bad stuff is um it does explain why you end up with this weird

spiral tiny little Avalanche Pebble at the top and then this huge sort of overe exaggerated reaction

Downstream yeah people don't know how to manage their emotions I think the the more at least

for me the more I've tried to create space between how I feel and what I do the more consistent my outcomes have

been what do you mean so if I need to create content and I'm not feeling it or I'm feeling tired

or things like that the more times I give into that excuse or that feeling then the more superstitious I become

about doing it in the future whereas a lot of times if I can just start when I am tired or when something is painful

and then still execute about the same as before I look at game tape or I look at video or look at the content from those

sessions for example and I see that I remember feeling terrible during the session but can't really see anything

and I think the more times you get that Loop going the more you can separate how you feel and what is required and the

more times you do what is required to get what you want the more times you get what you want I spoke to huberman last

year I think it's called the anterior mid singular cortex it's an area of the bre if I've got that right [ __ ] yes

bro the best advert for neonic ever um uh basically there is an area of the brain that tracks when you do something

that you don't want to do and you strengthen the connections in it by doing things that you don't want to do

especially when you really don't want to do them so you're hypertrophying it's this exact sort of intuition that you've

got that some people would call it resilience or willpower or whatever but there's a this is uh

neurologically represented in the brain these uh connections get stronger so I think it's so funny um gim Bros will

need a gym analogy in order to be able to believe that their brain changes but it's it's really useful to think hey

you're hypertrophying this area of your brain I snapped in Achilles I had to do a very particular series of rehab

movements in order to grow it back this is just the same yeah agreed successful people this is kind of

similar to what you were talking about bad things don't come in threes successful people see opportunity in

every failure normal people see failure in every opportunity both are right only one gets

Rich yeah so I was so this has been something I've been thinking about a lot which is basically

the shittiness of stuff um which is when you're growing in a business it's very painful when you're stagnating in a

business in your plateau and you don't know what to do it's very painful when you're declining and you also don't know

what to do it's very painful and so that means that all conditions of reality are painful and so if pain is a prerequisite

for reality then it means it's just a signal that we are alive and so in thinking about

that rather than pain is a problem it is a signal that I'm breathing and then becomes irrelevant how do you

ensure that you're not suffering unnecessarily you know pain can be a useful signal it can tell you to move

away from certain things that are suboptimal yeah I am I probably have relatively contrarian views on this um

but just even the judgment on pain I relatively reject just

like pain is good pain is bad I mean in the in the gym to give a gym gym example they found that the pain that you

experience when you're going to work out and there's a difference between like massive joint like oh I just snapped a

muscle and like just feeling bad but feeling bad has zero correlation to your performance in the gym and so I remember

reading that for the Olympic you know weight team they talked about that and I was like oh well if it has no

correlation then it's almost irrelevant and I can just keep living my life and so I think the ultimate version of the

resilience that you referencing earlier is rather than you know in the beginning you're like I feel bad and then you

think that that should weigh on the decision of whether you do the thing that you're supposed to do and then you

start realizing that you can do the thing even though you don't feel good about it and you start hypertrophying it

but I think the ultimate version of the hypertrophy when the muscle becomes a tendon or it just becomes fused is when

you don't even consider how you feel it's just not a thought you just keep you just do

it that's that movement from sort of type two to type one thinking you know from it being very conscious very

effortful to it's just a reaction I get up and I start to write right and um you don't use up any war power no because

it's just what you do right there's uh Rory southernland that we were talking about yesterday um in his he's the only

guy that I've ever heard swear in a TED Talk and um it he gave me this idea which

she's kind of related things are not what they are things are what we think they are for instance you're doing a

hard workout which gives you a signature feeling you're laid on the floor panting heart rate at 180 sweating from

everywhere with the taste of metal in your mouth this is oddly enjoyable but if this exact same sensation was to

spontaneously occur in your car while sat in traffic you'd call an ambulance for fear that you're having a heart

attack framing is everything Rory Sutherland says sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare

out of the window the problem is when you're not smoking and staring out of the window you're an antisocial

friendless idiot if you stand and stare out of the window with a cigarette you're a [ __ ] philosopher the power

of reframing things cannot be overstated it's significantly easier to find a way to reframe your experiences as enjoyable

while you improve them rather than waiting for them to be done before you give yourself license to be happy

so a friend of mine she's a a very very successful therapist uh and she always asks her patients when they come to her

and say some terrible thing happened she said what would it take for this to be amazing and so for example lady comes

says we're getting a divorce and she says so what would it take for this to be amazing and so it just completely

shifts the reality of like okay how could this be an amazing thing that could happen to me and this is relevant

for me shifting gears because I we just had a big tryy out inside of our company for a presentation slot that we have an

event so we had a bunch of the leaders in the company like the [ __ ] Hunger Games yeah we put a cash price fight to

the death pitch folks we did no we put a big cash prize out there oh oh yeah I totally did that I I told I was like

I'll have no no expression just in a toga yeah exactly and um and I could tell that some of them were nervous and

I thought about this because you know I speak a fair amount and I don't get a lot of nerves in general and I have a

whole bunch of thoughts on that but um the most basic one is that if you're still feeling anxiety which many of them

were like hey I'm so nervous or hey I have a lot of anxiety before going up I thought about it and champions just

interpret anxiety as excitement and if you're excited to go up then you're like I'm amped versus I'm stressed but it

feels the same the way you frame it totally changes how you feel when you're stepping on stage um but my two sense of

if you are feeling lots of anxiety it means you need to practice more that just my two cents and that comes for

everything whether it's to have a meeting or give a presentation or write an email or do a book like if you feel

nervous before you release it then you probably didn't work on it enough and I think the reality is that most people to

get not anxious about whatever they're doing you have to do it so many times that by the last time you're doing it

you're bored of it like you don't even want to see the thing again when you're sick of it is the point where you'll

have no adrenal response to the stimulus because you've seen it so many times you could do it in your sleep because you

hate it at this point and then when you get up you're like oh my god let's just do this because I'm I can breathe this

over with yeah what's the gap between your expectation of what is going to happen yeah and the um requirement that

you need to perform right this is where I need to be and this is how I think I'm going to perform yeah as opposed to the

other way so I saw this firsthand when I did the live tour last year so I did I think 17 shows in 28 days three

continents right like proper tour like real proper proper tour thing and um you know I did four work in progress shows

and then that run all around UK Island Dubai Canada US Canada again us again and I could see because it was around

about every other day for a month and each time that I stepped out on stage every single time that even though I'd

done the prep I'd spent all of this time I'd done the i' tried to you know I'm not nervous I'm excited I'm not nervous

I'm excited um still that degraded over time until at the end of it and this is why comedians I think when they end up

doing really big tours one of my friends did a 300 day tour of the same show he said I no longer felt like a comedian I

was a performer oh yeah because he's not stepping out on stage he is so dialed and routinized that he's bored

while he does it and uh yeah that's how you look at oh my God Joe Rogan just did Netflix live to [ __ ] God knows how

many millions of people metropolitan area of San Antonio's internet probably went down for him to be able to get that

con ction moving and uh how could he do that all of these people watching and all the rest of it that set that Joe did

I have seen at the Vulcan Gas Company downtown in Austin and I've seen it at the mother ship in different iterations

for coming up on three years now and his last special was six years ago that guy has said those sentences and waited

those times and got those laughs and understood the inflections and the the the the little pauses he needs to

do maybe 300 times s on that one set there's no more degrees of fre the only thing that could go wrong is a real

Quirk mistake that's kind of to be honest out of your control if you misspeak a word when you're paying

attention that's not your fault uh so yeah that's how people have unbelievable performance ability uh and it's just a

case of stepping there sort of one degree of competence at a time and if we think of confidence as the percentage

likelihood what we think is going to happen will happen as a predictive metric then in order to be more

confident we want to have more proof that what we think will happen will happen and so the easiest way to do that

is to do it a lot of times and so it would be reasonable to say that you're confident that it will go the way you

want because it has gone the way you've wanted so many times in a row before I've just realized I've never thought of

this before the fact that the word confidence is in how we describe it from a psychological perspective and

confidence is in the interval level that you have numerically at the same [ __ ] word that's so funny

operationalizing what how do you become confident do it enough times that you feel like it is unlikely that what you

think should happen won't happen my model of the world is accurate I'm confident when I go up to girls well you

start going to girls and you start tanking and then one out of 10 times it goes well and then you do it another 10

times and two out of 10 times goes well and then four out of 10 times and then eight out of 10 times and all of a

sudden you're confident because you have a high degree of predictive power when you say it will go this way that's such

a good reframing of confidence and the best part is you get to use the same word and you can boil it down to inputs

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checkout that's EIG ghts sleep.com slod wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout this is my favorite one I think

from you over the last few months you once wanted the life you have and if you don't like the life you have you

probably probably won't like the one you want but don't have either yeah this one I think about all

the time because I think about the life that I have now and I know that I wanted this life

but I obviously do a lot of thinking about this type of stuff um but the equal opposite of that is that when I

was poor I was pretty happy I was okay with being poor and now that I am rich I'll put quotes on that degrees

um it's it's about the same and so then it just goes down to well then the richness had nothing to do with the

level of contentedness which means that my wants in past and present and future all go into the bucket of irrelevant in

terms of their ability to affect my perception of reality in the present and so and thinking about that it makes my

wants have less stake today and so a lot of anxiety that I think a lot of people have around things that haven't happened

yet either good or bad like I hope this speech goes well or I hope I get this job promotion but the reality is that

once you get the job promotion you wanted it you resettle and the negative version of this is and you've probably

seen this stuff but when handicap people get handicapped so they have a terrible accident they get paralyzed or they lose

a leg or whatever there's a dip in their subjective well-being but after 3 to six months it typically restabilize which

means that if I didn't get paralyzed or even if I did get paralyzed it'd be just about as content as I am right now it's

like whatever is about to happen's probably not as bad as that and so that's the worst case scenario which is

nothing so okay good things aren't as good as you think they are bad things aren't as bad as you think they are yeah

life is life well it's the it's the you've already achieved goals that you said would make you happy again it's the

other side of this and you know the fact that we take for granted things that only in recent

memory we would have beg beged to have had the opportunity to have been able to have and now we're flippant about them

the new car that you thought about and you researched for 18 months and then you finally got it and you just curbed

the tires yesterday and you go all right whatever and you're like you real you spent all of this time thinking about

the house that you're going to move into the marriage that you were going to do the holiday you were going to take I

told you about this last time Morgan howel steps out onto after this huge big buildup with his kids and his wife steps

out onto the balcony of this holiday that he'd taken and his first thought was wow it would be so good if we could

come back here next year that was like during the process of experiencing the thing he was thinking about the next

thing and he caught himself and thought okay this means that success isn't a goal a journey or a destination when you

get it wrong it's a horizon every single step that you take towards it it runs one step further away

M so during my year off off that I took after during the year of the sale when I couldn't you couldn't I couldn't really

work on the business because you don't want to change anything major when you're going through a sale um but I

didn't know why if I was going to be owning this business soon so I basically just had to do nothing because I also

had to demonstrate that the team could do it without me so that's still a sellable asset so I basically just sat

there for a year that's when a lot of my like thoughts kind of caught up from you know when I had started years earlier

and that was when I kind of refined my kind of theory of living for me which was that hard work is the goal and so

it's not like work hard so that X because as soon as you have a so that then the x is the thing but if the goal

is to work as hard as you possibly can then the only real output we have is who we become along the way and so in

reframing that then it's something that I can win or measure myself against every day in real time throughout the

day which is how hard am I working because that is the goal and then even I say this just for audio but like

everything else takes care of itself still puts the everything else as the goal still it's just being vager but if

you just say like the only point is working hard because I know that whatever I'm going to get is stuff that

I will become accustomed to and the I guess opposite of the hedonic treadmill is like your the resilience

piece is that my ability to work hard itself is growable and so I just need to keep my RP my rate of perceived exertion

at 8 or 9 or 10 because I know that when I look back on my life the days that I loved the most were days when I had

nothing left in the tank and there's this thing that Jesse itler has this and I love it I hate him for having it so

[ __ ] good um but he has he taught us who kids which is he has them they have a little zero means that there's nothing

left in the tank and when they finish a race or they do whatever it's like did you leave did you leave anything in the

tank and I thought about that and the best days of my life were once when I had nothing left in the tank and so then

the goal becomes to empty the tank not what where I drive but just to drive the car as hard as I possibly can and that

means that in the beginning it's just straightaways I'm just seeing how high I can rev the engine but as it become more

advanced it's like all right well now we've got turns and then it's turns and elevation and then it's turns and

elevation without guard rails because we have risk and so when I think about how hard I want to work the interesting

thing about that is that the only person who can judge you on your success is you because you're the only one who knows

how much left in the tank you really had and the better you get and you can resonate with this you start winning

exteriorly and that's when people are like it felt so empty it's because they didn't actually work as hard as they

could have they just worked hard enough to beat everyone else but that discrepancy between how hard you could

have worked to to work your hardest versus what was required in order to win to me that's the opportunity that shift

ing towards the work being the goal unlocks for you and I work harder now than I did when I was poor and I think

it's because I've learned to enjoy it how do you ensure that the hard work Focus

doesn't detach you from outcomes and inputs this seems like there's a little bit of a tension with what we started

talking about in the beginning I just to oh toally it's Direction Over speed is the first one but we're now talking

about maximizing for Speed yeah so how do we balance direction and speed so with the question if the alc that we're

trying to have is being present then the outcome actually is irrelevant because it's about how much empty the tank if

we're talking about the signs of achievement then the outcome the outcome does matter obviously um and so

balancing both of those things which is that if I want to accomplish all my goals then I need to make sure that my

inputs are tied as closely as humanly possible to the outcome if I want to be satisfied it doesn't matter at all and

so I think it's marrying those two ideas where the perfect world in my opinion would be you work as hard as you

possibly can because you thought ahead of time what is the input that has the closest correlation with the outcome

that I want and then you put your blinders on and you start digging we don't rise to the standards

we have when others are watching we fall to the standards we have when no one is watching the only work that really

matters is the work that no one sees it shows you who you really are rather than who you say you are there's this line

that I heard David goggin say on Rogan and I can't remember who he was saying it to or what he said in response to but

he just said I'm David goggin's [ __ ] and I remember him saying it and I thought to myself

like you want to be able to say that in the mirror to yourself and not laugh at yourself and the only way that I can do

that is know that when no one's watching I work harder than when they're watching and thinking about it like that

has given me this persistent and everpresent scorecard or third party that's like no

one's watching which means now you have to work because otherwise you're full of [ __ ] and so it's this continuous

reinforcing cycle of the me and other me holding the whip behind me to see how much I can take but with each of the

whip that I take learning that I can take it and continue to trudge on and so as long as you keep going you bear

witness to yourself of what you are capable of and I find that incredibly satisfying in the trenches of misery

when you have to go through it you're not full of [ __ ] I'm still here it means that you're not full of [ __ ] what it

comes down to is I think I told you this story about when I was with Sam last year in La so um Sam ens used to make

content on the internet now he's very much an operator rather than a front-facing which is funny to think

about Sam the Creator as opposed to Sam the operator and I asked why he'd stopped making content and he said

because I felt like I had to start living up to in private the things which I was saying in public and he was

beginning to feel discordance between the two you know he was making changes personally but he created a brand

publicly but I think if you can get to the stage where the public version of you is the best version of you and then

private you has to live up to the best version of you and then you get to do this sort of self-reinforcing cycle

that's kind of The Virtuous version of that which I guess is kind of similar to what you're talking about here so I

think what we're teasing at is authenticity and so a lot of people feel like imposters because what they think

what they say and what they do are completely different um but from an operational perspective because that's

how I like to define a lot of words which is what do I have to do to be that right what do I have to do to be

authentic and you can describe someone as authentic by saying how would you behave if there was no possibility of

punishment and so if you could not be punished at all that behavior is who you are authentically and so in my opinion

our degrees of freedom are predicated on how much to what extent we act as though we could not be punished and so if what

we want to do and what we do have no possibility of punishment that is what we are when we are our true

selves Jimmy car talks about um nobody throws a Coke can out of the window with kids in the back right that means you're

a [ __ ] monster yeah it's what you do when there's no one around your uh old one about authenticity people are

attracted to authenticity but it's hard to Define for me here's my best attempt true alignment of what you think what

you say and what you do the hardest part is realizing that our thoughts are [ __ ] and that we have to fix them

instead of Faking the next two and it's exactly that and I think that I actually think Ground Zero of that is living out

your [ __ ] thoughts and then slowly try like I think it's it's it's I think the hardest jump is actually doing and

saying what you think when someone's like hey what do you think about this and you're like I wasn't paying

attention at all it's like oh wow okay and so then you basically become because I think if personal truth of not lying

to if you start by not lying to yourself and then you start saying those things then you start not lying to other people

and I think if you can decrease the the friction between what you really think and what you say it starts to create

some virtuous cycle outside of you that starts to orient your behavior so that you actually start doing what you really

think and I have integrity but in the TR truest sense as one of my personal kind of goals um but it's it's jarring to

people when you're just honest and like really honest like hey what do you do you want to go to this uh to to Sarah's

birthday party no and they're like uh what do you mean you busy like no I'm not busy but I

don't want to go people have a hard time just saying no to things and I would encourage you if you're listening to

this like try saying no to try actually telling the truth when you don't want to do something because we say we have so

many social niceties that we say oh I'm really busy or it's a really bad time right now or whatever it's um I had

somebody the other day I was with a friend and he like I didn't notice that I did this so sometimes it's nice to

have somebody from the outside and so somebody came up to me we were looking at a real estate property and someone

knew I was going to be there and so that guy showed up unannounced or whatever and he was like Hey man can we do a

podcast and I was like um I'm just in town GNA hang out with Lila for the next few days like not really trying to do

that and he asked again and he was like hey um he like 20 minutes let's like we can just we can just rock one out and I

was like well let me show you my calendar and I pulled up my calendar and it was all empty and I said see it's

there's nothing on there and I was like and I I just want to keep it that way and I didn't think anything of it

but apparently he left and then my friend just start just starts crying laughing just thinking how hilarious

he's like I can't believe you said that you that was so boss blah and I was like what is he talking about he's like you

just showed him your calendar that you had nothing and you were still like you're still not going to get any of my

time and I didn't perceive any of this extra narrative that he added to it but I think just being able to say no to

stuff when people ask you for it because people ask you for stuff all the time and it's these little these little nibs

these little tiny things hey can you do this or hey can we show up to this thing or hey you're supposed to or hey your

aunt did that one thing for you so therefore you owe her um and saying like I

don't subject myself to those rules and I had a a New Year's resolution which I do believe in in making resolutions like

why not um if you stick with them and so one of my more recent ones was um there are no such thing as social obligations

only consequences so you have no social obligations you have social consequences

but you don't have social obligations and so you have to go I don't have to go if

I don't go they what will happen as a result it decreases the likelihood they will invite me again which is great

because then I won't have to say no again so this actually saves me time in the future future and so a lot of people

don't play out the like what happens if it's like oh more of the thing that I would prefer which is not getting

invited to these stupid weddings or not getting invited to these you know christs or whatever they're called you

know bris whatever I don't bris whatever the thing is you you probably know what the word I'm trying to say what you're

talking yeah well kids getting circumcised or uh I think you go watch it like a viewing Gallery common thing

yeah is it yeah I think whatever doesn't matter all right point being if you say no and are honest about

why you said no people will be Jarred but then you get this muscle when we're talking about that muscle of being

authentic which is just saying what you really think and I think that when you do that you unlock a certain level of

confidence in yourself where you're like oh I didn't die oh actually what I would prefer to have happened happened as a

result of that oh you know what it's Friday night and I am going to get a good night's sleep because I do have a

clear day tomorrow and I'm going to work my face off and I didn't have to go to Sarah's thing and to me that's like like

over time I think I just do more and more and more of that and it feels better and better and better it's funny

that your friends saw that as a flex that that it was and I I can see why and I think I would oh my god dude like you

totally owned him with that thing like you showed off the fact that you've got nothing but really if we're all being

honest if we didn't want to do it that is the truth the only reason that it feels like a flex is that it's such a

left turn from the social mores that people typically go through I said this to you yesterday Dan bills Aran

superpower is his frictionless from what he wants to his mouth say what you want about Dan but he's lived very

unapologetically and that's what are the things that you can get Downstream from that I mean maybe you don't like his

values or his principles maybe you think that he's a bad guy or maybe think he's worth more or less money than he

actually is all of these things but what you can't say is that you don't trust the things that he does are not the

things that he wants to do and that commands a level of respect that absolutely and it should command and a

level of respect I actually think that when you live that way people trust you more because their ability to predict

your behavior 100% if I can't trust your no how can I trust your yes right and I think when people see you say no and

then later say yes your Yes means a lot more of course because it's the same thing Peterson talks about that a rabbit

can't be good it just has no choice to be otherwise you you can't The Vicious actually I think that some rabbits are a

bit like the [ __ ] so you probably can find some that are nasty you might have heard me say that I took my testosterone

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description below or heading to live.com slod wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's Li e m n

us.com wisdom a modern wisdom a checkout if you want revenge for the bad things that have happened in your life start

with the version of you that hasn't lived up to your potential so I think a lot of us have

the the battle of the other self that we're the the Lesser version of our self that we're trying to kill every single

day and so a lot of times we have this desire to point the blame finger exter Al but wherever you point the finger of

blame power follows and so whoever I blame for the life I have is the person who I give all the power over my

existence over my circumstances and so it hurts but if you turn the finger inwards and you start saying huh I don't

like my life the person that I need to punish or get back at is the real person who got me here which is me and so you

may be right that other people did certain things or you got dealt a bad hand it also doesn't

matter because the only thing that you can't control is obviously the actions that you take and the only person who's

in control of that is you and so the revenge porn is thinking about what the version of

you who got you here did and then acting in the exact opposite of that as as many times as you possibly can and the pain

that you feel by rejecting the thing that you used to do that got you into this bad circumstance that's the real

revenge it's kind of like uh the stoic Fork the dichotomy of control but it's just taking all of that and just lumping

it all on you yeah it's it's you know I mean this is kind of the the push back against victimhood culture that

externalizing the Locust of control it is the fault of the politics or the e om or it's the state of the dollar or it's

the patriarchy or it's whatever he goes hey look you will get 100x a THX your

returns placing your efforts to try and change those things on you as opposed to on the world like you I think basically

the best way to move through the world is to see your entire surroundings as immutable and you as mutable you're the

only mutable thing in the entire world you're the only anything that can change everybody else people opinions places

economy politicians policies all of that none of that's going to change you you can change that's it and then maybe some

of the other stuff does and that would be great it's a really interesting concept so do we accept the world and

change ourselves or do we change the world and accept

ourselves and so it's a really interesting dichotomy when you ask the question because on because both of

those sound right you're like I should accept myself and change the world but on the other hand you're like wait no I

should accept the world and change myself and so yeah because they're both piy Pym PA right and so um I think all

of it come Downs comes down to when you change yourself you will change the world because you will change

how you see it I think as well when it comes to accepting yourself do you want to accept

you do you want to accept a version of you that you shouldn't accept one that you're not proud of one that doesn't

live up to their word one whose thoughts actions and uh intentions aren't aligned fly you go well I mean I I can but I

don't particularly feel good about that that feels like the higher version of me the potential version of me that I want

to live up to is I'm sort of derating them that it's this isn't really the tri to them that it should be and yeah

that's why the self-acceptance movement that's why people feel icky about it people feel icky about the

self-acceptance movement because they know that people are accepting a version of themselves which is falling short

from what it could be I would say that they're not accepting themselves in saying that they accept themselves so if

I say is there a version of yourself that's better than you are right now and most people hopefully would say yes it's

like great accept that person and I think that to me when we talk about the authenticity accepting

yourself is accepting the ideal that we can live up to and that's that is what we accept not the shitty version of that

that we are today and I think that marries both sides of the argument Jimmy car broke my brain with

this one everyone is jealous of what you've got no one is jealous of how you got it I love that quote my God people

see the trophies but not the training ground everybody wants the view but no one wants the climb I love

it but the people who win love the climb and the real mountain has no

peak and so the view is always present the whole way up the

climb but it seems to me to push back there it seems to me like a lot of the time your head down the pleasure comes

from the climb not the view for you uh again maybe sort of uh non- typically constructed from a psychological

perspective that was nice that was diplomatic um uh so what would you say and this is something that I think you

know with these episodes that we do I often want to try and get you to push a little bit more to adapt your ideas and

your insights for people who may do have a little bit more of that emotionality that comes through to try

and sort of soften this up like I understand that people need more degrees of freedom than me typically I

understand that people probably can't get themselves to the level of work that I can so do you ever sort of play with

that idea of okay what does a little bit of view taking in look like whilst we're climbing I think a lot of the discontent

comes from the judgment people have about what they should or should not do along the way and so they take my

description as prescription for what they should do so I describe my life and then people think I'm prescribing what

they should do and it couldn't be further from the truth if you want to take a break at every two steps and take

in the view do it I mean in four generations no one will remember your name and so enjoy the view if you feel

like it I just happen to enjoy how much I can see that I can do that's what I enjoy and I and I feel like I am

most present when I work and so I'm not going to go into work life balance whatever because we already know where

that conversation goes but people have a harder time accepting that someone can just work all the time

and and truly love it and I Define that by there's nothing else I would rather do at any time time and so for me I feel

like I ex exercise absolute freedom in my life and freedom is reinforcing for all species dogs cows fish humans

freedom is one of the re most positively reinforcing thing that people have that everyone wants Freedom everybody wants

to be able to say f you right but once you say [ __ ] you you have to do something because you can't just stay

stand there and saying [ __ ] you over and over again for hours for the rest of your life you start to do something and

that thing that you choose to do after you do after you say thank you is what you want to do that's an

interesting point so there are um certain things that you have to do to get to the point where you

don't have to do things you don't want to do and then when you're liberated there is a whole new challenge now

because it's a completely blank map where you have to actually Define that that's one of the things you know about

working for yourself there's there's a lot of derogation about 9 to-5 and University education and kind of the

typical track and stuff like bro I you should be very cautious about criticizing people that have more normal

salaried 9 to-5 jobs because I look at most of my friends and they can't not take their work home with them so for

certain psychological makeups who's more free the person that actually gets to shut their work laptop at 5:00 P p.m. in

France they've got this new policy now where you can't uh email staff uh after I think it's maybe 5:00 p.m. or 6 p.m.

at night in certain businesses to try and sort of enforce this work life balance and stuff like that uh so for

certain people you're shaking your head what's you what have you what's your problem I mean my first thought was well

France just took the it's irrelevant economy and just made it less relevant and and secondarily the person

who made that rule is someone who fundamentally doesn't understand human behavior so if they were to pass that

rule for me then what they did is they actually made my life worse this was the thing when Elon took

over Twitter so it's one of my favorite stories over the last couple of years Elon buys Twitter Elon finds out

that 80% of the staff base just drink smoothies and go on hot girl walks all day and he fires them yeah and says this

team it was him and a bunch of Asian dudes uh selfie and he says this is the team that's going to run Twitter now and

he put I think a job posting out maybe on Twitter and he says I want people who want to work harder than they ever have

on the most difficult problems in the world and blah blah blah blah blah and he got tons of [ __ ] for it and they said

this is a regressive policy for industry this is taking people back to sending kids up to chimneys and so on and so

forth and it's just a complete failure of theory of mind that there are people out there for whom that is the job

advert I want to work harder than I ever have on the most difficult problems in the world at an intensity that would

kill most people because that's where I derive pleasure and satisfaction action from that's the best situation that I

could hope for and trying to take your model of well yeah but what about my maternity leave and yeah but what about

you know jeans Fridays and yeah but what about you know hot girl walks all of that is those are things that people

don't want adding those in gets in the way of the thing that they do want I think a lot of the confusion

around the people who are wanting to work harder than they are or don't like that I work hard or that you work hard

think that they they take this statement as a judgment or criticism on how they live their life and it's because on the

other side of that free line you're like okay I'm now free I have a blank slate if I do something or you do something

that they deem painful for them now or something that they don't enjoy they then say you are suffering and that is

bad and both of those things I reject wholeheartedly first you don't know that I'm suffering because you have no idea

what's going on inside of me come and also what does your judgment mean at all to

me there's a Tim Cook internal memo that he sent there's a saying that if you do what you love you will never work a day

in your life at Apple I learned that is a total Croc you will work harder than you ever thought possible but the tools

will feel light in your hands so good chef's kiss chef's kiss Tim

Cook feel like you crushed that one I have a friend who worked for a very highlevel uh recruitment company SE

Suite XX for the biggest companies on the planet I don't know whether it was some internal internet thing or whether

they actually saw these people or they maybe candidates with other companies but he was able to see the breakdown

interviews with some of the best CEOs in the world so he was able to see the summary of Tim Cook and Susanna was juky

the lady uh and apparently the first line so these guys are seeing everybody the best on the planet right and I was

like okay so just explain to me the interpretation difference between the guys that are already AAA and then Tim

Cook and he said the first line of Tim Cook's summary just said Rockstar that was the first thing all it said was

Rockstar and he realized that in a pool of the best Executives on the planet people like Tim and people like Susanna

still are heads and shoulders Above the Rest I just thought that was so cool to like see these people in their nent

stage before they've got the thing that they're going going to really magnify they had all the attributes they didn't

have the proof yet yeah they didn't have the playground they didn't have the petri dish to be able to show just how

much they could multiply it yeah which I think about that a lot when it comes to kind of like potential energy versus

reality for people on their way up and so there's this huge time delay between when we start behaving in a way that a

winner behaves and when we start winning and the problem is that the bigger the mountain you're trying to climb the

bigger the W you're trying to get typically the more delayed it is yeah between when you start behaving like a

winner and when you start being a winner and most people don't get the fast enough feedback loop to know that

they're on the right path when they are taking these first steps in the right direction because they have this really

big goal but they forget that with that really big goal comes the even longer delay that it takes to get there while

still continuing to act with no feedback from society positive reinforcement whatsoever and I think that's like if I

actually had to put a real like what's what's been what has worked so well for me and why the input over the output

Focus has been so powerful is that I can extend the time RIS in basically indefinitely because the goal is me and

then the external goals occur you don't need the positive reinforcement I mean everybody's seen it I need the positive

reinforcement but the the positive reinforcement is coming from me interally I'm just being like just just

because I think it's important the positive external reinforcement that most people are looking for right but if

you if you are the goal then the actions you take every day are reinforcing who you believe yourself to be that's where

the confidence comes from as long as the directionally correct and if you just want to be satisfied then just work your

ass off uh yeah I mean everybody's seen one of those exponential graphs and I I one

of my good friends George bought me uh at Professor um he's great he's [ __ ] fantastic I I

found I'll tell you once Ro [ __ ] he won't let me say it um but he's just got the most insane client uh like one of

the coolest companies on the planet um he bought me for a gift last year it's uh the 1 million subscriber announcement

post that I did uh it's the first ever test footage episode I did in 2017 and in the middle is the play graph

that goes between the two and you look and it is up until a year at the time up until like a year before it's flat

there's nothing there was days I remember looking back there was days when we were doing this show in March

April and May of 2018 where we did zero plays we'd already launched I was releasing an episode a week and there

was days where we did no plays and I released an episode and we did no plays I went back through and looked I don't

think I even told you this this I messaged every single one of the Thousand contacts in my phone that I'd

accumulated from nightlife promo on WhatsApp saying hi I've just launched a podcast would you mind subscribing to me

a thousand different people bunched into 50 person broadcast lists because that was the maximum broadcast list you used

to be able to do and I was the most ground floor door-to-door sales to try and accumulate an audience and it just

keeps happening there's no presuming that you keep on going exponentially it makes every previous version poultry and

uh yeah being able to continue doing something without seeing the results of your work is one of the best competitive

advantages because everybody else is feeling the same discomfort that you are everybody

else is going I don't know if this is going to work and this is hard and why is no one telling me that I'm doing a

good job and [ __ ] another day with no plays that's stupid and then you end up looking at

the top 100 podcasts in the world I think account for 80% of the global plays 100 shows out of

about 4 million account for 80% of the plays which means there's what 399,900

9 [ __ ] that has got the entire rest of it that's 20% for those that's it the leading indic at of a successful

person is the ability to act without anything happening and when you continue down

that path it happens slower than you expect and then faster than you can imagine and I think that's the part that

everyone misses is they expect the faster than they can imagine and they imagine really big and so then their

expectations are really big really fast but they they take the intensity and they don't apply it to a timeline that's

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Manson why I hate being around negative people being an [ __ ] is a weak person's idea of strength complaining is