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Okay, let's get into it.
Hello and welcome back to Chasing Instincts.
How the heck are you, buddy?
I'm good.
I'm great, Patrick.
We haven't done an episode with just you and I for like six weeks.
Is that true?
Yeah.
We've kicked off the year with a lot of friends of the show, a lot of guests.
I guess you're right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is just kind of the first time I squeeze one in.
I think we might do this week and next week just you and I. So I'm excited about this.
I missed you.
I missed you.
All right.
So we had something fun this week.
You posted something on Instagram some number of weeks ago.
I don't know.
Maybe a month or two ago. that you called 10 things that are hard to hear, but true.
It's a list for us.
We've got 10 things.
We're just going to talk through each one of these.
I thought all of them are great.
I'll give all 10 first, just so folks can know kind of what's coming.
And then we're going to chip away at each one of them.
So here's the list.
Here are 10 things that are hard to hear, but true.
Number one, we need to work on changing us, not them.
Number two, we complain a lot and it's not helping.
Number three, our priorities are out of whack.
Number four, the story we tell ourselves isn't true.
Number five, we feel like we are better or worse.
We are not.
Number six, we could be doing so much more.
Number seven, we are not good at being objective.
Number eight, being defensive is holding us back.
Number nine, life isn't fair.
Get over it.
And number 10, more things won't make us happy.
All right, before we jump into the first thing, anything worth saying about where this list came from or why you put it together.
It's funny.
As you're reading it, I'm actually like sort of doing the like.
I'm here, i'm trying to hear them for the first time again, so i'm playing the react.
I'm trying to like uh, how do i what emotions bring up to me and what i'm realizing is whatever number six on through was basically just responding to my feelings.
It was like, stop.
Maybe I had that when I first wrote it in mind, except for the last one.
The last one kind of throws it in as the carrot thing, because I think that's the thing that we all need to recognize as well.
I think it stems from being a leader and being a leader of myself first.
That's really what it is.
Like I'm trying my darndest.
Like I think most of us are here, of trying to live a life as close to and as great alignment as possible with what I feel is the best version of myself.
I feel like we're all chasing what is the good life.
And I think that we get really distracted from that a lot.
This is more of a reminder to myself than anything else.
And I use the pronoun we and our intentionally.
I am not saying you.
And that's very much because I don't want people to think this is preachy.
I'm not trying to be.
This is as much for me as it is for anybody else.
So if I feel like I can remind myself first these 10 principles and then bring these to my closest teams, right?
Which starts off my family.
First, actually I stayed before that, which then is Heather.
She is the next co-founder of my life.
Then it goes to our immediate family and then it goes to our teams here in the different businesses.
And then finally to the people that, like all the good folks that are listening to us now.
And the members of the gym and the people you touch through the, yeah, love that.
That's great.
Okay, cool.
Let's just jump into it, because we've got 10 of them and we want to try to get to all of them inside of this episode.
So number one, we need to work on changing us, not them.
Well, it's so easy.
We've talked about this a lot on this podcast.
Point fingers instead of pull thumbs.
It's the Jocko thing of extreme ownership is if we just thought of...
Everything in terms of the way.
What am I doing to contribute to this situation, positively or negatively?
And they're so easy to think and point over the fence to your neighbor and go look how messy their backyard is.
It's so easy to look at anyone and you just hear it in conversations all the time.
So I think one of the things that's helped me as a kid and you're the same, but we grew up fairly introverted is when you're an introvert you become an observer and you observe kind of the way that people communicate and talk and what's on their mind and what they think about it.
The unfortunate thing is, I throw myself into this as well, we tend to do this.
We tend to kind of go like, if they could only be better, right?
It's one of the things, it's funny that we're talking about this.
I just had a call with my head of marketing, And one of the points that we were talking about was what is the biggest constraint on the business?
What is the biggest obstacle that we need to solve?
And we used to think it was X and now we think it is Y.
And as he's saying this, he goes, and I just want to point out I totally agree with you.
And I am not a perfect human being that I have a tendency to point towards other people.
And just that level of awareness is so cool, right?
And I realize that probably a lot of this resides with me, but my tendency is to say it's actually them.
So as I'm saying them, I want you to call me out and ask me, is it me?
It's just, if we all had that level of vulnerability, right?
Even in the conversations with ourselves, when something's not going right, with your wife going.
How am I contributing to this?
Where am I falling short?
Why doesn't my kid ever listen to me?
Right.
That's such a good one.
And it's your kid's fault, right?
Of course.
It's your kid's fault.
Why does your kid not listen to you?
And we see this with some of our coaches working with athletes.
They're like, well, of course she got hurt.
She never comes in and warms up.
She comes in class every week.
We're putting it on them instead of taking ownership responsibility.
So that's our first one.
That's, again, going back to the title of this whole thing, hard to hear.
Yeah.
It reminds me of the Taylor Swift story that we've mentioned here before, which is it was in some documentary and she was being filmed as the Grammy nominations were coming out.
It was one of her albums had come out.
So they were expecting her to get you know some number of Grammy nominations and she didn't get any.
And she was on the phone with her manager or agent or somebody trying to make her feel better.
And the easy thing in that scenario would be like, why don't people respect the work that I did?
Why don't they, why didn't they see what, what everybody else saw, whatever.
And Taylor Swift's response is we just need to make a better album.
Oh, it's such a good story.
And it's so easy to skip over because she's Taylor Swift and she's popular or whatever.
But like the lesson inside of that is so wildly valuable.
Don't worry about what other people judge as being a good album.
Your job is to just make a better album than you did last time.
Wow.
I love that.
Right.
And we can take that to the obvious, right?
You take that to every facet, right?
Like it's not that your customers have bad taste.
Right.
It's not because your members don't listen or they don't show up.
Right.
Yeah.
Now it might be that there's a degree of truth to that, but there's also zero control in that.
Right.
It's so disempowering to have that.
Exactly.
Right.
Yeah.
So where is it that we can actually like?
We're trying to move it from the circle of concern to the circle of influence.
You have no influence over them.
You have all the influence over the way you come to the table every single day.
So are you coming with all of your best self?
And by the way, none of us are.
This is the whole thing.
We're always coming up short of our best selves.
So why not just put the emphasis into us trying to edge up, to be the better versions of us, rather than them?
It's even like trying to change people in period, right?
Like why does my fill in the blank relative or whatever eat better?
It's like, well, maybe we just focus on us.
It's not like, that's not complacency.
It's not, not caring.
It's putting things into like, just recognize the areas that were not perfect.
Yeah.
Number two, we complain a lot and it's not helping.
Yeah, so people who listen to this kind of know the jam.
But we have a really kind of first principle which is never whine, never complain, never make excuses.
That's just completely ripped right from the words that John Wooden wrote down in his book.
He has another one, which is never lie, steal, or cheat.
And those are six things, like just never do those things.
I think the first ones are just table stakes, right?
So like, but this next one is hard.
It's really hard not to complain.
For the same reasons that we did that we kind of listed above.
It's so easy just to point the finger.
And while this is so hard and fast into our culture, we even have, you know, we have the bracelets.
I'm wearing it now, right?
You still hear it all the time.
And people, myself included.
I think I do it more in my own head than out loud because I try to train the words a lot Mark, England stuff.
But even when people are aware of how destructive negativity is, it's still the default.
Like if you are not, this is kind of like the concept of drift, right?
There is a current pulling on us.
It is actually built into our biology to be negative.
It is vital to our survival to be negative.
Really important that we remember which berries kill us, then which tastes better.
The really red strawberries are the ones with the little green on the top.
That's not nearly as important that those seven over there will kill you or make you pee out of your butt for two days.
So we're hardwired.
Same thing, like the rustling in the bush.
Like.
If we have to like, we have to default to as our ancestral past.
That might be a big, big animal with huge claws that might see us as food.
So be negative instead of like.
I wonder if there's a little bunny rabbit that I could catch and have me have a meal out of.
The default is the negative.
So we're hardwired for it.
It also doesn't serve us the way it did then when we were trying to use our DNA, our default to stay alive.
We're in survival all the time.
The elements would kill us if we didn't.
Now we don't.
We're talking over whatever this is.
I don't even know what this is.
We're talking over...
Technology.
The airwaves.
The airwaves.
So we have to, kind of.
The punchline is that we have to override this default mechanism of complaining, because blame and complain and remain the same.
You remain the same, you are not growing.
If you're not growing, you're not living the good life.
Yeah, and also complaining a lot puts you in a state of stress.
And we've talked before about what it is the physical and emotional and mental ramifications of being inside of chronic stress.
And complaining is like us signing up for more chronic stress, right?
Stress is coming.
We've talked about that all the time.
Stress is coming.
We can't avoid it.
We shouldn't try.
But to sign up for more of it than we need is what it looks like to complain.
Yeah, that's cool.
So this kind of goes to the mapping of the hierarchy of mindset, right?
Victims and the pessimists complain.
They're the complainers.
Well, we know that that act is actually super detrimental to your health, to the point where yes, it creates more stress.
Stress literally is an artery clogging.
This literally will clog your arteries, which leads to the number one killer of the four horsemen of chronic disease, which is atherosclerosis, and That is as much a function of chronic stress which you are.
I love the way you're saying that which you are voluntarily signing up for.
I was talking to a member the other day whose son is a special forces.
And she was talking to him about how she's stressed with her job.
And his response was, stress is a made up emotion.
Mm-hmm.
It's a manufacturer.
It's not real.
I think it is real.
It's just we've associated it with things that aren't real.
We say that the boss asking you to get that project done, we respond to that as if it was being chased by the big furry animal with the big teeth and claws.
And it's not.
So in that sense, we are sort of not maybe making it up, but misattributing it.
Two quotes, and then we'll move on.
The first is from Tony Robbins.
He says that stressed is the achiever word for fear, which I just love.
And then the second one is probably my favorite Seth Godin quote, which is the best way to complain is to make things better.
How good is that, right?
The best way to complain is to make things better.
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Next one, number three, our priorities are out of whack.
Yeah, this goes to a little bit of a reminder to self of when we've been sold something that I don't think is going to get us to where we actually want to go.
That the material success, that the grind, the hustle, that the busyness, that the accolades, awards and achievements, basically the whole like dopamine filled culture right, is saying that this is what you should and this is what you should chase.
It's kind of the premise of this whole show right, and we're saying that that's Something worth questioning.
We shouldn't just fall for it at face value and just accept it, because that's what society teachers, parents and everyone else has said is what you should be prioritizing.
And I try to like elevate this.
I'm not saying your priorities out of whack in terms of like whether you should have an Apple or something else.
I can't – you know, you get it.
But it's like we're not trying to figure out these really kind of like easy – like which one is more important.
We're trying to go with like the really default thing of like what do you think you want your life to be about?
Because then when you get started at that level –
It's a decision tree all the way down.
And then all these other ones that seemed really important go like, well, that doesn't even enter the conversation at this point because I just had this great conversation with our CFO.
You would think that our CFO would be all about making more money and growing the business.
He goes, it has to start with what you want.
When you walk in here every day, what is the thing you want to feel?
That's so awesome to come from a guy whose job is supposed to be make the business more money.
Make sure you're on track for more growth.
And it's not that.
It's about health, not financial health.
Financial health plays a picture, but it's not the end-all be-all.
So I don't want to put this just in terms of financial earnings.
The idea behind this is question your wants and your desires.
Where are those actually coming from?
And we've talked about this before, but I think the healthiest counter to that is imagine yourself as your 80-year-old self with just a few days or weeks left.
What is it that you're going to wish that you had done?
And this is just the deathbed exercise.
It's perspective in the present moment.
So it requires a little bit of zooming out instead of just riding along the default wave.
Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that I don't know that a lot of people actually set their priorities.
I think a lot of people grab at priorities based almost entirely on what they see other people grabbing at right.
As if there's this limited number and if they don't grab one, they're not going to get any at all.
And I think the and this is really just reiterating what you just said I think the real work is to disentangle ourselves from everything that we were taught, intentionally and unintentionally, for the first 18 or 20 years of our lives and then be able to pick apart and choose with some more intention what the one or two actual priorities might be.
And then to act in accordance with them, of course, which is, you know, they're both hard.
But I think that that's really the work for everybody is to first recognize, like you said, what priorities did I just pick up because I thought I was supposed to.
So can I put those down?
And then what actually matters to me?
And then can I pick that up?
And then can I start making decisions in alignment with that?
Can we start making decisions that are in line with that?
Like that's the whole idea that we're trying to do is align our, our line actions and values.
So what do we actually value to your point?
And I said, picking up someone else's values because maybe we really value our calmness, as I do.
That's one of my really strongest.
As I've thought about this more and more, it's one of my strong.
I love calm.
I hate drama.
So it's an anti-vision thing that we worked on a few months ago.
So if I hate drama, if I hate gossip, if I hate toxicity... what is the thing I actually want?
I want peace of mind and I want calm.
If that's the true sort of.
I don't know if it's a North Star, but it's directionally correct.
What are my priorities then?
What are the things that, as you said, what should we be picking up?
It's not things and this has kind of gotten into the question of like CFO thing that probably doing a fundraising round with a venture capital is probably not going to instill more calmness.
Yep, that's for sure.
Right?
Whereas, guess what every one of these business forums I'm in is telling me to do?
That.
Exactly that.
Yeah.
Because the priority is income.
The priority is growth.
Growth.
Or the stated priority is growth, is more, is grow.
Yeah, exactly.
Yep.
I think that's exactly it.
Growth for growth's sake.
Exactly.
Number four, the story we are telling ourselves isn't true.
Yeah.
Sort of tangential to that one, right?
Yeah.
But here's even more so is we have so many unconscious biases.
We have so many the world that we are seeing and the reality that is being presented to ourselves is not factual.
And I'm not saying like we live in a matrix or something like that.
Or that there's no objective truth.
Maybe I am, right.
But what I'm saying is our reality is shaped by our beliefs.
If you believe something, this goes into the frequency illusion and confirmation bias, recency bias.
There are so many things that shape our reality.
That's not the healthiest way to navigate life.
What we want to try and do is scrape away.
I want to go through this thing with no biases.
I want to be on discovery for actual truth.
So you can imagine a situation where you and your wife are not seeing eye to eye on something.
You guys are in a little bit of a tiff about something.
You believe something happened that caused that.
She believes something different.
Something else happened.
That happened that we're both completely convicted of in the stories that we're telling ourselves.
Those stories do not serve us.
So the more that we can pull away from this storytelling mechanism which our brain loves to operate on, which that's what we are as human beings.
We are storytelling machines.
We are trying to create a narrative full of, you know, Jameson's words, full of villains and heroes, and good and evil, and triumphs and failures, and We really do.
We narrate this experience we're having, but the narration is fraught.
It's not real.
So if we are able to peel that back a little bit and see things more unbiased, your ability to then relate and have a deep conversation meaningful loving, long-term relationship with your wife goes up exponentially.
Like that is the health of these relationships is basically how little of that are you doing?
Because if every time something happens, you're like, there she goes again.
She's doing this thing, trying to control me or whatever it is.
Why does she tell me to do?
I don't know what the things are people argue about, but I use that as one of the examples.
But it goes into everything, right?
Right down to why we complain.
Right down to can we look at ourselves?
How can we improve rather than the storytelling that it's my customer's fault?
It's the other side of the political spectrum.
It is...
All of these stories that we tell ourselves, which just are not true.
It's becoming worse and worse.
This isn't the old guy diatribe, but we've done enough of that.
But the way that our infotainment is set up now, it is such confirmation bias.
The social network bias.
Sorry, the Social Dilemma movie.
The entire premise is built off of this, which is people looking across the other side of the political spectrum and going how can they not see this?
How can they still believe what they believe?
Why can't they see this?
And the answer is they are not seeing it.
Yeah.
They literally aren't seeing it.
So the story is completely different.
So the more that we can pop up out of that a little bit and not do so much storytelling but go kind of like in the first one.
What am I doing to contribute to this?
It helps us live a better life.
Certainly a more productive one.
Just to make sure we don't go too long here and we can move on to the next one.
We feel like we are better or worse.
We are not.
That seems related to the storytelling.
Yeah, storytelling.
Right.
Yeah, because we like to tell ourselves those stories as well, right?
And I'm certainly at fault for this in both senses.
I feel like I'm constantly going back and forth between these two things and I can't see how it helps me at all.
I've done forever.
I told myself I was too young.
And I think very quickly I'm going to start telling myself I'm too old.
Too old.
So what is it?
You're neither.
It's like an avocado.
You've got like 15 minutes where it's perfect.
Too bad.
It was when I was 33 years old, three months and three days.
It was Tuesday.
It was Tuesday of 1989.
That was the day that I was not too old or too young.
But it's that type of, it's, it's, you're not this or that.
You know, it's so easy to, I fall for this trap so much in like my business.
It's like, no one could, can build this business the way I can.
And then I'm like, I have no idea what I'm doing.
I can't be the one that does this because I have no idea.
You go from like, I'm the only one that knows how to do this to like complete imposter syndrome.
Yes.
And neither one of those serve us.
It's like you don't need to be telling yourself that story.
You are not as probably as good as you think you are.
And you're definitely not as bad as you think you are sometimes.
Yeah.
What is that phrase?
It's you're not better than anybody and nobody's better than you.
That's what it is.
Right.
It's recognizing that there is, that there is that truth in the middle that you are not special, but you are worthy of what you have right.
And recognizing that both of those things can be true at the same time.
You know what I came across?
I forget where I got this, but there is a certain character trait that's very common amongst successful entrepreneurs, which is that they have this crazy level of insecurity coupled with I can do huge, amazing things.
I think that's a Hormozy thing.
Yeah, that sounds right.
And you need both.
Yeah, it's kind of that, but I don't know.
I think if we got rid of that narrative, it would really benefit us all.
Instead of trying to like, because what it does is if I value calmness, which ultimately is what leads to peace of mind, the thing that pulls you away from either of those two things is judgment, right?
And judgment is, am I better or am I worse?
And, you know, as Shakespeare said, there is no good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
So, instead of trying to continually try to judge yourself against other people, the worst way, at least judge yourself relative to where you were yesterday.
But to judge yourself versus other people, am I better or worse than them?
It's going to do just that.
It's going to rip you out of this beautiful state.
And puts you into a place where you are distracted and unable to bring your best self forward.
And we talk about this in terms of athletics and peak performance all the time which is a flow state, is that one of open-mindedness, positivity and non-judgment?
Yep.
Once you judge, it's like literally like you're either in a lit room or a dark room.
The room goes dark once you judge.
You no longer get to see everything.
I think there's also an element of like finite games versus infinite games in this one, too.
I think, when we're either feeling like we are better or we are feeling like we are worse, what we're really doing is trying to assign a score to something that you can't really put a score on.
But how else, like?
How else are we judging ourselves better or worse, except for this imaginary scorecard that we're holding in our back pocket?
Right, and so it's this recognition that we are almost never playing finite games, right?
Finite games have rules and winners and losers, and everybody knows what they're playing and there's a beginning and an end to them.
But in almost every context where we have these feelings of like I'm doing terrible or I'm the best, I'm the only person that can do this, we're really inside of an infinite game which is, you know, it could be a business, it could be a relationship, it could be any number of things.
And an infinite game, you play... in order to keep playing the infinite game.
And so therefore there's no winners.
There's no scoreboard at all.
I think remembering better and worse are an attempt to create certainty in an environment where there is inherently no certainty.
And our job is actually to get comfortable inside of the uncertainty.
So we're not reaching for some false sense of, am I winning or am I losing?
Because there's no winning and there's no losing.
And if we can get our head around that idea, then we can free ourselves.
I think a little bit occasionally, from this narrative of we're better or we're worse and all of the pendulum swinging between those two states.
Where instead, to your point, we can just live in the middle of it.
We can stay calm.
We can stay responsive and not reactive.
Yeah, that's great.
It's very much that.
As you were laying that out, I kind of...
I realize why we do this as well, right?
We, as evolutionarily, we're hierarchical beings.
Yep.
We need to know where we sit.
So you get choice of mates and choice of meat.
Mates and meat, baby.
And that again, is one of those things that was survival before, which isn't a part of today's world.
So there is no.
This idea of I got to try to rank myself at all times again just doesn't serve us for where we are today.
Number six, we could be doing so much more.
I think this is my favorite one.
We can, right?
We can.
I don't know.
I just think that there's always, I think there's a reason that we have chasing excellence right it's not be excellent right it's like go do go try to do it it's not more in terms of productivity it's more impact it's more it's back to the priorities right yeah right it's like you set the right priority then we can say what does more look like what is the right more you could be doing more to be a great dad you could be doing more to be a great husband or person in your relationship.
You could be doing more to be a great neighbor.
You could be doing more to be a better... to take care of your body.
You could be doing more to, And this is so.
What I don't want to do is, like This is in no way, shape or form, a nod towards perfectionism.
Because what we could be doing so much more is so much more having grace with ourselves, not beating ourselves up for not being perfect.
I've really loved, which we kind of shaped this conversation around recently a little bit, is that idea of Aristotle's soul.
The soul is the best version of you.
I just love it.
It's not in the religious sense, right?
It's not your soul goes on to heaven or roams around the universe when we're gone.
It's your soul is, it's a part of you here on planet earth, and it represents the very, very best that you could possibly be.
Well, we're all, we're all, a degree, two, three, or a dozen short of that.
We could be doing more.
We could be doing more to be a better person.
And that's really what it is.
And, as I just said, don't beat yourself up, because beating yourself up is not in line with your best soul.
So it's kind of this whole like...
Which if there is a new sort of like evolution to this chasing excellence, it is that, right?
It's not only a fulfilled life.
It is not only the good life.
It is not only health in the five factors to create the freedom to be able to pursue those things.
I have a hard time.
I haven't seen it framed up better in terms of the highest arching objective of what we're trying to do and what it means to live a good, meaningful life, than to try to align yourself as close as possible today, tomorrow and forever with with the essence of your soul.
So do more to get closer to that.
Yeah.
And I think about so many of the things we've already talked about and probably a few things that we will continue.
We will talk about next, like complaining, or our priorities out of whack, or the stories we're telling ourselves that aren't true, or even the story that hey, we are better or nope, today we're actually worse.
All of those things are stealing from us our time and our energy and our attention.
And when they steal those things from us, we have less to give.
We have less ability to do more.
That would put us closer in alignment with that higher sense of ourselves.
Right.
And so it's like, it's this, every one of these things that we're talking about.
And so, and we talk about it all the time.
It's, and you already used this word once, which I love, which is distraction.
They're.
All of them distract from our ability to take the moment that we're in and point ourselves towards the few things that actually do matter.
And every time we get distracted and everything we look over there and we tell ourselves an unhelpful story.
What we're really doing is we're just, we're taking our eye off the ball.
And now we have to eventually reorient ourselves and take the energy it takes to do that and then start moving forward again.
And it's this whole song and dance and this circle that we're continually doing.
And the work is staying focused on the few things that matter.
And everything we're talking about so far are the things that ultimately don't matter.
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Number seven, we are not good at being objective.
Yeah, we talked about stories, complaints, trying to work on people changing them instead of us.
Those are all like...
Yeah, we're the main characters in the movies of our lives.
And we're going to see everything through that main character's point of view.
That is not life.
Like we are one of 8 billion people one of 8 billion souls on this planet.
Our view is not right.
This kind of like surmises all of the things that we just talked about.
That's what I was saying is when, in the beginning, I was like the last of these sort of wrap on top of each other.
Yeah. right?
Yeah.
Like, oh yeah, you think that, but guess what?
Also, yeah, but you're not going to be injected.
So that argument kind of falls on its face because you're coming to this with some sort of like bias that probably isn't real.
So I think that the idea here is continuing to challenge ourselves.
I really like what you said is we're sort of by default going to be distracted.
In order for us to Pour our energy, attention, time, resources, energy being the big one, right?
In order to pour our energy and focus into the things that are really going to truly matter to us.
A level of objectivity there is kind of key.
Otherwise...
We're going to be caught up in this distracted state and making decisions in this distracted state.
So it requires us to zoom out.
And I think continually zooming out to try to take in as much of a picture as possible.
You know, in the military, they have that acronym UTA, which is, it starts with orient.
Like the first thing before you make any, it goes like orient, objective, decide something.
But basically the idea is before you decide anything, orient yourself.
Like where actually are you?
Like zoom out a little bit.
Yes.
Like, don't just like pull the trigger there.
Like, wait a minute.
Are you where you need more context?
And I think what we can kind of constantly do is like continually challenge ourselves to zoom out of this really what seemingly in the moment seems really urgent and important.
And maybe this isn't.
Like you're in the midst of a thing with your kids and why aren't they listening to me?
And you want to get emotional.
You're frustrated angry, whatever it is.
Can we zoom out a little bit?
Because if we don't, we are not going to bring our best self forward.
And if we don't bring our best self forward, we don't get closer to the objective, which is a better, more meaningful, loving relationship with your kids that also leads to them growing up to being the responsible adults that chase excellence right.
So it's a matter of not relying so much on the immediacy of the minute circumstances and emotions that you're feeling right now, but try to be a little bit more objective in this situation.
Yeah.
And speaking of looping back on our previous ones, what just struck me was if we get better at being objective, I think by virtue of that we complain less.
Because almost always, complaining is fighting against the reality that has presented itself to us right.
Traffic, blah, blah, blah.
Traffic, it's always their fault.
And why is it?
But Like, if we can stay objective, we can say well, if traffic is always here, then why didn't I leave 20 minutes earlier, so that I wasn't 20 minutes late, right?
So, like I think, if we can continually remind our, continually try to be objective, I think some of these other things that we've talked about start to actually come in line right.
When we're when we can be objective, we can probably see how trying to change somebody else is way less effective than trying to change ourselves, right?
Or something like that.
When you're objective, you can see if your priority is out of whack.
Exactly.
See the story you're telling yourself.
And I think the other thing I was thinking about as you were chatting yeah, because I think we've already talked about it today but the idea of the realist inside of that mindset continuum.
I think it'd be really easy and push back on this, but I think it'd be really easy to think well, the realist sees things 100 objectively all of the time.
But I don't think that that's possible.
I think it's probably a slightly better, slightly more nuanced definition of the realist is they strive to see things with objectivity but still recognize that they will not always be able to accomplish that right.
And so just having that recognition of I'm going to try really hard not to tell myself a story about something that's not true, that's not objective, but I still am the main player inside of the movie in my head and I need to recognize that as well.
Yeah, that's very well said.
The realist is doing their job their darndest to not storytell, right?
But they also recognize that there's probably going to be a story loop going.
We're human beings.
We're storytelling machines.
What the optimists, the ones below that, the optimists, the pessimists and the victim do is they are storytellers.
They are creating a narrative.
The realist realizes that there's a narrative going on, but they have a healthy dose of skepticism of whether that's actually true or not.
It is the wise old farmer that says, we'll see.
He might be bummed out that his son broke his leg, but he's also willing to postpone whether this is good or bad.
And if you think about, this is why we kind of shape it up on that continuum.
The left-hand side of the continuum the victim, the pessimist and the optimist.
Those are the storytellers.
Well, what does storytelling do?
A good story creates drama.
So what we're saying is, on that side of the spectrum, you're creating drama. drama.
You are actually dramatic.
You are melodramatic.
This is not the way that you actually want to navigate the life in the best possible way.
What you want is calmness, peace of mind truth non-objectivity, so you can do all the things which you said in the last answer was so great, so you can bring your best self, your attention and energy to the things that matter most.
If you're caught up in the drama, You can't do that.
Think of like a kid throwing a temper tantrum, like a toddler, or think of a I have a preteen girl in middle school.
Think of the drama that they deal with.
Are they actually navigating the most important parts of their life, or are they caught up in things that don't matter that much?
The reason they're caught up in things that don't matter that much is because of the stories they're telling themselves and creating drama.
So what the realist does is not they are void of this part of humanity.
It is they recognize it's happening and they question it.
It's curiosity over judgment.
Yep.
Number eight, being defensive is holding us back.
No, it's not.
That's so good.
That's my response to that one, Ben.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's just like so obvious, right?
Like if you are so set in your ways that you can't be open-minded.
Ray Dalio Bridgewater Capital, the most successful venture company ever, wrote Principles.
The entire book is about remove closed-minded people from your life.
That's really the whole idea.
The whole idea is growth happens in these loops.
These loops happen when you are open to learning.
If you are not open to learning, you don't have the loop.
All you have is whether someone was successful or failure, and there's no growth trajectory.
It's kind of the same thing.
We need to stay, first off, hard but true.
That's what this whole list is again, right?
Hard to hear but true.
We probably are more closed-minded than we think.
We probably are more defensive than we think we are.
Again it goes right back to the survival things of like if people thought we were wrong about things we have no value.
If you have no value, why are you part of the society?
If you have no value to the society, kick you out into the wilderness and you get eaten by the big fuzzy thing with the claws.
So it is.
It comes down to like all this goes back to our like Paleolithic ancestral self, which has built up so much of our biology.
So much of our self-aware is written so long ago.
It's so long ago.
And it just isn't, while it's still a part of us, it doesn't serve us.
So us staying closed-minded and defending our stance, like the same middle school daughter Harley, she said to me before she's like sometimes I argue things even when I know that I'm wrong at them.
And I just do it because I don't even know why I do it.
Me too, Harley.
I'll just keep going.
Yeah, that.
I'm so glad you're aware of that.
I think of these sort of like intersecting loops, right?
Calm is certainly one of them.
The other C that's one of them as well is like curiosity.
Curiosity is the antithesis of a fixed mindset, the antithesis of judgment.
Be curious, not judgmental.
I think that those are two really high-level first principles that we should always just sort of ask ourselves, like when we get presented with anything.
Like, is this going to create more calm for me, value?
I would ask myself, is this going to create more calm in my life or not?
And am I being curious or judgmental in this situation?
Talk a minute about the holding us back part of this.
Being defensive is holding us back.
What do you think we, we protect ourselves by being defensive.
So, like I can, like the first part of it.
I know where it comes from, but what is the cost of that in your mind other than you know?
You talked about growth already in that growth loop.
But like, what do you mean by holding back?
What do we actually lose by being defensive?
So what we lose is growth and evolution, which is inherent to us living a good life.
Like everybody Arthur Brooks or the Dalai Lama or anybody they've all talked about how learning and evolving is is a necessary part.
Even Stephen Covey is one of his four L's, live, love, lead, learn.
Learning, growing, evolving is one of the core endowments of a good life.
So we want to learn, grow, and evolve.
Well, if we're judgmental, that's the antithesis of the growth loop.
You know, in Carol Dweck's words, this would be fixed mindset versus growth mindset.
Growth mindset is I'm open to being wrong.
I want to identify as the learner.
I want to be able to get better at this.
So tell me and please give me the feedback.
Coach me.
Tell me where I can improve.
Whereas the one that's being defensive is, no, you're wrong.
No, you don't know what you're talking about.
No, no, I got this figured out.
It's the opposite of humility, right?
It's a constant, fixed mindset person which is I'm only going to put myself in situations where I know I will succeed.
Well, if that's the case, what you are doing is you're avoiding challenge.
If you avoid challenge, there is no growth.
This is like organisms 101, like you have to be forced to adapt to something for an organism to change and grow.
That makes me think back to the priorities again.
Again, we just keep looping back on itself.
But if your priority is to protect your ego, then being defensive makes sense, right?
You want to protect that.
That's a priority.
I want to feel good about myself.
Okay.
And then what do you do?
It's their fault, right?
Exactly.
And then you complain.
Yes.
But if the priority is growth or the priority is being a learner, then being defensive doesn't make sense because that's not in line with that priority.
And again, it can't be something that you just pay lip service to, because in the moment if you say I want to be a learner, but in the moment where you get the opportunity to learn something the hard way and you resist it and you push it away, then that's not actually a priority.
That's just something.
That's as we've talked about with values all the time.
That's just a nice word you put on a poster on the wall right.
And so it's really important, I think, that we are honest with ourselves.
And then, when we are sure that we are right, that this is a real priority, that calmness is a priority, that being a learner is a priority, then we have to grit our teeth and we've got to hold our breath and we've got to get through the moments when our immediate reaction is is to push away from those things or to push further away from those things because they're uncomfortable.
Yeah.
If we're pushing away from things that are uncomfortable, then there we have it, right?
That's where we get to this.
It's holding you back.
Yep.
Number, where are we at?
Number nine, life isn't fair.
Get over it.
Get over it is something my mother has said to me since I can remember.
Really?
Yeah.
She's amazing.
I talked to her about this one.
That's why I added it in there.
I had it in there and I shared it with her and she was like, you should get over it.
Patrick, we like that.
I try to remind my kids of this a lot because what the kids will say is it's not fair.
Right.
Bodhi got the bigger piece of pizza.
That's not fair.
Oh, yeah.
Bodhi got to watch the iPad in the car ride while I was going to my tutor.
That's not fair.
Yep.
How come this, that's not fair?
This is just one of those like what you want versus what's reality.
Life, it's not fair.
In fact, it's brutally, brutally unfair.
It is so unfair that I grew up with the family I grew up with in the town.
I grew up with with the peace and safety that I had.
I never had to worry about getting beat up.
I never had to worry about food on my table.
I never had to worry about being abused as a kid.
That is so unfair compared to the people that are growing up in atrocious circumstances.
There's no fairness to that.
And to try to get the smaller things closer is an absurd practice.
So once you recognize that there is no fairness to this thing, it actually creates a lot of freedom, because you're not trying to create fairness.
Right, because life should be fair is a story, and it's a story that will never be true and therefore you will always be in tension with that story you are telling yourself.
You will always be in a state of stress because you are waiting for something that will never happen.
It's exactly right.
If I was to say, maybe give a top five of the victim mindset, this isn't the top five.
Absolutely.
Which is like, this isn't fair.
Why do I have to deal with this?
Why is this happening to me?
Why do I have to change?
Why can't they?
And guess what?
You're so right.
This isn't fair.
The biggest one I always think of is like I can't imagine like to lose a baby or a toddler, like to lose a child right.
That is so horrifically unfair.
Yes.
Yep, it is.
But it's to lean into that isn't the helpful thing.
Is it unfair?
Yes, it is.
Just yes.
It is unfair.
Own that part of it.
Yes, this was unfair.
But there's no more story after that.
It's not unfair so.
It's not unfair again.
What ends up happening is you create the story loop.
And then what happens is it becomes reticular activation system, which you look for, things that you believe are true.
And now these things that were neutral are now unfair.
And that's where it becomes detrimental.
It's not that this thing happened and it's unfair.
That sucks.
And that's true.
Yes.
But it's what comes downstream of that when you think that it's supposed to be fair.
And you wait for fairness to introduce itself.
When what you're saying is no, you have to actually sit in the discomfort of knowing that the unfairness will probably never resolve itself to the degree to which you wish it would.
It's about taking, it goes back to the beginning.
It goes back to like, are we taking ownership of our lives, right?
So there's.
I've been through some.
I've had so much blessings and so many.
I couldn't have written a better life for myself, but there's things that I thought were.
You know, if I'm looking back, I could have been like that's so unfair and gotten pulled down into a rabbit hole.
You know from you know having a gym business to That was shut down for three months.
And I still had to pay my employees for that time.
And I basically went bankrupt.
That's kind of unfair.
But that doesn't help.
Once you get past the pity party for yourself, it's about the next thing.
I broke three bones in my back and was essentially incapacitated, paralyzed for 11 days.
Didn't even go to the bathroom for two weeks.
If you perpetually tell yourself those stories, what is it that's on the other side of that?
Yeah.
And it's the same like we just need to.
I'm not saying don't have emotion and don't be pissed and don't feel it fully.
Do, do.
That allows you actually, it's better.
That actually helps you get to the other side where now you can go, okay, and now what?
Right?
And now what?
It's not a balancing act.
It's not like, and when's the good thing going to come now?
Because this was supposed to happen.
Yeah.
No, some people just have lives that are horrific.
They've been prisoners of war for five years.
Tortured.
But it doesn't help.
It speaks a little bit to the difference between being a victim and having a victim mindset.
You can be a victim without having a victim mindset.
Last one.
More things won't make us happy.
Happiness is not on the other sides of accolades, awards, or achievements.
It's certainly not on the other side of material things.
Yet, our biology is not programmed for that.
Our biology, meaning happiness, The way your brain operates is going to tell you that lie.
I really like it.
Chris Williamson had said this the best way that I think I've heard it, which is this is an unlearnable lesson.
You can't learn this lesson unless you've gone through it.
The way he says it is.
Only once you have the private jet and the mansion and the 10 million bank account can you go.
Yeah, that didn't make me happy.
And everyone that is on the climb trying to get there goes like, you ungrateful son of a bitch.
It's only once you've gotten, it's an unlearnable lesson until you've actually achieved the thing.
Nobody can actually get there.
I don't know if that's true.
That's unlearnable, because I think there are certain people that have done it, have pushed off the more for more fulfillment, more possessions, for more enjoyment, satisfaction.
But it's so tempting, right?
Because we all do it.
It kind of goes back to the growth for growth's sake.
And why it's built into our DNA is back in the day, it's part of our biology.
It was a whole lot better to have six bushels of carrots going into the winter than it was to have one carrot.
It was so much better to have five acres of land than one acre of land.
Because the chance of you having a harvest and having food for the winter went up.
It was so much better for you to have six servants than to be a servant.
It was all built into our survival.
Again...
This is not the case anymore.
We're not striving for our survival, but we think, meaning.
Think like the way we're wired.
As you said, our software was written a million years ago.
It is now hardwired into us and it's really hard to override the hardware, the software.
I don't know.
I don't know the difference between those two.
It'd be really better if it was really hard to override the software, really hard to override the hardware.
You can't overwrite hardware.
You can only override software.
There we go.
That's what we're trying to do here, is we're trying to override the operating system that we are born with so that it's an upgrade.
Yeah.
All right.
That was fun.
10 things that are hard to hear, but true.
I'm going to go through the list one more time, just as a reminder.
Number one, we need to work on changing us, not them.
Number two, we complain a lot and it's not helping.
Number three, our priorities are out of whack.
Number four, the story we are telling ourselves isn't true.
Number five, we feel like we are better or worse.
We are not.
Number six, we could be doing so much more.
Number seven, we are not good at being objective.
Number eight, being defensive is holding us back.
Number nine, life isn't fair.
Get over it.
And number 10, more things won't make us happy.
Thanks, Ben.
That was fun.
Thanks, Patrick.
Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week.
Two quick things before you go.
First, if you want even more from this episode, go check out the full five three, one breakdown.
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The link is in the show notes.
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