Shane Parrish - Mental Models, Good Decisions & Better Content | Modern Wisdom Podcast 334

Shane Parrish is the Founder of Farnam Street, an ex-Canadian Intelligence Agency Operative and an author. Farnam Street is one of the best blogs on the planet. Shane has been a huge contributor to increasing the popularity of mental models and effective decision making over the last few years, today we get to dig into some of his favourite insights. Expect to learn how to pursue growth without feeling insufficient, why everyone in Shane's company gets August off work, how to know when your ego is deceiving you, why making a ton of money on Bitcoin doesn't make you a genius and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at http://bit.ly/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on Reebok’s entire range including the amazing Nano X1 at https://geni.us/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Farnam Street - https://fs.blog/ Check out The Knowledge Project - https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #shaneparrish #farnamstreet #mentalmodels - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Let's say I write an article for the website. It's really popular. So now I know if I write another article like that, it's going to be really popular. Well, if I do this over and over again, and on a weekly basis, it won't make a difference. On a monthly basis, it won't make a difference. But if I do this for years, eventually I become irrelevant. And I become irrelevant, not only in my knowledge and my learning and my development, but I've become irrelevant to my audience because it's the same thing rehashed over and over again. And all's I'm going for is that immediate dopamine hit.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  So I fell in love with a tweet of yours from the other month, which said, "If you're not obsessed with it, you'll never master it. Being obsessed with something won't ensure mastery, but not being obsessed will ensure you won't master it." What have you been obsessed with this year?

• 0:46Speaker 00

  I've been obsessed with taking care of my family. I mean, it's COVID, right? So it's obsessed about taking care of all the people in my life. Work-wise, I'm just obsessed with little details, right? Like the font on the website and the Instagram backgrounds. And you know, people, people think that that's a little bit obsessive, but it's part of the craft. It's part of what we do. Writing, I'm trying to get better at. I'm obsessed with getting better at writing and being clear and being succinct and being relatable to people. And it helps clarify my thinking, right? Because writing is thinking on the page. And often I discover that through writing that I really don't know what I'm talking about. And that's, that's a great feeling in a way. It's bad in a way, but it's sort of like the dawning of wisdom, right?

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Because, you know, you, you can't learn anything if you think you already know it. And when you write it down, you force yourself to confront the fact that maybe you don't know it as well as you did, especially when you're trying to write it down for an audience that might not have the context or might not be a domain expert in what you're writing about. So you have to simplify. And simplify doesn't mean that it's simplistic. It just means that you're using different words that everybody can relate to. So you're now you're translating it side of the domain in which you might have learned something. You're translating it to a more relatable domain for everybody else. And I think that that's so powerful for us to just calibrate our own knowledge and hone our understanding of what we know.

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  How do you avoid getting bogged down in little details? Thiago Forte had a tweet a couple of months ago talking about how the highest leverage people that he knows, most of their work has a rough edged, half-assed quality to it because perfectionism is a low leverage activity. How do you avoid restricting the pace at which you ship work by focusing on the minutia?

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Um, I think I dabble in the minutia all the time, right? So the fonts, the layouts, the paragraph spacing, all of that stuff, I dabble in it, but it's not important to shipping. It doesn't hold back what we're doing because that can always be solved later. But when it comes to, you know, sometimes you just have to put a time box around things. And it's like, I'm going to give this the best effort I have in this amount of time. And sometimes you don't. And a lot of that comes from circumstance and preparation and a whole bunch of things that you maybe do or do not control, right? Like you're, you're born into life, you're born into a certain country, you get genes, a lot of this you don't control, your parents you don't control, you're pushed through this, and call it the lucky push, right?

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Your parents, your socioeconomic status that you grew up with, your friends, your school, and you go off into the world and you have more time to dabble, you have more time to do different things than maybe somebody who wasn't as lucky. But at some point you take control and you take control of your own trajectory. And that is the point where you start making decisions that really impact what's going to happen to you in life. And some people realize that they do and some people don't. And you have to realize what's core and what's not to what you're doing too in your craft, right? If you're focusing or obsessed with the details on something that's not important to what you do, then you know, that's probably not a productive or high leverage use of time. But if they are part of the craft.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  You know, writing a sentence, it could take all day to write a sentence, but that's part of the craft of what I, what I do when it comes to Farnam Street. And so that those details matter and they matter a lot. And you can outsource that to other people and you can be hands off about it. But eventually then you just become somebody who's outsourcing everything. And maybe that's what you want and you'll scale really well. And, but the internet gives us leverage to begin with, right? And so the leverage of the internet is for us to sort of like double the number of readers. It's no additional work for me. Double the number of listeners to your podcast or my podcast. It's no additional work for us. And whether you obsess over the font on your cover art photography, I remember

• 4:45Speaker 00

  I listened to a podcast on the way here today where you were talking, it took you six months and you woke up in the middle of the night and you discovered the name of the podcast, but you had dabbled for six months. So you're obsessively working on this for six months and then it hit you in the middle of the night. And I thought that that was like a key, that's a key relatable story to how, how it all actually works.

• 5:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, from a user, good avatar for someone that does browse fs.blog, it comes across, I think, the degree of finesse that the site has. It really is beautifully and aesthetically put together. Another thing that I noticed, your tagline changes seemingly every other time that I go on, whether it's get yourself together or sort yourself out, mastering the best of what other people have figured out. Like all of these are top notch taglines and it's obvious to a user, so at least an observant user, that you are iterating on this stuff. And I think that you're right. When the marginal cost of increasing the

• 5:49Chris Williamson?

  size of your audience is essentially zero, the selection effect, which chooses whether or not you are going to go from second in the world to first in the world, or from 40th podcast in your country to 39th to 35th, a lot of the time that is going to come down to quality as you get towards the top. So I often, I've been citing the stat a lot recently, which is 90% of podcasts don't make it past episode three. And of the 10% that do, 90% don't make it past episode 20. So by simply producing 21 podcast episodes, you're in the top 1% of podcasters on the planet, which is a beautiful power law to see. But.

• 6:29Chris Williamson?

  Of all podcasters that have produced 300 episodes or 500 episodes, what's selecting them as they're further through the maturation process? And I actually think that's a really interesting distinction that you're talking about there. That's probably missed off and Twitter obviously is not perfect for nuance. But Tiago's tweet misses that, which is that as you get towards the peak of your craft, those fine tuned points, the level of detail and resolution that you see things with, perhaps does matter.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  It also, I think, depends on your particular goals. Like, what is it you're trying to achieve? I mean, I dabble in this stuff just because I like dabbling in it. I like fonts, I like changing up the tagline. We don't use any real metrics for any of our page views or anything like that or signups. We just want to be the best that we can be, the best version of ourselves and get better every day about what we're trying to do in the craft. And we're about to redesign the whole website, which will come out in the next sort of like 45 days. But the idea there is also selection, right? So we just don't, we don't want the most readers, we just want the best readers. And same as listeners to the podcast, we don't really, we're not going for a mainstream podcast. If we were, we'd be releasing an episode every day.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  And what we're going for is we just want a really good audience who loves what we do. And that'll take care of itself.

• 7:56Chris Williamson?

  That's really interesting, really, really interesting point, man, to counteract the consistency and iteration addiction. As with everything, I think it is a balance.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Well, eventually you become irrelevant, right? So it like, just, just work through this with me. And this is my hypothesis, so I don't know if it's correct or not. But let's say I write an article for the website, it's really popular. So now I know if I write another article like that, it's going to be really popular. Well, if I do this over and over again, and on a weekly basis, it won't make a difference. On a monthly basis, it won't make a difference. But if I do this for years, eventually I become irrelevant. And I've become irrelevant, not only in my knowledge and my learning and my development, but I've become relevant to my audience because it's the same thing rehashed over and over again. And all's I'm going for is that immediate dopamine hit of what the audience wants. And I know it's popular because the metrics tell me it's popular. Same as with podcasts, right?

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Big name guests probably get more downloads than people that nobody's ever heard of before. But if you only do big name guests, then you're not having fun as a host. You're not getting to explore the subjects you want to explore. It becomes a business instead of a craft. And that's fine because you can look at it as a business. That's why I said it depends on your goals and what you're trying to achieve.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  When you say the best that we can be is what you're optimizing for, how are you, what are the ways that you're adjudicating that?

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Well, A, we have to make a living, right? We got payroll, we got to pay people. So we do need to generate some sort of income off what we do. But we also want to give back to the world. So part of what we're trying to do is equalize opportunity in the world, not outcomes. I don't believe in equal outcomes. I do believe in equal opportunity. And we don't have it. So what we're trying to do is popularize thinking, mental models, critical thinking, and sort of give people a broader education than what they got in school because we specialize so early. And so the best version of that means it's just increasingly relatable to other people. It means we're creating timeless content. We're talking about timeless things. We've been, you know, I've been blogging since 2009.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  And honestly, you should be able to go look at any article from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and it should still be relevant today. And that's the goal that we have for ourselves. And that's independent of sort of page views. Now, with that said, you know, we also, we need feedback. And the feedback comes from touching people. And by touching them, I mean interacting with people who read your website, not physically touching them because we're all supposed to be physically distant right now. But we go to events, we talk to people, we hop on the phone with readers. We have an engaging learning community where people give us feedback about what we're doing. And touching that medium is really important because if you don't touch the medium, you get Out of touch. And so we have to know that what we're doing is relevant for the people that we're trying to do it for.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  So yes, we're trying to do it for ourselves, but we're also trying to do it for other people. And if we're writing in a way that doesn't resonate with other people, that the examples don't resonate, the theories are too far out there, the prescriptions are not applicable, then we're not doing our job in the way that we want to be doing it, and it's not going to help us accomplish our goals.

• 11:08Chris Williamson?

  That's an interesting thing to do with anyone that's a creator or has goals online. The map and territory mental model is a perfect example of this, right? That you have a dashboard, which is a rough-hewn set of statistics, but it is a proxy for telling you the things that you might actually be optimizing for. Presumably, page views must at least in some part be aligned with popularity, because the more popular it is, the more people see it. But why is it popular? Is it just racing to the bottom of the brainstem?

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 11:36Chris Williamson?

  And then what's that, what's that effect where when a measure seeks to become the measure, the outcome itself?

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Oh, I think I know what you're doing. I don't remember.

• 11:46Chris Williamson?

  It's not the Parkinson's, it's not Parkinson's law. People are going to be screaming it at me. Anyway, that thing. But when you optimize for the outcome of the measure as opposed to the actual outcome itself, yeah.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Well, that's what we do at work, all these KPIs, right? We're optimizing for, but if you, the map is not, the territory is a perfect mental model. That's exactly what we were talking about in this sense. We get so far distant from what we're actually doing and the feedback of it. We're operating based on a map and we're not in touch with the territory. So when the territory changes, we don't know that the territory has changed because it takes a while for the map to update. We do this in organizations. If you run a team and you have, let's say, multiple managers below you, everything gets filtered. We learned this in kindergarten, right? One, one way we learn this is sort of how information gets filtered to us. So in an organization, we distill it into a dashboard. We have metrics. We have all these things. And if you're doing it that way, if you're operating that way, your job as a manager, your job as a leader is to touch.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Touch the territory on a regular basis? How's the morale with people? Are these still the right metrics? What's behind the scenes with these metrics? Is the goalpost changing? Is the way that we calculate them changing? Are they still the relevant metrics? So your job changes from just sort of managing to being active. And then it becomes, I need to be active touching the territory. In kindergarten, we do the telephone tag game, right? You sit in a circle. I don't know, we do this in Canada. You sit in a circle. One person says a sentence, you go around the circle. By the time it gets back to the person you started, it sounds nothing like. And everybody just changed one word. Well, that happens in organizations, right? So if you're the CEO of an organization and somebody who's really close to the problem, say you work in manufacturing and they're on the floor, they know exactly what the problem is and they pass that up.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  But as that gets passed up, layer of layer of management, everybody has their own slight tweak on it, different motivations, different incentives to say something different. And the information gets lost in the process. And that's why it's so important that we actually touch the territory. And one way that we've done that or popularized that is sort of management by walking around. I hate that term, but what really goes on with management by walking around is you're getting away from the map and you're touching the territory to make sure the territory still relates to the map. And if you think about it that way, it makes all the sense in the world because you're not just walking around to say hi. I remember I used to work with people who did that. They would just walk by and they'd be like, hi. And you, you know, they read this book and they're like, oh, that's management by walking around.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  He saw all of his employees today and, you know, went back to their office. But that's not what it means. It means you need to be connected to people, connected to the people you work with, connected to their work. You need to understand it at some level. And if you want to solve problems, you really need to get as close to the problem as possible because nobody understands that problem. At least the individual context of that problem, like the person closest to it. You might have a global context that you can add to it, which might change the solution to it. But you really need to talk to the people who are closest to the problem if you want to solve it.

• 14:43Chris Williamson?

  The interesting challenge there online, especially for content creators, is that you're inherently buffered away from the problem. You're away from the map and the territory itself as well, right? Like everything has got distance between you and it. Have you got any advice about how people can?

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Well, not only is there a ton of distance, there's a ton of noise, right? And that becomes hard because now you have to pick the signal from the noise. So who's actually telling me something that matters versus don't? I don't know about you, but I get a negative comment. I'll get a thousand positive comments. I'll get one negative comment. And it's that one negative comment that like really hits me and I can't let it go. And so touching the territory is sort of like, okay, are there? I'll give you a great example of something we messed up. We really, it's an audiobook called The Great Mental Models, Volume One. And I did the narration for that. And we did it with a studio that had never done narration before and a whole bunch of other things. Anyway, the narration sucked and it's totally on me.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  But when I get the feedback from it, the first bit of feedback is sort of like, okay, well, one person said that. Now that I'm not gonna, like, it bothers me, but it doesn't carry a lot of weight. But as more and more people and you start to get a cohort of people, and it doesn't have to be a large cohort, but it's enough people that for the second volume, we switch narrators, we get a different narrator. So it's sort of like, okay, we got feedback on it. The feedback made sense and it was, it wasn't consistent, but it was enough feedback to be relevant and statistically large. So, okay, at that point, now the world's telling us something. We have a choice. Do we adapt to what the world is saying? Or do we continue to believe that they're wrong and I'm right and the narration is fine?

• 16:31Speaker 00

  And it's like, well, no, I don't have any ego in this. I don't really need to be the narrator. There's no reason for me to be the narrator. And so it's change the narrator, right? And it's that sort of simple, but it's really hard when the world gives us feedback like that, when the map or the territory is changing to change the map, especially if we created the map. And that becomes like a really interesting nuance to this is because now, not only is the map, if you created the map, it's easy for me to be like, oh, the map's wrong, change it. But if I created the map, it's totally different problem. It's much harder for me to go back and say, oh, man, this thing I created, I spent maybe thousands of hours on. That's wrong. I gotta do it differently and I gotta think differently about it.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  And I think that the phrase that we we use internally is outcome over ego. And it's about putting the outcome first and your ego second. And so often what we do in organizations and what we do in life is we put our ego first and the outcome second. And a great example of that is sort of knowledge workers where we go to work, we're a knowledge worker. We get paid for knowledge, right? That's inherent in the the title of what we're doing. So if we're not right, what are we? And that means we're wrong and we can't be wrong because we're getting paid to be a knowledge worker. So and then what happens is you start distorting reality through the lens of you being right. So it's not about who has the best idea or who gets us to the best outcome. It's about me being right.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  And we never work so hard in life as we do to prove ourselves right. Even when we're wrong, we will go to the ends of the earths to be right. We'll discount evidence, we will ignore other people, we will prove them wrong. We'll get a chip on our shoulder about it, we'll be the I told you so person, we'll be, you know, not our best selves. And so one way to do this, and creators get this all the time, right? So if you think about the creator economy and and sort of, I wouldn't say thought leaders as much, but people who create things for a living and rely on people buying them, it's different, right? You're in a different frame of mind because you're getting constant feedback. That sold, that didn't sell, people are telling you, you're getting a lot more nuances along the way.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  You want to be right, but the world will give you very clear evidence that you are wrong. And you have two choices. You won't last long in this business if you don't adapt and you don't. Same as organizations, if you don't adapt to the the reality as it changes, or as you learn more about it and it's unchanging, then you're going to be facing a big problem.

• 18:58Chris Williamson?

  An additional challenge, which is faced online, are the incentives of bad actors. Because as you've identified, Comments sections can be a pretty ugly place to be and you don't know whether this person's commenting from a place of good faith. Is there some sort of selection effect that this particular medium or demographic or time of day or content or guest or whatever is selecting for which is skewing the kind of feedback that I'm getting? I'm not able to run this through the filters that I would be able to. So yes, I agree. The online content creator has more immediate feedback from the market and they are in some ways closer, but in other ways they're further away because-

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, they have a lot more noise to sift through.

• 19:41Chris Williamson?

  Great way to put it. You had a tweet as well, talking about ego. You had a tweet that said, "Don't let the victories go to your head or the defeats go to your heart." How can people detect when their ego is serving them and when it's deceiving them?

• 19:53Speaker 00

  When you just get too high on yourself in that sense, right? Like when you're, you sort of have a win and I had a friend who inspired this and I definitely won't mention their name and hopefully they don't listen to this podcast, but they made a lot of money on Bitcoin and it sort of, you know, it went to their head. And by went to their head, it made them think that they were a great investor and I think that's going to lose them a lot of money in the future.

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  Shane, there is no way that that person is going to work out who that is because there are about 100,000 people just in America that are in that position.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I only have a couple of friends so in that position. So it's not, it's not hard for them to discern who that is. But I think that, you know, we just, we get overconfident in our abilities and a dose of humility, but it's the same for the opposite, right? Like you're not a bad person or you know, you don't need to give up if you write a tweet and not a thousand people like it or you know, that you can't let that affect your drive and your motivation and you also can't get overconfident in your ability. If you, you need to distinguish between when you got lucky and when you're good. And if you're good, you can't be complacent because the world won't let you be complacent. And that's what I mean by letting it get to your head. If getting to your head means it affects your drive, it affects-

• 21:15Speaker 00

  Affects your, um, what you do and what you take on, then it's a problem. And I think the same on the, the opposite end, right? Your heart is where your drive comes from and not everything is going to go the way you want it to. I mean, nobody would have predicted last year, but we've all come through this pretty tough year together. And for some people, it's really got to them. It's got to their heart and it's sort of depressing and demotivating. And I, I think that it's not, it's trying not to allow that. And you control your circumstance or not your circumstances, but you control how you respond to your circumstances and what's happening. And so if you have a good day, that's great. You had a good day and if you have a bad day, that's great. You had a bad day and what I try to teach my kids is, um, they win or they learn, right?

• 21:58Speaker 00

  And so if you're in school, you're playing a video game, maybe you lose. What did you learn, right? That's a win. You, you can look at this totally differently. Don't let it affect how you, how motivated you are to play or, or you go from here. Don't let it affect your heart, just help it.

• 22:17Chris Williamson?

  One of the things-

• 22:17Speaker 00

  Or let it help you, I guess.

• 22:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is how athletes deal with situations. I've been increased, I played sports as a kid throughout all my childhood and I'm a big fan of watching sports as well. Only recently have I realized just how beautiful of a environment for high performers it creates. It's bounded, it's got very easy to quantify objective metrics of success and failure. There are slow, um, contributing factors that you can get to in terms of your speed and your stamina and your power and your outputs. And you can run drills, which you then apply. So you can kind of do a dry run of the thing that you're going to do. Me and you haven't done a dress rehearsal of this podcast before we come on here and then do it. Right. So I'll say this and then you say that, and then yeah, we'll wait for a bit.

• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  So I, I've just been fascinated by seeing that. And one of the problems, one of the reasons I think that people become disheartened with work is that there is such a myriad of reasons about why this could have gone well, why this could have gone badly, what contributed to my preparation or lack thereof? Was it the sleep last night? Was it the diet? Was it the argument with the misses in the morning? And, um, yeah, I think athletes, for those that are listening, you have a very, you're blessed with a, a very particular environment within which you can deploy your excellence.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  But it's also super competitive, right? It's, you know, you miss a step, you might be off the team. And athletes are a great example of not letting victories get to your head or defeats get to your heart. You know, if Michael Jordan, for example, playing basketball missed a shot and let that affect his drive, then he wouldn't be the Michael Jordan we knew. And if he, you know, won and it went to his head, he wouldn't have worked as hard in the offseason to get back there next year. And so like, I think athletes are a pure sort of manifestation of that, but we're knowledge athletes in a lot of ways, right? It's just as competitive, at least if you're a competitive type person. And, you know, slight nuances because of leverage can make a huge difference in your

• 24:20Speaker 00

  ability to not only deliver for the organization, but deliver on you, your goals and what you want to get out of life. And I think it's important that we're, we're not complacent. We don't coast and we sort of keep moving forward. And what do we need to do that? Well, we can't let everything go to our head and we can't let it affect our drive. So that's where that came from.

• 24:40Chris Williamson?

  Do you think it's possible to have a desire to improve that doesn't come from a place of insufficiency? This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. People, many people that want more out of life, I think are doing it from a place of a fear that they're not enough as opposed to a desire to do more.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Well, I can only speak in my personal circumstances. I would word it as pleased but not satisfied. I mean, I'm super happy with my life and where things are. Does that mean that it can't be better, that I can't do more for other people, that I can't live a more meaningful, fulfilling life? No, not at all. Do I have to discover what those things are? Yeah, that's part of life. But I don't think for me, it comes from a place of insufficiency. And I think, you know, we all have drive for different reasons. Mine is a chip on my shoulder, you know, from being a kid and told that I couldn't do anything, being told that I sucked at school and I'd be lucky to pass high school and all of those things.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  And drive, everybody has their own drive. And if your drive comes from insufficiency, I would sort of encourage people to change that story. Like let other people become the fuel for your fire, but you choose how that fire burns. And if it's in insufficiency, it's not a, I don't think it's a healthy fire. And I don't think it's going to burn really long and really hot. I think you need to turn that into... A different sort of story that you tell yourself, which is, I am enough, I'm enough. And if people don't think I'm enough, then maybe I have the wrong people in my life. And I think that it's really hard to get rid of people in your life because you're scared. But that's a much better choice than living your life like that for the rest of your life,

• 26:24Speaker 00

  where you feel like you're not enough, you feel insufficient. And I bet you, I bet you, if you did research, you go talk, go to an, actually, this would be a great example. Like, go to a retirement home or something and just volunteer time there and talk to people. And I bet you, they will all have felt those things at various points in their life. But now they'll be able to give you perspective on what they would change, what they would do differently. And I bet you, they delete people from their lives a lot quicker who made them feel that way.

• 26:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man. It's so strange, the way that our formative years, when we grow up, it just embeds into the substrate of who we are, right? And then you spend, you know, you've got 10 years of imprinting and then 70 years of deprogramming. It's kind of funny.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you don't have perspective, right? You only see sort of like, so for, in the mental model context of relativity, right? And so the way that we learn relativity, and I'll relate this back to the story in a second, is grade nine physics, you're on a train, you're holding a ball, the train is moving 60 miles an hour. You're holding the ball, how fast is the ball moving? Well, relative to you, the ball's not moving at all. A casual observer, it's moving 60 miles an hour as the train passes by. And as you're listening to this, if you're sitting and you're not in a car, you can say, how fast are you moving? And you'd be like, I'm not moving at all, you know, you're stationary, I'm stationary. But if we put ourselves on the sun, we're moving at like 18,000 miles an hour, right? All of a sudden. And so this perspective matters.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  And I think we often get caught in our immediate perspective. And we're blind to the, how do we actually put that in perspective of life, perspective of meaning? And so talking to somebody who's older, or imagining yourself being older, is a great way to get out of your current perspective and put whatever's happening in a greater, broader perspective. You probably don't want to wake up at 90, having lived this life, where you feel inefficient or insufficient to other people. That is not the way that you want to live and you can imagine yourself at 90 and you can really work backwards and see that that's the case, or you can sort of go talk to somebody who is 90 about this thing and they'll put it in perspective for you in their, their way,

• 28:33Speaker 00

  right? With their wisdom of having lived a much longer life.

• 28:37Chris Williamson?

  Starting with the end in mind is such a powerful mental model to do, but it's so difficult to hold on to, man. You get caught up in the urgent, right? The day to day, you've got to reply to this email and pick the kids up. Well, you, I don't, you do. And, you know, all the, all the different shit that we've got to do, right? And it's very, very easy, death by a thousand cuts, to slowly be skewed off your trajectory of where you were going and you can end up doing stuff that in no way contributes to what it is that you want. Yeah, I am, something that I heard you mention on Rich Roll's show was that you guys take the two months off every, every summer. Are you guys still doing that?

• 29:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. So things start winding down June 1st and they, we go to four day weeks and then this year we gave August off to everybody in the entire company. And I mean, I take July and most of July and August off. And that helps balance and perspective. But going back to what you said, yeah, you get caught up in the minutia, but the problem is we prioritize the minutia. And you should be giving yourself the best hour of the day, either for learning or the most valuable thing that you're contributing to the, the company. And how do you do that? Cause people always say, well, I don't have time to do that. And so, you know, you don't have time not to do that. And the way to do it is you book it in your calendar, but you don't book it for tomorrow because you look at your calendar for the next month, you're booked solid. Of course, everybody's booked solid. But you

• 30:00Speaker 00

  go two months out and all of a sudden you see a 9am slot on a Monday. Well, now you book every Monday at 9am and you book a meeting with yourself and then you book Tuesday, Wednesday, and ideally you get up to five days a week. You just go out as far as you need to do to do this. And then what'll happen is you'll wake up in October and the first 90 minutes of every day at work, you know, is your time. It's your time to learn. It's your time to work on the most important thing. It's your time to, to sort of make decisions. But the problem is, we look at our calendar next week and we're like, there's no way I can do that. And it's, well, of course, like, because you're booked solid. And that's, you know, you're making choices to being booked solid. But I would encourage you to go way far out, book it now,

• 30:44Speaker 00

  make it consistent, make it repeatable, and then you never have to find time. And what ends up happening is all this minutia that doesn't really matter gets crammed into the last hour of the day. And then you're really good at prioritizing in the last hour of the day. You're terrible at the start of the day. At the start of the day, anybody can usurp your time. They send you an email, you go on this wild goose chase. But the last hour of the day, you're like, man, I gotta get home, I gotta date, or I gotta get my kids, or I just want to leave the office. And so now it's like, oh, I don't need to do that. And then the other thing that you learn, and this is the lesson I sort of, I went to one of my bosses one day, and she said, you know, balls bounce for a reason, but most balls won't bounce. And so what's important at 8:00

• 31:26Speaker 00

  AM, unless it's really an emergency, often by 4:00 PM, that problem has already been solved. So this thing, so you're actually going to save a ton of time when you start pushing out a lot of this stuff to the end of the day. And the other thing that I've noticed in organizations, and I don't know if this relates to some of your listeners or not, but there's people who hog your time. And by hog it, I mean, they'll send out a draft presentation, and you know, it's a shitty draft. And they'll be like, what do you think of this? And you'll spend like, an hour fixing it. And what they've really done is they've outsourced their job to you. And you need to have standards. And your standard is, you know, is this the best you can do? And

• 32:09Speaker 00

  they'll never say yes. They'll be like, I'm looking for comments. Well, send it to me when it's the best you can do, and then I'll take a look at it. Right? And that can be your standard. And then people will stop annoying you with that. And I think it's really powerful way to get out of all of this. Because, you know, I used to get consumed by, I worked for an intelligence agency, right? Which is still, in many ways, government. And you get consumed by this stuff. And it's like, well, that's not why I signed up. That's not what I want to do. None of this is actually productive.

• 32:37Chris Williamson?

  How do you structure your days or your weeks to be productive? Have you got that 90 minutes first thing in the morning?

• 32:43Speaker 00

  I have three hours, so from nine to 12, I don't book any meetings. So every morning, every day, with very few exceptions, I know I don't have to find time to do what I want to do. And what I want to do can be spend time with the kids, go for a bike ride. What I want to do can be write a book. What I want to do can be whatever is the most important thing for me in that moment. It could be sleeping, right? But I never have to find the time. And the problem is, we're always looking for time for the most important thing for us. And we need to change the way that we think about it and give ourselves, we get one life, right? You could die tomorrow, I could die tomorrow. I don't want to live that life, knowing that I just got caught up in email.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  And part of that means, you know, about three years ago, I went through this crisis where I used to answer every email I got. And I was like, it just takes like three, four hours a day answering email. And I'm like, I can't do this anymore. And it's really, you know, at first, it's really hard for me because, again, staying in touch with the media and being connected to people. So now I read or at least skim every email, but I don't reply. And I really just don't reply to a lot of things, right? Like I won't reply to group threads at work unless I have something of value to add.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  And my baseline for contributing in meetings, on emails and all of that, doesn't start from here. I'm going to share what I know with you. It starts from what's my unique take on this particular problem? Do I have something that you probably won't see? Can I see a blind spot that you're missing? What do I know about this problem that you don't already know? And so often, what consumes time at work, two things. One, we're telling people what they already know because we're signaling that we did work. We're signaling that we're knowledge worker. We're signaling we're smart, but we're effectively just paraphrasing something that everybody already knows. That's a huge waste of time. And we get stuck in this sort of rut where we're just telling people what they already know.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  So to change that around at your next meeting, instead of saying, what do you think of X, Y, Z? Say, does anybody, change the value of signaling to signaling something that not everybody knows. What's your unique view into this problem? And then reward people with that sort of signaling, right? So now you're giving us, you're contributing information to the problem instead of just telling us what we need to know. And if you're saying something that we already know, it's easy to, oh, we already know that. Like that's established or, you know, you can, you can sort of help people move to this point. And it'll take a couple of weeks for it to work its way through. But it's really effective at gathering information and gathering high quality information. Because what you're really trying to identify is what are our blind spots?

• 35:32Speaker 00

  And the other thing that consumes people at work is poor decisions. And so we get rushed into this culture where I think we've all been there. You get this briefing, it's like 70 pages, either a PowerPoint presentation or, you know, a big document with a lot of research. You read the executive summary because you have no time. You read it on the way to the meeting and then you, you signal that you did the work by, you know, paraphrasing the executive summary. Nobody's actually looked at the data. Nobody understands the territory. You've only looked at the map and then you make a decision based on that. And the problem with that is that decision comes about to bite you, but it doesn't bite you right away. It'll bite you in three to four months.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  And then the other way that we, you'd think that that would be great feedback for us to make better decisions. But it's not because there's a lot of people between us and the implementation. So now we blame execution. It wasn't the decision we made, it was the execution, right? Because it's so easy to wash our hands of any, absolve ourself of any responsibility. But in reality, poor initial decisions consume a ton of time at work. And what we're really doing with a lot of our time is fixing our own mistakes. We don't want to admit it to ourselves, but that could be a communication mistake. It could be a mistake in the decisions you made. It can be a mistake and then that consumes a ton of our time.

• 36:52Chris Williamson?

  Man, I didn't think how much time has been saved and then re-lost over the last year with this switched virtual. So, all of the meetings that were potentially used, I saw this amazing meme, I think it was Rory Sutherland that shared it, where he said, "It's this guy looking and he can't believe it, he's sort of staring into his hands", and he said, "All of those meetings really could have just been video calls", and it's like, that's like the synopsis of 2020, I suppose.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  A lot of those video calls could have been emails, and a lot of those emails could have been texts, and a lot of those texts like, shouldn't exist.

• 37:30Chris Williamson?

  Didn't need to be sent, yeah. Here's another thing that I've been thinking about, I wanted to get your thoughts on. Is there a point where we should stop focusing on exploring and learning skills that we want to acquire, and instead focusing on exploiting the ones that we have? This kind of growth treadmill, people constantly looking for new acquiring, I think this probably ties in a little bit to the place of insufficiency thing, "I need more, I need to know more", as opposed to just focusing on exploiting and really getting stuck into the work?

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Two thoughts there. I think that's a false duality. I don't think it's an either-or, you should always be learning and you should always be using the knowledge that you learn. I think what you're talking about in a broader sense is,

• 38:16Speaker 00

  we're channel surfing life, right? And in a lot of ways, we have a poverty of commitment, because there's so many options. We don't want to commit to any one option, because the minute we commit, it locks us down into something, and we start to get feedback, and maybe we're not good, and you know, we're a beginner and it's hard. So, we just, we change the channel. Remember when you're a kid and you just like flick, flick, flick? We do this with Netflix now, like the endless browsing, you don't actually end up watching things, you know, it's 45 minutes later and you've just sort of previewed all these shows. But in life, what we really value, and I was reading about this a little bit recently, like what we really value, anybody that we hold up to be...

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Amazing or do incredible things. They've all committed. They've all gone all in on one particular idea, whether it be Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or whoever. It doesn't really matter, right? Any athlete, same thing, right? They've gone all in on what they're doing. And so we really value it in other people, but we're scared to commit to something for ourselves. And so we endlessly like channel surf. We're always looking for the new latest hack. We're always looking for the new way to do things. When, you know, in reality, it's the boring things that actually lead to the outcomes, right? Michael Jordan, the best basketball player in the world, and he's just top of mind because I've been

• 39:38Speaker 00

  reading about him recently. First pass that he would practice at every practice was a chest pass. Well, he learned how to do a chest pass when he was like five. It is literally the most basic pass in basketball. And you have somebody at the pinnacle of their career working on their chest pass. And, you know, that's all in. That's commitment to one thing. And that comes with consequences. It comes with costs and it might mean that we're wrong. And I think that's what we're really scared of. And so if we endlessly channel surf, we're never going to be wrong, but we're never going to be right either. And I think that that's really interesting from, you need to decide how you live your life, not let other people tell you how you live your life. You need to decide what's meaningful

• 40:20Speaker 00

  for you. You need to decide what you're going to commit to, what's worth committing to and what's not. But if the answer is nothing's worth committing to, then the problem isn't the options available to you. The problem is you.

• 40:33Chris Williamson?

  I love that. I was reading The Power of Marginal by Paul Graham. It's quite an old blog post now.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:40Chris Williamson?

  He says, "The more successful people become, the more heat they get if they screw up or even seem to screw up. In this respect, as in many others, the eminent are prisoners of their own success. As your platform grows and fs.blog gets more and more renowned, do you sense this at all? Do you have any strategies that avoid becoming too concerned about the success and about what comes with that?"

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Well, the success isn't really about me. I mean, I called it fs.blog for a reason.

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  Shane Parrish is great.com. Yeah, exactly.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, definitely not that, right? Because it's not. And then our tagline, the one that sticks all the time is mastering the best of what other people have figured out. And so I don't have the answers. I mean, I've come up with nothing original in my life. And so I don't, I think the popularity is for the website. The popularity is for the concept. The popularity is for learning. The popularity isn't unpopular. And I don't, I don't see it that way. And I mean, I don't, I definitely don't think of myself as that way. And, you know, I was talking with my buddy, James Clear, about this the other day. He had this wonderful phrase where he's like, I want to be the most well-known person

• 41:57Speaker 00

  that nobody recognizes. And I thought that that was really interesting, right? So not being sort of recognized or approached and having a big audience. But, and the question is like, why do you want a big audience? Is it for a big impact? Or is it because you want a big audience because that's your, your fast car? Or that's your, your sort of internal ego driving you? And I think, you know, for me, I see Farnam Street as a project that outlives me. And so I'm just a caretaker or curator at this point in time. And there'll be another person behind me who does the same thing, under the same brand, with the same audience or new audience. But it just continues because what we're talking

• 42:39Speaker 00

  about doesn't, doesn't change. What's valuable, learning, we might have to recontextualize some of the lessons for today's day and time, but we'll still be talking about the same issues. And so I don't view the website as like my lifetime. I view it as something that surpasses me, something that lives in infamy, and hopefully just goes on forever, right? And, but it's not about Shane. It's not about me. It's not about anything that I do. I'm just the temporary steward of this.

• 43:06Chris Williamson?

  You're sounding a lot, you're sounding a lot like the Dread Pirate Roberts here. It's like Ross Ulbricht meets, meets Shane Parrish. There's a quote from my buddy, Rob Henderson, who says, "You want everyone to know your name and no one to know your face."

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, that's interesting. I'll pass that on to James. Yeah, that's really interesting.

• 43:23Chris Williamson?

  I think Rory's identified the optimal level of fame as sometimes having someone come up to you in the airport. That was his definition of the optimal level of fame.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I think so, but like on the internet, it's different, right? Because now people can attack you and people can make up stories about you and they can, you know, try to take you down a peg, even if they don't know you, they've never met you, the stories are false, you know, they can carry their own weight. I think that, you know, there's a bit of a different world now where, you know, you used to be able to sort of, that one crazy person, if there was one, could sort of like yell in a, in an airport or a theater and cause a scene, but the number of people impacted are, you know, I don't know, tens. And now it's thousands and possibly millions. And I think that the, you know, the world is different now and we haven't quite adjusted to what that means.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  And we'll have to find some way to do that because we don't wanna, we don't wanna prevent people from sharing their thoughts. And you mentioned Paul Graham's essay. Paul Graham's a great example of somebody who's, you know, profound thinker, great essayist, great writer. And we, we don't wanna discourage the next Paul Graham because they don't want. And so I think anonymity is gonna be a big thing. And I think that that's gonna, whether it's enabled by the blockchain or something else, I think that people wanna have an identity that's online that might be detached from them as a person. And everybody online just, we already do this when you think about it, because we just show part of ourself online. You don't see my whole life.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  You see sort of what I'm thinking about, you don't see my time with my kids, you don't see any of it. So we just see one part of people. So if we detach people's identities from their, their self and we put them out there as, here's one part of me, I'm gonna put that out there. And maybe it'll be controversial and that'll be good because now we can start playing with ideas a bit more again, right? We've, we've stopped that because if you're fairly popular on any platform, you don't wanna do anything too controversial. And so you might not say what you actually think, but that that in itself is suppressing ideas being shared, suppressing freedom of speech, suppressing other people benefiting from that. You might be wrong and you get feedback that you're wrong, right? But now you don't want to put it out because you're too big, there's too much at risk, there's

• 45:44Speaker 00

  loss aversion about what you're doing. And I think that that we need to fix that because we want the best ideas. We want them to circulate. We want people to talk freely. And I don't mean that in any political sense. I just mean it in sharing ideas, technology, moving the world forward, equalizing opportunity amongst everybody. So we all start with a level playing field. Not that we end up with a level playing field, but we start with a more level playing field.

• 46:09Chris Williamson?

  I'm still undecided about the future of the anonymous creator economy. George Mack, mutual friend, is super bullish on it, adamant that that's going to be the future. I appreciate, given your background and how the blog started, that it makes a ton of sense. The one fly in the ointment that I see is that people follow people, they don't follow things traditionally. You know, you think Cristiano Ronaldo has 40 million followers, Real Madrid has 16 million, Elon Musk has double the amount that any of his companies do all added together, because we require that. Maybe the anonymity will permit people to get around that. Perhaps we'll get used to the persona, following the persona, not the person. But I'm not sure. And that'll be-

• 46:52Speaker 00

  But I mean, Farnam Street started as an anonymous blog.

• 46:55Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  And it would have been a lot quicker to build an audience. I can 100% say that with confidence if I started it under my name.

• 47:02Chris Williamson?

  ShaneParishyisGreat.com, I'm telling you, that's the one to do it. Final question, man. Eliezer Yudkowsky tweeted this the other day, and it's amazing. Such a good question. If you were a character in a book, what would your readers be yelling at you to do?

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a great question. Um, what would they be yelling at me to do?

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Probably be more open about working at an intelligence agency, be more open about stories, do more, do more interviews. This is what people already yell at me to do. You know, I keep, I keep my profile pretty low key for some of this. And I would say, do more, speak more in the podcast because I don't talk a lot in our podcast. And I think that that's what I already get yelled at. So I would assume that that is, to scale it up a bit. And, you know, that's okay, because that's not me. That's not what I want to do. So I just need to live a life that in accordance with what I want and what

• 48:11Speaker 00

  I value and doing things just to grow or get myself out there more that don't have another purpose that aren't going to help our mission, don't really help me.

• 48:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm glad that you broke the habit today and joined me, fs.blog, where else should people go to check out your stuff?

• 48:29Speaker 00

  At Shane A. Parrish, P A double R I S H on Twitter. And if you just Google Shane Parrish, you'll find a whole bunch of stuff. And yeah, would love for you to follow along and join us on our mission.

• 48:42Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. Thank you so much.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Thanks, Chris. Really appreciate this.