Best of 2023: Conversations of the Year

The Knowledge Project closes 2023 with a look back at some of the best conversations of the year. Featuring interviews from nine of the most downloaded and acclaimed episodes of 2023, this collection of conversations offers a variety of insights into the power of intention, how to become a better listener, how to give and receive feedback at work, the Four Pillars of Integrity, facing the realities of life, the importance of having deadlines, taking responsibility, building trust in a large organization, and when to double-down on your plans for success. Guests on this episode include: Mindfulness expert Jack Kornfield, executive coach Carloyn Coughlin, organizational expert Aaron Dignan, leadership expert Jim Dethmer, venture capitalist Ravi Gupta, author and Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly, doctor of psychology Julie Gurner, veteran CEO Frank Slootman, and performance psychologist Gio Valiante. -- 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 Sidebar: Accelerate your career. https://www.sidebar.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.

• 0:17Shane 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 is full of timeless wisdom that you can apply to life and work. 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

• 1:00Shane Parrish?

  join at fs.blog/membership. Check out the show notes for a link. The final episode of The Knowledge Project in 2023 is a collection of some of the best insights from the show this year. Not only can these serve as a reminder of some of the episodes and lessons you listened to this year, but they can set you up for an incredible 2024. You'll hear from Jack Kornfield as he discusses the power of intention, Carolyn Coughlin will teach you the strategies for becoming a better listener, Aaron Dignan will discuss the power of feedback and how it can affect your job, and Jim Dethmer will explore the four pillars of integrity. Ravi Gupta will explain how to face the realities

• 1:44Shane Parrish?

  of life. Kevin Kelly will teach you why the best strategy for success is not to be the best, but to be the only, and the importance of having deadlines. Julie Gerner will give you a unique strategy for taking responsibility and focus on the next steps when things go wrong. Frank Slootman will explain what it takes to build trust in a large organization. And finally, Gio Valenti will dive deep into something I've been thinking a lot about since we recorded the conversation a few months ago. And I know a lot of people ask, when do I quit and when do I double down? Thank you for listening and learning with us this past year. Together, we're going to make 2024 even better. Let's start with episode 156, Jack Hornfield.

• 2:28Shane Parrish?

  It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Intention is incredibly powerful for us. And it's said in the Buddhist teachings that intention is also the basis of karma or cause and effect, that the state behind your action matters as well as the action itself. So I'll give an example. Suppose you pull out of your driveway and you drive through the fence of the house next door, crashed through it and, you know, into their living room. Now suppose it happened that that was the neighbor who cut down all the trees you loved

• 3:18Speaker 01

  on the property line, you know, and shot at your dog and did a whole bunch of horrible things and you just were so enraged that one morning they did one more thing and you couldn't take it and you just crashed your car through. That will make a certain karma and the blue lights will come and you'll have to deal with all of the consequences of what you did. Suppose instead your accelerator pedal stuck. So the exact same thing happens. You get in your car and you pull out and then it crashes through the fence into the house. So the outside, no one could see anything different, right? But your intention was entirely different. It was an accident, you know, and the person comes out furious and you say, my accelerator

• 4:02Speaker 01

  pedal stuck and they might still be furious and you have to deal with insurance and things. But there will be entirely different consequences because the intention was different.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  So it becomes really powerful to start to pay attention to our intentions and setting our intentions deliberately. And also, of course, it's important then to notice the impact or the consequences because you could have good intentions and still out of them, there could be a bad impact, so you need to notice that. But one of the beautiful things that mindfulness training invites is the setting of deliberate intention. And it can be inwardly or it can be outwardly, whether it's before an athletic game, as you were talking about, or whether it's a business meeting, or it's, you know, in education,

• 4:56Speaker 01

  or whatever it happens to be. What's our intention? And setting intention starts to steer everything. There's something in, that's quite traditional, the kind of training that I did, in which you set these long-term vows. Sometimes they're called Bodhisattva vows. A Bodhisattva is simply somebody who's committed to the well-being of everyone. The Dalai Lama wakes up in the morning and says this prayer, "May I be food for the hungry and medicine for the sick. May I be a resting place for the weary and a lamp for those in darkness. May I be a boat, a bridge, a raft for those to cross the flood, and may I do so to benefit

• 5:40Speaker 01

  all beings for as long as time and space exist." Some little pesky little intention like that, right? Actually, kind of magnificent. You're invited to quiet your mind and to set your own best intention. If you were, it's like setting the compass of the heart. If you were to set an intention of what really matters to you most, this is called long-term intention, almost like a vow, "This is what matters and this is how I want to live," it becomes a touchstone for you. I mean, it can be as simple as, "I vow to be kind." Or I vow to live with more wakefulness and attentiveness to myself and others, or with more respect. It would be that simple.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  And then when you get to a place of struggle, things are confusing, you take a pause and you say, what's my best intention? What was that? And it shines a light and it gives you a new direction. Or if you're in conflict in a conversation, there you are, talking with your spouse. I'm here with my beloved Trudy, who is my wife and partner and amazing, wonderful woman. But it could happen on occasion that we have a little conflict. And if I take a pause, a breath, like that mindful pause, I can also ask myself, what's my best intention? Or my highest intention?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  And then consciousness changes. And instead of proving how right I was, which I certainly enjoy doing in certain moments, you know, I remember, what's my best intention? Well, my intention fundamentally is an intention to connect, to be kind, that we live with love, respect. And I feel that. What's my best intention? And my whole tone of voice changes. Because I could say, what did you mean? And it, you know, it fuels an argument. Or I could say, what did you mean? I want to understand in that same phrase. But it shifts from blame to interest and care.

• 7:54Shane Parrish?

  Is that what it means to set an intention? This is what matters. And this is the way that I want to live. And then how often should we consciously evoke those intentions when we're not in a moment? Like, should we just wake up and think these? Should we? How do you think about that?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  I don't want to make people even think that there's some kind of cookie cutter spiritual, okay, you should do your yoga and eat tofu and set attention, good intention every hour and stuff. It's not like that. You point to it quite beautifully. In moments of difficulty or conflict, taking a pause and asking, what's my best or highest intention? Shifts your state of consciousness periodically, whether it's the start of the day or a week, or some new venture, or some new adventure. It can be helpful to reflect on, you know, what's your best intention? But it's really organic and it's, in a way, what I want to say is, what works for you?

• 9:00Shane Parrish?

  We're sort of part of this always on go-go-go culture. We're busy, our minds are busy. There's always something we're thinking about that is, is sort of not the present moment, right? The grocery list, the kids seem to be picked up, there's a million projects at work. I have to text this person back, I need to email this person. And we're striving, right? We're striving for either, if we're, if we're conscious, we're striving for things that we want to pursue. And if we're unconscious, I feel like we're striving for things that other people want us to pursue. So we're playing life by somebody else's scorecards.

• 9:41Shane Parrish?

  But this striving individually might be detrimental to us. But it also pushes us forward as a society. So I see sort of like pros and cons to it. What ways does this striving sort of help us and in what ways does it hurt us?

• 9:57Speaker 01

  So let me ask you, again, now we're, now we're back on the basketball court, you know, where you want to win the game, or now we're in the terrain of running a business or teaching a class or something like that. Have you had the experience of being quite engaged? So that you're devoted to something and putting your best energy in it? Without the energy of tension, of grasping and striving as much as being engaged in the present for its own sake? And if you have, what did that feel like?

• 10:35Shane Parrish?

  I mean, it feels great, right? Because it feels like this feels like this conversation, right? One of the reasons that we book three hours is because then there's no time pressure. There's no, you're not thinking about, oh, I only have an hour. I gotta fit all this in. And so it's just, I am here in this moment for this length of time. And it all, it never goes three hours or very rarely. But I find that that frees me to be more focused in the moment where if it's an hour, it actually is detrimental to me being in that moment and being present.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  All right, so here you are in the supermarket. You got your list. And not only is it your list, but there's other people that you're close to that put their shit on the list.

• 11:19Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Right? And you, if you get the right kind of laundry soap and the right kind of ice cream or whatever for the kids or whatever, I don't know who makes your list, but there you are. You have a time constraint because you have to get back. There's something, you know.

• 11:35Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  How are you gonna do it? You could do it like careening through the aisles like a good New Yorker, grabbing things pretty quickly, trying to get through, you know? And at the same time, think about all the other stuff that you have to get done when you get home and all of that. That's one way you could do it.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 11:59Speaker 02

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• 12:27Speaker 03

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• 12:49Speaker 01

  The other you could actually enjoy, I personally like shopping. It's a, it's a great thing in my marriage because my wife does it. So I'm, I'm glad to do it. Grocery shopping or other kind.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  But you could do it and have fun.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  You could do it, and I bet you have at certain points and say, you know, now I'm shopping. Let me enjoy this. And it doesn't mean you're going to be much slower. You're not going to be the speed freak, you know, but yeah, let, let me, let me feel my steps and enjoy and be present and not try to work everything else out in my life. I'll, I'll just, in one, there's one Zen saying that says, you know, when you sit, just sit. And when you eat, just eat, you know, to just be where you are. And you can practice this and you start to pay attention to what it's like when you do it in a gracious way. And it doesn't mean you can't set a goal. And it doesn't mean you can't give it your very best and that there are certain moments

• 13:48Speaker 01

  you need to really throw yourself into something. But even that, you can do it with a good spirit and with fun rather than being afraid of how it's going to turn out. So this Zen teacher, Sung San Sanse Nima Kuri and Roshi that, or Zen master that I studied with. And so he was sitting in his Zen center in Providence one morning, eating his breakfast and reading the morning paper. And one of the students, as, as, as we are up at these students that we, said, hey, wait a second. Didn't you say when you sit, just sit and when you eat, just eat? What is this thing about eating and reading the paper? And he looked up and he said, when you eat and read, just eat and read.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  But the idea of it is still an invitation to bring this quality of mindful presence to actually be where you are more fully. Because 90% of your thoughts are repeats. Maybe more than that, when you sit in meditation and you kind of notice what's going on in your mind. And it's a little bit like being stuck in motel six at night with the shopping channel on or whatever, or some other channel. It could be, you know, whatever your favorite channel is, but it, it, they're, they're not new.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  And it's the brain and the mind reciting certain things. And you can say, thank you, I appreciate it. That's what minds do. And then you can tune into a deeper quality of being present. There you are in the supermarket. Say, all right, let me be here. And I'm going to try and solve the problems of my life right now. I'll take my time to do it. And then, of course, once in a while, as you don't pay attention to your thinking, some good new intuition comes. I don't want to put it down. Thought is a great servant. It's just not a good master.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  You don't want to let it run your life. You want the quality of presence and compassion to run your life and thoughts to serve that.

• 15:57Shane Parrish?

  From episode 157, Carolyn Coughlin.

• 16:04Shane Parrish?

  Listening is something a few people have told me that you're extraordinarily good at. I suspect that's because you listen below the surface and to the meaning and not just the words. How would you teach your kids to become better listeners? How do you teach adults to become better listeners?

• 16:21Speaker 04

  I've never had anybody ask me exactly that question before, Shane. I guess the first thing I would say is that listening tends to be contagious. So how each of us listens does tend to wear off on other people. So I've noticed, again with my children, that when I listen, what we call, I often call, listening to win, which is to just make them wrong. Or like, when I say, oh, that's not true. You, you look great. Or, don't worry about that. You, you know, you'll be fine. It might feel good to me in the moment, but it's not kind of... They don't feel heard.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  I find that when people feel really, really, truly seen and heard, it's one of the most extraordinary experiences that a person can have. And so just being around that and having the experience of being on the receiving end, that sort of deep listening where you feel truly seen and fully seen, is itself a condition, right? For, for learning to listen well. On the other end of the spectrum, there are very particular techniques that help people listen well. For me, the most important one has been really the training and understanding of adult development theory,

• 17:46Speaker 04

  particularly the one that my colleagues and I are most, have most depth in, which is the, the subject-object theory, that it was developed by Bob Keegan and others. And in the subject-object theory, you're, what you're listening for, the stage of development is defined by what is subject and what is object. And when I, when I say subject, what I mean is like what you're fused with. It's like the water you're swimming in, the lens through which you see things, but you don't actually even know you have a lens. And what is object is what can be held out and examined and talked about.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  Like a value is object if you can see how it's shaping what you do and don't do. A value is subject if it's invisibly shaping what you do and don't do, for example. So in the subject, this growth edge coach training that several of my colleagues and I run, what we're teaching coaches to do is to listen for what is subject and what is object. In listening in that way, you have to be listening below the surface of the story. And every time you hear a word or a phrase, wondering, hmm, I wonder what that person means by that. And so it's amping up curiosity. It's really, really foregrounding the fact

• 19:11Speaker 04

  that we, each of us never really knows what another person means. And so we can only be curious to find out.

• 19:19Shane Parrish?

  I like the word curiosity. When I think of listening, I think of seeing the world through the other person's eyes. I don't have to agree with it. I want to see what they see and I want to understand what they understand.

• 19:33Shane Parrish?

  One thing you said there that I want to come back to, in part because I have a child that does this, is listening to when. How, as a parent, do I coach, intervene, get this out of their system?

• 19:47Speaker 04

  How old is your child?

• 19:49Shane Parrish?

  Thirteen.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I ask that because it really does make a difference at their developmental stage, how you might go about this. And I'm struck by your phrase, I think you said, how do we coach this out of them?

• 20:07Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, maybe that's the wrong phrase, but it drives me crazy. And he's super smart, which is like, it amplifies it even more because often he's right.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  So what is the hardest thing for you about that?

• 20:19Shane Parrish?

  Just the social nature of it, right? And how alienating it can be to always be the person who is listening to when, right? So from his perspective, it's, I listen to what you said, I'm literal, right? And so it's incorrect. And I'm going to do you, he doesn't do it maliciously. He's like, I'm going to do you a favor and point out why you're incorrect. And as a parent, I don't know what to do with this because, on one hand, on a literal sense, he's right. On a social sense, he's wrong. And on a, is this going to get you what you want in life perspective, it's learning when to

• 21:03Shane Parrish?

  use that and when to not use that. And I'm struggling with him in terms of how I go about this.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  So you're worried that he will alienate people? Or is he alienating you?

• 21:19Shane Parrish?

  Oh, he's not alienating me. I think I'm worried that it makes it harder for him to fit in or be accepted by his people.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I can hear that, really, that that sort of deep desire for him to not have, yeah, for life not to be harder for him because. Because he is like.

• 21:39Shane Parrish?

  He's playing on hard mode.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, playing on hard.

• 21:42Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, he's playing on hard mode and he's already exceptionally bright, which in another, another way puts it on hard mode again, right? Uh, in certain ways, so.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I hear so deeply this, I mean, geez, um, the, the wanting for, to wanting to help somebody change something that is making, in your view, making their life unnecessarily hard. And, and then worrying that, maybe tell me if this is right, but worrying that, that if you don't help them change this, it might just become a more and more and more ingrained habit that continues to make their life hard.

• 22:21Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, well, I think that as, as he gets older, I mean, my role changes too, right? And it changes to, um, you're getting feedback. Are you seeing the feedback that you're getting? Are you, instead of a direct intervention, like, don't do this, do this. Uh, you know, it changes to when you did this, did it help you get what you wanted in that moment? Right? Or is doing this going to get you what you want? And that coaching after the fact is usually very helpful for him because he's like, oh, I didn't mean it that way, or I shouldn't have done that, or I wasn't thinking when I said something. And so it prompts at least a little bit of reflection around it, which we all have as adults too, right?

• 23:06Shane Parrish?

  Like, we all say stupid things on occasion or make a comment that we didn't intend to make, and it has an impact on another person. And then we reflect on it and we, we sort of, that reflection codifies the learning a little bit. So it takes that experience and it translates that experience into a little bit of learning. And with enough reflection and enough experience and enough iteration, enough feedback, we sort of self-correct as, as adults most of the time.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  And I think you may have a part of your answer already. So it sounds like what you're doing is you're creating the conditions for him to reflect on what the impact of the way he's listening or not listening is, is having.

• 23:51Shane Parrish?

  Well, trying to, when, when you said the phrase, listening to win, and you were talking with your kids about not listening to win, I was like, well, is there a way that I can put a term around it or a label around it? When I can just say, you're listening to win. And in that moment, that means this whole deeper conversation to him, which is like an instant prompt to correct or not correct to nudge behavior towards a better that he's choosing, right? Because I don't want to make his behavior choices for him. But can I say something like that? And when you were saying it, that's what I thought you were doing. So this is where the question, I didn't, I didn't intend for this to be like a longer question.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So your question is, is language, giving language to something? Can that be a help in shifting the pattern?

• 24:41Shane Parrish?

  Well, it's sort of a broader question. If we take it out of the context of me and my son, it's sort of, can we learn to listen to ourselves better? Or does it take an outside person to sort of intervene and point out our blind spots? And with my son, I'm trying to intervene or sort of point out a blind spot. You're blind to this, it's happening. I'm pointing out that it's happening. It sounded like that's what you were doing with your kids. Or maybe I'm misinterpreting when you said listening to win, which I love that phrase, by the way.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 25:11Shane Parrish?

  It's so accurate.

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I guess my point is there are many things and that you can do to help somebody to notice what they're doing in this case, in terms of how they're listening. One is reflecting back to them what you're seeing and the impact of that. One is the invitation to invite them to reflect on it. The connection between what they're doing and what they want. Another is giving it language. I love hearing that listening to win is such a powerful phrase. It is because you can just say that. It's like having some sort of a reminder every time you do something,

• 25:53Speaker 04

  like a light goes off, something flashes, and it helps to create the connection between this thing that you're, a really instant connection, a reminder of what you're doing. So the idea of listening to win absolutely can be a super helpful in shifting a pattern because it helps you to notice the pattern instantly each time it's coming up. The other thing I noticed just about feedback, the importance of feedback, right? We often cannot see what we're doing. And this is why we need company and we need company with whom we have trust who will tell us. Things that we can't see in ourselves. This is one of the core conditions for being able to shift and change.

• 26:40Shane Parrish?

  From episode 158, Aaron Dignan.

• 26:45Speaker 05

  I mean, feedback is, feedback essentially is tension. It's dynamism in the system. And you can quite literally make the argument that life, being alive, is about needing feedback. Like, everything you touch, as you walk, as you listen, as you feel the air on your skin, as you communicate with others, as you run, there are millions of points of feedback entering and leaving your brain. And that is, that is essential. If you take away your senses, I've taken away your feedback. And so you can't really operate in the world. And the same thing is true of a business. And he used to use a bike as a metaphor. So he'd say, you know, if I put you on a bike and I say, lock the handlebars and go, how far can you go with the handlebars locked?

• 27:28Speaker 05

  And the answer is like, not very far at all. If you ever try this, you fall over within like 10 or 15 feet. But instead, if you can have the feedback from the road and the resistance and the gravity, and then slightly turn, you know, left and right as you go, that's what you're actually doing when you go straight. You're kind of in a dance with the information that you have. And as you move from point A to point B, you're going to do some steering. And so I think for organizations and for people in teams and for people in relationships, that's what we're trying to do at our best, is steer dynamically based on the feedback we're getting, based on what we value. So based, whatever your principles, whatever your values are, whatever you care about, whatever winning means to you, you're going to steer in the direction of that based on the input that you get.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  But if you live in a system that's far removed from feedback, then it's problematic. Or even worse, if the feedback you're getting is actually disconnected from reality. Because you were talking about that, that part of being disconnected from reality. And it can happen a different way, where the only feedback I get is from a boss. The boss is telling me what they think is important. That is not what the customer cares about. It's not what the market cares about. And so I'm actually serving the wrong master, so to speak, and end up, end up getting stuck in a feedback loop that's inaccurate and inauthentic.

• 28:44Shane Parrish?

  That's so fascinating. So in response, I mean, it's. It's almost an argument for private businesses over public ones where you can take a longer term time horizon. It's very hard in a public company to do that.

• 28:56Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 28:57Shane Parrish?

  And the examples that all seem to come to mind all have a large inside shareholder or founder still in charge of the organization.

• 29:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, they really do. It's a common pattern across. I mean, we looked at 68 for the original book Brave New Work and yeah, it's a strong pattern.

• 29:13Shane Parrish?

  So with that said, what are the ways that organizations sabotage themselves from the inside?

• 29:20Speaker 05

  Essentially, what tends to happen is that you have a few things that go on. The first thing is that we tend to do what Jason Fried calls scarring on the first cut. So when something doesn't work or goes wrong, or there's an issue, or somebody steals a laptop, the organization freaks out and it immediately reacts with a policy or a procedure or a, you know, new security protocol or something.

• 29:42Shane Parrish?

  Just fire the person.

• 29:44Speaker 05

  Exactly. Right? Like just let it go and then move on. They don't wait for patterns, right? We don't wait for patterns generally. We just overreact and try to systematize everything. So that tends to sabotage us quite a bit. The other thing that we do is that we really get stuck focusing on metrics that become incentives, that become ways to drive mismanagement. And so there are many different names for this law, but when a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to become a good metric. And the idea is that we're optimizing for something that is a proxy for reality instead of reality itself. And again, we're putting our judgment down and just focusing on like click through rate. Like I'm just, I just

• 30:27Speaker 05

  have to hit this click through rate and I'll do whatever it takes to get it. And so that sort of over optimization on proxies or abstract goals rather than absolute principle driven goals is really problematic. And then I guess the last one is that we, and I talk about this a ton, but we confuse the context that we're operating in. So I talk a lot in my work about the difference between complicated and complex. And you've had some people on your show talk about complexity before as well. But the complicated context is like the engine of a car or a watch. It is predictable. There's cause and effect inside it. The parts fit in a way that if you're an expert, you kind of know how to take it apart and put it back together again.

• 31:09Speaker 05

  And so if there's a problem, it can be solved and it can be delivered and it can be, you know, working again. No problem. There's very high confidence in, in solutioning in those areas. But in a complex system, which would be like weather or traffic or gardens or six year olds. They are dispositional, so they have an attitude, a way they're trending, but you can't fundamentally predict them. You can't be sure what'll happen if you try something. And if you bring that complicated approach, the checklist, the Gantt chart, the quarterly goals, the objectives, the management to that context, you tend to really struggle and fail. And what we see is that, is that organizations tend to just over index on everything must be complicated. And so we're going to treat everything that way.

• 31:53Speaker 05

  And I routinely get brought into boardrooms with, with executives and teams that are like, look, we changed our company values and behaviors last year. We put them on coffee mugs and posters all over the world, all over the office, and nobody's behaving differently. Why? It's like, well, because you're yelling at the weather, right? You're yelling at the garden. That's not how these sorts of systems work. If you have a manufacturing problem where you don't have a tolerance, get that checklist out. If you have a broken engine, take it into the dealership. But if you're trying to raise a human being or build a successful team or create a culture of trust, that, that playbook doesn't work. And so we sabotage ourselves by constantly bringing it to the table and being like,

• 32:34Speaker 05

  the culture change initiative will be done in June of 2024 and we will achieve these five metrics along the way. And that's our, you know, those are our pillars. That's just all complicated talk brought to a complex party.

• 32:46Shane Parrish?

  I have a heuristic and you can, you can correct this because you've worked with more companies than I have. But the heuristic is the more a company espouses their values, the less they actually value.

• 32:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, that is funny because it's sort of like, yeah, when you're when you protest too much, right? That would be the Shakespeare of it, right? Thou doth protest too much. When you when you're speaking constantly about these are our values and they're so important, integrity, integrity, integrity, that that's a clue that something is going on that's not healthy, when in fact, good change and good patterns and culture are quite fluid. And so it should be moving effortlessly and behaviorally through the culture, through modeling and through storytelling, not through, you know, the poster with the five pillars.

• 33:31Shane Parrish?

  It also works for people, right? On the outside, where the people who expouse happiness the most on social media are probably internally the most unhappy.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Anyone who says, let me be honest with you, right? Just take a beat.

• 33:44Shane Parrish?

  Yes. So one of the things you said there was sort of like, we put procedures in place to lower variation to reduce mistakes because we're trying to avoid mistakes at some level. One thing I noticed is that procedures eventually circumvent judgment. And so what happens is if you follow the procedure, you never get in trouble, even if what you're doing is absolutely the wrong outcome. And you should know it's going to lead to the wrong outcome. You can just throw your hands up and be like, well, I followed the procedure. So therefore, I'm absolved of all accountability for exercising judgment.

• 34:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, that is 100% what happens. And in fact, I believe there's a German word for that, that that you are essentially saying it's I'm compliant. So it's the bureaucracy's fault. It's the system's fault. And that's because you've given away your right to think or your right to be accountable, your right to be responsible in the ecosystem. And it's a it's a lovely trade for most people because they're like, here, I just have to be compliant. And then when things don't work, it's not my fault. And it's, you know, we have the term CYA, cover your ass in business for a reason. People do a lot of things to CYA and and it doesn't tend to lead to good outcomes. So we have a lot of models that we use to

• 35:00Speaker 05

  explain this to people and to try to get them thinking about different ways of accomplishing the same goal. But yeah, it's as soon as you get into process and compliance theater, everything goes downhill pretty quickly.

• 35:17Shane Parrish?

  From episode 161, Jim Dethmer.

• 35:25Speaker 06

  The four pillars of integrity I got from Katie Hendricks, Dr. Katie Hendricks. It's been a cornerstone of my life for 30 years or so. So let's begin by just differentiating the way I want to speak about integrity from the way it normally gets talked about. You know, when integrity shows up as a value inside of a company, for example, and then you ask people, what does the value mean? The normal thing that people say is do the right thing, which is beautiful. I get that. Great. Integrity then tends to have more of a, like a moral or an ethical kind of orientation.

• 36:08Speaker 06

  And the way I play with integrity is none of that. But again, let's just do a little etymology here. So integrity from the root, same root as integer. So think of whole number. Think of wholeness. So that's where I like to go. Think of wholeness. So to me, integrity is energetic wholeness. Now, what that translates to very quickly for me is full aliveness. So when I am in integrity, I am energetically whole. I am fully alive. We illustrate it sometimes with, it doesn't work so much anymore because I think they fixed this problem.

• 36:53Speaker 06

  But when I was a kid and you put holiday lights on a Christmas tree, kind of the deal was that if, if one of the lights went out, the whole strand went out, you know, first it might blink a little bit and then it all went out. And if you think about the circuitry of those Christmas lights being a circuit of wholeness, and then if one little light goes out, then they start to dim and dim and dim until they all go out. So what I work with in my own life for many, many years is, am I fully alive? I also love the question, what am I willing to risk for full aliveness? We'll come back to that because that's a fun question.

• 37:35Speaker 06

  And then when I am not feeling fully alive, alive in my head, alive in my heart, alive in my gut, alive in my balls, if I can say it, alive in my spirit. If I'm not feeling alive, then I want to go check these four pillars because what reliably has been true for me is they are like the light on the strand. And if they get loose, my aliveness tends to diminish. It doesn't go out all of a sudden, but it diminishes. So what Katie Hendricks articulated as the four pillars of integrity. The first pillar is radical responsibility.

• 38:19Speaker 06

  It's really the decision to move out of blaming and criticizing, out of being at the effect of the world, and move into claiming responsibility or agency. A sure way for me to blunt my aliveness, my day-to-day experience of my vitality, is to live in victimhood, blame the weather, blame the traffic. What I notice is if I stop blaming and I choose to move the locus of control back over here, and I choose to have agency to be responsible for my experience,

• 39:03Speaker 06

  not the external world, but to be responsible for my experience, there's a surge of energy that comes back in the body. So that's the first pillar, radical responsibility. The second pillar is, am I willing to feel my feelings? I was a non-feeler much of my life. Now, I came into the world, like I think everybody does, as a full feeler. So, as an infant, I was a full feeler. I had access to my anger, to my rage, to my fear, to my sadness, to my joy, to my sexual energy. And then, like most people, I got a little bit socialized out of that. But then, I had some trauma in my life, in my family of origin, that came meaningfully to I had on my 17th birthday.

• 39:48Speaker 06

  This is really relevant to me and feelings. On my 17th birthday, I woke up about 5:00 in the morning to the experience of my dad having a massive heart attack. He happened to be sleeping in the single bed next to me. We'd gone to bed the night before, watching a Chicago White Sox game. And I woke up with him having a fatal heart attack. And I was a 17-year-old, young man, kid, and I was all of a sudden introduced to the death process, which I'd never been introduced to before. And that was traumatic in and of itself. But then, we followed the ambulance to the hospital, and we walked into the hospital, into the emergency room, and my dad had been wheeled into one of the bays there. And then, the nurse walked out.

• 40:33Speaker 06

  The nurse walked out and handed me his watch and his ring, handed it to me, not to my mom, who was there, and said, "He's gone. He died." I walked away from my mom, and I walked into a bathroom. And again, this was early in the morning. The hospital wasn't crowded, and I held my dad's ring and his watch in my hands, and I remember just melting down the wall, disintegrating into grief and heartbreak and loss and complete unknowing. And then, I, I love the phrase, "I pulled myself together." I stood up. I walked out to my mother.

• 41:16Speaker 06

  My mom at that point was a functional but a meaningful alcoholic and didn't have a lot. She hadn't matured to develop a lot of adult coping skills. So I was in a role of caretaker and helping her. I picked her up. I held her. I helped her. Went home. I called my older brother, told him that my dad had died, called my sister. Neither of them were in the home. And it's like I made a contract with myself in that moment, Shane, which is it hurts too bad to feel these feelings. And I consciously, unconsciously, some dance there locked them away until my late twenties at least, probably early thirties.

• 41:56Speaker 02

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• 42:00Speaker 02

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• 42:27Speaker 03

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• 42:50Speaker 06

  Here's what I didn't know is the amount of energy it takes to repress and suppress emotion. I tell people now, it's like your emotions are like a beach ball, you know? And you take them and you try to hold them under the water. And the more inflated the ball is, the harder it is to hold under the water. And if, you know, one beach ball is sadness and one beach ball is anger and one beach ball is fear. And after a while, you're holding these things under the water, you get exhausted.

• 43:22Speaker 06

  And I got exhausted. I was actually, I think mildly depressed. And a reason was that I was depressing my feelings. So now, this second pillar of integrity is, I just ask myself every day as part of my morning rituals, is there a feeling here that wants to be felt? And I've learned that these feelings can be felt very simply and efficiently and beautifully. And the thing that I was terrified of was being overwhelmed by the feelings doesn't occur at all. They become a natural enlivening part of life. They actually allow life to appear in technicolor and not black and white. They allow life force to come back into my body. So that's the second pillar. The third pillar is candor.

• 44:07Speaker 06

  So if I want to be out of integrity, if I want to dampen my aliveness, all I have to do is start accumulating withholds.

• 44:19Speaker 06

  Things that I'm not saying. Thoughts that I'm having, wants that I have, judgments and opinions that I have, beliefs that I have. All I have to do is start holding back, being authentic, being revealed. I will immediately feel less alive. When people reveal, when they become more authentic, they immediately feel more alive. Now, I just want to put a little asterisk by this. They also usually immediately experience chaos. Because I and we have been withholding for good reason.

• 45:02Speaker 06

  I put air quotes around that because it made sense to withhold. So I'm not questioning whether there's a reason to withhold. What I'm questioning is its effect on integrity and its effect on aliveness. And when we talk about integrity in relationships, and does the relationship have integrity? Whether it's a personal relationship or a public relationship, a professional relationship. One of the questions we want to explore is how revealed are we? We say, we use this little formula, when you withhold, then you withdraw, and then you project, which means you disconnect from relationship. So when we look at high performing teams, one of the things we see is they don't have many withholds.

• 45:44Speaker 06

  Everything is transparent to the to the decision process. Okay. And then the fourth pillar of integrity is, am I impeccable with my agreements? So an agreement is just anything I've said I would do or anything I've said I wouldn't do. Real simple. It's just who's going to do what by when? And I find that one of the ways people bleed off life energy is they don't make clear agreements. When they make clear agreements, they break their agreements, which creates a life force diminishment. It also creates drama in relationships. They they rationalize, justify and explain why they didn't keep their agreements rather than just taking responsibility for it. And they don't get back into integrity.

• 46:28Speaker 06

  I just find it so beautifully simple and alivening to go, we agreed we'd meet at the top of the hour. Let's just meet at the top of the hour. There's no, yeah, but you're not wondering, you're not having to email or text me. So those are the four pillars of integrity. Take responsibility, feel your feelings, speak candidly, authentically, reveal and be impeccable with your agreements. Now, in my experience, when I live like that, I feel incredibly alive. Now, we could also talk about, you know, do you eat well? Do you get a good night's sleep? You know, are you exercising? All of that, of course, would be part of feeling fully alive. But it seems everybody knows that. We might not be doing it, but we know it.

• 47:10Speaker 06

  But not everybody is playing the game of let's be fully alive and play with integrity.

• 47:20Shane Parrish?

  From episode 164, Ravi Gupta.

• 47:26Speaker 07

  So I have a couple of things that I say a lot at home. I say a lot at work and I say a lot, you know, in any setting where someone will listen to me. But two things, one, reality is undefeated, right? Reality is undefeated. And the second is embrace reality. The sooner you figure out what reality is and you embrace it, then you can do something about it. Right? And I have a friend who's a founder and he was he was down like six months ago. And he asked, he said, can we have dinner together? I'm not feeling great. And we went and we had dinner and, um, you know, it's not like the dinner ended and all of a sudden he was feeling great. But then three weeks later, he sounded like a different person. So I asked him, I said, what happened? Why you sound so much better? What happened?

• 48:10Speaker 07

  And he said, you know, instead of just thinking about the problem in the last few weeks, we've just started working on it. He's like, and we've only made like 1% progress. But he's like, it's so much better now that we're just working on it. Now we're just working on a problem. Whereas before, we were just thinking about it. And I think that that comes from the embracing of, okay, this is where we are. This is what we got to go do about it. And I, I think your point of effectively trying to avoid reality and kind of kick the can down the road and have somebody else have to deal with it, that's a real disservice to someone you care about or someone you love. It's the same point, reason that feedback is valuable. It's the, you know, I, I think it's the reason that sports teams

• 48:50Speaker 07

  are a good analogy when they're at the, at a very high level. Because the feedback happens every minute. If you're not good enough to be on the floor, if you're not good enough to be on the field, the ball goes by you. Your team might give up a goal. You know, it is quite obvious and the feedback mechanisms are quick. And so I think that one of the things that I think about is sort of the speed of reality. How quickly does reality hit you? And what is the impact of reality? And so there's that saying that every morning in Africa, I saw this on Twitter recently, but you know, every morning in Africa, Gazelle wakes up and knows that if he doesn't outrun the fastest lion, he's

• 49:34Speaker 07

  gonna die. Okay, cool. So he wakes up running. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up and knows if he doesn't outrun the slowest gazelle, he's gonna starve. So he wakes up running. Well, for those folks, for the gazelle and the lion in that case, reality hits, you know, very fast, every minute of every day. And the cost of not facing reality is death. Obviously, that's not quite the same for any of us sitting in our offices or whatever. But I do think, understanding that reality does hit you every moment and that not embracing it does have a cost, I think that's really important and valuable.

• 50:10Shane Parrish?

  Well, let's dive into that a little more because you work with founders.

• 50:16Shane Parrish?

  Who live and operate in a reality-based world. They can't create their own reality. They have to deal with reality. They're in the truth business, if you will. How do you help them see reality instead of misinformation or erroneous information or getting caught up in their own beliefs or their own ideas that may or may not be true?

• 50:40Speaker 07

  I think the first thing is a lot of founders, they're different. Some of them are amazing at that to begin with, right? That's their wiring. That's the way they are. And so frankly, with those folks, a lot of it is just making sure that you're helping get the right signals to them because by nature, they are such where, you know, they do that. There are some who I think, I'm sure you've heard about the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, right? I think that's actually been pretty negative overall to the like startup ecosystem because I think that people have heard that as Steve Jobs didn't embrace reality and Steve Jobs. I actually think that his was quite different. That was a representation of ambition. That was a representation of we need to be great.

• 51:25Speaker 07

  And I think that that was a representation of I'm not going to be constrained by what someone tells me can or can't happen. He still was embracing reality as to whether or not people love the product, right? He still was embracing reality as to whether or not it was selling and things like that. And so I think that, I think one aspect is sort of reminding people that the Steve Jobs example, which is incredible in so many ways, you kind of have to dig underneath that. The reality distortion field wasn't that he wasn't listening to market signals, right? It was that he was ambitious for his team of we can do better. We can do more.

• 51:58Shane Parrish?

  When I think of Jobs, what I think about when that happens, this reality distortion field, which I think we've mislabeled in a way.

• 52:07Shane Parrish?

  I think that his standard was just so much higher.

• 52:10Speaker 07

  The better example to me of Jobs is, have you ever heard the anecdote about him with the, with, when he looked at a cabinet?

• 52:18Shane Parrish?

  No.

• 52:19Speaker 07

  It's an amazing anecdote, okay? So there was this beautiful cabinet that he saw, okay? And he loved it and he thought it was gorgeous. And then he looked around the back of it. And in the back of it was plywood and it was ugly. And he was so offended by this notion that the front of it was beautiful and the back of it was ugly because someone's like, no one's ever gonna see the back. And he's like, no, I see the back. The back should be beautiful too. If you wanna try to make something beautiful, it should be beautiful from every angle, right? If the purpose of this is it's supposed to represent craftsmanship and beauty, don't, don't go halfway and make the back ugly. To me, the things that are interesting are like, if you tear apart the iPhone,

• 53:02Speaker 07

  even the switch, even the board underneath is, you know, clean and gorgeous and thoughtful. And I think that even the words on the back of the iPhone where it says, you know, designed in California, assembled in China, like, it doesn't say made in China. And so every choice that they made, I think represents, those are cool stories about Jobs and the standard that he had and the sort of willingness to be disliked in the name of going to get excellence. There's this story about Alexa with Bezos that's similar, where they came back and said, "Look, the latency is going to be this." And I don't know what the unit was, but Jobs or Bezos effectively said, "Well, I want it to be, you know, one-fifth of that." And they said, "That's impossible, we can't do that."

• 53:47Speaker 07

  He said, "Well, then we're not gonna ship it." But that was the magic and then they ultimately ended up doing it. So I think that consistent raising of the standard, that's the lesson from these folks. And so I think, going back to your point on reality of talking to founders, I think it's helping them see the right signals. Because sometimes, especially in the environment, and look, you know, investors, you know, all of us, we sent many of the wrong signals for a couple of years where people were rewarded. And so they could look at something of like, "What are you talking about? My business keeps on getting valued higher and higher and higher, you know? I'm doing the right stuff." But I think the duration of their perspective was not necessarily correct in that ultimately, you know, your business is going to be measured on the financial performance of it.

• 54:32Speaker 07

  And the financial performance is a representation of how much customer love there is and how much, what you've actually created. But I think the point Shane, for me, on getting people to embrace reality is, okay, cool, that signal that you're looking at is supportive of the point that we're doing great. What about all these other signals? And I think that, um, you know, you have to earn the trust of somebody, like you said, to be able to share that perspective. But I think that idea is one that, um, I, I think is really important to make sure that people have.

• 55:05Speaker 08

  From episode 166, Kevin Kelly.

• 55:09Speaker 08

  There's a lot of concern about artists and even writers about training in AI to produce work, to generate work, to creative work. And they're, the concern is, is well, you know, my material that I've worked really hard for has been used to train this AI. And people can use it to imitate me. And sometimes those imitations are quite amazing. Really what you want to be able to do is to have a style, so to speak, to have something that's unpredictable, that's im- im- im- imitable, that you, that you can't be imitated. And this again, goes back to my other piece of advice about don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only.

• 55:55Speaker 08

  So if you are in this category that it's hard to imitate you, that's a, that's a really good place to be in the human world and also a really good place to be in the AI world because AIs will have difficulty in imitating you.

• 56:09Shane Parrish?

  I think I'm in trouble. My kids went into chat GG or GPT the other day and they, they drafted this email and watched, they should get like more video game time, but they did it in the style of Shane Parrish.

• 56:21Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 56:22Shane Parrish?

  So they basically like, it was an email from myself to me. And I was like, this sounds awfully familiar. I was like, what was your, what was your query here? And they were like, Uh, draft an email to dad about, uh, in the style of Shane Parrish. I was like, oh my God, this is in tr- I'm in trouble.

• 56:39Speaker 08

  Yes, yes. So, so yeah, so you, you, you, if you were, if that was hard to do, then you have an advantage because your, your job is not going to be taken by an AI. And so the idea is, is to not be so predictable in the sense, particularly again, if you have, if your views on the environment can be deduced from your views on religion or something, that's going to be, that means that you're kind of not really that much of an independent thinker.

• 57:14Shane Parrish?

  And that's going to become more valuable because AI, at least at first, is going to give away, uh, standard thinking for free. So it'll raise the bar for some people, but it'll be so conventional for independent and original thinkers.

• 57:27Speaker 08

  Right, exactly. Right now, the best way to think of these AIs, the, the chat, training, the L, the L L M's is that they're, um, they're the epitome of, um, wisdom of the crowd. Okay. Their wisdom of the crowd thinking this, that's what it is. It's the collective, all the average people in the world and all their average foibles and all the average genius. And it's going to get a very kind of average thing that is often very correct, but oftentimes not because it's the average. And so, um, it's, it's always the, it's the wisdom of the crowd AI, um, which is really good if that's where you want to be. I've been trying to figure out the practical use of these things and how people are actually

• 58:10Speaker 08

  using them. I have a friend who runs a very, very popular blog site and he uses them to help them write headlines, to write a punchline at the end. And he said, it's often very generic and he has to kind of push them.

• 58:29Speaker 08

  To be snarky, he'll say, no, no, no, make it more snarky or pretend you're a snarky editor or pretend that you're a conspiracy. You'll have to kind of push them to not be that standard average. Deliberately say, no, you can be a little bit on a little fringier. You've got to be a little bit angrier. You've got to be something. And then the role play. If you don't do that, you won't get the kind of, as you said, the standard average.

• 58:54Shane Parrish?

  I want to come back to AI a little later because I think we'll have a broader conversation on it. I want to go to the next piece of advice that sort of stood out as I was reading these, which is always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect. So you have to make it different. Different is better.

• 59:14Speaker 08

  It is, right? Different is better. So deadlines, this again, took me a long time to kind of figure out that I needed deadlines and deadlines were the difference between, you know, a dream and a something that you complete. And what happens with deadlines for me anyways, you've got to ship. You're you're you have to abandon the project and it's not perfect. Oh, my gosh, it's not perfect. But because it's not perfect, you kind of have to be ingenious about making it a little different. And that and I find that deadlines force me to make decisions that you you don't have enough time, you never have enough time.

• 59:58Speaker 08

  And so you you you think of something to, I wouldn't say it's a shortcut, you think of a way to finish it. And that little, those little decisions are what make it a little different. One of the shocks to me about working at Wired on a monthly magazine was every single issue after years and years and years was a miracle that it got done on time. It was like you would think it would come down to some form of laying, you just, you'd be done on Friday afternoon. But no, it was, it was this last second getting it out the door every single time. And part of that was because. We kind of kept upping the the goal, the quality.

• 1:00:43Speaker 08

  You know, we're we're trying to make it better than last time. And so you come down to the same thing where you are being driven by the deadline to try to excel, but not making it perfect by by by by doing something a little differently than you did before.

• 1:01:00Shane Parrish?

  Because without a deadline, you can convince yourself that you can always make it a little bit better, but then you never ship.

• 1:01:06Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:01:07Shane Parrish?

  How do you find that balance between in a world of leverage, right? Like where an internet article can go viral and reach 100 million people or it can reach 10 people. How do you find that point at which I've done enough? I'm comfortable with this versus the trade off of do I raise the bar? Do I make this better? What is the advantage to doing that?

• 1:01:31Speaker 08

  So there's a couple of things, a couple of bits of advice buried in a book about that. One is this rule, which was actually based on some research in various different fields of life, that when you're trying to optimize something versus trying to explore, where you you have something that works and you just want to make it kind of better and go, you know, and optimize it versus

• 1:01:57Speaker 08

  doing the inefficient thing of going out to try and try something new. And it comes down to something like when you go out to eat at a restaurant, do you get your favorite thing that you know works? Or do you try something that is a new dish that may not work? And so the ratio is actually one to three, two to three, one to three. So you you actually want to spend two thirds of your time trying to optimize things that you want to go deeper and better. And then a third trying trying new things. And that's been shown in many, many ways to be roughly true. So that's one answer is yes, lots of times you're going to just try and make it really, really better or not thing.

• 1:02:41Speaker 08

  But a third of the time, you want to be taking a chance. The second thing is this idea that.

• 1:02:48Speaker 08

  I learned from doing art, there was actually a book called Writer's Time about how to write a book. And it said that basically, look, the amount of work to write a book is infinite. It just could go on and on. And that's true of almost any project in terms of perfecting. It's bottomless. So really, the only thing you control is your time. You say, I have this much time to give to it. I'm gonna do the very, very best in this amount of time. And that's sort of what a deadline is about. It's saying like, yeah, I mean, it could go on forever, but, but I have a deadline. So I'm gonna do the best, I'm gonna write the best book I can in a year or a year and a half, whatever it is. Or I'm gonna do the best podcast I can make in a week.

• 1:03:31Speaker 08

  And so that is a deadline. And what it's doing is it's giving you some way to control because you can't control the amount of work, which is infinite because you're always confined some way to perfect it. So, so this is the idea that you control things by controlling the time.

• 1:03:49Shane Parrish?

  I wonder if part of us is hiding behind fear too. We don't want the deadline because we actually don't want to put the work out there. We can convince ourself that hiding, you know, making it better, hiding behind this perfection is in and of itself work. And that we're accomplishing something. We don't have to put it out in the world and get feedback and.

• 1:04:11Speaker 08

  Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's true because it's not good enough yet. One of the things I have become a really big proponent of, which is, you know, doing things on a regular basis. So the advantage of someone like you doing a podcast on a regular basis, like if this one's a complete flop, that's okay. Tomorrow you have another one. We'll try again. And you just do it over and over again, and you put out whatever it is that you do. You, you know, you're trying your very best, but you know that, that, that there's more from where that's come from. And that gives you some kind of freedom. To fail in a certain sense because I'm going to do it again.

• 1:04:46Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Speaker 08

  And that's true of making art, which I do every day. I make a piece of art every, every day. So I'm going to put it out no matter what. And if it isn't up to the best standards, that's okay, because tomorrow I'm going to do it again. And that's true about writing or anything else is this, this idea that you want to do things on a regular basis. Because that is the source of great stuff, but also gives you that confidence and liberty to put out something that's not quite the best and not get really hung up on it because we're going to do it again.

• 1:05:22Shane Parrish?

  You get another up out, you get another crack at it.

• 1:05:25Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:05:30Shane Parrish?

  From episode 169, Julie Gerner. How do you shift that mindset where circumstances sort of like when you feel you're a victim? I mean, effectively, you're a victim to circumstance. You feel like you have no control and you're powerless. And there's nothing you can do. What would you say to, to somebody like that?

• 1:05:49Speaker 09

  That's a really great question. I think that there are two ways of looking at victim, things that have happened to you. You know, you can be a victim or you can be a survivor. And those are two very different cognitive positions. You know, you can't control what happens to you in either circumstance. But one is very powerful. You have overcome. One is, you know, you have had something happen to you and you are under that thing for quite some period of time. So for me, if I hear someone and I, I hear that kind of helplessness. One is that I never, I want to reframe that experience. I want to tell a different story. I want them to tell a different narrative to themselves. I want them to rewrite that.

• 1:06:34Speaker 09

  And in some ways you want them to rewrite that narrative to survivorship and overcoming and what it took. And you ask the right questions to get them to see, you know, that their own through way. In that case, is based on their strength and ability. And you want them to see those things rather than seeing the the kind of helplessness and powerlessness. It's the reason why oftentimes, you know, like people engage with me and they think we're going to go back in time and talk about their, I don't know, inner child or something. Um, but I am, I am someone who's going to start with who you are today. Because going back to the past is not really useful unless it informs who you are standing in this moment. We can't change it. We can't, uh, you know, go back.

• 1:07:16Speaker 09

  And going back to times of powerlessness also, it puts you in a bad mindset. It sets you up in a negative way. So I oftentimes will go back and restructure some things around, you know, risk, for example, is a really good area where we'll do some, uh, discussion. When people are hesitant to take risk, I want people to go back and say, hey, tell me about times you took risk and it really paid off. Like, let's talk about that. I want people to understand what they're capable of and sometimes to see what they're capable of in ways that they, um, that they quickly forget, right? I mean, negative things sometimes shadow our entire mindset and how we think about things. And we end up tossing aside some of the good things, right?

• 1:07:58Speaker 09

  Like you'll have, uh, you know, 20 compliments on your haircut. And one person says, oh, what'd you do to your hair? And that's the person who gets all the attention. So you think about, I don't want them shoving aside those 20 compliments or those 20 times they took the chance. So the 20 times that they overcame something really incredible that they kind of, you know, kind of shove off to the side. I want them to see those things very clearly and to see the minority of, yeah, you know, things happen periodically that aren't great for us and don't make us feel well. And we make bad, some bad decisions, but so what? Everyone does.

• 1:08:31Shane Parrish?

  I think that that's really important. I mean, we all make bad decisions. It's what you do next that sort of matters. I want to go back to something you said about childhood though, which is, I, I hear this a lot and I've always sort of wondered about it, which is like, uh, when people are in therapy and they're talking about their childhood and then they do this sort of like destructive behavior and then it's, uh, or self sabotaging behavior. And then they explain it away with, well, that's because of this when I was a child. And it, you know, I'm always listening to this and I never comment, but in my head I'm going, but you're an adult now.

• 1:09:03Speaker 09

  Right.

• 1:09:04Shane Parrish?

  Like at some point you take control over your, your response. And awareness of it is not the same as doing something about it.

• 1:09:12Speaker 09

  So this is, this is really fascinating to me, too. And I, I love hearing things like that when they come up because they're such clear, like, flags and clearly they are for you as well. Like you hear that and you're like, oh, this is a problem. Right? I mean, immediately. So I think about it like this. You could be sitting, and this is the example that I always think about because it pulls people away from some of the more emotional stuff. But you could be sitting in traffic and we've all sat in traffic. Right? I mean, traffic as long as the eye can see. And there will be some people you'll look out and they'll be like beeping and dodging and you know, like they're all over the place. And you can surmise how that person must be thinking. Right? I mean, it's just like, never gonna get there. Can't believe this is happening.

• 1:09:54Speaker 09

  Like, we could anticipate that these are coming from strong thought patterns and emotional places. But if you look to your right, I mean, there's probably also some guy or girl listening to a podcast, texting someone, windows are down, look as relaxed as could be. And so some people are going to say, you know, when you get home, like, why are you so upset? Oh, it's the traffic. The traffic makes me nuts. Right?

• 1:10:18Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:10:19Speaker 09

  But if the traffic really makes people nuts, it would make everyone nuts. And so it can't be that. It's how we're thinking about the traffic that really makes people be relaxed and productive or it makes them be just absolutely enraged and out of control. So when people are telling me that like, you know, I'm doing this because of my childhood, I'm doing this because of this, I think, you know, you're, you know, you're giving up some amount of power. You're giving up a lot of power to something outside of yourself. And you're also, how you're interpreting that event is not useful to you. You know, it may be, there may be a lot of truth to the terrible things that have happened.

• 1:11:05Speaker 09

  But you know, those, those terrible things, you, you have to shut the door at some point and say, you know, I am my own man or woman and I move forward. And you know, working on those traumas is important if you go to a therapist. And, and I think that that's really valuable stuff and it's worthwhile because it can change the course of your life. But if you're somebody who uses other events as a reason to self-destruct,

• 1:11:29Speaker 09

  You're ceding power and we see that even with, you know, in companies, right? Like, I'm doing this because so and so made me angry. I'm doing this because, you know, and you end up making some poor decisions. And ceding power because of someone else, you know, you're willing to make a poor decision. You're willing to give up. You know, sometimes people are willing to give up, you know, their entire future dreams because, you know, of X, Y, and Z, and it's a tragedy. So you want people to really understand the power they have to create their own lives at some point. And that they, that creation is not given to anyone else but you.

• 1:12:08Shane Parrish?

  I, I love what you said there. I think it's these ordinary moments that really dictate the outcome of our life. For a lot of our big decisions, we know we're making a decision. We're well aware of it, but in these ordinary moments, when things like this happen, we sort of tend to react without reasoning. And when we do that, we put ourselves in an increasingly bad position, right? You go home, you yell at your spouse, well, now your whole weekend's wrecked. Your marriage might be wrecked, like all of these things sort of like compound. And then you can't be present at work because you're solving something at home. And we just don't realize how the, these innocent little moments can derail us and put us in a worse position.

• 1:12:46Speaker 09

  I agree. I think that like we let life happen to us, right? And we don't decide that we are going to control the trajectory of it. And I think that that's true, whether it's in the small moments and sometimes even in the large ones. Like people will stay unhappy at a job or stay unhappy in their role. And they'll just stay unhappy instead of just saying, hey, you know, like eventually they'll reach a point. And this is true for everyone, right? Like they're unhappy, they're unhappy, they're unhappy. And then finally I've had enough. And all of those excuses they've used, there will come a point when none of them matter. And they're going to take that leap. But why does it have to get to that point? And why can't we kind of flag things earlier on?

• 1:13:29Speaker 09

  And I think early intervention, you know, I, I talk about that notion of like fighting up front. Early intervention in almost every case is worth, it's worth the attention, the hassle, the time that it takes. Because those are the moments that allow you to really gain ground. And to have a much more productive future, to have much more productive relationships, to be more productive at work, is to really intervene early. And I think intentionality is really the key. Thinking about, you know, how you want your life to look and what you're willing to put up with. You know, what kind of standards are you holding for yourself? And, and, you know, how do you value yourself?

• 1:14:12Speaker 09

  And a lot of those are around, you know, when you take action and, you know, how much you give and what you're waiting for and how much you're willing to take.

• 1:14:22Shane Parrish?

  From episode 173, Frank Slootman.

• 1:14:28Shane Parrish?

  So I understand there's no repeatable framework that you can just apply, but I would imagine there's, there's sort of repeatable principles and methods of thinking that you use. What are the ones that you find the most helpful?

• 1:14:38Speaker 10

  Well, I, I look very hard at what's working, what's not working. And in other words, you know, some things are not working at all. Some things seem to be working reasonably well. And then there are sort of the stuff that you're sort of humming and hawing on. So obviously you prioritize the, I mean, I've, I've sort of separated with people very, very quickly. Because I think the function, the functions that they were responsible for were barely breathing. And at that point, you know, I don't hesitate, you know, I move on quickly, immediately. You know, I go after cultural issues, you know, people that are just, you know, egregious violators of just things that we, we all generally find normal and acceptable.

• 1:15:19Speaker 10

  Um, you know, we, we very quickly separate on behavior. You know, performance is something that we will give more time. Behavior, we won't. And that's because behavior is a choice, not a skill set. You know, when you come in as a new leader, everybody's watching, not just what you're doing or what you're not doing. So if you're not moving on things that people, that everybody is seeing, your leadership brand is already in question because, you know, apparently you're blind and apparently you're hesitating. Uh, or you're tolerant of, of behavior that you shouldn't be tolerant of. So yeah, there's pressure because, you know, it's not just what you want to do. It's the whole world's watching.

• 1:15:56Shane Parrish?

  You said behavior is a choice, not a skill set. I've never heard it quite framed that way. I think that's a very, that's a really interesting way to look at it. But you also said that you sort of, you'll give time for performance, but not for behavior. How much time? How do you learn? Like, when do you pull the plug? When do you reinvest? And how do you think about that?

• 1:16:16Speaker 10

  Well, look, you know, behavior is, it'll smack you in the face usually. But I've also seen things happen underground where, you know, I wasn't aware of it and I wasn't seeing it. But it was happening because of what happened on calls that I wasn't on. You know, one time I got tipped off by an employee of my former company that's at luck. You know, that office over there is a complete disaster. And because they knew people there, and you know how salespeople are, right? Everybody talks, doesn't matter what company you're in. And then, you know, we started, you know, basically peeling away the layers. And all of a sudden, you know, you come across, you know, really bad situations, abusive situations,

• 1:16:59Speaker 10

  you know, harassment, all these kinds of things. Because sometimes it's just not visible. It's happening. People don't like to talk about it. You know, they're worried that they're ratting on people and they don't want to go to their manager because they don't trust their manager. You know, they don't, they don't trust HR, you know, which is usually, you know, your second choice or maybe your first choice to go when you have, you know, real behavioral, cultural problems. And then it just, it just keeps going on. So I've been surprised before about how much, you know, wasn't visible to us. Not just to me, but also the people that were, that I had brought in that were close to me. They were not seeing it either. Eventually, you know, believe me, it, we will, we will find it and we will get to it.

• 1:17:41Speaker 10

  And then we will, we will move at lightning speed. Because you want to get bad behavior, you know, out of an organization fast. Because that, that is your leadership brand. You start tolerating that. There's no end in sight to what you're gonna have.

• 1:17:55Shane Parrish?

  Trust is key to moving quickly, I would imagine, with velocity in organizations. How do you go about establishing trust in a performance-based culture?

• 1:18:04Speaker 10

  Well, you know, people need to believe that you're that you're fair and that you that it's not just personal preference, right? That you're not doing things because, oh, I don't like your haircut or whatever. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with, you know, how do we come together? How do we behave as a group? And, you know, if you have, you know, people behaving in huge conflict with that, then it's like, yeah, we are gonna move on it. Sometimes, you know, I've had situations, especially with young people, where, hey, we need to do a reboot, reset, come back tomorrow. I'm sure your parents didn't teach you, you know, to behave this way and you can do better. And I've seen people come back literally over the weekend and be a different person because for whatever reason, they were led astray by managers that just, you know, were inspiring that kind of behavior.

• 1:18:49Speaker 10

  That happens, right? People learn behaviors from what they see around them with a behavior that gets encouraged. And they don't realize that they are just getting adrift, you know, from their own upbringing and their own, you know, personal principles because that's sort of the environment starts to, you know, really, it's a slippery slope that they get on. And all of a sudden, they're in a place where they don't even recognize themselves anymore. And that's where a reset can really work, you know, because basically you're re-grounding them to, you know, normal behaviors and then things can work out really nicely from there on. But most of the time, unfortunately, it's like, look, you know, you're not a fit here. You know, this is this is not who we are, who we want to be. You know, it's choosing, you know, it's it's just, look, we want you to be this way, not that way.

• 1:19:33Speaker 10

  And, you know, for some people, it's like, hey, they learn behaviors in other companies. It's part of who they are, it's their culture. This is not, this is not for you, man.

• 1:19:41Shane Parrish?

  Alan Mulally put it to me this way. He said, when you're choosing a behavior that's not the organizational behavior that's desired, you're choosing not to be a part of the organization. I thought that was a powerful way to think about it.

• 1:19:52Speaker 10

  Yeah. You're separating and you're in violation of the culture. Driving culture is really important because if you don't, you know, other people will fill that void, right? And you get subcultures in a city or a division because strong personalities can do that. So unless you are filling that void, right? It will get filled by something or somebody else. And before you know it, you know, you're just a grab bag of stuff and it's just a bunch of thieves that's running a company. Well, you don't want that. The company needs to stand for something. This is who we are.

• 1:20:25Shane Parrish?

  Seems like there's a lot of organizations that are more family based. I mean, they take a very similar approach to a family and they don't necessarily think in terms of performance. What are your thoughts on that?

• 1:20:37Speaker 10

  Well, you know, we've talked about this quite a bit in recent years. You know, I don't think a business is a family. Unfortunately, in a family, you can't fire your family, even though you sometimes want to. You have to tolerate them and deal with them and sometimes in the most egregious way. That is just the nature of families. I mean, all the dysfunction that comes with it. But in business, it's more like being a professional sports franchise, right? You're assembling the best players and, you know, we may be friends, but we don't have to be friends because we're not coming together on the basis of friendship. We're coming together on the basis of mission, you know? In other words, shared purpose. You know, we're very demanding of each other and it's really about, you know, our respective

• 1:21:21Speaker 10

  contributions to the mission. That's the basis of our relationship. So it is much more akin to professional sports. I think that's the correct analogy. Now, some companies don't want to be that way. Companies like Salesforce and even Google come to mind, but you know, in the end, they're laying people off too by the thousands. Okay? So I guess it's not family after all.

• 1:21:47Shane Parrish?

  From episode 179, Gio Valenti.

• 1:21:53Shane 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?

• 1:22:28Speaker 11

  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 oppress it? So 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

• 1:23:13Speaker 11

  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, when you're chasing, you know, you play with nothing to lose, you're able to be fearless. So, so that's a real advantage

• 1:23:53Speaker 11

  as being the underdog. Tiger Woods is the only one who was the favorite every week and would start with a lead and, and then extend that lead. Blew the world away. And, and to this day, it blows out, because how do you do that? How do you, like, that's why greyhounds in, in dog racing are always chasing a rabbit. The psychological mech, even in, in, 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

• 1:24:33Speaker 11

  to the fact that he hadn't caught Jack Nicklaus. So he was, in his mind, always chasing. So it 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, uh, 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, and you're on the, your mandate as an investor is to return, well, 10%, right? You'd say that's your number. And you're

• 1:25:17Speaker 11

  only up 5%. And there's no way to make money in your strategy. All of a sudden, it's like, well, I've, I've got to, I'm going to press whatever advantage I have. What's a low probability advantage? And 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?

• 1:26:01Speaker 11

  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. 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.

• 1:26:46Speaker 11

  And so happiness is to want nothing. So the universality of the human condition is desire. 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.

• 1:27:27Speaker 11

  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, 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. 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.

• 1:28:10Speaker 11

  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, that led to, you know, to him getting these injuries and harming himself. And he wouldn't stop practicing, so he'd get injured.

• 1:28:53Speaker 11

  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, 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

• 1:29:38Speaker 11

  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, 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,

• 1:30:23Speaker 11

  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 want to push the advantage, you have to evolve to a level where you're some version of a complete human being, where you know yourself, right? The Socratic dictum of Nadi Sutra, know yourself and know others.

• 1:31:05Speaker 11

  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.

• 1:31:45Shane 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.

• 1:31:52Speaker 11

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

• 1:31:59Speaker 08

  Thanks for the great questions and for your insight. I really appreciate it. I'm a fan. You know, I, I, I really did enjoy this.

• 1:32:08Speaker 09

  Thank you so much for having me. You know, we've circled around each other quite a few times and, um, and you're a really thoughtful, wonderful man. So thank you for engaging with me today.

• 1:32:18Shane Parrish?

  Thank you so much for taking the time today, Frank. That was an amazing conversation.

• 1:32:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, you bet. Anytime. Thank you.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  And mutual thanks, Shane. Take care. Bye.

• 1:32:28Speaker 06

  I love co-creating with you. It's really fun. You know, it's a one plus one equals four experience for me. I just love it. So thank you.

• 1:32:37Shane Parrish?

  Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time today. Thank you, Shane. Perfect. Thank you.

• 1:32:44Speaker 07

  I'm very proud that you said that you'd want to do this again because I really love the show. I love The Way You Think. And I was very happy when you emailed me to ask me if I could be on it. And I also would love to do it again.

• 1:32:59Shane 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.