Welcome to the Knowledge Project podcast.
I'm your host, Shane Parish.
The goal of this show is to master the best of what other people have already figured out.
To do that, I sit down with people at the top of their game to uncover the useful lessons that you can learn and apply in life and business.
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Over the last five years, I've been lucky enough to speak with some of the most incredible people in the world.
And when I listened to past episodes, one thing that stands out to me is how well the insights from these conversations stand the test of time.
They're as relevant and insightful today as they were when they were originally recorded.
And in a world that encourages a treadmill of perishable information, it's worth revisiting wisdom that doesn't expire.
So a few times a year, we'll go back to earlier episodes, some of which you may have missed, some of which you may have forgotten, and pull out some gems around a single theme.
The theme for this episode is philosophy.
You'll hear Ryan Holiday explain how most mistakes are rooted in anger and learn stoic practices to resist those temptations.
Then Emily Belchettis talks about the perception reality gap and how what you choose to see and focus on in life can actually be used to increase productivity in your world in life.
I've used this and it's a massive game changer.
Then Neil Pastrescia will teach you the three elements of happiness and how practicing gratitude may be the best habit to cultivate in your life.
Nancy Sherman will chime in with the three layers of emotion according to the Stoics and explain how Stoic philosophy is much deeper than just embracing the sock, which is the common wisdom and having your emotions under control.
Then Derek Sivers, one of my favorite guests, one of my favorite people, will talk about the importance of ignoring the noise of information and focusing on personal directives in life.
And finally, Ed Latimore will teach you about the most important element for creating happiness and self-development that almost everyone gets wrong and explains how happiness isn't a rate, but a rate of change.
It's time to listen and learn.
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From episode 128, here is Ryan Holiday.
Going on to the next sort of topic, how can we learn to manage our anger?
I was thinking about this with a course that we made for Daily Stoic.
I was saying that like, just because you don't have an anger problem doesn't mean that anger is not a problem for you.
When I look at most of the mistakes that I made, most of the things that I regret, most of the things that I wish I could undo, usually anger is a pretty big part of that.
Anger was a driving factor in why I wrote the email and sent it.
It was why I chose not to do X, Y, or Z.
It's why I was speaking this way or that way.
So I think the question about anger is like, does it actually make you better at what you do?
It may in the short term, and to go to our point earlier about sustainability, is it fuel that can get you where you want to go over the long term?
Or is it really corrosive?
And usually I tend to find that it's pretty corrosive fuel.
So I think if we just start with like, let me make sure I'm not lying to myself about my temper, right?
Because a lot of us tell ourselves like, oh, it's because I really care, or it's what drives me.
I'm not as bad as my boss, or my dad, or whatever.
But if you really step back and you said, what is this actually adding, and what are the costs that it's coming at?
It usually becomes pretty illustrative that it's not a positive force in our lives.
What are the other sources of mistakes when you find yourself making mistakes?
Are there other common themes to those that you can pull out?
Well, the Stoics talk about the passions, right?
Today, obviously, we talk about passion being a good thing.
But I would say at the root of most mistakes, both personally and sort of historically, it's one of the passions, right?
Envy, lust, anger, fear, you know, pain, worry, you know, those sort of emotional states that take us out of the rational part of ourselves and into some sort of frenzied or flurried or consumed part, you know what I mean?
Yeah, the way that I think about that is they sort of like, they nudge us against reason, right?
So they make us more instinctive and less reasoning at the same time.
And those are the very moments that humans, unlike any other sort of mammal, can, you know, like any other animal can actually like, no, I'm going to put a two-second pause on this.
And I'm going to thank before I instinctively respond, because those instincts might have served me really well in the savannah.
But they're not necessarily going to serve me well here, because I'm about to do something that can't be unsaid or can't be undone.
Or I remember reading about this in Lives of the Stoic, which I have right here, about the, well, I think it was the emperor who stabbed the guy with his pen in the eye, right?
In a fit of rage, and then he couldn't undo it.
Yes. No, and it's often precisely the situations in which we are overcome by passion.
We have the slimmest margin for error.
It's like, I've talked to people about this, about anger, specifically, let's say like politically, especially right now.
It's no question, like what's happening in the world is appalling and frustrating.
And in some cases, like downright evil.
So you have to ask yourself, okay, like, so you're looking at this person who's in the way of what you see as progress.
So either, let's say it's an individual person, we're talking about vaccines or masks, or it's some politician who's, you know, stymying some important bit of legislation, either they mean well, and are massively misinformed, right?
In which case, anger, let's say, is not going to convince them.
Yeah. Or they are pathologically evil, in which case, you can't afford to be angry, because they're not angry, right?
Like they're pathologically evil, or a narcissist, or toxic, or whatever.
And so the idea that you can afford not to be hyper-rational and strategic, and in control of all of your faculties, you're in really bad shape.
I think you could argue that what Trump does, and I don't think this has to get political, what Trump does is, I don't think it's so much a function of genius on his part, so much as a confluence of personality traits, so enrages his opponents and disorients them, and is so the opposite of what they have experience dealing with, that it's almost like a self-protective
bubble, right? Because it's like he's inside the loop of the opponent, and because they're not thinking rationally, patiently, strategically, they're just like, ah!
Yeah, it's not your operating system, right?
Like he's literally just packed your brain, and he's making you respond in a way that's advantageous to him, and disadvantageous to you.
How do we overcome that?
Like how in the moment do you, like is there any stoic advice or anything that you've learned where it's like, do you take, I think there's one quote about sort of like reciting the alphabet before you respond.
Yeah. There's all these practical tips that we've learned as adults, like don't send the email, leave it as a draft, read it again in the morning.
Well, it's funny, one of the advisors to the emperor Octavian is this stoic Athenodorus, and he actually says this, he's like, look, as the emperor, you will be provoked, you will be angry.
He's like, but I want you to recite the letter of every letter of the alphabet before you do anything.
And I love that that's like 2000 year old piece of advice that you would also give your seven year old, and yet the most powerful man in the world needs it too.
The idea of the pause, I think, is super important in all things, right?
Because like very rarely are is that immediate solution the right one?
I think we talked about Kennedy earlier, think about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He was able to string out a nuclear standoff over 13 days, but it was only by stretching it out, by using the time, by talking about it, by talking through it, that he allows not just his own advisors to sort of see things in a better light, but he allows his opponent to come to their senses too.
And I don't think that would have been possible compressed into three days.
George Washington is one of his favorite expressions that actually comes from a line about the stoic Cato.
You know, he says, I want to look at everything in the calm light of mild philosophy.
And I think that's being rational, that's being empathetic, that's being not frantic or rushed.
And I think it's important to point out like people who knew George Washington were like, he has a horrible temper.
You know, he is an impulsive, deeply passionate human being, but that it's that he got control of those things because his positions demanded it.
So this isn't like, oh, I just have a good temperament kind of thing.
It's like, you have to cultivate that temperament, particularly if you're in some position of leadership or responsibility.
And you can't practice it in the moment where it's the most difficult, right?
Like you have to practice it in these little, somebody slits you, you know, almost on the playground, you're like, whatever, like these are the moments where you practice your response.
Because when it's large, when you're on the stage, when the lights are on, when everybody's watching you, that's not when you want to practice.
You want to have that instinctive response.
It's like, if you haven't practiced it in the little areas, it's very unlikely you're going to be able to do it.
Like when the game is on the line or your career is on the line or like the eyes of the world are upon you.
Totally. From episode number 154, here is Emily Belchettis.
Certain people see the world in a certain way and maybe something looks easier to them than it does to somebody else where we can hack this.
Talk to me a little bit about maybe the relationship between what we see and maybe what we accomplish or our motivation to do it.
Yeah. So, you know, that question that you're asking really is at the heart of one of our long standing lines of research is one trying to understand, well, what are sources of problems as people are trying to get stuff done in this world?
The goals that they care most about, you know, as a motivation psychologist, which I am also, you know, a lot of work has been done trying to understand, well, maybe people just really don't care.
You know, maybe they actually aren't as motivated on the things that they're working towards than they should be.
So let's increase motivation.
Yeah, that's part of it.
Maybe they are doing themselves a disservice.
They're talking to themselves in ways that aren't helpful.
Like, you know, they're putting themselves down or they don't really believe in themselves enough to be able to get the job done where our own worst enemy when it comes to self-sabotaging kinds of language.
Yeah, that's part of it.
And we can change those things, but that those changes don't help enough to push people in some cases, literally over the finish line if we're talking about the context of exercise.
So we were taking that idea that I had said 20 years ago, I was so naive to think I had discovered and applied it to the context of exercise and tried to think, okay, maybe there's something about exercise that not everybody sees it the same way.
Of course, we don't all think about exercise the same way.
I like exercising. My husband hates it.
He's a very fit person, which is annoying that he can hate exercise and yet still be quite fit.
He burns his calories when he sleeps.
It's so weird. And he's so lucky.
But that's because it's not fun, right?
So like, we all know those kinds of examples where we think about exercise in different ways.
But maybe there is something about the visual experience when exercising that is helpful for some people and might be part of the problem for others who are struggling to do it at the level that they want.
So that's one of the questions that motivated a big line of work that we've been engaged in is trying to think, okay, when it comes to exercise, distance perception is something that really matters.
We have to assess how much energy do I have, how much motivation do I have, and how far do I need to go and trying to regulate that, get those two in sync with one another.
So one of the first places that we started looking was, how do people perceive distance and is it related to something about their bodies or about their motivation?
We spent a long time looking through the literature to see how do people study distance perception, coming up with their own measures as well as using those from the past, to see not just what do people think about distance, but how are they really seeing distances.
And some of the things that we found, regardless of what measures we were using, was that people who weigh more, we index this by waist to hip ratio and by BMI, two metrics that the medical community uses to index people's weight status or to diagnose weight status.
And we found that people who have a higher waist to hip ratio or a higher BMI see distances as farther than people who have a lower waist to hip ratio or lower BMI.
Those distances literally look farther to people that for whom it might be harder to make it to that finish line, to navigate that space.
We also found that that's the case with motivation that when people are more motivated to exercise or to make it to that finish line, that motivation can in a sense compensate for that effect of their body on their perception of distance.
So that even highly motivated people, people who are highly motivated, even if they have a higher waist to hip ratio, might see the distance in a way that suggests it's just as short as people who have a lower waist to hip ratio.
So motivation can change our visual experience and align people to experience a world that looks more like a person who'd have an easier time navigating it.
So those were like, you know, two initial findings that sets of findings that suggested our visual experiences are not just reflective of the world that's out there, but instead it has to do with what is our body capable of doing and what is our brain capable of supplementing.
Our own motivational states and physical states of our body are working together to shift what it is that we're seeing in the world out there.
Now a couple that with like around this time, I had the opportunity to talk with some amazing athletes, some Olympic athletes, some of the world's fastest runners, like the fastest guy out of Trinidad, someone else who's trained against Hussein lightning bolt, like these are amazing accomplished athletes.
And I was wondering like, well, what are they doing?
Like what's happening with their eyes as they are running?
And like, I have no expectation that if I just interview them and then and adopt what they say that I'll be able to do what they have done, of course not, but I just wanted to get some insight from some really accomplished people.
Now my intuition going into this these conversations was that they would say that they have like amazing powers of perception they could see in front of them on the sides behind them, you know, I know that's not physically possible, but that's just what I thought would happen that they knew exactly where they were relative to their competition, that they could do
something with their peripheral vision that maybe I couldn't do.
But that's not at all. I was totally wrong.
They said they had this sort of hyper focus that, you know, for shorter runs, that they just focused on the finish line as if there was, you know, a spotlight shining just on that finish line and that they weren't paying any attention at all to their peripheral vision.
When it was longer runs that they would choose a target up ahead and focus on that till they hit it and then they would choose another target.
And that seemed to resonate with other sort of memoirs that I was reading about accomplished athletes as well, like marathon runners would take that approach.
So then I thought, okay, visual experience does seem to be implicated in how they're moving their body at these amazing paces.
And what they're talking about is something that we can teach other people to do.
We're not going to, we're not going to be able to take somebody who, you know, is really struggling to be in shape and turn them into a gold medalist.
That's not the point here.
That's not most people's goal, but can we improve their experience in some way by teaching them to do with their eyes what these Olympic athletes are doing?
The answer is yes. You can tell people just like I have you to focus their attention, choose a target.
Imagine there's a spotlight shining just on it.
Don't pay much attention to what's in your periphery almost as if you have like blinders on, right?
So don't pay attention to those distractors.
People can do that. We have them talk to us about like, well, what is it that you're focused on?
What's catching your attention right now?
Those are easy instructions to understand and it's easy to make your eyes do it.
What's important though is that that's not what their eyes do naturally.
When they're walking or when they're running, people do take a sort of wider perspective.
They broaden their scope of attention relative to what these instructions are having them do.
And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, what we found is that they moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up from the start line to the finish line.
It was always exactly the same distance.
And we were using our stopwatches to see how fast did they move?
They moved 23% faster and they said it hurt 17% less.
Right? So exactly the same actual experience, but subjectively, it was easier and they performed better.
They increase the efficiency of this particular exercise.
Now, of course, that's not going to make people, you know, one bout of efficient exercises and going to change people's body composition or help that won't have them meet a health goal.
They need to do this over time.
But what we also found is that if we taught them that strategy and tested its impact right here in front of us when we're watching and then tell them, now go out and exercise over the course of the next week.
And do you mind if we check out your fitness tracking app?
What we found is that people who have been trained in that narrowed focus of attention go out for more walks, they take more steps and they walk faster in each walk.
So we've improved the efficiency of their exercise, even when we're not there to monitor what they're doing.
And even when they're like compensation isn't contingent on what they're doing.
It's just like, hey, if you could, go for some walks and go for some or some runs and then let us see how it's going for you using the strategy that we talked to you about.
Now, why does that happen?
I think that's pretty amazing that that does happen because it's not magic.
It's about changing people's psychology.
Yes, we're changing what their eyes are doing.
That's changing their visual experience of the landscape, but that then has psychological consequences.
People, when they see that, when they experience that finish line is closer or the stop sign that they focused on or the building that they've always hoped that they could walk to that they're focused their attention on is closer, that changes their mindset.
Now it doesn't seem so hard because now it looks close.
It looks closer to me. They believe in themselves.
They have a sense of self efficacy that is higher now.
The task doesn't seem so difficult.
They believe they have the resources to take on this challenge.
There's a host of cascading sort of psychological effects that comes from that misperception of proximity, that visual illusion of greater proximity changes their psychology.
That then is what translates into the improved performance.
So here, really, to understand how do we get people to exercise better, one is that we want to induce that perception reality gap.
It's not something to be afraid of or to think as a deficiency.
It's an opportunity, actually.
It's an opportunity for some sort of self trickery, self deception here that can work to our advantage.
Once we know we are capable of changing our eyes, that can change our psychology, that can change our performance, why not embrace this perception reality gap and use it as a source of power and control and opportunity.
From episode number 72, here is Neil Pasarisha.
You've written broadly on three topics.
So gratitude, happiness, and resilience.
Yes. We've talked a lot about resilience.
Walk me through how these fit together, why these three particular topics, how they came to be.
Sure. And let's sort of go through gratitude and happiness, too.
Sure. So my wife left me, my best friend took his own life.
I started a blog called 1000AwesomeThings.com.
For a thousand straight days, I wrote about one simple pleasure in life.
Things like wearing warm underwear from out of the dryer, getting called up to the dinner buffet first at a wedding, which is huge at an Indian wedding because there's 500 tables.
Hating is during green lights when you're late for work.
Just little things. I expand on them in 500 word essays-ish.
And for a thousand straight days, I posted it, the blog went viral.
It took off. It turned into my first book, which is the book of awesome.
That book, therefore, is all about gratitude.
It isn't one of these academic...
That book became a New York Times bestseller.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I sold a million copies.
And it was number one, I think, for 100 straight weeks on the Globe Mail Bestseller list.
Why do you think it was number one?
Why do you think it resonated so much with people?
The weirdest advice or the weirdest compliment I ever got, two things.
Two, you know how people say stuff about your own work, and then sometimes they say stuff that helps you see it in a different way?
Mark Manson once said this to me on my podcast.
He's like, you know, when someone wrote this about my subtle art not getting a fuck, it made me realize what I was doing.
Right? So two compliments stuck out for me, Shane.
One is, this is the only self-help book I've ever bought that doesn't tell me what to do.
It shows me how to do it. Like, I'm not saying, oh, sit around your dinner table every night and write down this stuff on a piece of paper.
I don't say that once. I'm talking about the virtues of getting a moderate paneer before it's all out of paneer.
You know what I mean? So then you can start to see your own life that way.
And the second compliment I got that resonated with me was, my eight-year-old son never reads anything, but he read your book.
And so I think there's something to reading and books in general that I'm always scratching at, which is I'm trying to expand the size of the pie.
My writing veers slightly different than yours.
Like, I made them for the big, fat mass.
I want the most accessible writing possible because I want the widest possible market.
And when I get non-readers to read, that to me is a sign of the book's success.
Non-readers reading is kind of one of my big, ultimate goals.
And it's the topic that's enduring.
Like, we're all taught sort of awareness of gratitude and then that we should have gratitude.
And nobody's sort of like, I don't know, maybe I can't say nobody.
I mean, I am trying to think of how I model that for my kids.
It just seems so cheesy and hokey when you hear about it these days.
You know, I was like, yeah, I'll Oprah's gratitude journal and like write down five things on your bedside table before you go to bed.
And like, I mean, everyone's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
But it's when you do it as a practice, when you go, I always say to people, the best way to do it, quickest way to do it, is go around your dinner table at night and do Rose Rose Thornbud.
Have you heard about this?
No. So you say a rose from your day, that's something that was a highlight for you, a gratitude, then say your son says one, okay, your other son says one, whatever, then another rose, then a thorn, which is something that did not go well, because you want to get it off your chest, you need to vent and the other people need to show you empathy, okay, and then a bud, BUD,
which is something you are looking forward to tomorrow, next week, next year, whenever that little exercise helps you get all the gratitudes in that the science says really work.
So you know, work, Emens and McCullough, 10 weeks of five gratitudes a week makes you not only happier, but physically healthier after 10 weeks.
So we know it's a powerful punch to your brain to do that, but it puts it in a little around the table dinner exercise.
That's just quite like simple and easy to do.
Why is that effective though?
I have a theory on this. So my theory, and you're going to prove me wrong here in a second, is because I was thinking about this, researching, speaking with you, and also like the things that I do at home.
And I'm like, oh, these little moments of joy are actually really awesome.
But why are they awesome?
And then I think a lot of it is just adding perspective, right?
So you get almost like this flashlight with a narrow beam, and then you start, oh, like, I'm going to find something that's really nice, so you widen it a little bit more.
And then it's that perspective that causes you to see things in a new way.
But to get the perspective, you're actually reflecting.
And it's the reflection.
I think there's something to do with that reflection that actually drives the sort of, drives the response.
I don't know. Well, your brain is much bigger than mine.
So my instinct is to say, you're right.
No, no, that's not true.
Can I add in, can I sprinkle some salt on that with a little bit of evolutionary biology stuff?
200,000 years, we've been around ish, right, our species, and plus or minus, you know, whenever they can backdate the carbon dating of the first human body or whatever.
And for the first 199,900 of those years, we had to fight for survival.
Luckily, we there's something in our brain called our amygdala.
It secretes a fight or flight hormone.
And when you see a saber tooth tiger, you know, I got to fight that thing to the death with a stick, where I got to run the hell away.
Right. And that served us very well.
We went from a few scattered hundreds on the African savannah to the most populous mammal on the planet.
We took over this spaceship.
We won. We eat all the other ones for dinner, literally like we, they used to eat us, but we eat them now, you know, and we won.
We took it over. In the last 100 years, we no longer need that 199,900 years of evolutionary biology that has programmed us into thinking, if it doesn't kill me, I got to kill it and I got to run.
We now live in an era of abundance and that abundance is only skyrocketing.
Think about it. That model I said, you can press the button in a car, pace you up, press another button, you got dinner, press another button, and you got entertainment.
Like we just press buttons now.
So we don't need that, that fight or flight hormone as much, yet it's still there.
That is not, you're not just going to evolve away your amygdala.
You know, you, what are you going to do?
So you're going to naturally have all the neural pathways to see negative stuff first.
That is why it bleeds. It leads people always say to me, why isn't there a good news newspaper?
I'm like, no one would watch it.
They want to watch the fire.
We want the race car crash.
We want the hard hit and football.
We want that stuff that we, they're like, oh, everyone's rubber necking on the highway.
It's like, of course, everyone wants to see the accident.
We instinctively, biologically, evolutionarily want to see it.
So this gratitude stuff is actually practicing to develop a whole new muscle carving totally different neural pathways to see how awesome it is to be alive.
You got 30,000 days on this planet.
You will never be as young as you are right now.
And if you don't watch for all these tiny little pleasurable moments, it'll slip away and you won't see them and life is awesome.
And the gratitude stuff works because then you're like, whoa, I'm so happy to see you today, Shane.
I can't wait to shake your hand and thank you for your time.
I love seeing the farm street offices.
Wow. I can't wait to soak in your bookshelf on the way out.
It's beautiful. I want to soak that in because if I don't, life's over and I missed it.
Yeah, life is so brief and so fragile, right?
We think we naturally just sort of think, oh, life expectancy is sort of say 80 or something.
And I'm this old. So I have like all this time left in the future.
But recently, I mean, I've seen a lot of people that I know become sick or suffer some sort of catastrophic injury.
And life isn't long. Life is super short and fragile.
And we always think that we'll put off living until we're older when we retire.
We're going to talk about retirement a little bit, but we always think we can put this off until we're in a better place or we have more time.
But life, there's this quote by Mary Angelou that I love, which is, it's on the wall in my living room, actually.
And it says, life loves the liver of it.
Oh, that's good. And I think it's so deep on multiple levels.
And it's so easily accessible to you, right?
Because every day you wake up, it's like, this is your day, right?
You can live your best life today.
And so one of the routines we're talking about sort of like routines for gratitude or perspective, one of the things that I taught my kids to do, which I encourage all parents of young children to do if they're so inclined, is when your kids get out of bed in the morning, a lot of people send them downstairs like, go watch cartoons, because parents are a little slower
to wake up than kids. I don't know if everybody's kids are like mine, like, they're up and out of bed and like full bore in like 30 seconds, right?
Like I'm dressed. At like 5am.
Yeah. And so I was like, okay, you can't get out of your bed till 7.
Like, here's the rules sort of right?
Like at 7, you can come in my bed and we're going to cuddle.
And this is how we're going to start the day.
And they're still doing it.
They're 10 and 9, although it's gone from like 30 minutes to maybe 5 to 8 now.
But we sort of talk about it, like what we're looking forward to today.
Like if there was any lesson from yesterday from a sort of an educational perspective, I did this and I got this outcome, but that wasn't what I wanted.
So I would do it differently.
We just sort of like do this spaced repetition on, oh, remember what happened yesterday?
If you encounter this situation today, like how would you really respond to that?
And then it's like, what are you looking forward to today?
And we just spend a few minutes talking and cuddling.
Wow. What an incredible practice.
I'm very jealous. I want to do that now.
Like I don't do that with my kids.
You can't come in my bed and cuddle with me.
I particularly want to cuddle with you.
But I think that's amazing.
And it's about pausing.
And that's partly why I always say life's been in days.
I never refer to it as years.
I always refer to it as days.
I'm a big fan of the Kevin Kelly death clock idea.
So Kevin Kelly founder of Wire Magazine keeps a clock on his desktop that has expected lifespan, subtracts his current age, measured in days.
So if the average lifespan, which it is in North America is 30,000 days, and he happens to have lived 21,500 of them, that thing will say, quick, Neil, do the math, 8,500.
And then tomorrow it'll say 8,499.
And that literally is the number of days he has left.
A lot of people will find that too dark or too like, well, man, I think it's empowering.
It gives you information that it's like, you know what, I really don't want to spend my time this way.
From episode number 126, here is Nancy Sherman.
So what does being stoic mean?
Because I mean, at a high level, it does appear to be embrace the suck.
So what does it mean? How does it differentiate from that?
How do we go deeper? So stoicism came to have a little s in a way that really you don't see with many philosophies.
I don't know. We don't talk about Aristotle with a little s or maybe Platonic.
So with stoic, the one that has come to us is kind of almost through the British stiff upper lip, right, passionless, maybe the monarchy best reflects it.
You saw it in all the British tabloids when Prince Philip died was the Queen stoic enough.
That kind of got is one strand of stoicism, which is try to manage your debilitating emotions.
But it's not the only, because if you really read more deeply, the stoics with the big s have the most sophisticated emotion theory there is in the ancient world.
There are three levels at least of emotions.
What are those three levels?
They have emotional skin in the game, as I say, in these three ways.
One is that you have these preemotions or protoemotions.
You know, you shape, starts and startles.
You hear a loud sound and your body jumps a little bit or Seneca gives these great examples.
If you're general, you could be the bravest, most stoic general, but your knees knock a little bit when you hear the clarion call to start marching or you turn green if you're in a shipwreck.
You know, even if you're a sage, your body's talking, maybe not your mind.
It's your body talking and you can feel all those and they're probably very adaptive.
Someone like Joseph Ladoo, who's a neurobiologist at NYU and studies all the different levels of the brain, you know, refers to that as a, the sort of the low road emotions, the your amygdala, the limbic system, flight fight, we sometimes say, or autonomic arousals.
They have so many descriptions of them.
They're really prescient in this regard.
They're very forward thinking.
The next step are ones that can get you into trouble.
This is the second layer.
And these are the ones many of us feel.
So we, the way Seneca puts it, so he's now, we're talking now a Roman statesman and writer and spin doctor, speech writer for Nero.
He essentially says that you can overstep reason a little bit.
A little bit. You can, once started, these are hard to stop.
And so they're the, as if they're the proto emotions that you give a scent to, that's their word.
You endorse them. Is that like anger and fear?
Yeah, anger and fear, full-throated anger and fear and resentment and revenge.
And also grief that won't go away, you know, sort of the depression, we would might call it chronic grief these days, we might call it chronic grief syndromes that just won't go away.
So you, you, you endorse those first fleeting impulses that have come in from the body talking.
And you run with them and you run with them in a way where you can't stop fear, desire, pleasure, distress and under those four, everything falls essentially.
And they get the body going as well as the mind.
And essentially, and they're essentially belief theorists about emotions.
So they're cognitivists, which means it's not only an impulse that you give rise to, but it's a kind of belief that guy was out to hurt me.
And I'm going to be angry at him.
And your response to that ego bruises, I'm going to fight back in some way.
So these are all the emotions that if you let him run run amok, they can derail you.
Now the stoics are developmentalists.
So in this regard, again, they're really forward thinking, they're into moral development of the emotions.
Because that's where they think you really can, if you recalibrate your values, it has to be also with your emotions lining up to what you believe to be the right values.
So they think you should start trying to cultivate a good kind of fear.
And they actually have a name for it, which is consciousness.
They think you should start cultivating a good kind of desire and they give it a name.
And this is the third layer, we're into the third layer.
Absolutely, Shane. In this third layer is a kind of rational desire.
So you're not going after something with sticky acquisitiveness or kind of sticky attachment.
So your reasoning, you're not reacting.
You're reacting a bit, but your reaction is filtered through your reason.
And it's slowed down a little bit.
You've had a chance to sort of press the pause button a bit.
I mean, you may not get fully there.
This is in some ideal way, but this is what you're after.
You're kind of trying to slow down the response so that what you now come to think is the right way to react and the right way to see that thing outside that so bruised your ego before isn't necessarily as an insult.
Maybe the person was deluded, maybe move on, don't get pissed off by it or something of that sort.
I think of it as you're not stuck on the object of anger.
You're not stuck on the object of desire.
You're not stuck on the threat out there.
You have a kind of healthy aversion to threat.
You have a healthy approach to things that you want.
And you have a healthy, well, they also give you one for joy, a healthy pleasure.
That's maybe, you know, this is their word rational exuberance, but you get the idea.
It's actually our word for charity.
The Greek word is chara and ch and it turns into charity.
So it's a kind of charitable disposition of pleasurableness that comes along with doing things.
So they're all calm, equitable, serene kinds of emotions.
Do we get there? Most of us not fully.
Should we aspire to get there?
Yeah. And so that third layer is the one that you kind of want to keep in mind as you try to stem some of the more debilitating emotions that are hard to manage.
How do we do that though?
So a lot of that sounds like that moment of pause between the second and third layer between feeling anger and then how do you teach yourself not to reason, but to give yourself a pause so that you can reason, right?
And now your reason can take control of your emotions.
Like how do we regain control of that?
So the way they think about it is pretty graphic.
They're thinking that you have some time.
Now, we know we don't always have time, but they're reconstructing it as if you have time.
So you get this charged impulse that comes in.
He's insulting me, you know, and then you get hot and heavy.
I'm going to get pissed off.
I'm going to get angry. So they think that you can monitor your impression.
We call it an observing ego.
You watch yourself a little bit.
You watch how you're reacting or responding to the impulse or to that affront.
And they even have ways of doing it.
They're not going to sit you down in a therapist's office, but they are going to tell you at the end of the day to do some journaling.
This is what Seneca says, you know, the night is quiet.
My wife is asleep. She knows my habits.
That's exactly what he says.
And he says, you know, I got a little bit too angry at the doorman, at the building who didn't recognize me and didn't give, let me in.
Very pedestrian kind of response.
I wasn't seated at the head table at the banquet where all the dignitaries were.
I thought I should be. Well, maybe I'm a little too puffed up about that.
So the pause is sometimes built in in reflective moments.
And you know, that is what psychotherapies about.
And they called themselves therapists of the psyche.
The Greek word is therapy therapy of the soul or the psyche.
But it's it's themselves with themselves, whether in letter writing or these meditations, they're called meditations.
They're very discursive.
It's not like Eastern meditation.
So what does that work? Why does writing why is writing so effective?
I mean, my hypothesis is sort of like it helps us reflect.
It helps us clarify our thinking and helps us see our thinking.
It puts a visual to it. But not only that, it sort of like makes sense of our experience to ourselves.
It's that process for us.
If you put words on your thought, and you actually articulate them a bit, and you drill that articulation into your head, they have actual practices, you know, they're not just meditate at the end of the day, but think in advance, pre rehearse some of the bad things that could happen to you at the end, you know, during this day, and that will get you set up for it.
So they're very much about emotions, get their power by having words attached to them by being discursive, by being thought that is articulated.
We know there's a gap between what you think and say, and what you actually do.
There's not a perfect go to there at all.
And, you know, some of my more radical colleagues in philosophy might say, you know, we need moral enhancement, enhancement drugs, you know, and they'll go in for bio enhancement that closes the gap between cold cognition and hot emotion, so that we can really bring in line what it means to kill that many people with that drone strike.
You may be able to say it in your head, but do you really know what that feels like?
So we have to visualize and imagine in order to give meaning to these, to the emotional empowerment.
And sometimes it's not really just discourse, I think, or just words.
They're the beginning psychotherapists, as I say, they're, you know, in the tradition of any kind of Freudian or whatever follows Freud, words, chatting, putting words to your thought helps to do some chiminy sweeping.
But we may also just have to calm ourselves down, right?
We know that. We know that some of the sped up emotions really result from our ticking too fast, and we need to cool down the autonomic system a little bit.
And are there ways to do that that we can use?
I think there are. I mean, two things come to mind.
One is stoic and then one isn't.
One of the stoic ideas is you press the pause button or you insert some space between the initial input and the reaction.
And so they give you some time, they think, you can buy yourself some time between say, well, you know, all the biases we carry in our head that lead to pretty unreflective responses, whether we're talking about police brutality, or sectarian violence, or they think that if you can kind of slow down the initial impulse a little bit, you buy yourself a little bit of time.
Now you may have to have some of those responses stored up from another time, you know, and that would be when your journaling comes in.
The other side of this is to turn to Eastern practices, which really are not about chatting away in your head, but rather the opposite, not chatting in your head, kind of emptying it.
So various kinds of mindful practices where you, you know, a mantra may be the thing that allows you to empty your head.
From episode number 88, Derek Sivers.
And is that where you come up with your directives?
Oh, the directives. The directives, I think, came from, sorry, everybody listening.
Shane's talking about something I've something that I've blogged about a few times, which is this idea of taking, taking an idea and turning it into a directive, which is meaning telling you to do an action.
If you go to my site, if you go to Sivers.org, or if you read anything I've written, or even the TED talks I've put out into the world or whatever, you might notice that I like being very succinct, maybe not in conversation with Shane right now, but when I put something out into writing, I like being very, very, very succinct.
I like chopping out every possible word, leaving only the words that need to be there.
So I noticed that as I was learning about certain things, I felt like most books use way too many words.
And I came to this idea that probably the most succinct way to communicate an idea is to focus on the action itself.
Like if you command the action, then the action like a seed, I think there's like a nature metaphor in here somewhere, that the action has the seed of the idea in it, that the action carries the idea along with it.
You can talk for 400 pages about calories and this kind of fat versus that kind of fat and protein versus that, but instead you could just tell somebody, eat this, don't eat that.
Like those actions would carry that 200 pages of information in the actions.
And so therefore, the the succinct directives, the actions please my minimalist, ruthless editor sensibilities more.
I want to talk about directives a little bit more.
And what's interesting to me when I think about directives is they're great if you can get them from other people, but they're different.
Again, going back to this imitation versus like knowing and understanding.
So you're coming up with these directives, like you're doing the work, the mental work, like you have an experience, you're reflecting on it.
That experience can be yours or it can be from reading a book or somebody else's story, but you're doing the mental work of reflecting, integrating, digesting.
And then you're coming up with these directives, like so much of life today is like, just give me the directive and we haven't done the work.
In space repetition, like Anki, SRS flashcards, a lot of people say, you just give me somebody's deck so I can learn JavaScript or whatever.
I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no No, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no There's a general,
I don't want to call it lightness because that's not correct Levy, maybe?
I don't know. They feel that every day has a purpose Because the purpose is raising this little person and because there's purpose there are goals Maybe not explicitly stated but certainly outcomes that one is trying to achieve Processes they're trying to enjoy And I think that's why having kids does such a thing for a person they say having kids makes you grow It
makes you mature whatever I think what it really does it makes you focus on what's going to make you happy And you got to make it happen in that process and you quickly realize that happiness is not material It's easy to have a temporary boost of happiness when a material thing but all it is is a change in position There's that rate of change once the change doesn't happen
anymore. You're back to being unhappy So your whole life if you want to be happy you got to push towards something Does that matter what you push towards?
Doesn't matter what you want to be what you're trying to become but you got to be trying to become you have to try to become something You have an interesting philosophy on that too.
You said don't don't tell people what you're trying to become Just talk about what you have become Yeah, man, uh social media age, right?
We are affected with this This This disease of Self-promotion, but we're not self promoting what we've done We're self promoting what we plan to do and then we get a bunch of people to go.
Oh man Good luck Go for it.
You go girl. Whatever you see And your brain and this I mean this is true.
There's a lot of research on this your brain goes.
Holy shit Look at all this approval.
We must already did it. Why are we gonna keep doing work now?
We're gonna stack off uh This there's just no benefit of talking about what you've done.
Um at Best case scenario you do it Right Which is what you were trying to do worst case.
Yeah, don't And if you don't now you've told all these people that you are going to but there's nothing to show So now what do you do you hop on what are they called the dopamine treadmill you get back on and you talk about the newest goal?
I mean, I don't I don't know.
I don't think I've seen you on facebook at all But I'm sure there's some version that's on twitter though twitter tends to skew kind of different in terms of the activity that goes on amongst the users You see every someone goes i'm trying to lose this amount of weight I want to do this i'm gonna start this and people go there was a bunch of likes and there's a big rally
behind it And in three months the same shit they're in the same spot nothing happened nothing changed Why because they got all the validation your brain look I'm never gonna be a guy that says motivation doesn't count For a thing and motivation is important But it's a finite resource and it will exhaust itself and when that falls off You got to rely on maybe habits
system and necessity all kinds of things to get you through But because that system is in place it can be hot jacked the one of the ways we hot jack is we go when we we get out As false recognition it feel it look man I've gotten I've gotten a reasonable amount of recognition in my life for things that I have done I'll tell you what it's a lot.
It feels a lot better and it's a lot That's nerve-wracking when a person can graduate for something and then they can also go look it up independently online and go Oh, okay, right.
He really did that. Yeah It's but but if a person but if I if I chime in like when I'm but like a buddy tells me wants to do something I go cool, man.
I did I never asked about it again because I don't want I don't want to stress them out.
I know they didn't do it.
Otherwise they'd be they'd be all over it I would hear I wouldn't I didn't hear all about it, right?
But you you you don't hear the result and you talk about habits and systems there What's one habit you've changed recently that's made a profound impact on you?
Do you want to know this is silly man?
This is this is real silly, but it's true I watched the dishes as soon as I'm done eating Yeah, how is that impacted you?
All right, so so I don't know if you know when I was growing up My mom used to do that like right away.
You'd be like eating your last bite and she'd be grabbing the plate and Yeah, uh, so I used to make that bed up immediately when I got out of it every morning But but I didn't and then I switched it to the dishes.
What does this do? First of all to establish some like regularity To I gotta do the dishes anyway if I'm already up and moving around Man, I'm telling you this is the best part about studying sciences, right?
Not not like This the knowledge but the analogies you can make man a nurse is real the minute you sit down You do not want to get up and if you keep moving you don't want to stop.
That's all a nurse is right and objects You know resistance to a change of acceleration acceleration if you if I'm already up moving around putting dishes in and I just while I'm standing then I go All right, man.
Let me I'm just do these dishes right now.
No, I don't have to think about it It's already taken care of and when I sit down to go do something else.
I don't have to worry about doing work Or rather, I don't have to worry about interrupting my work to do that I don't have to worry about going there to catch the kitchen smelling funny I don't have to worry about the cats freaking out.
I don't have to worry about my girl going wild cooked When I'm this is going to get done, you know, I don't have to worry about any I have all I've done.
It's a small thing, but I've relieved so much.
Maybe that maybe that is a um A sign of how cool life is these days that like that little hijack Makes such a big difference But I think the bigger lesson is that if you can take advantage of inertia And just do things when you're already moving so you don't have to stop restart stop restart Your life will be a lot easier.
You you don't have to think about motivation to do your dishes or clean your room Or do your homework or whatever you got to do or go running It's why get out of bed.
My secret to to getting up early.
It's just to start moving If you don't have to have to do anything just don't sit down for 15 minutes You'll be you'll be surprised by how awake you are minute 16, you know Thanks for listening and learning with us for a complete list of episodes show notes transcripts and more go to fs.blog slash podcast.
We're just google the knowledge project Until next time
