Dr. Gio Valiante (Part 1): Discipline and Resilience

In the first of a special two-part episode, celebrated performance psychologist Gio Valiante calls on his vast experience working with some of the world’s top athletes and entrepreneurs. Shane and Valiante discuss developing discipline and resilience in work and life. Valiante offers his thoughts on the five ways to gain an advantage and win and how to change your habits. He also discusses the role your environment plays in discipline and how you can develop resilience in yourself and your children. Valiante is regarded as one of the most successful performance coaches in the world. He’s worked extensively with golfers on the PGA and LPGA Tours, Olympic athletes, and leading figures in NCAA football and the NFL, where he served as the Head Performance Coach of the Buffalo Bills. He has also logged over 5,000 hours coaching some of the most sophisticated investors in the world, including hedge fund manager Steve Cohen. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Our Sponsors: MetaLab: Helping the world’s top companies design, build, and ship amazing products and services. https://www.metalab.com Aeropress: Press your perfect cup, every time. https://aeropress.com Vanta: Helping you get compliance-ready, fast. https://www.vanta.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And so, discipline is just a habit of mind that evolves into a habit generally of behavior. And so, when you're trying to give someone more discipline, one of the things that's really, really important is, right out of the gates, is to change the actual behavior. Because as Albert Bandura famously said, "Behavior is a cause of behavior." Like, the more you can get someone to do something, the more likely it is to repeat. So, the reality about discipline is, the quicker you can get it infused into someone's habits, the more likely it is they're going to sustain it through life. If you're trying to change habits later in life, you've got to go all in, and as soon as you're aware that you want to change them, don't wait. Don't hesitate.

• 0:57Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out, so you can apply their insights to your life. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. Every Sunday, I send out the Brain Food Newsletter to over 600,000 people. It's considered noise-canceling headphones for the internet, and it's full of timeless wisdom you can apply to life and work. You can sign up for free at fs.blog/newsletter. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, special episodes that don't appear anywhere else, hand-edited transcripts, or you just want to support the show you

• 1:39Shane Parrish?

  love, you can join at fs.blog/membership. Check out the show notes for a link. In the first of a special two-part episode on The Knowledge Project, celebrated performance psychologist Dr. Gio Valiante calls on his vast experience working with some of the world's top athletes and entrepreneurs to discuss how to develop discipline and resilience in work and life. Dr. Gio also offers his thoughts on the five ways to gain an advantage. And win, changing your habits, the role your environment plays in discipline, and how we can develop resilience in ourselves and our children. He's regarded as one of the most successful performance coaches in the world,

• 2:22Shane Parrish?

  and he's worked extensively with golfers on the PGA and LPGA tours, Olympic athletes, and leading figures in NCAA football and the NFL, where he served as the head performance coach of the Buffalo Bills. He's also logged more than 5,000 hours coaching some of the most sophisticated investors in the world, including hedge fund manager Steve Cohen. If you stick around at the end of the podcast, I'm going to offer a mini-reflection on the episode and some of the lessons I took away, and I'm going to add to them so you can take away even more. It's time to listen and learn.

• 3:08Shane Parrish?

  I want to start with the five ways to gain an advantage and compete and win.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's an idea I put out into the world about a year, maybe a year and a half ago that seems to be getting a lot of attention. You know, it's, it's rooted in, in my experiences, first of all, as a psychologist who studies cognition and cognitive abilities and belief systems. And then as a sports psychologist on the PGA Tour for 15 years, and now someone who coaches quite a few people in, in, in finance and the hedge fund space. And so when we talk about the five ways to win, you know, you, you start with someone on the PGA Tour, like who I, I use a guy named Rory McIlroy as an example. And Rory McIlroy is an example of just someone who's just talented.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  And people recognize that in Rory, like, you know, if you look at videos of Rory McIlroy when he was six years old, he has the same golf swing today, you know, that, that he did when he was six years old. It's just, he rolled out of bed and knows how to swing a golf club. And people who have prodigiousness in a particular domain or arena, that's how they experience it. It's like, I could just play. There's this story about Eddie Van Halen and, and his brother Alex Van Halen. And Eddie Van Halen, it's, it's well-known, you know, was a musical prodigy, particularly on the guitar. But what happened was, as the story goes, Eddie Van Halen had gotten drums for a Christmas gift and Alex had gotten the guitar. And after they both were playing on their respective instruments for months,

• 4:41Speaker 00

  you know, Alex tells the story that Eddie picked up his guitar and started ripping on licks that Alex had been trying to do for weeks. And he picked it up, the neck and the frets made sense. And so that's what talent looks like. It's just someone shows up, it makes sense and they run with it. But where it gets interesting from there, you know, if you look at the PGA Tour and any given week, there's 140 players that get to play in a given event every week. And but Rory McIlroy doesn't win every week. And so, well, how does everyone else compete? So you're in the world and everyone recognizes often like that's just what talent looks like. And if you go into the markets, you know, great investors tend to have certain cluster of traits.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  It's, you know, they can remember every trade, so memory is part of it. Great analytical skills, great logical skills. They have typically great interpersonal skills where they know people and so they know the markets. They can benchmark against risk and risk taking. So they have all these cluster of skills and abilities. Well, so the way it works is if you are not one of these people who are just pure talent, one of the ways that you can compete is just through effort, right? Through your work, through working harder, right? So, you know, I'm willing to not sleep a lot, so I'm going to outwork you and maybe that's going to close the gap. And through effort, I can close the gap between myself and sort of the uber talented.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  So, you know, we use the language of being all in, you know, pot committed to your craft. And what you often see at the tail end of the curve, so if you move way out to the tail end of the curve, to the top one hundredth of a percent of people, and this is sort of domain agnostic, this is sort of the profile of excellence in any domain, what you see is this blending of vocation and avocation. You know, what happens often in psychology is psychologists will often say, well, you know, you are not your work, you know, who you are and what you do are separate things. And it's a healthy thing to keep those separated.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  And I understand the point, right? Because we have a personal identity and a family identity and a professional identity. But at the very tail end of the curve, what you see is typically a blending of vocation and avocation, where work and hobby sort of fuse. And like Kobe Bryant in basketball, like the level of all in he went, Ronnie Laught in football, Bode Miller in skiing, Kelly Slater in surfing, you know, every great scientist ever, right? You know, try to tell John Nash or Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton that they are not what they do. And the reason I say that is because the second way to win is

• 7:27Speaker 00

  hard work and effort, but often it's accompanied by love of craft, so that the work doesn't feel like work. So I give an example of my friend Steve Cohen. You know, Steve Cohen has the reputation of being arguably one of the best traders of his generation. And there's five or six iconic investors, and certainly Steve is in the conversation. And anyone who's ever sat next to Steve, they know. It's like, you know, what he does and how he sees markets, it's just, you know, I can't do that. I can't go there. And I've talked to, I had dinner with Steve's high school friends, and you know, Steve got up from the table to go to the bathroom, and they said, hey, G, like, this is how he was

• 8:07Speaker 00

  in high school. He was in charge of the high school investing club. And so like this prodigiousness that gets accompanied by effort. And I say that because over the course of 40 years, you know, assuming 250 trading days a year, Steve Cohen, 10,000 trading days, Steve took four days off. And those four days are because he was in the hospital. And it's not because he needed the money. He's been rich since he was in his, you know, early 30s. It's the habit of hard work, because what happens with people who love to work is an inversion happens whereby you start to love the hard parts of the craft. So for example, great golfer. So let's use golfers as an example. Everyone loves to hit the driver at the driving

• 8:52Speaker 00

  range because it goes far. But if you paid attention to Tiger Woods during his run, his epic run, and you watched him practice, Tiger Woods would camp out over three-foot putts for hours, so much so that if you went to the putting green... At an Isleworth Country Club where he lived, at the end of the day, you would see the imprints where his feet were and the line that the ball tracked from where he was to the hole. He would hit so many three-foot putts that it would burn the grass out. And you look at his track record, he didn't win those eighty-something events with his driver. His statistics from three or four feet in, that's what won it.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  It was the love of doing the boring stuff. And the equivalent is swimming is people practice their flip turns, right? Everyone wants to practice their stroke and all the fun stuff, but like find time in the flip turn. So the inversion that happens of people who are willing to outwork the competition, right, and effort. So again, go to the five ways to win. Number one is talent. Number two is work ethic. It's like, I'm, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna close the gap by outworking people. Now, where magic happens, and I think people use Michael Jordan as an example, is when you marry the two. He's the best, and he worked the hardest. Like, now that's, you know, the most talent, you know, married with the most effort is, is, you know, can become legendary.

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• 11:12Speaker 00

  Now, the third way to win is to have a differentiated perspective, right? To sort of see the world differently. And I'll give an example of a differentiated perspective. I'll give a couple of examples, I guess. So now, here we are in August and it's a good time in a lot of parts of the world, you know, to go look at the night sky. If you're a stargazer, like, you know, now's a good window. But when I look up at the stars, which I did with my kids this weekend, I see the Big Dipper. And Van Gogh looked at the same stars and he saw Starry Night. Right? So the looked at thing is the same. That's the objective. But the subjective interpretation, the subjective experience, is where people can separate themselves.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  So for example, if you look at college football, look at three sort of Hall of Fame coaches. You've got Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, and Steve Spurrier. Nick Saban generally views football as an arms race for talent. Just recruit the best character and the best athletes and stack your team with talent and then coach the heck out of it. So he's a wonderful coach, no question about it. But he and Bill Belichick were really, really early on profiling players and knowing how to get the best players in the building. So talent, you know, recruiting is a way to win in college football. But then get a guy like Steve Spurrier. If you look at the rankings of recruiting classes,

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Steve would always make jokes like, you know, "We never have the best recruiting class, but why are we always winning?" Well, Steve Spurrier said football is a game of space. So he would recruit a quarterback, had good decision-making, and receivers. And essentially what he tells quarterbacks is, you know, "The field is a multi-dimensional thing, and here's the clock, and just throw the ball into space and let the receiver run under it." And it worked. 10 SEC championships, a national championship, Hall of Fame.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Well, then you get a guy like Urban Meyer. And Urban Meyer came into the college football scene and his success was, I mean, it was jarring how he would take programs and how quickly they would win. And on some level, and I'm being a little bit simplistic here, but Urban Meyer sees this as a footrace, sees it as a footrace. It's a game of speed. And so at every position, if you're going to play for Urban Meyer, you better love to run, whether you're an offensive lineman, defensive lineman, quarterback, you have to run. So again, you've got, you've got three college football coaches. One sees this as a game of talent. One sees it as a game of spacing. One sees it as a game of speed. They're all looking at the same game, but it's a differentiated perspective. And that differentiated perspective can really unlock a lot of different things. If you

• 13:50Speaker 00

  ever read a book called Go Fast, Be Good and Have Fun by Bodie Miller, you can understand like how he was so successful, but like, he doesn't look at skiing, never looked at skiing as technique. He just saw it as speed. So essentially what he says is, I put my skis on the hill and I just feel speed in my feet. And like, I just try to find the speed and whatever my body does, it does. That's a differentiated perspective and it happens in the markets, right? Some people see it as, you know, if I could be faster to a trade. Some people see it as, as a game of slugging and slugging is a statistic in, in the markets where it's not how frequently you're right, but it's how big your bets are when you're right, right? So, so what you see oftentimes as investors is, is their

• 14:35Speaker 00

  hit rate is, is, is high, like they're right, you know, seven out of 10 times. But they make every bet, the, the, every trade, the same, the same amount of money. So that plays to their advantage. Well, there are other investors who say, you know what, I don't get it right a lot, but like, I know a good idea when I see it. And that ability to know a good idea and you size into that idea, well, that gives you outsized returns. So differentiated perspectives. On the same job. Uh, number four is process. We talk about a rigorous, disciplined process, being religious about process. I- i- i- even though Aristotle made the observation, what did he say? He said, um, "We are what we do every day, you know? Therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit."

• 15:19Speaker 00

  Any observer of the human condition has known, this goes back to Freud's idea of repetition, compulsion. You know, the output of a human life is essentially the expression of, of a repeated habit. If you have consistency of process, what it does is it guards against the natural variability of life, and if you're making mistakes, you know where to look. And so essentially having, you know, waking up at about the same time, consistency in food, consistency in exercise, you know, pilots talk about a pre-flight checklist that way because what happens is, any demanding job puts a premium on your cognitive abilities, particularly memory.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  And so when you get to the point where you're in cognitive overload, and professional sports are cognitive overload, um, academics are cognitive overload, markets cognitive overload. Well, the degree to which you can outsource this stuff to routine and, and, and, and auto- sort of go into automaticity, that creates space for actual decision-making and quote unquote "thinking." And so process is, is a way to get it advantage. So if you're not the smartest and there's a limit, you know, to your ability to work hard and you see things a little bit differently, but not too much differently, but you know what? I can design a life that has the wash, rinse, repeat of my life, you know, I can, I can live that. Well, that's an advantage. I'll give an example.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Whenever I would work with golfers on the PGA Tour, one of the things that, that really, really worked to the tune of about 50 wins. And so what's fascinating to me about, about entering a sports with a, with a degree in psychology is psychology is largely theoretical. And when you start applying a theory, it's like, is it gonna work? The theory to practice bridge. And so I created what's called the fearless golfer team. And so prior to that, what you would often see is golfers being reactive to the variability around them. So they would feel differently if their score was different. They would feel differently if they were paired with Tiger Woods or a marquee player versus a friend. They would feel differently based on their world rankings.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  So all the variability around them would change their psychology. They would try harder at the Masters than they would at the John Deere or like so the status of a tournament. So what I found when I got to the PGA Tour in 2002 were a group of people who were all competitive, but they actually didn't know what they were competing against. So I would ask them like, do you consider your, this is part of my psychological study. You consider yourself a competitive person? They'd say, absolutely. I'd say, okay, who are you competing against? And line up five golfers and you get five different answers. Well, one of them would say, I'm competing against people in my group. The next one would say, I'm competing against myself. You know, the other ones would say, I'm competing against the field, but that's all variability.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  And all of a sudden you would realize that there was no constants in their life. And so I created what's called the fearless golf routine and I would teach it to them. It's here's what you do before you hit a shot. Here's what you do with a shot. And here's what you do after, called 20 seconds of greatness. And by the way, Urban Meyer coaches the same thing in football, right? Seven seconds of greatness, because that's about how long if an offensive lineman can hold a block, if you can hold a play for, you know, three, four, five, six seconds all the way through and repeat that essentially 60 or 70 times, which is how many plays college football players are getting a thing like, process is a way to win. And I would often show them a shampoo bottle, read the back of a shampoo bottle, like lather, wash, rinse, repeat. So what do you do in the lead?

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Pick a target, make a fearless swing at your target, let it go and just keep wash, rinse, repeat, a good process. That's what wins over time, right? And then the final way to win is, and this is true more in business, the fifth ways you hire effectively. So if I don't have those other things, but I'm a good, I read people well and I manage people well. And I think you can look at someone like Ken Griffin. I don't think anyone would tell you that Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel is like a prodigious trader, but he's built a business system and a business model that's the ultimate meritocracy. And, and you know, you hire.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Um, to effectively compensate for the deficiencies that you have. And so you hire the best person at every position, it's true in sports, and you're an effective manager. And, and I guess there's a sixth way. You get lucky. And I'm holding up a book called The Luck Factor. It's, it's, it's a real thing, you know, it, you can assign it to randomness, or some people really are more lucky in life. Like, you, you, you flip a quarter in a random number generator five million times. And at the end of that five million flips, you're gonna get fifty fifty heads and tails. But within those five million flips, you're gonna see patterns that seem to be causal. You'll see heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads for a hundred iterations, and tails for a hundred iterations. And then you'll

• 20:12Speaker 00

  see heads, tails, heads, tails, heads, tails. And the reality is, there are some lives that land on heads, because you know, you're on the earth for seventy years, and some people just get lucky. So like, that's your path to winning. It happens sometimes, but so does the other side of the equation. Some people just, you know, on, on the probability scale, don't get lucky. So I don't really include that in the five ways to win. But like, it happens sometimes that, you know, you're born in the right setup, and life is a series of, of tailings.

• 20:40Shane Parrish?

  Thank you for that detailed explanation. I want to double click a little bit on discipline. Is discipline a matter of willpower? Like, some people say, I'm not very disciplined. How do you coach somebody to be more disciplined, or to, to gain the strength and advantage that sort of comes from discipline?

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Great, great question, and an important one. So the first thing that, that people in performance psychology or management, you know, either do or should do, is you want to get really, there are certain traits in the human condition that are fixed, and there's some that are malleable. In other words, in, in fixed traits, you're not gonna change them. And I think where people spend too much time is they, they try to fix the unfixable. You see this in marriages a lot, right? In, in marriage counseling and, and therapy. You know, you marry someone, and, and, and you want it to change. And when you're on the other side of the table, sometimes the answer is, hey, you know what you married. And, and so, you, you better be clear before you go in, and what, what you're gonna be able to change, and what you're not. So fixed traits versus malleable traits. And so, when

• 21:43Speaker 00

  we look at something, so, so we look at fixed traits, like personality. By and large, you're not changing personality.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Things like IQ, I mean, they they shift over time, they tend to gradually

• 21:56Speaker 00

  move in a direction consistent with, you know, with with with family sort of in IQ, a fixed trait like IQ.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Things like memory, you can improve your memory marginally, but like things like that tend to have genetic components. But where we looked at variable and malleable things, things like discipline. So you have to remember, the the the etymology of the of the word discipline is disciple. What is a disciple? Well, disciple is a student. So the actual idea of self-discipline is that you're a student of yourself. Right? So we think of discipline, you know, in modern times as as really the way we equate it is like the ability for delayed gratification. Discipline is the ability to withhold gratification and stay in the moment and and and and just, you know, run some process over time and not capitulate.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  You know, Navy SEALs, right, that in a very scary situation, your training shows up and you're disciplined, and that's all true. However, one of the things that is known about discipline is you can prime people for greater or worse discipline, and psychology would define priming by setting up a series of conditions that's going to increase the probability of a behavior. And usually, that's environmental. Can people become more disciplined? 100%, absolutely. In fact, William James, who's one of my intellectual heroes, sort of the father of American psychology. But if anyone's interested, you can go look up William James's, you know, what are known as his maxims on habit. And so it begs the question, if you're trying to change someone's habits, and habits are one of the things that are changeable.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  The problem is, the longer that you've done a habit, if it's a bad habit, the harder it is to change, right? The old saying that ruts long traveled grow comfortable. And so, discipline is just a habit of mine that evolves into a habit generally of behavior. And so, when you're trying to give someone more discipline, one of the things that's really, really important is right out of the gates, is to change the actual behavior, because as Albert Bandura famously said, "Behavior is a cause of behavior." Like, the more you can get someone to do something, the more likely it is to repeat. You know, and consistent with that, there's a time factor, there's an age factor.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  You know, Karl Marx said, "Give me a child to the age of seven and I'll give you a communist for life." And we have these colloquialisms, like, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." Well, why do these colloquialisms, you know, live in our conscious, collective consciousness for so long? Because they're largely true. So, the reality about discipline is the quicker you can get it infused into someone's habits, the more likely it is they're going to sustain it through life. If you're trying to change habits later in life, you gotta go all in, and as soon as you're aware that you want to change them, don't wait, don't hesitate. And, you know, one of the other things that William James says, he says is,

• 24:53Speaker 00

  "Until the new habit is securely rooted in your life, don't suffer an exception to occur." In other words, like, just because you think you've got it beat, like, you don't then reward yourself with pizza. You know, if your goal is to lose weight and you've gone a month of eating healthy, and at the end of a month, you're like, "Oh, I'm so proud of myself, I'm gonna reward myself with a pizza." It's like, you know, it's like what happens after Alcoholics Anonymous. You meet these people and they're like, "Yeah, I'm a recovering alcoholic." And you're like, "Wow, recovering alcoholic, when's the last time you've had a drink?" They're like, "Oh, I haven't had a drink in 20 years." You know, like, how is it that you haven't had a drink in 20 years and you're still recovering? Well, what they know is that that first drink brings in a whole cluster of behaviors and patterns

• 25:38Speaker 00

  that cluster together in sort of these neural networks. That that first drink, you know, can lead to the, to, to, to a bender. And so they really are recovering because 20 years later, you still have to work hard to groove the new habit because the old cluster is, is often still in there. So again, if you're trying to get disciplined, which is really important. Number one, you have to be a student of yourself. Number two, once you decide what you want to be disciplined on, you go all in. Number three, there has to be a behavioral component to it, not just a psychological component. And number four, uh, there's an every day-ness to it, right? You actually have to sort of work at it every day.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  You know, just because a habit gets entrenched in your life, it doesn't mean that you've won once and for all. You got, you gotta keep, you gotta keep working at it. You gotta keep sort of every, a little, a little, a little bit every day is sort of the key.

• 26:34Shane Parrish?

  I like that a lot. I want to explore the role of environment in either encouraging or adding friction to discipline. I think environment largely determines behavior in a lot of ways. Would you agree with that?

• 26:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think the psychological research, uh, research would show that, you know, Howard Gardner, who's a developmental psychologist at Harvard, who was the father of the, of the idea of multiple intelligence. He's, he's just one of these sort of world-class, once in a generation scholars, you know, he's, he's one of the, you know, what happens in academia is wherever you end up getting your, your PhD, they never let you, you teach at the same institution because they call it academic inbreeding, right? So they, they want ideas to sort of cross pollinate. But Howard Gardner is one of the very few people, he got an undergraduate degree at Harvard, masters at Harvard, PhD at Harvard, and then taught at Harvard for 40 years. Like he's, he's so special that they said, we're, we're not going to let you go. And he's another one of my intellectual heroes.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  And he said something at a conference once that blew my mind and said, when you dissect the research on nature and nurture, so you look at, you know, what we bring to the table as human beings that lead to the behaviors you're talking about Shane, and then the role of the environment. I said, what we're starting to realize is they're both more important than we think. They're both really important. And therein lies the difficulty in shaping behavior. When people call me and say, hey, can you help me? My answer is always, I don't know. But what I can do is when you look at ways of thinking, you know, ways of looking at solving the problem that can increase the probability of helping. So I'll give an example. I had a, a, a school teacher call me one time and say, hey, listen, there was a school teacher and a parent and said, hey, you know, my son is, he's a great kid.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  And for some reason, he keeps getting in trouble in school and it's starting to affect him. He's getting a label and a reputation as a quote unquote, bad kid. And I've talked to him about it. We've all talked to him. He's, he's, he's not trying to get in trouble. He's, is getting in trouble. Will you help? Well, sure. So I go into the school. You have to understand the role of, of the environment. So another way psychologists really look at this, you look at the individual and the environment around the individual. So we know that the environment is constantly imposing upon us, both consciously and unconsciously. And the term in psychology we use, it's called situated cognition. Situated cognition, that, that thinking happens in space. And so go into this classroom,

• 29:02Speaker 00

  take a seat in the back, largely just try to be invisible. And after a couple of days, I'm watching and what was happening is unbeknownst to the teacher, the teacher had sat this kid next to two of his best friends, who he'd develop a cluster of habits with outside of school of shenanigans and playfulness and not, not mean spirit, it's just playful. And so what happened is the teacher would be trying to teach and the best friend would lean over and the kid would try, he would really try. And he was so naive that, you know, he would look and see what his best friend was scribbling and then he would get caught and then he was in trouble and it kept happening. And the solve there was, was simple. It was change the seating. Right? And so, you know, change the seating of the classroom, the school, move the kid to a different place

• 29:47Speaker 00

  and voila, the behavior got better. You know, you put the kid next to the teacher in the front row instead of in the back row middle. And so a lot of times just changing. The environment around the individual changes the behavior. So you don't need willpower. I'll give a, I'll give a perfect example of that. So you take an individual, take a human being with, with the greatest amount of willpower and self-discipline there is. And you put them in a casino and you cover the windows. So there's no windows. So they don't know what time it is. And there's no clocks. So once again, you don't know what time it is. Then you pump that building full of pure oxygen. So it keeps them awake and alert.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  So their natural triggers that make them tired, they no longer get tired. So there's no windows, there's no clocks. You pump oxygen into it. You take their money and you exchange it for chips. And then you give them free alcohol. And then you play a certain kind of music. And all of a sudden, what is known on a probability level? That if you could shape the environment around the individual, you can shape their behavior. So oftentimes, these are the individuals that walk out of the casino at 5:00 a.m. watching the sunrise. And they're like, what just happened? You know, I just behaved in ways that's, that's not the real me. That's not, that's not who I am.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  And the counter argument is, well, clearly it is because this is what you did.

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• 32:13Speaker 00

  And but what you realize is changing the environment around an individual has such a powerful influence on the three biggies in psychology. The three biggies in psychology are thoughts, feelings, and actions. What you think, how you feel, and what you do. You know, if you wanna, there's this great song by the band Sister Hazel, you know, where they say, "If you want to be somebody else, change your mind." Well, that's not always true. More often than not, if you want to be somebody else, change your environment, like change where you are. And by changing your environment and/or the people around you, all of a sudden, the way the dominoes start to fall is you're a better version of yourself.

• 32:53Shane Parrish?

  I love that. What sort of things do you see with people at the top of their game in their environment that wouldn't necessarily appear with people who are not at that level? What's different about their environment?

• 33:09Speaker 00

  So there's a great book called The Talent Code by a friend of mine named Daniel Coyle. And what Daniel did is he did a deep dive into what he calls talent hotbeds. So he went to the places that seemed to produce disproportionate talent. So he went to the areas in Russia that were turning out champion tennis players, and he went to South Korea, where all these great female golfers were coming from. And he went to the Dominican Republic, where they're turning out these incredible young baseball players, and a place in Texas that was turning out incredible musicians. And he was looking for the, he was looking for the commonalities, like of these talent hotbeds. You know, if you think

• 33:50Speaker 00

  of Van Gogh and his group of artists, like what was it about that time and space that was able to create so many great impressionists? And what he uncovered was really interesting and unforeseen.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  One of the the the the common factors that produces disproportionate talent is what he had done with her too. One of them is called primal cues. Primal cues is that these places tend not to be identified by wealth and comfort. They tend to be the opposite. They tend to be places where the signaling of the community is like you better find a way to make it work. In other words, if this doesn't work out for you, like there's no plan B. Like your next best option isn't that good. You know, it's like growing up in a coal mining town. It's like it's it's the old American Horatio Alger stories or John Mellencamp song. It's like you you grow up in an environment and then all of a sudden that environment gives you an opening and an option.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  And like you're going to shoot that gap and these things get triggered in the brain and the body that are called primal cues. Now, it's not that your your your life is in danger, but like this is high stake stuff. And so what that does is it sharpens focus. It allows the brain to to to what's called myelinated so that memory and skill development, the velocity of skill development happens more quickly. One of the test questions I used to put on the sports psychology exams for my college students, I would say, why is it that a golfer from from Isleworth Country Club or Olympia High School has never made it to the PGA Tour? And these are very affluent places where you go to the driving range and these kids have the best instructors

• 35:33Speaker 00

  in the world, the most modern equipment, brand new golf balls hitting off perfect grass. And what you see is they is this scenario dominates junior golf and junior tennis and junior. But as the developmental trajectory goes, the game tends to weed these people out because they don't have the resilience and the grit and the fortitude because they were the formative years happened in such comfort that when things get hard, they don't know what to do with them. So one of the profiles of of these talent hotbeds is they tend to be places soccer, like Brazilian, Brazilian soccer is another example, where you have to tend to gut it out. And it's some version of natural selection where where innovation

• 36:18Speaker 00

  And evolving your game, knowing yourself and skill development are at a premium.

• 36:23Shane Parrish?

  So there's like a natural selection bias at the top for people who are resilient. You can't make it there without being resilient. How do we as parents develop resilience in our kids? And also importantly, how do we develop resilience in ourselves as adults?

• 36:39Speaker 00

  When we talk about like resilience and grit, a lot of times people think that those are causal variables. That they are the things that happen before success. And that's not untrue, right? They are. But one of the things you have to understand or you ask the question, like what happens before resilience? Right? It's like what Ayn Rand said about money. People say that, you know, money is the root of all evil. And Ayn Rand flipped the question, she said, okay, well, what's at the root of all money? Right? And the answer is people, right? So is it that money is the root of all evil or evil exists? And, you know, people use money as a mechanism to express their evil. A bit of a circular semantic argument. But one of the things that's known about resilience is it's critically important.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  And when you put it as a variable in psychological model, it tends to wash out,

• 37:30Speaker 00

  you know, things like, you know, ability or intelligence. Like it's more important in the course of the life cycle.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  Right up there with delayed gratification, which is another very predictive variable. So if you just marry, if you're raising kids and you can sort of teach your kids to delay gratification and to be able to withstand sort of failure and hard things and have resilience, like that's a pretty good setup for long-term success. But one of the things, one of the terms we use in psychology, it's called normative failure. And the idea is that when failure is the norm, resilience becomes second nature. And there's a biological imperative to that. So for example, we know that, you know, when boxers get hit over the course of time, their bones calcify, like and strengthen.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  If you look at any, any environment ecosystem, you know, for example, use Mount St. Helens. You know, in the early eighties, Mount St. Helens had a massive volcano. It blew this, this mountain to smithereens. It was a beautiful ecosystem.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  If you go visit Mount St. Helens, you know, thirty years later, it's remarkable. What it was, was, was, you know, fifteen feet of ash and everything seemed dead. And now it's a flourishing, thriving ecosystems. Um, in the forestry services, they now do controlled burns because they know that it's really healthy for forests to go through fires. And metaphorically, that's really, really true of the human condition. And in fact, that's captured in, in, in the Buddhist school of thought a little bit with, with, uh, with the symbol of, um, of the, uh, lotus flower. Right? So the characteristic of the lotus flower is that it's, you know, it's, it's, it's the most beautiful thing. It's a symbol of ultimate divine beauty. But the other characteristic of a lotus flower is that it only grows out of muck.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Like, if you ever look at the, the flower floating on the water, but you look down, the, the, the, these things sort of emerge out of muck, out of, out of what, what people would look at and say is, is ugliness. And I think in a psychological sense, certainly that's, that's true. You know, when in psychology, Eric Erickson, who's a, a, a great developmental psychologist, created the eight stages of life. You know, one of the things that he suggested is that, that, that to overprotect your children is to rob them of, of their life, uh, because you're making fragile people. And so you shouldn't overprotect your children from the hard things in life. And Jordan Peterson, current psychologist, says the same thing.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  He says, hey, if your kids are taking risks intelligently, if they're being smart while they're taking risks, like, you gotta let it happen. And so what happens is resilience actually tends to be born out of learning what to do with failure. And in, in, in, in, in my experience, people call me, usually I'm the last phone call, Shane. Like, you know, if it's a golfer, they've already fired their caddy and fired their swing instructor. And sometimes it's the wife who will call me. And the wife will be like, like, I can't stand to be around him. The dog can't stand to be around him. The children can't stand, he's just miserable. And what you realize is when life has stripped away all of these,

• 40:47Speaker 00

  you know, ego, generally ego protective mechanisms and left you perfectly raw. You know, so I, I mentioned Erickson. Erickson uses sort of the yin yang symbol that crisis and opportunity are synonymous. That, that, that, that they're not separate things, that, that in crisis, you get essentially the same amount of opportunity. Anyone who's been through a divorce, you know, knows that. Anyone who's lost a loved one knows that. Anyone who's ever had their life blown up and had to rebuild from nothing and hit quote unquote, rock bottom knows exactly what I'm talking about. You know, no one ever, no one would ever wish to be blindsided in life and their life fall apart.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  But when you actually are living in the room with, in, in, in, in, in a therapeutic sense, or in a counseling or coaching sense, with people whose lives have been blown to smithereens. This happened oftentimes during the pandemic. It happens during financial crises when people lose everything. Happened with Steve Jobs when he was, when he was fired from Apple. He, you know, in, in, in his speech called Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. He talks about the beautiful insights that began to happen because he was unencumbered by the expectations of being an executive. And so what happens is when you lose the baggage of, of your, your identity, of your ego, of yourself, what fills in the space is the freedom to create.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  And that freedom to create is also the freedom to take risks. And, you know, it's Janis Joplin, you know, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. So when life takes everything away from you, you get that freedom back. Great success, great fulfillment, great happiness in life often emerges from the muck, from the murk of life, from the failure, from those, those painful emotions that happen when we hit rock bottom. And so when it comes to parenting, it's this, it's sort of paradoxical because, you know, in the early stages of, you know, of a country, it's like, well, you know, every generation would say, I want my kids to have it better than I did because there was real suffering.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  But you hit a tipping point whereby, you know, if you're still running that playbook in your middle class or upper middle class or wealthy, you know, one of the, I'm working on two books right now. The first one's called Rich and Miserable. The world of wealth and the world of abundance and the world of quote unquote success is also imbued with a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression, a lot of drug abuse. And inasmuch as I could tell you, I celebrate abundance and I love success, what I can also say is that handing it to your children, making their lives too easy, giving them a glide path and protecting them from taking risk creates fragility. And if you send kids out into life, out into

• 43:42Speaker 00

  the world, fragile, you have done them no service and they are going to have a lot of suffering when the world comes at them the way that the world comes at everyone eventually. And so you want to develop resilience in kids, it's got to be some version of reality therapy, like tell them the truth. One of the things you see, I see way too much of it, and this is not just wealth, this is sort of a modern phenomenon. A lot of modern day parenting has nothing to do with the kids. It has to do with vanity. And so when you see these moms or dads at the club whose kid steps out of line a little bit or is being a little bit silly, the parent isn't yelling at the kid because they care

• 44:26Speaker 00

  about the kid's long-term development. They're yelling at the kid because they themselves are embarrassed. Like it reflects badly on me as the parent. And so what looks like parenting is actually a vanity project. And by the way, kids can spot that. They feel it at every level and it's not a way to make them feel loved.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  If you want kids to feel loved, you have to spend a lot of time with them. You have to tell them the truth. You have to be able to do the hard work of parenting, which is taking things away from them, which is also, by the way, going to inconvenience you as a parent. The moment you'll know you've succeeded as a parent is when your kid is able to look at you and say, hey, like, you know, I don't, I don't need your help. Like, I got it. Like, I'm glad that you're there as a safety net if I need you, but like, I got this. Because what you want is self-reliance, like, like, you know, a little bit of autonomy, where they believe in themselves.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Like, the confidence that your kids need to have to be successful adults is self-confidence. It's belief that's rooted in their own ability to solve the hard problems in life. And the only way, and the only way they're going to get that is through trial and error. Like, like, that's not me saying that. That's like deep amounts of empirical research in social cognitive theory, where, where success, the equation of success and failure, the math of it, is they have to do a lot of failing and then learn how to succeed in the face of failure. Because then, once that happens, the next time they hit failure, their brain triggers into, oh, wait, I know what to do with this moment.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Because the last time I failed, I kept persisting and I worked my way through it and then I succeeded. And in fact, I'm sorry for talking so long on this chain, but I'll tell you a really interesting study. They took a bunch of kids, I think it was middle school kids, but it might have been high school. I think it was middle school kids. And they showed them 20 math equations. And they said, okay, how many of these problems do you think you could solve? And every kid gave themselves a score. And then the second thing they did is they asked the kids, how confident are you in your ability to solve these problems? And they got a confidence score, it's actually known as self-efficacy. Then they gave the kids the tests. And what they found is the kids that were more confident, when they ran into problems, they worked harder to solve those problems. In other words, if I'm confident in my ability

• 46:56Speaker 00

  to solve problems, when I run into a difficult thing, I just, I keep working at it. This is the persistence that you were talking about earlier. So you keep reworking the problem a lot of different ways. And by working at it, I solve it, then I get to the next one. Kids who didn't have as much confidence gave up more quickly. And by giving up more quickly, they wouldn't get it right. So what you realize is that it wasn't the academic ability, or the IQ, or the standardized tests that foreshadowed the ultimate score. It was the persistence in the face of adversity. How do you develop persistence in the face of adversity and failure? You practice it as a kid. Carol Dweck, who's an academic researcher, talks about two kinds

• 47:40Speaker 00

  of feedback you give kids. You can either praise kids for their intelligence, or praise kids for their effort. And it's very known in the educational community, that when kids are successful, you say, hey, I'm proud of you. You worked really, really hard on that equation. The next time they go to work at something, they're going to try harder. If you give them praise, saying, hey, good job, you're really, really smart. The next time they run into adversity, essentially what their brain is going to say is, well, I have a fixed amount of intelligence, and the smartness that I have isn't solving this. Well, I'm just going to give up, because I haven't been praised for my effort. And so one of the best things you can do for your, for your kids, is to continually reinforce work ethic. Continually reinforce that, you

• 48:25Speaker 00

  know, they have control over their success, the degree to which they're willing to work hard.

• 48:32Shane Parrish?

  I just want to take a minute here to reflect on this episode, because Dr. Geo left a profound impact on me. And one of the things that I took away from this, and I reflected on a lot, I went for a lot of runs, and I thought about, and I sort of talked to other people about, was the sources of advantage. Now, Dr. Geo offered five sources of advantage. He said talent, effort, differentiate, process, and be a talent collector. So those are five. If you go back in the episode, he explains those. I'm going to add to those, because I've come up with more. Come up with 13 in total. So those are five. Let's go to six. Six is patience. Do you have more patience?

• 49:14Shane Parrish?

  Do you have the patience to know that you're making progress without visible results? A lack of patience changes the outcome. Often, we know how to get what we want, but what we do is we want it tomorrow. We don't want it in 10 years. We know how to get there in 10 years. We just work hard, we put our head down, do what we're supposed to do. But we don't want it, so we go for shortcuts. And that lack of patience changes the outcome. Ability to withstand pain. That pain is not physical pain. I mean, it can be physical pain in terms of working out. That's definitely something to consider. But that pain is mental. Can you do something different? Can you be an outcast? Can you be the tall poppy? Can you stand out?

• 49:57Shane Parrish?

  Are you willing to differentiate yourself? Can you withstand financial pain if you go through a crisis? The ability to take pain applies to every part of our life. Emotional pain, physical pain. Do you crawl up into a ball? Or are you able to withstand that? And what can you do to improve the odds that you can withstand these things? There's no time to prepare for crisis, whether it's a relationship, or health crisis, or a financial crisis. Nobody says, "Go home, and in two weeks, you're gonna get this. You know, this thing is coming, so you got time to get ready." You don't. Temperament. This is something I talk about in my book, Clear Thinking. How do you manage the urges that get other people in trouble? The emotional urges and impulses. Nine, partner.

• 50:42Shane Parrish?

  Your partner at home, partner at work. These things matter. If you have the right partner, everything's on easy mode. You bring all the baggage from your relationship with you to work, and you bring work into your relationship. You better make sure you have the right partner. That is a huge source of advantage. Ten, energy. Now one's self-explanatory. Eleven, curiosity. Again, self-explanatory. Twelve, I'm gonna say luck. But you can't really do anything about luck. You can do most, out of all of these so far, you can do a lot on each of them. Thirteen is positioning. Are you in the right position to play on easy mode? Are you playing on easy mode? Are you playing on hard mode?

• 51:26Shane Parrish?

  And the position you're in at the moment of the situation, the moment of challenge, the moment of circumstance, that doesn't change the fact that there's going to be a moment, doesn't change that you're going to get angry, it doesn't change the fact you have to make a decision. What it does change is how easy that decision is. And everybody looks like a genius when they're in a good position and everybody looks like an idiot when they're in a bad position. Are you playing on easy mode? Are you playing on hard mode? I just thought I'd offer a little bit of insight into how I reflect on each of these episodes. Thank you.

• 52:11Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project. The Farnham Street Blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear. Until next time.