Michael Gervais on the Path to Excellence | You Have To Wrestle With This

Ryan reads today's Daily Stoic meditation and talks to sport psychologist and entrepreneur Dr. Michael Gervais about his work in elite performance, the practical path to excellence, how to find purpose and meaning in your life, and more. Dr. Michael Gervais is a high-performance psychologist who has worked with NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, numerous Olympic medalists, and MVPs from every major sport. Dr. Gervais is the host of the popular Finding Mastery podcast that explores the psychology of the world’s most extraordinary thinkers and doers. Dr. Gervais created an online master class for the mind and co-authored the recently released Audible Original, Compete to Create, about how to train the mind. This episode is brought to you by Beekeeper’s Naturals, the company that’s reinventing your medicine with clean, effective products that actually work. Beekeepers Naturals has great products like Propolis Spray and B. LXR. As a listener of the Daily Stoic Podcast you can receive 15% off your first order. Just go to beekeepersnaturals.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout to claim this deal. This episode is brought to you by Box of Awesome from Bespoke Post. They have a huge number of collections no matter what you’re into: the great outdoors, style, cooking, mixology, and more. To get started, you just take a quiz at boxofawesome.com your answers help them pick the right Box of Awesome for you. Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code STOIC at checkout. This episode is also brought to you by Talkspace, the online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show. Today’s episode is brought to you by Munk Pack, Keto Granola Bars that contain just a single gram of sugar and 2 to 3 net carbs—and they’re only 140 calories. Get 20% off your first purchase of ANY Munk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and entering our code STOIC at checkout.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  You have to wrestle with this. It would be wonderful if history was a pleasant picture to look at. Sadly, it is not. Not today. It wasn't to the people of history either. Take Marcus Aurelius. When he was made emperor, he could not have helped but look back at his predecessors, most of whom had not stood up well to the duties of the office. It would have been nice to simply enjoy the pomp and glamour and traditions of the office, but to do that would have been to ignore its darker sides, too. For instance, at an early age, Marcus Aurelius was introduced to the inspiring examples of Cato, Thrasse, Hervitus, the Stoics whose lives instructed him in the importance of equality under the law,

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  freedom of speech, and respecting individual rights. Yet, it could not have escaped him that it was the emperors of the past who had brutally persecuted and taken the lives of those brave heroes, the people who had the same job that he now had. It would have been easier not to think about this, but he had to lest he want to repeat the mistakes of the past, lest he want to commit injustices himself. So Marcus wrestled with this. He looked uncomfortable truth in the face and tried to be made better for it. Was he perfect at this? No, of course not. Sadly, the persecution of Justin Martyr and other Christians under Marcus Aurelius was all too similar to the persecution of the Stoics under Nero. But

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  he tried. He moved the ball forward, if only a little. Today, we must do the same, whatever country we live in, whatever party we belong to, whatever generation we belong to. Are you, as an American, able to really sit back and think about what it has been like for Black people in this country? Not just during slavery, but much more recently. Are you familiar with the history of redlining, lynching, poll taxes, Confederate statues, and police brutality? Have you, as a German, really studied the Holocaust? Or as a British or French person, do you understand the viciousness of colonialism? As a Turk, have you honestly looked at the Armenian genocide? As a Chinese or Russian citizen, can you wrap your head around the extent of the enormous

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  human suffering and loss during your revolutions in the 20th century? Horrible things have been done by good people. Horrible things. Horrible things that are still happening, and the legacy of these things is still very much alive. It's not just race or nationality either. Doctors need to wrestle with the opioid crisis. The church with homophobia and abuse scandals. Former bullies need to wrestle with their schoolyard behavior. Football with concussions and player safety. Academics with their support of left-wing dictators. Hollywood with the blacklist. Parents with the mistakes they made with their own children, and on, and on, and on. We do this not to whip ourselves.

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, the Stoics know you cannot change the past, but you can learn from it. You can end what has gone on too long. You can make amends. You can help us get a little bit closer to a more just society. "We can't ever be perfect," Epictetus said, "but we can strive to be better," which is why we must wrestle with the past every single day.

• 4:02Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think you can tell a lot about a person by how they treat someone who can't really do anything for them, or sort of how they behave in private. And when my books were first starting to take off in professional sports, I got this text and a call, sort of out of the blue, from Dr. Michael Gervais, who is one of the most elite sports performance psychologists in the world. He's worked with the Seattle Seahawks and Microsoft. He's been featured everywhere you can imagine. He reached out to me and he just offered some advice and he gave me a bunch of great

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  advice and he really encouraged me and it was a it was a it was a super important informative conversation that I continue to reap benefits from to this day and I ended up coming out and meeting some folks at the Seahawks. I went out and did his podcast several years ago. It was it was an illustrative moment and so I'm really excited to talk to Michael Gervais today. I've actually been listening to his podcast for a long time. Shaka Smart told me about it. Everyone knows Michael Gervais, the influencer of the influencers as far as people doing great things in sports and business and music and life. I texted Camila Cabello before I got on with him and said I was going to talk to him and she was

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  very excited. I talked to Rich Roll, another guy who loves him. You know, Michael is legit. You're going to learn a lot in this interview and then actually tomorrow, the day after I'm recording this, I'm going back on his podcast again. So if you want a longer conversation or you want more him asking me questions, you can listen to that. And I did an interview with him several years ago, as I was saying, that's like three hours long, which I think you might like. You can listen to the Finding Mastery podcast, which is a great look into Michael's mind. And you can check out his Audible original, which he wrote with Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, Compete to Create an Approach to Living and Leading Authentically.

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  A great dude, a great book. Check this out and enjoy.

• 6:18Ryan Holiday?

  So I was curious about your story because how does one become a performance psychologist? Because frankly, I wasn't even aware that was a thing that existed until not that long ago. And I'm not sure. I think that it's becoming more popular and obviously you have a big platform. But I've got to imagine your average person, when they think, you know, Tom Brady or Russell Wilson, they're not or baseball, they don't think like, oh, this is where the real competition is these days. Like, this is where the the real training is being done.

• 6:53Michael Gervais?

  Yeah. So is the question like about training or is the question about like?

• 6:57Ryan Holiday?

  How did you get into it? I'm curious like how you even gravitated towards that as a profession?

• 7:04Michael Gervais?

  So it's like my awareness started when I was 15 years old and I there's two types of surfing. I grew up surfing. One was free surfing. One was competitive surfing. And I just couldn't put it together when the competition was on. And so in free surfing, I could, I had great command, like I was, I loved, I loved what the way it felt to be out there and do my thing and be creative. And then as soon as people were judging and watching and scoring and I just became, I don't know, 50% of myself, something like that. And so I was in a heat, perfect conditions, super glassy. It's about head high, which is just kind of really fun, great conditions. And there's only three people out in the water and normally there's like 30, let's say. And it's highly competitive, even in free surfing, to get the wave.

• 7:48Michael Gervais?

  But it's more like an aggressiveness meets positioning. And so come competition day, there was a gentleman that I was surfing with all the time. I was, he was like 20 something, I was 15 and he paddles by me and he goes, Gervais, I see you out here every week. And you gotta stop during these competitions, you've just gotta stop thinking about what could go wrong. And I was like, how the hell, how did he know? And then come to find out, there's this thing called psychology. And so eventually just took me down that path. And so that's, that's how it started. But psychology undergrad was general psych, master's degree was in sports and performance. I'm sorry, sport and exercise science.

• 8:32Michael Gervais?

  So kinesiology based and then PhD in psychology with an emphasis in sport and performance.

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, actually, now that you say this, it strikes me that performance psychologists have always existed. They were just previously known as older players, like that's where the wisdom was, or managers or coaches, right? It's just, it's only as sports has professionalized that that became a specialty, its own domain that there were experts in. But the idea of like, oh, I see exactly what you're doing and I've done that myself. Or that this is a very common thing that we see rookies doing every single year. I mean, that's as old as probably the, the Greek Olympics.

• 9:14Michael Gervais?

  When you think about who influences the psychology of people, it tends to be people that are influential in our lives. That doesn't mean that they're skilled. It doesn't mean that they're trained. It doesn't mean that they have any command of research or science or evidence or best practices, but they might have an intuition. They might have a way about themselves. They might have, they might be on it. They might be absolutely frickin amazing. And so sport and performance psychology is the formal study of the psychology of excellence. How do the extraordinaries, from a research evidence-based standpoint, you know, how do they do it? And the reason we want research and evidence behind it is so that we can stack on it and we're building from sturdy foundations, internal foundations, rather than,

• 9:59Michael Gervais?

  you know, my uncle, he played in the league once and what he did was, well, that's good for your uncle. Maybe it really worked and he was a Hall of Famer, but it doesn't mean it's healthy and it certainly doesn't mean it's sustainable. So, yeah, that's kind of, that would be the only slight difference. But your point is well taken, which is, let's call it 60 years ago, which isn't that long ago, great coaches, whether they're in sport, well, let's just stay with sport. Great coaches did most of it. They were the chefs. They were the nutritionists. They were the sub-parents. They were the technical coaches, physical coaches, mental coaches. They, and then as disciplines started to get more sophisticated, the progressive coaches like, hey, there's this thing called strength and conditioning as a science.

• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 10:43Michael Gervais?

  We should bring them in so our athletes will be bigger, faster, stronger in the fourth quarter, end of the game. Sure enough, they were. You know, you apply some good science and stuff happens, but that was like 60 years ago. Now every team has strength and conditioning. But probably the last 10 years ago is when the progressive coaches really started to double down on bringing the science of psychology into the fold.

• 11:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's interesting to me, too. I think sports is probably ahead of the rest of the world on this. And for people who've watched billions, maybe you see it a little bit in like Wall Street. But like when I I've been lucky enough, I know you've done the same thing when when I've either when I went to see you at the Seahawks, or when I've been to great college programs, or and then, you know, you visit a military base, you're you're meeting with some people in the special forces, you realize that actually, pretty much anywhere that elite performance is happening, they've had to figure out who have that the need to have someone specialize in making their elite performers better at the sort of mental side

• 11:52Ryan Holiday?

  of the game. And it's weird to me how similar all those domains are, even if in one in one domain, they're they're hitting a ball with a bat. And in another one, they're flying Apache helicopters. And then another, they're trading stocks, the same idea of like, getting better at the performance side of things being a priority is really interesting to me.

• 12:14Michael Gervais?

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're on that for sure, which is that there are only three things that we can train as humans, and they cut across industries, right? You can train your craft, whatever that might be, to your point, helicopters are throwing footballs, or, you know, canvassing, you know, with paint. So you're train your craft, train your body, and you can train your mind. And the best of the best are saying, and they've been doing this for a long time, hundreds, thousands of years, saying, I'm not leaving this mental training thing up to chance. You know, it's just that the science is now catching up, let's call it the last, you know, 60 years. And so, it yeah, you take your mind everywhere you go. How about that? So, you know, if it's a mess, it doesn't matter if you're in the

• 12:57Michael Gervais?

  living room or a boardroom. If it's a mess, it sooner or later gets exposed. And that's what happened to me. You know, I didn't have a sturdy framework to understand what it meant to be judged, as opposed to what it meant to use an opportunity to see what I was made of. You know, and yeah.

• 13:13Ryan Holiday?

  I was gonna say that that situation you described is so timeless and so universal, which is like, I know how to do this very well, and I've practiced it a million times. But where I struggle is under pressure, or where I struggle is in the moment, or where I struggle is, you know, when I had a bad night the night before. Like, how do you, how do you do it when it counts? You could see why that matters, whether you're trading stocks, negotiating trade deals for a government, or, or, you know, you know, SEAL Team Six.

• 13:48Michael Gervais?

  Yeah, and like, your, your relationship with thinking is, is, you know, born out of philosophy. So you've got, you know, your arms around philosophical positions and ideas and tenants, and psychology and philosophy are intertwined.

• 14:01Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 14:02Michael Gervais?

  And so some would suggest that certain branches of psychology are not that different than philosophy. And, and some of the greats, you know, like the first American psychologist, applied psychologist, William James, I mean, was he a philosopher? I think so.

• 14:16Ryan Holiday?

  I think so, yes.

• 14:18Michael Gervais?

  Yeah, so are most people philosophers? Yeah, some are just really sophisticated, and have really, you know, pulled on some threads to get some clarity. But most of us have ideas about ideas and ideas about humans, you know, because we're, you know, we're social beings. And then where the kind of the overlapping begins to be between philosophy and psychology begins to, you know, get onto the edges, is what our best practices from a laboratory meets frontier, you know, like, there's a frontier in all the domains that you're talking about. Like, where does the laboratory and the frontier, where do those meet, and how do we prepare and condition our minds to be able to execute out there? And sometimes philosophical frameworks are one of the big rocks to get in the container.

• 15:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I would think so.

• 15:03Michael Gervais?

  With the Stoics, like, you know, to your point, like, sorry to interrupt you, but what, like, what's in your control, what's not? Super basic, but powerful framework.

• 15:12Michael Gervais?

  And then when we kind of pull on that thread a little bit more like, okay, what's in your control is how you speak. Well, let's train how you speak to yourself. Let's train the way that you interpret events. You can train those.

• 15:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And what I think about it too, like when I think about, okay, so my background's in philosophy. I've read all this stuff. Well, then why do I have a therapist? Why do I, why have I, you know, gone to marriage counseling with my wife? Why have I done these things? It's because the broad philosophical concepts can only get you so far. And then you have to work with a specific person who has real training in the, in the sort of the human psychology and, you know, the interacting with, with human beings. I think philosophical principles tend to be broad. I don't want to say they're abstract, but they tend to be ideas. And then to me, where a performance psychologist or a psychologist

• 16:08Ryan Holiday?

  or a therapist of some kind is that's, that's helping the one-on-one individual apply those ideas to their specific problems rooted in their, their understanding of each other as human beings.

• 16:22Michael Gervais?

  Yeah, that's certainly where you go, when you go upstream, you go, okay, what are the philosophical principles? Then downstream are what are the psychological skills and tools that you can build as a repertoire, so that repertoire, so that you can apply the right skill or the right tool in the right way at the right time.

• 16:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 16:40Michael Gervais?

  And that doesn't necessarily mean that we're working, psychologists are working at the individual level only.

• 16:46Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 16:46Michael Gervais?

  Because there is scale to do in psychology, but it really is about principles, skills and tools that you can practice. And psychology is not that different than most other domains in human performance, which is like in the physical training world, there's sets and reps that you do, whether it's squats or whatever it is, you're like, you'll do six reps of four sets and, you know, call that, you know, part of your workout. The same is true psychologically. There's sets and reps. There's, and like you do sets and reps in breathing training, sets and reps in confidence training, sets and reps in focus and refocus training. I can get into all that if you want to get into it. But then there's also this other part, which is the self-discovery part. Which is like, who are you?

• 17:31Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 17:31Michael Gervais?

  And this is where it gets really interesting, you know, like that's the intersection that you and I play in like, what are the big questions in life? And are you grocking with them? What is your purpose? What are you gonna do with your money? You know, what does success mean? What is high performance? How do you define high performance? And so like, until you get your arms around those things, it stays in the abstract for others. And last part that I want to make on this point, because it's so important is that, let's say you said philosophy will get you kind of going. Well, if you only have psychological skills and tools, but don't map it to a philosophy or framework, I call it psychological framework. You don't map it into a sturdy framework, which is really,

• 18:16Michael Gervais?

  how do you make sense of yourself and the world around you? If you don't map it there, it just becomes like these kind of poorly adhesive Band-Aids. You know, like they're Band-Aids, they kind of work, but they're not really sticking. Cause it's, um, I don't know, it's a little bit of a weird analogy, but you know,

• 18:34Ryan Holiday?

  No, I like it.

• 18:35Michael Gervais?

  It's the point.

• 18:36Ryan Holiday?

  I think, I think you need both. And then I think where, where the, the, the performance specialist comes in or the coach, you know, however you want to think about it, it's so important is like, okay, so I was thinking about this as you were talking. So, you know, Alexander the Great is tutored by Aristotle. And then Alexander the Great goes to conquer the world. Now he could have taken one of Aristotle's books with him and just read that. But instead he brings Aristotle with him for a reason, right? Because it's about a dialogue, a discussion. He wants to be able to bring specific problems to this great mind for him to walk him through. And I think about Marcus Aurelius has this advisor named Risticus. He has a philosophy teacher named Sextus.

• 19:19Ryan Holiday?

  It's, it's the advisors that he has, the people who understand not just the world, but would then understand him at a level that he probably doesn't even understand himself, that allows him to work through these really difficult problems. And I think that's what you need when the stakes are high. Like, you know, you're, you're throwing. You're in the Super Bowl or you're running a company. The CEO can't afford to have their emotional issues cloud their judgment. Or, you know, and so I think it's really important that you bring someone in for your performance. It's not just for you, but it's, it's, and it's not that you're deficient in some way. It's that the, the, the process brings out the best version of you.

• 20:05Michael Gervais?

  Hmm. There you go. And so that's exactly right. And you know what we've learned? So let's call it. So I've been in sports psychology, performance psychology for 20, 25 years, somewhere in there. And the last six years, I've been fortunate enough to partner up and poke my head into enterprise businesses. At Microsoft being one of the, my, I mean, most amazing partners that we have. And I was blown away. Brian, poke my head in there, working with, um, all the way down from the CEO, executive team, all the way through the organization. And in elite sport, we talk a lot about recovery. And we have a performance division that sits inside to help coaches,

• 20:50Michael Gervais?

  figure out the psychology, their psychology, figure out the right psychology to, and the psychological skills for their, for their athletes. And we talk about recovery a lot. And the reason I'm bringing up recovery is because in business, one, they don't have that customized, partnered approach for training of the mind. They have mentors for training of craft, other CEOs that are on it or whatever. But training of the mind, they're not quite there yet, and they're certainly not on the conversation of recovery. And so what, yeah, what we've learned is that recovery is a massive competitive advantage, both for internal thriving, meaning that I'm living my best life because I'm no longer irritated and frustrated.

• 21:35Michael Gervais?

  And, you know, um, malaise or fatigue or anxious or whatever, because I've got the right systems in place to recover well and to be my very best, to use your language. And then the other part of it is that when you cascade that throughout the organization, it becomes this massive competitive advantage. And it's, it's radical because in elite sport, it is square one, like, and it's not there in business yet. So I'm excited to see what happens in business over the next decade.

• 22:03Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 22:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think this is what we're talking about, sports being on the cutting edge a little bit. I think sports are more under, it's like the sports know, the owner of a sports team or the coach of a sports team understand like, these are racehorses. These are like sort of elite racehorses. This is talent. And I think sometimes in the business side of things, you're like, this is labor. Like, these are just people doing a specific thing. This, I think, comes from our industrial understanding of how capitalism works or how business works. You don't think about it as talent. You don't, and what's really, it's weird to think that not that long ago, Silicon Valley was like, hey, if there's ping pong

• 22:51Ryan Holiday?

  tables and lunch at the, at the building, people will be happier at work and not try to sneak out of work all the time. And who knows, maybe they'll bump into each other in the hallway and have a good idea and that'll make us a billion dollars. Like, that, if you want to talk about recent, just how recent that, that, that is as recent as sports. Like, the NBA, for instance, is just like, hey, you know, if we, if we limit the amount of back-to-back games that a team plays in the course of a year, the on-court product will be better because the players will have slept more. You know, like, it's weird how recent a lot of this stuff is.

• 23:26Michael Gervais?

  Oh, and the language is really important because the language that we use is a reflection of our psychology, and it's also informing our psychology. So it's not just one directional. Is it if we, if we don't quite understand the potency of the language that we're using, and I'll give you a handful of things like should, or could, or I gotta, or never, and always. Those are all considered cognitive distortions, and they end up creating frameworks about how we are thinking. So it goes, it's like a bottom-up way approaching, I'm sorry, top-down. And so, to your point, is that when we use the word human capital, workforce,

• 24:09Michael Gervais?

  labor force, it's almost like it takes the humanity out of it.

• 24:14Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 24:14Michael Gervais?

  Where, when we talk about athletes and artists, we talk about talent, we talk, we call them.

• 24:19Ryan Holiday?

  Stars?

• 24:20Michael Gervais?

  Yeah, the thing that we, they're more aligned to the specialness of the thing that they do. But here's a trap.

• 24:29Michael Gervais?

  It's not, it's not quite as clean as like equal divide. Here's the trap is that most highly talented people were talented at a young age. They had some proclivity at a young age. This is, I'm talking more about the sport world than business.

• 24:42Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 24:42Michael Gervais?

  But they were talented at a young age. And as a young age, what most people do is that they're supposed to form their identity. But if the identity is almost infused with the thing that you do, then your identity is mapped to your outcomes.

• 24:59Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 25:00Michael Gervais?

  And you have this, and it's this really confusing, non-conscious, below conscious surface that I am what I do. And that ends up becoming problematic because all we're doing is we're saying, oh, the athlete, fill in the blank. And there's so much more than the athlete. So there's so much more than the star. There's so much more to them. There's a humanity in all things that we do. And I think a big part of my work in high performing environments is to help people. This is like basic one framework. Decouple who you are from what you do. And it's so intertwined. That's why the fight, flight, freeze mechanisms are on full tilt for people prior to walking on stage or prior to getting on the mound.

• 25:42Michael Gervais?

  Those, those true brain mechanisms that are responsible for survival are on point when there's nothing of real threat, physical threat. The only thing on threat, whether you're on the mound or on the stage, is other people's opinions. And, but our ancient brain, as beautiful as it is, hasn't caught up with modern frameworks. So just kind of pulling out identity, what you do, pulling those two things out is this massive gift to space and creativity and freedom.

• 26:14Ryan Holiday?

  But how do you talk to an athlete about not identifying with what you do when you're in an industry that's so cutthroat that if you are not winning, you don't get to do that thing very long?

• 26:27Michael Gervais?

  Oh, most of my environments are exact. Meaning like if you, there's a short runway for mistakes because it's also public. And so it's not that you don't identify with what you do, but your identity is not just that. And so when you pull apart what you do from who you are, the work is to say, well, who am I independent of what I do? It's that part of you that's the same as when you're 30, that you're three or 13, you know, like, who am I? And then the thing that I do ends up becoming the way I'm expressing my craft and expressing my philosophy and expressing my psychology. And I'm using my body or my canvas, whatever that might be, to do just that.

• 27:10Michael Gervais?

  And I'm telling you, it's the bet to lay because you create space and then you damp down all of the alarm bells in our brain. And let me just kind of do a little nerdy thing here for just a moment. That there is a difference between the brain and the mind. And I'm going to butcher an analogy here, just for the sake of simplicity, that the brain is like the hardware in a computer and the mind is like the software that runs the hardware. Now, it doesn't quite hold up when you really pull on the science of it, but it is interesting to think about, like, okay, you were born with some hardware. But who trained, who programmed your software? You know, and for most people, it's like, I don't know. For me, it was the knuckleheads on, you know, when I was in grade school.

• 27:54Michael Gervais?

  They, they like, and then the commercials I was watching and what the stars might say or might not say from sport, like, and then my, you know, the, the religious people in my family. And then my parents were doing their best, but it's a, it's a, it's a junk, it was before I really dove into it, it was a junkyard approach to identity and philosophy and whatever. And so there's a chance now as a, as an informed adult to say, right, I'm going to do that deep work. Who am I?

• 28:22Ryan Holiday?

  Right. No, I want to, so two things. So one, I would say to go back to this identity issue, maybe what you're saying is you identify with what you're doing, like, let's say it's playing baseball or, or trading stocks, but you can't identify as that. So it's with versus as, because it can't be, it's part of you, but it's not exclusively you. And if it's exclusively you, then you're very vulnerable.

• 28:46Michael Gervais?

  That's right, because like, let's say, and I think as a writer, you can relate to this, is that The trap is to say, you know, Ryan, you know, the shortcut, if you will, and there's really shortcuts are dangerous. So I'll asterisk that. Ryan, tell me about yourself and you go, oh, I'm a writer.

• 29:02Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 29:02Michael Gervais?

  Oh, boy, we're in trouble. Okay, because now like it's a shortcut to help people understand what you do.

• 29:08Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 29:08Michael Gervais?

  But it's not who you are.

• 29:09Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 29:09Michael Gervais?

  So like if we had more time, say, you know, Ryan, how do you describe yourself? And you'd say, well, which part of my life, you know, like, do you want to know my core principles? Well, you know, I've got a lot of roles. I'm a dad and a husband and a, and a, and a.

• 29:24Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 29:24Michael Gervais?

  But it's underneath the roles, I'm, and I'm a writer and underneath the roles, like this is the essence of who I am. So it's just getting clear that when I write, it's part of what I do.

• 29:34Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 29:34Michael Gervais?

  It's, it's a reflection of some stuff that I hold underneath the surface. And, um, but when you're reading my writing, whoever the you is, the other person, you're not, um, I am free from your evaluation of me. Because this is an expression, I'm doing my very best. It's an expression. It's not the totality of me.

• 29:56Ryan Holiday?

  And that's. Yeah, Cheryl, Cheryl Straight has, Cheryl Straight has talked about how often people confuse in, in my world, writing and publishing. You know, so people, you can identify, actually identifying as a writer is actually not a big problem. Because anyone can be a writer, right? Writing is the doing the thing. The problem is if you identify with being a, a published author. Or if, if you're identifying with football, because football is your life, great, you can, you can, no one can prevent you from having a relationship with football. If you're, if your identification is as a professional football player or as the best running back in football.

• 30:36Ryan Holiday?

  Now you're pretty precarious because a lot of factors determine what, how long, and if you get to continue to do that thing.

• 30:44Michael Gervais?

  And you're, especially in sport and business or writing, is that there's other people that are going to determine

• 30:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Michael Gervais?

  whether you can do the thing or not. And so, yeah, so if you are, um, a person who loves to create and whatever, it's independent. And so if it happens to be football, then it happens to be entrepreneurship, then it's trading stocks, and then it's being, you know, and there's a progression across life arc. Then it's such, it is like. Why would, why, okay, I was, I had pre-performance anxiety. But, okay, let's just call it what it is. I had anxiety.

• 31:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 31:17Michael Gervais?

  Okay.

• 31:18Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 31:18Michael Gervais?

  And anxiety is this excessive worry about what could go wrong. But in my life, what I was worried about that could go wrong was really what people are going to think of me. And so when you get down to it, well, no reasonable person goes, I need to be liked by others to be okay. But I'm telling you, it's, it's the default mechanism for most of us. And until you get in there, carve that thing out, it's like fucking hard sled. It's really hard.

• 31:44Ryan Holiday?

  One of my favorite passages in meditations, Marcus, and what I love about meditations is you have the most powerful man in the world writing to himself. And so you get this magnificent glimpse into sort of what's actually running through the head of, of the most powerful man in the world. And he says, you know, "We care about ourselves more than other people, but we care about their opinions more than our own, like about ourselves." And I think that's the same thing. It's like, you know who you are, what you're doing, whether for me, it's writing a book, for an athlete, you know, their ability to do something on the field. And then some sports writer says something negative and all of a sudden they're in their head about it. Or, you know, you see some person in the, some girl in the crowd you're trying to impress

• 32:29Ryan Holiday?

  and now you can't focus on what you have to do. And, and you have to be able to tune out what other people think about what you're doing. Cause what you're doing is quite frankly, hard enough.

• 32:41Michael Gervais?

  And at the same time, be open to hear that information. Because the one person in the back of the room that says, "I'm not willing to agree to what I just heard you say", might be an unlock for you to go deeper, to expand, to, to, you know, literally unlock a new way of thinking. But if we attach it to our ego and our identity, the, the classic psychological response is defensiveness. So, and this is actually, you know, the predictions for divorce, right? Like there's four henchmen for divorce.

• 33:10Ryan Holiday?

  No, what are they?

• 33:10Michael Gervais?

  That work, yeah.

• 33:13Michael Gervais?

  Most people do want to know that.

• 33:15Ryan Holiday?

  I'm gonna write this down.

• 33:17Michael Gervais?

  Like, what's the number? Better than 50% of people end up in divorce. And the Gottman Institute found that there's some predictability about.

• 33:25Ryan Holiday?

  Isn't contempt like the number one predictor?

• 33:28Michael Gervais?

  Well, it's yes, but there's four, there's four things that go in line. Like, okay, so critique, then defensiveness, then stonewalling, then contempt. So if you display contempt, it's because those other three were in place so long, for so, such a long amount of time. You're like, contempt is, I hate you, you know, like in whatever. And, and you, you know, people, I'm not saying I haven't been there before. It's not the brightest side of me, you know, but, but it's really this response to critique, defensiveness and stonewalling. And so if you can hear the person in the back of the room as not a critique, but an interesting perspective,

• 34:07Michael Gervais?

  and they might not have the most eloquent way to say it because they are anxious or, or frustrated or scared or righteous and narcissistic, whatever. But if you can attune to it to be information and not an attack, it opens up a whole nother level of like, oh, what, what, where might they be coming from to pick up on that? And if you could entertain that as opposed to, ooh, I'm being, I am being attacked. And it's more an exploratory concept around the idea, it's, it's really fun.

• 34:39Ryan Holiday?

  I want to go back to the, the performance thing for a second because I think there's a point for people who are not in sports that, to me, what I've taken from, you know, my interactions with, with people like you and these different organizations, I think to me, the lesson is if sports, an entire industry about elite performance in high pressure, you know, constrained, rule-based situations are not investing or have historically under invested, under invested in performance and are just now discovering the benefits of things, as you said, like recovery or, you know, mental wellbeing, dealing with your emotional issues, you know, what are your, what's holding you back, et cetera. If they're just investing in it.

• 35:25Ryan Holiday?

  How under invested do you think you probably are in your business, in your industry, or in your life, where there's probably less money on the line, the stakes are less public, and the outcomes are much less binary, so it's harder to even tell what's working or not working?

• 35:46Michael Gervais?

  Yeah, it's the right question for people of influence, whether it's in their home, or it's in their business, is we are definitely in the game of relationships. And it starts first with the relationship you have with yourself. I don't think you can outperform your self-esteem. I don't think that that's possible. I think you might get lucky. You're right.

• 36:10Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 36:10Michael Gervais?

  And we should double click on that in a moment, because it's a bit controversial, what I just said, controversial. But when it comes to like, real human performance, I'm not talking about money and recognition, big car, big watch, I'm talking about purposeful, meaningful way of living, you know, that level of success. Like, if your self-esteem, which is like, hey, I don't really think I matter, I don't think you can outperform and have an amazing life if your self-esteem is busted.

• 36:42Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. If you don't think you can do something, you're not going to be able to do it. I mean, it's as simple as that.

• 36:52Michael Gervais?

  No, no, no, I'm glad you went there. I'm going a different direction. I'm saying, from a foundational place of knowing that your life matters, and you matter, and it's meaningful to you, like, and then, then you, so that's, let's call it happiness, and joy, and content, and peace. I'm talking about that being the big driver for life performance. And if you want to add on top of it, like, extraordinary expressions, to your point, we need then self-confidence. Like, hey, I think I can do that thing. That's self-confidence. Like, it's not, I can do that. You know, it's like, I think I can get my arms around that.

• 37:28Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 37:29Michael Gervais?

  So confidence is state-specific, and self-esteem is more global, it's more pervasive. And so I just don't think, let's go back to the family, or the business that you're running, or the unit that you're running, is that, whether it's above the line, that extraordinary performance metrics, or it's below the line, the well-being and the foundations of life. I just don't think that you can really get there in a sustainable way, in a progressively fast way. Maybe if you want to think about like the fast pace of life. I don't think you get there in the most expedient way without bringing people on board that have been there and done it, understand the science and can share it in translation in, you know, practice, practicable form. But, you know, Ryan, you and I could figure out how to walk to, from, from your hometown

• 38:14Michael Gervais?

  to New York City. We could figure out how to do it. But you know what I'd say? I bet you'd, I'd, I'd listen to you because I think you'd say, hey, Gervais, why don't we, why don't we call up, you know, Mary? Because she's done it 15 times.

• 38:29Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 38:30Michael Gervais?

  I think she's got a map, you know, like, what, what do you think? I'd be like, oh, yeah. But why don't we do a psychology? What, why not? Because it was born out of the medical model. And the medical model studies the broken dysfunction, joints and bones and diseases. And the, the first science of psychology was born out of that. So that's why in the eighties, you see people tuck their head down, you know, their hat and they kind of hope no one sees them going into this psychologist's office and then have the most amazing conversation and then like worry about what people see out the, as they leave the back door. Psychologists put two doors in, a front door and a back door, so you wouldn't be seen. And we called, we thought that was good. That's such a bad idea.

• 39:11Michael Gervais?

  So, but now it's different because there is a science of excellence. And you get the extraordinaries across multiple disciplines raising their hand to say, hey, my mind's important, let's go. I'm not leaving up to chance.

• 39:23Ryan Holiday?

  I'm, no, I'm so glad you said this because that, that's what I meant about sort of my experiences at some of these teams actually has helped me at an individual level, like at the family level, you said, like with my first son, uh, he, we just could not get him to sleep. He did not sleep at all. He hated sleep. And so for like two years, my wife and I just did not sleep. Mostly, I would say my wife did not sleep, but, uh, to be perfectly honest. But, uh, with, with, with my second, we, we sat down and we, we went, there must be someone who's really good at this thing. And now, look, this goes to what we're Talking about historically, like historically, this is what your grandmother would have helped you or you know, your aunt, because this would have been more of a community there. You're passing wisdom to generation and generation.

• 40:06Ryan Holiday?

  But that that's not how the the world is set up for most families these days. So we we hired this woman and it wasn't cheap. So I accept that there's a certain amount of privilege in this. But we we hired this person and she came in and it totally changed our lives and it changed our son's life. And now we have this skill set to do this thing that we couldn't do before. And and that came from going like, hey, you don't have to learn these things by trial and error. You should ask the person, as you said, who's done it 15 times or the specialist. You don't have like, if the woman had given us horrible advice, we would have just ignored it. But you it starts with the willingness to take the consult or to ask the question. Because you never know what you might get out of it.

• 40:50Michael Gervais?

  Well, there and goes back to our first order of businesses, like basic frameworks. Are you a learner or and the doomed expert? You know, are you curious or are you a know it all? You know, like, those are basic philosophical positions. And it's interesting because most people, and I'm going to say like, I'm going to say 99% just because it's going to be outrageous when I say it is that I don't know anyone that thinks that they are not a learner, that thinks that they are close minded, that thinks that they are the cause of suffering in the world, that they're the jerk. Like, it's always the others, you know?

• 41:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, sure.

• 41:27Michael Gervais?

  But when you really take a look at how are you investing in learning? You know, and psychology is one of the greatest beautiful disciplines because you carry it everywhere you go. The complicated nature of it is it's invisible. And the second complication is that because you have a mind, you think that you're sophisticated in the mind. And I'm going to say that that's not the case for me. I had to study the bleep out of it to get, you know, just a basic understanding. So I I think that, man, it's such a gift that you can give your people that you love. Like, hey, let's get better on how the primary filter of life is your mind. The way that you express yourself and receive information.

• 42:09Michael Gervais?

  Let's get that thing. Let's kind of work around some bugs and patches and some holes in the screen. Like, let's get that thing rock solid. And it's just, that's what that's why I'm bullish. I think the next decade, Ryan, is the decade of the mind.

• 42:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 42:22Michael Gervais?

  2020 showed us that we're

• 42:25Michael Gervais?

  We came up short.

• 42:28Ryan Holiday?

  I agree. And that we're capable of extraordinary things when we concentrate on a problem that previously we said was going to take 10 or 15 years to develop, that actually, in the way that, hey, we're going to put a person on the moon, and then we did that thing. That goes to the self-confidence you're talking about. You're like, oh, it is possible.

• 42:51Michael Gervais?

  It is possible. Yeah, so that's like, I said earlier, you can't outperform your self-esteem. And I'm talking about true performance in life, independent of like the craft.

• 42:59Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 43:00Michael Gervais?

  And then to your point, like this get to the moon thing, I'm not sure you can outperform your vision either. So, vision is like where you really start to believe that thing is possible. And most people can do the intellectual exercise of thinking about all possible radical things, but then as soon as they put that piece of paper away, they're right back to the original framework, which is like, yeah, but, and I don't know, I don't have time for, and then they get caught in taking the real risks to invest time, or money, or energy into the growth capabilities. And so, again, this is the slippery nature of psychology, is that most people say one thing, but then, like, I'll tell you, I'll give you an example.

• 43:43Michael Gervais?

  I ask people when I do like a keynote type thing, I'll say, okay, how many people in the audience want to get after it? You know, have this amazing life, and I describe it, and 99% of people raise their hand, because it would be weird if you said you didn't want to have an amazing library. And then afterwards, like, okay, would we all agree here that you've got to take some risks? Because it's not, you know, it's not the safe path to get after in life. And they're like, yeah, yeah. And then sometime later down in the keynote, I'll say, okay, right, who wants to take a risk and come see how their mind works under pressure? And I've got, I've got real tests that I'll, yeah, I can challenge people with. One out of a thousand people raised.

• 44:20Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, because they'd rather not be embarrassed than, than do the exact thing they said they want to do.

• 44:27Michael Gervais?

  So their framework, they say their framework is A, get after it, whatever. But their true framework is to manage other people's expectations, is to look good rather than grow. And that's where I'm not mad about it. I'm just, I just feel, I'm, I've got the same things, blind spots that I try to work out now, but I've invested in 25 years. They end up changing and I'm so glad I'm not working on the same fricking blind spots when I was a 15 year old kid. God help me.

• 44:56Ryan Holiday?

  So if we take that most people are probably under invested in sort of personal development, the mind, psychology. There is another percentage of the population that I, I see, I think any author sees, I think anyone who speaks at conferences sees. I, I imagine you, you see it in your industry too. There's also the person, I wonder sort of what your read on these types is, who's, I don't want to say over invested, but there's, they're, they take it to an extreme where, you know, they've got like five gurus. They read, they're reading all the time. They're always studying, they're always on to the next thing. And there's an element, when, when I talk to these people where it's so, it's so clear they've, they've taken to the investment in this thing

• 45:40Ryan Holiday?

  as a substitute for taking risks, like you were saying, but also just like trusting themselves, like trusting their intuition to like make the decision, like for instance, like I, I sometimes, when you talk to people who are really into like mental models, which you know what they are, I, they're, they're, I'm studying all these mental models and I, and then I, I, I try to talk to, have you ever actually used this information, like, do you ever actually think about these models when you make real decisions? It's like, no, because this thing is a distraction. The same, I see the same thing, writers who are really obsessed with tools, right? Like what program do you use?

• 46:22Ryan Holiday?

  You know, what kind of paper do you, you can get obsessed with these sort of superficial optimizing things at the margin as almost a fleeing from the, the gritty reality of what you have to do.

• 46:34Michael Gervais?

  I mean, amen, you know, because there's, what I've come to learn in.

• 46:41Michael Gervais?

  The space of high performance, whether it's craft or meaning, having a meaningful, purposeful life is that there are no hacks, there's no shortcuts, there's no tricks and tips, like really, there's the fundamental way that you organize your life. And those fundamental decisions pay dividends in informing thoughts, words, and actions. And if you can line those things up, that's what it's about now. Lining up your thoughts, your words, and your actions, independent of the external conditions. That's freedom. That is mastery. I can line up my thoughts, words, and actions in the most hostile, rugged, stressful environments,

• 47:20Michael Gervais?

  because I have a true command of myself. And that, that is not like, what paper are you using? You know, what is the mental model? It's interesting, but it is the practice, the fundamental practice of expressing, you know, and refining, and figuring out how to get better at the things that matter most to you, whether it's loving, or communicating, or, you know, throwing a football, whatever it might be. And, you know, for some, it's all of that.

• 47:46Ryan Holiday?

  I was talking to Rich Roll about this, and we were joking about the irony that, that people who are really into psychedelics refer to that as doing the work, right? When, when, and I'm not saying there's not value in these therapies. And of course, as a psychologist, you know, there's all sorts of medicines that have been totally life-changing for people. So I'm not dismissing it completely. But I think that it is interesting to me, there's also this, this part of, I think, the sort of the world we're in, where people have taken, you know, investing in personal development, mental development, to mean,

• 48:24Ryan Holiday?

  like, go find the one thing that will magically do it for you, as opposed to having a toolkit or a set of practices that, that cumulatively get you closer to where you want to go.

• 48:40Michael Gervais?

  Yeah, that's it. And I think the getting to where you want to go is always, it's a big word, available right now. And so everything that you need, here's a fundamental axiom I have, everything you need is already inside you.

• 48:53Ryan Holiday?

  I told you, that should be the name of your book.

• 48:55Michael Gervais?

  Yeah, I know. Well, we got, we got to figure it out.

• 48:59Michael Gervais?

  And so, yeah, and so, so if that if that is potentially true, and it's worth exploring if it is or not, then then our job is to be here now. So we can access it because it's the only place we can access. Any of our gifts is in the present moment. It's where wisdom is revealed. It's where high performance is expressed. And it's where all things that are amazing are experienced. The present moment. So my mission in life, you know, my purpose, if you will, is to help people live in the present moment more often. And the mission is to to show best practices of how to train the mind to be able to do that. And to double click on your earlier comment about people consuming books and being around gurus like

• 49:43Michael Gervais?

  it's the consumption is the evidence of the anxiety that precedes it. Whether that consumption, whether it's comes in the form of like devouring books or it comes in the form of extra reps at work, like whatever, if it's coming from an anxiety place, it's like it's not, it's just the snake that eats its tail. Right. And so undoing that anxiety and applying to your point, applying the insights and practices is it's the real challenge. But here's what we know is when you apply something, there's a dip in performance. Any intervention, immediately following the intervention, there's a dip in performance. And if we feel like we're on a tight rope, we can't afford the dip. Right. You know, and so that's where it gets.

• 50:28Michael Gervais?

  But that's anxiety saying that the rope is really tight. There's slack. Sure. There's slack for most for most people, there's some slack. And 2019 and 2020 would say that financially there was less slack for many. And there was less emotional slack, too. I mean, anxiety is up, suicide is up, depression is up. You know, so we can't miss that there's real struggle and pain in people's lives that has been unearthed, you know? And so I feel that pain for people. It's incredible what's happening right now. And it's independent of money.

• 51:01Ryan Holiday?

  But it also it also revealed there was more slack, right, than than we thought in other ways, too, right? It was like, your work was suddenly like, oh, yeah, you don't actually have to come into the office. We were lying about that. You can do your job from home. Or like, you can do your job without business travel, or meetings in person, or, you know, make your own hours. So you're right, like, we tend to think, and I got to imagine athletes are like, convinced all the time, I'm gonna get cut, coach is gonna cut my playing time, etc. But you're probably having to go, no, what matters is that you get this right. There's more slack, the coach would rather you get it right, there'd be a slight different performance, and then a huge spike of growth than you to continue at this plateau.

• 51:43Michael Gervais?

  Well, you're right on the tension, is that if you don't believe that you have the or afforded the luxury of making mistakes for that, let's call it the dip, then we end up plateauing. And then there's this incredible tension around, why aren't you getting better? Well, how am I supposed to do that without dipping? So, and there's times to employ new interventions, and there's times to kind of stay the course and let it run. And so the last thing we want to do is start tinkering so much the night before game day, or even sometimes the week before the game. You know, so, I don't know, I think I think the human endeavor is amazing. I think it's complicated. I think it's beautiful. And back to the relationship pieces, that through relationships, we become, first it

• 52:26Michael Gervais?

  begins with yourself, and then it be then it's extended to others. And that includes Mother Nature, and, you know, whatever. So, it's the you are the pebble in the pond. And when you invest in yourself, that ripple becomes a higher magnitude.

• 52:43Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. So I was thinking about you and this idea of mastery. I've got to imagine you approach your craft not all that different than a running back, or a or a pitcher would like, it's, it's something you've dedicated your life to, you're now 25 years in, you're world class at it, you know, you're, you're in an elite level of people who've done it. How do you, how do you get better at what you do? Like, how do you think about, am I getting closer to mastery at this thing? Because there's no wins and losses for you.

• 53:24Michael Gervais?

  Yeah, I know. So, thank you for the compliment. And the wins and losses are their daily function for me now. So here's a framework that I measure success through. So let's call it daily success is how many times I can get my hair to stand up on edge. And that's called pilot erection, technical term. And that just means that I'm so snapped to the awe of an experience that my hair stands up as a reminder, like, ooh, you're in it. So it's that nexus between something that's vast and big and expansive, but the singularity of being fully present with it right in this moment. So that's one way that I'm measuring it, but it's experiential. So that's my scoreboard. That can also, that happens to me mostly in conversations.

• 54:08Michael Gervais?

  So it means I'm connecting in some way in the present moment with others, you know, that I really am engaged and interested. I'm listening more now in different ways than I was before. So, you know, being a beginner is harder than it sounds because you've got to kind of gate out a bunch of existing frameworks or knowledge points that have been useful in the past, but have a willingness to abandon, you know, things. So that's actually quite tricky to do. And where I go for both of those is, the reason I started the podcast Finding Mastery is that if you look at like over the six years that we've been doing it, over 300 episodes, is that we've got multiple different domains.

• 54:53Michael Gervais?

  And so I'm not going long and deep anymore in one, you know, it's like probably what you're doing as well is like from this, this person from this industry is amazing. Let's use the industry to understand how the person works.

• 55:04Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 55:05Michael Gervais?

  And then you go across multiples. And so it's like this, this range that is really fun. And then I'm dipping my toe into your world and trying to write a little bit more, which is, dude, that is hard. I mean. It's just hard, you know, I'm not good at it. And so, but I know that. And so I do my best and have conversations with people like you to say, hey, help me get better.

• 55:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, it's a tricky thing with books because usually if you're an expert at whatever it is that you do, you have some, you have some sort of medium that you're very effective at communicating it, right? So, you know, maybe you're an entrepreneur, so you speak through making companies or you're a speaker, so you speak through, you know, on stage or you, you speak one-on-one with individual people. You have theories that you've seen play out over and over again. And the tricky thing, and this is what I have to deal with every day, because it's the entirety of my profession, is what's in your head is not what's on the page.

• 56:08Ryan Holiday?

  And the difference between those two things humbles you and also drives you insane. And so you have to be able to get like, there's a great writing rule about two crappy pages a day, like that's how you write a book. And I think you actually get comfortable, you have to get comfortable not being good at the thing. Because one, it's the only way you can get better, but two, it's never good when you start. It's unlike, you know, a home run, it's not a thing you do once. It's, it's, it looks like you read the sentence once, but the sentence might have been read or written 500 times before it came to appear in that form.

• 56:53Michael Gervais?

  It's amazing. I remember when I was a little kid that I was like, why can't people just know what I'm thinking? Like, I had this as a kid, you know, and here I am as a psychologist, like, and God, wouldn't it be awesome if everything that I'm thinking right now was, you know, in a form that I could see too? And neither, so that second part is writing and the first part is like relationship communication. And it's really, it's just really tricky because most people's mind works far faster than they can construct four ideas that hang together in a graph. You know, and, and it's, there's so much more that you, I want to say around sentence one and sentence two, but then to reduce it to sense one and two feels like it takes

• 57:36Michael Gervais?

  me too long to get to the essence of it. And so then I put, I just get frustrated and put it down. So I respect what you do, dude, big time.

• 57:44Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I very much relate to that feeling because like I, I sort of, I came from, I've said this before, I sort of came from a family or I didn't really fit in. And so I, I remember this sort of feeling of like trying to explain something to my parents and the same, like, why, why don't they get this? Why don't people just know what I'm thinking? And then sort of going back to my room where I had a computer and that was the medium through which I could chat with my friends or write it out or, you know, express it in some way. So it really is, it's a, it's a specialty, right? The ability to sort of, Fitzgerald said that, you know, the genius is the ability to take what's in your head and make it real. In writing,

• 58:28Ryan Holiday?

  it's can you express thoughts in a compelling, interesting, articulate way? It's, it's not the easiest thing in the world.

• 58:35Michael Gervais?

  And you've done, done something remarkable is, so I've been in pro sport for a long time. You're in a lot of locker rooms, you know, like your book and your ideas are in most locker rooms. Like it's remarkable because I think you found that sweet spot. Like, okay, I'm not doing the 274 page, whatever like standard book that no one really reads more than, I don't know, 75 pages, you know, and all the, all the rest is redundant. But like you found that little sweet spot where it's, you can easily kind of hold the book in your hand and it's, you know, it's the old trick in like eighth grade. It's big font, nice spaces.

• 59:14Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I appreciate that. And it was, I think it comes from what you were just talking about, which is me, like, what my frustration with philosophy was, is that people were saying that they were explaining the philosophy instead of illustrating it. And so what was unlocked for me as a writer, and then this is my career, was the decision to say like, oh, you know what, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say Marcus Aurelius thought X. I'm gonna say, here's someone living by this idea from Marcus Aurelius. I think ultimately, humans live by stories. And I think the best books from psychologists, for instance,

• 59:56Ryan Holiday?

  is never, here's what the research says. It's always starts with a case study and then explains, you know, how this pertains to you. I mean, do I have it here? I mean, this is Man, Man's Search for Meaning. It's the ultimate book of psychology, because it's a psychologist where the case study is himself.

• 1:00:16Michael Gervais?

  Yeah, that's right. And, you know, the first half of that book is almost like a prerequisite for all humans. Like, it's amazing.

• 1:00:23Ryan Holiday?

  Have you read, have you read the new one? It's weird to think he has a new book.

• 1:00:28Michael Gervais?

  How can he have a new book?

• 1:00:29Ryan Holiday?

  They found a bunch of lectures that he gave that were lost totally to time. And Daniel Goleman wrote the intro, but it just came out this year. It's called Yes to Life. It's like, so good, so good.

• 1:00:41Michael Gervais?

  Okay, I'll for sure check it. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay.

• 1:00:43Ryan Holiday?

  But yeah, what I would do if I were in your shoes is, first off, you would never let someone in your office say, step into your office, go, I'm just not good at it. You would never let them say that, because it's one of the artificially delimiting beliefs that you were just, you were talking about earlier.

• 1:01:00Michael Gervais?

  But, but that's accurate. Like, I am not good. Like, okay, I'm not trying to compare myself to you. I'm just saying, I know that I'm not good at it. And so It's an, it's, there's some accuracy in my statement. It's, it's not dinging myself a seam or confidence, nor is it getting in the way of me putting pen to paper.

• 1:01:19Ryan Holiday?

  But you're identifying with the, you're identifying with an outcome or a state, a permanent state of being, rather than sort of focusing on like, like if you were, I would let it go if you were saying like, writing is very hard for me, right? That's different than like, I'm not good at it. I think what I would just think about in your shoes is like, first off, it, forget the outcome, focus on, you know, sort of iterative process. But then I would just go, look, it actually doesn't matter how good the writing is. What matters is how good is the message that's being delivered? And, you know, I, I've joked about this before, like, um, you know, Keith Richards memoir could have been written in crayon and it still would have sold millions of copies

• 1:02:04Ryan Holiday?

  because it's an incredible life, you know? I mean, uh, if, if Man's Search for Meaning was written 40% worse, it, maybe it would sell 3 million copies instead of 30 million copies, but it would still be a transformative book because it's getting, what, what matters is that it got to the essence of the human experience. That's not a stylistic choice.

• 1:02:25Michael Gervais?

  That's cool. Yeah, that's cool. There's space in the way that you're framing it. I appreciate you for that. Yeah, that's good. Hey, let me ask you a quick question before we jump.

• 1:02:36Michael Gervais?

  You know, where, where do you come from? You know, and I don't mean like your background, but like that place inside of you that is, it's kind of like that feeling behind your eyes, like when you're at your best.

• 1:02:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:50Michael Gervais?

  Yeah. Some people describe it in their chest or their heart. For me, it's kind of, you know, in the upper regions, like how, where do you come from when you're at your best?

• 1:02:59Ryan Holiday?

  I've, I've been thinking about this a lot, um, cause I, I was sort of getting there on my stillness book. I, I'm trying to, I think it's very easy as an ambitious person to, to come to your, whatever you're doing from a place of emptiness. Like if I do this, if I win this, if I make this amount of money, if I appear this place on this bestseller list, that will fill me up, right? And there's a, there is a sort of a desperation and a hunger in that that can, and a drive that can create good work. I think, you know, a lot of- A lot of great music is done by really hungry, ambitious, you know, like 19 year olds. Like, I might argue Bruce Springsteen's first two records come from that sort of hunger,

• 1:03:43Ryan Holiday?

  you know, that born to run hunger. But I've tried, as I've gotten older and better at it, I realized the best work comes from a place of fullness, where you're like, this is what I think, this is what's important to me, this is what I think needs to be said, this is why I'm the person to say it. And if it does well, it does well. And if it doesn't, I still know I did it and it was worth doing. So to me, it's, I can come from two places, emptiness or fullness. But, but fullness is where the best work comes from.

• 1:04:22Michael Gervais?

  Not to be lost on mindfulness.

• 1:04:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:04:25Michael Gervais?

  Like that, that thought as well. Yeah, so it's interesting you answer it that way because you didn't take it to like, and it like, it comes from an edgy place, or it comes from a, a restlessness, or it comes from a place of grace or peace. You're, you're using the word, you're using the framework like empty and full. And you can come from both of those places. Yeah, it's cool.

• 1:04:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's definitely a restlessness too. I mean, but that I would argue that you could probably take any of those words and, and, and categorize them as either an empty feeling or a full feeling. You know what I mean?

• 1:05:02Michael Gervais?

  I think most people come from a scratchiness.

• 1:05:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Michael Gervais?

  You know, this internal unsettled restlessness. And this is why 30% actually suffer from a mental disorder called anxiety. Like 30% meet the clinical criteria. That's a huge number. 15 is the actual data. Yeah, 15 is the actual data, but my best estimate is that it's 50% under reported. So three out of 10 people are like clinically struggling with how they use their mind. And the number's much higher when you think about like not meeting the clinical demands, but like, you know, so, yeah, so you're thinking about empty and full. It's cool.

• 1:05:39Ryan Holiday?

  Well, this was amazing, man. I'll let you go and I appreciate all the, all the work and look forward to chatting again.

• 1:05:48Michael Gervais?

  Oh, come on, man. Let's go more. Yeah. And thank you for the ways that you've influenced so many people, you know, carrying around your book. I've talked about you and, and your writings often. And so that's been fun, you know, from a distance to be able to celebrate you and your work and your ideas and to create a renaissance around Stoicism is, that's no easy task.

• 1:06:08Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you, you called me very early on in the books and you gave me a bunch of very helpful unsolicited advice and, no, no, I mean that in a, I mean that in a good way. Like that, that you didn't have to do. And, and it was very, very helpful and I appreciate it. It meant a lot.

• 1:06:28Michael Gervais?

  That's good. Cool, man. Congrats on your pod, too.

• 1:06:30Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you. Hey, it's Ryan. Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The, the reviews make a difference. And of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out the crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.