Neil Pasricha: Simple Rules for Happiness

0:00 One of the models I've been using with my kids a lot these days on cultivating resilience, and I think you might find this interesting, is the philosophy of take more pictures. Is the philosophy of take more pictures? And so Have you ever talked to a wedding photographer? And you say to them

0:17 Holy cow, like I was at that wedding too. How'd you get 50 amazing shots of like me and the bride or the bride and the groom or the bri the groom and the groom, whatever, whatever. And they're like, oh, I I took a thousand Did you hear me clicking like the whole four hours? Click, click, click, click. I took like a thousand, two thousand pictures. Of course I'm gonna have 50 good ones. And it Whenever I've had that sort of apocryphal kind of story happen over and over again, it makes me think of when I was a kid, Shane, and my my dad got me a book of baseball statistics. And as a baseball fan pre-internet, as a kid, we're the same age. Uh

0:52 This book of statistics is like Yeah, you could spend days in this thing. But I started noticing something interesting. Which is this. The guy that had the most strikeouts

1:02 Nolan Ryan. was also the guy that had the most Walks. Yeah, like Okay. Uh the guy that had the most wins.

1:10 Sa young was also the guy that had the most Losses. Say um You hear this story all the time in the news media, which is Tom Brady has the most completions.

1:21 We just played the longest. He just took more pictures. He also has the most incompletions. You know? This guy's got the most remote He's also got the most super ball losses.

1:31 You know, and so the philosophy I think that we've all experienced with the pandemic is we just took another pretty big picture. We just had another major life experience. All of us did. Those that are alive right now, listening to this, have had a major life experience, add that to the camera role of your life. And if you want to increase your resilience. Further.

1:48 Take more pictures. What in your life do you take more pictures in? Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. This podcast is about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so that you can apply their insights to your life. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member only episodes, access before anyone else, hand edited transcripts, and other member only content.

2:27 You can join at fs.blog slash membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Today I'm speaking with Neil Pasha. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and has written numerous bestsellers on happiness, including The Book of Awesome, The Happiness Equation, Two Minute Mornings, and more. He's one of the most popular TED speakers ever, and after listening to a few minutes of this, you'll see why.

2:50 This is the second time I've had Neil on the podcast. The first was episode 72, and it's one of the most popular and downloaded we've ever done. In this wide ranging conversation, we discuss gratitude, why we all feel so burnt out. where confidence comes from. The rituals, routines, and habits you can use to counter overwhelm and anxiety. the recipe for building resilience, and so much more. It's time.

3:14 To listen. And learn. Me through the impact. The UC not only on yourself, but on society.

3:31 From a happiness point of view. Over the last Two and a half years. Almost every indicator is ratcheted up. We're talking anxiety, I'm talking depression, I'm talking loneliness, I'm talking suicide. Start with anxiety, you know, we're now hearing that one in three college students have clinical anxiety. A lot of work is coming out from Gene Twenge at San Diego State University, Jonathan Haite, who I know's been on.

3:53 The Knowledge Project talking about the massive increases in anxiety, especially amongst teens, especially amongst teen girls. So anxiety is ratcheting up. We've been more clinging to our phones over the pandemic. We've been sequestered and you know, we're communicating that way. The Also spiking National Institute of Mat Mental Health says that forty three percent of us are now.

4:15 Say that we have a form of depression that's like almost half of us, Shane, like that's Hi. Um, loneliness, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in the United States has written an HBR cover story talking about how our loneliness rates have doubled. That's not just over the pandemic, that's over decades. But

4:32 very high rates of loneliness. He says that that's the next big epidemic coming and You know When the Surgeon General announces a future epidemic, you know, they're they're they're usually on point, right? It's like obesity and AIDS and Loneliness. And lastly, suicide.

4:47 Uh, the CDC is now saying that suicide rates are around 14 per 100,000. Just to compare, murder rates are around six per 100,000. So we are Ту та три танк сто. than anybody else is to us. The CDC says they have not seen murder. Not murder rates suicide rates this high.

5:05 since World War Two. So how are we doing on happiness? You know, at a high level using some of those indicators, the answer would be Not great. Uh

5:16 Oh. I wanna talk about All of these for a second, they were all trending that way. before The pandemic.

5:25 And that amplified it. Why do you think it amplified it? Daniel Gilbert wrote the kind of one of the foundational books in positive psychology, Stumbling on Happiness, which I'm sure is on this giant bookshelf behind us somewhere. And in it he has a wonderful quote, which is this If I can know everything

5:42 There is to know about you. You're gender, your nationality, your religion. Your health. Almost all of it falls away. In the face of the strength of your relationships with your friends and family. And I think if we wanted to put a little pinpoint on what the pandemic has really done for a lot of us.

5:59 It's just that Yeah. We aren't as connected. And we haven't been able to be as connected with our friends and family, and that has taken a huge Emotional.

6:08 And psychological. Tall on us. Did you find your friendship strengthened with some people? I I know for like me, for instance, I wasn't as connected to as many people, but the people I did connect with, I started spending a lot more time with them. Our relationships deepened and developed.

6:25 Your your bubble. Yeah, your bubble. I guess that was what everybody called it, right? Yeah, if you were lucky enough to have a bubble and if you were lucky enough to be bubbling with You know, y you've got Kids, you've got uh Uh you know, I'll uh

6:39 staff that you work with at Farnum Street, you have places that you are connecting with people. Not everybody has that. And so Uh We turn to our devices, we turn to our screens, and ви.

6:53 What we get there masquerades as deep s deeper social connection than it actually is. So what we are calling friends and what we were calling likes and what we were calling comments. You know our brains are looking for a deeper connection than I think that we can find online. And There's a lot of research to support that.

7:11 The the the classic being how do you feel after spending an hour on social media. Did we screw up like an entire generation of kids? I think some researchers would say yes. Um, you know, Jonathan Haidt had written that cover story in The Atlantic recently on how social media has fracturing the mortar of society. And he puts in it some basic ideas that you think would become law by now, which is Why is the minimum age of social media twelve? You know, why is it not

7:38 Sixteen. Right, why aren't the social media essentially Tools, right? They're they're as baked into our society as water and power, why don't they force breaks? Or interrupt your Endless doom scrolling. So

7:54 Uh I think there's a real argument to be made, and I'm citing some of the stuff from the Coddling of the American mind. Um, that would say, yeah, we gotta really, really take a hard look at what we're doing to ourselves and certainly our children when it comes to social media. And And cell phone access, I think that's a huge problem in the World today. what are the counterbalances to anxiety? And then I sort of want to dive into also resilience. Have we become more or less resilient as

8:21 Um coming through the pandemic and going through this experience. Yeah. So a lot there, anxiety. Resilience.

8:30 And you and I were talking before we started recording about how, you know, both of us Can Feel anxious at times. Um Uh, I believe it's eighteen percent of people will say that they have a form of anxiety. I mentioned in college students it's even higher, one in three.

8:47 I know for me, like before I go to bed chain, honestly, what I do is I grab a cue card. On my like downstairs table before I get up to bed, and I grab a marker and I force myself to just simply make a prioritized list of three things I'm gonna do the next day. Like in my pocket right now, as I sit here, I have like the the thing I wrote for today, right? Like the Go to the gym. Right, that's my basement.

9:08 Uh have lunch with my publicist and have this podcast with you. There's three, and that's all I can do. I force it to down to three, I leave it on the downstairs table, and then when I go to bed at night, and when I come downstairs the next morning I put it in my pocket and that Somehow Man, just to relieve some anxiety the night before.

9:24 In the morning. When I wake up I don't think we talked about this. Last time I I do a two minute morning practice, so I Grab a pen, piece of paper, or that yellow journal right behind you.

9:37 And I simply write down three statements that Pull anxiety out of me. Right? They are I will let go of. I am grateful for And I will focus on.

9:50 Those three statements act as a two minute Investment And lowering my anxiety and helping me Entered the day. from a less jolted place than if I was waking up and looking at my phone.

10:03 So I can go through the research on each of those statements. You know, if you want to, but really it's a two minute investment in a thousand waking men a day. towards level setting your mental health before you begin the day. Let's dive in on the focus aspect of that. It seems like people

10:18 Uh now more than ever. It seems and I don't know the research, but like we're spending more time Focus or like trying to focus, prioritizing, organizing. Less time actually doing the thing that we want to do through focus. Absolutely. You've probably heard and read the studies about how our attention spans are shrinking to that of goldfish levels, you know? Um

10:42 And there's some studies that have come out and said, you know, we're spending thirty one percent of our time today bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks as opposed to actually doing things. And people sometimes say to me, she's like, what does that even mean? Like book I was like, have you ever You know. uh turned on Netflix at 930 at night and you call your partner downstairs, you're like, hey, let's see, let's see if we can watch an episode of something before we go to bed. Right? And your partner's like, Yeah, yeah, sure. Well then, like what are you doing at 10? If you're like Leslie and I, you're on Raw and Tomatoes looking at scores, you're on YouTube looking at trailers, and you have

11:17 not picked anything and you realize it's too late to start. And we're doing that kind of stuff all the time. So we're falling into the traps. And look all the apps and algorithms are designed to hook our attention, so they're Constantly pulling us through text alerts and notification away from the thing that we want to focus on into the thing that they want us to focus on. And That's a huge problem because how many times you look at your phone and you're like, Why did I pick this up again? Or you're in your email and you get edited your email 20 minutes later and you're like, Wait, I came into my inbox to write to compose a new message. Right. And all I've done is now I'm lost. Now I've Now I'm lost.

11:53 So I think that we are seeing a dramatic shrinking in focus. And part of the reason I outline at the top of my day one thing I'm gonna focus on is because it helps force me. to carve away all the would do should do could do things And come up with one thing I will do, and I will honestly tell you. That some people will look at me and say, Okay, Neil, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, yours is probably like, you know, uh write a chapter or or or give a speech or whatever. Well, honestly, Shane.

12:20 Often what I'm writing down on my focus on thing is the thorn in my side. I'm writing down the thing that is the most Subtly Aggravating. To me, if I don't. Do it. I'm talking

12:32 Like Book the dentist appointment. Uh How often do you drive around with a little dashlight on your car that's telling you to get an oil change and you let it go and but it that's sitting subconsciously in your head. So often I use that focus to get something off my brain that I know will be sitting subconsciously in there otherwise.

12:51 And it could be something small, it could be a a loved one that you haven't called in a while. It could be um special time with a child that you feel a little bit more distance from. Maybe'cause you've been busy working for the past week, so you want you say Hey, I need to You know. do a puzzle or play guitar or something with my oldest son'cause we

13:11 We're we're we're having little spats, and it's because we aren't connected. So I use the focus as a way to prioritize. Not necessarily my work, but something that I think otherwise wouldn't get any focus. 'Cause it would fall away as it has been.

13:25 Until I write it down. And then do you do that thing first, or do you just make sure you do that thing during the day? I make sure so the exercise of two minute mornings I do first. And then I Think of that focus as a one item checklist that I love crossing off before the next morning, but I don't beat myself up. And if I happen to not do it,

13:45 That will probably become my focus for the next day. Right. So how do how do you organize your day to get stuff done? Well, let's zoom up a l a level first. Let's talk year, let's talk week, and then let's talk day. Because for me and Leslie, I am a really big believer in family contracts. And when I say family contracts, people like back off, they get worried, they think I'm talking pre-nuptials and stuff like this. No, I'm just saying here we are sitting here today. Most people listening to this will have a contract, a written contract in place with their employer of sorts.

14:17 Here's the terms of your working relationship. But when we sign that contract with our employer, we don't go home and say, okay, honey. Okay, partner, love of my life, mom I'm living with, roommate I take care of, whatever it is. Let's come up with the terms for our life. And so Leslie and I would ever throw out my career chain. I have changed jobs and now I'm self employed, but I'm talking really the ten years I was working at Walmart, we come home and we'd sit down and we say, what works for us.

14:41 So how do I design my day? Zoom up a level. We say Okay, Neil, you can go away four nights per month. Four nights away from the house. Four nights maximum. For 10 months the year. July, August for me is blacked out. That's 40 nights away from my house, about 10% of the year maximum. Then we have to have four family days.

15:00 Per month. A family day for us, Shane, is a day Where it's my wife Leslie, me Our kids. And nothing else.

15:07 No interruptions, no screens, no phones, no birthday parties, no visiting in-laws. It's just our family. We call that a family day and we have to for per month. The reason it's not at a weekly level yet is because If I'm travelling one week we can get two the next week or whatever. Okay.

15:23 Then we have four N and and Os and L no. Uh a month. Okay, I'm Neil, so NO is Neil's night out. And an L and O is Leslie Zide Out.

15:34 It's important to add stories and culture to the relationship that we you know for us. That come from outside. So we take a night off each about once a week. What's the night off? You can do whatever you want. It's whatever you want. She might go get a massage. I might go see a movie by myself. I might go hang out with a buddy and whatever, go to the bar, whatever it is.

15:53 But we have that built in. And then the last one is special time. I have to have A date night. Four date nights. A month, which may sound high and it's certainly hard to get, but

16:04 If I don't And our in my case. Everyone's contract will look different. If I don't get four date nights a month with my wife. We got no hope in running the rest of our lives, right? We have to be connected for us to be.

16:17 We call it CEO of the family, that's Leslie, and CEO of the business. That's me. To to do those two roles effectively, we need to be tethered. So this contract is at an kind of a yearly level, but it governs our time by month. Okay.

16:30 Then zooming into the week. One thing we touched upon in our last conversation was that I have a philosophy that everybody needs one untouchable day per week. You mentioned that when you were working in corporate style work.

16:46 you would block the mornings of your calendar, right? So I have a philosophy that one day per week you need to be untouchable. That is a way on a weekly basis. The untouchable day can move around, but it can't It cannot be deleted. So I have to block that sixteen weeks in advance after my speaking calendar is blocked, but before my

17:04 Weekly calendars filled in. Right. And people say to me, Oh yeah, I can't do that. You know, you don't know my job. Well try doing that for lunch. Try at least doing 12 to 1 pm. Leave the phone on your desk. Yeah. Right? Get outside, but plan some untouchable time in your week where you cannot be reached. That's super important.

17:21 Then on a daily basis, and I do believe at a high level, we overestimate how much we can get done in a day, and we underestimate how much we can get done in a week. You know, so I write those three things down. And I do them the next day. In any order that I want to, but Primarily I try to do the hardest thing first.

17:38 It's the classic. Squat first at the gym philosophy. If you hate swats Spot first. Well if

17:45 Done. Three things I've written down on the day include Writing? Then I'll probably write first because my ability to start writing at three PM stinks. So I have to just do the hardest thing first.

17:58 So it's just tackling those three things. And you could I govern myself with the monthly dashboard, which we could talk about if you wanted to separately, but For me, that's how I think about time on kind of an annual weekly and Daily basis. Okay, tell me about this dashboard. Ha

18:13 Okay. So You're driving a car. Right. Uh

18:19 The speed is sixty. Are you ever going 60? I mean maybe if you're on cruise control, but if you're like me, you're a bit below or you're a bit above. The the speedometer is giving you an indicator of how to adjust your behavior to better fit into. The guidance. Right.

18:34 I think of my life having a dashboard too. Okay, so I draw a picture on a piece of paper at the end of every month. I do this, I have a recurring calendar invite on the last day of every month. So Uh it just says dashboard. Then I draw it.

18:51 And it's a two by two. And in the center I draw a circle and I write my icky guy. We talked about Icky Guy last time, I K I G A I it's the Okinawan term to describe The reason you get out of bed in the morning, and for those that may not be familiar, Okinawa with one of the eight blue zones.

19:07 Discovered by Dan Butener and a team of National Geographic researchers where the percentage of people who live over 100 is way higher than most other places in the world. They discovered that in Okinawa, they don't have a word for retirement. Instead they have a word called icky guy. So you write that in the center. It's kind of like your purpose and it can shift. It can be hitting a deadline. For me, it's helping people live happy lives. For my wife who might be teaching empathy to kids. She's an elementary school teacher and she's raising our beautiful l young kids

19:33 But you write that in the center. That's your guiding force. Now on the top I've got two boxes. Top left is strong core. This is the stuff that pays your bills, Shane. This is the stuff you gotta do. Jane, this is for me. You know.

19:47 Uh writing one article. maybe publishing it uh Harvard Business Review or Fast Company, but submitting an article like a complete piece of work. That's one thing I want to do every month. Second is writing one chapter.

20:00 Right? Um Reason I've written. Ten books and journals in the last ten years, just because every month I'm trying to write one chapter. So on a monthly basis doesn't seem like much. But it adds up over time to like whole full books, right?

20:13 Helps that I'm writing about warm underwear coming out of the dryer and simple stuff like that, right? Uh and then and then uh the the third one strong core is for me. Uh giving four speeches per month. Okay. So I end up I end up doing About that many speeches per month. That's my strong core, that's the top left. And beside each of those at the end of the month, I just color them in green. Yellow or red?

20:31 Don't judge myself of the red. But that's the goal. That's the dashboard. Top right for me is fastest learning. Like you, I like reading books. I write I have a goal of reading eight books per month. Adds up to Super Week.

20:44 Doing two podcasts per month, think we're on about the same schedule. Your show and my show, which you've been kind enough to come on. Um And then I have one weird activity. I challenge myself from a learning perspective to do something outside of my comfort zone each month. It might be a concert in a faraway land, it might be going to something

21:02 That somebody invites me to have tickets for that I have never heard of, it might be Going to a sushi restaurant if I've never had sushi before it's just something different for me. I have had sushi before. Bottom left. Ah, so those top th two things are what I do. Bottom two is how I do it. So bottom left is best family and bottom right is best self.

21:23 Bottom right best self is often red, but it's like twelve workouts, twelve cardious. Right? Like that kinda stuff. Twelve meditations. Like that's my Taking care of myself. And then bottom left is Best Family. This is some of the dash, some of the uh Uh, family contract stuff.

21:39 More than four family days per month or equal to four. Less than or equal to four nights away. Right. And the time together.

21:49 I measure that or four N and O's, four L and Os I put on. And I color these circles on my dashboard each month. Yellow, green, and red. Have I ever had a month that they're all green? No. But if the top left is all green

22:01 And the bottom right is all red. Well, then guess what I'm telling myself? Next month I need to lean a little bit more into best self, otherwise the strong core is gonna fall off in six months. Yeah. And if the Family and the self is really Going well, as it often is in the summer, when we're really investing in the time of the kids and they're off from school, et cetera, et cetera. Well, look what's happened up top. You know?

22:22 We got cash flow problems. So it's just a guidance system. We need all of these things in life, and we so often forget it. We focus myopically on one part of life, right? There's There's people who are workaholics and what ends up happening or you get stressed at work and your boss throws a project on your your table.

22:41 And on a daily basis, I mean it doesn't accumulate into much, right? If you work late and skip a meal with your family. then you're not losing anything. But as those days turn into weeks and weeks into months and months into years. Well now you become disconnected. And there's part of us I think that needs to be Balance is the wrong word, harmonized or mosaic, right? I think of it as a mosaic where different things take on different shapes at different points in life, and that can be on a daily or weekly, monthly basis. But we all need to be

23:12 We need to take care of ourselves'cause if we don't take care of ourselves We can't work. We can't take care of the people we love. We can't do all the things we want to do. We can't live along And physically able life. Absolutely. But we also need things that we never talk about. Like we need to be our relationships need to be strong.

23:31 Which takes work, you and Leslie work at your relationship. Yeah. Not a lot of people do that. Yeah. Well It's only come from the fact that we notice that when we don't have day nights for a month or two. Then you start having a little bit more arguments, or you start having you y you lose sight of the

23:48 deep tethering that you have in a place of love and you start becoming transactional. And then friction starts to occur. So we think of those dates as an investment in the relationship and as you say, they take certainly work. But so many people just take their relationships friendships close relationships for granted. And they expect that if they reach out, the person's gonna be there, but they don't do the investments.

24:09 the little date nights, the little things that sort of like water the grass. Put it if you put it that way, like there's a patch of grass between you and I. And if we don't water it, it's gonna dry out. And if it dries out, any little spark will catch it on fire. But if we water it, you know, we can go through wind and fire and it's not gonna catch the grass on fire because we're good. Yeah. But it requires this investment. And then the other thing, like I think there's more to life too, right? And and that is And this is my

24:37 sort of hypotheses and maybe relates to how work from home it is affecting how people think, but We need to feel a part of something larger than ourselves. Absolutely. And that can be through work, but it's also in our community. Absolutely. And we're missing an aspect of this in sort of work from home if we don't get away from the screens. I think so.

25:00 Completely. I have a model that I call the four S. That I think everybody needs to get out of a A job? Oh tell me about this. The four S are you need. Let's start with story. That's the first S. Uh

25:13 Do you feel part of something bigger than yourself? Do you mentally ascribe to the company's mission or purpose or high level reason for being? Is that something you can get behind? Is that something you feel attached to? And so let's start with that. You gotta have the high level purpose. Then Social. You talking about work from home and I think we're kind of netting out you and I on the same place on here. It's like There's a reason that in a lot of engagement surveys inside big corporations, they ask, do you have a best friend at work? Yes or no? Because they have found that that is correlated with your engagement at the company. And you don't necessarily have a best friend at work when there isn't a Tuesday night social, or the boss doing an AMA, or the CEO having breakfast on Friday for anyone that wants to come. These things.

25:53 Create A culture. and they're invisible and they cannot be measured on a balance sheet. But when you don't have a place where people are together, you don't have a place. Where that can occur.

26:04 So that social connection, we talked about the Daniel Gilbert quote from Dummy on happiness, that's imperative. You have to have a connection to your friends, your friends and colleagues have to feel like They're part of your personal community. So we've got two. Story. Social. Structure.

26:18 Every single week has a hundred and sixty eight hours a minute. You got hundred and sixty eight hours? I got a hundred and sixty eight hours. Warren Buffett has 168 hours, Oprah has 168 hours, you divide it by three, you got three buckets of 56. You're supposed to sleep eight hours a night. Eight times seven is fifty six. Meaning if you do that, if you actually do that job of sleeping eight hours a night,

26:37 That's a whole bucket. If you work eight hours a day, that's a whole bucket. Those two buckets pay for, justify and create your third and final bucket, which you own. And if you have small kids like we do, maybe that's what that bucket's doing. But if you don't have small kids at home or you're doing something else, maybe that's your gym time, maybe that's your video game time, maybe that's your maybe that's your fancy football time, whatever it is. I think that structure is important for people. I don't think it's true that. Kids need schedules. I think it's true that everybody needs schedules. And then the last one is stimulation. This plays directly into the working unit for arm street. We are learning

27:10 Animals. There's a reason this podcast is called The Knowledge Project. It's popular because people get knowledge, presumably, when they listen to it. So Asking yourself Am I learning something new every day? Okay.

27:23 So add those four things up. Story social. structure stimulation those add up and into A satisfying career. And sometimes you're talking about being untethered from community or being untethered from

27:37 From you know, the connection. Inspect those for us. And see if you're getting them, and if not. Can you figure out ways to kind of work those into your career? Or your day to day career. So I always thought the career thing, I always, you know, felt like you need to feel part of something larger than yourselves.

27:54 And I was super fortunate in my my prior career to do that. And and now I feel s part of something even more incredible in a lot of ways. But this morning I went to the boys and girls club. Social breakfast. And I was as I was driving What what took you there?

28:10 Uh so one of my close friends is the chairman of the board. So Steve Bachta. But it may the chairman. I was like, sure, yeah, I wanna go. This would be awesome. And for those that don't know what is The boys and girls club. It's a it's a club in the in the community that helps kids that are sort of more at risk. Okay.

28:27 uh gives them resources, makes them feel part of something. helps them get uh more equity, right? Cause not as much as we want equal opportunity, not everybody has equal opportunity. And All free. And amazing.

28:45 And the people do incredible work. But as as I was driving home I was like You know what I haven't done much of Is

28:54 That are part of my Community. And my community not as in my street, but like my Ottawa community. And then I was thinking like what What would more involvement look like and why has this been missing?

29:08 And what about that? is missing. And I don't know if it needs to be a big part of my life or a little part. But I feel like the absence of it. Like I felt the absence of it this morning when I was driving. Yeah. And they probably felt your presence and maybe you're invited partly to gauge or

29:26 feel your interest in getting more involved. And I do think energy operates at many different levels, it operates at universal levels, it operates at global levels, and it certainly operates at local level so energy you put into your community you feel back Mm. property tax that the small business pays from the

29:44 hammer that you bought from the local hardware store is gonna eventually pay for the flowers in your local park. You know, so we are a function of the microcosms we live inside and investing in your community. Well, so this is also interesting because during the pandemic, I went to sort of great lengths to support local businesses because I feel like I'm part of an ecosystem. And I want these businesses to thrive even during a pandemic, especially if they're

30:10 They're sort of trying to uh pivot or operate differently. Um, and I believe we are part of an ecosystem, right? If any part of that ecosystem suffers, we all suffer. And our business we're fortunate that uh, you know, we're not client facing

30:26 We we don't have to close our doors, we can still operate, we can still do things, we can still reach people. uh in a lot of ways we had more of an impact during a pandemic when people had more time to listen to podcasts or read our work. And we need the obligation, you know, we have a responsibility almost to be a good steward in this ecosystem. Absolutely. And that may be something I I unconsciously recognize this morning is the giving back to the community. not only helps other people have a more equal opportunity, which I firmly believe in. I don't believe in equal outcomes. I do believe in equal opportunity.

31:01 Um and I think we need to sort of get back to that. And Anything that I can do to contribute to that makes me feel good. As a personal part of the podcast, people realize it's two Canadians talking here. Probably. Okay. Well, something you said that I want to go back to, you said schedule. People need a schedule. Why? Why did you say that? Oh, why did people need a schedule? Yeah. Well you you had I think you had tweeted

31:25 Uh A year or two ago. I said cool that I'd heard other places, but you know, you put your classic Shane spin on it. So I'm gonna paraphrase with something like you know, show me your schedule and I'll show you. Your priorities. A hundred percent. Right. And I think I had, you know tongue in cheek replied to you on Twitter and said

31:43 Yeah. I I will have accomplished my true priorities in life when I don't have a schedule. And what I'm actually finding out. As I raise children with my wife, and I try to live an intentional life. is

31:58 Well, actually, you know what, Shane? I disagree with my previous self and I actually think I mied habits. And routine baked into my life. Because it actually it actually makes me live a better life. So when I

32:10 What? I told you in the bottom right corner of my m of my monthly dashboard says twelve workouts, right? That would be three per week. Well, so what I do is I use an app called Trainiac. It it is uh it's so it's a live Um

32:23 uh trainer, like a real human trainer, but it's incongruous with me. So they send me a video and then I have to do the thing. And I've he they you get to tell them how many you want. So I say set it up for four per week. That way I'm yield managing up front, right? That way if I if I miss a quarter of my workouts, I still hit my goal of three. Well, what happens every morning When I do pick up my phone after I've done my two minute mornings, after I've done my You know, routinized breakfast. I've had the same thing for breakfast for 15 years, right? The same exact ingredients in my shake.

32:52 I check the phone and it's a guy on a video saying, Get down to the basement, Neil! It's time it's arms day, man! They're gonna pump that bicep. So I've got that routine. And if I didn't have that thing set up, I wouldn't do the workout. So that routine enables me to do the work and that's good because then I got energy for the whole day. You know the benefit of a workout?

33:09 Yeah, Naval on here talking about how working out every single day was the single greatest thing he does to enable everything else. So what I'm saying is there you go, I've entered into my life like a system You know, we don't rise to the level of our goals. We follow the level of our systems. I've entered a system that is now baked into my schedule in order to create a more effective me. And I have a better day. And the headache that I woke up with because the baby was awake kind of gets knocked out.

33:36 In the morning. So that's coming after the routinized breakfast. That's gonna be after the routine has two minute warnings. And now there you go by scheduling those three things at breakfast in the morning. I have a I have a better day. So I said that because I think if you don't have that kind of stuff, you're kind of wandering. What am I gonna make for breakfast?

33:53 Yeah. What's in the fridge. Then you you have to make all these decisions. Decision fatigue is a killer. And not only that, it takes willpower to make good decisions. It doesn't take a lot of willpower to follow a schedule. Right,'cause it you we've been taught our whole life, like look at your calendar, follow the rules. Making energy is a finite resource. And that you know, there's that great book called Will Power by John Tierney, and it's a finite resource. When it's gone, it's Gone and there's only two ways to replenish it. Which is

34:22 Uh sleep? Yeah. And Glucose. Which is why at the front of the supermarket after making Decision between thirty kinds of salsa and twelve kinds of eggs.

34:29 You know, you got a wall full of sugar. That's why it's there, because your decision making energy is low. You know, when Leslie and I got married, we got the, you know, we go to the department store and we get the tells on gun, we get to choose which kind of glasses do you want, honey? Which kind of plates. And at the end of the day, you're exhausted. You're choosing three hundred dollar ice buckets that you'll never use because your decision making energy is That When I wrote the happiness equation, I did a study and I found I found out by my own research that we were making around three hundred decisions a day.

34:55 So by root, anything that you routinize, am I using that word right? I don't know. Anything that you put into a system. enables you to have more cognitive load available. For the rest of the day. I I think it even goes deeper than that because I think if you conscious most of us fall into this and maybe we're unconscious about it, but if you consciously design your schedule. And you create

35:16 I call them automatic rules for success. And you follow those rules because uh as Daniel Conman has said, it's easy to follow rules. Even yourself, you follow rules. Other people.

35:28 If you say it's my rule. they'll just leave you alone. So what he said he's like his rule that he used as an example with me was I never say yes on the phone to an engagement. He was prone to saying yes. People call him all the time, ask him to speak, he was saying yes, he miserable. Yeah. And so the father of cognitive biases, right, couldn't say no on the phone to people. Yeah, so he's like, I just decided I made a rule that I never say yes on the phone. And I was like, So what happened? And he's like, Well after

35:58 After this. He's like I would say I never say yes on the phone I'll get back to you tomorrow. And he's like, I would only say yes, maybe like one out of forty times. So I went from saying yes almost every time to saying yes to only the stuff I want to do. Yeah. So I've given this a lot of thought and I'm like, how do we how do we design our lives in a way where it's not perfect. Like the young man knows the rules, the old man knows the exceptions, right? Like

36:26 Ever you should stop at a stop sign. If there's an ambulance behind you, you might go through it. Yeah. And so there's but what are the rules that we should use? And they're all individually different. But they're like prescriptions almost for success, right? Like your rule may be that you start your your um Breakfast in a certain way. Yeah.

36:44 Uh for me, I can't go to the gym four days a week. I have to go every day. I would find it harder to go four days a week. Then go every day. So my rule is I go every day. I close my move ring. Oh my God. I close my move ring like every I'm all sixty Eight day move streak. Like it's crazy.

37:05 But I go every Yeah, because otherwise you have to then get your momentum back up to start again if you have to take a break, right? Right. And on the days when I don't want to go, that's when it matters the most. Yeah. Going. And but I would like if I was doing four days a week, I'd be like, it'd be so easy for me personally to be oh I'll do it tomorrow. You know, I don't feel like doing it today. So I'll just do it tomorrow and I'll make up for it. Yeah, yeah, I know I love that what you say about roles. I find that you can sometimes see this in people's out of office. You know, uh

37:35 Like I got an out of office yesterday, um, from someone you've had on the show. I won't I won't say them their name so that I don't reveal their out of office. And it just said You know, classic. uh out of office like Hi, I'm away from the office right now. I'll be back, uh, whatever it was, Octur First.

37:51 Um I will delete my inbox uh at that time. So please email me again if it's important. I was like Yeah. Well that's a pretty clear rule. There is no receipt of any email received for a month. Yeah. Bake into the the out of office. I think that's a clever one.

38:08 You know, I think Tim Ferris has gone on the record of saying, you know, uh phrase blurb holiday has been effective when people were sort of incessantly asking him for blurbs for their books. The phrase uh I'm on a blurb holiday. was a little bit nicer and clearer than saying No, thank you. I don't want to say n nice things about you particularly.

38:26 You just say I'm on a blurb holiday, people respect that it's a rule. Right. You know. I like that. I like that phrase rules. You know, I I had that for years as you know uh A much more novice investor than you are.

38:39 I had decided, you know Long ago to To put any extra money I had into you know, uh an ETF that owned the total world equities, right? Pretty obvious basic investment decision. But what I would do, Shane, is on the front of every month when I said to myself, okay, now's the time, I'm gonna lop off the top of my check account, dump it into saves and throw it in the

39:00 Vanguard total world equity index or whatever it is. Well shoot, that that price went up a couple of buckses. I think I'll just wait till next month and then Well one if So I'm I'm inspecting the price and trying to time the decision. When I changed it to a rule based approach, i.e., if X doll if if if the number of dollars in check account is over X

39:20 Move to Y, the savings account. If the number of dollars in the savings count is over Z Move it to the move it to the investment. Those simple two rules avoided me from having to think about. The investment timing, which of course was

39:33 Part of the principle of investing it in in an extraterrestri to begin with. So what I'm trying to say is, yeah, now that I think about what you're saying. That rule. Enable me To start.

39:42 not thinking about it or trying to time and mark Well we're our own worst enemy most of the time, right? So like but but when you're you're when you have willpower When you're conscious. At your best. You can set up rules that you know your best self wants you to follow. Another example is like

39:57 I don't eat dessert. I do, obviously. But like Um A lot of people that I know have like adopted this, whereas if it's a choice Then the choice becomes a negotiation at the table. You're out with a group of people. It's like, I don't want dessert tonight. And they're like, come on, like just have a bite of cake, it'll be fun. And then you end up like succumbing to this. Yeah. But if you if you say

40:21 You know, my rule is I don't eat dessert. Right. Nobody's gonna argue with you. And you don't even argue with yourself. Yeah, it it I think that works for some people.

40:31 Would that work for you? Well, I so on that one particular, that would not work that would not work for me. What I've done instead is I've given myself a label. So this is taking your rules analogy and I'm taking it into a slightly different direction. So I say to Leslie and my kids, and they all know this, and People I'm with I say I'm a carb snob. That's what I say. I have labeled myself a carb snob. Okay? You bring out bread at the restaurant, it's cold, there's no butter, I ain't eating that. You bring it warm, there's butter, that's delicious.

41:00 Well I'm a carb snob and that's a pretty good carb, right? I'm a bit so on the on the you know Uh this diet part particularly by giving myself a label of carb snob I I only I'm really only eating carbs when they're really, really, really yummy.

41:14 But that's almost like a rule. But then you have a line, right? Because your rule is I'm not gonna eat it unless it crosses this threshold. It's gotta be uh piping hot. Yeah, exactly. It's gotta be delicious carb for me to want for me to eat it. Do you have any other sort of rules now that you're thinking about it that sort of like put you You know. On decisions, if we're making two or three hundred decisions a day.

41:37 No. Right away. And and those those numbers are spiking. Because What is news media and social media and text alerts and notification doing though that's right? We're forcing ourselves look at the front of everyone's phone. It's

41:50 Sixteen little squares and all of them are yelling at you in the form of a red circle. Right. Interrupted by the newsfeed on the left, if you swipe left that's a Kind of that's the baseline how you get it. And the text that come in.

42:02 So Here's a rule. I have disabled, I've deleted all social media off my phone. Right away, gone. No apps on my phone. Yes, I can still log in on a laptop, but it's really annoying, right? I and I've deleted the email app off my phone. So if I want email on my phone, I have to log in through the clunky browser. Yeah. And to get through the big Gmail stop sign that says, Are you sure you don't want to download the app? Yeah, I'm sure. You have to say I'm not interested every single time. Yeah. Right.

42:27 And once in a while they wanna like check who you are again. So it's annoying, you gotta click which things are actually like cranes or whatever, right? The only thing AI hasn't figured out is how to identify a crane for some reason. Hilariously. And then on my phone, I've disabled all text alerts and notifications. So what I do is I have to click the green text button to then see if there's text waiting. I do not get any text flashing on my screen anytime. I've also disabled the news media. A news headline service that's built into the iPhone as well. So on my phone, I've taken a lot of steps to make the device. In my mind A pull device. It is designed to be a push device.

43:02 And I've designed it. To myself as a pull device, meaning that it serves me. I'm the master. of that phone chain and I have to do all these things. You know, do your bidding the way you want it to. That's so interesting because what you've done is you've taken your best self.

43:21 Right, when you're when you're feeling strong. And you've created You've taken discipline. And you've created guard rails. in the environment so you've created an artificial environment

43:33 Where it's hard for you. to violate that discipline, even when you don't feel like it. Right. So when you don't you take in when you're strongest and when you have discipline and you've turned that in to an environment that'll carry you. Even when you're not disciplined. Well'cause now the friction is so high.

43:52 I was walking here. An hour ago down the street. There's a church just down the street from us here. And Ottawa and it says in the front of the church. Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted. I don't know if you saw it, it's just down the street from you. And I was like, Oh my god, that's hilarious. I'm gonna take a picture and post on Twitter, and I was like Well then I'll have to down the Twitter app.

44:10 And then when I download the Twitter app, it's gonna ask for my password and it's gonna send a code to my email, which I'm gonna have to log into forget it! Yeah, and that saved me from scanning the Twitter feed, which is so sexy and addictive. Yeah. Spend the half an hour before I saw you today. Preparing for the Parkins interview I have tomorrow, right? Like that's how I wanted to spend my time, so the Garbrails

44:32 served me in that case. Right. It can feel annoying sometimes. And there are failure points where you're like Tired and lazy and bored and you download the app and you scroll and Fine. But if you label that a dopamine treat and are aware of what it is, then at least you're living intentionally about it. Yeah. See your conscience about it.

44:49 Wanna go back to something we touched on at the very start, which is sort of uh resiliency and not only our individual resiliency But our collective resiliency. And we had sort of Um It was a two part question. I think we went on the second part of the question.

45:04 Good memory to call back to eight questions ago. I like that. Where? Where? Are we on this resiliency? Like are we more resilient because of this, or are we less? And I I sort of see pockets of both, to be honest with you. Yeah. Во ферствовал, when we spoke

45:22 on the knowledge project the first time. Uh it was Uh we didn't know, but it was the eve of the pandemic. Yeah, right. It was at the end of twenty nineteen. Uh my book on resilience had just come out. You are awesome. And I was talking about the models and frameworks I had in the book to try to cultivate resiliency in myself and in my kids. And I made the argument that.

45:44 I actually made the argument in the introduction of that book. None of us have been through a pandemic or a a war or we haven't had a famine and so A lot of us have thin skin, and I used examples and data to justify the fact that we have thin skin. Of course as always using myself as a prime example, you know, the way you feel like hurt and damage when you get a

46:01 Nasty email for days, right? Like I was like, This is me, I've got thin skin, so I need to address this problem. Right? Uh we talked I talked a lot about and we talked a lot about some of the models and tools to kind of cultivate that. Now you're asking you know, post pandemic twenty twenty two, um, how have we done? How are we doing? Hey Neil, we're now through a pandemic or most of the way through, depending on where you are and your

46:27 kind of experience today. Um How are we doing? Uh I will say A There isn't too much recent data to go on. Even the data on resilience that we're looking at now is still.

46:39 twenty nineteen kind of data, which shows that resilience is pretty low. And it's come comes back to some of what I was quoting before with the the work of Jonathan. Junk the height. Um and National Institute Mental Health. Kind of statistics.

46:51 But I will say one of the models I've been using with my kids a lot these days on cultivating resilience, and I think you might find this interesting. Is the philosophy of take more pictures. Is the philosophy to take more pictures? And so Have you ever talked to a wedding photographer?

47:08 And you say to them Holy cow, like I was at that wedding too. How'd you get 50 amazing shots of like me and the bride or the bride and the groom or the bri the groom and the groom, whatever, whatever. And they're like, oh, I I took a thousand Did you hear me clicking like the whole four hours? Click, click, click. I took like a thousand, two thousand pictures. Of course I'm gonna have fifty good ones. And it Whenever I've had that sort of apocryphal kind of story happen over and over again, it makes me think of when I was a kid, Shane, and my my dad got me a book of baseball statistics.

47:40 And as a baseball fan pre-internet, as a kid, we're the same age. Uh This book of statistics is like Yeah, you could spend days in this thing. But I started noticing something interesting. Which is this.

47:52 The guy that had the most strikeouts Nolan Ryan. Was also the guy that had the most Walks. Yeah, like

48:00 Okay. Uh the guy that had the most wins. Sa young? was also the guy that had the most Losses. Say um

48:07 You hear this story all the time in the news media, which is Tom Brady has the most completions. We just plan the longest. He just took more pictures. He also has the most incompletions. You know? This guy's got the most important

48:21 He's also got the most superbowl losses. You know, and so the philosophy I think that we've all experienced with the pandemic is we just took another pretty big picture. We just had another major life experience. All of us did. Those that are alive right now, listening to this, have had a major life experience. Add that to the camera roll of your life. And if you want to increase your resilience.

48:40 Further. Take more pictures. What in your life do you take more pictures in? I mentioned tenth book. Have they all been hits? No

48:49 The only way I'm gonna get to the next one that does well, if you even care about measuring success that way, that's a whole other topic when we talk about success, uh is Could you just write another book? Could you just do another take it take another swing? Could you just come up to the plate another time? And what in your life can you sign up? for the most. Well, when I was a kid, my parents would let me quit every I was in Cubs, I quit. I was in baseball. I quit. I tried a ro I did I did the most one lessons of any kid.

49:16 And then let me quit. And some people say that's horrible parenting because they should force you to stick with it and plow through. Yeah, maybe. Or maybe they just let me take more pictures till I found the things I really liked. And eventually kind of for me that was you know Things around cartooning and communication and writing and things I'm still kinda doing today.

49:32 And I went to go deep on them because I was allowed to take more pictures. So What's the data say on resilience now? Th there ain't that much. What do I think personally? We've been through a lot. And what do I think is a model that can help us?

49:45 Take more pictures. The winds pile up. when you pile on the number of times you step up to the play. One of the Ways that I interpreted what I was hearing.

49:56 is that we've all just come through a pandemic. And One of the things I try to teach the kids is how you talk to yourself. Matters. Your mindset matters.

50:08 An optimistic mindset isn't gonna make good things happen, but a negative mindset is gonna almost guarantee that negative things happen. Oh that's interesting. Say that say that one more time. So an optimistic mindset, positive mindset doesn't necessarily make Make the future positive. But a negative one does make the feature negative. Becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And so I've been telling the kids, I was like, Hey, you just came through.

50:32 A pandemic. We haven't had one of these in a hundred years. So you've done something difficult that a lot of people can't do. Um, or a lot of people haven't done, or a lot of people so like when we're doing things for the first time. The You know, they're anxious. They're they're sort of like

50:49 Going to back to school, right? There's a little bit of anxiety, but that jumping off a cliff jumping off cliff. Like we climbed up, we did cliff jumping, and I'm like Dude, you've been through a pandemic. Well you actually jumped off a cliff. Yeah. Well no, like we we climbed up uh you know, it's it's one way door. You climb up, I'm like you're going down. I'm throwing you down or you're jumping. Those are the only two ways down. Cause climbing down is not an option. Climbing down is like you're gonna be in a hospital. Why why is climbing down not an option? Because the way that you climb up, it's so slippery going down.

51:20 That if you even And was it a choice for them to to go up or Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, yeah. But when we're up there, I'm talking about saying good or bad either way, I'm just curious. No, no, yeah, the my parents extended get up there. Um but it's sort of like You've done hard things. And one of the things that I use with people And my kids especially is like you've been through a pandemic. That is a hard thing. Absolutely. That hasn't been easy. It's had ups and downs and pros and cons. but you've done it. You've come out and anybody listening to this, you've been through a pandemic too.

51:52 Right. You have many listeners under three. You've done something difficult, right? So often we think that we can't do this and resilience. In part comes from knowing that you've done difficult things in the past. And everybody's done something difficult here, but we don't think about it. It doesn't come top of mind. I do think that we have missed the conversation in society so far about this. The cl

52:16 the closure, the what's happened that in you know in corporate cultures there's usually like a postmortem. There's a post mortem that we have there's a there's a huge missing conversation on like because we've been reluctant to say it's over. Yeah. Right. I mean I'm still wearing a mask of my hair today, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not like it's quote unquote over, but There needs to be a much more bigger conversation about the Yeah. The so what now what, how do we feel? Like that's that's the paper that goes in the filing cabinet for next time. We haven't uh we haven't opened the T peeled open that uh that all the way yet. But here here's one aspect where I think we've done a major disservice to kids.

52:56 Is Um we've Told them. We've trained them that they don't have to do things they don't feel like doing. During a pandemic.

53:06 You don't have to do your homework if you didn't feel like doing it. Teachers gave you a free pass. Kids obviously being kids learn this. Manipulate it to the T. And pulling they're not very resilient now in that in that context, right? How do we pull that in? How do we rein that in?

53:22 And it's like well you can't stop working. Because there's a pandemic, right? Everybody who worked at a grocery store, all the doctors, all the nurses, all the policemen, all the firemen, like they didn't get to work from home. They still had to keep going to work and their jobs became harder. Not easier during a pandemic. And we tried to take kids and we tried to make their lives easier. Instead of just keeping it, I would say maybe not status quo is the option, but sort of

53:46 We made it so easy. How you feel dictates whether you can do your homework or not. How you feel dictates whether you go to school or not. And I think that that did a disservice for their resilience. And

54:03 One of the first sentences we said is anxiety rates in college students are one in three. And I'm talking clinical anxiety. Clinical diagnosed anxiety in college students are one in three. So if you don't get it. If you don't get it down, you get it up. And a lot of people are saying it's partly what you're saying is the the softness or the the low the lower kind of rules or standards or whatever.

54:26 But also there's a lot of less free play. There's a lot less free play, there's a lot less time in nature. Faultless things that resilience has kind of created when you're Perhaps in the woods and you fall off a thing and there's no one around or you're picking up worms or You know, when when we're inside systems that are really corralling our behavior, we have less ability to really kind of

54:45 go wide on on kind of what is and could be. Yohan Harry wrote has written about this a lot in Stolen Focus. He's got a really wonderful chapter on what the decline of free play is doing to the resilience and anxiety levels of our kids. So I go deep on Nature a lot. Uh I've gone deep into it from a happiness perspective.

55:06 I believe that uh a word That we're not using enough in society is Shinrin Yoku. Which is You're like, no one uses that word. What are you talking about? Well, there's a guy over in Japan named Doctor Jing Li, Q Y N G, and his last name's L I Li, and he's become the world's foremost researcher on Shinrin Yoku, which is literal translation chain is forest bath.

55:27 Forest bath. You know, in Japan in the late nineteen eighties, there's a bit of a cultural crisis when a number of prominent executives drop dead. In North America, we've got the highest level word in North America for you know working so hard is burnout. Burnout is the highest level. Well, they've got a word over there, and I don't want to I feel like it's karashi, I'm gonna butcher the Japanese word, but it means death by overwork. Okay, what he's put forward in a lot of his research and it's wonderful research is that By immersing ourselves in nature.

55:53 by immersing ourselves in nature. We actually do so much benefit to our mental health and our uh physiological health we increase the p production of nk You know, cancer killing cells. We Increase our heart health. We

56:07 reduce our anxiety, we'll reduce our stress levels. There it turns out that there's a there's a there's a chemical that trees release shade called phyton sides. Have you heard of this? P H Y T O N C I D E S phyton size when you're out in nature. Not when you're on a treadmill looking at a picture of the mirror trail. I'm talking when you're out in an actual bush. You're breathing in this chemical, which has been shown. To reduce

56:31 Your cortisol levels. You know, it reduces your cortisol levels, it and it reduces your anxiety levels by being out in nature. So part of the prescription I feel As we talk about resilience, and we talk about our our our mental health as we talk about our happiness is. I think every single day. People gotta take two minutes of the morning. We talked about that on on the the three qu the three questions I will let go of.

56:50 I'm grateful for I will focus on and they need to take it interjecting sometime in their day to immerse themselves in nature. I I say do it at lunch. 'Cause I'm picturing people under you know fluorescent lights in clinical atmospheres, and I say

57:04 Know where the closest bush is, know where the closest tree is, know where If you can just reset your physiology and reduce your cortisol and adrenaline levels by taking some deep breaths in nature, you Create. More energy and more positive mindset for the afternoon. Right.

57:21 And then we can talk about what you should do at bed,'cause I have some I have some prescription thoughts on that too. I I wanna come to that, but hold on, we're like there's three questions that I I've already got three rabbit holes here. The first one is sort of do you still have thin skin? You mentioned that earlier. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um So part of the reason I wrote that book was because I had found That

57:42 I was suffering from anxious thoughts for days when I got, for example, an asked email. And after one of my speeches, a guy ran up to me and said, Neil, Neil, Neil, what's wrong with my son? He graduated from uh he was a high school validatorian, he graduated from Duke. He was the top of his class, and his first day of work, his boss sent him a an email, you know, kind of Saying you gotta do this better. And he he he called me crying from his bed, saying he's not going back to work tomorrow. And when I heard that story, I didn't say Oh my gosh. Like You know, uh

58:11 You know. Can you believe uh what a failure son is. I actually recognize myself in the story. Like I was like Oh.

58:19 Yeah, that's A piece of work. So The whole nature of the books I write is really like most self help authors and you know this.

58:28 You run it for yourself. Right. And so when I put in practices in that book, like two minute mornings, right. I talk a lot about journaling. I talk about dot dot dot yet. Adding a little sliver of light after you hear the door click in the frame. I, when I'm at my best, use those models and systems to have thicker skin than I used to. And I so I would say yes, I've improved on that. But do I have

58:50 Thin skin. It's not. a yes or no black or white, I I I'm sure I could still get better. Someone can give me up. Verbal Hey, if this is on YouTube and the first comments like I hate that annoying brown guy's voice. Well, I'm still gonna feel that.

59:04 So I need to get better at avoiding the kind of uh nasty stuff online, I'm sure. We all do probably though. But it's it's so weird'cause like your review is overwhelmingly positive. But I look at the ones that are negative, right? Exactly. And they you remember those the positive ones just sort of like bounce off and we know that's biological. We've got a amygdala, A-M-Y-G D D A L A. It's one of the oldest parts of our brain. It's in one of the most central parts of our brain. It's about the size of a wallet. This thing secretes fight or flight. Um You know. Fight or flight hormones all day. We all have an amygdala. You don't want to take it out. It ain't gonna be good for you. So you gotta leave that thing in there and secreting fight or flight hormones all day. It's wonderful when a saber tooth tiger jumps out of the bush and you gotta decide whether to fight it or run away.

59:49 It's not so wonderful when you get a needs improvement on your performance review and you think that you're getting chased by a saber tooth tiger. It's not so wonderful when you get a headline saying like, Don't eat this toxic vegetable. And you click the link and it's like you know Too many carrots has been shown to you know, it's like We're falling into the trap that's a biological part of our brains. So of course when I look on iTunes, I look at the reviews for three books, my podcast, and yes, there's 15 five star reviews showing up. My eye And my brain naturally orients itself to the negative.

1:00:20 And it's not It it's not even so bad as to know that my brain does that. It's also so bad I believe these is to know that. The algorithms inside social media and news meet are designed to find and foster that. And what's even worse is that that is now changing our behavior so that we as people who are behaving in mo in more and more digital environments, we are naturally Becoming more extreme. We are naturally changing what we say online. We're now posting stuff that we know is going to be. on the edges of the spectrum because it will get more reviews and more likes and more shares. So

1:00:54 It's radicalizing us. And we are Do you see anyone reviewing three stars? Do you see what I'm saying? You either gotta be uh hyperbolically positive or hyperbolically negative otherwise no one's gonna read your abuse. It's astute.

1:01:08 to filter the Amazon reviews and find the three star reviews and read them. But we don't do that. And if you look at what's at the top, it's you know the one star, the five star. We're we're we are doing that to ourselves at this point because it's how our Things get read and noticed. You know, we're talking these days in society about quiet quitting. You know, the the

1:01:28 the philosophy that's talk about that you should do the the the minimum possible А укінбите грей транзин. We're talking about people sort of trying to Uh You you know.

1:01:39 find work that fits into their life, not try to fit their life into their work. And I think at a high level These are net positives because perhaps with the pandemic. Some people gained

1:01:50 more clarity to themselves about what was important and they stopped following the hedonistic treadmill of trying to get straight A's and get into a Ivy League school and get the You know. the the the McKinsey job or the consulting job and Uh, you know, kind of be an endless superachiever. And they've taken a step back in the pandemic and they've said, Well, wait a minute, I don't know if I want to be working eighty hours a week. I think I'd actually like to see my mom more.

1:02:18 So you agree with quiet quitting. Well The way that I define it, and maybe my definition is different than others, is doing the amount of work expected of you and not going over and above for the sake of going over and above. However, if you're trying to get a raise, get a promotion, stick out.

1:02:36 You know, rise up. Course you're gonna wanna You you just posted a tweet you said was your most controversial tweet. I guess you got Sizzling responses of the case. And some emails and sex and everything else.

1:02:48 Is there emails and what? Texts? Text, yeah. So the you wanna say the tweet so I don't paraphrase it wrong? Oh, I just said the people who don't go back to the office are gonna end up working for the people that do. Yeah. People that don't go back to the office. are gonna end up working for the people that do, which I think means that on the philosophy of quiet quitting, you're implying that those who

1:03:10 In general in life. show a little bit more hot spa and go for it a little bit, you know, at at a higher level or work above and beyond, eh, show up a bit earlier. Show up, period. We'll actually be the ones that get raises and promotions. Well let's break it down a little bit into human nature. Where does trust come from? A lot of trust is proximity. Trust is consistency. I see you every day. I can consistently gauge how you're gonna re I might not like how you respond to something. Your learning goes up. We change. But I know I know more about your life. I care about you in a different way. I know what's going on with your family. We have anecdotal Conversations with the water cooler. I coach you, I mentor you. Yeah. I'm invested in you. The people who are ambitious.

1:03:51 Are gonna be in the office and they're gonna get promoted by us for them. It doesn't mean they work harder, it doesn't mean they work better, doesn't mean they're more valuable. That wasn't what I said, which a lot of people run into. Uh but I just think Based on my knowledge of hu human psychology, they're gonna get promoted faster and they're gonna have a better career. And you're talking about organizations that are in hybrid mode. Yeah. Hybrid mode. And what if we're a hundred percent in person or a hundred percent remote, this isn't this this this uh idea doesn't doesn't hold weight.

1:04:21 And then the other thing that I said is the what's best for the person is not necessarily best for the company. And what's best for the person is not best for their career. And this is a disentangling with it comes to like quiet quitting. If you quite quite I hate that term, right? You want to do your job to spec. We you know, people have worked to

1:04:43 Peak to people have work to rule. For a long time. Yes. Uh you can't work. In an organization like mine. Because uh we're too small for that to happen.

1:04:55 Right, like that doesn't work. So ha uh you wanna work for a big company and do that. I can see how you can sort of get away with that. But then you can't come and complain later. That you're not developing fast enough. You're not getting as many opportunities. I agree with that. Absolutely. Depends what you want. Depends what you want. Maybe there's maybe maybe So give me the other side of this though.

1:05:17 Well We're w we're talking right now in fall two thousand twenty two, where the we're in the the dregs, we're in the trail, we're in the long the long finish of the pandemic. And what I'm arguing is that When we're Working at home for a long period of time. I think that a lot of people have

1:05:35 readjusted their life and have said that they may prioritize things a little bit different. If indeed you are saying, I want to be, I want to be home, I wanna be, I wanna see my mom more. I actually think I really want to live in Dallas because that's where my extended family is, although my company's based in Rochester, whatever, whatever, whatever. Then yeah, it's great for some trendy news media buzzer to label that quiet quitting because it, you know, it has got alliteration. So it goes viral. But really, uh what I'm saying is. It makes sense, don't you think, that in the six months, twelve months, eighteen months, after a two year kind of major interruption like that. People take time and pause to reevaluate their values and what's important to them. And if they do that and they find that they want to spend more time with their family and they want to live in Dallas, they don't want to move back to Rochester.

1:06:17 That's gonna look that's gonna look like they're not on the fast track anymore. They're not gonna be a hypo, they're not gonna be a level one, they're not gonna be the top right quadrant of the nine box grid, you know, they're not gonna be the the the de facto incumbent to the VP and the SVP. So maybe they're okay with that. Maybe they're okay with that. You mentioned Conman, he's the guy that came up with the seventy thousand dollar per year kind of the famous study that that's all you necessarily need. So maybe we are I hope I think some of us will take this time to realize that.

1:06:47 I'm okay with a little less and a little bit more. Nature Tom with my family. Time to invest in my physical health. And for me, that means a longer, more intentional life. That's that's some people. Yeah, I'm all for that.

1:07:00 As long as it's done consciously. 'Cause I think what's happening is it's sort of unconscious for a lot of people. And that sounds. Yeah, and it's also a moment in time. We could be having this conversation in two thousand twenty one or two thousand twenty three and you know, the the the culture will have shifted again. And think of like junior people too. Like this whole work from home thing we could talk about for a long time, but like Two aspects I wanna dive into. One is government and how that's not a security violation. Like this isn't

1:07:27 A field day for me. I'm way out of my element. Oh, from what I used to like. Somebody talking about you like verifying your social insurance number at home or having access to data. It is always funny though when you talk into someone professional and you hear like a meow in the background or something. Yeah. Well, it's just gonna take an incident. And then once there's an incident, they're gonna nobody could have saw that coming. Well, I can see it coming right now. And by the way, if I was a foreign adversary I'd be like buying apartments or renting apartments next to key people because now I can get all the information over the phone, right? No, okay. But the the other thing is uh probably more applicable to everybody else. Uh like think of development, right? You hire a junior programmer. Junior programmer wants to become a senior programmer.

1:08:10 Not only do we onboard into company culture. But we we sort of like How we develop that person. is through these water coolers. It's like five minutes is somebody's time. It's yeah. Getting to know other people in the organization and and that it's invaluable and incalculable and priceless the amount of

1:08:28 Conversation. That when you're in a cafeteria at a company that was in person is not fully remote, and you cannot calculate how valuable it was to hear somebody in the line ahead of you that's in another functional department. talking about the project you think you're in charge of. It turns out that it's happening in a different silo. because the two vice presidents left the meeting from the CEO and both of them were in charge of it, and now we've got a huge replication and duplication of work and that kind of stuff is happening all the time. Never mind what I talked about before with the four S's that you need to have social connection at your job and you don't feel as tethered to the community of your work when you don't meet or see anybody.

1:09:04 Ever. Period. Now if Jason Free was on here, he'd probably disagree. So Toby Luck was on here, he'd probably disagree. That's my view, Neil Passerich is landing on the Elon Musk side of things. I I'm sort of on that side too, generally speaking. I actually think a hybrid approach

1:09:20 personally is the worst like kind of approach. I was just about to say, don't you think that's just like the office with three people lonely under a dim light in the corner? Like that's the worst. And I I think it it doesn't Yeah, you're not getting any of the benefits of fully remote or being in the office. You're getting the worst. And it was the first uh in person event they'd had, and they were ecstatic. But there were lineups.

1:09:47 In the cafeteria. Yeah. They said, Can you believe there's a lineup in the cafeteria again? Yeah, that's awesome. It's it's Now the food is fresher. Now the Atmosphere is livelier. Now there's a live speech.

1:10:00 As opposed to everyone, you know, entering stuff in the Zoom chat. Okay. Maybe we're aging ourselves here, I don't know. Well as silly as it sounds, you know, I I I was hoping people would recognize that work fulfills a we need to work.

1:10:15 Right, we need to contribute to society, we need to contribute to Our families. Um I believe that and I believe without that. There's an element of life that's missing. And I feel like we miss a part of that aspect of it if we

1:10:29 If we're not in the office with people. And a lot of people right now, Shane, are in that zone where they're trying to evaluate whether this opportunity that they're doing today is as good or better than the one that they have that they're considering. And for those people, I would say you need to do two tests. You need to do the deathbed test. And you did the plan B test. If you were considering like I was in 2016 after I'd worked 10 years at Walmart, eight of which were overlapping with writing and speaking and stuff on the side, I was like, Do I want to lean into this full time? It's

1:10:58 Number one deathbed test. Which will I regret not doing more on my deathbed? Right. Probably heard of the five greatest regrets of the dying. Nurse Bronnie Ware, palliative care care nurse, has you know summarized that 2000 people dying the number one regret of the dying is I wish I lived a life.

1:11:14 That I wanted to. True to myself. Not the one that other people wanted me to. So the first thing is what will you regret not doing more? Right for me at the time in two thousand sixteen, it was like I think I'll regret not leaning into this this writer thing. Let's give it a shot. And the second thing is plan B. Okay, if it fails. This is a risk tolerance question. You're the investor here. It's like, if it feels, what are you gonna do?

1:11:35 Just It's It's maybe related to stoicism a little bit, like mentally picture your worst case scenario and dis and declare. your comfort level with that. For me at that time, I'll use my personal example, I thought

1:11:46 Well I guess I'll have to knock on Walmart's door again. Or you know Check around if anybody else wants uh someone to run leadership development. Could I do that? Would I be comfortable doing that? Yeah, I could. And so if you can wrap your mind around that.

1:11:59 Depending on your risk tolerance. If you're like I I I I burn the bolts and I'm okay, fine. But for me East Indian culture. Always have a day job. You need to have benefits. I already failed by not being a doctor. Hey, for me

1:12:12 It's like I I wanted to have a plan B in hand in my mental Pocket. before I made that late. If you can do those two tests, FIT test and plan B test, I think you're ready to make the decision.

1:12:22 Why do you think we're so I mean, this gets into mimetic desire a bit. But like why is it we're letting other people dictate the scoreboard of Our lives. Yeah, so Mm.

1:12:36 I started a blog in two thousand and eight. called one thousand awesome things. I was going through a divorce and the loss of my best friend and I Could feel That processing my emotions Through a positive oriented blog where I was counting down one awesome thing a day. I mean, it's stuff I'm still writing about 15 years later, the new book, Our Book of Awesome, is literally a bunch of awesome things. I thought this is gonna feel good. This is good for me, I feel satisfaction when I do it, I post every single one at 1201 AM. But then, Shane, back in 2008 when you got a WordPress.

1:13:05 Press blog, they all had a stats counter in the top right corner. You remember blog stats counters? Right? It's the equivalent of the ol what what what follower counts are now on social media. So for those that don't know what I'm talking about, The blog said how many hits it had, right? Well, I started getting addicted to that. Can I get 50,000? Could I get A million.

1:13:24 Can I get Fifty million. Can I turn this thing into Book. Well, it's on the bestseller list. There's a there's an extrinsic motivator right there, a best seller list used to come out once a week, now it comes out every hour on Amazon for the ranking. Like we're so what we've done is ratcheted it up. Well, could I make it a bestseller for two weeks? What about 10 weeks? What about fifty weeks? What about a hundred weeks? And so I became addicted to the extrinsic motivators and I lost. My intrinsic

1:13:46 Desire to write. In the first place. And guess what the research says? There's wonderful research from Teresa M. He's at Howard Business School. She's done research at Brandeis University, Edward Dessie. Um

1:13:57 It turns out that actually is what happens. And actually is what happens when we are When we are exposed to extrinsic motivators, they literally hide the intrinsic motivators in our brain. They asked the groups of 11 year old girls, two groups, one group, Shane, they said, Hey, could you teach her? Eight year old girls are

1:14:16 piano for half an hour? You will experience The joy. of teaching. You will have the pleasure of

1:14:23 Someone learning. Because of you. And they tell the other group We're gonna give you two tickets to the movies. If you do it for half an hour.

1:14:32 When they evaluated it afterwards, the ones that were given the extrinsic motivator of the tickets to the movies A stopped right at thirty minutes. To our point earlier, but a little bit of the above and beyond. They stopped here at thirty minutes. They were more frustrated with it, they had less satisfaction with it, and the people learned less from it. Intrinsic motivators are what we need to value and prioritize, and it's increasingly difficult. So

1:14:55 Part of the key to being happy is to constantly ensure that you are doing it for you. A key question to ask yourself in whatever work you're doing, I don't just want to confine this to like corporate work is Would I do this for free? Doesn't mean you should do it for free. But would you do it for free? Asking yourself that genuine question. If the answer is yes, it probably

1:15:14 Mien That you have some burning intrinsic motivation inside of it. So me right now, who was addicted to extrinsic motors before, I won't say I won't come clean and say I'm I'm perfectly fixed. But when I launched three books in two thousand eighteen, my podcast, I'm like, Okay

1:15:31 Uh Milala who's working for me? I'm like Don't give me the password to Lib Sin. Right, that's where the stats are held. Don't don't give me the pa if I ask you for it. Don't tell me.

1:15:40 I don't want to know the password. Right? Let me make this a purpose oriented goal. I want to read a thousand formative books for Fifine years, right? I don't want to get obsessed. with the stats. I don't wanna see them.

1:15:52 I don't wanna get obsessed with them because I'm gonna always lose. I'll always be a failure. It'll be a fraction of the knowledge project forever. Right. And no, but you will look at it and you'll say, oh, I'm a fraction person, X or Y, or whatever. Right. I'm just saying extrinsically motivated rankings algorithms, they make you feel like you're a loser all the time. The internet is a story that you stink. Always.

1:16:14 No matter how good our lunch is. That we eat. Today. Someone's at a lobster buffet in the mouth thieves. on the internet. And so the extrinsic motivator you're talking about control is we're letting them control us because they're fed to us all the time.

1:16:27 Follower accounts, likes. Comments. You're always Never. As much as the next guy.

1:16:35 Yeah, your reference group always changes, so you're never at the you're you're always above somebody. Right. Exactly. But why is it? And this this sort of relates to life in general, right?

1:16:48 Why is it that we let things That we can't control. Control us. You read a book. You don't control if it goes on to sell a million copies or ten million copies. Or five copies. Or five copies. You wrote the book.

1:17:04 Like control five. Well the work is done, sister. The work is done. Yeah. Right? Pandemic. Yeah. Another example. I don't control the government response. I don't control so much of this. And yet we let that control our happiness, our mindset, our motivation.

1:17:24 Yeah. Well, we're we're animals, man. We got an amygdala in our brain looking for well you know, looking for palms all everywhere all the time. We've been talking about this since like Marcus Aurelius probably like A thousand years before that. That's not that much evolution though. You know. Like

1:17:40 We've got three million years of evolutionary history baked into the brains that we have, probably a lot more than that if you think about dinosaurs being the same kind of four arms and legs on a thick body, like we we've got the same parts still. And those things will always be looking for problems. And sometimes when you look for problems, that's all you see. So the extrinsic motivators are fed to us more and more because they know that we're addicted to them. And we have to design our lives so that we Look, you were doing a great job of this. We're sitting in front of a bookshelf. Period.

1:18:06 Books fifty seven percent of Americans read zero books last year. You're sitting in front of a bookshelf. I don't know how many of these you read, but even if it's a fraction of them, you're way ahead. Fifty seven percent of people read nine. You're on a podcast called The Knowledge Project, which means you're spending your time. Finding people to interview.

1:18:22 Researching, I'm assuming, reading their books. You know, researching stuff they've written and asking them the questions you want to. And then you're writing a blog, FS.blog, which is your Your You're essentially exploring life. Intentional living.

1:18:36 Through Mental models. So you have already designed a life where you can take uh a random morning and spend time at the boys and girls club breakfast. You know, and then hang out on a nice com comfy chair and sort of talk about how the world is. You you've designed that for yourself. You have created that for yourself. You've gone done that from corporate work and you've done that and you're a very young person.

1:18:58 To done that. So you have Taken some of these Things that come into our lives, and you've just been conscious of them, you've been aware of them, and you have design your life around them. And everybody can do that. Everybody can decide that they want to cancel the newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and they should. Everybody should decide to unsubscribe from five emails tonight.

1:19:20 And they should. Everybody gets to decide if they want tax alerts and notifications enabled on their phone and they want the news scroll on the side of their phone every day. And they should. Everyone gets to decide where they plug their phone in. You know, 95% of people right now are plugging in with arms reach of themselves. So they wake up in the morning, the first thing they see is their phone that jostling themselves. Senseless. Oh Neil, I can't get rid of it. It's my alarm clock. Have you heard of Walmart?

1:19:43 It's ten bucks, man! Get an alarm clock! Oh well I'm very busy. I I I uh My you know, my sister could call me at three AM, I'm a very important person to work. No, you're not. No one's calling you at 3 a.m. And if they are, you get a landline, the company will say, Thank you for your 10 bucks a month. No one wants one of these things anymore. You give that part number to your five emergency people, your sister, the boss, the director of port, the person that you're taking care of, the elderly parent, whatever, and you give that number when you pay your$120 bill per month.

1:20:13 240 if you live in Canada, you say, I'm paying for the privilege of not living a life where I'm jostle senseless by my phone before I go to bed, on my phone when I wake up in the morning. So part of what we're talking about here is just Taking steps to become aware of how our behavior is being led into these intrinsically motivated traps. And just taking baby steps to Design our behavior around them. And we can do that.

1:20:37 And we should do that. 'Cause it leads to a happier life. I think it does. Uh I also think that there's like a social signal thing. When you I watch parents on their phone, like around their kids at the par.

1:20:51 You know, it's like they're signaling to other parents that they're busy and they're important and they need to do something, but they're not present in the moment with their kids. And if you If you solve the maze backwards, which I'm a fan of, right, how do I let other people's hindsight become my foresight. Then you realize

1:21:09 Living a life true to yourself. What were the other ones? The other four, right? Spending time with family. Being present. That's part of it. So like we're

1:21:19 we're automatically opting out of that the minute we pick up our phone when we're with our kids. And nobody's perfect by any stretch at this. Yeah. But but like even having the phone within reach, like that's the thing. I was just I don't have my phone on me. Well neither do I. It's it that's exact of course we're recording a podcast somewhere. No, but like a if I put a phone just right there on the table. Yeah. Do you feel like you're important at that moment? No, like unconsciously. You

1:21:47 Interpret this as like, oh well, if that rings, I'm not important. Do you know that study that was done in Italy? Yeah. Well, they put two group two strangers in rooms together. So say we didn't know each other, we're in a room similar to this. And they had test group A. And in test group A they put a notepad and a Pencil in between them and they asked

1:22:07 After ten minutes for the people that Go outside and tell the researchers how Good was the rapport. uh and kinship or relationship between you and that stranger you spent ten minutes with. Yeah. And then they had test group B and they put a a cell phone in between them. And it was not the cell phone of either person. It was not your phone or my phone. It was a dummy prop. It was just my phone.

1:22:28 But the presence of that physical device that nobody could actually touch or do anything with'cause it wasn't even their phone. Dramatically reduce the scores on the connection, the kinship, the relationship. When you have to talk to the person beside you on the airplane. Now you get up at the end of the fight, you're like I don't even know. There was someone there, as I was tethered in as soon as I sat down.

1:22:49 And so the presence of a device, to your point. It's actually I don't know if it's social cycles, but I'm thinking It's certainly disabling our connection. And The reason it's doing that

1:22:59 It's because what that device represents. And I'm borrowing the metaphor from uh brilliant Lori Santos here. It represents a wheelbarrow beside you, full of every movie that's ever been filmed, every song that's ever been sung, every letter you've ever written, every photo you've ever taken, every uh letter from every friend sitting beside you at the same time. as whatever you're trying to do and nothing. is as important as all of that.

1:23:22 Yeah. How do you compete with that? So you don't bring the thing. So you give your phone to your wife Leslie on Friday night at five and you say, Don't give this back to me till Sunday when I gotta set my fantasy football lineup. And at least then I guarantee forty eight hours. of no device in my In my presence.

1:23:38 And it's about the location of your charger. I say this thing about ninety five percent of people inside their phone. Not because I'm making that up, but because when I speak to audiences and I say, put up your hand if you sleep within arms length of yourself. And I'm telling you, Shane, 95% of people's hands are up. That charger should live in your Furnace room. The dimmest?

1:23:57 Cobby. room of your house so that you add a twenty second Frictional staff. To getting it. So that eleven

1:24:07 Fifteen. When your resilience is low physiologically, your decision making energy is spent, and you have the brilliant idea to send your direct report a nasty email. You don't. 'Cause we've all done it. And you feel terrible the next morning.

1:24:21 But you just don't want to take those twenty steps. So you don't do it. And so you create that little sense of friction and now you're going to bed in a better state. I was talking with somebody last week who said that um with back to school they made their kids

1:24:36 For their phone. In the kitchen. They're not allowed to take it to their bedroom. Yeah. And then they started doing the same thing. Yeah. 'Cause they didn't want to be a hypocrite, right? You have teenagers, you get Pointed out all the hypocrisy.

1:24:48 And they said they slept better. Yeah. And I was like, Are you like for real on that? Like How do you know you And they were like, I feel better in the morning. I feel Менець небор'ска фо кід, а Самомер тем. She's got them devices.

1:25:06 Uh however they're Wi Fi only. Yeah, they don't have data. And she unplugs her router. Yeah. Every night. Yeah, yeah. At ten. So everyone's internet Yeah. You know.

1:25:18 And you know, there's a famous series of Will Farrell commercials that anybody could Google on YouTube. I highly recommend them. They're called Device Free Dinner. He did the series of spots for the website, which is another great website called Common Sense Media. Don't know if you know it's like the way I check to see if every book or movie that whatever my kids want to watch is like age appropriate or not. So it's a really wonderful service if you don't know it. And if you have kids and you're wondering if they should read Harry Potter five at age seven or whatever it is. Um

1:25:44 He did a series of commercials where he plays the role of the dad. And he's like, you know, like, like, like, like, like this one turns my face into a rabbit. And you know, the family's just staring around at him like, who the hell is this guy? Yeah. But we laugh at that'cause we recognize ourselves and It's hard. Like it's hard balancing things, especially uh

1:26:06 You know, in some ways for you and I where work and life bleed together. In a way that is uh distinct from a lot of people, drives a lot of people nuts. Well,'cause I work seven days a week. But it don't work.

1:26:19 Eight hours a day every day. But like I'll work on the weekend. Oh one. Right, so the everything's And so everything blends together and it's sort of It works for me. I don't I don't find it a problem, but sometimes I do have to like step out of

1:26:35 a dinner and take a call or I don't try to orchestrate my life that way, but just be cognizant of the issues of cell phone addiction. Let's just be aware of it. We're not talking about it like it's a problem. Look, we don't realize that everyone's addicted to coffee because everyone's addicted to coffee. See what I'm saying? There's lineups at every coffee place. It looks like no one's addicted. It's not it's not that big of an addiction. Same with sugar or same, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But with cell phones. There's a problem. They all start with the letter P. The first one, absolutely, we've been talking about is psychological. We compare our director's cut life with everybody else's greatest hits. You're never as good as when I was in high school, same as when you were in high school. You could be the best basketball player on your team. You could see that guy, and you just knew if you took a hundred free throws in your driveway, you could probably be as good as that guy. Now there's a guy on YouTube.

1:27:20 throwing baskets behind his back from half court with the blindfold on. Yeah. You know, I used to think I was good at Mario Brothers, so I saw someone beat it on YouTube in six minutes. The whole game. Yeah. Right? You see what I'm saying? So psychologically you're always inferior. We are We're talking about resilience in kids. Well, one of the things we're doing is saying that they can never be good enough. This is just the nature of it.

1:27:39 Right, psychological. Second one is Productivity. There's reports to say we talked about this. Thirty one percent of our time on our phones is bookmark prioritizing and switching. The devices are Need to be turned into

1:27:50 Pull devices, not push devices. You get to control how the apps are set up, what's on the front page. You know, some basic tenants are even just turning your screen to black and white, mixing your apps up so that it's not uh, you know, compulsively checking the buttons, right? The way that we kind of end up into these little habits. And then the third one I'll say is Physical. Research from Australia shows that if you expose your brain to bright screens within two hours, I'm sorry to say this, within two hours of bedtime, your brain does not produce enough melatonin overnight.

1:28:18 That would be the sleep hormone responsible for it giving you a deep Restful. Sleep. Which may be why we're all waking up at like two or three AM after three hours of sleep. And having a hard time going back to the street. And you know what they're actually also finding, Shane, is that the bright screen when it turns off gives you about an hour d jolt of extra energy. Because apparently evolutionary biologists are saying

1:28:39 When the sun went down, you needed to build the fire. You need to get the cave set up. So actually when the sun went down When the When the You know?

1:28:47 When the fancy football app goes off in today's power odds. You get an extra jolt of energy so en I noticed this. Because if I Mistakenly Look at my screen till right before bed. I'm lying in bed.

1:29:00 Like this is like I'm on You know. I'm like Ready to build up fire instead of the game. As opposed to

1:29:08 Falling into a Deep slumber. How do you balance that with Success. With ambition.

1:29:16 With Drive. So this is the story of my life, right? Like ambition versus contaminant is one thing I've been exploring through my life, through my work for years. One thing that's helped me, I will say. Is when I had this sudden insight. That the hurt locker

1:29:32 Do you remember this movie? Did you see that movie Jeremy? So the Hurtlocker won Best Picture. Right? It won best picture. Best picture of the year. Right, Catherine Bigelow, the Hurtlocker. And I looked it up. It was uh twenty five million at the box office. Мода самір.

1:29:48 Y no Fast and Furious Seven. had eight hundred million and it was not made for nothing. Right? It was not me for nothing. And I realized that Th there's different types of success at play here. Let's just be very clear about that up front. There's a sales type of success, and there is a

1:30:03 social type of success. And this by the way, this This metaphor holds. Every year. It's like you know, when Moonlight wins best picture. Uh Alvin and the Chipmunk the Squeakwell is making ten times more revenue at the box office. It holds in publishing as well, right? It's very rare. Look, Mark Manson's the first to say that when Suttle Art Not Giving a Fuck came out. Uh it wasn't covered.

1:30:23 It wasn't covered by anyone. It wasn't reviewed in the New York Times book review. It wasn't lauded by the critics. It wasn't So separate those two out. There's sales success, there's social success. Okay. Then the third one I will say is self.

1:30:38 Self success. Intrinsically motivated. Are you happy with what you did? And by the way, a lot of what you do in life. has no sales or social component. The deck you're building in your backyard, the cake you're baking for your niece's birthday, these aren't things you're trying to sell or things you're trying to necessarily get praise for. I think of those three

1:30:59 corners of a triangle. As the success Triangle are the three S's of success, and I think of them like an old school wobbleboard at the gym. Meaning I don't know if you remember those old boards, you have to try to balance on it.

1:31:12 Well, you can't get them all up at once. So One thing that helps me Yeah. Tone down my ambition a little bit.

1:31:21 Із чисто сидін в тайпа сус. I'm going for with each project I do. Okay. Book of Awesome? Going for sales.

1:31:32 It's not gonna be in the New York Times book review, I'm sorry to say, you know? That was we're going for we're trying to sell a million copies of this thing. Let's sign every book and every bookstores to every media, let's try to do whatever we can do. to get this thing out there. Okay? That's a that's a good sales. Three books, my podcast? That's off. That's that's me orienting myself towards something I wanna do. That's a life goal. I wanna

1:31:54 Talk to interesting people about their formative books, and I want to read those books in advance. I want to spend years of my life doing it. I don't think that's gonna ever You know, beat Joe Rogan on the charts. You know, and I have to remember that on the days and nights where I look at the one star review about my squeaky voice and I look at the ratings and I'm like I slipped off the top two hundred and arts. I can't even make the top of them.

1:32:18 Never mind the whole thing. I'm like Wait a minute, why am I doing this again? And so Be really clear about which type of success you want. And that model shape, I will argue, holds true for any type of project you take on.

1:32:32 Okay. You're a a marketing job? Well Sale success means your product is a hit flying off the shelf. Social success means

1:32:39 You're loved by your your peers, you get a performance review that's that's promoted, self successes Are you happy with it? Right. Uh if you're a teacher Right.

1:32:48 Sales success is promotability. To vice principal, to principal superintendent. Social successes is your work recognized, copied, or you're the teacher, other teachers learn from. Self Are you happy with it? So One thing that helps me.

1:33:02 Yeah. Tone down the contentment and ambition. Paradox a little bit is knowing and articulating to myself. Which one I'm going for. on which project I take on.

1:33:15 'Cause you're gonna have to revisit it when you're upset about the other ones you're not doing. So success in life is one thing. How do you compare projects where you have an aim? She sold a million copies. Of a bar.

1:33:27 Now your next book comes out, you're probably probably not gonna sell a million copies. A million puts you in like the top zero point zero zero one percent of all books ever published. I love a quote. by Diablo Cody. Who you may or may not know is the uh Former stripper who wrote the movie Juno. Which was nominated for Best Picture.

1:33:47 Right. that movie went to be nominated for Best Because it was her first movie. Right. And I mentioned the former stripper because she's got an incredible memo memoir about her exotic dancing days in Minnesota, which is a wonderful read, uh called Candy Girl. Just as an aside for people this far in the listen that want to book record, there you go. Um She was asked, Okay, Diablo Cody. Uh

1:34:08 How are you gonna top this? Your very first movie was nominated for Best. And she said The perfect answer. I'm not.

1:34:18 And the fact that I did it the first time absolves me from the need to ever worry about it again. How interesting. Opposite of what I would have thought. What would you have thought? That you'd try

1:34:34 You would try to create something that was more successful and in the process destroy the art. or reduce its impact. Well Mm-hmm. That would be what I would have thought. Well I I will also say that success in what how

1:34:50 Say you're going for the million books thing and you hit it, okay, which by the way is still a shock and surprise to me that my first book. uh it did so well it there was a lot of lucky bounces, there's a lot of uh uh you know people way out of my range that said this is a book you should read, et cetera, et cetera. Uh But

1:35:09 It has partially it's partially what enables me to have this conversation today. Because I'm now only writing what I want to write, and I'm only working on the projects I want to work on because I have taken that goal off the table. It's not longer something I'm actually actively striving towards. I therefore get to focus on the art. And there's a wonderful essay written by David Foster Wallace, who I know you're a fan of, because I can see string theory on the wall behind us. Uh all those essays about tennis, which is a wonderful book.

1:35:35 Uh both flesh or not, uh about Roger Federer is a is a doozy. And that essay actually opened the other book I want to recommend to people. Um, which is called Both Flesh or Not, and includes that essay, Nature of the Fun. What he says is

1:35:48 When you've achieved commercial success, your instinct is to try to follow it with further commercial success. That's why the Stroke second album sounds like is this it? Yeah. Right. Right. But actually what you're forgetting is that what made that thing successful in the first place was that you were actually only chasing fun. Yeah. You're actually chasing fun. So if you wanna make uh Hail to the Thief

1:36:11 It's not quite as good as like a computer. So it's not gonna do as well. But if you make kid A. Well you're having fun, there's no guitars of things released online, like what a wild trip that was. Does it sell as much as okay computer?

1:36:24 Probably not. Bye. It's damn good listen. Because it's something so different. And so I think.

1:36:32 Your answer to how you follow up success is actually. Root in that essay. Which is you go back to fun. You listen to Diablo Cody, recognize you don't have to chase that goal anymore, and just lean into the fun. And guess what the ironic part about that is, Shane? That's more likely to cause future success.

1:36:49 It sounds so simple, I bet you that's hard to do. Absolutely. Everything we're talking about is hard to do. Look, the goal's not to be perfect. The goal is to be better than before. With all of the stuff we're talking about today, these are models, these are systems, these are tools, these are happy habits. Yeah. If you just take one Yeah. Thirty eight We've talked about

1:37:12 Then you've improved. You know, just one. Goal's not to be perfect, it's just to be better than before. Let's remember that above everything else here today. I wanna switch gears a bit. Uh for your fortieth birthday.

1:37:25 You this is a contrast, but like you went to a nude beach. I can hear your judgment and you don't know what Not for me. The social lures have been pop. So interesting. Well, I mean I've had body issues my whole life. Like taking off my shirt. Right. And running has been something I've actually built up to and like work towards. Uh How do you end up going on a nude piece? So I relate deeply to that. I relate deeply to body issues. I was the only brown kid in my class, I was the smallest kid in my class, I've got skinny wrists, I've got skinny uh ankles. I had thick Coke bottle glasses in a school where I was the only one of a different color, and no one else had glasses. Never mind, you know, the buck teeth and all that.

1:38:04 So I've had body issues my whole too, and you know what? I would guess most people watching or listening to this too. Can relate to that. Well I heard an old Brian Chesky quote, and I know you're a fan of his.

1:38:13 And he said that when they evaluated what actually created memorable experiences on vacation at Airbnb, so founder of and CEO of Airbnb was talking about. They did an analysis on what actually creates a memorable vocation. Well, it's when you do something inside your comfort zone, Shane. So I was like, wait a minute, I can just do that. Like

1:38:33 I can just do that without going on vacation. You could go on a vacation and sit in coffee shops and sit in a luxe resort and have no fond memories of your wonderful trip to Jackson Hole. Or you could stay in your hometown and go to somewhere you've never been before that feels like a big lurch. And you will remember it forever because you pushed yourself.

1:38:54 It's you're climbing up the cliff thing. Right? But but what was happen what was happening for us was it was a way to grow outside of our comfort zone and you wrestle with body issues completely when you are Make it in public. Um And

1:39:07 What I did that day was I collected ten smooth stones. From the beach. And I took them home as a way to kind of remember that experience, but also to create for myself. A rock clock. You've heard of the Long Mao Foundation.

1:39:22 You know about the ten thousand year clock that Bezos and the Long Mao Foundation are stabbing to the side of a mountain to dong every hundred years or whatever, to give us the idea and principle that what we're not living in isn't It we're living in a long now, we should be thinking in terms of you know big ten thousand year kinda epoch. Well for me The ten rocks represent a decade each of my life. They come from a

1:39:43 A day I did something. far outside my comfort zone, okay, so it sticks in my head. And I hope To live. Two one hundred and six.

1:39:51 Um I have a I have a Calendar entry for my wife's a hundred birthday when I'll be a hundred and six. So you know, March second, which is her birthday. That's the year that I'm a hundred and six is that's the day I plan to

1:40:05 you know eventually take that pill and end it off, right? But what am I saying? Ten rocks that represent ten декад. I keep four of the rocks at the front of my dresser. А ті

1:40:17 The other six rocks Six inches back. A clock. That I see every night before I go to bed.

1:40:24 I move one rock up every ten years. I I create the same metaphor that the Long Mouth Foundation is creating in a mountain, but I don't live near that mountain. I'll never hear that clock. And it's on my dresser. What is the power of that shame? No matter what happens in the day. Voilà. How high or how low it was.

1:40:44 No matter what. nasty email I got. What one star review I read. What person told me off? Whatever happens, no matter what. Well you look at the clock before bed, you're like It falls away in the face of a rock representing

1:41:00 the next ten years of your life. Yeah. It's certainly not that important when you zoom up to even a week probably or a month probably or a year probably. Certainly not. The rocks. So I use that rock as a visual clock on my dresser to glance at before I go to bed. And I look forward to the day six years from now when I move the next rock forward.

1:41:20 Right? Because then I can actually pause and say Hey, what really mattered from the last ten years that I'm still thinking about right now? Probably three things. I think we're we're on the cusp. Just to take this as a side track for a second.

1:41:33 of a huge uh jump in life expectancy. Yes. So I think you're a hundred and six, like you but be a hundred and twenty six by the time. You're gonna need more rocks. Even a hundred look my my father right now, as we record, is seventy seven. He was born in nineteen forty four in Amritsar, India. Yeah with Probably a life spend in the fifties and sixties. So he's living ten, twenty, thirty years past his expected life spent from the time of his birth and the places of his of his birth. Right.

1:42:03 And uh so yeah, when I right now life expectancy is Thirty thousand days. That's North American life expenses. Twenty five thousand days globally, by the way, which is sixty eight. Thirty thousand days from North America, which is eighty three. So it's like We're living thirty thousand days today. If you want to work hard at it and you know, I listened to your podcast with David Sinclair, like you know, there's lots of ways we can invest in our longevity.

1:42:27 Health span, not not lifespan, right? Then yeah, it'd be wonderful.'Cause we're only here once and it's nice to, you know Yeah. Take as much, give as much, live as much, and and have as rich and fulfilling and as giving of a life as possible. So That's by the way an argument towards having more kids.

1:42:44 That's it's another thing that I people say, Why do you have so many kids? Right? People get ask me less Leslie all the time. We have four boys. They're like, Why you have so many kids? I say The percentage of my life that's the hard part. The diapers? The party training?

1:42:57 The crime? It's it's Reducing as a percentage of my total life. Yeah. You ask anyone what the pleasure the most pleasure parts are.

1:43:06 Of having kids? Oh. When they're you don't have to take care of them your whole life. You just get the stories and the big thick table at Thanksgiving, and you get the person giving you an idea that you haven't talked to, and then you get the Christmas cards and That percentage goes up. Yeah.

1:43:22 Because the number of years you have to take care of a child, yeah, maybe going up a little bit, but it's Not going up to thirty or forty or fifty years. If your life span goes up that much. You've just dramatically shifted the percentage. Coming back to the nude beach.

1:43:36 Yeah. This You should go. No, this is not for me. Um Yeah. Mm. But if you are you running with your shirt off?

1:43:47 I I yeah, I'm built up to this. This is But this podcast luckily is not about me. It's about you. Okay. So There's a good way of flipping this around, right? Um That takes a lot of confidence to do that. What's the relationship between confidence and Happiness. Yeah.

1:44:05 Right. Absolutely. And I think there is a relationship there. Absolutely. Um First, I just want to say for anyone that's wrestling with body issues like me and Shane, and probably most people, I would I think that's most people, Shane. I don't think it's out of their I I really highly want to recommend the picture book Bodies Are Cool by Tyler.

1:44:23 Better F E D E R It is. A wonderful book for all ages we read to our kids probably once a week. So there's a just a book rec along body ish is just beautiful. Confidence.

1:44:35 Takes confidence to to go to a new beach. Uh or maybe not caring, right? But but here's the thing. I think that life is a river. It's a river, and there's rapids in it, and confidence gives you a way to paddle through. If you think about it like a two by two matrix. Um

1:44:53 One axis, that's called the bottom axis, is your opinion of yourself. Low or high. The uh Mm. That's the X axis. The y axis is

1:45:01 Uh On the left side, and it's uh your opinion of others. It can be low or high as well. Well, if you're in the bottom left quadrant chain, and we are all in all of these quadrants some of the time, I just want to say that up front, it's not like you just live in one place. If you're low opinion of yourself and your low opinion of others, you're in the bottom left quadrant, and you would be, I would declare you to be

1:45:23 Cynical. Cynical. Yeah. On his last episode of the Tonight Show, Conan O'Brien said, Please, I implore you, do not be cynical. It's my least favorite characteristic, and he ended the show. On that note. Cynicism.

1:45:35 You know? Don't think great of yourself, don't think great of other people. And we've all been there sometimes. Now what if you think you're awesome? Right? High opinion of self, bottom right.

1:45:45 But you don't think everyone else is that good. Low opinion of others. Arrogant. That would be arrogant. Right? We've Probably all caught ourselves thinking that way sometimes.

1:45:55 What if you're the opposite? You think everyone else is great? We've touched on this a few times in this conversation. But you think you stink. Yeah. High opinion of others, low opinion of yourself. Well, that would be insecure. And again we're all

1:46:08 When you get back a group photo, what do you do? You look at the picture of you and you're like, Oh my God, look at my hair. Oh my gosh. Double chin. My double chin. Everybody else looks great. And they're all like Oh sorry, I didn't notice your double chin, I've been looking at I was looking at my my fat thigh. Nobody cares. I was looking at the their their that that's insecurity and we've all been there too. Well, what is confidence? My definition is a high opinion of yourself and a high opinion of others. So It may or may not take a trip to a nude beach to figure this out.

1:46:38 But We're all beautiful. Slash Rawly. We're all beautiful. We're all wondrous

1:46:45 Beautiful. Beings of love and energy who get to exist right here, right now, as animals that we've been for three million years. We came from the water. It's nice to go back to that water and remember that. And I think Holding on to that. Two by two in my head has been helpful for me when I've caught myself dashboard like.

1:47:04 Swerving between the other three boxes. I just carry with me how can I have a high opinion of myself? And a high opinion of others. I'm Prom.

1:47:13 As I'm sure a lot of us are. To those feelings of insecurity. Then they flip flop into feelings of of of uh arrogance. than they may be.

1:47:21 But the cynicism. If I can think great of myself. and great of other people, then I navigate life with more confidence. It helps me be more intentional when I'm choosing which of the three forms of success I want on the project. And therefore I'm living a more intentional and happy life because I'm deciding how it goes. I'm I'm being conscious.

1:47:39 Uh bits. It's just about Awareness at the end of the day. It's so easy to forget that Like we're fucking alive.

1:47:49 We're fucking alive. Like how incredible. How statistically improbable. How And we just can't take this for granted and we have to live our lives. How would you end this? I mean, we talked about a lot of negative stuff today.

1:48:05 A lot of positive stuff. Yeah. What's w what would you You put a billboard up, what do you want everybody to take away? Yeah. Yeah. First of all, I just want to say

1:48:16 Like You're great. Uh. questions. You questions. You're just like de The reason it's fun to have a rolling conversation with you is because you're just such a great conversationalist. Thank you for the opportunity and for the uh privilege of talking to you today in this wonderful space with these people recording us in

1:48:36 front of this beautiful community oriented towards learning. I really Don't take that lightly and I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. Very generous of you. Um I think that the three words I would plaster on the billboard are Remember the

1:48:50 Lottery. Remember the lottery because you know what? At the end of the day, we have to remember That we've already won. There are a hundred and fifteen billion People shame.

1:49:04 Who have ever lived In the world. If you're watching or listening to this right now, you're one of the eight billion people who are alive. Today. Which means

1:49:17 By de facto, a hundred and seven billion of the other people are no longer here. That's a one in fifteen lottery that you've already won. It means In other words, that fourteen out of every fifteen people Fourteen out of every 15 people will never see another sunset.

1:49:34 Yeah. They'll never have another bowl of ice cream. They'll never kiss their kids good night again. You won the lottery. You're already here.

1:49:42 If you happen to have a post secondary education of any kind. You're one of six percent of people in the world who does. It's a gift. To be educated. And if you don't when you're listening to this, you do. Cause I know you you have wonderful conversations gotta a ad nauseum on the show.

1:50:00 So you're it to get the gift of education is a whole other gift. If you make more than five thousand dollars a year. You're above the world average. If you happen to make more than fifty thousand, you're in the top zero point zero five percent. You know, we talk about the one percent like they're other people. No, they're us.

1:50:17 We are. We're lucky. And if you happen to live in a country where you Trust the water that comes out of your taps. where you feel safe when you walk out your front door, where you can marry who you want or live where you're pleased. You know that collective set of freedoms is rare. If you happen to be and I'm guessing the majority of the people

1:50:35 listening man and I know not everybody is, so I wanna be careful, but I wanna just say Keep going down that opportunity curve. So one in fifteen chance that you're alive. It's a six out of a hundred chance that you ha might have an education. You know?

1:50:48 You're in the top one percent if you're making over X dollars a year. And we keep going down that curve, we're lucky to be here in the entire universe that we've inspected as far as we can with as many cameras we can point in every distant direction with shutters that we can open for a year and come back with pictures and galaxies and radio transmissions. This is the only place we've ever found in the entire universe where Life can exist. And we're happen to be alive at a day and an age where we can talk. where we can interact and we can communicate with each other across time, across distance, across psychologies and spaces and cultures and languages. You and I could be talking right now, and some of it could be watching this in Urdu, and we could have been dead forever.

1:51:29 hundred years and it would still be going because we get to be a lot today. Let's remember the lottery chain and no matter what else. Let's remember. Well, we've already won. That's a perfect way to end this. I think uh I'm super

1:51:44 Grateful. That we might. I think I won the lottery when we met. Thanks. You're very sweet.

1:51:51 Thank you for the opportunity. It's been a wonderful chat. I really appreciate it. Thanks and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes transcripts and more go to fs.blog slash podcast or just Google the Knowledge Project. Recently, I've started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview after the interview.

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1:52:46 The Fernand Street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking. turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate. Sharpen your decision making. and set yourself up for unparalleled success.

1:53:03 Learn more at fs.blog slash clear. Until next time.

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