Best of 2023: Conversations of the Year

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/6753ea9dfe59e023

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The final episode of the Knowledge Project in 2023 is a collection of some of the best insights from the show this year.
Not only can these serve as a reminder of some of the episodes and lessons you listened to this year, but they can set you up for an incredible 24.
You'll hear from Jack Cornfield as he discusses the power of intention.
Caroline Coughlin will teach you the strategies for becoming a better listener.
Erin Dign will discuss the power of feedback and how it can affect your job.
and Jim Dethmer will explore the four pillars of integrity.
Ravi Gupta will explain how to face the realities of life.
Kevin Kelly will teach you why the best strategy for success is not to be the best.
But to be the only
And the importance of having deadlines.
Julie Gerner will give you a unique strategy for taking responsibility and focus on the next steps when things go wrong.
Frank Slootman will explain.
What it takes to build trust in a large organization, and finally
Giovalianti will
Dive deep into something I've been thinking a lot about since we recorded the conversation a few months ago.
And I know a lot of people ask
When do I quit and when do I double down?
Thank you for listening and learning with us this past year. Together we're gonna make twenty twenty four even better.
Let's start with episode one fifty six.
Jack Hornfield.
It's time.
To listen.
And learn.
Uh-huh.
Intention.
Is
Incredibly powerful for us.
And it's said in the
Buddhist teachings that intention
Is also
The basis of
Karma.
Or cause and effect.
That
Um, the state behind your action
Matters.
As well as the action itself.
So I'll give an example.
Suppose you pull out of your driveway
And you drive through the fence of the
House next door crashed through it and
you know, into their living room.
Now suppose it happened that
That was the neighbor who cut down all the trees you loved on the property line.
You know, and shot at your dog and did a whole bunch of
horrible things and you just were so enraged that
one morning you they did one more thing and you couldn't take it and you just
Crashed your car through
That will make a certain karma and
The blue lights will come and you'll have to deal with all of the
consequences of what you did.
Suppose instead your accelerator pedal stuck.
So the exact same thing happens. You get in your car and you pull out and then it crashes through the fence into the house.
So the outside no one could see anything different.
Right.
But your intention was entirely different.
It was an accident.
You know, and the person comes out Furious and you say my scolarator.
pedal stuck and they might still be furious and you have to deal with insurance and things.
But there will be entirely different consequences.
Because the intention was different.
So it becomes really
Powerful
To start to pay attention.
to our intentions and saying our intentions deliberately.
And also of course it's important then to notice the
The impact or the consequences.'Cause you could have good intentions and
still out of them.
There could be
A bad impact.
So you need to notice that.
But one of the beautiful things that mindfulness
Training.
Invites
is the setting of deliberate intention. And it can be inwardly.
Or it can be outwardly.
Whether it's before an athletic game as you were talking about, or whether it's a business meeting or it's
You know, in education or whatever happens to be
What's our intention?
And setting intention starts to steer everything.
There's something in
That's quite traditional in the kind of training that I did.
Uh in which you said
These long term vows, sometimes they're called Bodhisattva vows, a bodhisattva is
Simply somebody who's committed to the well being of everyone.
The Dalai Lama wakes up in the morning and
Says this.
Prayer.
May I be uh
Food for the hungry and medicine for the sick.
May I be a resting place for the weary and a lamp.
Uh for those in darkness may I be a boat.
bridge a raft for those to cross the flood, and may I do so.
To benefit all beings.
For as long as time and space exists. I'm
Some little pesky little intention like that, right?
Actually kind of magnificent.
You're invited to quiet your mind.
and to set your own best intention.
If you were it's like setting the compass of the heart.
If you were to set an intention.
Of what really matters to you most.
This is called long term intention.
Almost like a vow.
This is what matters and this is how I want to live.
It becomes a touchstone for you.
I mean it can be as simple as I vow to be kind.
Or vow to live.
with more wakefulness and attentiveness to myself and others, or with more respect. Be that simple.
And then when you get to place of struggle
Things are confusing.
You take a pause here and you say
What's my best intention?
What was that?
And it shines a light and it gives you a new direction.
Or if you're in conflict in a conversation.
There you are.
Talking with your spouse, I'm here with my beloved Trudy.
Who is my
Wife and
partner and um a amazing, wonderful woman, but
It could happen on occasion that we have a little conflict, but
And if I take a pause.
A breath like that mindful
Pause.
I can also ask myself what's my
Best intention.
Or my highest intention.
And then consciousness changes.
And instead of
Proving how right I was, which I certainly enjoy doing in certain moments, you know.
I remember what's my best intention.
Well my intention.
Fundamentally isn't tension.
To connect, to be kind.
That we live.
With love.
Respect.
And I feel that.
What's my best intention?
And my whole tone of voice changes.
'Cause I could say what did you mean?
And it you know, it fuels an argument.
Or I could say.
What did you mean?
I want to understand.
In that s that same phrase.
But it shifts from
Blame
To interest and care. Is that what it means to set an intention?
This is what matters and
Uh this is the way that I want to live.
And then how often
should be consciously
Evoke those intentions.
when we're not in it in a moment. Like should we just wake up and and think these? Should we
How do you think about that?
I I don't want to make
people even think that there's some kind of
cookie cutter, spiritual, okay, you should do your yoga and eat tofu and
Set the tension to good intention every hour and stuff.
It's not like that.
You you point to it quite.
Beautiful.
In moments of difficulty or conflict.
Taking a pause and asking what's my best or highest intention.
Shifts your state of consciousness.
Periodically, whether it's the start of the day or a week or some new venture or
Some new adventure.
It can be helpful to reflect on
You know, what's your best intention?
But it's really organic.
In a way I what I want to say is
What works for you?
We're sort of part of this.
Always on go go go culture.
Uh we're busy.
Uh our minds are busy.
There's always something we're thinking about that is is sort of not the present moment, right? The grocery list, the kids need to be picked up. There's
A million projects at work. I have to text this person back. I need to email this person.
And we're striving, right? We're striving for
Uh.
Either if we're if we're conscious, we're striving for things that we want to pursue.
And if we're unconscious, I I feel like we're striving for things that other people
want us to pursue.
So we're playing life by somebody else's scorecards.
But the striving
Individually.
My
uh be detrimental to us.
But it also pushes us forward as a society. So I see sort of like pros and cons to it. What ways does this striving sort of help us and in what ways does it hurt us?
So let me ask you
Again, now we're now we're
Back on the basketball court.
You know, where you want to win the game or
Now we're
in the terrain of running a business or
Teaching a class or something like that.
Have you had the experience of being quite engaged in
So that you're devoted to something and putting your
Best energy in it.
Without
The energy of
Tension of grasping and striving.
As much as being engaged.
In the present for its own sake.
And if you have, what did that feel like?
I mean, it feels great, right? Because it j it feels like this feels like this conversation, right? One of the reasons that we book three hours.
Um
is because then there's no time pressure. There's no you're not thinking about
Oh, I only have an hour, I gotta fit all this in. And so it's just I am here in this moment for this length of time.
And it it all it never goes three hours, or very rarely, but
I find that that frees me to be more focused in the moment, where if it's an hour
It actually is detrimental to me being in that moment and being present.
All right, so here you are in the supermarket. You got your list.
And not only is it your list, but there's other people
That you're close to that put their
Shit on the list.
Yeah. Right. And you if you get the right kind of laundry soap and the right kind of
Ice cream or whatever for the kids or whatever. I don't know w makes your list. But there you are.
You have a time constraint'cause you have to get back.
There's something, you know. Yeah. How are you gonna do it?
You could do it like
Creening through the eye.
Like a good New Yorker grabbing things pretty quickly.
Trying to get through.
You know
And at the same time think about all the other stuff that you have to get done when you get home.
All of that.
That's one one way you could do it.
The other you could actually enjoy I personally like shopping.
So uh it's a great thing in my marriage'cause my wife does it. So I'm I'm I'm I'm glad to do it.
Grocery shopping or other kind.
Um
But you could do it and have fun.
You could do it and I bet you have at certain points.
And say
You know, I'm now I'm shopping, let me enjoy this.
And it doesn't mean you're gonna be much slower. You're not gonna be the speed freak you c you know.
But uh yeah, let me let me
Feel steps and
Enjoy and be present and
Not try to work everything else out in my life. I'll I'll just
In one there's one Zen saying that says you know, when you
Sit just sit and when you eat, just eat.
You know, to just be where you are.
And you can practice this.
And you start to pay attention to what it's like when you do it in a gracious way.
Um and it doesn't mean you can't set a goal.
And it doesn't mean you can't give it your very best and that there are certain moments you need to really throw yourself into something.
But even that you can do it with a good spirit and with fun.
Rather than being afraid of how it's gonna turn out.
So this Zen teacher
Sung San Sunny McKorean Roshi that
Or a Zen Master that I studied with and so he was sitting in his
Zen center in Providence one morning.
Eating his breakfast and reading the morning paper.
And one of the students as as
As we are up at E students that we get.
Said, Hey, wait a second.
Didn't you say when you sit just sit and when you eat?
Just eat. What is this thing about
Eating and reading the paper.
And he looked up and he said.
When you eat and read.
Just eat and read.
But the idea of it is
Still an invitation.
To bring this quality of mindful presence
To actually be where you are more fully.
Because
Ninety percent of your thoughts are repeats.
Maybe more than that when you sit in meditation.
And you
kind of notice what's going on in your mind.
Yeah, it's a little bit like
Being stuck in
motel six at night with the shopping channel on or whatever, or some other channel.
It could be, you know, whatever your favorite channel is.
But it
Yeah.
They're they're not new.
Um and it's it's the brain and the mind.
reciting certain things and you can say, Thank you. I appreciate it. That's what mine's do.
And then you can tune into a deeper quality of being present there. You are in the supermarket.
Say all right, let me be here. I'm not gonna try and solve the problems of my life.
right now I'll I'll take my time to do it.
And then of course once in a while as you don't pay attention to your thinking
Some good new intuition comes. I don't wanna put it down thought is uh
Is it great.
Servant. It's just not a good master.
You don't want to let it run your life. You want the quality presence.
And compassion.
to run your life and thoughts to serve that.
From episode one fifty seven, Carolyn Coughlin.
Listening is something a a few people have told me that you're extraordinarily good at, I suspect.
That's because you you listen below the surface, uh, and to the meaning and not just the words.
How would you teach
uh your kids
to become better listeners. How do you teach adults to become better listeners?
I've never had anybody ask me exactly that question before, Shane. Um
I I guess the first thing I would say is um that listening
Tends to be contagious.
So
How each of us listens
Does tend
Two
Wear off on other people.
So I've noticed
Again with my children.
that when I
Listen.
what we call I often call listening to when
uh which is to just make them wrong. Or like when I say, Oh that's not true, you you look great.
Or
Don't worry about that. You you know, you'll be fine.
It might feel good to me in the moment.
But
It's not.
kind of
They they don't feel heard.
That mind that when people feel
really, really, truly seen and heard.
It's one of the most extraordinary experiences.
Um that a person can have.
And so
Um
Just being around that and having the experience of being on the receiving end.
Uh that sort of deep listening where you feel truly seen.
And fully seen?
is itself a condition.
Mm.
for for learning to listen well.
On the other end of the spectrum.
There are very particular techniques.
That help.
People listen.
Well, for me the most important one
has been
really the training and under in and understanding of adult development theory.
Particularly the one
that um my colleagues and I
are most um have most depth in.
Which is the the subject object theory.
um that it was developed by Bob Keegan and others.
And
In the subject object theory,
you're what you're listening for, the stage of development
Is
defined by what is subject and what is object. And when I
when I say subject, what I mean is like what you're fused with. It's like the water you're swimming in.
the lens through which you see things but you don't actually even know you have a lens.
And
And what is object?
is what can be held out and examined.
And talked about
um like a a value is object if you can see how it's shaping.
What you do and don't do.
Um a value.
is subject if it's in visibly shaping.
What you do and don't do.
For example.
in the subject um this
growth edge coach training that um several of my colleagues and I run.
what we're teaching coaches to do is to listen
for what is subject and what is object.
in listening in that way.
You have to be listening below the surface of the story.
And every time you hear a word or a phrase wondering
Yeah.
I wonder what that person means by that.
And so it's amping up curiosity.
It's
really, really foregrounding
The fact that
We each of us never really knows what another person means.
And
Um so we can only be curious to find out.
I like the word curiosity.
When I think of listening, I think of
seeing the world through the other person's eyes. I don't have to agree with it. I want to see what they see and I want to understand what they understand.

uh I wanna come back to you in part because I have a child that does this is listening to win.
How as a parent
Do I
Coach, uh intervene, um
get this out of their system. How old is your
Child?
Thirteen.
it really does make a difference at their developmental stage.
how how you might go about this. And I'm struck by
By your uh phrase I think you said
Um
How do we
How do I we coach this out of them?
Yeah.
Maybe that's the wrong phrase, but it like drives me crazy. And he's super smart, which is like it amplifies it even more because often he's right.
So what is the hardest thing for you about that?
Uh, just the social nature of it, right? And how alienating it can be to um always be the person who um
is listening to win, right? So from his perspective it's
Uh I listened to what you said. There it I'm literal.
Right.
Uh and so
It's
It's incorrect and I'm going to do you he doesn't do it maliciously. He's like I'm gonna do you a favor and point out
Why you're incorrect.
And as a parent
Uh, I don't know what to do with this because
on one hand, on a literal sense he's right, on a social sense he's wrong.
uh and on a is this going to get you what you want in life perspective it's learning when to use that and when to not use that.
And I'm struggling with him in terms of how I I go about this. So you're worried.
That he will
Alienate people? Or is he alienating you?
Oh, he's not alienating me. I I I think I I'm worried that um it makes it harder for him to fit in or um be accepted by his people.
So I can hear that really that
That's her deep.
desire for him to not have
Yeah, for life not to be harder for him because
'Cause he is like he's playing on hard mode. Yeah, playing on hard mode. Yeah, he's playing on hard mode and he's already uh exceptionally bright.
Which in another
another way puts it on hard mode again, right? Uh in certain ways. So
Yeah, I hear so deeply this I mean, she's um
the the wanting for
To wanting to help somebody.
Change something that is making
In your view, making their life unnecessarily hard.
And
And a worrying.
that maybe tell me if this is right, but worrying that
Um
That if you don't help them change this.
It might just
become a more and more and more ingrained habit.
That continues to make their life hard.
Yeah, well I think that I as as he gets older, I mean my role changes too, right? And it changes to
Um, you're getting feedback. Are you seeing the feedback that you're getting? Are you instead of a direct
uh intervention like don't do this, do this. Uh, you know, it changes to
When you did this.
Did it help you get what you wanted?
In that moment.
Right, or is doing this going to get you what you want?
And that coaching after the fact is usually very helpful for him because he's like oh
I didn't mean it that way, or I shouldn't have done that or
I wasn't thinking when I said something.
And so it it prompts at least a little bit of reflection around it.
Which we all have as adults too, right? Like we all say stupid things on occasion or make a comment that we didn't intend to make and it has an impact on another person. And then we reflect on it and we we sort of that reflection codifies the learning a little bit. So it takes that experience.
And it translates that experience into a little bit of learning. And with enough reflection and enough experience and enough iteration, enough feedback, we sort of self correct as as adults most of the time.
And
I think you may have a

Answer already.
Um
So it sounds like what you're doing.
Is your
Creating the conditions.
For him to reflect.
on what the impact
of the way he's listening or not listening.
Um
Is is having.
Well, trying to when when you said the phrase listening to win and you were talking with your kids about not listening to win, I was like, Well, is there a way that
I can put a term around it or a label around it when I can just say you're listening to win.
And in that moment, that means this whole deeper conversation to him, which is like an instant prompt to correct or not correct, to nudge behavior.
uh towards a better
that he's choosing, right? Because I don't wanna make his behavior choices for him, but
Can I say something like that? And when you were saying it, that's what I thought you were doing. So uh this is where the question I didn't I didn't intend for this to be like a a longer question, but
Yeah. Yeah. Um
Uh so your question is is language
Um
Giving language to something, can that be a help?
i in in shifting the pattern. Well well it's sort of a a broader question. If we take it out of of the context of of me and my son, it it's sort of
Can we learn to listen to ourselves better, or does it take an outside person to sort of intervene and point out our blind spots?
And with my son, I'm trying to intervene or or sort of point out a blind spot. You're blind to this. It's happening. I'm pointing out that it's happening. It sounded like that's what you were doing with your kids, or maybe I'm misinterpreting when you said listening to win, which I love that phrase, by the way.

Um yeah. So accurate. Yeah. I they're
I guess my point is there are many things.
And want that you

can do.
To help somebody.
to notice what they're doing.
in term in this case in terms of how they're listening.
One is
uh reflecting back to them.
What you're seeing.
Um and the impact of that.
One is the invitation to invite them to reflect on it, the connection between what they're doing and
What they want.
Uh another is giving it language.
I I love hearing that listening to when is such a powerful phrase it it is because
It you can just say that.

It's like having a
um some sort of a reminder every time you do something, like a light goes off, if something flashes and it helps to cre
Create the connection.
between this thing that you're do a really instant connection
And
a reminder of what you're doing. So the idea of listening to win.
Absolutely. Can be a
It's super helpful.
in shifting a pattern because it it
it helps you to notice the pattern instantly each time it's coming up.
The other thing I noticed just about feedback, the importance of feedback, right? We often cannot see what we're doing.
And this is why we need company.
And we need company with whom we have trust.
Who will tell us?
Things that we can't see in ourselves.
Um this is this is one of the
poor conditions for being able to shift and change.
From episode one fifty eight, Erin Dingnan.
I mean feedback is the feedback essentially is tension, it's it's dynamism in the system, and and you can quite literally make the argument that life being alive
is about needing feedback.
Like everything you touch as you walk, as you listen, as you feel the air on your skin, as you communicate with others, as you run.
There are millions of points of feedback entering and leaving your brain.
And that is that is in essential. If you take away your senses, I've taken away your feedback.
And so you can't really operate in the world. And the same thing is true of a business.
And he used to um
use a bike as a metaphor. So he'd say
You know, you're if I put you on a bike and I say
lock the handlebars and go.
How far can you go with the handlebars locked?
And the answer is like
Not very far at all. If you ever try this, you fall over within like ten or fifteen feet.
Um, but instead if you can have the feedback from the road and the resistance and the gravity and then slightly turn
you know, left and right as you go. That's what you're actually doing when you go straight. You're you're kind of in a dance with
the information that you have
And as you move from point A to point B, you're gonna do some steering.
And so I think for organizations and for
people in teams and for people in relationships.
That's what we're
trying to do at our best is steer dynamically based on the feedback we're getting.
Based on what we value.
So based whatever your principles, whatever your values are, whatever you care about, whatever winning means to you, you're gonna steer in the direction of that based on the input that you get.
But if you live in a system that's far removed from feedback
then it's problematic, or even worse.
if the feedback you're getting is actually disconnected from reality. Because you were talking about
that that part of being disconnected from reality. And it can happen a different way where
The only feedback I get is from a boss.
The boss is telling me what they think is important.
That is not what the customer cares about.
It's not what the market cares about. And so I'm actually serving the wrong master, so to speak.
And end up end up getting stuck in a feedback loop that's inaccurate and inauthentic.
That's so fascinating. So in response I mean it it's
It's almost an argument for
private businesses over public ones where you can take a longer term h uh time horizon. It's very hard in a public company to do that. And the examples that all seem to come to mind all have a large
inside shareholder or uh founder still in charge of the organization. Yeah, they really do. It's a common pattern across I mean, we looked at sixty eight for the original book, Brave New Work and
Yeah, it's a strong pattern.
So with that said, what are the ways that um
organizations sabotage themselves from the inside. Essentially what tends to happen is that you have uh a few things that go on. The first thing is that
We tend to do what um what Jason Freed calls scarring on the first cut.
So when something doesn't work or goes wrong or there's an issue or somebody steals a laptop
The organization freaks out.
And it
immediately reacts with a policy or a procedure or a you know new security protocol or something. Just fire the person.
Exactly, right. Like just let it go and then move on. They don't wait for patterns, right? We don't wait for patterns generally. We just overreact and try to systematize everything. So that tends to that tends to sabotage us quite a bit.
The other thing that we do is that we uh we really get stuck
focusing on metrics that become
incentives that become ways to drive mismanagement.
And so there there are many different names for this law, but when a when a metric becomes a goal, it but it ceases to become a good metric.
And the idea is that we're we're optimizing for something that is a proxy for reality instead of reality itself. And again, we're we're putting our judgment down and just focusing on like
Click through rate.
Like I'm just I just have to hit this click through rate and I'll do whatever it takes to get it.
And so that that
sort of over optimization on
proxies or or abstract goals.
rather than absolute principle driven goals is really problematic.
And then I guess the last one is that we and I talk about this a ton, but we confuse
the context that we're operating in.
So I talk a lot in my work about the difference between complicated and complex.
And you've had some people on your show talk about complexity before as well.
But the the complicated context is like
the engine of a car or a watch. It is
predictable, there's cause and effect inside it, the parts fit in a way that if you're an expert, you kind of know how to take it apart and put it back together again. And so if there's a problem, it can be solved.
And it can be delivered and it can be, you know, working again, no problem. There's very high confidence in in solutioning in those areas.
But in a complex system, which would be like weather or traffic or gardens or six year olds
um they are dispositional. So they have an attitude, a way they're trending, but you can't fundamentally predict them
You can't be sure what'll happen if you try something.
And if you bring that complicated approach, the checklist, the Gantt chart, the
quarterly goals, the objectives, the management to that context, you tend to really struggle and fail.
And what we see is that is that organizations tend to just over index on everything must be complicated.
And so we're gonna treat everything that way.
And I routinely get brought into boardrooms with w with executives and teams that are like, look
We changed our company values and behaviors last year. We put them on coffee mugs and posters all over the world, all over the office, and nobody's behaving differently.
Why?
It's like, well, because you're yelling at the weather, right? You're yelling at the garden. That's not how these sorts of systems work.
If you have a manufacturing problem where you don't have a tolerance
Get that checklist out. If you have a broken engine, take it into the dealership.
But if you're trying to raise a human being or build a successful team
Or create a culture of trust.
that that playbook doesn't work. And so we sabotage ourselves by constantly bringing it to the table and being like the culture change initiative will be done in June of twenty twenty four and we will achieve these five metrics along the way. And that's our, you know, those are our pillars.
That's just all complicated talk brought to a complex party.
I have a heuristic and you can you can correct this'cause you've worked with more companies than I have, but the heuristic is the more a company expouses their values, uh, the less they actually value.
Yeah. Yeah, that is funny. Cause it it's sort of like uh yeah, when you're when you protest too much, right? That would be the Shakespeare of it, right? Thou doth protest too much when you when you're speaking constantly about these are our values and they're so important, integrity, integrity, integrity.
That that's a clue that something is going on that's not healthy. When in fact
good change and good patterns in culture are quite fluid.
And so it should be moving effortlessly and behaviorally through the culture through modeling and through storytelling.
Not through
You know, the poster with the five pillars.
It also works for people, right, on the outside, where the people who expouse happiness the most on social media are probably uh innerly the most unhappy.
Yeah, yeah. Anyone who says let me be honest with you.
Right. Just take a take a beat. Yes.
So one of the things you said there was sort of like
Um, we put procedures in place to lower variation to reduce mistakes,'cause we're trying to avoid mistakes at some level.
One thing I noticed
is that procedures eventually circumvent judgment.
And so what happens is um
If you follow the procedure, you never get in trouble.
Even if what you're doing is absolutely the wrong outcome and you should know it's gonna lead to the wrong outcome, you can just throw your hands up and be like, Well, I followed the procedure, so therefore I'm absolved of all accountability for exercising judgment.
Yeah, I mean that is one hundred percent uh what happens. And in fact I believe there's a German word for that.
Um
that that you are essentially saying it's
I'm compliant, so it's the bureaucracy's fault, it's the systems' fault.
And that's because you've given away
your right to think or your right to be accountable, your right to be responsible in the ecosystem. And it's a it's a lovely trade for most people because they're like, here, I just have to be compliant.
And then when things don't work, it's not my fault.
And it's you know, we have the term CYA cover your ass, uh, in business for a reason.
People do a lot of things to to CYA and
And it doesn't tend to lead to good outcomes.
So we have a lot of models that we use to
explain this to people and to try to get them thinking
about different ways of accomplishing the same goal.
But yeah, it's uh as soon as you get into process and compliance theater, everything goes downhill pretty quickly.
From episode one hundred sixty one, Jim Deathmer.
The four pillars of integrity I got from uh Katie Hendricks, Dr. Katie Hendricks.
It's been a cornerstone of my life for
thirty years or so. So let's begin by
Just
differentiating the way I want to speak about integrity from the way it normally gets talked about.
You know, when integrity shows up as a value inside of a company, for example.
And then you ask people, what does the value mean?
The normal thing that people say is do the right thing.
Which is beautiful.
I get that.
Great.
Integrity then tends to have more of a
Like a moral or an ethical.
Kind of orientation.
And the way I play with integrity
Yeah.
None of that.
But again, let's just do a little etymology here. So integrity.
From the root
Uh same route as integer.
So think of whole number.
Think of
wholeness. So that's where I like to go.
Think of wholeness.
So to me integrity is
Energetic
whom us.
Now
What that translates to very quickly for me is
Full.
aliveness
So when I am in integrity, I am energetically whole.
I am fully
Alive.
We illustrate it sometimes with uh
doesn't work so much anymore'cause I think they fix this problem, but when I was a kid
And you put uh holiday lights on a Christmas tree.
Kind of the deal was that if
If one of the lights went out, the whole strand went out, you know, first it might blink a little bit and then it all went out.
And if you think about the circuitry
of those Christmas lights.
Being
A circuit of wholeness
And then
If one little light goes out, then they start to dim and dim and dim until they all go out.
So what I work with in my own life
For many, many years is
Am I fully
alive
I also love the question, what am I willing to risk for full aliveness? We'll come back to that because that's a fun question.
Ah and then when I am not feeling
Fully alive.
Alive in my head, alive in my heart.
Alive in my
Got.
Alive in my
balls if I can say it alive in my spirit
If I'm not feeling alive.
Then I want to go check these four pillars because
What reliably has been true for me is they are like the light on the strand, and if they get loose.
My aliveness tends to diminish. It doesn't go out all of a sudden, but it diminishes.
So what Katie Hendricks articulated as the four pillars of integrity, the first pillar is radical responsibility.
It's really the decision to move out of blaming.
And criticizing
Out of being at the effect of the world
And move.
into
Claiming responsibility or agency. A sure way for me to blunt my aliveness.
My day to day experience of my vitality.
is to live in victimhood.
Blame the weather.
Blame the traffic.
What I notice is if I stop blaming and I choose to move the locus of control back over here and I choose to have agency.
To be responsible for my experience, not the external world.
But to be responsible for my experience.
there's a surge of energy that comes back in the body. So that's the first pillar, radical responsibility.
The second pillar is
Am I willing to feel my feelings?
I was a non feeler.
much of my life. Now I came into the world like I think everybody does.
as a full feeler. So as an infant, I was a full feeler. I had access to my anger, to my rage, to my fear, to my sadness, to my joy, to my sexual energy.
And then like most people, I got a little bit socialized out of that.
But then I had some trauma in my life.
In my family of origin.
That came meaningfully to a head on my seventeenth birthday.
This is really relevant to
Me and feelings on my seventeenth birthday I
I woke up about five in the morning.
To the experience of my dad having a massive heart attack. He happened to be sleeping in the single bed next to me. We'd gone to bed the night before watching a Chicago White Sox game.
And I woke up with him having a fatal heart attack.
Yeah.
And I was a 17 year old young man kid, and I was all of a sudden introduced to the death process, which I'd never been introduced to before.
And that was
traumatic in and of itself.
But then
We followed the ambulance to the hospital and
We walked into the hospital into the emergency room and my dad had been wheeled into one of the bays there.
And then the nurse walked out.
The nurse walked out and handed me his watch and his ring.
Handed it to me, not to my mom, who was there.
And said
He's gone. He died.
I
Walked away from my mom
And I walked into a bathroom.
And again, this was early in the morning, the hospital wasn't crowded, and I held my dad's
uh ring and his watch in my hands, and I remember just melting down the wall.
disintegrating into
grief and heartbreak and loss and
Complete unknowing.
And then I
I love the phrase.
I pulled myself together.
I stood up.
I walked out to my mother
My mom at that point was um
A functional but a meaningful alcoholic.
And
didn't have a lot, she hadn't matured to develop a lot of adult coping skills. So I was in a role of caretaker and helping her.
I picked her up, I held her, I helped her.
Went home, I called my older brother, told him that my
Dad had died, called my sister, neither of them were in the home.
And it's like I made a contract with myself in that moment, Shane.
Which is
It hurts.
Two
Bad.
To feel these feelings, and I
Consciously, unconsciously, some dance there, lock them away.
Until my late twenties at least, probably early thirties.
Here's what I didn't know.
Is the amount of
Energy
it takes to repress and suppress emotion.
I tell people now it's like your emotions are like a beach ball, you know?
And you take them and uh you
Try to hold them under the water.
And the more inflated the ball is, the harder it is to hold under the water. And if you know, one beach ball is sadness and one beach ball is anger and one beach ball is fear.
And after a while you're holding these things
Under the water.
You get exhausted.
And I got exhausted. I was actually, I think, mildly depressed. And a a reason was that I was depressing.
My feelings.
So now
This second pillar of integrity is I just ask myself every day as part of my morning rituals.
Is there a feeling here that wants to be felt? And I've learned that these feelings can be felt very
Simply and efficiently and beautifully
And the thing that I was terrified of was being overwhelmed by the feelings doesn't occur at all.
They become a natural
enlivening part of life. They actually allow life to appear in technicolor and not black and white. They allow life force to come back into my body. So that's the second pillar.
The third pillar.
is candor.
So if I wanna be out of integrity
If I want to
Dampen my aliveness.
All I have to do is start accumulating
withholds.

Things that I'm not.
Saying.
Thoughts that I'm having.
Wants that I have.
judgments and opinions that I have.
beliefs that I have.
All I have to do is start.
holding back
Being authentic.
being revealed.
I will immediately feel less alive.
When people reveal
When they become more authentic.
They immediately feel more alive.
Now I just want to put a little asterisk by this.
They also usually immediately experience chaos.
Because
I and we
Have been withholding
For good reason I put air quotes around that because
It made sense to withhold.
So I'm not questioning whether there's
A reason to withhold what I'm questioning is its effect on integrity.
And its effect on aliveness.
And when we talk about integrity in relationships.
And does the relationship have integrity, whether it's a personal relationship or a uh public relationship, a professional relationship? One of the questions we want to explore is how revealed are we? We say we use this little formula. When you withhold, then you withdraw.
And then you project.
Which means you disconnect from relationship. So when we look at
high performing teams, one of the things we see is they don't have many withholds.
Everything is transparent.
to the tra to the decision process. Okay.
And then the fourth.
Pillar of integrity is.
Am I impeccable with my agreements? So an agreement is just anything I've said I would do.
Or anything I've said I wouldn't do. Real simple.
It's just
Who's gonna do what?
By Web.
And I find that
One of the ways people bleed off life energy is they don't make clear agreements.
When they make clear agreements, they break their agreements.
Which creates a life force diminishment.
It also creates drama and relationships.
They they rationalize, justify, and explain why they didn't keep their agreements rather than just taking responsibility for it. And they don't get back into integrity.
I just find it so beautifully simple and enlivening to go
We agreed we'd meet at the top of the hour. Let's just meet at the top of the hour. There's no
Yeah, but you're not wondering, you're not having me to email or text me.
So those are the four pillars of integrity. Take responsibility, feel your feelings.
Speak candidly, authentically, reveal, and be impeccable with your agreements. Now, in my experience.
When I live like that.
I feel incredibly alive. Now we could also talk about, you know, do you eat well? Do you get a good night's sleep? You know, now you exercise. All of that, of course, would be part of feeling fully alive, but seems everybody knows that. We might not be doing it, but we know it.
But not everybody.
is playing the game of
Let's be fully alive and play with integrity.
From episode one sixty four
Ravi Gupta.
So I have a couple of things that I say a lot at home, I say a lot at work and I say a lot
You know, in any setting where someone will listen to me.
But two things. One, reality is undefeated.
Right.
Reality is undefeated. And the second is embrace reality.
The the sooner you figure out what reality is and you embrace it.
Then you can do something about it.
Right. And
I have a friend who's a founder.
And
He was
He was down.
Like six months ago.
And he asked, he said, Can we have dinner together? I'm not feeling great. And we went and we had dinner and
Um, you know, it's not like the dinner ended and all of a sudden he was feeling great. But then three weeks later he sounded like a different person.
So I asked him.
I said, what happened?
W wha you sound so much better.
What happened?
And he said
You know?
Instead of just thinking about the problem in the last few weeks, we've just started working on it. He's like and we've only made like one percent progress.
But he's like, it's so much better now that we're just working on it. Now we're just working on a problem. Whereas before we were just thinking about it.
And I think that that comes from the embracing of okay.
This is where we are.
This is what we gotta go do about it.
And I uh I think your point of
effectively trying to
Avoid reality.
And kinda kick the can down the road and have somebody else have to deal with it.
That's a real disservice to someone you care about or someone you love. It's the same point reason that feedback is valuable. It's the you know, I I
I think it's the reason that sports teams are a good
analogy when they're at the ver at a very high level.
Because
The feedback happens every minute.
If you're not good enough to be on the floor, if you're not good enough to be on the field.
The ball goes by you. Your team might give up a goal. You know, it is quite obvious, and the feed mechanic mechanisms are quick.
And so I think that um
One of the things that I think about is sort of
Yeah.
The speed of reality.
How quickly does reality hit you?
And what is the impact of reality?
And so there's that um saying that uh every morning in Africa
Uh I saw this on Twitter recently, but you know, every morning in Africa uh gazelle wakes up
And knows that if he doesn't outrun
the fastest lion.
He's gonna die.
Okay, cool. So he wakes up running.
Every morning in Africa a lion wakes up and knows if he doesn't outrun the slowest gazelle, he's gonna starve.
So he wakes up running.
Well, for those folks for the gazelle and the lion in that case.
Reality hits
You know
Very fast.
Every minute of every day.
And the cost of not facing reality is death.
Obviously that's not quite the same for any of us sitting in our offices or whatever.
But I do think understanding that reality does hit you every moment and that not embracing it does have a cost.
I think that's really important and valuable.
Well, let's dive into that a little more because you work with founders.
who live and operate in a reality based world.
Uh they can't create their own reality.
They have to deal with reality. They're in the truth business, if you will. How do you help them see reality?
Instead of misinformation or erroneous information or
getting caught up in their own beliefs or their own ideas that may or may not be true.
I think the first thing is a lot of founders
They're different. Some of them
are amazing at that to begin with.
Right. That's their wiring. That's the way they are. And so
Frankly, with those folks, a lot of it is just making sure that you're helping get the right signals to them because by nature they are such where
You know.
They do that.
There are some who
I think
I'm sure you've heard about the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, right?
I think that's actually been pretty negative overall to the like startup ecosystem because I think that people have heard that as
Steve Jobs didn't embrace reality and Steve Jobs
I I actually think that his was quite different. That was a representation of ambition.
That was a representation of we need to be great.
And I think that that was a representation of I'm not gonna be constrained by what someone tells me can or can't happen.
He still was embracing reality as to whether or not people love the product, right?
He still was embracing reality as to whether or not it was selling.
And things like that. And so I think that um
I think one aspect is sort of reminding people that
The Steve Jobs example, which is incredible.
In the U.S.,
You kind of have to dig underneath that. The reality distortion field wasn't that he wasn't listening to market signals, right? It was that.
He was ambitious for his team of we can do better.
We can do more. When when I think of jobs, what I think about w when
that happens, this reality distortion field, which I I think we've mislabeled in a way.
I think that his standard was just so much higher.
The better example to me of jobs
Is
Have you ever heard the anecdote about him with the with uh
When he looked at a cabinet? No.
It's an amazing anecdote.
Okay.
So there was this beautiful cabinet that he saw.
Okay. And he loved it. And he thought it was gorgeous.
And then
He looked around the back of it.
And in the back of it was
Plywood.
And it was ugly.
And he was so offended by this notion that the front of it was beautiful and the back of it.
was ugly because someone's like no one's ever gonna see the back and he's like no I see the back
The back should be beautiful too. If you want to try to make something beautiful, it should be beautiful from every angle.
Right.
If the purpose of this is it's supposed to represent
craftsmanship and beauty. Don't don't
Go halfway and make the back ugly.
To me
the things that are interesting are like if you tear apart the iPhone, even the switch even the board underneath.
Is
You know.
Clean and gorgeous and thoughtful.
And I think that's a great question.
even the words on the back of the iPhone where it says, you know, designed in California, assembled in China, like it doesn't say made in China.
Yeah.
And so every choice that they made
I think represents those are cool stories about jobs and the standard.
That he had and these sort of
Willingness to be disliked in the name of going to get
Excellence.
There's a story about Alexa.
With Bezos, that's similar.
Where they came back and said, look, the latency is going to be this.
And I don't know what the unit was, but Jobs eff or Bezos effectively said
Well, I want it to be tw you know, one fifth of that.
And they said, That's impossible. We can't do that. He said, Well then we're not gonna ship it.
But that was the magic.
And then they ultimately ended up doing it. So I think that consistent raising of the standard, that's the lesson from these folks.
And so I think going back to your point on reality of talking to founders, I think
It's helping them see the right signals.
Because sometimes, especially in the environment, and look
you know, investors, you know, uh all of us, we sent
Many of the wrong signals for a couple of years where people were rewarded. And so they could look at something of like, What are you talking about?
My business keeps on getting valued higher and higher and higher.
You know?
I'm doing the right stuff.
But I think the duration of their perspective was not necessarily correct in that
Ultimately.
You know.
Your business is gonna be measured.
On the financial performance of it.
And the financial purpose is a representation of how much customer love there is and how much
what you've actually created.
But I think the point, Shane, for me, on getting people to embrace reality is
Okay, cool. That signal that you're looking at is supportive of the point that we're doing great. What about all these other signals?
And I think that um
You know, you have to earn the trust of somebody, like you said, to be able to share that perspective.
Um
But I think that idea is one that um
I I think is really important to make sure that people have
From episode one hundred sixty six, Kevin Kelly.
There's a lot of concern about
artists and even writers about
Training.
In AI.
To produce
work to generate work.
to creative work. And they're the the concern is as well, you know
uh my m material that I've worked really hard for has been used to train this AI
And
People can use it.
To imitate me.
And sometimes those imitations are quite
Amazing.
Really what you want to be able to do
Is
To have a style, so to speak, to have something.
That's unpredictable. That's in imitable. That you you that you can't be imitated.
And this
Again goes back to my other piece of advice about
Don't
Aim to be the best.
Aim to be the only.
So if you are in this category that it's hard to imitate you
That's a
That's a really good
place to be in in the human world and also a really good place to be in the AI world because AIs will have difficulty
in imitating you. I think I'm in trouble. My kids went into chat GG or GPT the other day
And they they drafted this email on why should they should get like more video game time.
But they did it in the style of Shane Parish.
Yeah.
So they basically like it was an email from myself.
To me.
And I was like, This sounds awfully familiar. I was like what was your what was your query here? And they were like
Uh draft an email to Dad about uh in the style of Shane Parish, I was like, Oh my God, this is in tr I'm in trouble.
Yes, yes. So so yeah, so you you you if you
were if that was hard to to do, then you have
an advantage'cause your your job is not going to be taken by an AI.
And so the idea is is to
Not
be so predictable.
in the sense particularly i again if you have
If you
Your views on
The environment.
Can be
deduced from your views on religion or something.
That's gonna be that means that you're kind of not really that much of an independent thinker.
And that's gonna become more valuable'cause AI, at least at first, is gonna give away uh standard thinking for free. So it'll raise the bar for some people. But it'll be so conventional for
independent and original thinkers. Right. Exactly. R right now the best way to think of these AI is the the chat
training the LL the LMs is that they're um
They're the epitome of um
Wisdom of the crowd.
Okay, the wisdom of the crowd thinking. This that's what it is. It's a collective all the average people in the world and all their average foibbles and all the average
Genius.
And it's gonna get a very kind of average
Thing that is often very correct.
But oftentimes not because it's the average.
And so um it's it's so it's the w it's the wisdom of the crowd AI.
um, which is really good if that's where you want to be. I've been trying to figure out the practical use of these things and how people are actually using them.
I have a friend who runs a very, very popular blog site and he uses them to help them write h headlines.
To write a punchline at the end?
And he said.
It's often
Very generic and he has to kind of
Pushed them.
to be snarky. He'll say, No, no, no, make it more snarky, or pretend you're a snarky editor, or pretend that you're a conspira you'll have to kind of push them to not be that
Standard average.
deliberately say no you can be a little bit um on fr a little fringier, you've got to be a little bit angrier, you've got to be um
Something. And then
The role play.
If you don't do that, you're gonna get the kind of as you said
the the standard average.
I wanna come back to AI a little later because I think we'll have a broader conversation on it. I wanna go to the next piece of advice that sort of stood out as I was reading these, which is always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect. So you have to make it different.
Different is better.
It is, right.
Different is better.
So so so deadlines
This again took me a long time.
to kind of figure out that I needed deadlines and deadlines were the difference between, you know, a a dream and a
Something that you complete and um
What happens with deadlines for me anyway is you've got a ship. You're you you're you you have to abandon the project and it's not perfect.
Oh my gosh, it's not perfect. But
Because it's not perfect, you kind of
have to be ingenious about
Making a little
Different.
And that and and and I find the deadlines force me to
Make decisions
That you you
You don't have enough time. You never have enough time.
Um and so you you you think of something to
I wouldn't say it's a shortcut, you think of a way to finish it and that
Little those little decisions are
What make it

A little different.
W w w one of the shocks to me about um working a wired on a monthly magazine was
Every
single issue after years and years and years was a miracle
That it got done on time.
It's like you would think it would come down to some some formula and you just you
be done on Friday afternoon. But no, it was it was this
last second getting it out the door.
Every single time.
And part of that was because
We kind of kept
Upping the
The goal, the quality. We're you know, we're we're trying to make it better than last time.
And so you come down to the same thing where you are
Bing
Driven by the deadline.
To try to
Excel but not making it perfect by but by by doing something a little differently than you did before.
'Cause without a deadline you can convince yourself that you can always make it a little bit better, but then you never ship.
Right.
How do you find that balance between
In a world of leverage.
Right, like where an internet article can go viral.
and reach a hundred million people, or it can reach ten people.
How do you find that point at which
I've done enough. I'm comfortable with this.
versus the trade off of do I raise the bar, do I make this better.
What is the advantage to doing that?
So there's couple of things, couple bits of advice buried in a book about that. One is this rule, which was actually based on some research.
Uh in a
various different
Fields of life.
that
When you
Trying to optimize something versus trying to explore.
Where where you you have something that works and you just wanna make it kind of
Better.
And go, you know, and optimize it versus
doing the i inefficient thing of going out to try and
Try something new.
And
comes down to something like when you go out to eat at a restaurant, do you
Get your favorite.
thing that you know works or do you try something that
There's a new dish that may not work. And so the ratio is actually
One to three. Two to three. One to three. So you you actually want to spend um two thirds of your time trying to optimize things that you
when it go deeper and better and then a third trying trying new things. And that's been shown
many, many ways to to be roughly true.
So that's one answer is yes.
Lots of times you're gonna just
try and make it really, really better or not thing, but a third of the time you want to be
Taking a chance.
The second thing is this idea that um
I learned from
Doing art.
There was actually a book called Writer's Time.
About how to write a book.
And it and it said that basically look the the the the the the amount of work to write a book is infinite.
It just could go on and on.
And that's true of almost any project in terms of perfecting. It's bottomless. So really the only thing you control is your time.
You say I have this much time to give to it. I'm gonna do the very, very best in this amount of time.
And that's sort of what a deadline's about. It's saying like
Yeah, I mean i it could go on forever, but but I have a deadline, so I'm gonna do the best I'm gonna write the best book I can in a year or a year and a half, whatever it is, or I'm gonna do the best podcast I I can make in a week.
And so
that is a deadline and what it's doing is it's giving you some way to control because you can't control the amount of work.
Which is infinite because you're always
Can find some way to perfect it.
So
So this is the idea that you control things by controlling the time.
I wonder if if part of us is hiding behind fear too. We don't want the deadline
Because we actually don't want to put the work out there. We can convince ourselves
that hiding, you know, making it better, hiding behind this perfection
is in and of itself work.
And that we're accomplishing something.
We don't have to put it out in the world and get feedback and
Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, that's that that's true'cause it's
Not good enough yet.
Um I one of the things I have become
um a really big proponent of, which is, you know, doing things on a regular basis.
So the advantage of someone like you doing a podcast on a very good basis, like if this one's a complete flop, that's okay. Tomorrow you have another one. We'll try again.
And you just do it over and over again and you put out whatever it is that you do, you you know, you're trying your very best, but you know that that that there's more from where that's come from.
And that gives you some kind of freedom
Two
Fail.
in a certain sense, because I'm gonna do it again. Yeah. And that's true of a making art, which I do every day. I make a piece of art every every day. So
I'm gonna put it out no matter what.
And if it
Isn't up to the best standards. It's okay, because tomorrow I'm gonna
Do it again.
And that's true about writing or anything else, is this this idea that you
wanna do things on a regular basis because that is the source
Of
Great stuff.
But also gives you that confidence.
And liberty.
To put out something that's not quite
the best and not get really hung up on it because we're gonna do it again. You get another ep out, you get another crack out of it.
Right.
From episode one sixty nine, Julie Gurner.
How do you shift that mindset or circumstances uh sort of like when you feel
You're a victim. I mean, effectively you're a victim to circumstance. You feel like you have no control and you're powerless.
And there's nothing you can do. What would you say do to somebody like that?
That's a really great question. I think that there are two ways of looking at at victim
Uh
Mm.
Things that have happened to you.
You know, you can be a victim or you can be a survivor.
And those are two very different
cognitive positions. You know, you can't control what happens to you in either circumstance.
But one is very powerful.
um you have overcome.
One is you know you have had something happen to you.
And you are
under that thing for quite some period of time.
So for me, if I hear someone and I I hear that kind of helplessness.
Um, one is that I never I I wanna reframe that experience. I want to tell a different story. I want them to tell a different narrative to themselves. I want them to rewrite that.
Um, and in some ways you want them to rewrite that narrative to survivorship.
and overcoming and what it took, and you ask the right questions to get them to see
um you know that their own through way
in that case is based on their strength and ability. And you want them to see those things rather than seeing the the kind of helplessness and powerlessness. It's the reason why oftentimes, you know, like people engage with me and they think we're gonna go back in time and talk about their, I don't know, inner child or something. Um, but I am
I am someone who's going to start with who you are today.
Because going back to the past.
And
Not really useful unless it informs
who you are standing in this moment. We can't change it. We can't
uh you know go back and going back to times of powerlessness also
It puts you in a bad mindset. It sets you up in a negative way. So I oftentimes will go back and restructure some things around.
You know, risk, for example, is a really good area where we'll do some
uh discussion when people are hesitant to take risk. I want people to go back and say
Hey, tell me about times you took risk and it really paid off. Like
Let's talk about that. I want people to understand what they're capable of and sometimes to see what they're capable of in ways
That they um
That they quickly forget, right? I mean, negative things sometimes shadow our entire mindset and how we think about things, and we end up
tossing aside some of the good things, right? Like you'll have
uh, you know, twenty compliments on your haircut, and one person says, Oh, what'd you do to your hair? And that's the person who gets all the attention. So
You think about I don't want them shoving aside those twenty compliments or those twenty times they took the chance, or the twenty times that they overcame something really incredible that they kind of
you know, kind of shove off to the side. I want them to see those things very clearly and to see the minority of
Yeah, you know, things happen periodically that aren't great for us and don't make us feel well and we make bad some bad decisions, but
So what?
Everyone does.
I think that that that's really important. I mean, we all make bad decisions. It's what you do next that sort of matters. I wanna go back to something you said about childhood though, which is
Uh I hear this a lot and I've always sort of wondered about it, which is like
uh when people are in therapy and they're talking about their childhood and then they do this sort of like destructive behavior and and then it's uh or self sabotaging behavior
And then they explain it away with, Well, that's because of this when I was a child. And it you know, I'm always listening to this and I never comment, but in my head I'm going, but you're an adult now.
Right. Right. Like at some point you take control over your your response and awareness of it is not the same as doing something about it.
So this is this is really fascinating to me, too. And I I love hearing things like that when they come up because they're such clear, like
flags and clearly they are for you as well. Like you hear that and you're like
Oh, this is a problem, right? I mean in immediately.
So I think about it like this.
You could be sitting, I and this is the example that I always think about because it pulls people away from some of the more emotional stuff, but you could be sitting in traffic, and we've all sat in traffic, right? I mean, traffic as long as the eye can see.
And there will be some people you'll look out and they'll be like beeping and dodging and you know, like they're all over the place. And you can surmise how that person must be thinking, right? I mean, it's just like never gonna get there. Can't believe this is happening, like
We could
anticipate that these are coming from strong thought patterns and emotional places.
But if you look to your right, I mean there's probably also some guy or girl listening to a podcast.
Texting someone, windows are down.
look as relaxed as could be.
And so some people are going to say, you know, when you get home like
Why are you so upset?
Oh, is the traffic. The traffic makes me nuts, right? Right.
But if the traffic really makes people nuts, it would make everyone nuts.
And so it can't be that. It's how we're thinking about the traffic.
Um
that really makes people be relaxed and productive, or it makes them be just absolutely enraged and out of control.
So when people are telling me that like
You know
I'm doing this because of my childhood. I'm doing this because of this. I think, you know, your
You know.
You're giving up some amount of um
Power.
You're giving up a lot of power to something outside of yourself.
And
you're also how you're interpreting that event is not useful to you.
You know, it may be there may be a lot of truth to the terrible things that have happened.
But you know, those those terrible things, you you have to shut the door at some point and say, you know, I am my own
man or woman and I move forward.
And you know, working on those traumas is important if you go to a therapist. And I think that that's really valuable stuff and it's worthwhile because it can change the course of your life.
But if you're somebody who uses
other events as a reason to self-destruct.
You're seeding power, and we see that even with um, you know, in companies, right? Like I'm doing this because
So and so made me angry. I'm doing this because
You know.
And you end up making some poor decisions.
Um
And seeding power.
because of someone else, you know, you're willing to make a poor decision, you're willing to give up
You know, sometimes people are willing to give up, you know, their entire future dreams because, you know,
of X Y and Z, and it's a tragedy.
U so you want people to really understand the power they have to create their own lives at some point.
And that they that creation is not given to anyone else but you.
I I love what you said there. I think it's these ordinary moments that really dict the outcome of our life. For a lot of our big decisions, we know we're making a decision.
We're well aware of it. But in these ordinary moments when things like this happen, we sort of tend to react without reasoning.
And when we do that, we put ourselves in an increasingly bad position, right? You go home, you yell at your spouse, well, now your whole weekend's wrecked, your marriage might be wrecked. Like all of these things sort of like compound. And then you can't be present at work because you're solving something at home.
And we just don't realize how
The these
Innocent little moments.
uh can derail us and put us in a worse position.
I agree. I think that like we let life happen to us, right? And we don't
decide that we are going to
control the trajectory of it. And I think that that's true, whether it's in the small moments and sometimes even in the large ones. Like people will stay
Unhappy at a job.
Or stay unhappy in their role, and they'll just stay unhappy.
uh instead of just saying, hey, you know, like it eventually they'll reach a point. And this is true for everyone, right? Like
They're unhappy, they're unhappy, they're unhappy, and then finally
I've had enough. And
All of those excuses they've used.
there will come a point when none of them matter and they're going to take that leap.
But why does it have to get to that point? And why can't we kind of flag things earlier on and I think early intervention.
You know, I I talk about that notion of like fighting up front.
early intervention in almost every case is worth
It's it's worth
The attention, the the hassle, the time that it takes.
Because those are the the moments that allow you to really gain ground.
And to have a much more productive future, to have much more productive relationships, to be more productive at work.
is to really intervene early. Um and I think intentionality is really the key.
thinking about, you know.
Um
how you want your life to look.
and what you're willing to put up with, you know, what kind of standards are you holding for yourself and and you know, how do you value yourself? And a lot of those are around, you know, when you take action and, you know how much you give and what you're waiting for and how much you're willing to take.

From episode one seventy three, Frank Slootman.
So I understand there's no repeatable framework that you can just apply, but I would imagine there's there's sort of repeatable principles and methods of thinking that you use. What are the ones that you find the most helpful?
Well, I'm I I look very hard uh at what's working, what's not working. And in other words, you know, some things are uh not working at all.
uh some things seem to be working reasonably well and then there are sort of the stuff that you're sort of humming and hawing on.
Um so obviously you you prioritize the I mean I've I've sort of separated with people very, very quickly because I think the the function the functions that they were responsible for.
We're barely breathing. And at that point, you know, I I don't hesitate, you know, I move on quickly, immediately.
You know, I go after cultural issues. You know, people that are are just, you know
egregious violators of just
things that we d we all generally find normal and acceptable, um, you know
we we very quickly um behavior. You know, performance is something that we will give more time. Behavior we won't.
And that's because behavior is a choice, not a skill set.
You know, when you come in as a new leader, everybody's watching, not just what you're doing, but what you're not doing.
So if you're not moving on things that people that everybody is seeing.
your leadership brand is already in question because you know apparently you're blind and uh apparently you're hesitating.
uh or you're tolerant of of behavior that you shouldn't be tolerant of.
So yeah, there's pressure because, you know, it's not just what you wanna do, it's the whole world's watching.
You said behavior's a choice, not a skill set I've never heard of.
quite framed that way. I think that's a very um
That's a really interesting way to look at it.
But you also said that you sort of you'll give time for performance, but not for behavior. How much time? How do you learn uh like when do you pull the plug? When do you reinvest? And how do you think about that?
Well, look, you know, behavior is uh it's
it'll it'll smack you in the face, uh, usually, but I've also seen things happen underground where, you know, I wasn't aware of it and I wasn't seeing it.
But it was happening because it would happen on calls that I wasn't on.
You know, one one time I uh
I got tipped off by uh an employee of my former company that said look, you know, that office
over there is a complete
you know, disaster and uh because they knew people there. And you know how salespeople are, right? Everybody talks, doesn't matter what company you're in.
And then, you know, we started, you know, basically peeling away the layers and all of a sudden, you know, you come across, you know
Really bad situations.
abusive situations.
know harassment, all these kinds of things. Um because sometimes it's just not visible. It's happening. People don't like to talk about it.
it they they're worried that they're ratting on people and they don't wanna go to their manager because they don't trust their manager.
you know, they don't they don't trust HR, you know, which is usually, you know, your your second choice or maybe your first choice to go when you have, you know, real behavioral cultural problems.
And then it's just it just keeps going on. So um I'm I've been surprised before about how much, you know, wasn't visible uh to us, not just to me, but also the people that were
that I have brought in that were close to me, they were not seeing it either. Eventually, you know, believe me, it it we will we will find it and we will get to it.
And then we will we will move at lightning speed. Um
Because you you want to get bad behavior, you know, out of an organization.
fast. That that is your leadership brand. You you start tolerating that
There is there's no end in sight to what you're gonna have.
Trust is key to to moving quickly, I would imagine, with velocity in organizations. How do you go about establishing trust in a performance based culture? Well, you know, people need to believe that you're that you're fair, that you that it's not just personal preference, right? That you're not doing things because, oh, I don't like your haircut or whatever.
It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with, you know
How do we come together? How do we behave as a group? And you know, if if if you have you know people behaving in in huge
conflict with that, then it's like, yeah, we are gonna move on it. Um sometimes, you know, I I I've had situations, especially with young people, where
Hey, we need to do a reboot, reset.
come back tomorrow. I'm sure your parents didn't teach you, you know, to behave this way and you can do better.
And I've seen people come back literally over the weekend and be a different person because for whatever reason they were led astray by managers that just
you know, we're inspiring that kind of behavior. That happens, right? People learn behaviors from what they see around them with a behavior that gets encouraged.
And they don't realize that they are just getting a drift, you know, from
from their own upbringing and their own, you know, personal principles because that's sort of the environment starts to, you know, really
It's a slippery slope that they get on and all of a sudden they're in a place where they don't even recognize themselves anymore.
And that that's where a reset can really work, you know, because basically you're re grounding them to, you know, normal behaviors and then things can work out really nicely.
uh from there on. But most of the time, unfortunately, it's like look, you know, you're not a fit here. You know, this is this is not
Who we are, who we want to be.
You know, it's choosing, you know, it's it's it's just look, we want you to be this way, not that way. And you know, for some people it's like hey they learn behaviors in other companies, it's part of who they are, it's their culture.
This is not this is not for you, man.
Alan Malale put it to me this way, he said, Uh, when you're you're choosing a behavior that's not the organizational behavior that's desired, you're choosing not to be a part of the organization. I thought that was a powerful way to think about it. Yeah.
You're uh you're you're separating and you're in you're in violation of the the cul driving culture is really important because if you don't
you know, other people will will fill that void, right? And you get subcultures in a in a city or a division.
Because strong personalities can do that. So unless you are you are filling that void, right? Um it will get fill by something or somebody else. And then before you know it, you know, you're just a grab bag of stuff.
And it's just a bunch of thieves that's running a company. Well, that's you don't want that. The company needs to stand for something. This is who we are.
Seems like there's a lot of organizations that um are more family based. I mean, they take a very similar approach to a family and they they don't necessarily think in terms of performance. What are your thoughts on that?
Well, you know, we we we've talked about this quite a bit in uh in recent years. You know, I don't think a business is a family. Unfortunately in a family you can't fire your family even though you sometimes want to.
You have to tolerate them and deal with them.
And of sometimes in the most egregious way. That is just the nature of families. I mean the all the dysfunction that comes with it, um, but in in business it's more like being a
professional sports franchise, right? You're
you're assembling the best players and uh you know, we may be friends, but we don't have to be friends because we're not coming together on the basis of friendship. We're coming together on the basis of mission.
You know, in other words, share purpose.
You know, we're we're very demanding of each other and it's really about
You know.
our our respective contributions to the to the mission.
That's the basis of our relationship. So it this much more akin to uh to professional sports. I think that's the correct analogy. Now some companies
don't wanna be that way. Companies like Salesforce and and even Google come to uh to mind, but you know, in the end they're laying people off too by the thousands, okay? So I guess it it's not family after all.
From episode one seventy nine, Gio Valiente.
One thing that the bus seemed to be able to do, and I think we hit on this in that answer, is two things stood out there. They know when to walk away.
They know when to fold it. They know when to
You know, just okay, it's over, move on, next one. They're able to move on.
But they also know when to push their advantage. And I'm thinking
Tom Brady, right? He was the ultimate sort of quarterback who would take the check down, but he also knew when to push it down the field.
How do we learn when to uh how do we learn to cultivate those skills in ourselves? How do we know when to push?
And how do we know when, you know what, this just isn't gonna
Get us the outcome that we want.
Best question I've been asked by an interview in an interviewer in my lifetime.
Like that's
An awesome question that nobody ever asks is the question.
for anyone who's trying to be successful sustainably successful
When do you press? How do you know when to press?
both engine the markets the the the paradox is there sometimes you gotta let it happen
And sometimes you gotta make it happen. When people try to force
Force a result when they shouldn't, like that's when when you get stopped out, and the opposite's also true. So how do you know when to oppress it again? So, number one, I'll say about Brady, don't forget.
Lot of failure early. And so what happens is when you fail your fail early, you start to recognize what a real opportunity looks like. And then oh, by the way.
When that opportunity um
presents itself, there's a lot of fuel to make it happen. You're like, oh like you should, you know, it's Mark Wahlberg in acting. It's like you're letting me into this club. Okay
There ain't no way I'm giving up my advantage. So it becomes this relentless
Yeah, one of the things about Tiger Woods that's so remarkable is is
He's the only golfer, and I mean this.
The history of the game.
Who's ever played better with a lead?
So even Jack Nicholas, who's arguably the best of all time, Jack said I was better than
if I was trailing, because what happens is when you're when you're chasing
You know, you play with nothing to lose, you're able to be fearless.
So so that's a real advantage is being the underdog.
Tiger Woods is the only one who's the favorite every week and would start with a lead and and then extend that lead.
blew the world away and and to this day it blows away because how do you do that?
How do you like you that's why greyhounds in in dog racing are always chasing a rabbit. The psychological mechan, even in in in in running, you have somebody who's pacing you, right?
Cause we know the brain works in ways we're having something to chase.
Is the way to get the best out of yourself. Well, how did Tiger Woods do that? When he was in the lead, the one being chased.
Well, he was playing against history. So even when he was leading the tournament, he was still trailing Jack Nicholas. So he benchmarked
he would index his thinking to the fact that he hadn't
caught uh Jack McLean. So he was in his mind always chasing. So it begs the question when you talk about judgment is knowing
When to pr what an advantage looks like.
And when and how to press your advantage
And when patients
Uh when the situation calls to do nothing. And here's one way to assess it.
Evaluate your why.
Because what happens is when people press an advantage incorrectly
It's usually out of impatience.
It's usually out of frustration that's happening right now in the markets. There's not a lot of volatility in the marketplace right now. And you're on the your mandate as an investor is to return 10%, right? You say that's your number. And you're only up five percent. And there's no way to make money in your strategy. All of a sudden, it's like, well, I've I've got to, I'm gonna press whatever advantage I have.
What's a low probability advantage, and but you're gonna force a little advantage, you're gonna make a mistake, and then you're gonna lose your job. So, number one is you have to question.
What's underneath the desire? So let's talk about desire for a minute, which we haven't talked about, which we need to talk about. If you look at the human condition,
Look at all the major religious traditions.
One of the universalities of the human condition is desire.
And every school of thought has found a way to try to deal with it. So, for example, if you look at Christian uh Catholicism, how does Catholicism deal with desire? Well,
Too much desire leads to um yeah, you'll you'll wreck your life and everyone else's, right? It can lead to real problems, the desire. So Catholics punish it with guilt. What do the hedonists say? Hedonists say, Well, you know, if you want it, it's a good thing you satiate that desire. If you have an itch, scratch it.
And we know that that leads to overindulgence
to sloppy life, you know, typically a drug habit. And one way or the other, you know, you know, sex if you're gonna have an addiction going to blow your life up if you're a hedonist.
Buddhists and Hindus say
Desire's the key thing that leads to suffering, right? So if I want this pen.
The moment that I want the thing that I can't have
I feel a state of suffering.
So all human suffering comes from desire.
And so and so the way to happiness is to remove all desire to ex to get rid of all your worldly possessions.
And to sit in observation of yourself and so happiness is to want nothing.
So the universality of the human condition is desire. But what we know
Is that that desire is the thing that leads to all the cognitive biases.
that that that almost all of the mistakes people make in life is a function that they want a particular outcome. They want a particular thing. The good of it
Is desire, as Anne Rand arch articulates, right? As as Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, when he talks about free markets.
He says that that the desire leads to innovation. Innovation leads to to competition, which eventually leads to the best product in the market, which is what elevates the human condition. And that's why
proponents of capitalism and free markets. You can just see it in modern day, like the world moves
Because because individuals innovate and evolve, whether it's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.
Jeff Bezos has created eight hundred billion dollars of wealth for other people.
You know, you you see the way free markets work, they're a function of desire, and that's what Freud called sublimation.
If you sublime and channel desire
uh into evolution. It's what creates great works of art.
Architecture, right? And Rand writes about this in in Fountainhead.
So desire channeled properly can lead to some of the highest highs
Uh, and the L of the best expression of the human condition. The problem is the downside of desire, left unchecked.
leads to the kinds of behaviors that are duplicitous, that desire run amok
We all become a worse version of ourselves. This happened at Tiger Woods.
Лай, домфорте, сам деза.
That fueled arguably the greatest body of work in the history of sports.
The fuel that burned inside him, you saw it come out in his celebrations.
There's a lot of want in there, but that's the same desire.
That when it got channeled the wrong way that led to the bad decisions
that you know led to the blew up his marriage that led to you know to him getting these injuries and harming himself.
And you he wouldn't stop practicing, so he'd get injured. He played the US Open on a broken leg.
And one
And so you have to go back to the first order variable, which in his case is desire.
to to to answer the question and and if you look at the causal chain, the way the dominoes fall in decision making, which is a cognitive act.
Not an emotional one.
You have to understand what are the the the the variables that have led to you wanting to push your advantage. And so essentially in modern day analytics, you're running probabilities.
You know, if if if if you have a a trading strategy and the numbers say
That you have an advantage. You know, the old saying that if you don't know who the sucker at the table is, you're the sucker. And that's true in all games.
in the achievement domains where there's a scoreboard and there's competition.
And so you have to find a way to map your advantages and know in the moment whether you have an advantage. And if you do
How much risk are you how much risk are you willing to take and what losses are you willing to tolerate? And then the psychological component under that is.
Can you handle losses well?
And if you can't, if you're the sort of person who's gonna say, you know, if I lose this much money on this trade, it's gonna meaningfully affect
What I do in the future. That's your tell.
So one of the things we do, even though we try to arm out the human condition from decision making.
You know, as Antonio DiMaggio writes in um in in in in searching for Spinoza.
You know, he says like when you look at people with localized brain damage who have no ability
To feel emotions.
Their decision making is not good.
When human beings get localized brain damage where they can't feel emotion,
Their decision making is not better.
It's worse, in fact.
So if you look at someone like you know, I guess an enlightened individual
They are not without emotion.
They have refined their emotional reactions in a way
that elevates their senses. So you know you want to push the advantage
You have to evolve to a level where you're some version of a complete human being, where you know yourself, right? The Socratic dictum of Nadi Sutra, know yourself.
And
No others.
Complicated games require complexity of thought.
You know, life at the tail end of the curve does not lend itself to simplistic
Thinking.
You have to have complexity of thought, though the decision is final.
you know, the diff the decision yes or no is binary and and sometimes
You know, you you engage as what I call caveman golf, like seaball hit ball.
Um, you know, don't overcomplicate it.
Uh and and be decisive in your decisions.
Um
That's a great answer. Wanna thank you so much for one of the most amazing interviews I think I've ever been a part of.
Hey man, you set the table.
to to to invite the best ideas out of people and I think that's why we all love you so much. So
Thanks for the great
questions and for your insight. I really appreciate I'm a fan.
You know, I I I really did enjoy this.
Thank you so much for having me. You know, we've circled around each other a quite a few times and um
And you're a really thoughtful, wonderful man, so thank you for engaging with me today.
Thank you so much for taking the time today, Frank. That was an amazing conversation.
Yeah, you bet. Any time. Thank you.
And mutual thanks, Shane.
Take care. Bye.
I love co-creating with you. It's really fun.
You know, it's a one plus one equals four experience for me. I just love it, so thank you.
Thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you, Shane.
Perfect. Thank you.
I'm very proud that you said that you'd want to do this again because I really love
The show I love.
And
I was very happy when you emailed me to ask me if I could be on it and I also
Uh would love to do it again.
Thanks for listening 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.
The Fernham 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 tool to master your fate.
Sharpen your decision making.
And set yourself up for unparalleled success.
Lear more at fs.blog slash clear.
Until next time.