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Hello and welcome back to the show.
Thank you very much for joining us.
I'm here as always with Ben and we are very, very excited about this conversation.
We have with us today, Jim Murphy, author of the book, Inner Excellence and brand new book.
It actually just came out yesterday as of when we're recording this called The Best Possible Life.
Jim, how are you?
We have been looking forward to this conversation for weeks.
So good.
So grateful to be here.
Thank you.
Ben and I talked last week and we were joking that, and these are my words, but I think Ben agreed.
I've never had more highlights out of a book than I have with inner excellence.
It was like, almost to the point where I was like I need to stop highlighting every fourth word here, because at some point the highlights don't make any sense.
Oh, that's amazing.
So great to hear.
I actually, when I was reading the new one Jim, I was reading the new one and I was like, oh my God, oh my God underlining underlining, reading to my kids.
Like, oh guys, wait, listen to this one.
And then I like, after reading and reading, I then finally turned the page and I was like chapter one.
I was like, what?
That was all the intro?
Yeah.
I had the same experience.
I was at my son.
I was at a birthday party that my son was at.
And I was just.
Oddly enough, I was sitting at a bar, which is not something I do, but it was at a.
It was on an arcade with a bar.
I was reading best life possible.
And that was exactly the same experience I had with the intro.
I was like 15 minutes.
I was like, no, I need to stop.
Yeah.
I'm impressed, man.
It was really, really, it's really good.
So excited.
We're going to stop complimenting you endlessly now, but we just wanted to lay the claim that we're a big fan.
So we're excited to talk to you.
Here's where I would love to start our conversation.
I'm going to start, ironically or not, with a quote from the book, because I think it sets the table for us.
And this is from Inner Excellence.
You write this we must not be slaves to comfort and pleasures, but rather be selfless so that we can be fearless.
When we're selfless, we aren't led by our feelings and desires which unchecked, continually increase, but we become disciplined enough to embrace discomfort and adversity.
And it's that phrase be selfless so that we can be fearless that I really want to dig into today, with you today, Jim.
And so can you first just start with why is fearlessness a target that we should be aiming towards?
Yeah, I feel like we're born with two natures.
We have this nature that's created in God's image, and so we have this deep essence in our dna wired for love and wired for relationship every human.
We also have a natural self-centeredness.
And that self-centeredness, i think, if you watch kids growing up and and you'll see that they've they As soon as they're born they start to realize that if I cry, I'm going to get attention.
And so that starts to multiply and then start to realize like okay, I can get what I want if I do the right things.
And then it turns into this self-reliance that is really important and helpful.
Like, you know, I can start to use the bathroom on my own and I can read and do all these things.
I have agency.
And so really huge part of growing up.
But the problem is that self-reliance has to end if you want to live an extraordinary life, because that self-reliance is going to turn into fear, frustration and isolation.
You're never going to reach your potential unless you learn to surrender your little power for a greater power.
Your self-centeredness for connection.
We're created for relationship.
And when you think about the best performances or when either of you have had the best moments of your life, there's no self-protection.
As humans.
If we want to reach some level of fullness of life, we have to experience more beauty and we need to cultivate the imagination.
If you don't have a clear plan, the imagination and your mind and life is going to go towards self protection and it's going to build walls that will imprison you.
Hmm.
Can we talk for a minute about something you've labeled in the book, the affluenza virus?
You're right that what we love most at any given moment controls our lives at that moment.
And so again, within the context of this self-centeredness, what you just labeled as the little power that we have, which I think is great,
Can you just talk a little bit about what the affluenza virus is, and then the five things that our culture seems to idolize?
Yeah.
And so our greatest need is for love and to be loved and accepted.
And our greatest fear is the rejection of that love and acceptance.
And so how do we get that love?
How do we feel okay?
When I walk into a room of strangers, how am I going to feel okay?
Well, I'm going to feel okay if I fit into the culture.
And the culture obsesses about what I call the PALMS, the acronym of five things.
It's just possessions, achievements, looks, money, and status.
And this culture lends itself to.
The influenza is when we have this virus that causes us to get sick physically.
The affluenza is when our heart gets caught up in this virus that's obsessing about these five things.
And for most of my life, I've been obsessed about those things.
And I think it's really hard.
Especially if people are motivated and have some skill, then they're very likely to get caught up in this, because you quickly learn that you know if I get more achievements and more status, I'm going to get more of that.
That quote love.
And so, but it's, it's a false peace.
It's a false love because it's, It's this peace and love that comes from getting good circumstances.
But as soon as the circumstances or results go away, then the love and peace is gone.
Yeah, it's a conditional love based off the circumstances you highlight, in that it's not only these five things, it's these five things in comparison to others, and how insidious that aspect is.
Yeah.
So we all have this part of our mind that I call the ego that's always threatened and always comparing.
And C.S.
Lewis talks about it really well.
The idea is that growing up, I just had this one narrative for my life.
The only possible option was that I'm going to be a superstar.
Every guy is going to want to be me.
Every girl is going to want to be with me.
I'm going to make millions of dollars, and that's going to be my life.
And when we think about the comparing thing and how this ego wants to look good and feel good.
I remember when I was young we got everyone on our team got a trophy.
And a few years ago there was a lot of talk about that, about everyone gets a trophy and how that may not be great.
And I certainly didn't like it.
And the reason is, because I was one of the best athletes on the team.
And I felt like it diminishes what I could do because, like everyone gets a trophy, then what good is that trophy?
And so pride.
I think pride and self-centeredness is kind of the root problem because it leads to every other problem that CS.
Lewis talks about.
The pride is not so much that I have a lot of money or I have a lot of achievements.
It's that I have more than other people.
Because if everyone in the neighborhood has the exact same house and the exact same car, even doesn't matter how big and nice they are, there's not going to be pride.
It's that I have it more than others.
If you're living in a, a third world country, in a destitute village in Africa, and you get a bike and no one else has a bike, your pride and your ego soars.
And then all of a sudden you see someone drive by in a car and you're like It just instantaneously changes the perspective.
We're so conditioned to compare.
And this, I mean, it goes like evolutionarily, right?
It's all about where we are in the status of the tribe.
And if we have more than something else, we're more desirable mates.
We get first choice of food and so on.
It's a trial that never ends.
This is the problem with the ego.
We're always on trial and it never ends.
I'm reading Psychology of Money right now, which I can't believe I haven't read before.
And I just read this part this morning, which represents this so well.
And to you as well Jim, being in the Cubs organization as a baseball player.
He uses baseball players as an example.
He's like If you're a rookie baseball player making half a million dollars a year, by all measures you are extremely wealthy.
But if you happen to be on the same team as Mike Trout, who has a contract for 431 million, you feel poor.
And if Mike Trout looks at hedge fund managers and starts getting into those circles, he's making a year what they make in a quarter.
And if those hedge fund managers then compare themselves to the top hedge fund managers, which make 700, it's just the game never ends.
And then you go like, okay, then they compare it to Jeff Bezos.
And it's like, it is a never ending game.
And to your point, it's all just to fuel this ego.
And I wonder if you could just That word's thrown around a lot, right?
The ego.
And I'm wondering if you can help us kind of just frame up.
When we say the ego, what are we talking about?
Well so, in addition to the part of our mind that's always threatened, always comparing and never satisfied, I'll give you an example of what happened to me.
I was in Florida for an inter-excellence retreat with a professional baseball player.
And he got injured just before.
And so he had to fly back to the headquarters to do rehab.
And I decided to go there anyway to Florida.
And a friend of mine was a couple hours away and said, hey, you want to meet for lunch?
And he said, yes.
So I drive down there and then I don't hear from him.
Until late in the afternoon.
And then he says, can we switch it to dinner?
And at first I'm like, no, I'm not switching it to dinner.
I'm a busy guy.
And I just drove all the way here to meet you for lunch.
And so I started thinking about what am I going to do now?
And where in Florida will I go?
And where will I spend the night?
And at first I thought well, I'm just not going to spend the night here and hang out with this friend because he lost his chance.
Was some version of that I was thinking?
And then I was like so one of the important tools.
What do you do in the moment when you're not present, you're not feeling how you want to feel.
And so one of the tools that's really important is to check in. and think, is this ego right now?
And so I did a little check in.
I was like, what's happening right now?
Well, you're a little bit frustrated.
And then I asked myself a key question.
Are you taking this personal?
I was like, you are.
You're taking it personal.
When I think of inner excellence, I think of self-mastery.
And when I think of self-mastery, I think of mastering the ego.
When I think of mastering the ego, I think of three things being unembarrassable, unoffendable and unirritable.
And so part of that unoffendable is taking things personal because it really limits your life.
And so I thought, are you taking this personal?
And it's like, well, yes, you are taking it personal.
I am.
Because if I wasn't taking it personal, then.
There would be no emotion attached to it.
I would, do you want to meet for dinner?
It would be completely, do I want to meet for dinner or not with my friend?
And there would be this past thing would not impact it.
And I wasn't going to meet for dinner because I was taking it personal.
So I thought, okay, what if you didn't take it personal?
Well, then all the options would be on the table.
I could have dinner with him or whatever I wanted.
And I thought, you know, I think that is the best option.
I'm going to spend the night here in this part of Florida and I'm going to go to dinner.
So we have a great dinner.
It was wonderful.
The next morning, I'm going to a coffee shop to have a video call with my spiritual director.
I'm driving through this neighborhood and I was like, oh, this looks really familiar.
And I was like, I think this is where I had my retreat with Nelly Korda, the golfer.
And so I called her.
I said, hey, is this where we had our retreat?
And she's like, yes.
And she's like, you know what's amazing, because I hadn't talked to her for a while.
It's like I just caught my boyfriend reading a book and he never reads and it was your book, Inner Excellence.
So we met for brunch, had a great brunch, and I hadn't seen her for, I don't know, a year or two.
That would never have happened had I not stopped and asked myself, are you taking it personally?
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How do we balance that sort of dichotomy between the ego and wanting to be special and awesome and the best and gain and achieve?
And how do we work with that with this sort of The destructive side of the ego.
Because on the outside looking in, it feels like the ego can serve us in a sense.
I want to be better.
I think of the ego as kind of like fire.
Fire can really do amazing things, right?
Beautiful fireplace and you know what, roasting marshmallows and the sun's providing heat sunset, all those things, but also obviously, it can burn you.
And so fear is similar.
Fear is maybe the biggest obstacle we face in life because it really limits your life incredibly.
But also fear can motivate you.
And a lot of people that are very successful.
Fear has really motivated them to work really, really hard.
And ego, I think, is similar.
In general, if you really want to have extraordinary life, then mastering the ego is going to be crucial.
And when I say extraordinary life, I don't mean being world number one and winning an Olympic gold medal.
And this is kind of where the in the desert.
What I learned is that one is that I don't want to spend my life helping someone become world number one if it's not meaningful.
Like, what if they're a bad person and wherever they go, they kick the dog and mean to people?
Was I...
Did I make the world a better place?
Did I do any good by helping that person become world number one?
I didn't want to just help someone make a lot of money and be rich and famous.
And then what I learned really changed my life.
I learned that If you want to have the most peace and confidence, the most poise under the most pressure for anybody, the path to training yourself to do that is the same path to living the most extraordinary life.
A life where you have amazing experiences, deep enriching relationships, where you're learning and growing, feeling fully alive.
And that path is a wholehearted path where you train your heart to love most, what's most empowering.
And that means also recognizing that the biggest challenge I face in my life is my own self-centeredness.
Athletes get confused, and the rest of us?
It's like, well, I know that I need to be confident to be good.
And so should I tell people how good I am?
Do I need to be cocky?
How does this work?
And I'll give you an example of how I think confidence where it sits.
I'm a performance coach.
I've been doing this for several decades and working with elite athletes.
And the first few years, I was really shocked that some of the best athletes in the world are asking, telling me they want more confidence.
I was not expecting that.
Even coaches, managers, American League Manager of the Year just got the award, Davey Johnson, and he's telling Pat Gillick that he's, and he had the highest active winning percentage when I was talking to Pat, interviewing Pat for my first book, Dugout Wisdom.
And he was like, yeah, I'm not sure what I'm going to do next.
He had just gotten the award voted with, like a few weeks earlier, American League Manager of the Year Baltimore Orioles.
And when I was interviewing him in person, the award had just come to his mailbox and he's showing it to me.
And that guy was telling Pat Gillick on speakerphone.
I'm sitting next to him.
He's like yeah, I don't know what I'm going to do with my life now.
You know, I can only play so much golf and maybe I'll get into real estate.
And I'm like, he's just joking.
He's not serious.
He can't be serious that he's questioning like his future in baseball.
And of course he became manager again and probably won another world series.
So what's more important, more powerful than confidence is presence.
Hmm.
Fully present is much more powerful.
It's a skill to learn that's much more powerful than being confident.
So is that the...
If the unembarrassable, unoffendable and unirritable which I love those three, I think that's awesome.
If that's sort of the thing that we're trying to, the character traits we're trying to be able to get to, to be able to let ego loosen its grip, is the practice.
The practice is the way to get there.
The practice of being more present?
Yeah, that's definitely part of it.
A major part of it is recognizing is this ego right here.
Yeah, you said like the check-in.
I like that.
Yeah, and am I taking it personal?
Am I embarrassed?
Like if you're completely humble, you could never be humiliated.
And that's why selfless is fearless.
If you're, when you're at your very best.
If you're completely humble, you can never be embarrassed.
Is that what you said?
Yeah, humiliated.
Yeah, it's, humiliation is, oh my gosh, look at how you made me look.
I feel so terrible.
You're not going to feel terrible if, that's only pride.
It's, Your feelings are hurt because you think other people think less of you.
And that's what humiliation is.
But if there's no self to protect, there's no humiliation.
That's what being unembarrassable is.
Humility to me is an accurate view of self.
That's the definition of humility, which I talk about in The Best Possible Life.
Which turned out to be a summary.
It's a book on the spiritual life, but it turned out to be a summary of inter-excellence.
I didn't know that going in.
And so I talk about humility there a lot, because I think it's so powerful, because I think humility and wisdom are directly correlated.
And wisdom.
I have several definitions for it, but one of them is to be to have unobstructed views of beauty, connections and opportunities.
One of the things that you present in Inner Excellence that we're talking around a little bit that I'd love to dig into is the internal adversaries that we all have.
And you label them the critic, the trickster, and the monkey mind.
And I feel like when we're talking about that triumphant of being unembarrassable, unirritable and unoffendable, It's when we fail.
It's because the critic, the trickster and the monkey mind have taken control.
So can you maybe define those for us and talk about their relationship to ego and to fear?
Yeah, so anxiety is a problem, a huge epidemic now in the world today, especially Western culture.
To me, anxiety is a mind that has too many thoughts from too many concerns.
And this is the monkey mind.
The monkey mind's not just the mind that's cluttered, really, really cluttered, and that's anxiety.
And so these three things.
So the monkey mind is the cluttered mind and The critic is the part of our mind that's constantly judging.
And when I say judging, I mean in a negative term judgmental, to lay down a negative verdict about self, others or circumstance.
And one, you are not the judge.
And two, you never know if a circumstance or result is good or bad.
There's this story that I tell.
I have an inter-excellence retreat coming up in Mexico here soon, where we build a house with youth, with a mission for a family in two days, and they get a full inter-excellence retreat on top of it.
So we cram it all into four days.
And so there's a story that I always tell about this farmer who he has a boy and a horse and the boy rides the horse to plow the fields and one day the horse runs away.
And so the neighbors hear about this and they say man, I'm so sorry to hear about your horse running away.
Are you going to lose the farm?
This is so terrible.
And he says, you know, I don't know if it's good or bad.
And then several days later, the horse comes back and he had met another horse out there.
And so now he has two horses.
So the neighbors hear about it like, oh, my gosh, you got double two horses.
You can plow the fields in half the time and double the resources.
This is so amazing and he's like i don't know if it's good or bad.
And several days later the the father's son, the farmer's son, is breaking in the wild horse so it can plow the fields and it bucks him off.
He breaks his leg.
The farmer's neighbors hear about this like oh my gosh, this is the worst thing that could ever happen.
And then several days later, a war breaks out and they take every able-bodied man to war.
And because he had the broken leg, he didn't have to go to war.
And so that saves his life.
And this is how most of us live our lives this constant looking at the circumstances, reacting emotionally.
And this is a problem.
If you want to live an extraordinary life and reach your potential, we have to start to develop more non-judgmental awareness.
And so the critic is a part of our minds that's constantly judging self, others, or circumstances.
And the thing that's so important to understand is you don't know what the best outcome is for you.
Right now you have say your top 10 goals and things that you want to have happen in your life and the top 10 fears and things you don't want to have happen.
If we were to sit down we could probably lay those out, but the thing is they could flip-flop positions.
The 10 things you fear most might be the 10 best for you.
The 10 things you want most might be the 10 worst.
Like we've got the masters golf tournament coming up here very soon.
Who's gonna win?
Well, Bubba Watson won twice.
And after his second one he calls his caddy Teddy Scott, who's now Scotty Scheffler's caddy world number one.
And several days later, he calls up Teddy and Teddy answers the phone and Bubba goes, is that it?
And Teddy's like, Bubba?
He's like, Is that all there is?
And it's like, what do you mean?
It's like, nothing's changed.
I'm the same.
I thought there was going to be more after winning the second Masters and this emptiness.
Are you surprised when high-level performers like that or across any of the different contexts that you work with?
Are you surprised at one, the success that they've had in spite of understanding these things?
And two, are you surprised by the gap of understanding between again ego fearlessness, the critic and all of these other ideas?
I'm shocked at the level of pro sports teams in general across any sport.
The lack of understanding of human nature.
And if you want to get your team to perform the best, then you really need to understand human nature.
And understanding human nature means understanding the human heart.
And with all the technology...
It just feels like sometimes it's just hard to imagine that this isn't more understood across all sports around the world, that if you want to develop a winning culture, then you need to train the person and you need to help them learn to sacrifice for others, and that means mastering the ego.
Instead, pro teams are just for more money and people that have the most talent, and you know, my master's degree was was studying how to build a championship team by interviewing major league baseball managers and GMs.
And kind of what came out of that understanding is that you need to build individual champions, build people who realize that they want to have a meaningful, fulfilling life and that they're created for relationship.
And that means, if you want joy, which I define as a deep sense of well-being, freedom and gratitude, and inner buoyancy and delight that comes from sacrificial love.
If that's what you want, and I think everybody wants that, then that's going to take work.
That's going to work on mastering your ego and learning to serve and love.
But it's very easily missed because the more successful you are in the world's eyes, the more pride, more ego and more attached you get to that affluenza.
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Going back to that affluenza thing, I feel like it's at the root of all of this.
If it is about living the best possible life, and that is about having learning and growth and deep relationship and being a part of unconditional love, is this an unlearnable lesson?
Meaning like you don't really know it until you're in Bubba Watson's shoes and you actually get to the place where you've crossed the proverbial goalpost.
And then you get there and now you look back and go, well, how can we struggle with this so much?
I know it's a part of our culture, but why is this so pervasive?
I think of Jim Carrey saying I wish everyone could get their dreams come true so they could realize it's not going to make them happy.
Right.
I think of Tom Brady with his seven Super Bowl rings and him saying after the third one, Is this it?
God, there's got to be more.
So now he's got four more.
There was.
There was more.
He's filled with peace and joy, right?
Now he's living this life where it's just nonjudgmental awareness, just connection to God.
That's not what happens.
If you want to live an extraordinary life, you have to develop self-awareness and learn who you truly are, your true self, not the heart that I talk about.
Leading with a heart and inner excellence.
But it's really important to understand that the heart needs to be trained.
The heart is naturally self-centered.
And so if you say well, I'm leading with my heart and I just got to go with my gut, go with what I feel right now, this could be very dangerous.
Well, what if you feel like 100% that I need to take illegal drugs right now?
I've got to do it.
Or I've got to smoke pot to feel okay right now, or I've got to have a drink of wine to feel okay, or another drink.
That may be 100% how you feel.
Every fiber in your body may feel that way.
It's true.
But it may 100% be leading you towards a cliff.
And here's something that's really powerful you can think about is there's a virtual reality headset game that you can play.
And I've brought it to several retreats where It's called Richie's Plank Experience.
And you put on this headset and you get into an elevator and it takes you up 60 or 80 floors.
And then the elevator opens up and you're over like New York City.
And there's just a plank.
And you've got to walk like six feet out to the end of the plank.
And the first time I did this, I was at a golf course in this restaurant.
There was kind of an open area.
And I'm standing on solid ground.
But I put this in there and everything in me was like don't walk in that plank.
Don't walk in that plank.
And this is what I'm talking about.
You're everything in you, your heart may be saying, I have to do this.
This is true for me.
And you could be completely walking off a cliff.
And so in that moment, what I had to do was I had to make sure that I
I went by the truth, not by my feelings.
Yeah, it's starting to come.
So if we were to ask an addict right, a heroin addict like, what's the thing that you want and you feel like you need most in your life, they're going to say something that's very unhealthy for them.
And us on the other side, it's so easy for us to see that.
But we're in the midst of it.
It's very hard for them to convince themselves otherwise.
I love that idea of like, you have to, you can't just listen to the heart.
You have to train the heart.
In that process of training the heart, I think of the addicts.
That's uncomfortable.
That's painful.
It's going to get worse before it gets better.
And some of the spiritual practice, like if you, there's a few people I've talked about this that like it's actually.
It becomes really uncomfortable when you start to challenge the ego.
Is this something that you found?
That there is this sort of like You got to go through it before you get to the side?
It's not just like, okay, flip the switch, and now it's like I see in color.
There's a process that might be tough that actually keeps you from walking through it.
It's like, no, I'm just going to keep chasing the accolades, the awards, the attention.
That was a little bit easier.
Yeah, one of the problems that people have that are successful if you have a lot of resources, then when you get irritated you can just never deal with that again.
I'm not going to do that again or not deal with that person again.
And that's going to really limit your growth.
We're all addicts.
We all have had something that has been our go-to when we feel uncomfortable.
The heroin addict or the person that's overweight, that's just easy for the world to see.
But the need to be right, or addicted to your phone, or addicted to pornography, or addicted to dopamine.
I think it's so important to understand that, if you want to live an amazing life, one of the disciplines of inner excellence is to deprive the appetites.
As you get older, as you go through life, the tendency is going to be to try and make your life more and more comfortable.
And that's a dangerous path.
That's the natural tendency that I've fallen into is I just want my life more comfortable.
And so I'm going to try and get more things, more people, more situations that make my life easier.
That is not how the universe creates extraordinary life.
The key thing to understand.
If you want to live an extraordinary life like I shared, with amazing experiences, deep enrichment relationships, learning and growing, feeling fully alive, you need to know that the best possible life has one foot in joy and one foot in suffering.
It's not my favorite.
That's just how the universe is.
Right.
Patrick, before you jump on, I want to just make sure we come back, because I think we Maybe I missed it.
We have those three things.
The critic, the monkey mind.
The monkey mind is the cluttered.
The critic is what we're trying to fight there is the need to judge.
Did we talk about the third, the trickster?
The trickster.
Yeah.
Sorry, we didn't.
Thank you for bringing that up, Ben.
The trickster.
So when I think of the trickster and I got this word from a guy named John Kehoe who wrote a book called Mind Power Into the 21st Century amazing book, a great friend of mine.
It's just kind of simplified what I think about the mind.
And I read it 20 years ago, still a great book.
And so the trickster I think of as that part of our mind that's always threatened, always comparing, and it lies to you.
And it's so important to know that you are not your thoughts.
You're not your mind. your own mind is going to lie to you.
And if you don't understand that, then you're going to get caught up in terrible thoughts.
And it's also important to understand the most graceful, loving people have had horrible thoughts.
And the problem is when you start to fuse with those thoughts and feel like that's who I am, because now you're going to feel guilt and shame and then that's going to lead you to make poor decisions.
I saw this great bumper sticker that said, don't believe everything that you think.
I thought it was so cool.
It's like the trickster.
Is there another part of the trickster that is this sort of, I mean, it's just this.
Not only you're not.
You might have bad thoughts doesn't mean you're a bad person, but this also sort of like the trickster, I feel like is so intertwined into the affluenza thing, right.
It's going to trick you that happiness is on the other side of success.
I still like, I'm so aware of this.
This is what we talk about every week on the show.
And I still, I'm telling myself that story a little bit.
So here's the, I'm going to go back to the story.
It was like, we are on Cape Cod every summer.
It's this beach community.
I'm like, when we get a boat, right?
When we get a boat, we're going to, it's going to be awesome.
Right.
Cause I don't think it's in this status game wise.
It's not like and because we have a boat and look at my I truly, because I think it's because it's where me, I'm trying to question it.
I'm going to have better experiences with the people I love.
Because we're going to be able to have more deeper and meaningful relationships and more awesome experiences.
But here's the thing.
The punchline of this is we got a boat and I'm pumped and it's awesome.
But now the story I tell myself is yeah, when we get that next bigger boat, we're going to be able to.
There's always a bigger boat.
Yeah.
Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy me a boat.
It can buy me a truck to pull it.
But I justify it.
And I don't know if this is real or not because I'm like, we love it so much.
We have so much connection.
I could be with my kids.
We're on the boat and they can't go anywhere else and they love it.
But it's a small boat, so we don't get to go on the boat every day because we get weathered out.
If we had a bigger boat, we'd be able to do more meaningful things, bigger trips.
We have more time with the kids.
What's the process?
What's the right thing to go is like are you just kind of moving goalposts or is this a real thing that you are actually going to be able to have those more meaningful things?
Things being relationships.
There's two things here meaningful life, peace and joy, and then there's also the diminishing returns.
And so, if we talk about diminishing returns, the more that you go down the road of making your life more comfortable and happier with happiness I define as a positive, temporary feeling based on what's happening, better circumstances that you like.
You have great definitions.
Thank you.
I think it's so important if you want to live a great life, you have to be a good communicator.
There's diminishing returns on pursuing happiness.
The more that you get more comfortable, the more you're going to need to be more comfortable.
That's just how it goes.
This is not only important to know, but it's also a good thing that The more I make myself comfortable, the more I'm going to need.
It's not like as soon as you start flying in first class a lot, then you're starting to think about private jets.
As soon as you get a boat, you're going to want a bigger boat.
And then the bigger boat is not going to be enough because it's diminishing return.
So that's something important to think about.
Even more important is the understanding of joy and meaningful life.
What do you want most of your kids, Ben?
Well, I want them to live deep, meaningful lives.
That's what I want for them more than anything else.
Okay, so if you want that, then the boat's not going to do it.
Yeah, but Jim, it's a good boat.
The boat can be a part of it.
I'm not saying that you should get rid of the boat.
The boat can be a part of it because, like you said, it puts everyone together and that's a good thing.
But understand what's going to be far more important is who you become and do you live a life of sacrificial love.
What's in your heart and teaching them how to live sacrificially, how they can deprive their appetites to cultivate the spiritual life, and how we're created for relationship and how, when you serve others, that's where the meaning comes from.
And when you devote your life to a purpose beyond yourself, then you can have the most extraordinary life.
And if you don't have a clear plan and system to do this, the natural tendency is I want to make my life easier and more enjoyable.
That's the path you're going to go down unless you interrupt it with a clear plan.
Can you say that word again?
Deprive the appetite?
Yeah, so the discipline of one of the nine disciplines of inner excellence is to deprive the appetites in order to cultivate the spiritual life.
I first heard this from a podcast with a guy named Tyler Staton and I think his name was Chris Couch.
But that idea I think is this kind of somewhat of a stoic idea.
So important.
This goes along with the understanding that the best possible life has one foot in joy, one foot in suffering.
If you want to live an amazing life, you need to have some level of health.
And health means strong muscles.
Strong muscles, the only way to get strong muscles is you have to break them down.
There's no other way.
You have to go through the suffering of breaking down the muscles to get them strong.
And that's kind of how life is.
You can't gain wisdom by reading about it in a book.
You have to go through difficult things.
Life is training for you, and the training comes in the difficulty.
And if you resist the training, then you're also resisting the wisdom and the best life.
Life is training for you.
What are we training for?
A life of glory.
I define glory as the brilliance and weightiness of infinite inherent worth.
So my life.
I'm obsessed about being on the cover of Sports Illustrated and being the superstar on the cover of magazines.
And so to have that sort of glory.
But that glory is not only fleeting, it can be hurtful to the best possible life, because it can create this pride that creates the self-centeredness that leads to fear.
And so the feeling of infinite inherent worth, then there's no more comparison.
There's no more need to be better than others.
There's only love.
When you get rid of everything, when you get rid of fear, then the only thing that's left is love.
Fear is the big obstacle.
And fear comes from self-centeredness.
Yeah, you're right.
When the central purpose of your life revolves around loving and serving others, a powerful series of events begins to unfold.
Fear loses some of its grip since fear is self-focused while service is focused on others.
You've talked a little bit already a couple times about connectedness being sort of the goal or the thing we should be aiming ourselves towards.
Can you talk about Maslow's selfless actualizers a little bit and its relationship, or where connectedness and community and love fits into that?
Yeah, Maslow's hierarchy. this pyramid is actually not something that he created.
And so this was created after his death, I believe, was the pyramid aspect of it.
Hmm.
And I think it gets confused, because he talks about self actualizers and I think it's very powerful model, but it's I think it's better understood as a selfless actualizer, because when you're having the best moments in your life, there's no concern for self.
Like if you're standing at the Grand Canyon or beautiful sunset, you're not thinking how great you are.
Or if it's really, really beautiful, you're caught up in the moment of the beauty.
There's no thoughts of self.
Great book, great movie, anything great moment, the self is completely gone, because the self has too many limitations.
When we think about ourself now, the subconscious which is running our life with our heart, its main role is to protect you.
And so it does that, by reminding you of all your failures and anything that can be a problem, it's going to be on the lookout for oh, that could be a problem.
Oh, that was painful.
That was painful.
Be careful about that.
And so that's why selfless is so important.
And in other words, walking in love.
I think we're always walking in love or fear, and one version of love, or some version of love or some version of fear, some aspect.
And so.
We talk about here on the show.
One of our big pillars is something we just call living with your heart on fire, which is a nice way to say living with purpose, living with passion.
And you talk about something in the book in inner excellence called Zoe, which is full aliveness through love, wisdom and courage together.
I just think this is such a wonderful idea and maybe a great place for us to start sort of closing down this conversation.
Can you talk to us a little bit about Zoe as perhaps the pinnacle of what InterExcellence is trying to move us towards?
Yeah, it's always a Greek word.
It means absolute fullness of life, to feel fully alive, to be vibrating at the highest level of positive energy.
When I was, I spent five years full-time writing and researching the book, gave away over half my possessions and moved to the desert to live a life of solitude and figure out my life.
And that's where InterExcellence was born.
And I was writing the book and I asked my friend to read the manuscript from my church.
And she said, I read InterExcellence.
Have you ever heard of the word Zoe?
And I said, no.
And she said, It's actually a word in the Bible that's used a lot.
It means life, absolute fullness of life, to feel fully alive.
She said, I think that's what your book is about.
And I said, yes, that's exactly what my book is about.
I've always obsessed about being a superstar and wanting to have what the world says is success.
But what I've realized is what I've always really wanted is to feel fully alive.
And then the great learning for me in the desert was that when you become fully alive and live that life, then you're better.
Everything else is better.
You become a better parent.
You become a better person.
You become better at your job.
And it's our greatest desire to feel fully alive.
We get that desire met when we love others unconditionally.
Inner excellence they seem to be, and the best possible life.
It almost seems to be a very I mean, you said it, but they're very similar with a slight shift.
I think that inner excellence is through the lens of performance, whereas the best possible life is more about performance fulfillment.
To pull back to the InterExcellence one, because it's kind of where our show started was in the competitive arena.
And a lot of people are in athletics and you obviously started your career as a competitive athlete.
Where does competition fit into this?
It seems like The path might be to sell half your possessions and move to the desert, but there might be a place where competition could serve us, if approached more appropriately.
Yeah, I think I'm a better competitor now that I did that.
So the word compete comes from a Latin word, competere, which means to seek together.
And so it's really misunderstood, I think.
To seek together.
The word has been twisted in Western culture.
Yeah, it means to seek together.
So if you're playing tennis against somebody, for example, that person loves tennis.
You love tennis.
You're both playing this game together.
The opponent is not the enemy.
They're a partner in the dance.
This Phil Jackson's line from Sacred Hoops says So powerful for me, really influential for me very early on.
And when you realize that say, I work with a lot of pro athletes.
When you realize that you want to play, you play basketball.
It's not the end.
Basketball is not the end for you, or golf or whatever it is.
Basketball is a way where you can feel fully alive.
It's a way where you can learn and grow to become the person you're meant to be in this season of your life.
You're a basketball player, a golfer, a football player, and you can use that sport to become the person you're meant to become.
And when you compete, to do that, to learn and grow as your number one goal.
I'll give you an example.
Opening day, Thursday, the Mets playing the Pirates.
And one of my clients plays for one of those teams.
And we're talking about the next.
And he asked me a great question.
How do I hit 300 and hit so many home runs?
And I said, okay, so what you're really saying is how do you have a great season?
And I said, You have a great season if you make the season about personal growth.
Pro baseball, 162 games.
And it's like 12-hour days, six, seven days a week sometimes.
It's very immersive and it's obsessive about stats.
But stats are all description of the past and potential future.
If you want to be great, you have to learn how to be fully engaged in the moment.
If you want to be fully engaged in the moment, unattached to your results, then you need to focus on something more powerful and meaningful than something that you can't fully control.
For that to be not focused on the past or the future.
To be fully present, you have a kind of like a some like a framework, a way that we could kind of do that one you said is to like get out of your head into your heart.
Can you just unpack that quickly?
Every day you're fueling your soul and your heart with everything that you read watch, listen to people, you hang out with things you let your eyes go to.
And if you don't have strict boundaries around that then, like for example today, i'm flying to california to go to a cabin in the woods in Crestline California, to work on the InterExcellence workbook for nine days.
And then right after that I go to the InterExcellence Youth with a Mission retreat to build a house in Mexico for five days.
So I have this social media thing that blocks social media, called the BRIC, and it's this device.
You tap it and then you can't access social media, and so i'm not gonna unbrick my phone, it's gonna stay bricked the whole time.
I just decided that, talking to my spiritual mentor before this for my trip, my next trip because i know that's the danger is well, what if i can't access social media on my phone for a month?
Let's say i go for a month.
That's a small danger, small sacrifice.
The great danger is if I spend time scrolling when I'm in the cabin in the woods.
What else can we do to be fully present?
You know, in the best possible life.
I talk about the three worlds that we live in, the three worlds model.
And it's something that I use with every single client.
And essentially it's the third world is your world of results and circumstances.
It's win or lose, success or failure.
It's all the people in your life, all the circumstances in your life and all the results that you get.
It's the world that I've obsessed about and that everyone that's successful or wants to be successful obsesses about.
It's the culture that you're immersed in and everything you can see, feel, touch, feel.
Think about everything that you see.
World two is your inner world and all your actions that follow.
And then world one is the unseen world that controls the world we can see, touch, and feel.
World one is the world of everything that's eternal.
World three is everything that's temporary.
And so when you wake up, world two is the world where everything hinges.
The world of your nine to five, this is your inner world and your actions that follow.
And so you wake up, what happens to most people is right away they go to third world.
They're checking the results and circumstances.
What's going on with the markets and social media and What are people, what's my email?
All these different things.
And it's something that everyone's done.
That can be very problematic.
Because now we're going to be putting out fires.
First, we're going to see that.
If we go right to third world, we're going to see that.
And then we're going to get feelings based on what we see.
And those feelings are going to be not stable because there's way too much out of your control.
Things that you want can't control and things that you don't want that are happening.
And now you're going to get these negative feelings and start your day like that.
And so most people are in world two.
They might be playing the masters here, coming up very soon in world two, but their heart and mind is in world three of the past and future.
And every goal you ever set, every result you ever get is past and future.
It's all world three.
Can't fully control it.
So we need to learn how to live fully engaged lives, heart, mind, and body in world two every day.
And that's where world one comes in.
You have to learn about who you are and how you want to feel, how you want to live, what's most important to you, who is your true self, and develop that and cultivate a purpose beyond yourself.
So that's what you focus on every day and get to regularly.
Last question, and then we'll let you get back to your day and your trip.
But speaking of the trip, speaking of bricking your phone while you're gone, it reminded me of something that you quote, Dallas Willard.
And I think it's in the section about being fully present.
And Dallas Willard writes, you must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.
So, as a closing note on this conversation about inner excellence, about how to be selfless so that we can be fearless, how do we, how do you maybe make sure that you are ruthlessly eliminating hurry?
Because Hurry seems to be something we are all afflicted with today.
So how do we start to ruthlessly eliminate hurry so that we can be present, so that we can eventually be selfless and fearless?
Yeah, I was recently asked what's the biggest challenge that we face in our day-to-day lives and I said busyness.
Busyness and hurry, they go together.
For example, I think part of living the best possible life is having a heart of compassion.
And compassion literally means to suffer with.
Passion means to suffer.
And it's not possible to be compassionate in a hurry.
You can't live an extraordinary life in a hurry.
I used to think that hurry, I would hurry to reduce my stress.
I'm going to hurry up and get these things done so then I can not be so rushed and so stressed.
I didn't realize until later that hurry was causing my stress.
And there's this great line that I don't remember.
Who said it was from a sermon podcast, but he said I wasn't in a hurry.
He was driving.
I wasn't in a hurry, but hurry was in me.
Hmm.
So how do we reduce this hurry sickness and this busyness?
We have to simplify our lives.
And it's two things that are so important.
You need to have a purpose for your life that goes beyond yourself.
Otherwise, you're never going to simplify your life.
You need to take time to sort that out.
And at our retreats, we work on that.
Every retreat, people walk away with their life purpose.
And you start by thinking about how you want to feel, how you want to live meaning, how do you want to face adversity?
Who do you want to become?
And what's most important to you, your values?
And simplifying your life is hard.
It's a harder life.
Just imagine, what's the most simple life?
Living in a cabin in the woods with no electricity.
That's a simple life, right?
Easy to picture.
You're cutting your own firewood, candles for light.
Well, it's a hard life.
You don't get Amazon deliveries.
You don't get food delivered.
It's a hard life, but it's a simple life.
And so life has become very complex, and complexity can make things simpler, but it also can create way too many thoughts from way too many concerns.
Jim, thank you so much.
You're the author of Inner Excellence and the new book, The Best Possible Life.
We really appreciate your time and wish you well on your nine days of no social media.
Thank you so much for having me.
What a joy.
Jim is awesome, man.
Thanks.
Thank you so much for being here.
Two quick things before you go.
First, the 531 listener guide for this episode is in the show notes.
Five big ideas, three reflection questions, and one key takeaway.
Check it out at the link in in the show notes.
And second, if you're ready to do the daily work, not just listen to the show, the Chase Club is where the crew does that together.
Daily lessons, monthly challenges, a Friday Chase Club, chat club all of it at the link in the show notes and chasing excellence dot email.
