only and the importance of having deadlines.
Julie Gurner will give you a unique strategy for taking responsibility and focus on the next steps when things go wrong.
Frank Slutman will explain what it takes to build trust in a large organization.
And finally, GeoValianti will dive deep into something I've been thinking a lot about since we recorded the conversation a few months ago.
And I know a lot of people ask, when do I quit and when do I double down?
Thank you for listening and learning with us this past year.
Together we're going to make 2024 even better.
Let's start with episode 156, Jackhorn Field.
It's time to listen and learn.
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Intention is incredibly powerful for us.
And it's said in the Buddhist teachings that intention is also the basis of karma or cause and effect that the state behind your action matters as well as the action itself.
So I'll give an example.
Suppose you pull out of your driveway and you drive through the fence of the house next door, crash through it and, you know, into their living room.
Now, suppose it happened that that was the neighbor who cut down all the trees you loved on the property line, you know, and shot at your dog and did a whole bunch of horrible things.
And you just were so enraged that.
One morning you, they did one more thing and you couldn't take it and you just crashed your car through.
That will make a certain karma and the blue lights will come and you'll have to deal with all of the consequences of what you did.
Suppose instead your accelerator pedal stuck.
So the exact same thing happens.
You get in your car and you pull out and then it crashes through the fence in the house.
So the outside, no one could see anything different, right?
But your intention was entirely different.
It was an accident, you know, and the person comes out, furiously, you say, my, yes, colorator, that'll stuck and they might still be furious and you have to deal with insurance and things, but there will be entirely different consequences because the intention was different.
So it becomes a really powerful to start to pay attention to our intentions and setting our intentions deliberately.
And also, of course, it's important then to notice the impact or the consequences because you could have good intentions and still out of them, there could be a bad impact.
So you need to notice that.
But one of the beautiful things that mindfulness training invites is the setting of deliberate intention and it can be inwardly or it can be outwardly.
Whether it's before an athletic game, as you were talking about, or whether it's a business meeting or it's, you know, in education or whatever it happens to be, what's our intention and setting intention starts to steer everything.
There's something in that's quite traditional in the kind of training that I did in which you set these long term vows.
Sometimes they're called bodhisattva vows.
A bodhisattva is simply somebody who's committed to the well-being of everyone.
The Dalai Lama wakes up in the morning and says this prayer, may I be food for the hungry and medicine for the sick?
May I be a resting place for the weary and a lamp for those in darkness?
May I be a boat, a bridge, a raft for those to cross the flood?
And may I do so to benefit all beings for as long as time and space exists?
Some little pesky little intention like that, right?
Actually kind of magnificent.
You're invited to quiet your mind and to set your own best intention.
If you were, it's like setting the compass of the heart.
If you were to set an intention of what really matters to you most, this is called long term intention, almost like a vow.
This is what matters and this is how I want to live.
It becomes a touchstone for you.
I mean, it can be as simple as I vow to be kind or I vow to live with more wakefulness and attentiveness to myself and others or with more respect.
It would be that simple.
And then when you get to a place of struggle, things are confusing.
You take a pause and you say, what's my best intention?
What was that? And it shines a light and it gives you a new direction.
Or if you're in conflict in a conversation, there you are talking with your spouse.
I'm here with my beloved Trudy, who is my wife and partner and amazing, wonderful woman, but it could happen on occasion that we have a little conflict.
And if I take a pause, a breath like that mindful pause, I can also ask myself, what's my best intention or my highest intention?
And then consciousness changes.
And instead of proving how right I was, which I certainly enjoy doing in certain moments, you know, I remember what's my best intention or my intention fundamentally is intention to connect, to be kind, that we live with love, respect.
And I feel that what's my best intention and my whole tone of voice changes.
Because I could say, what did you mean?
And it, you know, it fuels an argument.
Or I could say, what did you mean?
I want to understand in that same phrase.
But it shifts from blame to interest and care.
Is that what it means to set an intention?
This is what matters. And this is the way that I want to live.
And then how often should we consciously evoke those intentions when we're not in it in a moment?
Like, should we just wake up and think these should be?
How do you think about that?
I don't want to make people even think that there's some kind of cookie cutter spiritual, okay, you should do your yoga and eat tofu and set the tension into good intention every hour and stuff.
It's not like that. You point to it quite beautifully in moments of difficulty or conflict, taking a pause and asking what's my best or highest intention shifts your state of consciousness.
Periodically, whether it's the start of the day or a week or some new venture or some new adventure, it can be helpful to reflect on, you know, what's your best intention.
But it's really organic.
And it's in a way, what I want to say is, what works for you?
We're sort of part of this always on go, go, go culture.
We're busy. Our minds are busy.
There's always something we're thinking about that is sort of not the present moment, right?
The grocery list, the kids seem to be picked up.
There's a million projects at work.
I have to text this person back.
I need to email this person.
And we're striving, right?
We're striving for either if we're conscious, we're striving for things that we want to pursue.
And if we're unconscious, I feel like we're striving for things that other people want us to pursue.
So we're playing life by somebody else's scorecards.
But this striving individually might be detrimental to us, but it also pushes us forward as a society.
So I see sort of like pros and cons to it.
What ways does this striving sort of help us?
And in what ways does it hurt us?
So let me ask you again, now we're now we're back on the basketball court, you know, where you want to win the game or now we're in the terrain of running a business or teaching a class or something like that.
Have you had the experience of being quite engaged so that you're devoted to something and putting your best energy in it without the energy of tension, of grasping and striving as much as being engaged in the present for its own sake?
And if you have, what did that feel like?
I mean, it feels great, right?
Because it feels like this feels like this conversation, right?
One of the reasons that we book three hours is because then there's no time pressure.
There's no, you're not thinking about, oh, I only have an hour, I got to fit all this in.
And so it's just I am here in this moment for this length of time.
And it all, it never goes three hours or very rarely, but I find that that frees me to be more focused in the moment where if it's an hour, it actually is detrimental to me being in that moment and being present.
All right. So here you are in the supermarket.
You've got your list. And not only is it your list, but there's other people that you're close to that put their shit on the list.
Yeah. Right. And you, if you get the right kind of laundry, so.
And the right kind of ice cream or whatever for the kids or whatever.
I don't know who makes your list, but there you are.
You have a time constraint because you have to get back.
There's something, you know, yeah, how are you going to do it?
You could do it like. Careening through the holes by good news.
Or grabbing treats pretty quickly, trying to get through, you know, and at the same time, think about all the other stuff that you have to get done when you get home.
All of that. That's one, one way you could do it.
The other, you could actually enjoy.
I personally like shopping.
So it's a great thing in my marriage because my wife doesn't.
So I'm glad to do it. Grocery shopping or other kind.
But you could do it and have fun.
You could do it. And I bet you have at certain points and say, you know, now I'm shopping.
Let me enjoy this. And it doesn't mean you're going to be much slower.
You're not going to be the speed freak, you know, but, you know, let me, let me feel my steps and enjoy and be present and not try to work everything else out in my life.
I'll just, there's one Zen saying that says, you know, when you sit, just sit.
And when you eat, just eat, you know, to just be where you are.
And you can practice this and you start to pay attention to what it's like when you do it in a gracious way.
And it doesn't mean you can't set a goal.
And it doesn't mean you can't give it your very best and that there are certain moments you need to really throw yourself into something.
But even that, you can do it with a good spirit and with fun rather than being afraid of how it's going to turn out.
So this Zen teacher, soom samsamsa ni ma kriyaan roshi that are a Zen master that I studied with.
And so he was sitting in his Zen center in Providence one more time.
He was sitting in his center in Providence one morning eating his breakfast and reading the morning paper.
And one of the students as, as, as we are up at these students that we said, hey, wait a second, didn't you say when you sit, just sit and when you eat, just eat?
What is this thing about eating and reading the paper?
And he looked up and he said, when you eat and read, just eat and read.
And the idea of it is still an invitation to bring this quality of mindful presence to actually be where you are more fully because 90% of your thoughts are repeats, maybe more than that.
When you sit in meditation and you kind of notice what's going on your mind, and it's a little bit like being stuck in Motel six at night with the shopping channel on or whatever, or some other channel.
It could be, you know, whatever your favorite channel is, but it, it, they're, they're not new.
Um, and it's, it's the brain and the mind reciting certain things.
And you say, thank you. I appreciate it.
That's what minds do. And then you can tune into a deeper quality of being present.
There you are in the supermarket.
Say, all right, let me be here.
I'm not going to try and solve the problems of my life right now.
I'll, I'll take my time to do it.
And then of course, once in a while, as you don't pay attention to your thinking, some good new intuition comes.
I don't want to put it down.
Thought is a, is a great servant.
It's just not a good master.
You don't want to let it run your life.
You want the quality of presence and compassion to run your life and thoughts to serve that.
From episode 157, Carolyn Coughlin.
Listening is something a few people have told me that you're extraordinarily good at.
I suspect that's because you, you listen below the surface, uh, and to the meaning and not just the words.
How would you teach, uh, your kids to become better listeners?
How do you teach adults to become better listeners?
I've never had anybody ask me exactly that question before.
Shane, um, I guess the first thing I would say is, um, that listening tends to be contagious.
So how each of us listens does tend to wear off on other people.
So I noticed again with my children that when I listen, what we call, I have a call listening to win, uh, which is to just make them wrong.
Or like when I say, well, that's not true.
You, you look great or don't worry about that.
You, you know, you'll be fine.
It might feel good to me in the moment, but it's not kind of, they don't feel heard.
That mind that when people feel really, really, truly seen and heard, it's one of the most extraordinary experiences, um, that a person can have.
And so, um, just being around that and having the experience of being on the receiving end of that sort of deep listening where you feel truly seen and fully seen is itself a condition for, for learning to listen.
Well, on the other end of the spectrum, there are very particular techniques that help people listen.
Well, for me, the most important one has been, um, the most important one.
It has been really the training and understanding and understanding of adult development theory, particularly the one that, um, my colleagues and I are most, um, have most depth in, which is the, the subject object theory, um, that it was developed by Bob Keegan and others.
And in the subject object theory, your, what you're listening for, the stage of development is defined by what is subject and what is object.
And when I, when I say subject, what I mean is like what you're fused with.
It's like the water you're swimming in, the lens through which you see things, but you don't actually even know you're, have a lens.
Um, and what is object is what can be held out and examined and talked about.
Um, like a value is object.
If you can see how it's shaping, what you do and don't do, um, a value is subject.
If it's invisibly shaping, is listening to it.
Right. So from his perspective, it's, uh, I listened to what you said there.
It, I'm literal, right?
Uh, and so it's, it's incorrect.
And I'm going to do you. He doesn't do it maliciously.
He's like, I'm going to do you a favor and point out why you're incorrect.
And as a parent, uh, I don't know what to do with this because on one hand, on a literal sense, he's right on a social sense, he's wrong.
Uh, and on a, is this going to get you what you want in life perspective?
It's learning when to use that and when to not use that.
And I'm struggling with him in terms of how I go about this.
So you're worried that he will alienate people or is he alienating you?
Oh, he's not alienating me.
I think I'm worried that, um, it makes it harder for him to fit in or be accepted by his parent.
Yeah. So I can hear that really, that, that sort of deep desire for him to not have, yeah, for life not to be harder for him because, because he is playing on hard mode.
Yeah, playing on hard mode.
Yeah. He's playing on hard mode and he's already, uh, exceptionally bright, which in another, another way puts it on hard mode again, right?
Uh, in certain ways. So.
Yeah. I hear so deeply this.
I mean, geez, um, the, the wanting for, to wanting to help somebody change something that is making in your view of making their life unnecessarily hard.
And, and then worrying that maybe tell me if this is right, but worrying that, um, that if you don't help them change this, it might just become a more and more and more ingrained habit that continues to make their life hard.
Yeah. Well, I think that as, as he gets older, I mean, my role changes too, right?
And it changes to, um, you're getting feedback.
Are you seeing the feedback that you're getting?
Are you, instead of a direct, uh, intervention, like, don't do this, do this.
Uh, you know, it changes to when you did this, did it help you get what you wanted?
In that moment, right? Or is doing this going to get you what you want?
And that coaching after the fact is usually very helpful for him because he's like, Oh, I didn't mean it that way, or I shouldn't have done that.
Or I wasn't thinking when I said something.
And so it prompts at least a little bit of reflection around it, which we all have as adults too, right?
Like we all say stupid things on occasion or make a comment that we didn't intend to make and it hasn't impact on another person.
And then we reflect on it and we, we sort of that reflection codifies the learning a little bit.
So it takes that experience and it translates that experience into a little bit of learning and with enough reflection and enough experience and enough iteration, enough feedback, we sort of self-correct as, as adults most of the time.
And I think you may have a part of your answer already.
Um, so it sounds like what you're doing is you're creating the conditions for him to reflect on what the impact of the way he's listening or not listening, um, is, is having.
Well, trying to, when, when you said the phrase listening to win and you were talking with your kids about not listening to win, I was like, well, is there a way that I can put a term around it or a label around it?
When I can just say you're listening to win.
And in that moment, that means point A to point B, you're going to do some steering.
And so I think for organizations and for people in teams and for people in relationships, that's what we're trying to do at our best is steer dynamically based on the feedback we're getting based on what we value.
So based, whatever your principles, whatever your values are, whatever you care about, whatever winning means to you, you're going to steer in the direction of that based on the input that you get.
But if you live in a system that's far removed from feedback, then it's problematic or even worse.
If the feedback you're getting is actually disconnected from reality, because you were talking about that, that part of being disconnected from reality.
And it can happen a different way where the only feedback I get is from a boss.
The boss is telling me what they think is important.
That is not what the customer cares about.
It's not what the market cares about.
And so I'm actually serving the wrong master, so to speak, and end up getting stuck in a feedback loop that's inaccurate and inauthentic.
That's so fascinating.
So in response, I mean, it's almost an argument for private businesses over public ones where you can take a longer term time horizon.
It's very hard in a public company to do that.
Sure. And the examples that all seem to come to mind all have a large inside shareholder or founder still in charge of the organization.
Yeah, they really do. It's a common pattern across.
I mean, we looked at 68 for the original book Brave New Work and yeah, it's a strong pattern.
So with that said, what are the ways that organizations sabotage themselves from the inside?
Essentially, what tends to happen is that you have a few things that go on.
The first thing is that we tend to do what Jason Fried calls scarring on the first cut.
So when something doesn't work or goes wrong or there's an issue or somebody steals a laptop, the organization freaks out and it immediately reacts with a policy or a procedure or a new security protocol or something.
Just fire the person. Exactly, right?
Like just let it go and then move on.
They don't wait for patterns, right?
We don't wait for patterns generally.
We just overreact and try to systematize everything.
So that tends to sabotage us quite a bit.
The other thing that we do is that we really get stuck focusing on metrics that become incentives that become ways to drive mismanagement.
And so there are many different names for this law, but when a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to become a good metric.
And the idea is that we're optimizing for something that is a proxy for reality instead of reality itself.
And again, we're putting our judgment down and just focusing on like click through rate.
Like I'm just, I just have to hit this click through rate and I'll do whatever it takes to get it.
And so that, that sort of over optimization on proxies or abstract goals rather than absolute principle driven goals is really problematic.
And then I guess the last one is that we, and I talk about this a ton, but we confuse the context that we're operating in.
So I talk a lot in my work about the difference between complicated and complex.
And you've had some people on your show talk about complexity before as well.
But the complicated context is like the engine of a car or a watch.
It is predictable. There's cause and effect inside it.
The parts fit in a way that if you're an expert, you kind of know how to take it apart and put it back together again.
And so if there's a problem, it can be solved and it can be delivered and it can be, you know, working again, no problem.
There's very high confidence in, in solutioning in those areas.
But in a complex system, which would be like weather or traffic or gardens or six year olds, they are dispositional.
So they have an attitude away their trending, but you can't fundamentally predict them.
You can't be sure what'll happen if you try something.
And if you bring that complicated approach, the checklist, the Gantt chart, the quarterly goals, the objectives, the management to that context, you tend to really struggle and fail.
And what we see is that, is that organizations tend to just over index on everything must be complicated.
And so we're going to treat everything that way.
And I routinely get brought into boardrooms with, with executives and teams that are like, look, we changed our company values and behaviors last year.
We put them on coffee mugs and posters all over the world, all over the office, and nobody's behaving differently.
Why? It's like, well, cause you're yelling at the weather, right?
You're yelling at the garden.
That's not how these sorts of systems work.
If you have a manufacturing problem where you don't have a tolerance, get that checklist out.
If you have a broken engine, take it into the dealership.
But if you're trying to raise a human being or build a successful team, or create a culture of trust, that, that playbook doesn't work.
And so we sabotage ourselves by constantly bringing it to the table and being like, the culture change initiative will be done in June of 2024.
And we will achieve these five metrics along the way.
And that's our, you know, those are our pillars.
That's just all complicated talk brought to a complex party.
I have a heuristic and you can, you can correct this because you've worked with more companies than I have.
But the heuristic is the more a company exposes their values, the less they actually value.
Yeah. Yeah, that is funny because it's sort of like, yeah, when you're, when you protest too much, right, that would be the Shakespeare of it, right?
Thou doth protest too much when you, when you're speaking in the community, when you, when you're speaking constantly about these are our values and they're so important, integrity, integrity, integrity.
That, that's a clue that something is going on that's not healthy.
When in fact, good change and good patterns and culture are quite everything goes downhill pretty quickly.
From episode 161, Jim Dothmar.
The four pillars of integrity I got from Katie Hendricks, Dr.
Katie Hendricks. It's been a cornerstone of my life for 30 years or so.
So let's begin by just differentiating the way I want to speak about integrity from the way it normally gets talked about.
You know, when integrity shows up as a value inside of a company, for example, and then you ask people, what does the value mean?
The normal thing that people say is do the right thing, which is beautiful.
I get that. Great. Integrity then tends to have more of a like a moral or an ethical kind of orientation.
And the way I play with integrity is none of that.
But again, let's just do a little etymology here.
So integrity from the root, same root as integer.
So think of whole number, think of wholeness.
So that's where I like to go.
Think of wholeness. So to me, integrity is energetic wholeness.
Now, what that translates to very quickly for me is full aliveness.
So when I am in integrity, I am energetically whole.
I am fully alive. We illustrated sometimes with doesn't work so much in work, because I think they fix this problem.
But when I was a kid and you put holiday lights at a Christmas tree, kind of the deal was that if if one of the lights went out, that's the way they are.
And so, frankly, with those folks, a lot of it is just making sure that you're helping get the right signals to them, because by nature, they are such where, you know, they do that.
There are some who I think I'm sure you've heard about the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, right?
I think that's actually been pretty negative overall to the like startup ecosystem, because I think that people have heard that as Steve Jobs didn't embrace reality and Steve Jobs.
I actually think that his was quite different.
That was a representation of ambition.
That was a representation of we need to be great.
And I think that that was a representation of I'm not going to be constrained by what someone tells me can or can't happen.
He still was embracing reality as to whether or not people love the product.
Right. He still is embracing reality as to whether or not it was selling and things like that.
And so I think that I think one aspect is sort of reminding people that the Steve Jobs example, which is incredible in so many ways, you kind of have to dig underneath that.
The reality distortion field wasn't that he wasn't listening to market signals.
Right. It was that he was not just trying to make sure that he was not it was that he was ambitious for his team of we can do better.
We can do more. When I think of jobs, what I think about when that happens, this reality distortion field, which I think we've mislabeled in a way, I think that his standard was just so much higher.
The better example to me of Jobs is have you ever heard the anecdote about him with when he looked at a cabinet?
No. It's an amazing anecdote.
Okay. So there was this beautiful cabinet that he saw.
Okay. And he loved it and he thought it was gorgeous.
And then he looked around the back of it and in the back of it was plywood.
And it was ugly. And he was so offended by this notion that the front of it was beautiful on the back of it was ugly because someone's like, no one's ever going to see the back.
And he's like, no, I see the back.
The back should be beautiful too.
If you want to try to make something beautiful, it should be beautiful from every angle.
Right. If the purpose of this is it's supposed to represent craftsmanship and beauty.
Don't don't go halfway and make the back ugly.
To me, the things that are interesting are like if you tear apart the iPhone, even the switch, even the board underneath is, you know, clean and gorgeous and thoughtful.
And I think that even the words on the back of the iPhone, where it says, you know, designed in California, assembled in China, like it doesn't say made in China.
And so every choice that they made, I think represents those are cool stories about jobs and the standard that he had and the sort of willingness to be disliked in the name of going to get excellence.
There's this story about Alexa with Bezos that's similar where they came back and said, look, the latency is going to be this.
And I don't know what the unit was, but Bezos effectively said, well, I wanted to be one fifth of that.
And they said, that's impossible.
We can't do that. We can't do that.
We can't do that. And so they said, well, then we're not going to ship it.
But that was the magic. And then they ultimately ended up doing it.
So I think that consistent raising of the standard, that's the lesson from these folks.
And so I think going back to your point on reality of talking to founders, I think it's helping them see the right signals, because sometimes, especially in the environment, and look, you know, investors, you know, all of us, we sent many of the wrong signals for a couple of years where people were rewarded.
My business keeps on getting valued higher and higher and higher.
You know, I'm doing the right stuff.
But I think the duration of their perspective was not necessarily correct in that ultimately, you know, your business is going to be measured on the financial performance of it.
And the financial purpose is a representation of how much customer love there is and how much what you've actually created.
But I think the point, Shane, for me on getting people to embrace reality is, OK, cool, that signal that you're looking at is supportive of the point that we're doing great.
What about all these other signals?
And I think that, you know, you have to earn the trust of somebody, like you said, to be able to share that perspective.
But I think that idea is one that I think is really important to make sure that people have.
From episode 166, Kevin Kelly.
There's a lot of concern about artists and even writers about training.
In AI to produce work, to generate work, to creative work.
And the concern is, as well, you know, my material that I've worked really hard for has been used to train this AI.
And people can use it to imitate me.
And sometimes those imitations are quite amazing.
Really, what you want to be able to do is to have a style, so to speak, to have something that's unpredictable, that's immeasurable, that you can't be imitated.
And this, again, goes back to my other piece of advice about don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only.
So if you are in this category that it's hard to imitate you, that's a really good place to be in the human world and also a really good place to be in the AI world, because AIs will have difficulty in imitating you.
I think I'm in trouble. My kids went into chat, G.G.
or GPT the other day and they drafted this email and they should get like more video game time.
But they did it in the stock.
We're actually using him.
I have a friend who runs a very, very popular blog site and he uses them to help them write headlines, to write a punchline at the end.
And he said it's often very generic and he has to kind of push them to be snarky.
He'll say, no, no, no, make it more snarky or pretend you're a snarky editor or pretend that you're a conspirator.
I have to kind of push them to not be that standard average.
Deliberately say, no, you need a little bit on a little fringier.
You've got to be a little bit angry or you've got to be something.
And then the role play. If you don't do that, you won't get the kind of, as you said, the standard average.
I want to come back to AI a little later because I think we'll have a broader conversation on it.
I want to go to the next piece of advice that sort of stood out as I was reading these, which is always demanded deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary.
A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect.
So you have to make it different.
Different is better. It is right.
Different is better. So deadlines, again, took me a long time to kind of figure out that I needed deadlines and deadlines were the difference between a dream and something that you complete.
And what happens with deadlines for me, anyways, you've got to ship.
You have to abandon the project and it's not perfect.
Oh, my gosh, it's not perfect.
But because it's not perfect, you kind of have to be ingenious about making a little different.
And I find that deadlines force me to make decisions that you don't have enough time.
You never have enough time.
And so you think of something to, I wouldn't say it's a shortcut.
You think of a way to finish it.
And that little, those little decisions are what make it a little different.
One of the shocks to me about working a wire on a monthly magazine was every single issue after years and years and years was a miracle that it got done on time.
It was like you would think it would come down to some formulating.
You just you'd be done on Friday afternoon.
But no, it was it was this last second getting it out the door every single time.
And part of that was because we kind of kept upping the goal, the quality.
You know, we're trying to make it better than last time.
And so you come down to the same thing where you are being driven by the deadline to try to excel by not making it perfect by doing something a little differently than you did before.
Because without a deadline, you can convince yourself that you can always make it a little bit better, but then you never ship.
Right. How do you find that balance between in a world of leverage, right?
Like where an internet article can go viral and reach 100 million people or it can reach 10 people.
How do you find that point at which I've done enough?
I'm comfortable with this versus the trade off of, do I raise the bar?
Do I make this better? What is the advantage to doing that?
So there's a couple of things, a couple of bits of advice buried in a book about that.
One is this rule, which was actually based on some research in various different fields of life that when you trying to optimize something versus trying to explore, where you have something that works and you just want to make it kind of better and go and optimize it versus doing the inefficient thing of going out to try and try something new and comes down to something
like when you go out to eat at a restaurant, do you get your favorite thing that you know works?
Or do you try something that is a new dish that may not work?
And so the ratio is actually one to three, two to three, one to three.
So you you actually want to spend two thirds of your time trying to optimize things that you want to go deeper and better.
And then a third trying trying new things.
And that's been shown in many, many ways to be roughly true.
So that's one answer is, yes, lots of times you're going to just try and make it really, really better or not thing, but a third of the time you want to be taking a chance.
The second thing is this idea that I learned from doing art.
There was actually a book called Writers Time about how to write a book.
And it said that basically, look, the the the the amount of work to write a book is infinite.
It just could go on and on.
And that's true of almost any project in terms of perfecting.
It's bottomless. So really, the only thing you control is your time.
You say, I have this much time to give to it.
I'm going to do the very, very best in this amount of time.
And that's sort of what a deadline is about.
It's saying like, yeah, I mean, it could go on forever, but but I have a deadline.
So I'm going to do the best.
I'm going to write the best book I can in a year or a year and a half, whatever it is, or I'm going to do the best podcast I can make in a week.
And so that is a deadline and what it's doing is giving you some way to control because you can't control the amount of work, which is infinite because you're.
So I oftentimes will go back and restructure some things around, you know, risk, for example, is a really good area where we'll do some discussion when people are hesitant to take risk.
I want people to go back and say, hey, tell me about times you took risk and it really paid off like, let's talk about that.
I want people to understand what they're capable of and sometimes to see what they're capable of in ways that they that they quickly forget.
Right. I mean, negative things sometimes shadow our entire mindset and how we think about things and we end up tossing aside some of the good things, right?
Like you'll have, you know, 20 compliments on your haircut.
And one person says, oh, what'd you do to your hair?
And that's the person who gets all the attention.
So you think about, I don't want them shoving aside those 20 compliments or those 20 times they took the chance.
So the 20 times that they overcame something really incredible that they kind of, you know, kind of shove off to the side.
I want them to see those things very clearly and to see the minority of, yeah, you know, things happen periodically that aren't great for us and don't make us feel well and we make bad some bad decisions.
But so what everyone does?
I think that that's really important.
I mean, we all make bad decisions.
It's what you do next that sort of matters.
I want to go back to something you said about childhood, though, which is I hear this a lot and I've always sort of wondered about it, which is like when people are in therapy and they're talking about their childhood and then they do this sort of like destructive behavior and then it's your self-sabotaging behavior.
And then they explain it away with, well, that's because of this when I was a child.
And, you know, I'm always listening to this and I never comment, but in my head, I'm going, but you're an adult now.
Right. Like at some point you take control over your your response and awareness of it is not the same as doing something about it.
So this is this is really fascinating to me, too.
And I love hearing things like that when they come up because they're such clear like flags and clearly they are for you as well.
Like you hear that and you're like, oh, this is a problem.
Right. I mean, immediately.
So I think about it like this.
You could be sitting and this is the example that I always think about because it pulls people away from some of the more emotional stuff, but you could be sitting in traffic and we've all sat in traffic.
Right. I mean, traffic as long as the eye can see.
And there will be some people you look out and they'll be like beeping and dodging and like they're all over the place and you can surmise how that person must be thinking.
Right. I mean, it's just like never going to get there.
I can't believe this is happening.
Like we could anticipate that these are coming from strong thought patterns and emotional places.
But if you look to your right, I mean, there's probably also some guy or girl listening to a podcast, texting someone, windows are down, look as relaxed as could be.
And so some people are going to say, you know, when you get home, like, why are you so upset?
Oh, it's the traffic. The traffic makes me nuts.
Right. But if the traffic really makes people nuts, it would make everyone nuts.
And so it can't be that. It's how we're thinking about the traffic that really makes people be relaxed and productive, or it makes them be just absolutely enraged and out of control.
So when people are telling me that, like, you know, I'm doing this because of my childhood, I'm doing this because of this, I think, you know, you're, you know, you're giving up some amount of power.
You're giving up a lot of power to something outside of yourself.
And you're also how you're interpreting that event is not useful to you.
You know, it may be, there may be a lot of truth to the terrible troll, the trajectory of it.
And I think that that's true, whether it's in the small moments and sometimes even in the large ones, like people will stay unhappy at a job or stay unhappy in their role and they'll just stay unhappy instead of just saying, hey, you know, like, eventually they'll reach a point.
And this is true for everyone, right?
Like they're unhappy, they're unhappy, they're unhappy.
And then finally, I've had enough.
And all of those excuses they've used, there will come a point when none of them matter and they're going to take that leap.
But why does it have to get to that point?
And why can't we kind of flag things earlier on?
And I think early intervention, you know, I talk about that notion of like fighting up front, early intervention in almost every case is worth.
It's worth the attention, the hassle, the time that it takes.
Because those are the moments that allow you to really gain ground and to have a much more productive future, to have much more productive relationships, to be more productive at work, is to really intervene early.
And I think intentionality is really the key.
Thinking about, you know, how you want your life to look and what you're willing to put up with.
You know, what kind of standards are you holding for yourself and, and, you know, how do you value yourself and a lot of those are around, you know, when you take action and how much you give and what you're waiting for and how much you're willing to take.
From episode 173, Frank Slutman.
So I understand there's no repeatable framework that you can just apply, but I would imagine there's there's sort of repeatable principles and methods of thinking that you use.
What are the ones that you find the most helpful?
Well, I look very hard at what's working, what's not working.
And in other words, you know, some things are going to move on.
Sometimes, you know, I've had situations, especially with young people where hey, we need to do a reboot, reset, come back tomorrow.
I'm sure your parents didn't teach you to behave this way and you can do better.
And I've seen people come back a little bit over the weekend and be a different person because for whatever reason, they were led astray by managers that just, you know, were inspiring that kind of behavior.
That happens, right? People learn behaviors from what they see around them with the behavior that gets encouraged and they don't realize that they are just getting a drift, you know, from from their own upbringing and their own, you know, personal principles because that's sort of the environment starts to, you know, really, it's a slippery slope that they get
on and all of a sudden they're in a place where they don't recognize themselves anymore.
And that's where a reset can really work, you know, because basically you're regrounding them to, you know, normal behaviors and then things can work out really nicely from their own.
But most of the time, unfortunately, it's like, look, you know, you're not a fit here, you know, this is this is not who we are, who we want to be.
You know, it's choosing, you know, it's it's it's just look, we want you to be this way, not that way.
And, you know, for some people, it's like, hey, they learn behaviors in other companies, it's part of who they are, it's their culture.
This is not this is not for you, man.
Alan Mulally put it to me this way.
He said, when you're you're choosing a behavior that's not the organizational behavior that's desired, you're choosing not to be a part of the organization.
I thought that was a powerful way to think about it.
Yeah. You're, you're, you're separating and you're in, you're in violation of the cult driving culture is really important because if you don't, you know, other people will will fill that void, right?
And you get subcultures in a city or a division because strong personalities can do that.
So unless you are, you are filling that void, right?
Um, it will get filled by something or somebody.
They're able to move on, but they also know when to push their advantage.
And I'm thinking Tom Brady, right?
He was the ultimate sort of quarterback who would take the check down, but he also knew when to push it down the field.
How do we learn when to, how do we learn to cultivate those skills and ourselves?
How do we know when to push and how do we know when, you know what, this just isn't going to get us the outcome that we want?
Best question I've been asked by an interview in an interviewer in my lifetime.
Like that's an awesome question that nobody ever asks.
It's the question for anyone who's trying to be successful, sustainably successful.
When do you press? How do you know when to press both in golf and the markets?
The, the paradox is there.
Sometimes you got to let it happen and sometimes you got to make it happen.
When people try to force, force a result when they shouldn't, like that's when, when you get stopped out and the opposite's also true.
So how do you know when to oppress an advantage?
So number one I'll say about Brady, don't forget a lot of failure early.
And so what happens is when you fail your, fail early, you start to recognize what a real opportunity looks like.
And then, oh, by the way, when that opportunity presents itself, there's a lot of fuel to make it happen.
You're like, oh, like you should, you know, it's Mark Wahlberg and acting.
It's like, you're letting me into this club.
Okay. There ain't no way I'm giving up my advantage.
So it becomes this relentless, you know, one of the things about Tiger Woods that's so remarkable is, is he's the only golfer.
And I mean this in the history of the game who's ever played better with a lead.
So even Jack Nicklaus, who's arguably the best of all time, Jack said, I was better if I was trailing because what happens is when you're, when you're chasing, you know, you play with nothing to lose.
You're able to be fearless.
So, so that's a real advantage is being the underdog.
Tiger Woods is the only one who is the favorite every week and would start with a lead and then extend that lead, blew the world away.
And to this day it blows out because how do you do that?
How do you like, that's why Greyhounds and dog racing are always chasing a rabbit.
The psychological mechanism, even in running, you have somebody who's pacing, right?
Because we know the brain works in ways where having something to chase, is the way to get the best out of yourself.
Well, how did Tiger Woods do that when he was in the lead, the one being chased?
Well, he was playing against history.
So even when he was leading the tournament, he was still trailing Jack Nicklaus.
So he benchmarked, he would index his thinking to the fact that he hadn't caught Jack Nicklaus.
So he was in his mind always chasing.
So it begs the question when you talk about judgment is knowing when to, what an advantage looks like and when and how to press your advantage.
And when patients, when the situation calls to do nothing.
And here's one way to assess it.
Evaluate your why. Because what happens is when people press an advantage incorrectly, it's usually out of impatience.
It's usually out of frustration.
It's happening right now in the markets.
There's not a lot of volatility in the marketplace right now.
And you're on the, your mandate as an investor is to return 10%, right?
You say that's your number and you're only up 5%.
And there's no way to make money in your strategy.
All of a sudden it's like, well, I've got to, I'm going to press whatever advantage I have.
What's a low probability of vanishing, but you're going to force a little advantage, you're going to make a mistake and then you're going to lose your job.
So number one is you have to question what's underneath the desire.
So let's talk about desire for a minute, which we haven't talked about, which we need to talk about.
If you look at the human condition, look at all the major religious traditions.
One of the universalities of the human Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos has created $800 billion of wealth for other people.
You know, you see the way free markets work.
They're a function of desire.
And that's what Freud called sublimation.
If you sublimate and channel desire into evolution, it's what creates great works of art, architecture, right?
Andrian writes about this in Fountainhead.
So desire channeled properly can lead to a lot of things.
It can lead to some of the highest highs and the best expression of the human condition.
The problem is the downside of desire.
Left unchecked leads to the kinds of behaviors that are duplicitous, that desire run amok.
We all become a worse version of ourselves.
This happened to Tiger Woods.
Like, don't forget the same desire that fueled arguably the greatest body of work in the history of sports, the fuel that burned inside him.
You saw it come out as celebrations.
There's a lot of want in there.
But that's the same desire that when it got channeled the wrong way that led to the bad decisions that, you know, led to the blew up his marriage that led to, you know, to him getting these injuries and harming himself.
And he wouldn't stop practicing so he'd get injured.
He played the US Open on a broken leg and won.
And so you have to go back to the first order variable, which in his case is desire to answer the question.
And if you look the causal chain, the way the dominoes fall in decision making, which is a cognitive act, not an emotional one, you have to understand what are the variables that have led to you wanting to push your advantage.
And so essentially in modern day analytics, you're running probabilities.
You know, if you have a trading strategy and the numbers say that you have an advantage, you know, the old saying that if you don't know who the sucker at the table is, you're the sucker.
And that's true in all games in the achievement domains where there's a scoreboard and there's competition.
And so you have to find a way to map your advantages and know in the moment whether you have an advantage.
And if you do, how much risk are you willing to take and what losses are you willing to tolerate?
And then the psychological component under that is can you handle loss as well?
And if you can't, if you're the sort of person who's going to say, you know, if I lose this much money on this trade, it's going to meaningfully affect what I do in the future.
That's your tell. So one of the things we do, even though we try to arrabe out the human condition from decision making, you know, as Antonio DiMaggio writes in searching for Spinoza, you know, he says like, when you look at people with localized brain damage who have no ability to feel emotions, their decision making is not good.
When human beings get localized brain damage where they can't feel emotion, their decision making is not better.
It's worse, in fact. So if you look at someone like, you know, I guess an enlightened individual, they are not without emotion.
They have refined their emotional reactions in a way that elevates their senses.
So, you know, you want to push the advantage.
You have to evolve to a level where you're some version of a complete human being, where you know yourself, right?
The Socratic dictum of Nadhi Sutra, know yourself and no others.
Complicated games require complexity of thought.
You know, life at the tail end of the curve does not lend itself to simplistic thinking.
You have to have complexity of thought, though the decision is fine.
