Dr. Gio Valiante (Part 2): Failure and Success

In the second of a special two-part episode, performance psychologist Dr. Gio Valiante calls on his vast experience working with some of the world’s top athletes and entrepreneurs. Shane and Dr. Valiante discuss thoughts on failure and the fear that holds you back from making the most of your talent, shifting from an ego orientation to a mastery orientation, common misperceptions about success and failure, and how we learn when it’s time to cut our losses and move on to a different challenge. 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. Listen to the first part of this special episode on the Farnam Street blog or wherever you listen to The Knowledge Project. -- 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

  So at the end of the day, what I'm always telling people, both matter. Like, you can be intrinsically motivated and like the praise and the recognition, but the order has to be love of craft and then, like, it has to be, you have to love what you're doing and then enjoy the things that come with it, because when the order flips, invariably, it's going to be a problem.

• 0:37Shane 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 love, you can join at fs.blog/membership.

• 1:22Shane Parrish?

  Check out the show notes for a link. This is the second of a special two-part episode of The Knowledge Project, featuring performance psychologist Dr. Gio Valiant. If you haven't listened already, go back and check out the first portion of our interview in episode 179, either at the Farnam Street blog or wherever you usually listen to The Knowledge Project. Gio is regarded as one of the most successful performance coaches in the world, and he's worked exclusively with golfers on the PGA and LPGA tours, Olympic athletes, and leading figures in the NCAA football, 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 billionaire hedge fund manager Stephen Cohen.

• 2:07Shane Parrish?

  On this episode, we continue our conversation, beginning with his thoughts on failure and the fear that holds us back from making the most of our talent. Gio also discusses the shift from an ego orientation to a mastery mindset, common misperceptions about success and failure, what we learn from success and how we learn when it's time to cut our losses and move on to a different challenge. It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:45Shane Parrish?

  The direction I want to go after that is sort of in failure. I mean, often the reason we don't try things is because we don't want to fail. So we don't build these muscles because we're not failing. What happens when fear sort of like takes hold of us? Like, what does the world look like? How is it different? And how does it shape what we're about to do? And how do we get out of that?

• 3:08Speaker 00

  Great question. Yeah, because one of the things that we know is people think of success and failure as opposite things, right? That the more I succeed, the less I fail. But that's really sort of a modern conception of success and failure. The fact of the matter is failure is woven into the fabric of success. It's not how do you avoid failure? That's the wrong question. The right question is, how do I fail? Or how should I fail in ways that lead to the type of skill development and belief system that allow me to succeed long term? So it's how do we fail? Like in snow skiing, you want to teach kids how to fall so they don't get injured. You want to teach students how to keep trying and pushing themselves as hard as they can. And the question is, what do they do with the failure?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Now, here's where it gets fascinating. If you want to anticipate how someone is going to react to failure, you shouldn't address or attack how they react to failure. What you should actually do is try to go in a time machine and go back to the beginning. And you ask them, why do you do what you do? This is, if you were to ask me, To to to to pull out some of the most, the the the greatest insights to come out of psychology. This would absolutely be one of them. It's it's it's research on what are called achievement goals. Achievement goals explore the why, the human why. Why do you do what you do? What you, after, you know, you ask a thousand people this question, huge data sets.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  What you come to find is these thousands of people, all of a sudden, they tend to bucket into one of, one of two categories. It's either a mastery orientation or an ego orientation. And these two different orientations as to why people do what they do tend to be very predictive of of ultimate success. And here's why. So a mastery orientation, here are the answers people with a mastery orientation typically give. Why do I do what I do? Well, I'm curious about it. It's, I do it because I I I love the, I'm intrinsically motivated. I love to solve the problems. I love the work of the practice. I find it, you know, inherently interesting, like I think about it all the time.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  This is what I was talking about earlier, earlier about the blending of vocation and avocation. You know, go back to the why. And so what you'll often see in the game of golf, or even happens with students in school, right? It's, you know, why do kids love to learn? Because learning is fun. Why do kids, you know, go on the golf course, want to play until the sun has set? And they're out there all night? Because it's an amazing sport. It's super fun. It's it's it's it's just fascinating, get lost in the, in the game. So at what point in in educational development do kids, you know, start to dislike school? Happens around third grade. What happens in third grade? We start giving kids grades. So what happens is there's a shift from a a mastery orientation to what's called an ego orientation.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  The ego orientation, when you ask people with an ego orientation, hey, why do you do what you do? What you'll often see is, well, I like to beat other people. Or I want to prove something. I need to prove myself to other people. Or it's some version of image management, like you're trying to show, show off and and prove yourself to other people, right? So imagine, you know, Shane, give, give me a domain of functioning or or or an arena or an area that's interesting to you. So so so give me any a a arena or domain.

• 6:31Shane Parrish?

  Business.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  Business is a great example. Certain people go into business because they want to make a lot of money. Like it's just it, they want to make a lot of money. So that's their driving force. Other people go into business and they find that business is fascinating. Certain components of business, motivation, you know, business management, organizing people, innovation, product innovation, research and development. What happens is when, when you get lost in, in, in, in, in the problem solving of it all, like the Steve Jobs. And, and, and what it leads to is deeper cognitive processing, more creative problem solving. But here's the key thing, the key thing.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  When mastery oriented individuals fail, the reaction is curiosity. It's, it's what, it's what, um, Thomas Edison said, you know, when asked, hey, you know, what was it like to fail a thousand times? He said, he was reported as saying, "The light bulb was not an invention with a thousand failures. It was an invention that simply required a thousand steps." You know, Tiger Woods, when, when you watch the way he handles career and his approach to it, it was a purely mastery oriented mindset. It was, you know, get a little bit better every day, like make better mistakes.

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• 8:19Speaker 03

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• 8:50Speaker 00

  Conversely, what you see out of an ego-oriented individual in business is when they fail, they feel embarrassment. Now, I want you to pause here for a minute. Two individuals, everything else being equal, same education, same ability, same training, same everything. One of them goes at their craft, or at their domain, or at their career, from a place of, "I love to learn, I love to problem solve, I go into depth with these things, and I largely do it..." I don't really, I'm not engaged in image management. The second individual goes in, competing against other people, caring about, over caring about what people think.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Success is only defined by that which is palpable or tangible, like they're playing for trophies. Then you fail, because if you're living, you're trying to get at the tail end of the curve, you're gonna fail. And you react with embarrassment. When we talk about the toxic emotions, embarrassment is, depends on the person, but it's one of the two most painful psychological experiences a person can have. Humiliation is second, only behind grief. The type of grief that comes when you lose a loved one, when you lose a child, which is like a throw switch in the brain, which shuts everything down. The biological mechanisms in the brain, from like when a parent loses a child, are so strong that you're just, you shut down, and you're not gonna think your way out of it. Like, it's unbelievable.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Right behind that is humiliation. And so what happens is when people feel embarrassed, their brain starts, sends signals where they create cortisol, stress, epinephrine, adrenaline, norepinephrine. Their perceptions change. So rather, so when you're embarrassed, rather than see opportunity, all you see is threat.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Right, so all of a sudden, there's a distortion of reality. And so, all of a sudden, when all you see is threat, you stop taking risks. Now, it becomes some version of avoiding the pain that comes from embarrassment. So, like, all of a sudden, why is everyone walking around underperforming relative to their ability? Largely, it's because people live their lives trying to avoid embarrassment. Now, why is that? Because they approach life from an ego orientation. Imagine if, Shannon, if every time you failed, big or small, I were to come up and smack you on the hand. Well, the brain is going to process that as pain. And the part of the brain, the amygdala, that processes pleasure and pain, it doesn't distinguish whether it's physical pain or psychological pain. It's just pleasure/pain.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  So, now, the brain equates failure with pain. Well, all of a sudden, the brain then anticipates the next time you're in a risk-taking situation, or you're going to put your ideas into the arena of a meritocracy of your company, or like, you think you can help. But if every time that happens, someone makes you feel embarrassed, or, gosh, even if they don't make you feel embarrassed, you make yourself feel embarrassed, because the reason you're doing it is, is you want people to like you. You're going to run away from that feeling. And all of a sudden, you're on this time equation, and the wash, rinse, repeat of your life is essentially avoiding embarrassment. So, you're taking no risks. And 20 years goes by like that, and you look back and you're like, where did the time go?

• 12:11Speaker 00

  And everyone else is wondering, boy, I really thought that that person, you know, could have been better. And you're like, you know what? I thought I could have been better. And it happens at such an unconscious level that, that people are unaware of it. And it's even true in acting. And it's even true in sports like golf, where, you know, actors, they have to make an impression on the audience. But if you talk to the best... They're not doing it to impress other people. They're doing it for the moment. They're doing it for the performance. They're doing it for the psychological freedom that comes with the delivery. And so the number one agreement I have with anyone who ever wants to work with me is, as I tell them is, you have to promise me that you're going to take embarrassment out of the equation. Because I can't make you great if you're willing

• 12:56Speaker 00

  to react with embarrassment. Because the brain will anticipate embarrassment. It'll put you into a psychological straitjacket that will forever restrict your ability to have creative problem solving, to have deep cognitive processing. It affects memory. It affects all the things that lead to success.

• 13:14Shane Parrish?

  Is that why even elite athletes often don't practice, especially in team sports, things they're bad at, because they don't want their teammates to see them failing and they're embarrassed?

• 13:25Speaker 00

  Happens all the time. I have an NBA player who in practice would shoot, call it like eighty-five percent from the free throw line. And in games would shoot somewhere, you know, in the fifty percent range. And it was all because he cared what people thought of him. You know, in sports, we call it having rabbit ears. You know, it's impression management. And this often happens in Hollywood, where people start to believe their own press. And there's actually a psychological shift that happens, believe it or not, because people get great at these things because of the master, because they love them. But all it takes is a few iterations of people telling you you're great, or I give you money. In fact, there's a great book called Born to Run, which talks about what happens, if

• 14:08Speaker 00

  you look at what happened to the record times in marathoning, is when Nike entered the equation and started rewarding runners with contracts, the speeds went down. Because people stopped love, they stopped running for the love of the craft, and they started running for the incentive, for the reward itself. And what is known is that incentives are demotivating. They undermine the intrinsic motivation that lead to greatness. There's this great little parable, where there's an old man with a garden. And one day, he wakes up and his garden is torn to bits. And he doesn't know why. And so, a week later, you know, he puts his garden back together. A week later, he goes out and the garden's

• 14:51Speaker 00

  torn up again. He doesn't know what's happening. So on a Saturday, wakes up early and he goes out and he learns that the neighborhood kids were playing football and they were running right through his garden. And, and so he said, well, what am I gonna do here? One day he called the kids over, said, kids, come here, he goes, everyone come here. Said, I'm so thankful that you're using my yard to play in. He goes, it gives me great joy to give you such great joy. He said, everyone, I want you to come over here. And the kids did. And he gave all of them five dollars. Said, here's five dollars. Um, that's how thankful I am. The kids said, thanks, mister. And they went back to the game. And then next week, the kids played their football and they came. The old man gave them five dollars. And after a couple of months, kids played their football and they rushed through the game and they came and they said, where's, where's our five dollars?

• 15:35Speaker 00

  He said, oh, I'm sorry, kids, because I don't, I don't have any more money to give you. He goes, but you're welcome to play as much as you want. And as the parable goes, of course, that was the end of football, that the kids stopped playing. Because what happened is the shift, they started out playing because it was fun. And eventually you're playing for the money. And there's some version of that in everywhere in life, whether it's praise, whether it's the approval of other people, whether it's the need for glory, or whether it's money, when you do a thing only for the outcome and you lose the love of the craft, the love of the game, you're not going to be any good at it. So at the end of the day, what I'm always telling people, both matter. Like you can be intrinsically motivated and like the praise and the recognition,

• 16:19Speaker 00

  but the order has to be love of craft and then, like, it has to be, you have to love what you're doing and then enjoy the things that come with it. Because when the order flips, uh, invariably, it's, uh, it's going to be a problem. And so this, this shift from mastery to ego is a real thing. And it's a real problem for professional athletes, unless they figure it out and they shift back to the mastery orientation. Um, and they're willing to kick embarrassment, you know, out of the equation, you know, for good.

• 16:47Shane Parrish?

  How do we shift from a ego orientation to a mastery orientation? Can we just think our way into this?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  The answer is it depends. Some can and some can't. For the ones who can, I've had dramatic results, both, uh, in the markets, you know, with, with, with, with portfolio managers in the hedge fund world, uh, and with, with professional athletes. And it begins with the why.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  And I always start by asking someone, they come and see me for the first time, and tell me, tell me why you do what you do. And I look and they write it all and go deeper, I say, keep going. And then I say, okay, well, let's look at your reasons. And then you lay it out and you map it out. And you say, okay, well, here's the danger. Here's the reality, by the way. You could be ego oriented and be successful. It's happened to the NBA a lot. But here's the thing. The only way to be ego oriented and be successful is you better never lose your confidence. Because what we know is confidence is a variable. Sometimes we're more confident than others. If you're ego oriented and you lose your confidence, that's where the embarrassment comes into play. That's where you're screwed. So that's why athletes often surround themselves like entourages. Essentially, what they're saying is, you know, keep telling me how great I am,

• 17:56Speaker 00

  because confidence is so important that I need it. So that's, that's the only way to win with an ego orientation. But generally speaking, what I'm trying to do is shift people back to a mastery orientation. And so you lay out the characteristics of a mastery orientation, and it determines how you practice. And, and it determines, the most important thing that you do, believe it or not, is you help people correct their reactions to failure and who they listen to. So one of the characteristics of an ego orientation is you care what people think about you. And like, who is they? Like, that's the thing. It's like, I'm wondering, I worry about what they're going to think. Who's they? What your reason, you realize, most people are walking around, essentially, it's what we call, it's called a personal fable, that they, you

• 18:39Speaker 00

  know, we are all the stars of, of, you know, Shakespeare, life is a stage, you know, but like, but most people are the actors in their own play. But we over index for how much people care about, you know, about us. Like, we think that people are thinking about us all the time. And we want to make it a good impression on them. And it could be the media. It could be the writers and reporters, it could be the critics, it could be your, your friends, it could be the, the crowds. Mostly in business, it's management. It's like, I care what, what my managers think of me, what, what my boss thinks of me. People don't pay too much attention to forming opinions of other people. It tends to be just a quick reaction that they're careless about. And they care even less about the words they use. And so when you go around life caring too much what people think about you,

• 19:22Speaker 00

  and you actually like internalize and you let it affect your decision making, it's a recipe for for just a bad life with no happiness. So what I'll say is let's pick three people, maybe four, who you're gonna give the power, who you're gonna actually listen to, who you know, love you and care about you, who are accurate observers and who will tell you the truth. And if you're willing to solicit the truth from those people in your circle and your community, you have to use people as your mirror. So you need feedback from people. You just have to be intentional about who those people are, who are gonna be your mirrors. And in fact, that's one of the key predictors of success are, both for kids and adults, is you know, who are you surrounding yourself by?

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Who are you using to populate your ego, I'm sorry, your ecosystem? So what I'll do with people is we'll intentionally pick, here's who you're willing to listen to. Okay, number one. Number two, we're gonna pre react. In other words, when you fail, how are you gonna react? Because what we know is the toxic emotions that kill us are a function of how we react. So if you fail, you can react one of five ways. Embarrassment. The type of pain that comes with embarrassment will flood the brain and flood the body with these with these chemicals that will ensure underperformance. Okay, well, second way to do with failure. Anger. People fail and they just they rage and they get angry. Over the course of time, that's pain. So now you're also conditioning yourself for underperformance by reacting with anger too much. Third way to react.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Acceptance. I failed it, I accept it and move on. No harm, no foul. Then we start getting into the elevating emotions. Humor. Now, this is really hard for competitive minded people to wrap their minds around. But if you can hit a bad shot in golf or if you can fail at some particular thing. And your reaction is, is you, you accept it, but then you laugh. You're like, that was terrible. That it's like, it was so bad, it's funny. And or, well, I did everything right in the process. You know, bad luck. And, and you can find a way to infuse humor into your failure. One of the things that happens is your body doesn't react with the toxic emotions or toxic chemical epinephrine, norepinephrine cortisol.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  And, and it often leads to more joy and more abundance. I'll give a quick example. I had a golfer on the PGA tour who was 0 for 210. He had, he had gone for like seven or eight years and never won on the PGA tour. And so one of the things we started to do is replace his reactions. And so, uh, and I remember, I'll never forget, he said to me, he said, so what you're telling me is you want me to suck and enjoy it. I'll never forget the moment, the, the, the first week, you know, he started accepting bad shots instead of beating himself up. And then you started to see more psychological freedom in his, actually his golf swing. And then he came out and he won the second week. So seven years, no wins, 0 for 215, and he won 15 days later. And that's a function of the reaction.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  And I'll never forget a moment, he was playing badly and he was out on the golf course. And I saw him and his caddy laughing. Cause this, and one of the things we know in psychology is sense of humor is one of the greatest tells of, of, of psychological health and wellbeing. One of the keys to psychological health is to be able to laugh at things that are funny. And that's one of the, I think, the problems of the modern times. If people have lost their sense of humor. And, you know, Freud wrote about wit being critically important because life is so painful and so difficult. You have to find a way to find things funny if you're going to survive in this world. And so the way we shift people back to mastery, Shane, is we get clarity on the why, so they're doing it for the right reasons. We make sure that we're clear about how they're reacting to criticism, whose opinions they care about.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  We make sure that life is not a vanity project. If the reason that they're doing it is not to impress other people. And then we're intentional about how they're reacting. So that life is not only a vanity project. It's also not an exercise in self abuse, that they're accepting of their mistakes, forgiving of themselves and others. And then what you start to see Is there's more joy in the work, there's more psychological freedom, there's better risk-taking and ultimately better results. And as I explain it, you can see it's just a causal chain. The way the dominoes fall and they end up on the scoreboard, but it goes all the way back to the fundamental question of why do you do what you do?

• 23:46Shane Parrish?

  I love that answer and thank you for so much detail on that. I want to sort of explore failure and success. We often think that we can only learn from failure. We can fail ourselves, we can watch other people fail and we can learn from that. I want to take a different approach to that question. What can we learn from success?

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Wow. Curveball me. Let me, let me tell you how performance psychology thinks of that. Number one, you have to define what success is. Like, what do we mean by quote unquote success? Right? Number one. Number two, on the one hand, persistence and resilience and grit are critically important to succeed. In other words, powering through failure and the idea of keeping at something and, and working your way. But here's the other part of the equation no one wants to talk about. A lot of winning is knowing when to quit. It's knowing when to get out of a bad bet, knowing when not to beat your head over a wall. Like in poker, for example, it's knowing when to fold. It's in the markets,

• 24:47Speaker 00

  knowing a bad trade and cutting your losses. You know, because what happens is you see the tail end of the curve. Most people at the tail end of the curve have a puritanical work ethic. And their answer their whole lives has always been, no, I'm not winning, just work hard. You see this with kids in high school. They outwork everyone. They get to college, they outwork everyone. But if you go to the tail end of the curve and you take all these people and then you lay them on a distribution, what you come to realize, they're all, they all work hard and they're all persistent. So then where's the advantage? If you commoditize effort and resilience and persistence along with talent and other things, then where's the advantage? Well, the advantage then

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Is knowing, believe it or not, like, like how to take breaks, how to rest, where are the places that you think you're best? You know, it's, it's, it's, you know, if you look at Harold Bloom's, it's called the taxonomy of higher order thinking. At the tippity top of it, it's, it's, you know, there's knowledge, there's knowing things. And right above knowledge, the next sophisticated level of learning is called comprehension. It's to understand what you know.

• 25:54Speaker 04

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• 26:24Speaker 03

  College football is back. So Hilton called and me, the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  And then above comprehension is what's called application. It's like, okay, here's what I know and I understand. I can apply it to my life in real ways. We, we know this in schools, sometimes kids will be great test takers, but like they don't apply it in their real life. So what are they really learning? Then above application is analysis. Analysis to be able to break a problem apart into its finite components. And then above that is what's called synthesis, the ability to recombine it and put it back together. Right? So knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis. But at the tippity top of the pyramid is judgment. That's why our legal system judges. It's the ability to infuse and integrate knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis and ultimately make good decisions, right?

• 27:39Speaker 00

  What, what we call inferential intelligence to be a good decision maker. I remember one time, a few years ago, I was up in Buffalo, New York, meeting with a guy named Sean McDermott, the head coach of the Buffalo Bills. Sean McDermott is an unbelievable human being. He was seventy and O as a high school wrestler. Like, do you know how hard it is to be at seventy O at anything? So to be seventy and O in high school wrestling, I think in Pennsylvania, which is one of the most competitive places in the world for wrestling. And he ends up becoming, you know, an incredibly good NFL coach, under consideration for Coach of the Year. He helped break a seventeen year playoff slump for the Buffalo Bills. They're now in the playoffs, seven years in a row. This is Sean McDermott.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  So anyway, I was up in Buffalo, meeting with Sean. After Buffalo, I flew to Dallas, Texas, spent two days with a guy named Jordan Spieth. Jordan Spieth is gonna be a Hall of Fame golfer. He's already got the record, just a matter of when they induct him. And I flew from there to Greenwich, Connecticut, or Sanford, Connecticut. I spent two days with a guy named Steve Cohen, who's a hedge fund manager, who's now the owner of the Mets, who's known in the world. It's just, you know, there's a great article, you know, Steve Cohen always wins. Wins in the markets, he wins in the art world, he wins, and he's just a winner. His horse won the Kentucky Derby. He's just a brilliant guy. And I remember walking with Steve after these other days, and I'll never forget this. She said, "Oh, my God, this is the same conversation I just had."

• 29:08Speaker 00

  At the tail end of the curve, successful people are generally having the same conversations, different parlance, different language. You know, you have to know different things in the markets versus engineering versus academia versus a particular sport. So there is domain expertise. But the human beings, we take away the domain expertise, what you come to realize, it's the consistent application of the basic principles. It's Aristotelian in nature. If you wanna, if you wanna aggregate every success book ever written, go read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Like, there's not a whole lot happening that Aristotle, you know, didn't already write about in Nicomachean Ethics.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  You see, number one, believe it or not, is humility. The best in the world readily acknowledge that they don't know. Now, I'm not saying, so they're humble, but there's also a little arrogance, right? There's conviction, there's belief that, that what I'm doing is right. I believe in my path. But underneath that is the humility and the recognition that, that they don't know. Which is why the second step, it's a never-ending series of problem solving and testing and risk-taking. So they're willing to try a bunch of different things until they get it right. Which is, oh, by the way, why they're mastery-oriented. Because they know they're gonna fail, but they refuse to, they refuse to react to failure with embarrassment.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  They react to failure like Thomas Edison with more curiosity. Elon Musk is a perfect example of that. And by the way, Tiger Woods was a perfect, how many times did Tiger Woods change his golf swing? Every expert was, was saying, you should never do this. You have the greatest golf swing in the history of the game. But it was, it was governed by this idea of kaizen, which is continual improvement every day. Willing to fail and so, you know, you're constantly evolving. Jack Nicklaus, by the way, was exactly the same way. Ben Hogan was the same way. So anyway, so what you see is humility. You see the ability to, you're, you're, you're an example of this, Shane. I mean, look at what you've built. You're putting yourself out there to test ideas.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  You're vulnerable and taking risks every day that people are gonna criticize you. And like, that takes courage, right? You know, Peter Buck, the guitarist of R E M, played a whole album on a mandolin, you know, in the first take. You know, R E M could have been, kept, keep making the same music and just print a lot of money, but like, no. So the next thing you see, and William James talked about this. He talked about having a bit of a vision. And this is the beautiful thing about being a snowflake, about humanity, is none of us are the same. Like, every one of us is differentiated in a particular way. And so the ability, you know, in golf, we say the ability to play the shot that you see, to build what you see, to trust your own vision, your own eye.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Again, Elon Musk is, I think, a really great, modern, living example of that. Is, you know, the things he's doing are the things that he set out to do a long time ago. And like, and he's, he's being additive to humanity in countless ways.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  And you see this with, with, really with great leaders, I think Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi. You know, the ability to, to lead people in a manner that is not like the Machiavellian view of politics. You know, politics can be a nasty business, but to stand out there and put your ideas out there and to preach love and, and, and to preach non-resistance and to live it, like what a contribution to humanity. I think like, believe it or not, in the world of pop or like Taylor Swift, don't underestimate the power of these global influencers and the impact. You know, the brain has these things called mirror neurons that fire when we watch people do something. And so you've got a world of young women looking at these female role models.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  And so the mirror neurons that fire, that we're all a little bit monkey see, monkey do. So what do the best of the best do? They're really intentional about what they look at. They control their focus and, and sort of who they put in their world so that the mirrors and the feedback they get is accountable. Well, they'll say things like, hey, listen, I want you to hold me accountable uh, uh, for what I do. Work ethic is unequivocal. They always feel in a rush, you know, Elon, Elon Musk's father said about him like, yeah, he's behind on his timelines, you know, he's still behind. And so what you'll see is, is the best of the best are always working at a feverish cadence, like they're always trying to play catch up.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  But again, if you ask them, they're not workaholics. You see it with people in the kitchen, the culinary arts. You see it with musicians, you see with people who love to do landscaping. You know, at the height of the human condition are what are called flow states. And flow states are when we get in the zone. And so, you know, flow states are governed by, you see with the, the, the loss of time, that hours pass by and you're like, oh my God, where did time go? Um, it's the transformation of time. There's an effortlessness to it. Um, hard things sometimes feel easy. And what you realize is, is flow states are the hallmark of, of people who are great at what they do. They get lost in what they do.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  And so if you're listening to this, you should ask yourself, what do I do? Where I lose track of time? Is it reading a book? Is it being in conversation? Is it a dinner party? Is it time with my children? Is it swimming? And whatever that thing is, so long as it's healthy, and so long as you're not saying, "Well, it's, you know, doing heroin or meth," right? If you're doing something healthy, and it's characterized by a feeling of elation, and you lose track of time, and it's effortless, do more of it. That's what you can learn from success. And the one final thing I'll say is, the asterisk next to it, is it's really hard to let all

• 35:04Speaker 00

  those things, you know, humility, curiosity, work ethic, you know, surrounding yourself by great people, taking risks. It's hard to create a world for yourself where those things get fertilized if you're populating yourself with people who judge you and criticize you, and who suppress your psychological freedom, who make you feel self-conscious, and/or who are, in your life, headwinds. You know, I've watched athletes who go home, men and women, and you marry the wrong person,

• 35:48Speaker 00

  and that person is not on board with the vision, or at the very least, they're... They don't have to be fully supportive, but when you marry someone, or if you have someone in you, a boss, who get their satisfaction out of your failure, or who can't feel happy with themselves unless you're failing, all the other things get relegated to insignificance when there's a feature of your life typically in the form of a person, or an institutional headwind, where there's a bias against your success that you don't recognize when you have a blind spot.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  So you really have to change your aperture and go to 30,000 feet and say, "Okay, am I set up for success?" Yeah. Then you ask the people you trust, "Hey, you know, how do I seem to you?" Like, audit your... Have other people audit you. Good? Okay, if that's the case, throw yourself all in, deep immersion in the thing you love to do, lose track of time, and find the hardest problems there are, and set out to solve them. And then, when you come out of the flow state, and you look up, you're like, "Man, that's the body of work I did?" Wow, it didn't feel like that, but the body of work, that's what's going to stand the test of time.

• 37:10Shane Parrish?

  One thing that the best seem to be able to do, and I think we hit on this in that answer, is two things stood out there. They know when to walk away. They know when to fold it. They know when to, you know, just, okay, it's over, move on, next one. They're able to move on. But they also know when to push their advantage. And I'm thinking, Tom Brady, right? He was the ultimate sort of quarterback. He would take the check down, but he also knew when to push it down the field. How do we learn when to, how do we learn to cultivate those skills in ourselves? How do we know when to push? And how do we know when, you know what, this just isn't going to get us the outcome that we want?

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Best question I've been asked by an interviewer in my lifetime. Like, that's an awesome question that nobody ever asks. It's the question for anyone who's trying to be successful, sustainably successful. When do you press? How do you know when to press? Both in golf and the markets, the paradox is there. Sometimes you gotta let it happen, and sometimes you gotta make it happen. When people try to force, force a result when they shouldn't, like, that's when, when you get stopped out. And the opposite's also true. So how do you know when to press it against? Number one, I'll say about Brady, don't forget, a lot of failure early. And so what happens is when you fail early, you start to recognize what a real opportunity looks like. And then, oh, by the way, when

• 38:30Speaker 00

  that opportunity presents itself, there's a lot of fuel to make it happen. You're like, oh, like, you should, you know, it's Mark Wahlberg in acting. It's like, you're letting me into this club? Okay. There ain't no way I'm giving up my advantage. So it becomes this relentless, you know, one of the things about Tiger Woods that's so remarkable is he's the only golfer, and I mean this, in the history of the game, who's ever played better with a lead. So even Jack Nicklaus, who's arguably the best of all time, Jack said, I was better if I was trailing, because what happens is when you're chasing, you know, you play with nothing to lose, you're able to be fearless. So that's a real advantage as being the underdog.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Tiger Woods is the only one who was the favorite every week and would start with a lead and then extend that lead. Blew the world away. And to this day, it blows out because how do you do that? How do you like, that's why greyhounds in dog racing are always chasing a rabbit. The psychological mechanism, even in running, you have somebody who's pacing, right? Because we know the brain works in ways where having something to chase is the way to get the best out of yourself. Well, how did Tiger Woods do that? When he was in the lead, the one being chased, well, he was playing against history. So even when he was leaving the tournament, he was still trailing Jack Nicklaus. So he benchmarked, he would index his thinking to the fact that he hadn't caught Jack Nicklaus. So he was, in his mind, always chasing. So it

• 39:56Speaker 00

  begs the question, when you talk about judgment, is knowing when to, what an advantage looks like, and when and how to press your advantage, and when patience, when the situation calls to do nothing. And here's one way to assess it. Evaluate your why. Because what happens is when people press an advantage incorrectly, it's usually out of impatience. It's usually out of frustration. It's happening right now in the markets. There's not a lot of volatility in the marketplace right now. And you're on the, your mandate as an investor is to return 10%, right? You say that's your number. And you're only up 5%. And there's no way to make money in your strategy. All of a sudden, it's like, well, I've got to, I'm going to press whatever advantage I have. What's

• 40:41Speaker 00

  a low probability advantage? But you're going to force a little advantage, you're going to make a mistake, and then you're going to lose your job. So number one is you have to question, what's underneath the desire? So let's talk about desire for a minute, which we haven't talked about, which we need to talk about. If you look at the human condition. Look at all the major religious traditions. One of the universalities of the human condition is desire. And every school of thought has found a way to try to deal with it. So for example, look at Christian Catholicism. How does Catholicism deal with desire? Well, too much desire leads to, um, you know, you'll wreck your life and everyone else's, right? It can lead to real problems, the desire. So Catholics punish it with guilt. What do the hedonists say? Hedonists say, well, you know, if you want it, it's a good thing. You satiate that desire.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  If you have an itch, scratch it. And we know that that leads to overindulgence, to sloppy life, you know, typically a drug habit. In one way or the other, you know, you have sex, you're gonna have an addiction. You're gonna blow your life up if you're hedonist. Buddhists and Hindus say desire is the key thing that leads to suffering, right? So if I want this pen, the moment that I want the thing that I can't have, I feel a state of suffering. So all human suffering comes from desire. And so, and so the way to happiness is to remove all desire, to get rid of all your worldly possessions and to sit in observation of yourself. And so happiness is to want nothing. So the universality of the human condition is desire.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  But what we know is that that desire is the thing that leads to all the cognitive biases, that, that, that almost all of the mistakes people make in life is a function that they want a particular outcome. They want a particular thing. The good of it is desire, as Anand Rand articulates, right? As, as Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, when he talks about free markets, he says that, that the desire leads to innovation. Innovation leads to, to competition, which eventually leads to the best product in the market, which is what elevates the human condition. And that's why proponents of capitalism and free markets, you can just see it in modern day, like the world moves because, because individuals innovate and evolve,

• 42:53Speaker 00

  whether it's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos has created $800 billion of wealth for other people. You know, you, you see the way free markets work. They're a function of desire. And that's what Freud called sublimation. If you sublimate and channel desire into evolution, it's what creates great works of art, architecture, right? Anand Rand writes about this in Fountainhead.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  So desire channeled properly can lead to some of the highest highs and the best expression of the human condition. The problem is the downside of desire. Left unchecked, leads to the kinds of behaviors that are duplicitous, that desire run amok, we all become a worse version of ourselves. This happened to Tiger Woods. Like, don't forget, the same desire that fueled arguably the greatest body of work in the history of sports, the fuel that burned inside him, you saw it come out in his celebrations. There's a lot of want in there, but that's the same desire that when it got channeled the wrong way, that led to the bad decisions that, you know, led to, blew up his marriage,

• 44:01Speaker 00

  that led to, you know, to him getting these injuries and harming himself. And he wouldn't stop practicing, so he'd get injured. He played the US Open on a broken leg and won! And so you have to go back to the first order variable, which in his case is desire. To answer the question, and if you look at the causal chain, the way the dominoes fall in decision-making, which is a cognitive act, not an emotional one, you have to understand what are the variables that have led to you wanting to push your advantage. And so essentially, in modern-day analytics, you're running probabilities. You know, if you have a trading strategy and the numbers say that you have an advantage,

• 44:45Speaker 00

  you know, the old saying that if you don't know who the sucker at the table is, you're the sucker. And that's true in all games in the achievement domains, where there's a scoreboard and there's competition. And so you have to find a way to map your advantages and know in the moment whether you have an advantage. And if you do, how much risk are you, how much risk are you willing to take and what losses are you willing to tolerate? And then the psychological component under that is, can you handle losses well? And if you can't, if you're the sort of person who's gonna say, you know, if I lose this much money on this trade, it's gonna meaningfully affect what I do in the future, that's your tell. So one of the things we do, even though we try to arb out the human condition from decision making,

• 45:29Speaker 00

  you know, as Antonio Damasio writes in, um, in, in, in, in Searching for Spinoza, you know, he says, like, when you look at people with localized brain damage who have no ability to feel emotions, their decision making is not good. When human beings get localized brain damage where they can't feel emotion, their decision making is not better. It's worse, in fact. So if you look at someone like, you know, I guess, an enlightened individual, they are not without emotion. They have refined their emotional reactions in a way that elevates their senses. So, you know, you wanna push the advantage, you have to evolve to a level where you're some version of a complete human being,

• 46:14Speaker 00

  where you know yourself, right? The Socratic dictum of Nadi Sutra, know yourself and know others. Complicated games require complexity of thought. You know, life at the tail end of the curve does not lend itself to simplistic thinking. You have to have complexity of thought, though the decision is final. You know, the decision, yes or no, is binary. And, and sometimes, you know, you, you engage as what I call caveman golf, like see ball, hit ball. Um, you know, don't overcomplicate it, uh, and, and be decisive in your decisions.

• 46:51Shane Parrish?

  Uh, we always, I'm cognizant of the time here. We always end on the same question. What is success for you?

• 46:56Speaker 00

  For me, uh, back of the napkin, top of mind stuff, Shane. For me personally, and, and listen, I, I always preach middle class values because I think they work in life. Um, whether you're worth, you know, $20 billion or not, like, and, and so I don't vilify wealth. I love abundance and I love success, but like the values, ten, middle class values tend to work in life because they keep you humble and they keep you happy. Um, but for me, I learned about myself, something that I think is really valuable to learn. I had a lot of success pretty early, like in my early 30s. I had PhD from a great university, was a college professor, a bestselling book and, and, and, and a real, a lot of success in the world of sports psychology.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  At two houses and two jet skis and two Vespa's that we'd cruise around town in. And I remember one of my friends said to me, he said, oh, man, he said, you know, you must be so happy. And then it was like, you know, you hear the scratch of the record, zzz, just like, man, I'm not that happy. And I learned about myself that stuff doesn't matter to me, like more things, you know. I was an example of Henry David Thoreau's, you know, you start by owning your possessions and eventually your possessions own you. I learned about myself that building out a big life doesn't work for me, though it works for some, so I don't script that in my clients. You build whatever life you want to build. What I learned for myself, it's what, it's what the actor Mike Myers, Mike Myers, who, you know, who, and they're writing, doing Austin Powers.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  Beautiful thinker, great comedian. In an interview, he talked about what he called no money fun, no money fun. He said, when I was a kid, we would sit out by the airport, my dad and I, and we'd watch the planes land. He said, because we had no money. He said, and we would watch the planes land and we would guess what kind of plane they were. And then we'd go to the lake and we would skip stones and we'd watch cars and guess what color they were. He said, we grew up with not a lot of money, but I was always happy. And here's the line, he said, he said, my dad was good at no money fun. We always had fun and things didn't cost a lot of money. What I learned about myself, Shane, is the things I love to do, I love to hit golf balls. It's therapeutic for me. I could do that at the driving range, doesn't cost any money, five bucks for a bucket of balls. I love books.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Books don't cost me any money. I get them free as an academic, I have free access to libraries. Books don't cost me any money. I love working out, working out and being physically fit, doesn't cost a lot of money. I love the human condition. I love talking to people and learning about them, particularly people I'm fascinated by the tail end of the curb. All four of those things cost very little to no money. So what I learned about myself of the things that I love to do, they tend to be active. There's active engagement is the profile of my happiness. It's not passive, it's not lazily sitting on a beach getting drunk. It tends to be either task oriented, hitting golf balls, working out, reading books.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Or people oriented, which is I'm asking questions about how people do what they do. You know, about their own happiness, about their, their own failure, about the uniqueness of their experiences, what are called crystallizing experiences, the insights they have, their insecurities. And so, uh, the profile of my happiness is, is exactly that. I'm very cognizant, you know, that we get, if we're lucky, call it 80 years in life, you know, for the first dozen of them, you're not really, or your first five of them, you're not really conscious or conscientious. The last bunch of them, there's no physical vigor. And, and objective time turns into subjective time, which means time speeds up.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  And so for me, it's, it's cliche, but it's, it's making sure that I'm present for every moment of it, even and especially the pain. People ask me, what do I do when I'm afraid? Stare at it, like go eyeball to eyeball with the fear. Because if you run away, if you allow life to bully you, you're not present for the moment, you're checked out. And so the type of courage required to be present for every moment of your life, oh, by the way, that's what Tiger Woods does. Oh, by the way, that's what Steve Cohen does. Oh, by the way, that's what Steve Jobs did even on his deathbed. And you look at the ugliness of the human condition, the narrative in politics, the, the way people treat people, well, that's been happening since the beginning of time.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  The human condition has never been Pollyannaish. But if you can find a way to be realistic, but directionally positive, to celebrate the positive, to be optimistic, to continue to be kind to yourself and to be kind to people. You know, in times when you have no reason to be grateful, to say thank you, when you don't have a lot of resources, but you help other people. Like, there's a bit of a formula there that generally leads to a good life. We talk about the qualia of your experience, not the quantifiable, what have you accumulated or the record. It's the, it's the quality of how does your life feel? And so when you ask what happiness to me is, I always have my hand on the pulse of

• 52:08Speaker 00

  the quality of my experience. And I'm spending time with people that I find interesting and they're not always the most successful. Sometimes they're just really interesting. You know, the mechanic that fixed my car is a genius, in my opinion. People go into that garage with their cars every day and nobody knows that they're entering a place with a remarkable human being. Like a lot of times on Friday afternoons, I sit with him with a six pack of beer and he tells me the stories of his life. Growing up in the deep south, um, guy can fix, he can fix plane, he can fix any engine on earth. And nobody knows that they're going to a mechanic every day who could do anything that is interesting. And so for me to spend time with remarkable human beings who teach me at every turn,

• 52:52Speaker 00

  that's, those are the things that if my life is populated with those things, I feel like I'm, I'm being successful.

• 53:11Shane Parrish?

  That's a great answer. I want to thank you so much for one of the most amazing interviews I think I've ever been a part of.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  Hey, man, you set the table to, to invite the best ideas out of people. And I think that's why we all love you so much. So, thank you.

• 53:32Shane 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 Farnam 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.

• 54:08Shane Parrish?

  Until next time.