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Hello and welcome back to the show. I am Patrick.
I'm here as always with Ben and we are joined by our friend Chris Irwin.
Gentlemen, how are you both doing today?
Good. Terrific. Fantastic. Glad to be back.
Good to see you both. Chris, welcome back.
This is the fourth time you've been on the show.
I think that might be a record. That is, I think, actually a record.
Yeah. You did a good job. You came up with a framework that required four conversations, Chris.
Yes, at least. Good job. Yeah. Yeah, which is either a really good thing or really bad thing.
It's too complicated to get through in one.
That's right. So for folks maybe who haven't tuned into the episodes that we've had with you before, I'm going to do a quick reminder of what we're talking about.
We are talking about Chris's idea of the mind killer.
So the first time we had you on was in December of 2024.
We talked about oblivion and awareness, and we talked about The concept of mind killer is what they are and specifically focused on the first mind killer, again, oblivion.
And we talked about how developing awareness of our thoughts is the foundation for what you deem as mental fitness, which is a very cool concept we've stolen from you.
Second episode, January 28th, The Inner Echo Chamber.
We talk about two more mind killers, storytelling and suppression.
We talked about how we create harmful narratives about past events and suppress emotions and introduce reframing and emotional processing as countermeasures.
And then the last time you were on was in April of this year.
The title of the episode was The Turtle Principle.
And we talked about the fourth mind killer, fear and its countermeasure, openness.
And in this one, we're going to talk about the final mind killer, stagnation.
We're gonna talk about why curiosity and wonder can keep us moving and what developing a personal mission statement has to do with all of it.
So I'm excited to dive into this conversation with you.
Chris, I like to do this. Could you remind us what mind killers are?
Maybe a short definition so that we're all on the same page, perhaps if we haven't tuned into those previous episodes.
Yep, for sure. So mind killers are essentially the way that we self-sabotage our own mental health and prevent ourselves from being mentally fit.
So most of the time these days, people think of mental health as a pathology, right?
It's something to treat. And if there's something wrong, you have a problem of some sort.
You go to a therapist or you get pharmaceuticals or both, some variant of that.
And the whole concept of mental fitness is that, no, this is a discipline that gets better and fitter through training, exactly like physical health does.
But in order to be able to do that, you need to know what you're doing wrong.
So in terms of the ways that you're not mentally fit, what are those things?
What are the tendencies that we have to drag down our own mental health?
And so that's what the mind killers are.
And I've stated this before, but it's born out of the fear is the mind killer, which comes from the movie Dune.
That's where I kind of, I sort of stole that term from that movie.
There's this whole thing called the litany against fear, which the whole idea is that fear will kill your mind in a dire circumstance where you can't think rationally.
So I just kind of like broaden that idea to these other things.
And so you mentioned we've gone over oblivion, storytelling, suppression, and fear and their countermeasures.
And now the fifth one. And I should say too, there's a framework here that I haven't talked about yet in terms of the way that you can kind of like graphically think of these things that I think is real important to kind of quickly go over.
So if you think of a two by two matrix, right?
You have like four boxes that are arranged in a square where your X axis, so to speak, is time basically.
So past and future, right? So the two boxes that are stacked on the left represent the past.
The two on the right represent the future.
And then your Y axis is essentially your energetic, your mind, basically the energy of your mind.
So the top two boxes is thinking and the bottom two is feeling, right?
So you've got kind of like thinking and emotions like that.
So then each one of those boxes, you've got that matrix there, right?
So right in the center of that is oblivion.
That is just complete lack of awareness of what's going on in the present.
It really kind of overlays the whole thing, right?
If you just have no awareness of your past thoughts, your future thoughts, your emotions, nothing, you can't do anything here.
So that sort of sits in the center. And then if you start at the top left box, that's storytelling.
That's your thinking about the past. That's the stories we tell.
That's how we think about the past. Suppression is a feeling about the past problem.
So you go down, right? That's your feeling past.
And then you go over to fear, which is your feeling future.
And now we have one box left, which is the thinking future, which is where stagnation comes into play.
Brilliant. I love that visual. Yeah. What, if anything, do we need to know or understand about just the idea of stagnation as a concept to get into this conversation about why it is that fifth mind killer?
What do you mean by stagnation? I think what you need to kind of realize is, so if you think about that framework where you have those four boxes with oblivion kind of overlaying the whole thing, it's like, okay, what would that mean?
What does your thinking future mean exactly?
Because a lot of people I think would say it's fear.
People think fearful things. Like that would be the biggest problem when it comes to thinking about your future.
But we've already talked about this. Fear is an emotion.
It's a feeling problem, right? It may be born of a thought sometimes, but the real problem is the emotion itself.
It's the energy that goes along with that and what you do with that.
So it really is this idea of like, you just don't grow.
You don't develop. You wake up today and you're exactly the same as you were yesterday in terms of your mental development.
Not just what you know, but what you're able to do.
We go back to this idea of, fitness, as I define it in either the mental or physical realm is your capacity to act.
That is the simplest way I can think of defining it.
And so if you're going to have more capacity to act, you have to get smarter.
You have to be able to do more. You have to build skills.
You have to do all those things. And unfortunately, so many people hit this stagnation point where they just plateau off and they're not learning anything or developing any skills they're basically just like getting distracted with social media and watching tv and that kind of thing and to me it's the place where a lot of normal typical kind of mindfulness practices will fall short.
There's a lot of talk that mindfulness, great meditation, breath work, journaling, all that stuff, all this like internal analysis stuff, which is what we've talked about so far, right?
Becoming much more aware of your thought processes, dealing with suppressed emotions, reframing your stories, becoming more open.
So you're not like pushing back on things and becoming resistant, right?
But then that's still just, it's all like internally, like a lens is internal and you're not like becoming more worldly, right?
And I think that's a big chunk that's missing from those things.
We almost put it in this like academic realm where it's not part of that.
And to me, that is the final thing. It's like, okay, if you get this Ferrari of an engine of your mind really tuned up, well, now what can you do with it?
Like where can you make this thing go? And that piece is equally important, as important.
All right. So I think that the obvious where I go is Ferrari of a mind, love it.
Stagnation, bad. Build, skills, good. Capacity to act, love it.
Act like a Ferrari, even better. Yep. Where do we start?
Yeah. And actually, let me frame up a little bit more of why I think we suffer from this a little bit.
Part of it is just societal, I think. We still live in this model where we sort of have like an education phase of life, and then we have a work phase of life, and then we have a play golf until you die phase of life, right?
Basically, it's like 20-ish years, maybe a little more, where we learn stuff.
You go to school and your job, so to speak, the expectation is that you're learning things.
Skills to like you're playing sports or whatever it may be, or you're playing a musical instrument or something like that.
And then but that's all in preparation for like this work phase of life that you go into next.
And that's going to be 50, 60 plus years, whatever that may be.
Of course, it used to be a lot of like we're in that like one career or a few careers for your whole life and that's completely changed.
But people kind of shift into like the skills and stuff.
The stuff they learn is about work at that point, right?
It's about like getting better at my job or it's like I may have to take some training or something like that.
But the kind of like learning for learning's sake completely falls off the map for a lot of people.
And a lot of stuff is considered childish too.
It's like, well, we don't like do skills, even a sport or a hobby or something like that, tinkering with stuff.
And then again, and then it's like, well, and then you finally retire and then you just kind of like frump on the couch and play golf and get tan like Ben until you die, right?
Like that's kind of the thing. And nowadays- I'm tan, the next step is death.
Yeah, the next step is death. Damn. But-
And nowadays, too, I feel like that's like we're almost at a race to the bottom intellectually in a lot of ways.
Right. Like like social media and media just keeps making things like dumber for people.
You even hear this if you're writing a book as I as I am, where it's like you got to make that people read at a sixth grade level.
You got to make that you got to dumb it down.
You got to dumb it down, make it more easy to follow.
Like people can't understand that. Right.
And that's, I mean, I get that. I get the accessibility behind that.
But that's a terrible statement about humanity in general.
Because to me, you just then have to be getting it lower and lower and lower.
Like eventually you're just communicating grunts and emojis and, you know, we're back to like cave people or something like that.
So I think we just have to take it upon ourselves to break out of that trend and really think on a day-to-day basis as I'm going to bed. what have i done to actually increase the capacity of my mind today what have i done to expand it am i did i learn anything new really learn anything right not just like watch some bullshit youtube video or whatever but did i learn something today am i building my and i can get into the different ways i break this out but that's basically the idea is there a A difference between the brain and the mind in this sense.
So there's a lot of coming out right now in terms of the neuroplasticity of the brain.
And as you challenge it, whether it's through Rubik's Cube or reading a challenging novel, your brain will essentially rewire and grow and evolve and the cognitive decline gets pushed back.
Is there something different that – is that what we're talking about or is there something different on top of that that says, yes, all good, but in terms of this stagnation, what we are trying to do is work on –
And walking into the mental dojo and training the mind, like stop the stagnation, actually take steps forward.
And in order to do that, it's not just read Shakespeare.
It's not just do more Sudoku. It is or that new game that's like really everyone's playing now.
It's from Crazy Rich Asians. Have you seen?
It's kind of like, no. Have you seen that?
No, no. And that's what, like, all these soccer moms are playing this now.
Oh, wow. And you ask them about it, and it's sort of like gin rummy, where you, like, rummy cube, where you're, like, trying to do math to make combinations and stuff.
And they're like, it's good for the mind.
Okay. I get that that's good for the mind.
Is it like Mahjong? I think that's it. That's exactly it.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So is that, I get that's good for the mind.
But when I hear that, I hear good for the brain.
Is it also good for the mind in terms of the way you're saying it, in terms of mental fitness, having the capacity to act in terms of not just cognitive ability, but also this sort of centeredness, this resilience, this emotional maturity, this ability to, if you get knocked off center, to self-soothe and get yourself back on the right track?
Yeah. So let me go out at that a couple of different directions.
First of all, just getting back to something we probably talked about in the first episode that we did together, the relationship between brain and mind, right?
So brain to me is an organ in your body.
That's all it really is, right? It's no different in that regard than your heart or your lungs or anything like that.
And the health of your brain is important, for sure.
It impacts your mind. But your mind is the energy.
It is the experience. It is you. It is that sort of ephemeral thing that we can't put a point to or really put our finger on or anything like that.
And that's a really important distinction.
Obviously, our mind is somehow, we don't even exactly know, it's somehow connected with our brain.
But that's not the only piece of it. And a lot of circles nowadays, we get really wrapped around brain health. which again is important, but I'm really talking about mind health, mental fitness, right?
So the things you're talking about, yes, there is for sure science out there that talks about how learning, doing that kind of things, there's neuroplasticity behind that, that stays off neurodegeneration and conditions like that, that there's a definite benefit sort of like biologically, right?
But in terms of the improved experience, yeah, absolutely.
Like that piece, because to me, that capacity act isn't just resilience or like not being able to write yourself.
It's not just that. Again, it's like I'm in a situation where I have to, problem solve my way out of it?
Have I done enough work ahead of time where I've got more tools in my toolbox to solve my way out of this situation, right?
Can I come up with a novel solution to something?
That is part of mental fitness. That is part of a fit mind as far as I'm concerned.
I'm getting a conversation with somebody and they're so outside of my wheelhouse that I can't even communicate effectively with them.
Can I improve that? Yeah, I can. And that to me is part of a fit mind.
It also just like even just in terms of having more knowledge that you can then turn in on yourself.
Obviously, right? The more you know, the more able you are to look at those things objectively and understand what's going on.
So to me, it's a huge piece of it that's critical to have.
The other thing I want to say real quick that I didn't kind of touch on is where you see this a lot, this kind of being stuck, being stagnant, is where people... spend a long time in a career and then they have to do something else.
Like you see it in veterans a lot. And that's why it kind of came to light for me.
It's like, you spend 20 years in the military and all of a sudden you're out of that.
People feel like, well, that's it for me.
That's the best thing I'll ever have done.
Their identity is so tied to something like that, that they can't break out of that and think, no, I can do something completely different.
And Patrick, I know I provided kind of a rough draft of the chapter of the book on this, but I talk about Bob Ross in there, who we all know Bob Ross.
Most people hopefully will still know him.
Well, at some point that's going to age out, but...
He's like this, you know, guy with the poofy hair and beard that painted happy little trees on TV.
And he's had this really like super mellow, he's like a human quaalude, just like super mellow, soft spoken.
Hey man, it's all happy trees and everything.
And we all know that persona. So it's like so strong, right?
Like you could have a little caricature of him.
People would know exactly what that is. But Bob Ross was a, spent 20 years in the air force as a, and at least part of that time as a drill instructor, like full metal jacket style, screaming at people.
And you would never know it seeing what he became.
And when I found out about that, it was like, he was, I think he was stationed in Alaska.
He like did some painting class or something, fell in love with painting.
It was like, when I'm done with this military stuff, I'm doing that.
And I'm never screaming at people ever again.
And he had the courage to like completely shift and do something.
He learned a completely new skill. Right.
And change the way he was. Now, it's not to say you have to go through such a dramatic transformation, but that thought of of I am that thinking again of this, like it's future storytelling in a lot of ways.
Right. Like when you look at this sort of. where it falls in that matrix, it's butted up against fear and storytelling.
And that's because those, it's kind of born from that.
Like it bleeds over from those things, right?
Like fear about what could happen in the future bleeds into that.
And this storytelling of like narrative from the past and that the identity, and I'm the type of person who that then leads to like, well, you know, yeah, I was that for 20 years.
It was best I'll ever do. And, you know, I might as well just like go out to pasture at this point.
I like that the two stories, or two of the stories you've told us in the last few episodes, Bob Ross and Bill Buckner.
I think everybody understands these stories from the 80s.
I'm curious, is a synonym for stagnation, that's probably not a synonym, but is what we're talking about with stagnation, could we also use the word lazy?
And how do those two things interplay with each other in your mind?
That's a good question. I've never really thought of it in terms of laziness, but I guess you could sort of think of it that way.
That being said, I think there's people who are not lazy who are stuck, right?
Like you can think of people that are very busy, very successful, go to work every day, work hard, go to the gym, do all of that, but they're still stuck.
10 years from now, they're going to be the exact same as they are now.
They literally may not have learned anything outside of job requirements.
They spend any of that time that they could just sort of digesting media and whatever.
They can't do anything new with their bodies.
And I believe a big part of this is skill development, whether that is...
You know, an instrument like me or woodworking or juggling or magic or archery or whatever, you know, like that or sport.
Even a new sport can be something like that, too.
It's just a way where you're expanding your abilities.
That capacity just becomes bigger and broader, right?
I want to go back a little bit to what you talked about a few minutes ago, this sort of three stages that we all kind of get shoved towards, which is, you know, education or schooling and then work and then Ben gets a tan and dies.
That's what I got out of that so far. What about the pasture?
He's done. Can we go back to that education piece?
And I wonder, is the way we are educated and obviously the way we educate the generations behind us, do you Is how we think about education feeding into what ultimately becomes what sounds like a midlife crisis of stagnation?
Is there something about how we're taught to learn that creates the stagnation?
I'm trying to think of the way to kind of frame that a little bit, like the way we're taught to learn.
I think it is somewhat just a societal construct.
Again, of like, you do this for a certain period of time, then you do this for a certain period.
Now, I think that this is probably potentially changing a little bit.
But certainly for me growing up, that was the paradigm.
That is how we sort of thought of life. And I...
I benefited from having a father who, he would always say to me, I never figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up.
And I honestly never really knew what he was doing for a job either.
He did a lot of different things over the course of his life.
But he just had that attitude and he was always reading a book and he was always curious about things.
He was always asking people questions. He always just, even though he was super intelligent, he kind of, he never...
Whoever he was talking to, he made them feel like they were the most important thing in the room and was just like, so wanted to understand more about them.
And I just, I really thought that that attitude was so critical.
Now, whether that's something that he was just inherently had or whatever...
I don't know. I don't know. Maybe, maybe that's the case, but it was a good model to learn from.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't know, man. Like, I think some of it is, is again, societal and we're sort of taught that way.
And then, and then, but. really what we should be doing with people, right, is teaching them how to learn.
That idea of just like perpetual learning, I think is so, so critical.
I think you guys subscribe to that, ascribe to it, but it's something that you, I think you have to consciously pay attention to on a day-to-day basis.
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Can we maybe move into, I think he used the phrase, the cycle of wonder.
Am I getting that right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
So it's basically a way to break this down into, as you know, everything I do, I try to make it non just theoretical, but actionable.
Like what does this, what does this actually look like in terms of a workout, so to speak, right?
Like work workout or physiology is great, but like, what am I doing on a day-to-day basis to make this happen?
Um, So I look at it as you've got two phases, so to speak, of breaking out of this.
And the countermeasure to this is wonder, this idea of just like curiosity, right?
Like just childlike curiosity about things.
And so if we're going to break out of this, there's kind of two pieces to it.
There is the learning piece, like how do we bring on the information?
And then there's the application of those things, right?
So it's like we want to acquire the new abilities, whatever those look like, and then we want to be able to apply them.
And so the learning piece, the acquiring piece is two things.
It's knowledge, straight up knowledge, like stuff that I understand that I didn't understand yesterday and skills, which is your body being able to do something.
And there is a distinction there. I think of something like a martial art, right?
You can read books on how to do martial arts and really understand how martial arts works and not be able to do it.
Right? Reading all the books in the world about jiu-jitsu is not going to make you better at jiu-jitsu.
You may understand it, you may be able to watch it and like see what moves are happening and the history of it and all of that does not make you good at that at all.
You then need to go learn how to do it with your body, right?
You have to practice it. And the same is true with any other discipline, same as with music.
You can learn all about music theory and not be able to play a single musical instrument.
So you have to be doing both those things.
Now, they don't have to be necessarily in the same discipline, but the idea of I'm doing things where I'm just basically reading, right, like understanding stuff that way, but then taking on some kind of skill that I practice, right, on a day-to-day basis.
For me, that typically is musical instruments.
I've got guitars and pianos that I'm, I'll piano, digital piano that I'm kind of tinkering around.
But I also like, I go, I still play soccer.
And I like to think that that is, there's all sorts of benefits to that, like community and you can name a whole bunch, you know, obviously the physical fitness aspect, but there's a skill base to it too, right?
Like I'm out there, I'm trying to like still get better at that skill.
And then there's the application of those things.
So when you have that capacity then, or as it's getting better, okay, now what do you do with it?
You can do three things. You can play, like literally free play, like just go around, plunk around on this thing, whatever it may be.
Again, that could be a sport where you just like... having fun with it, same thing with an instrument, like I'm just playing around with it, you can solve, problem solve.
So, and that's certainly like, think of something like chess, right?
Like if you learn how to play chess and play chess a lot, it's a problem solving thing.
Like I, all of a sudden I can see solutions That I couldn't see before.
And that's a whole fascinating thing in and of itself, which I wish I knew the neuroscience behind.
At some point, I need to get into that. But just you guys have all had that moment where it's like you're looking at something and you're looking at something and you're looking at something and all of a sudden, like the solution comes to you.
How that happens, I don't know. But I do know the more of a foundation you have around whatever that is, the more likely that is to happen.
And there's a cross-disciplinary thing about it too, right?
So like you then start, the more knowledge you have that's broader in skills, you can bring those into things.
It's like, you know, if you were... If you're an athlete, you can then bring some of those skills and knowledge you learned as a competitive athlete into business, right?
There's applications across things. So we've got kind of free play, problem solving, and then creation, like the art of these things.
Once I know how to play a guitar, I can create a new piece of music.
If I learn how to paint, like Bob Ross, I can create something.
And I think that to me, as we talk about mental fitness and humanity, That ability, like there's no better, pardon the word, but personification of kind of the human mind than artistic expression.
It's the one place that I think we actually can improve on nature. like like there is there some beautiful kind of music in nature like bird song and waves crashing stuff sure but you compare that to you know Mozart it's just not even close like that's something you're able to bring something new into the world that didn't exist it's like beautiful and that's that's an incredible thing to be able to do but again it's built on the capacity you've you know, fostered over time.
You know, it's interesting. I thought you were going to say Bon Jovi.
I like Bon Jovi too, man. It's good too.
My son, my son is in a band and he, he only refuses to play songs by two, two bands and it's Bon Jovi and Guns N' Roses.
He refuses to play those bands? Yep. Right.
Guns N' Roses? I'm just like, you're wrong.
So you're wrong. Sorry. Like wrong. Like those are bangers.
You play those, people are going to lose their minds.
Yeah, you go rip out the solo to Sweet Child of Mine and you see what people lose their minds.
Game over. And then go talk about Bill Buckner and Bob Ross.
And then go talk about Bill Buckner and Bob Ross.
What's interesting, Chris, is what I'm thinking about, this idea of stagnation and creation, which I think you could, in a certain context, you can sort of juxtapose the consumption versus creation.
And we live in a very consumptive culture.
And in many ways, we're pushed towards consumption as sort of the American dream.
And what's interesting to me, the dots that I'm connecting is, everything's pushing us towards consumption.
And overconsumption tends to crowd out creation.
And that in and of itself creates this stagnation.
And so you've got all these people who, through varying means and methods, are being pushed somewhat consciously towards stagnation so it's almost like oh of course there are so many people who are feel stuck or feel unsatisfied or unfulfilled it's because their entire life leading up to that moment where they realize it has been here consume more consume more stuff and let that crowd out any moment you might have for creativity and creation 100 percent Yeah.
I mean, that is the model these days, right?
It's just like consume, consume, consume.
We're just going to push content at you at all times that you are very passive with.
And it's not to say that you can't consume content that's interesting or might teach you something.
You for sure can. But the majority of it is just kind of vapid nothingness, right?
It's just sort of like vacuous nothingness. nothing that that doesn't again you get to the end of the day and you're like what how did that really make me better and and it's not to say also like we need time for just recreation and we need time to unwind and we need time to just entertain and all that we need that but Part of the problem with that constant barrage of noise and information and everything, it's just like the ability to kind of separate and do nothing is people don't think as much anymore either.
Like, just think. Sit there and think for a little bit.
Right? I mean, and that goes back to sort of like the awareness of your own mind, but...
You just, people look for distraction and it's almost like, here's another thing too, the advent of AI, I think is making this worse because you just have a robot now that does your work for you.
And it's great, don't get me wrong. I love ChatGPT, it's a hugely valuable tool.
But when you're forced to actually think for yourself, it's almost uncomfortable these days.
I'll give you a prime example of this that just happened to me.
I'm working on this book and I use an AI tool to help me basically edit it.
And it's called Lex. Lex.page, really useful writing AI thing, just different than ChatGPT.
It's more designed for authors. And so as I'm writing, it's like, I chat with it and I help, it helps me kind of restructure things.
And I'm like, I don't like the way that sounds.
Can you give me, and I was coming back from a trip on a flight and I had two flights with a layover and neither flight had wifi on them, which is really rare these days to literally.
So it was like seven hours or something.
And I'd gotten through all the podcasts I had downloaded.
I'd read the entire book I had. I had nothing left.
And there was no screen either. There was no like videos to watch or anything.
It was like old school, like playing with nothing to do.
And I've got my laptop. They call that raw dogging.
Yeah, raw dogging. Yeah, right. Yeah, I've seen that.
No screen. You just stare at the seat. No headphones, no nothing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Raw dogging. Yeah, raw dogging.
So I sat there for a few minutes at the beginning of this flight that was going to be on for like three hours.
And I thought, all right, what can I do here?
I can't, I'm like, I guess I could take the manuscript that's in Lex and I could just put it in a word document and just work on it myself, like without AI.
And I was, it was daunting. I was like, shit, I'm going to have to just work on this myself.
Just think. And it was a little bit of a, checking myself aha moment of wow okay you that's something to be aware of right like your reliance on this thing this artificial stupidity it's the uh you know it segues so where it parallels so nicely because you've reframed this up as mental fitness yep right which is this thing that is trainable and if you work at it it improves it's not something you need to necessarily it can help, but a pharmaceutical or therapist, but no, you can go to the mental gym and do work.
You have to work at this thing. You can think of the evolution of our species, right?
Before the advent of the agricultural revolution, we were hunter gatherers and our physiques were, we didn't outsource our physicality. to a horse with a plow.
We didn't outsource it to a farm where we raised the cattle.
We had to go get it. We had to go hunt it.
We had to gather it. Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution, what we used to have to do to walk and transport on our backs, now we have cars and planes and trains and things move faster than a horse and we no longer could, we can now outsource more of our physicality what this with this AI, to your point, we are now outsourcing our cognition.
We are outsourcing our brains and our and if we're not careful about that, to your point, we're going to fall farther into stagnation because it's the environment we have to We have to fight against this as well.
Yes, we have to fight against the ultra processed food that is consumed our environments.
It's now when you get an oil change, you also have to say no to the Twizzlers.
When you go, you know, when you go when you go to buy a printer Ink from Staples, you have to say no to Sour Patch Kids.
It's everywhere. And you have to be so crazy intentional with this development of our physicality.
Otherwise, if you let the environment take over, you're going to be up against it.
It's the same thing with where we are at the very, very beginning stages of this cognitive play as well.
Yeah, yeah. I always envision, I think of that movie Idiocracy, Mike Judge, where it's just people get dumber and dumber and dumber and dumber.
Or like WALL-E, right? That movie. Yeah, WALL-E is the one that I think about a lot as well.
You know what also is interesting is you and Patrick both framed this up really nicely in terms of, you know, what we're in front of now is a lot more distraction.
Yeah. We talked about this framework, and Patrick, maybe you can help me remember who actually presented this, but there's this really cool, Chris, thing that we came across, which is, you know, 50, 100 years ago, there was art.
And art enhanced your well-being. Art made you better.
When you watched a ballet, when you read Shakespeare, when you saw even some really incredible movies from the past that were art.
Then somewhere along the lines, art turned into entertainment.
And it wasn't necessarily about who can make the most beautiful thing.
It's who can make the most entertaining thing.
That then turned into... Maybe I'm missing one here, Patrick.
You can help me out. Distraction, as you said.
And then distraction, how it's now led into... The game is not... the distraction play like, no, no, no.
Pay attention over here. Don't worry about that.
Pay attention over here. It's here. It's in the phone.
It's now turned into addiction. How do you get them to actually not stop scrolling?
Like it's literally, that's the game. It's been monetized to who can keep eyeballs glued the most.
That you know, is scary. Maybe I'm doing a little of my own storytelling and finding that emotional thing about the future.
But it is one of those things that we have to, again, be cautious of because the game now is not... We think it's art or we think it's entertainment.
This is so cool. But when you get to the end, as you said, you get to the end of the day, you're like, what the hell?
What did I do? All I watched was like seven second reels of nothing.
Because you were distracted and addicted.
It's funny, the more I think about it, the more I feel like this mind killer specifically is going to become more and more and more relevant.
Again, it's all relevant and all that work needs to be done, but this is going to become more and more a part of people's... It's going to become more pervasive in society where people have to resist this urge.
You talk about like the music industry now.
I watched a video. There's a guy, Rick Beato, who does a, he has a YouTube channel, which I really like.
I don't know if you guys have ever seen his stuff, but you know, whatever it is, millions of subscribers, but does a lot of breakdown music, just like really knows music theory, how to play instruments and just dives into like what makes songs really good.
And he's talking about AI music now where you can, and he does this in basically real time.
It takes him like a couple of minutes to, where he goes into whatever i don't know if it's claude or chat gpt and just basically creates a fake artist says hey i need an indie kind of artist guy creates a photo looks like a real photo of this person not a real person fake name little bio and then it's like okay i want lyrics about this circumstance was like driving through the desert or something Here you go.
Lyrics, right? Instantaneous. And then throws it into an AI music engine, use these lyrics, make a song in this style.
Boom. And it sounds just like, I mean, like it's getting to the point.
There was a little one that started with the AI music.
You could kind of hear, but it was like a guy strumming a guitar singing where I was like, if I heard that on the radio, I would have no idea.
And no one had to learn an instrument to do that.
No one had to learn how to write lyrics, no one had to do any introspection, nothing, zero.
And that's fine from a consumer perspective of like, oh, this is a nice song.
But from a people that are going to generate the content from, again, a personal growth perspective, zero.
That's terrifying, terrifying of where we could get to of nobody able to do anything anymore other than feed prompts into computers.
I did a video the other day on social media where I was just showing people how to...
Like I just figured out a guitar solo by ear because, you know, again, even that's a shortcut, like in a, in a skill.
And I, I'm not saying I don't do it. Of course I do.
Like I'll look on videos on how to, if I want to learn a song, how to play it.
But the skill of, I'm just going to listen to this and figure it out.
Note by note is again, like something I have to force myself to do, but there's a huge benefit to it.
It makes me a better musician. I hear things now that I didn't hear before where I'm like, Oh, I know what he's doing there.
You know, that kind of thing. So yeah, it's going to become extremely relevant, more and more relevant.
I think there's another interesting parallel.
There's lots of interesting parallels between the mental fitness and the physical fitness.
And I think one of them is, and I think we've seen the physical end of it for the last, whatever, 20, 30 years, which is that to get fit, to get fitter is very uncomfortable.
And you have to accept that discomfort day after day after day in order to move closer to that fitness.
And I think that what we're talking about today, especially what we're just talking about is to fight against stagnation, to create and not consume, to think when it's easy not to think, is we are now entering into a period where it's going to be just as easy to be physically unfit as it is to be mentally unfit because it's so easy to whatever it is, use AI to consume, to jump on your phone, to do whatever.
And now more and more and more, we're faced with the discomfort of starting to build the mental fitness because the world is conspiring to make it really, really easy to just take the easy road one more time and one more time.
And the other thing that we didn't even talk about yet is it's more and more just telling you what you already want to hear.
Right. It's not exposing you to new ideas.
It's like, oh, you like this. I'm going to feed you more of that.
You like this is what you believe. I'm going to feed you more of that.
Right. So like we have to do extra work now to your point, be uncomfortable and think about and entertain ideas that don't coincide with what we already believe or what we already think we know.
And that takes extra work now in a way that it didn't before, because you just get, everyone's in their own echo chamber, right?
You're in this knowledge bubble, belief bubble of information.
That's just like, I'm in my, I'm safe, right?
I'm in this echo chamber and I'm good. And I don't have to listen to anything I don't like.
And yeah, it takes more work these days, but you have to do that.
It doesn't mean you have to look, you can still, but entertaining those ideas is, is really important debating people is important having a argument like a civil argument that exposes you to something like i didn't think about that way maybe and being open to those suggestions again that's a curiosity like am i really interested in what this person has to say am i really interested in their point of view that's wonder that's a sense of awe right and I like what you said.
I think it's a really good clarifier. When you say the word debate, I think most people go, I'm going to try to win.
I'm going to try to get my point across.
But like you said about your dad, your dad walked around with this crazy sense of curiosity and wonder and you just said it like, what can I learn from this person?
Yeah, right. That, I think, is such a valuable character trait to go into every situation, every interaction, asking yourself, what can I learn from this?
Yes. And it's super valuable. And as you tie all that back together, right?
So if you think of that, like that final kind of countermeasure and circling it back on itself.
And this is called the countermeasures is the arrow.
It's the mental fitness arrow. So if you take the first letter of each one of those, awareness, reframing, regulation, openness, wonder, it spells arrow.
And the whole idea is like, this is the direction we want to go.
And it's also kind of a weapon. I mean, I come from the military.
We love acronyms too. So it's like... You know, this is a weapon to fight the mind.
You're in a safe place. Yes. Yeah. It's a weapon to fight, to battle the mind killers too.
But as that kind of loop closes on itself, that curiosity and the observation from the beginning, that is like if you're to encapsulate the whole idea, it's curious observation, right?
Internally and externally, right? That is like the embodiment of mental fitness is curious observer.
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There's something interesting in this conversation that I think I'm trying to connect the dots on, which is, you know, and what I'm thinking about is, you know, Ben, you just mentioned most people when they go into a debate, they want to win.
And there's one or two other moments in this conversation that I started thinking about, like, OK, so one of the things that we're trapped by is. is our obsession with outcomes.
And I think I thought about it again with like, in 10 minutes, you can create a fake artist with AI and you've created music.
But Chris, what you're saying is like, it's actually process that we need.
We're obsessed with outcome. And what we're giving up with that obsession is an appreciation for the process that builds towards the outcome.
Yeah. I mean, you guys know this. I mean, that's the whole point of all this stuff is there is no winning.
There is no end game. There's no finish line.
It's just a day after day after day pursuit.
It is a process. And to that end, you have to figure out a way to be in love with the process.
You have to be interested in the process.
Certainly true with with physical fitness.
And I mean, that's part of the reason why like what you guys do is because it's a way to make it engaging for people.
It's a way to make the process fun. Like they're not all competing.
You know, I mean, for the longest time working out wasn't about competition at all.
It was just about, you know, I want to look good and feel good and live longer and that kind of thing.
And that ability to be engaged in the process is so important.
I always think of Steven Pressfield, who wrote The War of Art.
And in that book, he talks about guys like Eddie Van Halen, who it's hyperbole, obviously.
But actually, he talks about, I think, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I may have been injected the Eddie Van Halen.
But the point is like. Arnold Schwarzenegger, if he was the last person on earth, would wake up and go to the gym.
Like he loved bodybuilding, right? And he loved the competition aspect too.
But on some level, that didn't matter. And Eddie Van Halen... when the lights went out and the show was over, he like still went backstage and just played the guitar because he loved playing guitar, right?
It didn't, that part was great, all the accolades and the fanfare and everything, but he loved playing guitar.
And so with these things, with the skills, with all of it, That's this magic is you got to, you got to love the thing, the process, right?
Like that's where you got to, that's the curiosity aspect of it, but that's where you got to find it too.
And some, and it can take some work too.
You know, I'm big on, you got to have a hobby.
You got to have something, get a skill, right? you may not have had a hobby in a really long time.
So it might take you some work, but there's a lot of hobbies out there.
And I know tons of guys that have later in life, I mean, I know a bunch of dudes that after the military became like metal workers or woodworkers, guys that make furniture and like, awesome.
That's so, or archery is a big one. Guys become hunters and that's a skill, you know?
I'm taking my first archery lesson in two hours.
Nice, nice. Try not to kill yourself. Yeah.
Arrow goes this way, Ben. That might be a good segue because the last thing I wanted to chat with you about, Chris, is actually a bit from the chapter, a couple chapters that you sent us to read and chapters of the books.
You're working on a book about all these mind killers, which I'm really excited about.
So I want to talk about personal mission statements.
I'm going to read a little bit from that chapter.
And I'm interested because Ben and I just had, we just did an episode on building your vision and your anti-vision.
So in other words, like where are you trying to get to and what are you trying to stay away from or get away from?
And part of that conversation or part of that process is to have a sense of mission, of purpose, of what you're trying to do here or why you're here.
So you write this, but by battling stagnation through the cycle of wonder, you don't just create things, you forge your future self.
Dedication to these practices can take you beyond personal improvement and show you who you can become.
However, it helps to have a North Star on this journey to give you direction and meaning.
So I'd love to just like give us some thoughts on the role of a personal mission statement, perhaps how you came to that, and then how it does fit into this puzzle piece of stagnation.
Yeah. And by the way, I'd love to hear about anti-vision or whatever the term was to use that.
That's really cool. I really want to hear what that is.
So see, there's the curiosity piece. I'm curious about what you guys are doing.
Yeah. Yeah, I think coming from the military, the idea of a mission is really obvious, right?
Like we have mission statements for commands, for organizations, for teams, and then we have missions that you do.
Like in the military, and it's really clear, like this is the objective.
This is what we're going to go do, what we're trying to do.
And that's translated into business too, where like organizations now, much more so than I think in the past, have a mission statement.
It's like, here's what we're all about. And Simon Sinek obviously made this like part of the whole zeitgeist and like kind of transformed things in a way with the whole start with why thing.
But, and he's now adopted this with personally as well, personal mission statement.
But I will say it's something that I had never done and I'd been exposed to that material.
And then I heard Evan Hafer on Joe Rogan, probably, and Evan Hafer started the CEO, founder of Black Rifle Coffee.
I heard him years ago. And he was talking about how he was kind of like in this place, like get out of the military, sort of lost, directionless, rudderless, and just decided to write a simple mission statement.
It was really... I mean, almost like childlike in its simplicity of just to transition out of the military and lead a happy and fulfilling life.
But it was just something to be like, am I, every day when I wake up, what I'm putting in on the day, is it getting me towards this goal, right?
A North Star. And hearing that, I was like, yeah, I need to do that.
I think I've never actually sort of reified that.
I've never made it concrete that, And it actually turned out to be harder than I thought.
Now, I actually did it. I was working on this before like even reading Simon Sinek's stuff or anything like that.
He has a very specific way to do that. He's also very like, so it's almost like formulaic.
He's also of the mindset of like, that's your why forever.
Like it never changes. I'm not sure I ascribe to that.
I think... And I think we can get too into the weeds on it too.
It can be like, oh, I think whatever feels good for you is great.
I think it's got to be simple. You should be able to like, remember it.
And I think it should be tied back to your values.
So I always like the drill of just like, start with what matters to you.
Where do your values lie? Because the reality is for a lot of military people like me, where we feel like the military gave us purpose.
And when we get out, we no longer have a purpose.
It's not accurate. What really happened was the military's values aligned with our own.
And that's why we were drawn to it. But that idea of purpose is not something you like go find, like it's under a rock or something like that.
It's something you create. And I think that's the people feel like it's passive.
It's like, I'm just going to wait for my purpose to land in my lap someday or my mission statement.
So look, I just, I nubbed this down to the idea of a mission statement.
And I like that because I think it can be fleeting if it needs to be.
It doesn't have to be, this is your mission statement for the rest of your life.
But it's whatever it is, it's simple, short, tied to your values and gives you a direction that you're trying to get to every day.
So if somebody was out there like, okay, I want to write this mission statement, and we've talked about a number of things today, but one of those being creativity or create something, is it like, okay, I'm going to go, you just mentioned hobbies, right?
So let's just use that as the example. I want a hobby.
I want to connect that to my personal mission statement, or are those kind of different enterprises in some way?
I think they're slightly different. They're connected, but I don't think it's exactly the same thing.
I think it is your mission statement is kind of the bedrock of the direction you're going, right?
And then everything should... Wrap up to that somehow.
Like if you put, if you wrote that down and pasted it somewhere where you can see it, it's like, what am I doing right now?
Is it, I mean, obviously we all have cheat days, right?
Like with food or whatever. So it's, I think you can have mental cheat days too.
I think that that's okay. It's an 80, 20 thing.
It's not, we shouldn't be striving for perfection.
You're never going to get there anyway, but it's like, okay, is 80% of the stuff I'm doing heading that way.
Right. And I think that's a good metric to have.
Yeah. I like that. I also really like it can sound like it's not going to have as much meaning or be a little more ambiguous or not as directive if you do it as, I'm going to use the word loosely as you just described it, which is just what feels good.
If it changes, it changes. And you're kind of like, well, okay, then how is that going to be a true North Star if that's a sense?
I just want to point to some research that we've come across before, which is They compared and contrasted companies that changed their mission statement versus ones that never changed their mission statement.
And the ones that changed it were significantly more successful.
I forget what the terms are that they use to describe successful than the other ones.
And at first glance, you kind of go like, that seems very counterintuitive.
And when you unpack and roll it back a little bit, it actually makes tons of sense.
The ones that are changing their mission statement are talking about their mission statement.
It must matter to them if they say, hey guys, we actually think it's more in this direction now.
Hey guys, maybe this word wasn't right. We think that this should be there instead.
Hey guys, yeah, the last 10 years we were doing that.
We've shifted, we've grown, we've evolved.
The markets have changed. We're actually doing this now.
So I think that this understanding of giving yourself a little bit of brevity, a little bit of not brevity of like leniency, grace.
Yeah. Of grace in terms of like, you don't need to nail this thing.
It doesn't need to be perfect. As you said, it's directional.
And if you're going in the right direction, 80% of the time, you're going to end up pretty damn close to that North star.
Hmm. We never hit the North Star anyway.
The North Star is a moving horizon. So we just want to keep on moving in that right direction.
And that helps us get there. And Ben, everything you just talked about, like the organization doing that, what's all that born from?
That all, to me, gets back to wonder. That's all curiosity.
It's all internal like, hmm, you know what?
Actually, we probably should do this a little bit better.
I mean, like, I've done that all the time at the foundation where I work.
Like, we changed our mission statement a little bit, you know, and we've changed our pillars and everything because we're constantly going back and going, and look, this is something I've really respected about you.
I remember taking, I think, like your Philly donor course, and then I took it again, or there was some point where I'd seen it twice.
And the next time I did it with you, you were like, yeah, we did this for a little while.
We realized that like, I mean, how many times have you gone back and analyzed your own methodology and like revamped things, right?
Numerous times, I think, right? It's been through a number of iterations, right?
Yeah. And that's all that, that, again, that is that curiosity mentality, right?
It doesn't mean you were wrong. It doesn't mean that you're not like exacting about the things.
It just means that you constantly have that attitude of, hmm, is that right?
Does that still feel good? Am I still on that path?
Is it still what I care about? Right. And that's all curiosity.
Love it. It's a great place to wrap up, Chris, other than the episodes, conversations we've done with you in the past, which again, I do recommend folks go check out where you write in a book, like where can folks kind of follow along to make sure that we're gonna have you back on the show soon.
So just stay tuned folks. But if folks want to follow you around the internet, whatnot, where's the best place to point?
Yep. So they can find me. I'm at this Chris Irwin across the internet on social media platforms.
That's also my personal website. All of the mental fitness content is at raresense.com.
That is a sub stack. I greatly appreciate them through these conversations.
I've had a number of new subscribers, a lot coming from you guys.
I want to say to all those people though, that as Patrick said, I'm in the middle of writing a book.
And so that I have not put out any new content on the subsect this year because my effort has just had to have been there.
So, um, my apologies for that being stagnant getting back to the the title of this the topic here but it will it will come back and it's free so like it's not costing anybody anything and there's plenty on there to dig around on but yes my apologies like i i have to put the effort into this book to get it out into the into the market hopefully by by the end of this year early next year so and then outside of that yeah i mean like i do i do work with people and i work with companies like I'm about to do a kind of like a month long course, so to speak, like a human performance kind of course thing centered around this idea with the company.
So that type of opportunity is out there too.
All right. Well, we'll keep having you on.
You can keep updating us on the book and all the other things.
But until then, thank you. Cool. Thanks, guys.
Always a pleasure. Thanks, Chris. Thank you very much for tuning into the show.
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For more frameworks and daily practices, visit chasing excellence dot email.
And don't forget to tap the link in the show notes for today's full listener guide, where we break down the key ideas and provide actionable steps to help you put them into practice.
Until next time, keep building health, finding freedom and living with your heart on fire.
Oikos presents 15 Seconds of Strength. Here we go.
Steve's got a trunk full of groceries and no one to help him.
Oh, that's tough, Jim. Looks like a five-trip load at least.
He grabs the first bag, the second. Bob, it looks like he's trying to do it on one trip.
He shimmies the door open, steps over the dog.
Oh, and he stumbles. Oh, right into the kitchen without missing a beat.
Jim, now that's a man who eats his protein-packed Oikos.
With 15 grams of complete protein in each cup, Oikos Triple Zero can help build strength for every day.
Oikos, stronger makes everything better.
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