The Mindset That Unlocks Your Full Potential | Dr. Gio Valiante

Steve Cohen and Jack Nicklaus shared the same performance coach. For the next hour, he’s yours too. Dr. Gio Valiante is the world’s leading performance psychologist. We discuss why most people never reach their potential, how confidence and fear shape performance, and what separates those who consistently excel from those who stay stuck. He shares practical strategies for building better habits, overcoming self-imposed limits, staying focused under pressure, and creating the conditions for long-term success. If you’ve ever felt capable of more, this episode will help you understand what’s holding you back and what to do about it. ------ Chapters: (0:00) Why most people underperform and the central governor hypothesis. (4:46) Why lasting change starts with behavior rather than thinking. (7:52) The difference between mastery motivation and ego-driven motivation. (11:24) Flow states, presence, and learning to enjoy the everyday work of excellence. (14:28) Practical techniques for developing presence and reducing distraction. (18:16) Why environment and systems have a greater impact on performance than goals alone. (26:33) What interview questions reveal about confidence, motivation, and character. (31:47) Why overcoming adversity often reveals a person's greatest strengths. (32:46) Rebuilding confidence by focusing on small wins instead of chasing big recoveries. (38:55) The psychology of confidence and the four sources of self-efficacy. (47:14) How self-talk shapes beliefs, behavior, and long-term performance. (50:04) Why fear of rejection and the need to belong influence our decisions. (53:35) Identity, self-discovery, and the importance of moving beyond childhood conditioning. (1:03:20) Definition of success and the experiences that bring lasting fulfillment. ------ Follow Dr. Gio Valiante X: https://x.com/GioValiante ------ Thank you to the sponsors for this episode: +Applovin: Launch your first AppLovin campaign and grow your business: https://applovin.com/shane +HeyGen is a message-first AI video platform that helps people and AI agents turn ideas into professional video in minutes. Try for free at https://www.heygen.com/tkp +Matic: the robot vacuum that does it all—grab yourself a year of free bags here. http://maticrobots.com/shaneparrish +LMNT: My go-to zero sugar electrolytes — get a free LMNT Sample Pack here: https://DrinkLMNT.com/TKP Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you go through life over indexing and caring too much what people think about you, that's your ceiling.

• 0:09Shane Parrish?

  I want to start with something you said last time we talked, which is most people are underperforming relative to their ability.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:17Shane Parrish?

  Walk me through that.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  There's a term that I came across many years ago called the central governor hypothesis, and essentially conveys the fact that most people underperform. And, and any observer of the human condition, I think, going back to forever, agrees that that's probably true. Now, why is that? Well, you have to sort of delve into sort of human biology and genetics and understand. So what's, what's the purpose of the, of the brain?

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Generally to keep you alive long enough to reproduce, right? You know, at a, at a fundamental biological level, but we're not designed to overperform. We're designed to survive. And so overperformance or, or achieving one's potential requires sort of a cognitive decision to push oneself there. Right? So to illustrate it, I think a common illustration is if you look at marathon runners or any extreme athlete. Marathon runners, triathletes, these are people who design their lives around pushing human potential. And so begs the question, well, then, then if these are people who are even, even the ultra marathoners, right? People do, you know, five marathons over the course of five weeks or five days, whatever they do, how many of them push themselves to the point of death?

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Like, how many people push their limits? The answer is, is typically it's a very small percentage, single digits, you know? If you have five, you know, rounding numbers, five million marathoners, maybe five or 10 die in a year. And most of the times because they get hit by a car or some other condition, but it's not because they push themselves too hard. They cross the finish line and they're still alive. And they go and they, they carb load and so forth. Now, why is that? Because the brain has built in mechanisms to shut us down so that we don't do self-harm. Right? And so those are the same mechanisms that the drive level for human beings, you know, govern our conduct. So, so underperformance is built into the human condition.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  So that we can stay alive. And that's why, you know, they, they do these really interesting studies with sort of single cell organisms, where you put them in a Petri dish and you make the conditions uncomfortable. Right? So you put these, these various, they use various types of organisms and you make it hot on one side of the plate and they gravitate to comfort and you make it too cold, they so at a, really at a fundamental biological level, you know, we are all programmed to seek comfort and safety. Well, comfort and safety are the exact opposite of overperformance or realizing one's potential. And so therein lies the starting point, sort of table stakes. You know, if you want to be great at something, you know, the old adage is you have to get

• 3:01Speaker 00

  comfortable being uncomfortable, but that's something you have to train yourself to do. And so the central governor hypothesis suggests that, yeah, you know, there's a governor in the human brain. And that governor is built structurally by, you know, a couple of things. Number one, the survival instinct. Number two, the desire for comfort.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Number three, the desire, you know, at a, at a fundamental biological level to, for our DNA to replicate itself. You know, there's this, there's this view from geneticists that we as humans, you know, we talk about human agency. Human agency being defined as the degree to which we have conscious control over our lives, right? Agency being acting on your own behalf. The fundamental question is, do human beings have free will? Right? William James and the pragmatists asked that question. And again, most observers of the human condition suggests that we have less control over ourselves than we believe we do. And so what did William James conclude? He said, "My first act of free will is to choose to believe in free will."

• 4:05Speaker 00

  And if you really think about that, and you go down that rabbit hole, and then you look at the studies, people think that they're thinking where they're generally rearranging their prejudices. And so the few acts of agency we really have, one of them is to decide our path and then cultivate the habits, which then become unconscious to push us out to the tail end of the curve in any domain. But again, we all default to underperformance. So, so to become a really, really good at something requires an act of agency to choose to become really, really good at something. That's table stakes. That's the opening bit. And then from there, you know, that's where the work begins. So, yeah.

• 4:46Shane Parrish?

  So if I choose to become good at something, I'm going to be good at something. Like, what is one practical thing that people can take away from this to change in their life to help them realize their potential?

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Right. So, but, you know, the, the research on like, you know, what the data shows on New Year's resolutions, right? 95% of them are over by the end of February and then the other 4% are over by the end of March. So the choice is just the beginning. Right? I think the first thing to understand is that we are all creatures of habit. As Albert Bandura said, "Behavior is a cause of behavior." Right? Behavior is a cause of behavior. That the more you do something on a probability scale, the more likely you are to do the same thing. And so if you really want to get out of, you know, your situation, or you want to do it differently, there's, there's a couple of things to think of. Number one.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  It's in the doing, not in the thinking or the saying. Right? One of the things I always say to people is it, it really doesn't matter what you say. It doesn't matter what you feel. It doesn't matter what you believe. It just matters what you do. Right? And taking that step, that action step, that behavioral step is a huge part of it. John Dewey, the American philosopher, beautiful, beautiful insight. He said, "We don't think our way into a pattern of living, we live our way into a pattern of thought." I mean, just really think about that. We don't think our way into a pattern of living, we live our way into a pattern of thought. And what he meant by that is, you know, going back to your question, how do people change? Most people think, think, you know, if I'm going to change my mind.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  And what Dewey is saying is, no, no, no, changing your mind is one way toward change. What he's saying is we don't think our way into the, into the living, into the doing, we live our way into a pattern of thinking. So what he's essentially suggesting, what I believe is, change what you do. And as you change your behavior, then you change your mind. So going back to what I said earlier, it doesn't matter what you think, what you feel or what you say, it's just a matter of what you do. And so to your original question, what is one thing someone can change if they want to be better? Find out the comfortable habit that's holding you back, whether it's your phone, whether it's your food, whether it's the excuse you tell yourself, or you know, just one thing.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Change that and then hold yourself accountable on a repeated basis to that one thing. There's an everydainess to excellence. There's an everydainess to it. People often ask me, well, you know, I want to write a book, Dr. Geo. How do you write a book? And what I say is you sit down and you write. You want to write a book? You write a book. You don't wait for inspiration. You sit down every day and on the days where nothing's coming, you stay in your seat and you write it badly. Because you have to write through the bad days to get to the good days. And I've conducted many writing workshops for master students at Rollins College and Emory University. And in writing workshops, I mean, that's what they talk about. If you want to write a book, if you want to be a writer, writers write every day. You know, say it badly, write it badly, but don't get up.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  And, and so that everydainess is the hallmark of excellence in every domain.

• 7:51Shane Parrish?

  Why do some people grab on to these basics and use them and get better at them and slightly better at them and keep doing them?

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:59Shane Parrish?

  And some people don't?

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, you're asking a question and you use, you say some people. I would say everybody. Now, why is that? Not to sort of overpsychologize this, but I do think that there's, there's a lesson in it. It's that if you go back to fundamental human motivation, like why do people do what they do? And in fact, one of the earliest psychological studies I did in, in sports psychology was I asked, I interviewed 200 golfers, some on the PGA tour, LPGA tour, good amateurs, regular amateurs. And the, the question was simple. It's why do you play golf? And you'd think it's an easy question. Why do you play golf? But what emerged from that was probably one of the most profound insights into really

• 8:43Speaker 00

  into human motivation and golf just being sort of a Petri dish for humanity. And what you realize is some people play for love of the game. I love golf. Some people play because they're competitive. I want to beat that other person. Some people play for money, but they use golf as a vehicle to solve other things in their life. Well, if you extrapolate that and you, you ask doctors, you know, why'd you go into medicine? Lawyers, you know, why'd you go into law? You ask teachers, why'd you go into teaching? What you come to realize is people tend to bifurcate into two different camps. So, so going back to human motivation of why do people do what they do?

• 9:18Speaker 00

  People who have a mastery motivation, they engage in their craft or their task, it's governed by a few things, like it's intrinsic motivation. They do the act for the sake of the act itself. Right? It's, they're not using it as a vehicle to get somewhere to do a thing. It's like the satisfaction's in the doing. Now, the alternative path of why people do what they do, it's called an ego orientation. And, and, and it's, it, it's in the name, the meaning of it. It's why do you do what you do? It's to enhance the ego. It's, you know, I do this for money. I do it to feel important. I use the thing as a vehicle to make myself feel better. So if you go into medicine because you want to make a lot of money, but you actually

• 10:01Speaker 00

  don't care about medicine, invariably you're going to burn out. If you go into law because you want to be rich, but you don't love law, you're going to burn out. Same with all sports, same really everything in life. So what you find at the very tail end of the distribution, the top 1% of 1%, the all timers, the origin of the greatness, right? The, the first order variable, the first domino to fall, is they tend to gravitate toward their calling intuitively. And the reason why they do it is for the love of the craft itself. It's a calling and they protect that purity. And so what you'll often, also often see is people who have a rebirth or a renaissance

• 10:44Speaker 00

  in their careers, it's like, where did this come from? What they often say is, "Oh, I fell in love." It's Kelly Slater. "I fell in love with surfing again." It's Brooks Koepka in golf recently. "I love golf again." It's musicians, right? Who's, who are practicing their craft late in life.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  And so the journey, the developmental path is it starts with a mastery orientation. You do the thing because you love to do it. Then you start getting rewarded for it. And then the rewards itself become more, more powerful than the thing. Then you lose yourself. Then you rediscover yourself and you find your way back to mastery, back to the calling itself. Yeah.

• 11:24Shane Parrish?

  How do we fall in love with what we do though? Like if I go into golf because I love it and maybe I ebb and flow through, oh, you know, I start winning and I switch from this mastery mindset to this ego mindset.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:37Shane Parrish?

  And I start losing. That's very different than an office worker or an executive in a company who has a job and they kind of like it, but they want to get better at it.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:46Shane Parrish?

  They want to reach their potential.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:49Shane Parrish?

  How do we switch into a mastery focused mindset and something that we might not fully love?

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, that's a great question. And it goes back to what we touched upon already, which is sort of the idea of human agency and free will. Like, well, what do we actually have control over? So there's a book that I'm sure you've read. It's called Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. You know, the idea of flow or a flow state, it's, it's the highest form of the human condition, right? If you want to look at what human beings are capable of, just, just go find people who have ever been in flow. Now, the research on flow is fascinating because it shows a couple of things. Number one, we can get into flow doing almost anything. Gardening, people, you know, people can get into flow gardening or cooking, great conversations or flow states, playing sports, being in love, reading a book.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Now, what are the characteristics of the hallmarks of flow? Number one, time is transcendent, right? It's, it's the idea that when you get lost in a great book and you look up, you're like, that was three hours or a great conversation, you know, two hours went by, three hours. You know, athletes have told me, it's like, when you're, when you're really in a flow state, you look up, the game is over. It went by very, very quickly. There's a paradox of effort, like hard things feel easy. There's a paradox of perception. You're so lost in the moment, you're so present that you forget that you're being watched or there's an audience or there's an outcome. And so human beings who are able to transcend their limitations typically get lost in a flow state.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  So if you ask me, what advice would I give to people who are sort of stuck in the middle part of the distribution or just quote unquote, average, but who want to be great? I mean, there's a few things. Number one, be mindful of your habits. Number two, get comfortable being uncomfortable. But number three, get good at being fully present. Get in the moment. You know, John Dewey, John Dewey, in a book called How We Think, John Dewey said, there's no greater enemy to effective thinking than a divided interest, right? A fragmented interest. You partition your hard drive where you're here, but you're thinking about something else. You're here, you're thinking about, you're never fully present. The best of the best are present for everything all the time.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  So again, it's a bit of a Buddhist tradition, but, but the habit of being present is a hallmark of excellence. So if people want to be great at their jobs, you know, get into flow. Well, how do you get into flow? Get present, challenge yourself, fall in love with the details and love the mundanity of your work.

• 14:28Shane Parrish?

  I want to come back to flow for a second. Is that, I'm assuming that's common amongst all top performers, that people are fully present. How would you explain that to somebody like the fully present? What do I do when I'm in a meeting and my mind starts thinking about picking up groceries or the kids or all of a sudden I'm not fully present? How do I bring myself back to fully present?

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Like everything else, being present is a habit. And like any other habit or skill, you can practice it. So you can't just hope to call on, you know, on deep immersion or presence or flow if you're not in the active habit of being present. Okay. So it begs the question, what gets us out of the present moment? Well, it's distraction. It's attachment. And so the good news for, for, you know, for anybody who wants to get better is a little bit of practice on a consistent basis goes a long way. So for example, what do I do in my own life? Knowing as much about psychology as I do, every Friday at the end of the day, I take 10 or 15 minutes and I ask myself a simple question.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  I say, what are my attachments that have attached themselves to me that are interrupting my thoughts that I didn't put there by conscious choice? And what am I thinking about that, that I didn't choose to think about? What am I feeling that I didn't choose to feel? And you come to realize is, is as we go through the journey of life, just by default to the structure of the human brain, we attach to things or things attach to us, actually. It goes back to the, to what Nietzsche said. You know, Nietzsche and Carl Jung both agree on this idea that we don't have ideas, ideas have us, right? We don't often choose to think or feel the way we feel. Things happen to us that govern our, you know, it's conditioning. It's really true.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  And so what I do, the active practice of detaching from things that are shaping my thoughts or feelings or behavior, I detach from them. And what you come to find is what fills in that space is psychological freedom and presence. So a little bit of practice with these things on a regular basis and all of a sudden you come to find you have psychological freedom. And from there, you can explore the best version of yourself. So, yeah.

• 16:44Shane Parrish?

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• 17:24Shane Parrish?

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• 18:08Shane Parrish?

  Your first three videos are free. Heygen.com, H E Y G E N dot com. How curated important is shaping our environment? And I mean this in, in the sense of not only our physical environment, but our mental environment, the information that we consume, the people we let into our life.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Incredible question. You know, there's this, there's a song by an old band called Sister Hazel. And the lyric goes, if you want to be somebody else, change your mind. And I, I like the band, but I loved that line, but, but the reality is the line is wrong. The reality is if you want to be somebody else, change your environment. Now, why is this true? So there's this idea in psychology, it's called situated cognition, situated cognition. And situated cognition conveys the idea that the human brain is constantly interacting with the environment around it on both conscious and unconscious levels, primarily unconscious. So think of it this way, when we're hot, we sweat, but we don't choose to sweat. When we're cold, we get goosebumps, but we don't choose to get goosebumps.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  The human brain interacts with the environment on an unconscious level. In fact, the unconscious interaction in the environment is the primary vehicle of human conduct. And so, you know, in the book Atomic Habits, the author has this really beautiful, really beautiful line that's getting a lot of traction in the world these days. He says, we don't rise to the level of our goals, we shrink to the level of our systems. What does he mean by that? And what he means is, let's say that you aspire to greatness, but you're in a, in a school system or a classroom or a company or on a team that doesn't support your path to excellence, right? When you go to take risks, you get slapped back.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  If you're a hedge fund portfolio manager and you're in a place that is so risk averse, right? That's governed by a risk manager, a risk officer who's just trying to keep his or her job. And so they're playing it safe. So every time you ask for more capital or you want to go outside of your risk limits, it's an automatic no. Well, all of a sudden that becomes, right? That becomes your ceiling. If you really want to understand human potential, ask yourself this question. What is greater? The difference between two individuals or the difference within an individual and himself or herself? So think about just you and I. Let's say a company is looking to hire someone and they're like, oh, should we hire Shane or should we hire Gio?

• 20:40Speaker 00

  And they profile us and they look at the differences and they come to realize, well, you know, they're pretty close to the same, you know, IQ or intelligence, you know, similar education, like a lot, it's, it's a hard choice, but like, we'll go with Shane. But they never ask the question.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  What does Shane look like at his best or his worst? And where is he in that regard? So they hire, they spend all these resources profiling people to make sure they hire the right person. But once the person gets on boarded, they don't really look at the differential of the person at the best or at their worst, or how do we get the best out of them? Now, here's what research shows. Research shows that the differences within individuals is typically greater than between individuals. In society today, we spend so much time comparing candidate A versus candidate B. There's more psychological alpha within individuals than between individuals.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  And teams, and organizations, and schools spend so much time comparing student A and student B, or not realizing, and this is where I live. It's like, okay, what's, what can this person be? A person comes to me, hey, can you help me? It's like, okay, well, let's look at where you're at right now. What are the mechanisms of suppression? What are the things that you asked earlier? What keeps people from overachieving? What are the, we call them the mechanisms of suppression that lead to underperformance or underachievement? And they're known, they're largely known what these mechanisms of suppression are. You start removing them and helping people identify them. And then all of a sudden, they start to blossom.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  And therein lies, there's a greater difference within an individual than there often are between two individuals. And what contributes to that? It was a mission that had meaning to you. And you were part of a system of collective problem solving, solving hard problems together. And whenever a company or an organization in various fields, more and more that I'm speaking to at a leadership level, and this is true in schools as well, and teachers, job description should converge and boil down to really, it's one sentence. Your job description, everywhere I go, it's always the same. Be good at solving hard problems together, or get good.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Learn, actually, if I really were to articulate it, learn how to be great at solving hard problems together. Now, that's a easy thing to say and a really hard thing to do. Because ego, right? Put a hard problem in front of two people, never mind 10, especially smart people who are used to being right. But they think there's a different solution than the other person, and that they're wrong, but they've never been wrong before, and they get defensive, and it leads to argument, people closing themselves off. But if you can actually participate in a system where people are competent and capable, open and willing, and their highest calling is to be great at solving hard problems together,

• 23:50Speaker 00

  that's the path to an autotelic state of being. It's the path to flow. It's the path to greatness and excellence. Two stories, I'll illustrate that. Number one, Einstein, he was stuck on the problem for a very, very long time. And he was on the walk, on a walk with a younger colleague, trying to explain, here's what I'm working on. And in the process of deconstructing and dissecting his own thoughts and explaining it to someone, that's when he had his aha moment, it was an epiphany. And then over the course of the next three months, he wrote two papers that led to the Nobel Prize. So he was stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck. The synthetic function of language, the process of trying to articulate his thinking led to the epiphany.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Crick and Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA, it's the same thing. It was through the interactive process, there were four researchers on that team. But it was, it was the interaction of problem solving that happened. And so if people are trying to elevate and realize the full expression of their talents and abilities, the first place you have to look, I said earlier, you have to look at your habits and your behavior. The reality is, the first place you have to look is your systems and your environment, whether it's a place that has all the hallmarks of leading to excellence, which is honesty and truth telling, which is challenge and skill development, which is no ceiling.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  And one of the hallmarks, by the way, of these, you know, Daniel Coyle articulated this in a really nice little book. He calls them talent hotbeds, right? There are places that, that tend to graduate disproportionate amount of excellence. So, you know, great singers tend, tend, you know, tend to come out of this little, little school in Dallas, Texas, around Dallas, Texas. Grace, for a period of time, great tennis players came out of Russia, great baseball players out of the Dominican Republic, great female golfers out of, out of South Korea. If you look at the world of golf, you know, historically, great golfers out of Texas and California, these great golf states. One of the hallmarks of talent hotbeds is what do people do with mistakes?

• 26:01Speaker 00

  And so by and large, the primary mechanism of suppression, why people don't achieve what they're capable of achieving, has to do with how they're conditioned with dealing with mistakes and failure. But if you really want to be great, put yourself in an environment that allows you the freedom, this challenge and accountability and rigor and detail, but that's not over punitive of mistakes.

• 26:32Shane Parrish?

  When you're interviewing somebody, I want to know the signs of greatness and the signs of this person isn't as good as they think they are. What are the markers of, you know, Steve Cohen called you a canary in a coal mine, but also you have an incredible ability to identify talent in very short period of time?

• 26:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:55Shane Parrish?

  What are the questions you ask? How do you do that?

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Of all the variables that psychology measures, the two that I think are the most important are confidence and motivation, right? Confidence and motivation. People think it's intelligence, but it's actually not. So the story of intelligence is, you know, the way we define it is a very muddled story. So intelligence, this idea of IQ, which people still use as a marker of intelligence, IQ meaning intellectual quotient, started, I think it was in the late 1800s in France, and Alfred Binet, the French government said, hey, listen, we need to be able to identify kids who are struggling in school. If we can identify them early, we could do an intervention. That's all it was.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  So Alfred Binet went and did some studies, interviewed a bunch of people, and came with this intellectual quotient, said, you know, if we measure here, these are the kids who will struggle in school. And when this research made its way to America, America did with it what Americans do. Let's commercialize it. So they started selling people on this idea that the higher IQ, the smarter you are. It's, it's undeniably false. Higher IQ doesn't mean you're smarter. And then if people went just maniacal and intelligence tests, which is a multi-billion dollar industry, and that's why it's stayed alive to this day, the SATs and the ACT and educational testing systems, multi-billion dollar industry. That's the reason the idea hasn't died. It's financially driven. It's a nonsensical idea now.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  You can argue that there is a thing called G, which is general intelligence. But again, so, so a Harvard researcher, kind of Howard Gardner, who, who started doing research in developmental psychology, then cognitive psychology, and he posited the idea that humans have what he called multiple intelligences. And it challenged the status quo of IQ. And what he says is human beings have individual autonomous intelligences. For example, verbal intelligence, mathematical intelligence, and all of these intelligences have their own characteristics. He calls interpersonal intelligence, which you're a genius at. What's interpersonal intelligence? Interpersonal intelligence, the ability to read someone else in real time, sort of sense where they're at emotionally, cognitively, and steer them.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  You know, great politicians have great interpersonal intelligence, great school teachers. The fourth kind of intelligence is called intrapersonal intelligence, the ability to know yourself. How smart are you actually if you have a perfect memory but have no self-awareness?

• 29:26Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Right? That's not intelligence. Gardner talks about bodily kinesthetic intelligence, the ability to know your body in space. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Martha Graham, the great dancer, knowing your body and to be able to have this proprio perception, spatial intelligence that great architects have to see things dimensionally. Anyway, your question is, what do I look for when I'm screening people? Well, I want to understand what is the entire profile of this person? Where do they come from? What's their source of their motivation? How do they handle failure? I want to know the degree to which they tell the truth. Because in most cases, when people are having a conversation, particularly in an interview,

• 30:10Speaker 00

  they're presenting a version of themselves that they want you to see. But that's not the version of themselves that's going to show up in the workplace. So one of the most important questions is, is this, it's, tell me a time in your life where you had to work with somebody you didn't like. Could have been in elementary school, been middle school, been projecting college, your last company, somebody who you fundamentally disagreed with and then viscerally didn't like, but had to work with. How'd you handle that? And if you ask a version of that question, and you just sit back, that will reveal the kind of person they are.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  And it will also reveal how they will, how they will respond when faced with adversity in the workplace, particularly if you're in a hard industry, where you're trying to solve hard problems. How to handle conflict? To what degree do you blame others? To what degree do you shut down? To what degree are you engaging? The research shows that companies that put brand management or image management over problem solving tend to deteriorate pretty quickly. So it has to be an environment or a culture where smart people are empowered to solve hard problems, but they care more, in your case, more about the mission than about the self. So I look for all of these things.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  And again, it depends on the role, because a lot of people are capable or competent. But if you put the right person in the wrong role, they're never going to flourish. So it has to be a fit for, for the exactness of the role itself.

• 31:47Shane Parrish?

  Are there any other questions that come to mind that you think are particularly revealing about people?

• 31:54Speaker 00

  What is the biggest obstacle you've ever had to overcome in your life? And the follow up there is, what resources did you lean on to overcome that obstacle? In other words, how did you overcome it? So people stop at what obstacle did you overcome? Where it becomes interesting psychologically is how did you overcome them? So going back to a really important interview question is, yeah, tell me the hardest thing you've ever overcome. And then what did you enlist? Did you go to other people? Do you have a network? What beliefs did you engage? It's really important to understand the method by which people overcome their obstacles. They have to rely on themselves. And this is what Tiger Woods was great at for a period of time.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  It's like, hey, here's, here's what his self-talk was. You got yourself into the, into this mess? Now get yourself out of it. And that's the best version of Tiger. Obviously, we've seen some other versions of Tiger, but the best version of Tiger is Tiger telling himself, you got yourself into this mess, now get yourself out of it.

• 32:55Shane Parrish?

  One thing I find, you know, with myself that I catch myself doing now that I never was even aware of until recently, is shrinking the gap between where I am and what do I want to accomplish. So not the ultimate goal, but like the first step. So we often look at like the thing that we want to accomplish. I want to be XYZ, I want to, and that, the gap between where you are and accomplishing that thing just seems really big.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:23Shane Parrish?

  And I find that shrinking the gap, and I was talking with Dr., I think it was Dr. Emily Bacalatus on the show, and she gave the example of a marathoner. And I thought this was like really apt, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. But she said, you know, when their legs start hurting and it's mile 11, like they're not thinking about the finish line. They switch their, their focus to the next stop sign, the next red light. And then you do that, and then you do it, and you do it. And all of a sudden, you're back in your flow state. You're back in the state where you're either not feeling it, or you've worked through the pain.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  So oftentimes, people, the people like in golf, people don't call me when things are going well. You know, I've got an email that came in this morning. For the first time in my career, I'm in a slump, you know, first time in my career, I'm in a draw. First time in my career, I'm not making money. I'm a, so these are the messages I get. How do you walk someone out of a draw? Let's say you're running $500 million and you're down, I don't know, let's call it, you know, let's say your limit's a $500 million, you know, the company's going to fire you, you know, if you're down 20 and you're down 15, and you don't have a lot of room to go. But like, you need to put on risk because scared money don't make money. So you need to put on risk, but you know, if you're wrong again, you're out of a job.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  And the path to getting out of a draw, the step one is to get in the habit of making money again. But like, you don't, see where, where people make mistakes is they look at the size of the draw, and they start trying to make it all back in one swing. They, they, they just start panicking. And what people do in panic is they, they lose their rationality. They see threat instead of opportunity, all sorts of characteristics of a PM in a draw. And what I say is, you know, we're not going to make it all back. Let's, let's make a hundred dollars. Let's make a hundred dollars this week. So bring down your risk and let's get in the habit of making money. And then it's like, but I'll never get out of this if I'm, it's like, no, I understand that.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  But what happens is, you know, as Vince Lombardi famously said, winning is a habit. And so unfortunately is losing. Well, so is making money. So is doing well in golf. A confident investor, when he looks out in the world, sees the world as a place of abundance, sees opportunity, sees the market as a place of abundance, sees opportunity everywhere. I don't have enough time to get to all the opportunity. I don't have enough capital. I need more money because there's so much money to be made in this market. When we lose our confidence, we see the market as a place of threat. Everything is dangerous, landmines everywhere. And so you, you come off your ability to take any risks, all you see is danger. And so that's why you have to protect your confidence. Why is that? Because fear distorts our ability to see the world accurately.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Fear is distortive. Fear means danger is everywhere. At least we perceive danger everywhere. So the first thing I have to do with a PM is get them in a habit of making small dollars. Why? Because the biggest source of confidence is success. So if you get in the habit of making a hundred dollars, it's like, well, next we make a thousand dollars. Now you're confident again. Now you see opportunity, see opportunity. You start deploying capital into better opportunities. You're more patient when a move. So one of the characteristics of confidence versus fear is, you know, let's say you deploy money into an idea and that idea moves against you. Do you cut the position or do you put more money into it? Well, if you love the thesis and you love the work and you love the idea, you double down.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  You invest in an idea that's going against you. When you're scared, you see threat and danger, you pull out at the wrong time, you over trade an idea. So you have to protect your confidence at all costs, confidence and motivation. But when you're scared, you never see that path. And so step one for anybody in crisis, honestly, whether it's a golfer, a PM, people in private markets, venture capital firms, and it's what you said, alluded to earlier, runners. It's like, let's start finding small wins, things that we know we can, and then celebrate them because it changes the emotional profile. And you start smacking, stacking incremental small wins and that leads to greatness. So, yeah.

• 37:32Shane Parrish?

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• 38:11Shane Parrish?

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• 38:54Shane Parrish?

  Is there a difference that between types of confidence? Like, we all know the person who's confident from arrogance.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:02Shane Parrish?

  And then there's like a, almost a confidence from humility. There's different types of confidence.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  There are different flavors of confidence. So when we talk about the research on the self in modern times, there's three self constructs. There's self-esteem, self-concept and self-efficacy, right? And in simple terms, self-esteem is defined as how do I feel about myself? My self-esteem is, my self-esteem is high or low, right? It's just an emotional feeling about oneself. And while it's important to have a healthy self-esteem, it's not empirically related to excellence in any way, shape or form. Some of the highest performers don't feel good about their performance. And the best in the world never feel good about it. And then underachievers feel great about themselves, right? There's overconfidence, or they feel great about themselves no matter what. So there's self-esteem. The second variable is self-concept. And self-concept is how do I view myself? So that's identity. When I look in the mirror, what do I see?

• 39:53Speaker 00

  That's somewhat related performance. But then there's self-efficacy. And self-efficacy is essentially operationalized confidence. So here's what's known about confidence, there's two forms of it. Confidence as a personality trait. Some people are born, and if you talk to the mom or dad, they're like, yeah, he's been that swashbuckling confidence. He's been that way his whole life, whatever that thing is, he or she has always had it. So that's confidence as a personality trait. That doesn't necessarily do much in life. You have people who are failures who have it, people who are successful, and everyone in the middle. The way that modern psychology defines confidence is self-efficacy.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  Now, the beautiful thing about operationalized confidence is we can measure it. We know how the dominoes fall and we know what creates it. So for example, this is another question I ask in almost every interview. Tell me something you think you're good at. So, you know, any listener who's listening to this, who's trying to be good at something, if I ask you, tell me something that you believe yourself to be good at. And then give an answer. And then if I deconstruct it and I say, tell me why you believe that, what you come to find. And this is true categorically across the human condition in every domain. It boils down to four kinds of experiences that that person has had. The number one experience is, is what's called a mastery experience.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  It's simply success and failure. Here's how many times I've done this and failed. Here's how many times I've done it and succeeded. But it's not arithmetical, it's the interpretation of success and failure. It's like when Michelle Kwan in the Olympics lost the gold medal to Tara Lipinski. The media said, Michelle, you just lost the gold medal. You must feel terrible. She's like, no, no, I didn't lose the gold, I won the silver. Both are objectively true. Michelle Kwan won the silver, but she did lose the gold. But the interpretation of it allowed her to protect her confidence. And guess what? Later that year, she won the world championships. So, right, the number one source of confidence, the first place the brain goes when it asks itself, "Hey, can I do this thing?"

• 42:02Speaker 00

  It goes to prior experience. But what you have to be mindful of is the, is the pain of failure hurts more than success feels good. So what happens is we tend to index toward our failures. Right? We bring the pain of the past failures to the moment. That's why most people are underconfident. Right? Because, because the way the memory in the brain-

• 42:22Shane Parrish?

  Is they're remembering all of the, the things that they've done wrong? All the mistakes they've-

• 42:26Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. Golfers always want to talk to me about their bad shots. Portfolio managers always want to talk to me about the money they've lost and what they didn't do.

• 42:34Shane Parrish?

  And it's like an anchor.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  It becomes an anchor, it becomes their ceiling. Right? The second source of confidence is verbal persuasions. We call verbal and social persuasions. It's the feedback we get from other people. You allude to that. "Why do you think you're good at something? Because people have told me that." Here and again lies the bias. Criticism hurts more than praise feels good. So if you just combine mastery experiences where failure hurts more than success feels good, verbal persuasions, criticism hurt more than compliments, over the course of the life cycle, people index toward the pain of their past failures and their criticisms. And they index toward that. And they start living their life in anticipation-

• 43:16Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  -of indexing toward that. Third experience is called vicarious experiences. How do I compare to other people? We judge our abilities relative to other people. But when we see someone effortlessly do better at something we work at, that lowers our confidence, called vicarious learning. And then the fourth source of confidence in the final, it's called physiological states. It's the butterflies in the stomach. Shane, why do you think you're great at interviewing? Because I can feel it. It's a feeling, it's not- But what you come to realize is that the butterflies that you feel when you're interviewing an important person, that you feel great about, that gets you excited, those are the same butterflies that people feel when they choke physiologically. It's the interpretation.

• 43:59Shane Parrish?

  Ah, okay.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  So in aggregate, confidence is, is amalgamation of prior success and failure, what people communicate to us, and whether we're good or bad, how we compare ourselves to others, and then how we feel about what we're doing. So if you want to become great at something, you have to understand if you're- So you talked about people who are way overconfident. Here's what, here's what's known about confidence. If this is your objective skill and ability, measurable, your verbal intelligence, your mathematical intelligence, your skills as a, as a hedge fund manager, a money maker, as a podcast interviewer, here's what I do well. I know how to construct questions. I know how to listen. I know how to follow up. I know this. Here's your skills.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  A little bit of overconfidence is really, is a really good thing. Why? Because that takes those skills and abilities and it elevates them. You see opportunity. You take more risks. You put yourself in more challenging situations when you're a little bit overconfident. Where does it get dangerous?

• 45:01Shane Parrish?

  A lot of overconfidence.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Too overconfident, because that leads to sloppiness, arrogance, laziness, self-delusion, deception, right? So you have to protect confidence. Now, here's what else happens when we lose our confidence. When our confidence is below our ability, we index toward that. So it doesn't matter how many skills and abilities you have, they're going to find a way to that belief. It happens all the time. And what's the primary mechanism of underachievement? People index toward their past failures, they index toward criticism, what other people are going to think about them, because we could- Now, where does this show up? If you look at the data on, on risk-taking in financial professionals, investment professionals,

• 45:46Speaker 00

  what you'll see is a curve that, that diminishes over time. It does the opposite of whom. We lose our risk appetite as we get older. Why is that? The simple answer is, well, I've already made my money, so I don't want to put it at risk. That's not true. What actually happens is we accumulate, even though we, our skills get better, we're better than ever at what we've done, we've also accumulated enough failure that we don't want to feel that way again. So we lose our appetite for risk. This happens across every achievement domain. And so it goes back to the fundamental question is, how do you live at the tail end of the curve? You have to have a playbook for what you're going to do with mistakes and failure, because the four sources of confidence, your prior experiences, the brain is going to experience

• 46:30Speaker 00

  failure more painful than success feels good. Well, you have to use and override, use your agency to flip the script on that. That's why visualization works when it works. That's why self-talk works when it works. Number two, verbal persuasions. You have to decide the degree to which you're going to care what other people think about you, because that becomes your prison. If you go through life over-indexing and caring too much what people think about you, that's your ceiling. Physiological states, if you never want to feel uncomfortable, that's your ceiling. Vicarious experiences, if you are going to spend your life comparing yourself to others and instead of indexing toward your own full potential, that's your ceiling.

• 47:12Shane Parrish?

  You mentioned self-talk. Do positive affirmations work?

• 47:15Speaker 00

  They do. They work when they work, so long as they're not delusional. Now, why do they work? You know, people misunderstand the dynamic between cognition and language. People think that the words I use are a reflection of what I think, that I have a thought and I use words and that word describes my thought. That's not what actually happens. What actually happens, and it's a developmental thing, it happens early in life, language and thought are separate. Right? Like, they think of an infant, right? There's all this, they don't even have language yet, but then they start using words, you know, second, third, fourth year of life. And words are just random. But then words start to reflect thoughts. And then what happens is there's a blending where language and cognition become the same

• 48:00Speaker 00

  thing. That's why certain words are charged with emotion. That's the beauty of a great lyric in music or a great sequence of words. That's why in therapy or even in coaching, you're trying to give people a language that's empowering. When we're young, developmentally, the language that others use becomes our own internal dialogue, typically the parents. So how our parents talk to us becomes how we talk to ourselves or our teachers or our coaches. And if that's not functional and healthy and directionally accretive to success, that becomes our self-talk. And then we talk to our kids that way. And then all of a sudden, it becomes generational trauma or generational excellence.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  So self-talk absolutely matters because of this interaction between language and cognition. Do affirmations work? Yeah. Where do we see this most prominently? In prayer.

• 48:51Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  So think of it this way. This is incredible. So if you think of all the major religions, they've had several thousand years of trial and error to get it right. So whether you believe in God or not, or believe in a religion or not, these are institutions that have had several thousand years to get it right. And what do they all have? They all have prayer as some component of what they do. Why is that? If I sit down to dinner with my children and every night I make them sit around and say something approximating grace, where they simply articulate the words, I, you know, "I'm thankful for the food before me." They're practicing the habit of gratitude.

• 49:29Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  And so what happens in religious tradition is if you articulate the words, a profession of faith, say these words, just say them. I don't care if you believe it. The more you say it, invariably, the randomness of experiences could be like, "Oh, it is true." Then we start to believe the things we say. So self-talk absolutely matters, but not immediately. It doesn't work automatically. It's over the course of time. The process of articulating and using words carefully galvanizes the kinds of beliefs that lead to success, failure, happiness or misery. Yeah.

• 50:03Shane Parrish?

  One of the other things you said that I want to come back to, because I think a lot of people live their life in a way that they don't want to be disliked by other people. And it governs what they do. And so it's fear in a way, you know? But they're letting other people dictate their behavior and their choices. How do we let go of that?

• 50:22Speaker 00

  Well, do you know why that is?

• 50:23Shane Parrish?

  Why?

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Why do you think this? Why do you think most people-

• 50:27Shane Parrish?

  I think there's an evolutionary component to it. So if I have to answer this, I mean, my guess would be that, you know, we grew up in tribes.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:34Shane Parrish?

  Being excommunicated from the tribe meant death.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:37Shane Parrish?

  We evolved over thousands of years with this in mind. You're not part of the tribe, you're out of the tribe. And if you're out of the tribe, you're dead. And so we have this mechanism that we, we hold on to that's rooted in our biology.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And evolutionary psychology, which is another branch of psychology, has done really wonderful research in on packaging this, right? Like that belonging, part of a community is safety, to be excommunicated is death. Now, what happens is through natural selection, the brain does not evolve. Natural selection doesn't work as fast as changes in society. So I always say this to golfers, your game, your, your brain did not evolve for you to be a PGA Tour golfer or hedge fund manager. Your brain did not evolve with the intention of you being a professional investor. Like that, that's not how natural selection worked. It wasn't directional. So you're trying to do a hard thing with an imperfect instrument, which is the human brain. And this is the one thing that separates humans from every other animal on earth is we get to engage in abstract thinking. It's called metacognition, right? The ability to think about your own thinking.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  No, no other creature can do that. You get to think about your thinking and then make adjustments. So the beautiful thing about, about abstract thinking is it gave birth to this idea of forethought. It's, I can actually anticipate. If I want to be comfortable in 10 years, I save my money today. We anticipate a, a potential thing and it governs current behavior. No other creature can do that. That's the good thing is we get to anticipate and plan. Here's the bad thing. Forethought tends to lead to people over indexing to the future. So essentially what we start asking is what if questions? What if I, what if this plane crashes? Oh my God. We know that people who are anxious are, are living the future.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  They create their own anxiety. What if the plane crashes? Portfolio managers, what if I lose all my money? What if I get fired? Golfers, what if, you know, what if I lose my credit? We camp out in the future and we go to worst case scenario. This is one of the weird features about the brain is I had a girl call me, actually, I'll never forget it, the morning of her wedding, the morning of her wedding. She's a friend of mine in college. She's like, I'm so sorry to bother you. I said, no, no, what's going on? I said, shouldn't, aren't you busy today? And she's like, yeah. She goes, she goes, Jill, what if I'm making a mistake? What if he cheats on me? What if he stops loving me? What if, what if? All these, and this is one of the tells, ask people, like, what are the what if questions you ask yourself? And what you come to find is people almost always go to worst case scenario. They bring that future state into the present moment, then they start reacting as if it's real.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  Can't tell you how many hedge fund portfolio managers go through this. They could have made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in their life. They start losing a little money, like, oh my God, what if I get fired? And for some reason, the story is always the same. And so when we talk about the powerful things about the brain, abstract thinking, forethought, hypotheticals, you have to learn how to leverage that to your advantage because the natural human default reactions to another one of the things that pushes us to the middle part of the distribution and, and presents us from, from overachieving. And so when we talk about evolutionary psychology and, and, and, and survival, the reason that I, I talk about forethought and, and abstract thinking is because it emerges at the same

• 53:47Speaker 00

  window of time, which is adolescence and middle school. So what you see out of adolescence.

• 53:54Speaker 02

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• 54:24Speaker 00

  So we get to think in hypotheticals and abstracts. And for the first time in our lives, this happens, every human being everywhere on earth, it's a universality of the human condition, is we ask the most important question in human existence. Who am I? That question doesn't happen with young people because their identity is largely a part of their family. But we start having these, oh, who am I? And that's where this process, Freud identified this process called individuation, which is where we separate from a family identity. And that's where the rebellion occurs, right? Because kids need to answer that question. And then what you also start to see is this need to belong, conformity. You see it all over middle schools and high schools, everywhere in the world.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  I need to be part of this group. I need to wear the right clothes. I need to make the cheerleading team or the football team or whatever. It's that need for belonging. There's two psychological insights that I think are probably the two most important that I've ever come across. And here's one of them. We try on different faces until we find a face of our own. But what drives that for, yeah, for a large middle period of life, middle school, high school, college, even, it's called this extended adolescence, even in the twenties and the thirties, is this idea of I'm trying to find myself, right? And this used to be these, you know, go west, young man, and, and Jack Kerouac, you know, the open road. This used to be a healthy process where you go, the process of self-discovery was the

• 55:54Speaker 00

  search, the travel, the moratorium. There's this great line in the movie, A River Runs Through It, where, where one of the sons comes home, home from college and goes to his father, who's a, who's a, played by Tom Skerritt. It's like, so son, you've had four years of college. What do you want to do? He's like, it's like, oh, I don't know. It's like, but you've had four years to know. And that's what college is supposed to be. Colleges, if you think about the, the university, the etymology of the university is the word universe. The university was first born to be a repository of everything in the known universe. So it was a place you could come and there was civics. There's mathematics. There was theater. There was astronomy.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  There was, there was language and you can come to a place of learning and the vehicle of that learning was critical thought and the pursuit of truth. And so this need for belonging is born out of evolution, natural selection, manifests most, most pronounced in adolescence and middle school. And then in the healthy identity, you get to this place called an achieved identity, where you've tried on different faces. You've done a search, you've done exploration, you've tried different things, you've taken some risks. And then you finally come to this moment where it's like, huh, I know who I am. I know the real me. That's not the real me. I, I won't participate in that. This is who I am.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  And then what happens is you can then, you know, what, what Eric Erickson says is, when we talk about, about finding a partner to love in life, it goes psychological intimacy. You have all these people trying to find a partner. What Erickson says is you can't give yourself to someone if you don't have self to give.

• 57:38Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  If you haven't developed a full sense of yourself, what are you giving to the person? Right? So that's what we talk about, like work on yourself, develop a healthy sense of self. Who am I? Like solve for that and then go forth, you know, to your ultimate destiny in life. The second most important question.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  It's something I think about. Usually you have an idea, it's like a song and you listen to it for a little while and then, yeah, I don't like it, I'm onto a new song. This is a question that has never left me because I see it every day in my work. It shows up all the time. And it's not even a question, it's an observation, a very keen observation by Sigmund Freud. We spend our adult lives undoing the debris of childhood. So just pause there for a minute and think about your life. When you ask somebody, why do you do what they do? On a surface level, they're going to give all these answers. It's like, oh, because I love it. Oh, no. If you actually have deep conversations with them, what you come to realize is the

• 58:40Speaker 00

  fuel itself, the motivation is rooted in experiences that they had in their youth. Lance Armstrong. Why? What gave Lance Armstrong the fuel to ride his bike while he had cancer? What was he trying to overcome or solve for? Talk to him or read his book, the trauma of his youth. Tiger Woods, trauma in youth. They didn't want black kids playing golf. They made fun of them. That's the fuel. Now, one of the things I often have to say, your parents did too good of a job. You're too well adjusted, right? But if, but that's not the case for most of us. Most of us are trying to solve for things that happened during those formative years. Here's where it gets dangerous. I had a, a Wall Street guy who I was working with.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  He was, at the time, he was late 40s, had made five, six, 700 million dollars. He was miserable. He was married with two kids. He was up at 4:00 AM every day, worked relentlessly. His family was falling apart. Relationships weren't great, massive insecurity. And I'll never forget this, through our work together, it was in our second year, he told me this story about a girlfriend he had in high school. He grew up, my client grew up really poor with a brother, was like a drug addict, in a, in a, in a very sort of low income, low SES family, dysfunctional parents, drug addict brother, and then there was him.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  At high school, he had a girlfriend. She was the it girl of the town. Her mother, if I remember correctly, the mother drove a white Jaguar. She was on the tennis team, country club. So imagine a scenario where, you know, lower, you know, lower SES class gets to date the it girl. And that validates you as a person, right? Because nothing else in your life is validating you. Then the time comes, almost like the, the archetypal movie, The Notebook, and she breaks up with him. And of course, he's like, but why? And the answer is the story, we've seen them millions, like, you know, at the end of the day, like, mom and dad are never going to let this happen. You don't fit. Like, we don't belong together. It broke his heart.

• 1:00:40Shane Parrish?

  We come from different worlds.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Come from different worlds. Can imagine the kind of pain because that, that validates what he always thought about himself, like, I'm a loser. I'm never going to get out of this mess. So what do you do at that point? Essentially, what he told himself is no one's ever going to hurt me again because I'm too poor.

• 1:00:58Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  And he went to Wall Street and he worked 20 hours a day and he was relentless. And even people who worked with him, it's like, that guy's animal, relentless. And I start working with him because he knew something was broken. And it was his identity, by the way, that. So what happened was, going back to Freud's observation, we spend our adult lives undoing the debris of our childhood. He had never solved for that, even after the hundreds of millions of dollars. And we finally traced back that story. It was catharsis. And I remember having to say to him, I said, hey,

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  You don't get it to over. She's never coming back. And oh, by the way, look at your life.

• 1:01:31Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  And from that day forward, I have a text on my phone. He had sent to me a couple of years ago. He's like, his family was intact. His wife loved him again because he stopped trying to solve for the pain of an 18 year old self. But most people never do the work to do that. Most people never do the work to go into their, you know, their psychological sellers and try to understand the formative experience that put them on their path. And what happens is if you don't do that, you spend the rest of your life compensating for childhood insecurity. You make yourself miserable. You make everyone else miserable and you never become the fullest version of yourself. So what I would ask everyone to do at a certain point in their

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  life is, you know, to what degree do you spend your life undoing the debris of childhood? As you look at kids, and this is, by the way, there's a whole nother level of dysfunction. And that's the billionaire class and those kids, which I've also met a lot of them, sort of the trust fund kids, the heirs and heiresses who've never had to earn money. You want to talk about an absolute disaster set up for life. It's because they never learned self reliance. It imposes an identity. And so they never actually become themselves. They have this, what's called the identity foreclosures. Like this is who you are. You're a Thurston. And all of a sudden, they have crises later in life when they finally wake up like, I never chose this life. So the poverty path or the wealth path lead to the same kind

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  of dysfunction because there's no self discovery in the identity. The best identity path is you do your own work. You try on different faces and then you make a choice to who you want to become. But the convergence of those two observations, number one, we spend our adult lives undoing the debris of childhood. And that debris can come in the form of extreme wealth. It could come in the form of extreme poverty. It could come in the form of trauma. It could be come in the form of, of, of living in a country club and being fragile and everywhere in between. And then the secondary thing is when you finally come to that awakening in that moment, yes, who am I? Who do I want to be? That opens everything up. And, and

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  that defines most of, most of humanity, almost in every domain.

• 1:03:49Shane Parrish?

  That's a beautiful way to end this. We always end with the same question though, which is what is success for you?

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  Success for me is, I think, a little bit different because I was successful pretty young in life. You know, I had a real period of time I graduated from Emory University, first in my class, from the top of my class. I was a young professor at Rollins College, the youngest professor at the time. I was one of the youngest to ever get tenure. I had a bestselling book. I was being celebrated by the, the sports world, Sports Illustrated. I had two jet skis. I had a house and an apartment materially. In the veneers of my life, I had one life, right? And I went to, I had my friends from undergrad, from the University of Florida. We had all gone to an Irish pub and just catching up with each

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  other in life. One of my friend's girlfriends, who's now his wife, and we're all still really, really close. She's like, you're killing it. I want you to. She's like, we're so proud of you. She must be so happy. And Shane, it was like one of those moments that we were here, the record scratch. Oh my God, I'm not that happy. I'm not. I have all of this stuff. And I have all the superlatives. My life doesn't feel the way that people, the way that it looks. And even, even, you know, the articles, people writing about me, young, you know, you know, all these relationships, flying in jets. It looked great. I wasn't happy. So what I did is I, I went to the dean at Rollins College. I said, I need to take a sabbatical, which I had earned at the time. And so I went out to Austin, Texas,

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  and I got a 1-1 unfurnished. And I, and I really needed to solve for this case. And what came out of that period of moratorium and self exploration, what I did is I went to a bookstore and I started buying books. You know, who went through this was actually Michael Crichton, the great author and the great movie creator, Michael Crichton. He wrote a great book called Travels, which, which he articulated his own life journey. How do you become Michael Crichton? So he went through what I went through. It's like, you have all this material success, but you're not happy. So I went to a bookstore in Austin, Texas. I spent, I think at the time, it's like $400, $500 on books. But I made it a point to buy books in everything outside of my area of expertise. I love books. Just anything. And I loaded the apartment up with books. And I got privileges at the University

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  of Texas because I was an academic, they gave me a little office. And I spent four months in Austin, Texas, back when Austin was weird, right? The catchphrase of Austin, Texas in the 90s was keep Austin weird. It's where all the artists and creatives and poets and musicians went to, to have a little bit of a hippie journey. And I wanted to immerse myself in that culture. I was hanging out with a bunch of comedians, one of my best friends were at the time, they were standup comics. And what came out of that was my self understanding that there are essentially four things that make me happy. Number one is working out. And I don't look like it, but I work out every day. I just love the process of working out and fitness. Number two is books. Working out doesn't cost money. You know what else doesn't cost money? If you have a library card or books.

• 1:06:46Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  Number three is having really good conversations with smart people. This, like, I could do this all day, every day. Right? That makes me happy. And then the fourth one's a little bit indulgent. It's, I love hitting golf balls. But like not playing on it, like, like the, it's therapeutic for me, getting lost, just hitting a ball at the repetition, almost like, you know, at the end of hitting balls for an hour, it's cathartic and therapeutic and it clears my brain. Those are the books, conversations, working out and golf balls cost no money. So what I learned is unfortunately for me, more money doesn't lead to more happiness. A certain level, like I want to be comfortable.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  And by the way, I love abundance for people who love money. So I want everyone to make as much money as they can, if that's important to you. What's important to me is if I have those four things, if hot water comes out of the shower, when I turn it on in the morning, for me, a hotel is, you know, a night, it's a bed, it's four walls. And it's like, I don't need more. Incrementally, more stuff doesn't lead to more happiness for me. So happiness for me is essentially those things. And then I added a fifth, it's raising, raising kids who are resilient, who are not fragile, who want to be global citizens, who are lifelong learners and who the expression, they're going to have the full expression of their talents

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  in life and do what I hope to do, which is on some level, be a light in the world and the darkness, elevate others. And I know it sounds corny and cheesy, but on some level, you know, make, make the world, you know, a little bit better place, ease other suffering because you can, and make the world a better place. That's, and that's my definition.

• 1:08:34Shane Parrish?

  That's beautiful. Thank you.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  Thank you. I appreciate the time, man. This is awesome.