In order to make a mark in the world, you don't need to necessarily uncover something new.
You don't need to invent a new product or like uncover a new fact.
There's so much ground to move in just taking what's already out there
and telling a better story around it, just telling it in a more compelling way.
And there are so much potential in doing that.
And the barriers to entry are so much lower than inventing something new or discovering something new.
Just taking what is already known and telling it in a more easy to understand captivating way.
So have you ever felt like the world is changing so fast, you can barely keep up that
no matter how hard you try, you still feel kind of lost in a sea of uncertainty.
You are not alone. When most of us feel this, our default is usually to try and attack the change
to lock it down to make things certain, which in the end is a futile quest. And it also distracts us
from focusing on what really matters in those moments, what is still there and can help us come
back to a place of peace and ease, even in the face of profound disruption.
So what should we be doing instead? My guest today, Morgan Housel, offers a pretty surprising
solution. In his latest book, Same as Ever, a guide to what never changes, Morgan just completely
flips the script on our fixation with change. He asks, what if instead of obsessing over the newest
trends or changes, we focused on timeless truths of human nature that endure amidst it all.
And as Morgan puts it, rather than pretending that we can predict the changes ahead,
let's focus on things so indelible across history that we can confidently expect them in our future.
It's a really powerful reframe I found. So Morgan Housel is a two-time winner of the
Best in Business Award for the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, a former columnist
for the Wall Street Journal. His books, including The Psychology of Money, have been lauded for their
practical wisdom and storytelling flair. In our conversation, Morgan and I explore the power of
understanding our hard-wired behaviors and biases. We discuss how small twists of fate can
profoundly alter the trajectory of our lives in an instant. How the stories we tell ourselves and
others not only captivates minds and moves hearts but also changes the way we experience nearly
any circumstance and why there is no one formula for the good life only the life you consciously
choose and create. So join us as we investigate the gift of focusing on what indoors of
building lives not on the shifting sands of change but on the bedrock of timeless human truths.
So excited to share this provocative conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
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Just really excited to dive into just a bunch of the topics especially from the latest book you know
I think we're all in this world where we open our eyes and we feel like like the pace of change
is almost unfathomable and that there's a you know a sense of persistent whiplash and how do we
keep up and what matters and what doesn't matter so it's really interesting to see you sort of
diving into okay so everyone's focused on change and how to navigate change but what if we pay a
bit of attention to what's not changing and the psychology around that and how to fix our lives so
I'm really curious at that sort of contrary and choice to say let me devote a very substantial
amount of time and energy to going deep into this at a moment where it seems like everybody else
wants to talk about the opposite so take me there actually what is the compulsion you know when
you think about like let me actually focus on that outlier or the many outliers in a world where
everyone's saying we've got to focus on everything that's changing over going to get quote left behind
yeah I think it was really two things that led me to be interested in this topic and then
eventually write the book one was maybe the most important was just as an amateur student of history
which is like that's the majority of whatever it is the history of all kinds of different topics
two things are interesting from history one is recognizing what has changed technologies
and cultural norms and like there's a million things that have changed of course that's what's
obvious in history but to me what's more interesting is when you come across something in the historical
context and you realize that that's exactly what's happening today and you find something you're like oh
this is how they dealt with this problem a hundred years ago it's exactly how we do it today there's
no difference whatsoever that's more rare than the things that change and it's harder to spot but
when you spot it's like wow there's this facet of human behavior or an element of life that is
exactly the same today as it was a hundred years ago or five hundred years ago or a thousand years ago
and therefore you can take that and say look if that thing hasn't changed in five hundred years
it's probably not going to change over the next 50 years you've probably found something that is
just an indelible part of human behavior and then the other element that I connected to that
that made me interested in this topic was you know I've been a financial writer for 17 years
and something that's always bothered me about the financial industry the financial media
and financial advisors and portfolio managers is how bad we are at forecasting just the ability to
say like once in x recession once in x bear market nobody can do it nobody can do it that's barely
an exaggeration and with that you can do one of two things you can become more of a cynic and just
say nobody knows anything don't even try to forecast futures totally a noble or you can connect it
to the first part and say look there's a lot that we don't know about the future and then we can't
predict but there are also lots of behaviors that have been so stable in time that show up
so commonly in history that we can confidently state that those are going to be part of our future
and then therefore you say I have no idea when the next recession is going to occur
and neither is anybody else but when it does I know exactly how people are going to behave
I know exactly how they're going to respond to greed and fear and risk because that's never changed
it's been the same forever I think that was really the big thrust of when I got interested in this
topic and eventually wrote the book about it yeah it's kind of like the psychological equivalent
of like 157 catch up you know it's it has been the same and it will be the same for I think over
a hundred years now it's like what is the human behavior version of this thing that just constantly
indoors no matter how much we change as individuals it's one of those things that's always there
and it's always the same it's interesting as you're describing you like we do have this compulsion
to believe that we have some capacity to predict the future in a very past life I actually started
my career as an enforcement attorney at the SEC so in mid 90s I'm working in New York City in the
SEC this big prestigious financial institution at least from the outside looking in and there was
an investigator there was an older guy later in his career and he literally would sit at his desk
all day long and he had like reams of paper billowing over the edge of his desk and he was like
madly like typing away at like a calculator and trying to figure things out and pencil in his hair
and what he was doing was he was spending all day every day he believed that he he had downloaded
the formula in a dream that would allow him to enter all the very balls to predict the exact
high and low of the market a year in advance and he was possessed by this a dialing it in and
optimizing it he's not the only one we are kind of like wire to feel like we do have this capacity
to see the future and then we want to bet on it and what's your take on this and where it comes
from and why it's just it endures to this day I think it is too painful for almost anyone to accept
how uncertain the future is how uncertain your future is if you were completely accurate if
you're completely honest about how uncertain it is it would be hard to get out of bed in the morning
I think people need some level of like rational ignorance if that's a weird phrase to assume that
they do know what's going to happen in their future to give them enough optimism to say look
since I know what the future is going to hold I can go out and take this risk and take this action
because I can kind of see it path where it's going to go next I think people need that level of ignorance
to move forward and if you're completely honest it would be hard to move forward I also think that
the it's so alluring because as your old coworker could probably think about and dream about
if you can predict the stock market the rewards are enormous if you can predict who's going to win
the Super Bowl the rewards can be enormous if you do know exactly where your career is going to go
next the life payoffs are enormous and even if there is a fraction of one percent of a chance
that you could do it if the rewards can be so high that it's still going to compel you to take
some action to do it but I think it's really the first part where it feels so good to remove
uncertainty and therefore we fool ourselves one way or another into thinking that we or somebody
else does know the future this particularly happens when the world is on fire so to speak during
recessions wars pandemics historically going back hundreds of years you see this that people are
the most gullible and they have the highest desire for different predictions when the future is the
most uncertain and so if you go back to the Great Depression World War II the Great Plays that
that swept over Europe for most of hundreds of years that's when the desire for like find
some crazy witch doctor who's going to tell me exactly what's going to happen next because it
feels so good to remove that uncertainty and I think that will always be the case no matter how much
and this is something that the era of big data has not changed whatsoever like we have so much data
showing among other things how bad we are at predicting like in the stock market what not
hasn't changed the demand for predictions at all so I think no matter how much data we have
showing that we cannot do it the desire is never going to diminish whatsoever yeah what's
interesting also and I'm curious what you feel about this I have always seen uncertainty and
possibility of two as two sides of the same coin like you cannot have one without the other if
you're going to exist in a world of possibility you have to accept that you know you're also
carrying a coin that holds equal stakes on the uncertainty side if you're going to actually
trying eliminate uncertainty in your life what you're inadvertently doing is eliminating
possibility you know because there can't be possibility if everything is known and yet we are so
wired as human beings to want to eliminate uncertainty but I think the focus is when we think about
uncertainty we think about uncertainty in relation to a downside and we think about possibility
as always about the upside and we never really think about them as being inseparable I'm curious
what your take is on that lens I think I'm very related to that framework I often thought of luck
and risk as being the opposite sides of the same coin where if you said what is the definition of
luck well my definition would be there are things that can happen in your life outside of your control
that can influence outcomes in a positive way more than anything you did intentionally that's
what luck is but if you said what's the definition of risk I'd say it's the exact thing things can
happen in your life outside of your control they have a bigger influence on outcome than anything
you can do intentionally it's the same thing just in opposite directions and what's important is
that people tend to be very cognizant of risk and very ignorant of luck people are like always
like in finance for example risk adjusted returns say hire risk managers everything
about investing is risk risk risk nobody talks about luck nobody talks about nobody is going to
have luck adjusted returns no one talks about hiring a luck manager at the bank nobody does that
and I think at least part of the reason is if I look at your success and I say you got lucky I
look like a jealous jerk and so people don't want to say that and if I looked in the mirror and
said Morgan your success was just due to luck and I'm telling men think about myself that makes me
feel bad I want to think that any any level of success I had I did intentionally but really if
you dig into things like there's so much outside of your control and if you consider that luck
then it's and that too is another thing that's like if you're actually honest about it it tends to
be too hard to swallow but the opposite is like we're so cognizant of risk and when things go bad
you're like oh well it was risky it was risky couldn't have seen this coming but when things go
very well and very few people say I just got lucky so it's just like a difference in how we acknowledge
them in life yeah and at the same time when you sort of like think about and talk to some of the
like most iconic investors in history oftentimes they'll tell you that a big part of their
quote success over not just a couple of months or even a couple of years but over decades
is by largely focusing on managing the downside and just knowing you know it's the classic line
let the winners run and you like and cut the losers short fast so there is a huge amount of this
focus but I guess the finding the winners and letting them run like there's a lot of luck in that
side of it also yeah which factors into the whole equation so part of what you're the whole idea
with the new book is yeah essentially okay so if so much is outside of our control let's look at
the things that have pretty much stayed largely the same in human behavior and circumstance and
culture and society over a long time so we kind of lean on those things and count on them but I
guess the big question before we dive into some of the more details is to what ends like what's the
outcome that we're working towards by focusing on what's staying the same and on an enduring basis
I think for me it's almost a plea for humility and in some ways I don't want to state this too
strongly but in some ways I think rather than focusing on the things that do never change
it highlights the things that we that we cannot know and the things that that we most of what we
spend our time predicting in finance of like where stocks go next ones the next recession what
our interest rates going to do who's going to win the next election once you focus on the things
that are predictable the behaviors in time that are predictable you almost naturally realize that
things like that are not predictable it's almost just like looking at it in the reverse order
so I think that's a big part of this I think the exercise for me to in a strange way has had like a
very big impact on my information diet because when you train yourself to really pay most attention
to things that never change then when you are reading the news or reading a book or watching a
documentary you're always kind of asking like is this relevant in the future well with with this
bit of information only relevant to some specific point in the past and it may have been very important
in the past and shape the world in a very special way but it's not something that's going to be
enduring going forward I'll give you an example of this if you're looking in the stock market and you
see a piece of of information that says Microsoft quarterly earnings beat by 5% beat estimates by 5%
okay that's a piece of information it may have been very relevant to last quarter may have been
very relevant to what the stock did today is that going to make much of any difference whatsoever a
year from now 10 years from now 20 years from now like no no it's expiring information it has a
shelf life but if you are understanding the history of how investors react to greed and fear
is that understanding and that lesson going to be relevant to you 10 years from now yes
probably it'll be just as relevant 10 years from now as it is today so it has pushed me to focus
more on what I think is going to have a long shelf life or a permanent shelf life versus what I
think gets most of our attention in the media which is expiring information yeah I mean that's
really interesting also because it seems like a part of what you're saying is you referenced it a
couple of times like greed and things like this and fear is that the part of the human experience
that's most predictable that kind of stays the same over a long period of time is human behavior
whereas the part that's least predictable is circumstance and a lot of people would look at
the human behavior and say like people are rational people change like you couldn't predict
how somebody can respond to something but I guess what you're saying when you zoom the lens out
and you look at sort of like humanity as a whole and like all the different ups and downs over
long windows of time and how we've responded it actually is pretty predictable it's definitely
true that at the more macro level when you're looking at large groups of people or you know
whole countries of people that's when you get these behaviors that change can definitely within
individuals even I am sure you and everyone else within my own life I have changed my behaviors
have changed my outlook has changed my views my political views my economic views have changed
and evolved and they will continue to do so in the future I hope so it's less predictable at the
individual level but more so at the macro level when everyone's working together when kind of the
outliers cancel each other out and you're just looking at the big blob of humanity how do people
respond to greed and fear and risk tends to be fairly stable over time even during periods when
the economy has completely and utterly changed I'll give you one example of this there's a very good
book called The Great Depression a Diary it was written by the so high-o-lawyer named Benjamin Roth
who kept a very detailed diary during the Great Depression in the 1930s it was just his personal
private diary but he was a bankruptcy attorney so he had a very interesting perch in terms of
what was going on during the Great Depression and his son published it in 2010 and there's an entry
in there from 1932 which is kind of the bottom of the Great Depression in hindsight we know it's
kind of the bottom it was the worst that it got and I remember reading it and thinking to myself
if you change the dates on this diary entry from 1932 to 2008 our financial crisis
every word that he said would fit right in every single word fit in perfectly just in terms of
what people were thinking back then and then two pages later Benjamin Roth writes in 1932 he says
if you change the dates from 1932 to 1907 the previous Great Depression that they had everything
fit in and then he starts thinking is as actually and I say it's the exact same what happened in
1894 and 1876 all the other recessions were exactly what was happening and when I was reading it
80 years later it seemed to fit in perfectly to what the world was going through in 2008 and so
a lot of these things I can at the macro level in terms of the behavior now the Great Depression of
the 1930s was very different in the details versus what happened in 2008 but the behaviors really
weren't the behaviors were really the same it sounds like you're also just stealing it down to
we're really not talking about like the full spectrum of human behavior we're talking about like a
core set of primal reactions to almost like extreme events or circumstances yeah those things
they like like you said fear like greed like things like this that for some reason they're kind
of hardwired into us and during these big dramatic changes in circumstance we tend to when it
comes to that core set of behaviors those have endured for generations and probably will for
generations I think there's an element of that too in terms of like the generational where a lot
of these just views of the world and what you should be paying attention to get passed down
throughout the generations so the reason that my grandparents were acting the same way in the
stock market as I am is a lot of it is it's like that's a general knowledge a generational knowledge
transfer of learning how these things work so we're all kind of even though they are separated
by a long distance in time a lot of these things just the education that we have the knowledge
of the stories that we all read get passed down along the generations yeah now that makes a lot
of sense to me you know one of the things that you write about also when you talk about is this notion
of I guess you describe it as it's like a leverage effect like how very small things can make a
really big difference especially very small things that that were either you didn't see coming
or you couldn't see coming do you actually describe a story of like a skiing incident where this
becomes pretty pretty apparent yeah so I grew up as a ski racer in Lake Tahoe and I was on the
the Skavai ski team a bunch of my friends so we were teenagers at during this period and sometimes
we would ski out of bounds which you're not supposed to do you duck under the ropes that say do not
cross but that's where the amazing skiing is and when you get down to the bottom there's no
chairlift when you're skiing out of bounds so what we would do is we would ski out of bounds and
then it would spit us out on a backcountry road and we'd hitchhike back to the mountain we've
been doing this for years since we were on a 14 or something and one day is 2001 we were 17 years old
at the time myself and my two best friends Brendan Allen and Brian Richmond we were skiing out of
bounds and as we're going down we triggered a very small avalanche it wasn't that big it like came
up to our knees and we just kind of like rode it down and kind of high-fived about it at the end
like oh that avalanche that was cool and then we start hitchhiking back and we get back down to
the base of the mountain and Brendan and Brian say hey let's let's go do it again let's go do that
run again and for whatever reason I said I didn't want to do it it was probably the hitchhiking that
freaked me out the most I always thought like we were about to be abducted here so I said hey
rather than then hitchhiking you guys go ski that run again and I'll drive my truck around to
the base of the mountain and pick you up and we said great and we went our separate ways they
went skiing I went to go get my truck so I could go pick them up a few minutes later I'd go in my
truck to meet them at like this designated pickup spot and they were not there and I waited
about 20 minutes and they didn't show up I didn't think that much of it I think I figured they
had priority hitchhiked back they got you know maybe I was late and they they already left I really
didn't think any it was a problem but the day went on and nobody else had really seen them either
and no one else had seen the back of the locker room or on the ski team everyone's oh I haven't
seen Brendan Brian at hours and later that day Brian's mom called me at home and she said hey
Brian didn't show up for work today just very unlike him do you know where he is and I told her
the truth I said like we are we are skiing out of bounds I was going to pick them up but they never
arrived and no one seen them since and we started kind of putting all this together that this did
not look good after many hours we called the police for a missing person report that eventually
turned into we got search and rescue involved search and rescue when they went to the out of bounds
area where I told them we had been skiing as soon as they entered this area they's found the fresh
scars of what was clearly a massive avalanche that had just occurred within the previous few hours
so they kind of knew at that point what had likely happened here and after I guess about 12 hours
of searching or so the search dogs that they had kind of homeed in on a spot in this avalanche
debris field and they found Brendan Brian dead buried under six feet of snow during this massive
avalanche and of course you know whenever I tell the story I always have to say like look I know
you I'm sure and everyone else has lost somebody dear to you it's not unique in that sense
but as years went on it dawned on me it was not immediately obvious but like among the many takeaways
that I had of like dealing with losing these two friends was what if I had gone with them what if I
had not said hey I'll go pick you up what if I had said hey let's all three of us go do that again
what 100% chance I would have died I mean a massive avalanche is not something you can really survive
it's like a giant tsunami barreling down on you so then I start thinking about the most important
decision that I ever made in my entire life was this dumb brainless decision to not take a second
rune with them and that was a decision I put no thought into whatsoever I didn't weigh the pros
and cons I didn't seek outside advice it was just a dumb brainless decision that was more important
than every other decision I've made in my life by an order of magnitude and I think that idea of
like a decision that you make that you put no thought into an event that you think is completely
trivial can completely not only change the course of your life every one of us has dealt with
that whether you know it or not but I think it also happens at the macro level one of the most
astounding stories that I've ever read in history was during the Revolutionary War George Washington
and his troops during the Battle of Long Island were cornered by the British and all the British
really had to do was sail at the East River in New York and George Washington would have been
cornered and it would have been all been over they the British would have won the Revolutionary War
but that didn't happen because the winds were blowing in the wrong direction that night
so the British could not sail at the East River and it gave Washington just enough time to regroup
and get away and the rest was history and David McCullough who was like one of the world's foremost
authorities on US history he passed away not too long ago he was asked by Charlie Rose about
this instance and Charlie Rose said if the wind was blowing in the right direction that night
and the British could sail up the East River would there be a United States of America today
and without hesitation David McCullough says no never would have happened so the entire existence
of the United States of America relies on the directions that the wind was blowing during some
random night in August 1770 whatever it was at the time when you think about how fragile the world
is at the individual level at the macro level that really highlights of just like who are you to
pretend that you think you know it's going to happen over the next five years in your life or in
the country nobody does nobody does it's a very humbling admission but I think if you study
enough history you see that over and over again yeah it's incredibly humbling but it's also on
the one hand it's incredibly freeing on the other hand it's a little bit terrifying like there's
a lot of existential lengths that gets sort of baked into this acceptance of the fact that there
are so many things that are either unforeseeable or they are foreseeable like for example the avalanche
but the decision that you make around them in your mind was pretty inconsequential yes it really
like there wasn't any there weren't any any states so I'm just I'm going to go grab my truck you know
if we just sort of surrender to that you know the world seems so much more fragile you know this is
missing to labs you know like black swan events it's you know it's it's the stuff that we don't see
and can't see yeah but it's also the stuff that we potentially what you're describing is we can see
but for whatever reason we don't see it as consequential we don't feel like the decision that we made
or about it isn't anyway meaningful until after the fact and we realize how extraordinarily
important it was in our lives and to talk about like what you can do about it or what you can't do
about it I mean for sure there is somebody today who left for work at 752 but if they had left
at 753 they would have died in a car accident and the reverse is true there's someone who left
at 753 who did die in a car accident this morning and if they had left at 752 they would be at
home with their wife and children right now that exists all the time and I think that is just the
fragility observation of life as well but for the person who left one minute earlier you know that
would have survived if they left him in earlier what advice even with hindsight do you tell that
person you can't preemptively look at the clock and say oh I need to wait an extra hour to miss
this intersection they're like you can there's not much you can do about that's just the inherent
fragility of life and I think when you accept that there's no amount of preparation or planning
that can actually protect you that can actually protect you from something like that even if you're
wearing your seatbelt and you have an airbag in one night it's just like the dumb luck of what you
didn't see coming that chapter in particular was not here's what you can do about it here's the
advice that I can give you other than let's not pretend like there's a reason I conclude as a
first chapter because I think in many ways it highlights the premise of the book which is do not
pretend like you know what's going to change in the future you do not the world is very very fragile
and hangs by a thread and therefore rather than pretending like we know that what changes are in
our future let's focus on things that we know how are so indelible across history that we can
confidently put weight into their existence in our future yeah until relatively recently it's
meant my entire life in New York City so I was there during 9-11 and exactly like you said you
know I knew people that went to work that day and didn't come home I also knew people that were
headed to work and had for some reason it wasn't a premonition or anything like that like the the
sub we got delayed like the a meeting got canceled or like you know got put off two hours and they
didn't have to be in quite so early and but for that fact who knows what would have happened and
they live with a level of angst that to this day often indoors just by sort of you know like the
the quote close call but also for a lot of people Mike's parents has been when you go through that
it can either be psychologically devastating or it can basically rewire the way that you look
at every moment of every day of the rest of your life and say like I am promised nothing
let me be here let me just find as much joy as I can let me be with the people that I want to be
with sometimes it's both and sometimes it goes back and forth between them but it doesn't not affect
you in some profound ways what I've seen yeah someone recently asked me if I had survivors guilt
from my skiing story and I said I don't think survivors guilt is the right word but I think
survivors humility is probably closer to it I don't think I've ever felt guilty about it maybe I
should I you know there's probably a lot to unpack there but I definitely had this it left me with
the feeling of like anything had happened at any moment to anyone I mean that we woke up that day
just thinking it was an ordinary day we had been skiing that run since we were kids we had been
skiing in general six days a week for our entire childhood growing up so there was nothing out of
the ordinary about that day nothing seemed like what we were doing was any different from what we
had done the day before and the day before they really was just kind of a strike out of the blue moment
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you kind of bounce around between a whole bunch of different topics in the recent book and
that was really interesting one of them that you jump into is this notion of divide between
expectations and reality and in particular the impact on happiness on like how our our affect
on how you know not just successful but like how we view our lives how we move through lives how
fulfilled and happy we are and you also have a really interesting conversation around
not just the the happiness or the expectation reality gap but also how relative time periods
influence this and its effect on happiness yeah I've always been interested in just this
general idea that if expectations rise and lock step with circumstances then the economy can get
much stronger much richer much more productive much more prosperous and people don't feel any
different for it because and there's there's no such thing as an objective level of wealth everything
is just relative to other people into those people around you so people rarely stop and think about
like oh wow wages adjusted for inflation have doubled in the last you know 30 40 years no very
few people do that calculation what they do is they look at their neighbors and their co-workers
and they're like oh what do they have well how big is their house how big is their car and then
they measure that relative to whatever they have today but because of that you do go through these
periods where if you look historically like the average American has gotten so much wealthier
adjusted for inflation since the 1950s way wealthier earning way more money higher net worth bigger
house better health longer life expectancy go on down the list and not only are we by and large
you know happier for it but there is this nostalgia for the 1950s where across generations people
tend to look at that period as the peak golden airs years of middle-class prosperity and if you
look at the numbers it's just not the case it's really just not the case and I think if there's
any explanation for that nostalgia of like well if we are richer today why do we view that as being
such a great period and I think at least one of the explanations here there could be many different
explanations is that the 50s were an era where for better or worse there was very little wealth
inequality a lot of that was just like an echo from World War II about how companies were managed
and you know the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent in the 1950s so it was an era where you did not
have by and large extremely wealthy people inflating the aspirations of everybody else and so because
of that the lower wages in the 1950s felt great because people looked around and everyone else
was learning lower wages the tiny homes that they lived in felt adequate because everybody else
was living in a tiny home the cheap vacations going camping up in the mountains that felt like a
great vacation because that's what everybody else was doing at the time and I think like to grossly
generalize what has happened over the last 80 years is on average we have gotten richer our
incomes adjusted for inflation have doubled our homes have increased the size of our homes have
increased but there's a small level society that's gotten way richer and is living in way bigger
homes and living way better lives that has inflated the aspirations of everybody else and so even if
you look at a period where you're like you're talking to average Joe American and you're like hey
average Joe you're earning twice as much as you used to why aren't you happy by a large is because
he's now looking at somebody on Instagram who's earning 10 times as much as he did and is earning
at living in a 10 times bigger house and so it's just the idea that if your expectations rise as
fast as your income or faster than your income you're never going to be satisfied with what you have
and there's a very long history of that like me that's always been the case but it's more
potent today than I think it's ever been because of social media and now when you are comparing yourself
to other people in society it's not your neighbors and your coworkers it's a curated highlight reel
of a bunch of strangers picked by an algorithm that knows exactly how to get your attention
and knows exactly how to drop a little bit of dopamine right in your face that's always been
the case but it's more powerful today than I think it's ever been yeah I mean that's so interesting
and if I hear what you're saying correctly you know the impulse this is one of those things that
say the same you know we've always had a comparison side of ours like we we're always happy relative
to those we compare ourselves to there's no really objective sense but the really big shift here
so that stayed the same for generations the big shift you're describing is that the actual
circumstance of wealth disparity whereas like whereas kind of like everyone that was around you
immediately is probably in a similar circumstance you didn't have a whole lot of access to reach beyond
that immediate sphere of influence to be able to compare yourself to now there is extreme
differences in wealth and pretty much every single person through their devices and through social
media has all day every day pushed to them access to be able to compare themselves to so many others
who will be persistently profoundly wealthier profoundly farther down the road whatever is the
perception in your mind you've no you have no idea what the real lives are but and that's part
of like the weirdness here too is that we're now comparing ourselves to people that we have no
connection or relationship to and also we're taking the representations of their relative wealth
as a to be true and b we assume that they must be happier than us also when both could be
complete fiction and we've seen so often especially in social media that they are smoking mirrors
and yet the compulsion is still there we just keep doing it 100% agree like everybody knows
the person on social media that paints their life let's say they're a close friend of yours
and they paint their life as being perfect here's my beautiful family on our beautiful vacation
with our loving relationships and if you know that person closely you're like that's not who you are
I know you guys are hurting you guys are on the verge of divorce but now on Facebook it looks like
everything is great everything's amazing people tend to they don't communicate on social media as
much as they perform for you and so nobody including me by the way is really giving the full picture
of what's going on in their life on my Instagram I post cute pictures of my kids I don't post pictures
of my kids having tantrums which of course they have all the time and so social media is designed
almost like it's intentionally designed so that when you look at it everybody else looks happier
prettier smarter more successful than you are and it's very effective at making people believe
that no matter how well you're doing and how much money you're making and how happy your
relationships are it's not good enough there's other people who are doing way better than you
that's what it leads you to believe so even though that has always been the case it's just it's been
absolutely supercharged in the last 10 years and because of that I think you can easily imagine
a world in which my grandkids your grandkids are earning twice as much money as us and living
longer than us and maybe in a peaceful world like imagine some utopia in the future for our grandkids
and they're no happier for it they're no happier for it because they just expect all of it
and they are surrounded by people who no matter what utopia they're living in somebody else in
social media is living in what looks like an even better utopia so that by and large has existed
for hundreds of years it's just crazy powerful right now so I mean we're always begging the question
then you know if this is kind of hardwired into us and it has been forever and it probably will be
in the future and technology isn't going away you know the algorithm still largely run all of this
stuff that we interact with on a day-to-day basis and they'll keep feeding us what they're feeding us
how do we not let this just just joy us I think at the macro level there's very little we can do
about it people are comparative creatures by nature and there's a very good element to that like
you want to live in a world in which most people wake up in the morning feeling like whenever I've
achieved it's not quite enough I need to innovate more I need to work harder I need to make the
world a better place I need to you create a better world for my family you want that drive and a
lot of that drive comes from a feeling of inadequacy relative to other people so there's a very
healthy element to this comparison game that we don't want to eliminate it gets dangerous at the
individual level when your own goalposts of success are moving faster than your circumstances
so I was just add I just did a podcast earlier today with my wife my my wife and I were being
interviewed by somebody else talking about money in our old household and my wife said oh like over
the years our goalpost has shifted like our goalposts of success used to be back here and now it's
way up there we have moved it but we haven't moved it as much as our income has gotten up and that's
the only thing that's important so it's fine to you had to have aspirations but you also need the
understanding that if your aspirations are growing faster than your circumstances just a recipe for
disaster so I want more money I want more success of course everybody does but I also know that I
need to manage my expectations with as much emphasis as I do managing my circumstances and if I
don't it's all for not like if I'm fortunate enough to achieve any kind of financial success but
I expected all of it you get no joy from it whatsoever so I think that balancing app between like
yes the aspirational goalposts can move just making sure they are moving slower than your circumstances
and your income so to speak that's a critical part but I think at the high level it's never going
to go away there's no societal solution for comparing yourself to other people and assuming that
they are happier than you are and by the way in terms of that being the case forever Montesquieu
said this 300 years ago he said if you only want to be happy that is very easy to achieve but people
want to be happier than other people and that is difficult because we assume other people are
happier than they are he said that 300 years ago and it is as true today as it was back then
yeah well it wasn't there like a similar Aristotle quote it was only like it's it's easy to be happy
like do nothing be nothing say nothing I love it it speaks to the expectation side of it it is
interesting to think about the fact that a certain amount of just sort of underlying disc intent
has fueled so much good in society like if we were happy with the state of medicine 300 years ago
it would be the same you know for the happy the state of communication of connectivity of like
all these sort of transportation would still be largely the same and maybe you're going to argue
that there are certain things about like day-to-day life that were better 300 years ago and you
may be writing certain elements but on the whole when you look at the metrics of a society and the
markers that we tend to look at for you know like a good society a society treats this people well
and that lives longer and does all these things and you know we do want that level of change and
you will never have that without a certain level of underlying disc intent with the present and
I think some people get tripped up because they're like well that's always a bad thing and my take
has always been you know disc intent can coexist with gratefulness at the same time like I'm grateful
for where we are and for what we have and at the same time I still yearn for change in certain
elements of my life and in my world and those things can coexist you know you don't have to just say
like I don't like I'm not grateful you know like I'm ungrateful and I just want more like you can
actually have both of these things you can be grateful and honor and humble and at the same time
want change and I think sometimes we don't think that those things can coexist and I'm curious
what you're taking is on that no I completely agree I mean I framed it very in very similar terms
of you need to get optimism and pessimism to coexist yeah but I think it's used as framed it
of terms of gratefulness and disc intent to coexist that's really important I think the cognitive
dissonance of that you should be able to handle that the that you should not be one or the other you
can have both of those at the same time the other thing that comes to mind here in terms of having
people wake up disc intent and being that be the fuel of progress I love reading biographies of
very successful individuals and very rarely with almost no exceptions do I finish the biography of
this successful entrepreneur general sports person whoever might be and think I wish I had their
lives almost never because their life seemed torturous and terrible that's why they're successful
is because they woke up every morning absolutely tortured out of their minds because they needed to
achieve more success so at the end of the biography I usually think I'm so glad that person exists
in the world because I get to benefit from everything that they created at the same time I would never
end a million years want their lives that's a really important realization that's sometimes like the
biggest innovations that we get from society are from people or from eras where things are terrible
and I think if you go down the list Steve Jobs Elon Musk Jeff Bezos Michael Jordan Kobe Bryant I
think they're tortured people they are or wore tortured people who woke up every single morning
with their mind like buzzing to a degree of like I haven't achieved enough whatever I've achieved
it's not merely enough I'm not moving fast enough I'm not I don't have enough money the company's
not big enough we need to go go go and again I love that they exist in the world but let's not
pretend ourselves that like that's something that I would necessarily want for myself and I think
a most people wouldn't want it for themselves Elon Musk said this just a couple weeks ago he said
in paraphrasing him but he said you might think you want to be me the richest man in the world
but I'm telling you you do not and he points to his head and he's like it's a tornado up here you
do not want to be inside of this head right now and I think that is it was a very honest admission
and I think that's true for a lot of very successful people that they are tortured by their feeling
of inadequacy of what they've achieved yeah I don't know if you ever saw the movie with lash the
a miles teller and jk statements and he's sort of like a young upcoming jazz drummer who wants to
be one of the greats and it's literally all about how hard will we push ourselves to that point
where we don't just change our own future but we literally make a mark in history and we change
the nature of the entire genre or field that we're in in a way where like people remember us for
generations and the question is like if we look at the musicians that have changed the face of music
are we really glad that they existed probably like you were saying do we like reading books and
biographies and memoirs about their life's sharp because it's wildly entertaining and often off
the rails but like would we want to be the protagonist and that story ourselves as much as we might
want what we think they have and I think that's where the disconnect is we're like oh if only I
could have like achieved that though of no right here fame or money or wealth or impact or whatever
it is so many of us want that but then if you basically have to opt into the truth of the the
story that you have to live every day to get there or be there get that almost none of us want that
like that is our nightmare scenario totally and yet we kind of gloss over that point we just like
we don't want to tell that part of the story we just want to tell the end state yeah I mean I'm
over here in one time that Bill Gates worked seven days a week for 25 years did not take one day off
not for holidays not six days 25 years he worked seven days a week and here again my feeling is like
bless him I'm so glad of what he gave the world both in technology and now through his philanthropy
and be I would never in a million years want that for myself I'd like my days off with my kids
arguably the most important thing in my life I admire people like Bill Gates those people like him
more even more and I think it pushes you away from maybe some sense of jealousy when you think like
you just mentioned you look at what they have a hundred billion dollars and mansions and jets
whatever it might be and you move from jealousy to when you look at what it took to get that I'm like
man thank you for giving that to the world and also thank you for like giving myself something to
compare to of like of course I would love your wealth but I frankly would not like the work life
balance that you chose during your career I prefer mine and therefore I'm more grateful for
mine that I have right now yeah and it's it's a thing I mean you're sort of referencing a lot of
people who are the quote icons business but if you look across nearly any domain and you look at
who are the legends and icons the people had that changed the game in this space whether it's art
music writing literature movie making and then you look at their lives invariably see something
very very similar like the person who is able to achieve an impact on that level without this
just wildly disruptive personal story or narrative I have been searching for people like that for
decades and probably found less than I can count on one hand across every field and domain like
that I've been doing this I'm good like project for over a dozen years now and it really is it's
sobering and so this also brings up another thing you step into this conversation from a different
angle in the book as well when you say it and at the same time it's supposed to be hard maybe not
hard in the way that we're talking about where you literally sacrifice your entire life you hand it
over to the gods of impact and innovation achievement but the other side of it is like what you know
like it's also supposed to be hard that enduring challenge and hardship is actually an essential
element of pursuing goals if you're saying yes to that you're saying yes to a certain amount of
this not necessarily at the extreme but even on day-to-day basis you're most fundamental this is
what I want to accomplish in my life yeah because it's in my field my domain I think about investing
a lot and in investing in stock market over a very long period of time you can make a lot of money
and do well but there's a cost to that and I don't mean like the cost like the management fee
on your mutual fund I mean the cost you have to be willing to pay is putting up with a never-ending
parade of uncertainty and volatility and ups and downs and maybe years on end where you don't make
any money or lose money that's a cost of admission that you have to be willing to pay and a lot of
people ignore that because it's not on a price tag anywhere it's not on a label it's like this
weird emotional ephemeral like cost of success you need to be willing to put in but it's supposed
to be hard like people use in investing again a lot of people know the statistic of 90% of active
managers who are trying to outperform the S&P 500 can't do it they'll fail 90% of professional
investors cannot outperform the index and a lot of people use that statistic to show that like
the industry's a scam or whatnot my response has always been of course of course it's like that
what world do you want to live in in which everyone who tries to be the market can do it like
that that that world should not exist of course it's supposed to be hard that's why it's so
rewarding is because it is so hard to do and like people will understand that to make that you
know what percentage of college basketball players make the NBA I don't know but let's say it's
1% nobody would say college basketball is a scam because 99% of people don't get in the NBA people
know like it's supposed to be hard to get in the NBA that's why it's awesome but I think for some
areas in life that kind of goes out the window and because the cost of success is not on a price tag
it's very easy to overlook what's actually going to be required of you how much life you're going
to have to exchange how much stress you're going to have to exchange in order to get this thing
that you are looking at I read this great interview with Taylor Swift recently and she was talking
about when she was like a 15 year old aspiring singer like when she first started going on the stage
and she said she would look at her future 10 years in the future and she would imagine not just where
she would be but what it would take to get there and that might sound right but I think that's
actually very rare I think most people when they're dreaming about their future just dream about
where they're going to be they just dream about the reward the big house the big salary the fancy car
and they don't actually have a sense of what it's going to take to get there and so I thought that
was actually a very wise statement coming from earth yeah that makes a lot of sense to me
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plan and she was basically researching what's the most effective way to achieve something big and
important that you want you sit like you know have the wish like define it as much as you can
you know like and then and this is where it's sort of like differs from different approaches
he's like proactively identified the potential obstacles the barriers the roadblocks both
internal to you and external that you think might realistically be a part of this journey and then
plan it's not just planning how you're going to succeed it's pre-planning how you'll respond to
these things if and when they drop into your path and she found that you know like when she split
people up and ran the study on this that the people who actually did this process were much more
likely to achieve the thing they wanted to achieve than the people kind of ignored all of those
stumbles and the the internal demons and the external things and just kind of said this is what I
want here's my plan to get it and I'm just going to push through until I get it like really grappling
with how quote hard this potentially is going to be before you even say yes to it it both gives you
the plan to respond if and when it happens but part of the theory in my people succeed also I'm
curious what your take is on this is she kind of felt like these people also had a much more sobering
take on what it might actually take out of them to go for this thing and it probably stopped a lot
of them from doing it in the first place when they realized they weren't down for that so then the
people who looked at that and then said yes were much more likely because they had a shift in mindset
not just plan yeah I think it's it's true in the in the startup space in business where the
successful entrepreneurs tend to have two character traits one is just a ridiculous amount of
endurance to just the ability to accept pain and number two a complete ignorance of the stumbling
blocks that are like irrational optimism in their own ability and so it's two things together
because if you were rational about how hard it's going to be to make this startup work and how
greatly the odds are stuck against you a rational person wouldn't do it you need an irrational CEO
to be like all right our odds of success are 1% let's go do it and to have the endurance to just
like put up with all the missiles that are fired at you along the way there's a thing in psychology
called depressive realism which is the idea has been studied that depressed people make more accurate
predictions about the future because they're more realistic about everything that can go wrong
so an optimist is like oh the future like we're going to be great like our teams great we'll solve
any problem and the depressed person is like no the here's a list of 20 things that are going to go
wrong that are going to prevent you from doing it and the depressed person is more likely to be
accurate in those assessments but that depressed person because they're depressed even if they are
accurate about the future is probably never going to get going they're going to be stuck in bed so
to speak whereas the irrational optimist who is not accurate about what's going to lie in the
future is the one who's actually got a fighting chance of making their just because they're getting
out of bed so I don't know what the balance between those two would be other than like that's what
it is for startups it's like a crazy amount of endurance to absorb the bullets fired at you
and an irrational optimism about your ability to get it done that makes sense to me as you're
describing that literally just pulling up in the last two days I just saw a new research that came
out on the podcast industry like the space that we're in right now and they showed that a quote the
likelihood of achieving a quote successful podcast was 5% and that the typical podcast that starts
publishes one episode and never publishes another one and they defined successful as I believe it was
reaching a hundred published episodes that's interesting because you hear so much talk about
podcasting it's amazing and it's great and everybody should have a podcast and the barrier
to entry is so low you literally just turn on your computer and like start talking and anyone can
do and yes yes yes it's all true and if it was easy to actually sort of like endure in the space
you wouldn't see that 5% metric and in fact in the data they actually said that your four times
more likely to succeed in your own company starting your own company then you are in getting to
a success point in a podcast so it's really sobering when you see the data and I can imagine how
many people if they read that report when they were thinking about starting a podcast which is
be like nope and how many people that now currently are quote successful in the space had they seen
that data in the beginning would have said not doing it not gonna do it what's interesting about
podcasts you mentioned this though like the barriers to entry are so low that it actually makes
sense for people to be like I'm gonna try this and if it doesn't work like fine it didn't work I
don't I didn't have to invest tens of thousands of dollars to make to try and this so it's worth
trying a similar story for Mr. Beast the biggest YouTuber yeah he told the story where he was like
a lot of young youtubers will come to him and ask for advice and he says go make a hundred videos
and then I'll give you advice and he said two things happen one most people do not make a hundred
videos just like the podcasters will make three videos and then quit or if they do actually make a
hundred videos they don't need his advice anymore they've already figured out what works for them
that calling mechanism I think is really important the other person who I know does this is
Seth Godin the author as a famous author a lot of podcasts reach out to him and say hey I'd love
for you to be our guest and Seth if it's a new podcast he says I will be your 30th guest like this
is a new podcast I'm not going to be your second guest I'll be your 30th guest and he kind of
knows that most people will not make it to 30 podcasts but if they do then it's a good podcast like
you're like you probably figured out what works and what doesn't so I think that's great a lot of
people too even if they do know that there's only a 5% chance it's going to work you know the this
is where like the irrational optimists will be like well yeah but I'm part of the 5% that's me I'm
going to do it so I think even if you know the statistics the irrational optimism of moving forward
is just such an integral part of how people think yeah and that kind of ties into one of the other
things I want to touch based on that that you write about it which is sort of like the um the
enduring nature of storytelling is one of these things that's kind of like it has always been
at the center of the human condition it has always been something that has been almost like the
bedrock of how we make meaning in life is just the power of storytelling in not just influencing
all the people but I think influencing ourselves and really understanding how to make meaning out
of the day-to-day experience of our lives and as as the world changes so much of it is about what
is the story we're telling about the way the world is changing that allows us to make meaning in this
moment yeah people do not have enough cognitive capacity to actually like parse the data of everything
going on in their life they more or less need a bumper sticker a slogan to be like this is how
the world works rather than like parsing the fine details is going to be like who's telling a story
that sounds good I'm going to line up behind that person so there's so many instances in history
in so many different fields where it's not the best answer that wins it's not the right answer
it's not the accurate answer it's the best story is the person who gets other people to line up
behind them and say that's the one you see of course a lot in politics where the politician who
comes up with the best policy the most effective policy almost never wins who wins is the guy who pounds
the table the artist and tells people what they want to hear on either side whether it's Obama or
Donald Trump like they're incredible storytellers at getting their message across I think for a
lot of analytical minds this drives you crazy if you think the world should be governed by and driven
by the right answer or the best answer you're constantly baffled at why people are following and
paying attention to the wrong answer but when it's a compelling story one other example that I
use in the book is Ken Burns the great documentary filmmaker most of his documentaries do not
uncover new information he's telling stories about things that everybody knows about the civil
war it's like the most documented period in American history everybody knows how it ends everybody
knows what happens everybody knows the characters he's not giving you any new information what he
does better than anybody else who's ever existed in this space is he tells a good story about the
topics that he covers civil war Vietnam World War II whatever would be a better story than any other
historian that exists and so even if the academic historians are uncovering brand new information
and Ken Burns most of the time is not he's going to be so much more successful and well known and
well read paid attention to than them because he's telling such a good story Ken Burns told the
story in an interview where he said what he's making a documentary he will literally change the
script the narrator script so that a specific word that the narrator says matches up with a specific
beat in the background music so like when the narrator says a powerful word it matches with a
powerful beat in the background music and I remember hearing that and thinking myself what other
academic historians do that and the answer is none of them he's the only one who does that who
puts so much effort into telling a good story and that's why he's so much more successful than they
are so even in the most boring like analytical fields it's always the storyteller who's going to get
people's attention yeah and I think we see that so many times and again sort of like my reference point
for podcasting for that is one of the longest running podcasts in the space hardcore history
Dan Carlin publishes two to five years right yeah if that I think it's more like once a year it
probably is down to that at this point it's often like anywhere from like three to seven hours in an
episode and yet it is consistently one of the top podcasts in the space because he takes that
entire time to just pour himself into being and and he's doing exactly what you just said he's
telling history that like he's he didn't make the history like it's in the books all over the place
if you really want to go into it but he tells it in a way that is just so engaging and it draws you
in and the power of storytelling I think is so undervalued and yet it is so central to almost
everything we do as human beings and our ability to not just rally people to our cause or to like
gather people and build community and and innovate and and create progress but also like I said
just to make meaning out of our own day-to-day experiences like in part about the circumstances
but also in part about like it's a story we're telling ourselves about this particular moment
or circumstance and that's how we get through so many of our days when it seems like the world
is spinning out of control like what's the story we can tell that makes meaning out of it
and it sounds trivial but like with Dan Carlin hardcore history part of why he's so successful
and such a good storyteller is literally like how he changes the cadence of his voice and sometimes
he's using like a deep slow tone and sometimes he's like yelling at the microphone and you compare
that to your average like Ferris Bueller Ben Stiller who who as it was a teacher and Ferris Bueller
like the most boring dry monotone he's just such a Dan Carlin as such a good storyteller that he
can literally just be reading the historians book which he very often is he's just like citing
material in there but he's so good at communicating it that he can publish a nine hour documentary
or a podcast on World War One and you're going to listen to every word of it you can't stop it's
so good and that's actually really optimistic to think that in order to make a mark in the world
you don't need to unnecessarily uncover something new you don't need to invent a new product or like
uncover a new fact there's so much ground to move in just taking what's already out there and
telling a better story around it just telling it in a more compelling way and there are so much
like potential in doing that and the barriers to entry are so much lower than inventing something
newer discovering something new just taking what is already known and telling it in a more easy
to understand captivating way yeah no that makes so much sense to me one of the topic I wanted to
touch into also and it kind of riffs off the back of this in a way you know we're talking about
storytelling often like telling the stories of other people other moments other experiences of
history but in a way that's relatable to other people but this is one of the topics that you dive
into also is under the category of now you get it is the importance of first hand experiences
on understanding and responding to situations in a way that is constructive in your life like
yes it's great to read about it like watch the documentary like read the book like gather all the
information but one of these things that endures is the absolute critical importance of us actually
being the protagonist us being in the story ourselves and playing a role I'm curious what drew you
to want to actually center this as a topic and take me a little bit more into that topic and why
you feel it's so important one is I'm a amateur fan student of military history conflicts battles
and I myself have never served in the Armed Forces so no matter how many World War Two books I
study no matter how many D-Day documentaries I watch never in a million years should I pretend to
know what it's like to be shot at in anger and you see that come up quite a bit there's quite a
bit of talking about in various points of history where in basic training you will have generals
commanders who say like everyone in basic training is full of bravado and they're like I'm going
to go get the end like give me a gun I'm going to go get the bad guys like here I come and then they
get put on the front lines and they are utterly scared shitless and that is so common all throughout
war there is some studies that have shown they're very controversial so let's take all this with
the grain of salt that shows that during World War Two even the front line soldiers the percentage
of them who actually fired a bullet was actually very small and these are the people on the front
lines the theory being that even on the front lines most of the people got up there being shot at
and were completely scared out of their minds so scared that they didn't even have it in there to
pull the trigger that's not a criticism in the slightest because in the slightest because I might
very well be that person as well but I think the understanding that like when you're in basic training
you're like I'm going to get out there and fight for my country I'm not scared of the Germans I'm
going to go do it and you get in the front lines and it's like oh I had no clue what this was
actually going to be like I think that's a good model for a lot of things in life for your career
like a lot of 18 year olds are like I want to be a lawyer I'm going to love being a lawyer
sounds like you were or are so one and I think a lot of them after the first year of being an
associate they're like this is not what I signed up for I didn't realize it was going to be this hard
I didn't realize the hours were going to be this long and I was going to be this tired
happens in a lot of fields I know a lot of doctors and dentists are like this as well like it's very
hard to proactively see what that amount of stress and the number of hours and the pressure that
you have is going to do to your psyche it's almost impossible to know what it's going to be like
until you have experienced it firsthand it's easy to look at what other people are doing in life
and criticize what they're doing or to criticize the behavior that they're having without realizing
that if you are in their shoes experiencing all of the context that they are you might be doing
the exact same thing yourself yeah that makes so much sense to me and it really argues for
not just trying to think your way to experiences and to what you want to do who you want to become
what you want to try like do the research do the thing and then at some point the only way you're
really going to know is to run the experiment you know to put yourself in the field of play and
whatever that may mean whether it's you know you're an artist who like decides I'm going to paint
100 paintings and just see where it goes or a friend of mine who's now become a really well in
an illustrator at least a condened the one her family who she always considered to be like not
artistic she was a teacher and she's like I don't know maybe there's something inside of me so she
literally started she made a commitment she said I'm going to do something and post it on Instagram
this isn't very early days of Instagram every day for a year because she's like the only way I'm
going to know is let me just do this and I'm going to make a bold commit and say every single day
I'm going to do something and put it up there and put it out there and over the course of that
year she started to realize wait not only do I enjoy this but if you like I'm improving at it and
she learned the hard and she tested all of her assumptions you know and some of them blew up some
of them were like tested and reinforced some of them were not but if she you know she had kept
just saying what if I and tried to imagine and talk to everybody who's out there in the field
of illustration everybody who's doing it she would get a nice data set but it wouldn't be her data
set you know and there's a really big difference but we love to think that there isn't
yeah I think you also once you do those experiments you can have a newfound appreciation for people
who you might not have respected that much before whether it is the soldier who did have the guts
to actually fight on the front lines when everyone else was scared then now will now like if you
experience that fear yourself now you might have so much more respect and admiration for them
or the artist who is going out and being vulnerable by posting every day online until you experience
the critics who are like putting down your work whether you are a writer and artist until you've
experienced that you might not know like how much fortitude it takes to make yourself vulnerable
and put your art online I think that once you have experienced some of these things yourself it
gives you a much more respect and admiration for the people that are going through it in real time
why Brene Brown often says you know she has no tolerance for feedback or input from people who are
not also in the arena themselves you know like getting battered and like doing the thing
a man in the arena quote story has been badly abused over the years but there's a lot of truth to it
that it's like yeah like not until you've been actually any year getting punched in the face should
you be criticized people who are who are down there being punched yeah which when you think about
the the state of social media it controverses that whole idea left and right and brings us almost
back to our earlier part of the conversation about the perils of like comparative happiness and
all that stuff yes there's a great quote here to to finish this part from Jeff ML the former CEO
of general electric he said every job looks easy when you're not the one doing it like very easy
to criticize but until you understand actually all the elements of the stress and the uncertainty
and the various stakeholders that you have every job looks easy when you're not the one doing it
so zoom in the lens out we've been talking about sort of like all these fundamental parts of
human nature that tend to stay the same in a enduring way and how circumstance the society
interacts with it and how we can think about it in the context living our lives whenever you write a
book you know you're saying yes to effectively spending a chunk of years both doing the research
and then doing the writing and then putting it out there in the world and spreading the word
when you write something like this do you have an intention behind it I've always thought that
and I've talked about that I write for an audience of one which is me I want to consider myself
a selfish writer a because I think you do your best work when rather than trying to pander for some
unknown audience you're just like I'm just doing this for my own sense I think most painters most
artists are selfish painters they're not painting for an audience they're just like well this is
what I want it to look like and so I try to do that for myself but because of that I feel like a
lot of what I write about almost all of what I write about is I'm just trying to figure out problems
in my own life in my own world rather than being like oh let me let me try to find good advice for
other people most of it because I write it through the lens of like I'm just writing this for me
and I want to write it in a story that I think is interesting in a language that I find personally
persuasive I don't really don't think about anyone else when I'm doing it but because of that it's
almost like a therapy session for me when I'm going through these it's not that like oh I have all
this knowledge about storytelling let me share it with you it's like I was trying to figure out the
power of storytelling in my own life in my own career and studying it for my own selfish reasons
and now let me just kind of share with you what I found so that's I think that's that's a lot
of the purpose for me is I feel like it's a great job of just self reflection and self study and
then if you can take those lessons that I've learned about for my own life if I can try to share
them with you in a story that some people will like some people won't that's always been kind of
the thrust behind writing for me. Love that feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well
so in this container of good life project if I offer up the phrase to live a good life what comes
out. There's a great quote from Chris Morley where he says there is only one success in life and
that is to be able to spend your life in your own way and that too like might sound kind of like
try and trivial that's like fortune cookie advice but that's it it's the observation that like
the good life for me might be a disastrous life for you and vice versa that were all so different
and so individual and it's only a good life if you are doing it your way and you made the decisions
yourself about what you want to do. I think in finance in personal finance most debates about
what kind of lifestyle you should live are people with very different personalities talking over
each other and people being like you should loosen up you should spend more money you should buy
a bigger house maybe that would work for you but maybe this works for me. I can't be ever consider
that and I think it's a sign of immaturity when you assume that because you want or don't want
something that other people should want or not want that thing and so the good life to me is just
it's the life that you chose for yourself even if other people look at that and they don't quite
understand why you're doing it. Thank you. Hey before you leave if you'd love this episode safe
but you will also love the conversation we had with Scott Galaway about finding center in a
changing world you'll find a link to Scott's episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life
Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me Jonathan Fields editing helped by
Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter, crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Del
for her research on this episode and of course if you haven't already done so please go ahead and
follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app and if you found this conversation
interesting or inspiring or valuable and chances are you did since you're still listening here
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conversations become action that's how we all come alive together until next time on Jonathan
Fields signing off for Good Life Project.
