#106 Josh Kaufman: Maximizing Our Locus of Control

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/ea5de8af8abbab41

Going back to our conversation of Munger.
He has a a a lot of
Very good quotes about
You know, the the the best way to
Do well is to avoid making
Avoidable mistakes.
There's a certain context in which that's true.
And those are the high stakes things that are difficult to reverse, that are very expensive, that are very destructive. Yeah. Those are the things you absolutely don't want to screw up.
And on the other end of the spectrum, where you have more latitude.
Screwing up more
is a way to increase your rate of learning.
And to increase your knowledge and and
That gathering of knowledge has compound returns in and of itself.
And so in many areas of both life and business, more experimentation means more mistakes, but it also means more results and more growth.
to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parish.
This podcast sharpens your mind by helping you master the best of what other people have already figured out.
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Today I'm speaking with Josh Caughtman.
Josh wrote one of the best business books of all time, The Personal MBA.
In this conversation we talk about rapid skill acquisition, mental models, decision making, overcoming fear, and so much more.
It's time to listen and learn.
Mm.
grew up in a small one stop like Midwestern town uh with no role models and like entrepreneurship or business. And you came to write one of the best selling business books of all time with a personal MBA.
How did that happen?
It's kinda weird. Uh a long circuitous route.
Yeah, so I I grew up in a little town called New London.
In uh north central Ohio.
Uh think
Light manufacturing a little bit and agriculture. So
One stop light.
There's a McDonald's.
I think this this happened before I moved to the town, but
Um, the the story is that the town shut down.
They called off school and had a parade.
Uh full of tractors.
when the the McDonald's opened in in uh
In my hometown.
So uh so yeah, I I grew up um not around business at all.
Um, most of my role models were the teachers at
at the school. Those are the adults I interacted with on a day to day day basis. And and most of the adults
Either worked a farm.
Or they uh they made a commute to to one of the larger towns in the surrounding area and and did some, you know, light manufacturing.
Think rural Ohio Ohio stuff.
Yeah, my my investigation into business didn't start until I was uh a few years into college. That was my first real exposure to business as a
Topic of study.
And something that um
Really once I started learning about it was fascinating to me. And that was the University of Cincinnati.
Cincinnati. Yeah, Cincinnati, Ohio.
The reason that I went to the University of Cincinnati
Was um
To me, and I I think this is relatively common.
uh for for folks from from my neck of the woods is that you went to college to get a job.
That was the purpose.
Um, there it wasn't, you know, the the high minded liberal arts, you know, let's go to broaden yourself all of this thing. It's like, no, you're gonna study something that's useful.
And then you're going to get a job because that's that's the purpose of education.
So the reason that I went to the University of Cincinnati

awesome extended internship program called a cooperative education co-op program.
And uh
The benefit of that is I was going to spend way less time in the classroom and more time working in a real
functioning business. And so in theory, you do well in your co-op.
And you have a job.
Straight.
coming straight out of college.
So yeah, I I spent it was a five year program and I spent three and a half of those years learning it in the classroom. And I spent a year and a half of that.
learning full time working for what ended up being a very large business, uh, Procter and Kimball. Yeah, one of the one of the largest companies in the world. That was that was my introduction to to business as a topic.
Which must have been like a crazy place to go right away, right? Like right outside of school, you end up at one of the largest consumer product companies in the world.
well hone processes, not
I would imagine not super entrepreneurial.
And then how did that translate into sort of the personal MBA?
The personal MBA, it a couple things.
Um
It was mind bending.
Working at a a
company that large.
So I I went I think the the only real
commercial experience I had was was working um over the summer for a a
computer place that you know
I would
Drive down.
to help an old lady figure out how to open her email, like that kind of stuff.
And so walking into this business that is is gigantic.
It took a while to wrap my head around.
exactly what an organization of that size, how it works, what are all the pieces, how does everything fit together.
I had this experience.
You know, growing up working in these very small businesses, the computer store.
Um mowing lawn for people.
This was the back um like 1998, 1999. So developing webs websites for people. So I I had some experience in the smallest of the small.
businesses in the world.
And the the internship experience.
Was
The largest of the large doesn't get much bigger than that.
And so what I wanted to do with their personal MBA
was uh I was I was walking into a job where a lot of people that I was going to be working with had just graduated from a top fifteen MBA school.
It didn't make sense for me to quit my job.
And
borrow a bunch of money, go back to school, and to come back to the kind of job I already had.
I just wanted to learn what I needed to know to succeed.
And so the personal MBA became a project where instead of going to school, I decided to read and research on my own.
And the litmus test for what became
the ideas in the personal MBA, the book.
was trying to find all of the business concepts.
That makes sense in both of those domains.
Like what are the ideas that you need to know to succeed in
The hugest businesses in the world.
Or in the type of business that you can
Start by yourself.
On a weekend.
And then you could test it against all of these sort of like top fifteen MBAs that were coming in.
Yes.
That's great. Uh like where did
Where did Munger come into this? Cause I I I I remember um Charlie Munger and mental models being a huge influence. And the personal MBA is basically a book of mental models that people need to know for business.
Was Munger sort of like something you discovered as you were doing this research, or
Munger, I discovered Munger, I would say
Two or three years into the project.
Actually. So so I was
I was reading and researching on my on my own, just
picking up any business book that looked interesting.
And what I found was was that there was a larger set of books.
That helped. So so for example, um, Influence by Robert Shaldini.
Not necessarily a business book. It's a it's a
Psychology book.
And so I w I was reading and researching and
At that time, it's kinda the the the early advent of the blogging period.
And I came across uh lessons in elementary worldly wisdom.
the transcript of Charlie Munker's speech.
And when I came when I came across that
It was it was a revelation. It's like this is exactly what I've been looking for. This is exactly what I've been trying to do.
Of course, here's here's another rabbit trail into let me read everything that Charlie Munger has ever written or look at all of his speeches, all of the all of the things that he's done.
And
It was fascinating and illuminating and
It was focused on investors.
So people who are are making capital allocation decisions.
And at this point, I think I was um
A year out of college.
And frankly, I didn't have a whole lot of capital to invest.
Theoretically, like
As an investor, yes, this is a a wonderful tool.
But what I was looking for
is this approach. Like what are all of the ideas that are essential for a business person to know?
What helps you succeed? How can you understand the world around you in a useful way?
But I was looking at it specifically in the context of
practitioners or entrepreneurs.
You know, if if you're going to run a business, if you're going to work in a business and improve it.
What's this what uh what what is that set of mental models?
Look like.
And so the personal MBA as a book
Uh became
Just that.
Like let's take this idea of mental models, which is very valuable, very useful for everyone.
And apply it in this specific context.
So no matter
what industry you work in, what market you're you're operating in.
What your personal experience in business looks like.
What is the small set of business concepts you need to understand in order to do your work well?
I'm curious as to how you would define a mental model.
So for me.
Uh mental models
are concepts or ideas or representations about how something in the real world works.
And they are useful because of this wonderful capability that we have in our minds, which is mental simulation.
And so I think I think the analogy that makes the most sense is
When you go to a skilled car mechanic
The mechanic has a mental representation of of what
A car.
is how it works, what are the pieces, how do they fit together.
And if you're seeing something weird in the engine.
Or you're hearing something weird in the engine.
That mental representation gives them a way to hone in on exactly what's going on.
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I think in the same way, a skilled business person has a set of mental representations about what a business is, how it works, how the pieces fit together.
And when you have
An accurate
working mental representation, you can
you can use your mind to simulate what's going on.
What you should be seeing, what you're not seeing.
Um, if you change something in your marketing or your sales process, how that's going to affect the rest of of the business.
Um, so yeah, met mental models are for mental simulation, and the best business people in the world
A have more and more accurate mental models to draw from.
So they have a more comprehensive understanding of of
what a business is, how it works, how to make it better.
And then they're able to use that mental representation.
In the context of a real business.
Two
Make changes.
Run experiments.
Uh try different things and
Keep doing what works and stop doing what doesn't.
And if you do that over a long enough period of time, the business as a whole becomes much, much better.
I think one of the things that Munger also said was, uh, you know, there's very few models that carry the bulk of the weight of
the thinking and the outcomes. What are the what are the ones in the personal MBA that you see repeatedly the most useful in your own day to day life and the feedback that you're getting from people reading it?
So the the personal MBA. It's actually it's baked into the structure of the personal MBA. So so the book is roughly three parts.
Uh part one is all about business.
what they are, how they work.
Uh part two is about people.
Because businesses are created by people for the benefit of other people.
And so if you don't have a working understanding of how
people work, you're going to have a really difficult time.
And then part three is about systems.
So what are complex systems? What are some of the principles that can help you think about or reason about complex systems?
And having that knowledge is what helps you
Start to tweak or experiment.
in a complex system in a way that's not going to have
Hopefully.
Unanticipated consequences.
negative third or fourth or fifth order effects, that kind of thing.
The organizing principle in the first part of the book about business.
is something that I call the five parts of every business.
Which is is essentially a a working definition of what a business is and what a business does.
And uh just very briefly, uh a a business has
Five parts.
Uh they create something valuable for other people, which is value creation.
Marketing is attracting attention and getting people interested in whatever it is you have to offer.
Sales is about the process of taking someone who is interested.
A prospect.
And getting them to pull out their
Wallet, checkbook, credit card.
And
give you money for this thing that you've made.
Uh value del delivery is the uh the part of the process where you actually
give your customers what they have paid for.
'Cause if you don't, you're not running a business, you're running a scam.
And finance is just the the the process of
looking at the inflows and outflows money and answering two very important questions.
A is more money flowing in than flowing out.
'Cause if not, you have a problem.
And B.
Is it enough? Is it enough to compensate you for the time and attention and energy that you're continuing to invest?
in the business.
Because if it's not.
then that business has a sustainability problem. There's not a a good reason for you to keep doing whatever it is that you're doing.
And so what I found with
Particularly new business people.
Um or people who are trying to start a venture for the first time.
Having that
understanding of
Businesses always have these five parts.
And these five parts have very specific concrete goals attached to them.
I found that it it's it's helps.
New business people really wrap their minds around, okay, what are we dealing with here? This is a release relatively constrained set of concerns. I can think about them, I can reason through them.
And um this is when when somebody is trying to
Write a business plan.
For the first time.
My advice to them is very simple. Take out a sheet of paper.
You have
Five subheads, value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance.
And if you can sketch out in detail
What each of these processes look like in the business.
you'll be in really good shape. That's all you need to do.
And so yeah, in in instead of having business be this
Amorphous nebulous blob of
things I need to do to make money.
uh it helps to to have that deconstruction to know exactly what you need to do and in what order.
And to be able to to look at what you're missing so you can fill in the blanks.
What are the ones that you keep coming back to personally?
Again and again.
Like what are the the ideas from um not not just the book, but like the idea uh like are you finding yourself more in the complex systems? Are you finding yourself more in the people? Like what are the models that you repeatedly use when you're making decisions?
Yeah, I think about the
the ideas in
working with yourself and working with other people.
All the time.
Um, so it it's really helpful to have a working understanding of uh sunk cost.
Um it's it's work it's useful to have a working knowledge of a crazia.
Like when you're trying to get yourself to do something you know you should.
uh be be doing, but somehow there's some sort of barrier.
That's keeping you from doing that.
I think at this point
I've I've
worked in enough businesses and started enough of my own businesses that the the business side of things is relatively
Fluid. It doesn't take a whole lot of
mental effort or energy to keep those things in mind right now.
But
you are the instrument that you use to get things done in the world. And so the the debugging your own mind and help and trying to anticipate how others are thinking and feeling.
and trying to optimize around that.
There's still a tremendous amount of effort and skill.
that's valuable in that domain. And and I find myself thinking about those sorts of things.
Quite often.
Well let's double click on that for a second. How do we debug our own brain?
I think
It's helpful to understand.
One of the things that that I've found in terms of a a technique.
That I use a lot.
Is uh is logging.
So just trying to pay attention to what it is that you're doing, what you're trying to do.
And then writing down
Both what you accomplish in the course of a day, but also the decisions that you make and the places where you get stuck.
or you've been trying to make progress on a a in a certain area for a while.
And it's just not working, or you're feeling uncomfortable, or there's a decision that you need to make that you're not.
making for whatever reason.
I think a lot of times
People will just
sit with that and not do anything about it. Like the the
mentally and emotionally, they get bound up about certain decisions.
And unless you are making a concerted effort to capture what those decisions are.
And go back into your thought process and try to figure out why.
Like why am I stuck on this particular thing?
What information do I need?
that I don't have yet.
Like who could I talk to about this? Is there an experiment that I could run to to try it this way and see if it works?
All of those things
It's pretty straightforward to do them.
It's the remembering to do them.
And the the the consistent
Noticing when there's a barrier.
And then trying to to
deconstruct and go a little bit deeper into why that barrier might exist in the first place.
That's the practice.
And it it it really is just something that you need to pay attention to and just go back to every single day.
I I'm super curious about that. I mean, it sounds like it it's a very active form of reflection.
You're reflecting on sort of like what's happened to you. You've had an experience, you're reflecting upon that experience, and you're trying to figure out the next steps or what went wrong. And the writing is is really the
the work of the reflection, if you will.
Yeah. It's it's a a daily review process.
combined with
getting into the habit of making notes as you're doing the work.
Uh which I th I think has a couple of benefits.
A it's just good practice to to
track how you're actually spend your time and energy or investing your time and energy.
Instead of just
Relying on your memory.
to do that because our memories at keeping track of
What we really do.
I think there's there's another
cognitive and emotional benefit to doing this
Which is
All of us are are
involved in something, hopefully, that we care about that's important to us.
Oftentimes those projects are very complex.
And
Take a long time, take a lot of of energy, take a lot of effort.
The to-do list can be thousands of items.
And so if if you're gauging your
mental and emotional conception of
progress on
Is my to-do list done yet?
The answer to that day after day, week after week, year after year is
No, it's not done yet.
Therefore, it's hard to feel good about
what it is that you've done in a day.
At least for me, um, the pr the practice of of daily logging

helpful in terms of feeling
Like
No, I
I did.
20 things today. Here's exactly what those are. Here's how it's related to what it is I want to do.
And
You get the double benefit of giving yourself credit.
for the things that you are doing to push the ball forward.
And then also having this
rich corpus of information that you can go back to and evaluate your process, evaluate your decisions and make improvements from there.
I like that a lot. I I think like one of the things I struggled with
Especially as a knowledge worker was just sort of like, What's my product?
Like what's what's tangible at the end of the day? I would come home and
You know, I'm like, What did I do today? And it's like I wrote an algorithm. And you know, that's not very tangible, right? Like it's sort of you lose track of the bigger goal, you sort of, you know, you think about it differently, but
Yeah, I I find that really interesting.
There are many conversations. One thing that you're
amazing at is synthesizing information across a broad domain. You have this
Unparalleled skill.
Uh, what's your process for that? How would you teach that to somebody else?
Like walk me through how you do that. It's it's m
Like it blows my mind.
Thanks.
Um
I think in terms of of technique or process
There's two steps to it.
Um, one is the more input that you have from a wide variety of sources, the more material.
that you have to work with.
So I I think if if we invert that into
What a lot of people don't do is they pay attention to a very narrow set of sources or all of their
Their reading, their research, their experimentation, their investigation.
is in one very narrow domain and they don't really stray outside of that.
The wider you look, the wider the the variety of sources that you have coming into your brain.
The more access to
interesting insights and connections you would
you would have.
So so yes, reading broadly, experimenting broadly, having experiences in different domains and trying to bring those domains together. That's the first part.
And I think once you do that
And this was very much the process for the personal MBA.
I I read
hundreds, thousands of business books over a very long period of time.
And when you do that.
You start to see the same ideas come up over and over and over again.
And so there's there's a certain frequency analysis that you can do on
paying attention to to the ideas, the organizing structure, the names, the
The concept, the relationships that keep coming up over and over.
As you are doing this wide exploration.
And that's a really good pointer that that there's something about that that's particularly important, that's worth knowing, that's worth understanding.
And then when when you come across those things
They become
natural targets for
the next round of of research or explor exploration or experimentation.
When when you're doing the the sort of wide coverage, are you also like you said thousands of books, hundreds of thousands?
Are you going across time as well? Like are you looking at sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, two thousands?
Or is it sort of like
What are the last
uh, you know, one hundred best selling business books and then pulling them out. Like so when you're getting these ideas, how much are
How how do you know that they're also
Um not gonna disappear across time.
And I th this this might be a distinguishing factor of the the research process.
I try to narrow down
What I'm reading.
To
Mostly books that that you could fit into the framework of
How to think about
Fill in the blank.
And so I'm not reading a bunch of biographies.
I'm not reading a bunch of, you know, entertainment or or
Um call it trend pieces.
Like, you know, here's
Uh, I just I I remember a book from a couple of years ago of like the rising twent trend of of Twitter. It's like that's not
a good investment in terms of this kind of research.
I want to read something.
Like influence, which is how to think about cognitive biases in the
in in the specific application of persuasion in sales.
I want to read On Writing Well by William Zinser.
to to get in my brain like how to
Convey nonfiction material in a clear, concise
Way.
And and so I think the more
The more practical and
application oriented uh a sources, that that narrows down the scope considerably.
Because there's a there's a bunch of sources that
um I'm not necessarily paying attention to. Not to say that there's not value there. It's just not the same kind of thing.
But then that allows because you know looking at it from the the the standpoint of application really lets you say, okay.
Here are the techniques that keep coming up. Here are the concepts that come up over and over again.
And that's where you you really start to see the commonalities across approaches and across philosophies.
I I I like that for sort of like how you created what you were writing about or how you thought about things, but you also do this for subjects that are completely unrelated to that. I mean
Um, I remember the first time I met you, I think we talked about water bottles for like 45 minutes. You know, you've done a deep dive into sort of like microphones and audio equipment and like your ability to just take in a huge amount of information and distill it, like
Walk me through how you do that with something tangible, like a water bottle or a microphone or or something you've done recently that I I don't even know about. Cause you're doing it's it's sort of like the same process, right? Like you're gathering this information, you're distilling it, you're
Yeah, so so in those other domains, I usually have a specific problem that I want to solve.
Like there's a reason that I'm doing it or there's a reason that I care about it.
And that's where the exploration and experimentation piece.
comes in.
I don't necessarily know what's going to work in advance, but I do know that I have a problem that I care about and a way to solve it.
Which is
I can collect a whole bunch of different examples.
and test them out or put them through a process of comparing A versus B.
Over and over and over and over again.
If you do that for any significant length of time, you start noticing which are the things that solve your problem better and which are the things that have some
significant drawbacks.
And so yeah, I don't know if there is
Any magic here aside from
Curiosity and interest and
Patients.
Like just being willing to test a whole bunch of different things.
Uh beyond
Beyond what you would usually do in the context of
satisfacing, like just trying to get to good enough as quickly as you can.
Or just
Picking out something that somebody else recommends and going with that recommendation blind.
Um I think
Just e even a uh
A relatively small amount of experimentation is
can get you further down
The the line of
What is the best
X for Y problem.
Then you can find
uh reading in a book or searching the internet or or um asking a friend about it.
I'm curious as to what your personal process is for making decisions, if you've if you've actually formulated one or like how do you go about doing that for something
um say medium significant to high significant.
I approach high significant decisions with a
Good degree of caution.
Um, and there is um you you you can think about this in terms of value of information.
And so if you go through, for example, a research process or
an experimentation process trying to collect as much information about this particular decision as you can.
There's a value of information.
In the sense of the more information that you collect, that can give you good signal.
to
help you hone in on on what looks to be the best decision you can make at a point.
But there's also a cost of information.
Of
All of that research, all of that experimentation.
You're spending time, you're spending attention, you're spending energy in order to collect it.
And so
I usually I I am far
And this is just
personality.
I'm far more in the optimizer, maximizer camp of decision making. Like I wanna try to get to the best that I can.
Given
the time and energy budget that I have.
set aside for this particular thing.
And do you do that in advance, like your time and energy budget? You're like, I have two days to decide this, or
Yeah.
I try.
Um but I'm also I'm also
of the inclination that I'm going to make that time and energy budget as
big as I can possibly make it.
That's not necessarily optimal in the sense that, you know, there are some things like, for example,
If you're choosing a water bottle.
You can probably satisfice on that. They'll all hold water. It'll be fine.
But
If you if you care about so so one thing that is um
I know about myself.
I care about the tools that I use. I care about the things that that are in my environment day to day.
And so yeah, I'm I'm willing to
have a larger time or energy budget.
about certain things that I use often that I care a lot about or that produce a particular result that I want.
Yeah, it's it's it's always like
Here's my budget.
And then I'm going to to collect as much information as I can with
with the amount of resources and attention at my disposal.
And then go with the
The best one that I know at the time.
How do you filter that information? Like how do you find high quality sources of information? Are there sort of like tips or tricks that you found? Is it
I mean internet reviews seem, you know, generally pretty useless. Um this is where recommendations are worth their weight in gold. So if there's a a source that you trust that talks about a specific thing in a specific way.
That's a very good signal.
Um reviews can be good signal.
If they include the information that this is what I was trying to do.
And this is the problem I was trying to solve.
And this is how this particular resource.
solved this problem or helped me with this.
provide a solution in in a very concrete way.
I don't pay much attention on the review front too.
Oh, this was really interesting. This was this was enjoyable. This was a fun use of my time because that's I mean
If you're looking at a fiction book, that's exactly what you're optimizing for. But if you're trying to solve a problem, you're really looking for
I needed something to do X.
I I tried a bunch of different things or I tried this one, it solved my problem, then that's that that automatically goes on the consideration set of like things that I should pay attention to, things that I should try.
And do you find there's some sort of like triangulation with that as well? Because uh if people are trying to solve
Um the same problem
over and over again with the same products, like you're you're you're getting the variables that probably matter to solving that particular pro problem, or am I just sort of
No, I I think that's accurate. I think there there's also and the it's um it's important to to talk about this in the experimentation exploration context.
Um, when you're doing this sort of research, there's always a certain amount of malinvestment.
Like you buy you know you buy a microphone that doesn't work for you. Um you
You buy a water bottle that's highly
review and it ends up leaking or being annoying in some way.
And there's a certain amount of waste.
in the process of of doing this exploration.
Which which is really annoying. Like you would
Hope to avoid most of that.
But I think in a lot of domains where
you're doing synthesis or you're doing optimizy sort of research.
That malinvestment is a form of tuition.
It's the price that you're paying to gather information about this domain that you care about.
And so if the problem is worth solving at all.
It's probably worth having an experimentation budget.
where, you know, in the process of trying things, you'll find some things that work and some things that don't. And hopefully you can minimize that cost.
For sure.
But you're always going to have a certain amount of
part of the process or part of the materials or part of your sources that just aren't going to work out. And that that's
There's nothing wrong with that. That's to be expected. Well it's interesting you say there's nothing wrong with it. I I I think like or in organizations, there's definitely uh an expectation that we're not gonna fail.
I I mean, as much as they talk about celebrating failure, uh, you know, there's not a big tolerance, especially for sort of like big failure, right? If you're gonna fail, it's gotta be a little failure and you can't try these big bold ideas, but also personally, like there's a there's uh as you were saying that, I'm like, there's something about that that we just don't
want to admit to ourselves, whether it's an ego thing or
Or whatever it is, like there there's a niche there and almost an arbitrage, if you will, for people who are willing to do that and suffer through a few iterations to find something or
Um
Even at work, like just the ability to fail is is culturally generally unacceptable.
Yeah, this this gets back to loss aversion.
Right. We hate to feel like we're losing. We hate to feel like we're making bad decisions.
Uh
In the context of an organization.
looking bad in front of other people.
giving them a reason to question our judgment about future things that might be more important.
And there's there's also a scale in which
failure is more or less accept acceptable.
And so yeah, for it for the big important life or organizational decisions that you can't if can't
You can't screw up because the consequences of screw up are so big.
That just indicates that you need to have a bigger research budget.
or or experimentation budget, information collection budget in order to optimize that.
as much as you can by the time a decision absolutely needs to be made.
But yeah, I I think it's one of those things that
People are
Two
conservative when it comes to doing that exploration bit because the mistakes, because the waste.
We're too emotionally attached.
To
Wanting to avoid those things.
Then is r is is really good and and proper and valuable in that context.
Um, I think this is you know going going back to our conversation of Munger.
He has a a a lot of
very good quotes about
You know, the the the best way to to
Do well is to avoid making
Avoidable mistakes.
There's a certain context in which that's true.
And those are the high stakes things that are difficult to reverse, that are very expensive, that are very destructive. Yeah. Those are the things you absolutely don't want to screw up.
And on the other end of the spectrum where you have more latitude.
Screwing up more
is a way to increase your rate of learning.
And to increase your knowledge and and and that
Gathering of knowledge has compound returns in and of itself.
And so in many areas of both life and business, more experimentation means more mistakes, but it also means more results and more growth.
I I like that. I mean I I think that
If we're learning, that's just a big
It's like a big footnote to that, right? Because it's
We we all know somebody with twenty years of experience, but it's like the same year repeated over and over. So experience isn't enough to like learn something. How
Yeah.
I'm curious as to to hear your riff on sort of like how the
Not only do we acquire skills, but how do we learn something? And we maybe we can separate those. So let's go with like how do we learn something? And then maybe is that different than rapid skill acquisition
Or where are they where do they overlap?
Yeah, I think the the first thing to delineate is
Knowledge and skill are two completely different things.
So knowledge in the learning sense, gathering information, forming these concepts. So like the personal MBA is a book of business knowledge.
It is not a book of business skill.
In the sense that
Skill is being able to perform in a particular way.
with an objective that you care about.
So you should be able to see yourself in the real world doing something to produce a particular result in a reliable, repeatable way. That's what skill is.
I think a lot of people conflate the two.
Um so going to school.
Often gives you
Knowledge?
Some of that knowledge is useful, some of the no knowledge is not.
And then skill is usually gathered in the context of doing the thing that you care about doing.
With skill.
In general, the best approach is um I I really like this phrase, how quickly can you start making mistakes?
How quickly, how can you get to the point of, yeah, learn a little bit about the topic, whatever it is that you're trying to do.
Because that helps you.
Understand what performance looks like.
It helps you self-correct. So as you're doing the thing you're trying to do, if you make a mistake, you're capable of recognizing and correcting that mistake in the moment.
But skill
Is
Always gained in the context of
Practice.
And um and there's been a a lot of research over the years about
What effective practice.
is what it looks like how you do it.
It's often called deliberate practice.
Um so
You are not distracted. You're focusing exactly on what's going on. You are paying attention to your performance and correcting yourself as you go.
And then you are also
Paying explicit attention to small variations.
in what you're doing.
uh trying little experiments. If I do it this way, how does it turn out? If I do it that way, how does it turn out?
And I I think back to your question.
What separates people who are
Good at something.
in a skill context versus people who are great.
Something.
is that they are much better at doing that very fine experimentation in the moment, paying attention.
Learning the variations, learning the exceptions.
And that's what allows them to develop.
great skill in a wide variety of circumstances when it comes to that particular domain.
You you've had experience with this, I presume.
A little bit. Yeah.
It it's really fascinating to me because uh
When you you were talking about that, what one of the things I'm hearing is that the
Again, the ability to fail, the ability to play
is part of
being able to do something
uh not only learning
But if you're learning with an instructor, do you do you lose that ability to play? Do you lose the ability to fail because they're always correcting you before you sort of like get too far out of line?
No, so so that's it's related. It's not exactly the same thing.
And so usually when you're when you're learning a skill.
One of the things that allows you to learn that skill faster or p or pick up that skill faster.
is what's called a fast feedback loop.
And so there should be a a very short period of time.
Between
Making a mistake.
or not performing in the way that you want to perform.
recognizing.
that there's something to be improved.
And then making the adjustment, making the improvement.
And so when it what an excellent
instructor or coach or someone who is a teacher, someone who's who is helping you develop the skill.
What they give you primarily, aside from having some knowledge and experience about
What performance looks like.
is they are a party that is outside of yourself.
who can take an objective look at exactly what it is that you're doing.
And they can notice the fine variations, the the small mistakes, the things that you might not even notice.
And then the feedback loop that so they can they can stop you, they can call it out, they can help you correct it in the moment.
Whereas you might not not even recognize that you're making
Making a mistake.
That's the value of having
having a coach.
And I think that the that a lot of the the most effective
Forms of practice are all of those things that give you that fast feedback loop, whether it's it's
you know, there's somebody outside of you coaching and and
highlighting when th things need to be improved.

Or even just like going through the process of
learning a little bit about what you're trying to do before you start doing it.
The value of that is is that fast feedback loop, recognizing when you made a mistake.
Um a tangible example of that.
So both of both of my kids are learning how to play the piano.
And
the method that that they are using, which has worked
phenomenally well. It's called the Suzuki Suzuki method.
of uh of music.
You don't even start.
By playing
Notes on the keyboard.
You start by listening to music.
And the reason is
By the time you sit down in front of the keyboard to play a piece.
You already know what it's supposed to sound like.
And so while you're playing
you know, you you hit a wrong note, you know immediately that that note is not
correct and you need to go back a little bit and fix it.
And so that
That form of fast feedback.
allows you to progress far more lap rapidly than you otherwise would because you are able to make those fine variations.
in the act of practicing.
It's like the first thing you're learning is how to correct yourself when you make a mistake or how to acknowledge that you've made a mistake is probably the better way to word that. How how does that translate into the workplace? Like
not piano, but like I I'm in the workplace. I want to be better at my job and and you know, there's a subset of skills that that involves from, you know, presenting to everything else. But it seems like the ability of other people to give you feedback in the workplace is
largely gone away uh for various reasons, whether they don't want to hurt your feelings or or whatever's going on.
Or, you know, in some ways they compete with you. Your colleagues rarely come up to you and say, Hey
Josh, here's the one thing holding you back from getting a promotion.
uh that I wanna get too, right? So y you have the semi competitive environment, but
you know, your boss is busy and they're they're not always able to coach you and how how do we learn to give ourselves feedback or identify where we've made mistakes from everything from writing emails to presenting to yeah.
I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
I think one of the most valuable tools we were talking about logging earlier.
This is another one of those areas where keeping a daily log of what you're doing.
And how
Your internal
understanding of how you did, what went well, what didn't go well, what you would try the the next time.
Just having that reflection loop.
is one of the best things that you can do for yourself.
to both
capture what's happening in the moment.
Oh you did.
As well as go back and look at it later.
So maybe you're a manager and you have a few direct reports.
you have a one on one meeting with one of them.
And you take some notes about what you talked about.
How it
How you were feeling during the meeting, how it seems like they were feeling, how they were reacting.
And then if you get feedback from the outside world later.
Like
your direct report comes back later and said, Yeah, that thing that you said during our meeting the other day.
that really didn't work for me or that made me feel a certain way or all of that.
You can contrast
your contemporaneous experience with what you're doing at the point when it happened to the feedback and the information you're getting from the outside world.
And you can use that contrast.
Two
experiment in certain ways or do things differently.
the next time around. It's it's that reflective loop.
That lets you get better at some of the soft skills.
that are otherwise really difficult.

Um the same thing goes for something like speaking.
And so when you speak.
Even if it's just for yourself.
Make a recording.
Yeah.
Give yourself the opportunity to see yourself from the outside doing this thing that you want to get good at.
I know from experience going back and and watching that.
Both takes time and is is oftentimes a little bit painful or a little bit uncomfortable.
But it's that form of feedback that allows you to
Focus on certain areas of
your performance that you want to improve and then
make a plan to improve those in
Very specific ways.
Does that make sense? Yeah, I think that's very actionable and doesn't really rely on other people so much. I like the idea of having a reflection loop for yourself where you're
You're putting it on you. And I mean, ultimately it is on you, right? Nobody's gonna
Nobody owes you anything and you need to figure out a way to get better at the skills that matter for your particular job.
Yeah.
And I I think you know you'll you'll see in a wide variety of domains the
The people who
have the habit both of of learning and experimenting.
But then also
reflecting and capturing their progress and deciding what to do next consciously instead of just
Trying a bunch of things.
Yeah, throwing spaghetti against the wall.
that kind of approach.
The more deliberate and
focused and intentional you are.
about this process of improvement, the the more you're going to improve per unit of time. Yeah, I think that
reflection is a largely misunderstood component of learning. And I think that without reflection we don't really learn
Uh as
Ma maybe the uptake of learning is much slower without it. I I would almost say we don't really learn without some sort of
um pain or reflection angle to learning. I mean, if you put your hand on a hot stove, you learn really quickly because you have a pain response in your in your brain and
Uh, you know, but reflection is the work of learning. I I I honestly I think of it as that. And if you think of it as that, it changes
The question is you ask other people too, because it now you're you're not asking other people what to do.
You're asking them to to basically open their mind about the reflections
on their experiences they've had. So you have an experience and they reflect on it. So
I wanna learn from you. I'm not gonna say like what do I
What do I need to do in this case? I I want to say it, like how did you think about it? What did you see? What were the raw inputs?
How did you see those kind of aggregating and playing out over time?
If you had models and analytic models about how you thought about it, what were those models?
Um and then how does that uh to your point earlier about time, right? Like how does that fast forward in time and how how can we anticipate that playing out? And
If you do that with three or four different people in a certain domain, you can triangulate on the variables that really matter in a given decision.
Uh and it's really easy to ask people what to do and I think that that's really
Uh we we default to that'cause we're busy and
Um, but then we're just sort of getting the answer, but we're not getting the experience. We're not getting the learning that comes with the experience. So we don't know the edge cases.
And you know, it's like our friend Tim, who's got the there's a l a line cook and a chef, right? They both can follow the same recipe, but when something goes wrong
The the chef can diagnose almost instantly why because they've done the work, they've reflected on the line cook has a a much different
uh level of experience and level of reflection. And so it's much harder for them to diagnose.
Absolutely.
I love that analogy.
Such a good one. Yeah, Tim is so good, man. I I'm curio I'm gonna switch subjects a little bit here, but I'm I'm curious to hear your thoughts on
He wrote a book about the Hydra and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on overcoming fear. And you know, it seems like we're we're often and and this goes back to something we were talking about earlier about making mistakes. Like we're we're scared to make mistakes. We we don't and if we do want to deviate, we wanna deviate just a little bit, not too much. That way if we fail
Uh and it's lost a version and you know, even if the upside's huge, we d we don't want to lose.
Um so I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
on the research you've done on overcoming fear and if there's a moment in your life that you can think of where you've had to overcome fear.
The the book that you're referencing, How to Fight a Hydra.
is a a book a lot about
Many
Interesting difficult to approach topics.
So it's it's about ambition in the sense of wanting to do something big.
Or wanting to do something you've never done before.
It's about fear.
It's about fear of the unknown.
Um, not knowing what to expect, not knowing if you're going to be able to do this thing that you want to be able to do.
It's about uncertainty.
So not having all of the answers in advance, not knowing exactly what you're going to need to do or how you're going to need to grow.
in order to get to the end result.
And it's about risk.
It's about facing the
The very real possibility that you're going to invest your time, your energy, your money, your life.
in something that might not produce the results that you're hoping for.
In the process of of writing that
Book.
My uh my process is very research based. I I'm I'm
Reading I'm trying things.
My inclination is is to to take a non fiction
attack on explaining how to do all of this well.
And when I was working on the book
Subjects like risk
Or uncertainty.
Lack of locus of control.
Uh, all of those things if you
If you think about it too much.
If you consider it
too accurately, they become very uncomfortable very quickly.
Because it
It's it's really like coming to terms with the things that you control and the things you can't and and you know, the the very real possibility that
this thing that you want to do is a dead end, that's not gonna work for you.
And and so
There are things that we can do.
Um, to minimize uncertainty, to minimize risk, to maximize our locus of control.
And so the process of writing a book, um, how to write a hydra is fiction.
And and what I was trying to do in that book is instead of explaining how to do it.
in a
list format or advice.
You know, do A B C D E F G
Um, what I was trying to do is is help readers
Have a more accurate mental simulation of what it looks and feels like.
To use these sorts of ideas on a practical level.
Um, so show someone doing it instead of explaining necessarily.
How?
To do it.
And I think a lot of it
The the early steps are
A formal acknowledgement of
You are signing up to do something.
difficult and uncertain that might not work.
That's a very real possibility.
And so I think a lot of people
early on in the process will either
Let that stop them.
Right there.
Like if I I if I can't be guaranteed that this works, I'm just
Not going to do it.
that is not necessarily a constructive response for a lot of the
bigger, more ambitious things that we want to do.
But then also by recognizing it.
You rob it.
quite a bit of its power.
So instead of it trying to be this inconvenient truth that you are trying to to push to the corners of your mind and ignore.
And a lot of the compensating behaviors in in terms of cognitive and behavioral psychology that that appear when we're dealing with these sorts of things.
They tend to appear when we're trying to suppress acknowledging
an accurate statement around the world or about the world.
And so by acknowledging exactly what it is you're trying to do.
Acknowledging that it's uncertain.
and risky and you don't know exactly what what what you're going to need to do or how you're going to need to grow at the start.
That puts you on a very firm footing with reality.
Because it helps you acknowledge
There are ways that I need to grow.
In order to face this challenge.
There are things that might get in the way of accomplishing this goal. Let me figure out what they are.
There are risks.
That
If something goes a certain way.
I'm not going to get what I want. What are those risks? And what are the things that I can do to alleviate
At least the known risks, the things that I can do something about.
And I think all of those things
They don't
Sol the problem.
in the sense of removing the uncertainty, removing the risk, making it
a one hundred percent guarantee that you're going to get what you want.
But they make the project much easier to approach.
and your experience of doing the things you need to do to get what you want.
becomes
Much easier, much less stressful.
um much more approachable in a way that the
The big
Nebulous project is not.
I like that. I mean I often think of of this as like
When you're talking about risk, there's there's sort of
Additive subtractive risk and then there's multiplicative risk.
And uh, you know, that's a helpful framework to sort of be like, Well, if it fails, like what's the worst case outcome? You know, rarely is it multiplicative and you're going back to zero.
Uh and in some cases
People just
Think that
Other people have this ability, like entrepreneurs are just born with this ability to
Have no fear and pursue their dreams and
What would your response uh like and what would your response be to that?
There are no
born people who know exactly what's going to happen and
Yeah, so uh we we uh
Another way of putting it is
We expect ourselves to be omniscient and omnipotent.
And we are not.
And neither is anybody else.
And and so
I think dropping that
As much as we can.
Or at least acknowledging our preference of like we would we would like to know.
what's going to work or what's not going to work before we do it.
That would be a wonderful capability to have. Every business person, every investor.
On the face of the earth.
would give up their entire um
everything that they own in order to have that capability. Because with it you could do anything.
Um
I I think
Just coming to terms with
These are fundamental
aspects of reality.
They can't be run around.
They can't be hacked.
They can't be
Eliminated.
In the context of
anything that we want to do with our lives. These are these are inherent facts about the world that we live in.
And so accepting that that's the the way things are.
Um, it's and it's it's it's the first part of the battle. If you don't do that, you're gonna have a really hard difficult time doing anything else.
But once you get past that.
That's where the exploration and experimentation
Trying new things, taking informed risks. So
So pushing in ways that probably aren't going to kill you or do permanent damage.
but might represent a real breakthrough in this area that that you care about.
Ю стан стоps.
And and there's there's an idea.
that I talk about in the personal MBA called threat lockdown.
It's it's our our mind's defensive mode.
When when we feel like our world is out of control, or there's
There's some scary, risky, bad thing that can happen to us.
Ar natural response
is to lock down.
We go into defensive mode. We try not to stick our neck out. We try to get super conservative.
Yes. We're we're minimizing exposure.
And it's important to understand that's a physiological response, and it's built in there very, very deeply.
And so if you recognize that that
That is something that is a part of all of us.
What are all of the things that you can do to
debug or disable that threat lockdown response.
Long enough.
to do the exploration, to do the experimentation, to do the things that will actually get you closer to where you want to be.
From where you are now.
And I think the more you're able to focus on
I don't know if this is gonna work, but I'm gonna try it.
And any th any result gives me more information.
gives me more data about the world, it it improves my skills, and improves my capabilities of acting in the world.
That is a win regardless of
Whether or not that discreet experiment
Actually.
moves things forward or not. You are becoming a better, more skilled person by virtue of doing the thing that you're trying to do.
I like that. Uh one thing that I would maybe add to that and I would love to hear your reaction to it is the people you hang around make a huge difference for your risk tolerance, too. So it i if your sort of like five closest friends are very intolerant of any risk, it's gonna be that much harder for you to take a risk and I
And I noticed this sort of when I left government, everybody was like, Oh my God, you're crazy, right? Because nobody wanted to leave. You're you're leaving this guaranteed well paid job.
um, you know, extremely well paid, great job, I love my job, but you're leaving this to do something so uncertain.
And being around people at work was one thing. And then my parents also thought I was crazy, but my friends were like, What took you so long?
And you know, it was it was very different my reactions being and where my brain tended to go. So, you know, when I was telling people at work, it's like, Oh, maybe I'm missing something. Like maybe
And and that's a g healthy response as well, but it it's sort of like then you start
Um doubling down on all the negatives and and the uncertainty and
it becomes self reinforcing. And then with my other friends, it's like, Oh, I have a bit more freedom and I I feel
Like I know it's gonna work out even if
It's unfounded.
Yeah, and I'd I'd take that one step further.
Which is
Sometimes your friends or your peer group
can violate your expectations about what's possible.
in a particular area.
And so, you know, it it one of the most valuable things that your peer group can do or the people you surround yourself with.
They can have
Experiences that you wouldn't expect
would work. They they can try things that you've never tried before. They can
do experiments that maybe don't work out and you can learn from that.
And so just just having a group of people who are
able who are who are trying to do roughly the thing that you're trying to do.
And they're doing
They're making their own risks. They're they're doing their own experiments. They're collecting data and then sharing back.
There's an enormous amount of value.
In that.
And so having having
a group of people that you can trust to be.
Honest about the process.
and supportive of you and your own attempts to push in this particular direction.
That's something that is very difficult to
replicate or replace. There's enormous value in that.
We were talking earlier about sort of side projects and r rabbit trails and y you were saying how they're undervalued. Um
Can we expand on that?
Um this is this is something that
Well let's bring it back to a a a mental model. So combinatorial effects.
are things that happen when you bring other
sometimes unrelated things together in a in a new and valuable way.
Skills have combinatorial effects.
So the the more experiences, the more capabilities that you have in sometimes wildly different areas.
Each of those capabilities
brings the possibility of combining it with something else in your wheelhouse in in a way that
works particularly well. I I think the the classic
business example of of this is um
In the founding of Apple, when Steve Jobs takes a calligraphy class.
And then typography and and that element of
Design becomes
an instrumental part of the very first
Macintosh computers.
That's an example of bringing something that seems
completely out of left field, right? Like what do computers and calligraphy have in common?
But it turns out when you do some experimentation and you you apply what you learn in one area to a completely different area.
You can un unlock a lot of value.
And so
Um it also reminds me there's there's
One of one of the the way back
Um X K C D cartoons.
was like the value of things to my career.
Like this degree that I went to school for for whatever, or the w the weekend in high school that I spent.
packing together a Perl script. That form of experimentation. Like
Just trying a bunch of things.
Learning how certain things work.
Sometimes it's the side projects, sometimes it's the things that you
We're doing just because you were interested or just because you cared about it.
Or just because you wanted to see if you could
push the state of the art in a particular area.
Those are the things that end up
Providing
An unexpected enormous amount of value.
From my own life, the personal MBA was a side project.
I planned on, you know, at at that point in my life.
I had a really good job.
Had a similar experience to you.
In the sense of
Oh I I remember.
Um so my my dad
was an elementary school principal
And then towards the back half of his career, he was a a principal.
He was a a teacher first and then a principal.
My very first year out of college.
I had a job where I was making more than he had made.
In
Twenty five.
thirty years in education.
And I remember when I went home and I told him that I was quitting my job to start my own business.
It's like what are you doing?
That's crazy. Like why would you give up this sure thing?
In order to
Do this thing that you have no idea whether it's g not going to work or not.
The reason I did it was because
The project
was
Valuable.
demonstrably valuable to a lot of people.
I had data to suggest that if I I invested more time and energy here, it would pay off.
And yeah, there was uncertainty there. There was risk there. Um, I was giving up
Something that was valuable.
in exchange for something that I didn't know the value of.
But
The only reason it was a possibility in the first place.
was because I decided to invest
a portion of my time and energy in this crazy side project that I had no idea how it was going to turn out.
But the upside of it happens to be a lot more than
than I could have expected at the beginning.
Yeah, I think a lot of people don't understand sort of linear versus nonlinear and exponential upside. I mean you you traded a very linear
probably stable but great career for uh you know, in some ways a lottery ticket on
A nonlinear outcome.
Yeah.
And I think
Yeah, maybe maybe a little bit.
More than a lottery ticket. Cause the the lottery ticket you have no information at the beginning. Yeah, yeah. And so
The nice thing about all these side projects, because you're doing experimentation.
And because you're doing iteration.
All of those experiments give you data.
from the world about is this working for me? Is this working for other people?
And the more information you collect, the more confidence you have.
About
You know, if I do more in this area, is it going to pay off?
And you could affect your outcome too. So like yeah, it's not a pure lottery ticket, but it it's definitely, you know.
Uh not guaranteed either.
Uh another one of the the sort of side projects you're thinking about right now is social status. Can you
I'd love to hear your riff on that for a second.
Yeah, I've I've been thinking about social status for
Many years now.
And it's it's one of those it's one of those things. It it came up very early in my research.
Because
Fact of the matter is.
From a business context.
If you build positive social signals.
into your business in some way, shape, or form.
If
If people if the people who you want to become your customers
Look at your offer and say
Yeah, this is gonna make me look really good.
then the offer is immediately more enticing than it would be without that.
Social status.
You know, and and and the value of that to a customer.
Is the sounding.
Classic example.
A Rolex does not tell time better than timex. In fact, it's probably worse.
But
That's not the reason that people buy Rolexes. People buy Rolexes for the status signal.
Because there's something
They're they're trying to communicate an intangible quality about themselves.
in a visible way. So something making something that would otherwise be invisible visible to other people in a way that they can understand and appreciate and value.
So there's there's a there's a value
in understanding social status, being able to use it, being able to um
to apply it consciously to produce a particular result.
The other part is that
Social status is at the root of sometimes
The biggest mistakes.
Or the dumbest investments the things that we look back.
In our lives and say
Yeah, I really wish I wouldn't have done that.
I I call that status malfunction.
So sometimes there are things that we want to do in our life for our our career.
that are particularly status heavy. We think they're gonna make us look really good in front of other people.
And yet
There are drawbacks, there are costs, there are trade offs that
We should consider that we don't because the the lure of status.
In terms of a psychological or emotional weight is so big.
That we just kinda blow over all of those things.
And we make the dumb decision.
just because we think it it'll it'll make us look good.
Is there an example that comes to mind?
We'll we'll use the example from from the personal MBA. I I make an argument very early on in the book.
That um
that business school in in
very many senses is primarily about
Status signaling.
It's it's about
Signaling that you are part of a group of serious qualified business people.
Um, sophisticated operators, people who are competent, people who know what are what's going on, people who can make the big things happen in the world.
There is nothing that's taught.
in business school classrooms that you are not capable of learning and understanding and applying on your own.
There's there's there's not. Full stop.
Even so
People are willing to spend
So the the latest estimate that I've
that I've heard.
All of the costs of going to a top program.
So tuition fees.
Um
Cost of living.
Opportunity cost of lost wages, when you when you calculate the whole thing.
There are, if I'm remembering correctly.
Nine schools that have just passed the four hundred thousand dollar.
Mark.
In terms of
total cost of a program.
That's a very expensive status signal.
And there are some some people in some circumstances for whom that will be
A
good or at least neutral investment.
And there are a lot of people in the world for whom that will be a millstone around their neck.
For the rest of their life.
And so I I I was noticing this subtext in
A lot of my work
Both in in the in the personal MBA, in the first twenty hours, in how to fight a hydra.
We're
You can often
Get much better results.
If you're willing to
Examine, look at, and take seriously the lower status option.
And evaluate that in terms of does this help me get what I want in a
Faster, more direct, less expensive.
Um less risky.
Less uncertain way.
And
Making those trade offs for people.
On the mental and emotional side.
is really difficult because you know passing up a high status option that's in front of you.
very often feels difficult. It feels like a very real loss. People have a hard time giving up status when it's offered to them.
And so yeah, I've I've been
Thinking about this for a very long time.
And uh it's an intrinsically difficult problem, but I think it's it's a problem that's very valuable to think about.
I think it's really interesting because status also keeps us in organizations, it keeps us compliant.
Yeah, in in all of these
subtle ways, right? There's just almost like
Tacit agreement that when I'm in a meeting and my boss is there, that if I go along and get along
I'm gonna be I have a chance at that chair one day, but if I ruffle f
Ruffle some feathers or
You know, uh
cause difficulty, then I I'm not going to be able to climb this corporate ladder, which is largely a status symbol, the titles, the all of these things.
Uh I I find it really interesting.
About people that pass on that and people that gravitate towards titles and position and it it's just a really interesting sort of
um characteristic to notice.
Yeah. And and I think it also applies to
your personal definition of success.
And so even people late.
In their careers.
In our modern society, status is is very often attached to
Having a lot of money.
having a very large organization
being well known um by
Yeah.
Tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of people, tens of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people.
And
Even people who have reached
from a different reference level or a different reference group.
An enormous amount of success.
Don't feel it.
Because there's always the next level the the next rung on the ladder to climb.
There's always the next thing that you
Could be doing it.
Yeah.
Um
And and and so I I think of
Of the
The Munker quote.
Somebody else is always going to have more money than you.
This is not an emergency.
And the same goes for somebody else's is always going to have more followers on Instagram.
or a bigger email list or a bigger book launch or
Yeah, w whatever whatever your your reference
Somebody's gonna get rich quicker than you. And and it so in the absolute
When you look at your life um in in the grand scheme of things,
The vast majority of us that are are listening to this podcast.
We liv better.
Then the highest status
People lived.
As
early as like a hundred years ago. There there's there's no question.
Like would you choose to be a king or an emperor in an era before antibiotics or after antibiotics? Like the it's just it's crazy.
And yet
The emotional experience that we have.
Does not reflect the reality of
what we could feel if we defined status in a different way, or if we were more careful about or
Careful, deliberate, intentional.
About how we think about success and status. It it's never been so visible that other people have more status. And and it's really interesting because it's on particular variables now, too, right? Like it used to be you sort of lived on your street.
You could see that Joe got a new car or whatever, and and you know, it's this one reference point, but it's your your little tiny community, but now you you're
inundated with
Instagram and Facebook and you're connected in a way that everybody is always doing something that you want to do in one particular aspect of your life. Somebody's got a new car, somebody's going on vacation, somebody's
uh you know, got a really found a really attractive partner, you you sort of like and then you're you're constantly feeling less about yourself.
I I'm curious, you you sort of talked about success. How do you define success?
Yeah, I I thought about this a lot.
When I quit my job.
to do my own thing.
And for me
Success is working on projects that I value and I think are important.
With people that I like.
In a way that allows me to take care of myself and my family.
That's it.
And so if I'm doing those things.
I am being successful.
If one or more of those things are slipping.
Then something needs to change.
And part of that was a reaction to the realities of working in a big corporate environment.
So I I saw a lot of people
who were working on projects they didn't care about.
I saw a lot of of
people who were trying to get into the upper rungs of management and they weren't particularly enjoying the role.
or the pe uh the company of the people that they were working with.
And I saw a lot of people who
didn't spend time with their family.
And invested all of their waking hours in in pushing the organization forward, even if they were carrying severe personal costs.
To do so.
That to me
With with my values, with my priorities.
That status function.
If I do that, I am making a poor decision that's going to lead to a lower quality of life and lower enjoyment of life for me.
Because of status.
because of the lure of that.
And so yeah, it it's it's really
It's interesting from the perspective of
Knowing a lot of people in in in a lot of different industries.
Who have big мізнесes with lots of employees.
Um who
Uh launch books that that
Sell many, many copies. You know, all of this like whatever
Whatever.
data point you use to make the comparison.
There's always going to be someone bigger.
And
I found it really helpful to to think about this idea of status malfunction.
to use that as an opportunity to take a step back and evaluate and say, no, like
There are certain brass rings that if I decided to
Pursue them.
I would be actively making my life worse in ways that I care about.
And it's a I found it a a a very valuable check step to to before committing to something, be like
Is this really going to improve things or is is this
Something that feels enticing.
Because of
millions of years of human psychology and evolutionary development.
But in the end.
is leading to an outcome that I don't want.
You have to set your own scorecard. I think that's a great place to end this conversation, Josh. Thank you so much.
Shane, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
Um
Hey, one more thing before we say goodbye.
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