Why You’re Not Changing Even Though You Know What to Do | Mark Manson - EP 808

In this episode of Passion Struck, John R. Miles sits down with three-time New York Times bestselling author Mark Manson to uncover why knowing what you need to change isn't enough—and what it actually takes to break old patterns, let go of outdated identities, and create lasting change.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01John R. Miles?

  Hey friends, what if your biggest problem isn't that you're not doing enough, but that you've spent too long proving that you are enough? You can be successful, needed, and surrounded by people and still feel completely unseen. That's the problem I explore in my new book, The Mattering Effect. I show you how we become hyper-visible for what we produce, while quietly becoming invisible to ourselves, and introduce the matter framework to help you reclaim meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. Stop auditioning for your worth, start living from it. The Mattering Effect is available for preorder now at matteringeffect.com. Have you ever finished a great book, or listened to a podcast and thought, "This is gonna change my life",

• 0:45John R. Miles?

  only to discover a week later that nothing actually changed? If so, you're not alone. When Mark Manson joined me on Passion Struck, he explained why that happens, and why real transformation is far more uncomfortable than most of us expect. Take a listen.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  For a human to actually be different than they were before, it requires you to do one of two things. It requires you to behave in ways that are new and uncomfortable, or it requires you to let go of beliefs and perceptions you had about yourself, which is also not fun, because that's a form of grief. By definition, change requires either destruction of former behavior or former identity. Both of those things suck. If you're smiling about it, it probably didn't really change your life.

• 1:42John R. Miles?

  It's your friend, John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener, or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've felt the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough? If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

• 2:22John R. Miles?

  Welcome back to episode 808. And today, we're continuing our series, "The Adaptive Brain: How Your Mind Learns, Changes, and Heals." Let me ask you something. Have you ever finished a great book? Listened to an incredible podcast? Or had one of those conversations where you thought, "This is it. This is finally the thing that's gonna change my life." You felt inspired, you saw yourself differently, you understood exactly what you needed to do. And then, a week later, you were right back where you started. If you've ever had that experience, you're not alone. I think every one of us has. We mistake clarity for change.

• 3:07John R. Miles?

  We assume that because we see the problem differently, we'll naturally behave differently. But if that were true, we'd all change the first time we had a breakthrough. That's what makes today's conversation so fascinating. Joining me is Mark Manson, the three-time New York Times bestselling author, whose books have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Mark has a way of challenging the assumptions we don't even realize we're making. In this conversation, we tackle one of the biggest misconceptions in personal development: the idea that insight creates transformation. Mark argues that understanding yourself is important,

• 3:50John R. Miles?

  but understanding yourself isn't the same thing as changing yourself. Real change asks something much harder. It asks us to act differently before we're ready, and sometimes, to let go of identities we've spent years building. But here's what stayed with me long after we finished recording. This really wasn't a conversation about self-improvement. It was a conversation about courage. Because every meaningful transformation asks us to leave something behind: an old habit, an old story, or even an old version of ourselves. We tend to think change should feel exciting, but Mark makes a compelling case that real change often feels uncomfortable before it feels liberating.

• 4:34John R. Miles?

  And I think that's exactly the conversation so many of us need right now. So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with Mark Manson. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck, and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:57John R. Miles?

  I'm absolutely honored and actually thrilled today to welcome Mark Manson, someone who I've always wanted to have on Passion Struck. Welcome, Mark.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 5:08John R. Miles?

  So Mark, over the past couple of weeks, as I've been preparing for this, I've immersed myself back into your books, but I'm also a subscriber to your newsletter, to your Substack, where I read your essays, and I also listen to your podcast. What has surprised me the most is that I stopped feeling like I was reading a writer, and I started to feel like I was reading someone trying to reverse-engineer human behavior. Is that a good way to think about this? What's been going on over the past 18 months?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Strangely, I take that as a compliment. I spent pretty much the whole early part of my career just focusing on books and writing. And I had a little bit of an epiphany a few years ago, which was that a sudden realization that a lot of the audience that I had built or cultivated online might actually be more important and more valuable in the long run than, say, just writing another three books. And once I had that realization, I actually very seriously kind of got into trying to study and understand online media, online content, and really trying to scale a content business out. So I had to learn video production and podcast production. The current podcasts were on, Solved is the second podcast.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  It started a Substack, newsletters, all sorts of things. And I think I've actually been surprised how much I love it. Because as much as I love writing and I love books, it's zooming out, I think, working on media in general just really forces you to think broadly and try to understand where the culture is, what people respond to, why do certain people resonate to certain content over others? Some people prefer listening, right? A lot of the people listening to us right now, they probably prefer listening to a podcast or a book than, say, reading 500 pages or watching a 10-part series. And then other people are the complete opposite. And I just find it very fascinating

• 7:11Speaker 01

  reaching those different groups of people and communicating to them in different ways.

• 7:16John R. Miles?

  Yeah, what I have found is I take an episode like this, and I parse it probably into 20 different pieces, from quote cards to long-form Substack articles, to Instagram, to short videos. Because I think you're right. What I've discovered is different people have different ways that they like to absorb content. Some want really quick, 30-second, 40-second bites, and others want the long-form answers. But one thing, and I'm not sure if you find it on your show, that's really surprised me is how few people apply what they hear on the show. And that's been something I've been trying to figure out. It's one thing to have a great guest like you on, but how do you get them to actually use what we talk about?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  That is the billion-dollar question in this industry.

• 8:05John R. Miles?

  Yes.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  I'm of two minds about that. Sometimes I feel, and especially when it comes to writing, I, because I think

• 8:17Speaker 01

  for a lot of this, it's such a personal process for a lot of people, that I try to just trust that when they're ready to act, they will. I often see my job as more of helping people shift perspective. It's like a very cognitive process, like sharing a new idea, shifting a perspective, challenging an assumption, maybe pointing out a blind spot, and just trusting that's gonna be upstream from their behavior. But yeah, there are other times where it's like pretty clear what somebody needs to do, and they're just not doing it. And I think that's where you fall into, you start to fall into like kind of the classic self-help conundrum,

• 9:00Speaker 01

  where you can, where actually feeding that person more information can be counterproductive, because it can trick them into thinking like they're doing something when they're actually not doing anything. But the truth of the matter is that I don't know if there's anything you and I can do to make people take action on things. It's, you can give them the tools, you can point them to the door, you can tell them how to walk through it, but until they get off their ass and walk through it,

• 9:29Speaker 01

  it's like...

• 9:31Speaker 01

  You can only do so much.

• 9:33John R. Miles?

  I recently put out a Substack post and you might find it interesting because I was kind of going into what I think are some of the fallacies of the self-help industry. And I said in it that one of them is, I think it's pushing us to live in a monastery, but a monastery where it's like every, everything that you do is as an individual, where if you look at most monasteries over the centuries, they involve community and it's almost as if the self-help world is asking you to do everything without a community. And then we wonder why we're disconnected.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I think especially it really seems to be like the last three or four years in particular, there's developed this obsession with protocols and routines and habit stacking. And it feels like people's, I don't know, I just think so much of life is in the chaos, is in the unexpected. And especially in a lot of relationships and community building is in the spontaneous and unexpected. And so it is, I definitely feel, I've got a saying that I say to myself a lot and I say to friends a lot, which is optimal is suboptimal, that it's if you are like, if every moment of every

• 10:52Speaker 01

  day is completely optimized, then you are not leaving any slack in the system to be challenged or pushed out of your comfort zone. And yeah, I do think long-term that is a problem.

• 11:04John R. Miles?

  Someone picked up the subtle art a decade ago and fast forwarded to today. What's a belief that you held back then that you've been forced to abandon?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny because, so we're coming up on 10 years on the book and we're doing a 10th anniversary edition. It's going to come out, I think, January 2017. And so I've been actually going back through the book and looking at a lot of it. I don't know, I'll say this, I don't think there's anything big or major in the book that I'm like, oof, don't agree with this anymore. But it is interesting looking back because I think there's kind of certain emphasis is misplaced in a few spots. Back then, I think social media hadn't really dominated our life yet the way it does now. Let me put it this way. I think one of the things that I've become very aware of in the

• 12:00Speaker 01

  last 10 years, the whole message of that book is really find something you really give a fuck about and then just block out the rest and be willing to suffer and sacrifice for it. The problem is that I think if you look at a lot of the problems in the world today, it, they are caused by people who really only give a fuck about one thing and are willing to sacrifice themselves and suffer for it. So there's a little bit of, I think there's a little, it's a knife that cuts both ways. And I think I was less aware of that at the time. And I think today we'll see as I work through the book and do some minor revisions. But I think I would encourage people to remain a little bit more skeptical of what they invest themselves into and the beliefs that they hold on to.

• 12:45John R. Miles?

  When I first started this podcast and came up with the name Passion Struck, it actually mirrored the message from your first book in many ways. It was really about, I'd been talking to Jim McKelvey, founded Square, and he was telling me about the thing he sees with entrepreneurs who don't end up hitting it big. It's because they find this thing to be completely keyed into and then they lose their way over time. And so to me, Passion Struck was you find this thing, you invest everything of yourself into it, no matter if it causes you reputation harm or financial harm, because you're pouring yourself into it. And over the past couple of years is, I guess, my thinking

• 13:30John R. Miles?

  has evolved. I've really shifted the focus to human flourishing and it being more about how do you become alive? Like, how do you help someone live so that at the end of their life, they're not regretting becoming alive in their life? Does any of that resonate with you?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  For sure. I think you and I are a little bit in the same boat with kind of both the passion piece and on my side, the values piece. It's, there's definitely a little bit of a survivorship bias, right? Because you can look at, you can look at all these founders who made it, right? And it's like, okay, well, they gave up everything and they worked 18 hours a day and they lost relationships and they lost friendships and they had no life and they slept on a mattress on the floor. But what you don't see is that for each one of those that made it, there's 100 that did the same thing and essentially wasted five years of their life. And it, and I think in my case, it's for every person who really goes all in on something, gives a fuck about something

• 14:30Speaker 01

  important and does something great. There's also somebody who goes all in on something, gives a fuck about something and does something terrible because they value the wrong thing. So I guess the conclusion here is that life's very complicated and.

• 14:46John R. Miles?

  Well.

• 14:49John R. Miles?

  Well, I think it begs the question, if you're someone listening to us, how do you know when your own mental model or your pursuit is stopped matching reality?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  The feedback mechanisms in your life need to be functioning correctly. And I think one way you could look at maybe our current time is that by removing friction out of our lives, technology has also made it easy to ignore those feedback mechanisms, right? It's probably easier than ever to ignore reality if you really want to these days. And it's easier than ever to convince yourself of something being true if it's not there because there's just an endless supply of algorithms that are willing to reinforce whatever you want them to reinforce. It's funny. So I

• 15:39Speaker 01

  launched my podcast, Solved, we launched about a year ago and we do these massive four or five hour long deep dives into a single subject. And at this point, we've done, I think 13 or 14 episodes. And it's been really interesting. I think one of the biggest things that I've taken away from doing all these episodes is it's become a running joke on the show that about half the time, we get two hours into a five hour episode on procrastination or emotional regulation or whatever it is. And it just turns out that Aristotle was right. And it's become an

• 16:20Speaker 01

  inside joke with my audience of, all right, guess what? Guess who nailed this 2,500 years ago? Aristotle. And we've just been like collecting evidence to prove that he was right ever since. But I've actually really, it has shifted my views to a certain extent over the last year in that it has made me really take some of that ancient wisdom a little bit more seriously than I think I used to. I've always been a science and research guy. And I'm now far enough into my career that I've seen a lot of that science and research either not replicate or get overturned by new findings. And then meanwhile, in the process of researching these episodes, I'm seeing,

• 17:02Speaker 01

  I'm like consistently coming back to Aristotle, who just like nailed it first try in 400 B.C. So it's, I've definitely found my views kind of like shifting backwards in time to a certain extent.

• 17:20John R. Miles?

  It's interesting. Ryan Holiday is onto something.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  He really was. He really was. And it makes sense, right? That like, if something's going to survive 2,000 years, it probably did for a reason. And as the world gets more chaotic and difficult to understand, it makes sense that people would gravitate towards stuff that has survived for that long.

• 17:49John R. Miles?

  I've recently been rereading Thinking Fast and Slow by Danny Kahneman. And as I was reading it, it was interesting is I think as I was in chapter 27 or 28, and it's a long book, he mentioned something that I thought made me think of this interview. He said that our minds are remarkably good at creating coherent stories from incomplete information. And your recent work seems to suggest that we're equally good at mistaking those stories for transformation. Do you think self-awareness has become another cognitive bias?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  It's a good question. I actually did a YouTube video, I think, two years ago. And I asked the question, if it's possible to be too self-aware, that it's like, it's actually maybe a little bit, maybe the optimal level of self-awareness is to not know certain things about yourself, right? Because then that, I think, leaves you a little bit more open and flexible. But I do think one, one of the pitfalls of this industry, and it's something that I've been writing about for a very long time, is that.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  People come to it wanting transformation. And when you want to experience something, you it's

• 19:03Speaker 01

  quite easy to convince yourself that you've had that experience, even if you haven't. And I think a lot of self-help content, information, seminars, et cetera, is actually optimized around giving people that placebo event of, oh, my God, I'm a new person. Right. And it's you literally did the same thing today you did yesterday. So it's, and again, coming back to that, that point earlier about the removal of friction is removing feedback from our lives. Right. If we have less feedback coming into our conscious awareness from the outer world, then it makes it easier for us to delude ourselves into believing whatever we want to believe.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  And it's something I worry about for sure. It is, I don't think people, because people who kind of do this, they get, they're really happy and excited and they feel like they're changing their life all the time. I think, and I've had this argument with people as well. They're like, well, what's wrong with that? Let them be happy. Let them enjoy their quote unquote transformation. The problem is that I think it encourages a detachment from reality that in the long run is not helpful. It actually just sets them up for more failure further on.

• 20:20John R. Miles?

  We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Mark Manson. As you're listening today, I'd like you to sit with one question. Where in your life have you confused awareness with action? Most of us know more than we've ever known before. We understand our habits. We recognize our blind spots. We can explain why we react the way we do. But as Mark reminds us, insight isn't the same as transformation. Change doesn't happen because we understand ourselves better. It happens when we're willing to make different choices, even when those choices feel uncomfortable. And that idea connects deeply with the research behind my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, coming October 6.

• 21:04John R. Miles?

  One of the things I discovered while writing it is that many of the identities we carry weren't chosen consciously. And those patterns may have served us once, but over time, they can quietly become the very thing standing between us and the life we're trying to create. If you'd like to explore more of those ideas about my book or grab the companion workbook for today's episode, go to the Ignited Life on Substack. It's designed to help you move beyond insight and begin putting these ideas into practice. Now, a quick break for today's sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 21:50John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Mark Manson. Do you mean because they set their expectations and the bar is so high that they're easily disappointed? Or for another reason?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  I think it removes accountability, right? So if, and I live in LA, so I live in West LA. Like, I run into these people all the time. Like, I literally run into people who, on a Monday evening, are like, I went to this retreat this weekend. It changed my life. I'm like, really? Really? You've been out for all of 36 hours. Tell me how this changed your life. But like, they, they're very sincere. Like, they really mean it. And then, of course, they go on and behave the exact same way they've behaved for the last three years. And, and I think it's a problem because if you give people kind of this placebo transformation, right? If you convince people that they are constantly transforming when they're actually not,

• 22:48Speaker 01

  then you actually remove the responsibility for them to actually do anything different.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Right? Because it's, if you go to them, you're like, hey, you know this behavior that you keep messing up? You should probably stop doing it. And they're like, no, I just had this, you should have seen me last weekend. But like, my new shaman has this new meditation practice. I'm a completely different person now. It's like, okay. Right? In a weird way, like, the pursuit of personal growth can be another form of avoidance of personal growth.

• 23:23John R. Miles?

  Yeah, I heard you recently talk about this unsolved. I think the line you said was insight is the smart person's favorite form of procrastination.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Yes. And sometimes I say, I also say, research or learning more is a smart person's favorite form of procrastination. It's tricky. And it's like, one of the things I try to remind my audience all the time is that for you to actually change, right? For a human to actually be different than they were before, it requires you to do one of two things. It requires you to behave in ways that are new and uncomfortable, which is not fun. And we resist that. Or it requires you to let go of beliefs and perceptions you had about yourself, which is also not fun because that's a form of grief, right?

• 24:15Speaker 01

  You're losing something. You're losing a piece of your life or you're losing an assumption you had about yourself. There's a sadness that comes along with that. Sometimes an anger or guilt that comes along with that. That's also not fun. So it, by definition, change requires either destruction of former behavior or former identity. Both of those things suck.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  So change, like, you should not be, anything that quote unquote changes your life, like, you should not be smiling about it. If you're smiling about it, it probably didn't really change your life.

• 24:51John R. Miles?

  Well, think about seals who go through buds. One of their favorite sayings is embrace the suck. And I went to the Naval Academies for that whole first plebe year. What they're really trying to do is to change your complete belief and behavioral system. And it totally sucks.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 25:11John R. Miles?

  In fact, all four years in some ways really sucks because they're trying to mind warp you in a completely different way. So that's when I think of what change is really about. And it is extremely uncomfortable. And to me, when you're sitting in that discomfort, that's when you know that you're actually doing it. The, the problem is, most people never reach that point.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  And look, there are, for example, let's say, my wedding. My wedding was an amazing day. It was like, one of the best days of my life. Yes, I think objectively, my wedding changed my life. But it's interesting because it's not just like joy and parties. Like, there's, it's the whole process of getting engaged, getting married, making that commitment, figuring out if she's the one. That was a messy, anxiety-ridden process, right? That also had stretches of self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy, sometimes questioning of, am I doing the right thing? But then, of course, you end up with this joyous day and it's amazing and everything.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  So like, I think what people miss is that they only see that peak experience. They see that one moment at the end where everything's amazing. And they just want to recreate that over and over again. Whereas like, what they don't realize is that what allows that peak experience to happen is this elongated period of struggle, questioning, doubt, frustration that enables the peak experience to emerge. And I think a lot of what the self-help industry does is it markets that peak experience without that struggle, that, that period of struggle and doubt and frustration.

• 26:50John R. Miles?

  I really agree with you here. One of the things that I often talk about is this concept that I picked up in the military called transition points. And as I experienced when I served, I saw the most mishaps, whether that was people getting injured, losing their life, bad things happening during the transition points, which I describe, is there are these long periods that you're training or you're on the way to a mission or on your way back from a mission, where you're not in that peak moment where you're hyper-concentrating in everything else. And you tend to let your guard down, other things happen, and we don't pay attention to them as much. Yet, I think most of our change happens

• 27:35John R. Miles?

  in micro choices, micro changes that we make in those transition points. And to me, it's having this awareness or this intentionality that you're trying to make better micro choices along the way during that period that leads you to that peak experience, rather than making poor ones.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 27:58John R. Miles?

  One of the things, Mark, I, I saw is you talk a lot about personality adaptations, behavior, value systems. And you talk about them almost as distinct operating systems. Is there a people, is there a layer in those operating systems people misunderstand the most?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I think the biggest error is that people conflate all of those operating systems.

• 28:24John R. Miles?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Assume they're all the same thing, that it's your personality and your values and your identity, like, these are all the same things. I like to kind of divide them up into three layers. And the bottom and most foundational layer is, in the psychological research, is what's referred to as personality. And personality is, it's largely fixed, it's largely determined, like, you don't really get to shape it or consciously alter it. By the time you hit puberty, whoever you are is kind of who you are. And it's interesting, because, first of all, I think a lot of people don't even recognize that there are aspects of our personalities that are fairly fixed and immovable over a long period of time. But secondarily, like,

• 29:11Speaker 01

  the goal with personality is simply to understand yourself and then accept yourself, right? If you are, I think, what I see a lot of people do is they try to take traits that are, to a large extent, innate in who they are, and then they think they should be able to change them, right? It's like introverts who think that they should be able to be extroverted, and like, highly spontaneous people who feel like they should be able to plan everything perfectly. And it's, when you look at the psychological research, like, it just shows time and time again that, no, you're not really going to be able to shift some of these things. And so I think simply being educated on what is changeable and what's not within yourself is absolutely crucial. And then the things that are not

• 29:56Speaker 01

  really changeable, learning to accept them and owning them, because then you, it's, all of our personality traits evolve for a reason. They're highly adaptable in some situations and like poorly adaptable in others. So if you're like naturally an extremely organized person, and you love order and systems and protocol and everything, like, you should probably not be in a really unpredictable profession. It's going to drive you crazy. You're just going to feel like you're like banging your head against the wall all the time. But if you put yourself in a profession like finance or accounting or something like that, where you're rewarded for that personality trait, you're going to thrive, you're going to do an amazing job. So it's, this is true in, in kind of all of our areas of life.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  It's true in our relationships, it's true in our interests and skills and everything. The, kind of the second layer is the adaptation layer. And this is, this is essentially like how we mediate between our personality traits, kind of our fixed traits, and our environment, right? So to help people understand this, I'll use kind of a crude example. Let's say you're short, but you're in an environment where you have to play basketball all the time, right? What's an adaptation for that? Well, an adaptation could be that you learn how to shoot three pointers. Because it's, okay, I'm never going to be good close to the basket because of my height, so let me figure out how to play out on the perimeter.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  I'll be much more successful. That skill set becomes your adaptation to your environment. The truth is that we're doing this all the time in everything we do, right? So it's, maybe I'm highly introverted, I'm in an environment where I need to be social all the time, let me find an adaptation that allows me to handle this a little bit more easily. Or I'm somebody who's very creative and spontaneous, I'm in an environment that rewards certain skills and behaviors, let me develop a skill set that can help me adapt to this environment. The funny thing is, is those adaptations, that, those adaptations

• 32:00Speaker 01

  end up becoming how we define ourselves, right? So, yeah, it's developing those skills, habits, and mental habits as well, attitudes, assumptions, those things end up getting clustered, and we call those our identity. And the interesting thing about our identity is that we protect it emotionally. So if I develop an adaptation, which is, I'll give you an example from my personal life. So I'm naturally introverted, a little bit socially anxious, but I've ended up in a lot of situations in my life where I'm like, I have to be in front of people all the time. And so one of my adaptations is humor. I use humor to diffuse my own discomfort and anxiety. And if I can get people to laugh, it makes me

• 32:45Speaker 01

  feel a little bit more comfortable, right? That humor eventually becomes part of my identity. So I'm like, I'm a funny guy, right? Like, I walk around, this is, it's just something I believe about myself. And it's something, because it's something I believe about myself, it's something I try to bring out even more and get better at. Now, if somebody comes along and I make a joke, and they're like, wow, you're really not funny, because it's part, it's an adaptation, it's part of my identity, I will have an emotional reaction to that. I will protect my adaptation emotionally, and I will be like, wow, this guy's such a dick. I don't want to hang out with this guy. It's, maybe I'll try to insult him back. Whereas if somebody threatens something that is not an adaptation to you, you don't

• 33:29Speaker 01

  really care, and you're willing to let it go. So it's, people, the emotions and the behaviors are downstream from our identity. Our identity is ultimately just an adaptation of our personality to the environment. And what's interesting is that people spend so much time either trying to change their personality, which can't be changed, or trying to change their adaptations, which is really hard, because essentially, you're trying to either change a behavioral habit, or you're trying to change a belief about yourself, which both of those things, as we discussed, is like, not fun and not easy. When actually the easiest thing to change out of all this is to just change your environment. If you

• 34:14Speaker 01

  put yourself in a different environment, where different adaptations become useful, then your adaptations will naturally start to shift. And your military example is a perfect example of this, right? And you probably saw this with tons of guys that you were in the service with. They come from all sorts of backgrounds, maybe they were like, getting in all sorts of trouble in school, or grew up in a rough neighborhood, or whatever. And then suddenly you put them in bootcamp, and it's like, they straighten the fuck up, because they're in a new environment. And it's like, all of their old adaptations, like, it does not fly in this new environment. And so strangely, the environment is actually the easiest lever to change your life.

• 34:58John R. Miles?

  I can really resonate with that. I spent most of my career in very large companies like Dell and Lowe's as an executive, and I am like you, I am very much an introvert. I have very much social anxiety. And so I found myself going to work for years and years, trying to become an extrovert. And I would get home, and I would be so friggin' physically exhausted. And until I read Susan Cain's book, really didn't understand why. And along the way, I became quite numb. And I, looking back, I figured it out. It's, was trying to do so many adaptations that I ended up wearing a mask, really around

• 35:41John R. Miles?

  who I was. But when I switched that environment and took myself out of that constant having to perform 20, the entire time I was at work, which was a shit ton of hours, my life got so much better. And I was able to, I think the strong parts of my personality started to reemerge, and I felt more like myself.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  I think that feeling of being yourself is finding an alignment between those layers, right? It's like, when your personality, kind of your natural proclivities are lined up with your behavior, your identity, and that's lined up with your environment, like, when all those things are in tune, you feel, I think that, that is the feeling of authenticity. And I think that's like where people, it's also where people thrive. And I think what you're describing, right, is having to adopt adaptations that are contrary to your natural tendencies. You end up feeling either a little bit fake or just exhausted. Or, like you

• 36:44Speaker 01

  said, numbing, right? Like, I, the way that I managed my social anxiety and introversion for years was just getting drunk. And that worked for a while, but at a certain point, it's, that's not working anymore. And, or at least, it's not a sustainable adaptation. I think it's one of the most useful things people can do. And it's funny, too, because I think a lot of people, they feel a little bit let down when they hear this, this advice, which is just, put yourself in a, in an environment that's like more catered to your natural strengths. It seems obvious, it's not very sexy. Again, I think people are enamored with this idea of like, personal transformation, when it's really like, yeah,

• 37:27Speaker 01

  just put yourself in a different room that makes everything easier. And it's, you don't have to work, you don't have to try to change all this stuff.

• 37:36John R. Miles?

  Well, what you're saying, it's absolutely true, because the more I was doing these adaptations, the more I was masking the superpowers that I had. And I was not using my inherent talents that were right there in front of me, because I was so preoccupied with trying to fix myself to fit the environment I was in. And I'll tell you, that's one of the things that brings me so much more satisfaction today, is I've actually rediscovered them and get to deploy them, because I've now reorganized my whole life, so it's on my terms, instead of making someone else rich. I've switched it to, now I work for myself.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 38:19John R. Miles?

  Mark, one of the things I have studied a lot is motivation. And I think a lot of people are convinced that lasting change is a motivation problem. And I've come to fundamentally believe that although motivation is part of it, I think it's more systems problem and mechanistic. Does that resonate at all with you?

• 38:42Speaker 01

  I think so. I think kind of the popular notion of getting motivated is the wrong question to ask. It's, if you're trying to motivate, it's like willpower, right? It's, if you're even having to ask about how to get motivated, then you're probably, it's probably not, it's not even the right question. You're like, you need to back up and be like, because in my opinion, if you're aligned with your values, if you're doing something that feels, that seems important to you, and you're in an environment that is, that you can thrive in, motivation should happen on its own. It shouldn't be something that you have to summon or go look for.

• 39:23John R. Miles?

  I was hoping you might be able to tell us a little bit about your new application that you've built.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so speaking of starting companies and working for yourself. So last year I started an AI. So last year I created an AI app that basically helps people talk through their problems. And the reason I made this is because I noticed so many people in my day to day life were going to chat GPT for life advice. And the problem with chat GPT is it kind of just tells you what you want to hear. And I did some research and I discovered that like over a hundred million people are using chat GPT for life advice. And it's not designed for it. It's not trained for it. It's a huge problem. So I went and I found a co-founder who's been building AI products for the last 10 years.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And we really tried to build something that really challenges people to be better, can question their assumptions, can point out blind spots can. And really just be a sounding board for whatever they're going through in life. So the app's called Purpose. People can check it out. It's at purpose.app. There's a free trial. But it's been interesting because like you said at the top of the show, most of my career I've been a writer. More recently, I would say I've been kind of just across media, right? Podcasts, videos, newsletters. This was my first foray into the tech world and it's given me a lot of respect for just like what those people go through.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  I can't tell you how many times we're like, we were working on this product and there'd be like a bug or an issue or something. And I would like, I would tell the team, I'm like, oh, we should just change this. And they're like, okay, cool. We can have a, we can have a new build done in two weeks. And in my head, coming from like writing and media, I'm like, can't you just delete it?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Take two weeks. Oh my God, this is so hard.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  So it's been interesting.

• 41:19John R. Miles?

  For your benefit, that is my entire background. So I was the CIO of one of those companies I told you about. And when people who don't understand these large companies, they can't comprehend what an IT budget that's around a billion and a half looks like from a project perspective, because we would have literally five, six, 700 projects running at the exact same time. So there, but I have that same frustration that you experienced, especially from the customers that we were trying to serve who were like, why is it taking you so long to fix these things? Which they don't understand all the spaghetti architecture that a company like Lowe's has developed in 60 plus years

• 42:01John R. Miles?

  that you have to contend with as well as you're breaking things along the way.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  I've become very accustomed to the term tech debt, which I'm sure.

• 42:09John R. Miles?

  That's exactly what.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  The story of your life for a long time.

• 42:15John R. Miles?

  Mark, I want to talk to you about Robert McNamara for a second. Cause as I was reading your Substack, it really fascinated me that we independently landed on him, but for very different reasons. And I'll let you expand on this, but you use them to show what happens when our models become disconnected from reality. I use them in my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, to show what happens when organizations optimize what they can measure and lose sight of the humans inside the systems that make companies what they are. It made me wonder if we're actually exposing different expressions of the same problem.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  It sounds like we are. So that piece from the Substack is called Why Intellectuals Are Fucking Idiots.

• 43:02John R. Miles?

  And it's true.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  A classic spicy title for me. But the whole point of that piece is that every, there's this classic saying that is the map is not the territory. Right? It's, and I think you can adapt that to say that our mental models are not reality. They are, we aim to make them as accurate reflections of reality as possible, but no model is perfect. There's another saying that says that no model is perfect. Some models are useful. And I use McNamara as an example of, he was brought into the Department of Defense during the Vietnam War to modernize and revolutionize

• 43:41Speaker 01

  the defense industry and the military and really build everything around metrics and a production line approach to how the military was run. And of course he had spreadsheets and dashboards and was tracking all the numbers on everything. And the fascinating thing was that he, all the numbers were coming back from Vietnam, saying that we were winning. It's like they had far more casualties than we did. They were spending more munitions than we were. They had fewer supply lines than we did. It's just like, everything came back showing that we were winning the war. And then obviously, as we know now, we were not winning the war. And the point I made in the piece was that the thing, what it turned out, the things that you can't measure

• 44:25Speaker 01

  ended up being far more important in the Vietnam War than the things you could measure, which is for one, the North Vietnamese willingness to die is something you cannot measure, but it turned out to be much more important than what you could. And I kind of used him as a cautionary tale of there's a, we all have a bias towards legibility, which is that we all have a bias towards things that we can see, that we can count, that we can measure. And because it's easy to measure and track those things, we assume that they must be. It's easy to convince ourselves that they are much more important than the things that we can't countermeasure. But I would argue that the most important things are the things that you cannot countermeasure.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  And it's, and as a result, you get a lot of situations where people's mental models don't match up to reality. And then the smartest people end up looking like idiots.

• 45:26John R. Miles?

  I listened to the interview you did on Modern Wisdom and you guys were talking about significance and it got me thinking about. I've been exploring this idea, whether people defend their beliefs, not simply because they're right, but because those beliefs protect their sense of significance and belonging. Do you think for a lot of people, that's part of why change feels so threatening for them?

• 45:49Speaker 01

  I do. Coming back to the adaptation thing, let's say you develop a skill as an adaptation. And that skill is very difficult and it like changed, it really saved your life in a lot of ways. That is going to, that's going to give you a lot of meaning and significance in your life. And so you're going to feel

• 46:09Speaker 01

  extremely attached to that. I'll give you a really practical example of this. My wife grew up very poor in Brazil and we're talking leaky roof. Didn't have a phone until she was a teenager poor. And she, as an adaptation, she developed an incredible ability to plan, to work really hard, become very disciplined. And she did extremely well academically. She got full scholarships into college and got herself out of poverty, got a good job and was extremely frugal with money.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Now what's, so she developed this adaptation, quite literally saved her life. And she got into adulthood and was in a completely different place than where she grew up.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  But what's interesting is that adaptation, which was this kind of constant paranoia and fear around money and this almost neurotic need to plan everything. It started to hold her back, right? Because you, once you reach a certain place of security and comfort, you don't need to plan for the worst case scenario every single day and you don't need to count pennies at the end of every single week. But she was still doing this, right? So she felt like she had, it started to hold her back, but she didn't want to let it go because it was so important to her. And she was so proud of her ability to do it. And it meant so much to her that she resisted it for years. And she still struggles through it quite frequently. That's what I mean by our adaptations become our identity.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  And the more useful, the more embedded those adaptations are, the more we protect them and the more we hold on to them. And it can be difficult because as life changes, our environment changes, the adaptations that used to serve us can start to hurt us. And if those adaptations are extremely meaningful to us, then we're not going to want to let them go. And so it is, and this kind of comes full circle to the question you asked about how my views have changed on the subtle art. I think in the subtle art, I really espoused like meaning and values as just an unqualified good thing. Whereas I think today I realized that it's a little bit more nuanced than that. Sometimes you can find a lot of meaning and value in something that's not good for you anymore.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  That it's an adaptation that's like not helping you anymore and that you'd actually be better off figuring out how to let it go.

• 48:27John R. Miles?

  Mark, one of the essays that I wrote, and you'll have to let me know if my memory is correct. Your father gave you some incredible advice about becoming the goose instead of fighting over the golden eggs. I have it correct. Looking back, how much of your career has been about becoming the goose?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  For listeners, I've often said in interviews that I think the best piece of advice I ever got was from my dad. Early in my career, I was a struggling blogger. I had a couple online businesses that weren't making any money. And I remember I wrote a piece that I was very proud of. And then a week later, a much larger person in my industry essentially just plagiarized what I wrote and passed it off as his own and got a lot of attention and respect for it.

• 49:16John R. Miles?

  Been there, been there.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  And I remember I was just absolutely crushed and just so frustrated. And I called my dad, who's a successful business owner, and I told him about it. And I remember he just started laughing. And he was just like, he said exactly what you just said. He's like, oh, man, been there. But I remember he told me, he said, Mark, there's kind of two ways to make it in the world. There's, you can either spend your whole life looking for golden eggs and getting good at finding and accumulating golden eggs. Or you can just figure out how to be a goose that lays golden eggs. And if you figure out how to be the goose, then you'll never worry if somebody comes and takes one of your eggs from you.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  And what that taught me is that ultimately, if you're able to really innovate and find some unique piece of value, if you develop the skill of like, finding unique value to give to the world, then you really won't worry about those people in the long run. And you won't have that scarcity mindset or that kind of possessiveness. And I really try to live by that. I really try to push myself to do things differently, or look at things differently, or try to like, be unique in some way. And not because I'm like, paranoid that people are going to come take my golden eggs. But it's just, it just seems

• 50:46Speaker 01

  like the better way to live from a, like a mental health and a wellbeing perspective.

• 50:52John R. Miles?

  Amen to that. Mark, very discoverable person. But if a listener wants to go to the epicenter to find out everything you're about, is the best place for them to go your personal website or somewhere else?

• 51:05Speaker 01

  I'm literally everywhere, any platform, just look for Mark Manson, go to markmanson.net. My books are probably everywhere. So yeah, just Google me. And then check out the app. It's purpose.app. Let me know what you think about it.

• 51:24John R. Miles?

  I can't keep your books in my house. Every time they're there, one of my kids finds them and takes them to read, and I never get them back. Thank you so much for doing this. It was really an honor to have you on the show.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Thanks, John.

• 51:36John R. Miles?

  I hope today's conversation with Mark Manson gave you something to think about. For me, one of the biggest takeaways was this. Sometimes the thing keeping us stuck isn't that we need more information, it's that we're holding on to an identity, a habit, or an environment that no longer fits who we're becoming. And Mark made another point that I really loved. He talked about the difference between chasing the golden eggs and becoming the goose that lays them. In other words, instead of constantly trying to protect what you've already built, focus on becoming the person who can keep creating something valuable. That's a very different way of thinking about growth. If something from today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me a

• 52:19John R. Miles?

  message on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Substack, or share this episode with someone who might need to hear it. And if you haven't already, make sure you're following Passion Struck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or a YouTube channel, so you don't miss what's coming next. Because in our next episode, I'm joined by number one New York Times bestselling author, Dr. David Perlmutter, whose new book, Brain Defenders, explores something I found absolutely fascinating, the immune system inside your brain. David explains how these cells called microglia can either protect your brain or become destructive, and how the environments we create through our sleep, exercise, diet metabolism, and even our relationships

• 53:00John R. Miles?

  can influence which direction they take. And here's the question I want you to carry with you into that conversation. What if the choices you're making today aren't just affecting how you feel tomorrow, but helping you determine the future of your brain? I think you're going to want to hear this one. We're going to call those the microglial cells. And they are very sensitive to metabolism. When our metabolism is doing what it should do, keeping our blood sugar in check, our weight in check, our blood pressure where it needs to be, reducing inflammation, then these brain immune cells are supportive. They're nurturing our synapses, they're nurturing the blood brain barrier, they're doing their best to keep our neurons functional and firing

• 53:42John R. Miles?

  appropriately. But they can shift on us. They can turn their backs and become what I call in the book, the evil twin. Same cell. It can shift when they are challenged by inflammation or metabolism issues in the body. And now they are destructive. Until then, remember, you don't have to become someone else to change your life. Sometimes you need to understand what's shaping you, decide what no longer serves you, and have the courage to choose differently. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion struck.