18 Lessons From 500 Episodes - Sam Harris, Jocko Willink & Alex Hormozi

To celebrate 500 episodes on Modern Wisdom, I broke down some of my favourite lessons, insights and quotes from the last 4 and a half years. Expect to learn why having no role models can be an advantage, how discipline eats motivation for breakfast, why you should be training for the difficult, why success in pursuit of happiness can be self-defeating, why fame makes you weak, how an obsession with productivity is just immortality by another name, what I learned about negativity biases from Margaret Thatcher, the importance of letting go of successful habits for new ones and much more... Sponsors: Get £250 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #motivation #discipline #fame - 00:00 Intro 01:53 Discipline Eats Motivation for Breakfast 04:22 Absurd Ideological Beliefs are Shows of Fealty 06:12 You Are Training for the Difficult 11:03 Achieving Happiness Through Success is Self-Defeating 15:03 Out-Groups are More Popular than In-Groups 18:07 Productivity Obsession is Immortality by a Different Name 23:00 You Can’t Control the Mind with the Mind 24:50 Fame Ain’t What it Used to Be 31:29 The Negative Bias is No Longer Serving Us 35:41 What Got You Here Won’t Get You There 39:42 Romantic Desirability Has Almost No Predictive Power for Long-Term Relationship Happiness 46:04 Be Careful, You Can’t Control the Perceptions of Other People 50:34 When You Get Bored with the Process, You Negatively Change the Trajectory 53:38 The Reverse Role-Model 56:41 Your Weirdness is your Competitive Advantage 57:55 The Moment-to-Moment of Almost Anything is a Grind 1:02:05 Accept that All Your Heroes are Full of Shit 1:04:46 The Expectation Effect - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You can't really fake motivation, no matter how motivated you feel. If you don't go and do the thing, that wasn't motivation. And on the other side, if you don't feel motivated at all, and yet you do go and do the thing, that is motivation.

• 0:15Chris Williamson?

  Bonjour friends, welcome back to the show. It is episode 500, which is definitely a number that I didn't think that we would be getting to. The last few, all of the last year and a half has been insane, but the last six months has been particularly ridiculous. So I wanted to say thank you to everybody that supports the show and supports me. It's an incredibly small operation. It's me and video guy Dean and assistant Ben, and then some people that we rely on to do other stuff. And that's pretty much it. And I think this year we'll maybe put out somewhere in the region of 300 videos on YouTube, 150 episodes.

• 0:55Chris Williamson?

  And the support that we get from you guys and the encouragement and the involvement in really smart discussions is, it's phenomenal. The messages that I get gas me up more than any amount of plays or buttons and plaques from YouTube ever could. So yeah, thank you. Today I'm going to go through a selection of some of the best lessons that I've picked up from the last few years. Some of them are new ones since the last time that I did one of these. And some of them are ones that I forgot about last time and I'm just deciding to add in now. Some of them I've learned from the show and others have just been things that I've picked up from listening to other bits or research or just life in general. If you are signed up to the newsletter, some of these might be familiar.

• 1:38Chris Williamson?

  And if you're not signed up to the newsletter and you like what we do here at Modern Wisdom, go to chriswillx.com/books and you can sign up, get a free reading list with 100 books that I think that you would love. And you'll get signed up to the newsletter as well. Let's get into it. First one, this is actually a lesson from Jocko Willink that isn't even out yet. So this is an exclusive because this episode doesn't go out until next week. But this is discipline eats motivation for breakfast. So I was listening to Jocko on Sam Harris and Sam was talking about the fact that you can't fake bravery as an emotion, because you can fake being angry or you can fake being upset or whatever. But if you fake being brave when you're terrified, that is what bravery is.

• 2:22Chris Williamson?

  Doing the thing in spite of terror literally is bravery or courage. And I suggested to Jocko that perhaps there's something similar to do with motivation, that people over complicate motivation because they believe there's some sort of optimal mental state that they're supposed to be in when they feel like they're going to do it or they want to do it or whatever. But you can't really fake motivation, no matter how motivated you feel. If you don't go and do the thing, that wasn't motivation. And on the other side, if you don't feel motivated at all, and yet you do go and do the thing, that is motivation. And Jocko agreed and he said, that's why I prefer discipline to motivation. Motivation is fleeting, it comes and goes. Discipline is always there.

• 3:05Chris Williamson?

  You don't need to want to go to the gym or meditate or walk your dog or have a difficult conversation with your partner. You simply need to do the thing. And by doing the thing, you shortcut the need for motivation entirely. I mean, that's almost everybody that I know that is incredibly motivated or that people would see as being motivated. When you actually look quite closely, it's probably not. It's discipline masquerading as motivation. And motivation can come and you can use it. You've had the right mix of songs in the morning or the right pharmacological blend of caffeine and CBD or whatever else it is that you use. That's great. Like, take advantage of it if you want to get some extra wind in your sails.

• 3:47Chris Williamson?

  But the point is that what you're relying on should be something which is more replicable, that's more under your control. And motivation is super, super fleeting, like Jocko says, so.

• 3:58Chris Williamson?

  I just really love that discipline eats motivation for breakfast. And the fact is that you can use it when it's there. But if it's not, you don't need to worry because you know that you've got something to rely on. And that's where learning about discomfort, leaning into it, becoming accustomed to doing things even when you don't want to do them helps so much. Because if you only do things when you want to do them, you're going to put yourself at the mercy of the world. Next one. This is Gwinda Bogle, who I absolutely adore. And if you don't follow him on Twitter, you should go and follow him because he's outstanding. His Substack's amazing as well. Absurd ideological beliefs are shows of fealty. An absurd ideological belief is actually a form of tribal signaling.

• 4:40Chris Williamson?

  It signals that one's ideology is more important to them than reason itself, than truth, sanity and reality. To one's allies, this is an oath of unwavering loyalty. To one's enemies, this is a threat display. It's not always about what's true. It's often about how does this make me look to my tribal compatriots and to my enemies? So this is one of the most interesting things that's made me realize about how the internet works and Twitter, that a lot of the time, people aren't saying a thing because they believe in a thing. It's like wearing a badge of honor. It's an identifier to the rest of their group. It is a threat display to the people that they don't agree with. And the more extreme and the more ridiculous some of these beliefs are, when you look at

• 5:25Chris Williamson?

  them with a rational perspective, you say, how could somebody believe this thing? Well, you're presuming that the reason that they're saying that they believe it is because they actually believe it. If you go one step removed and you think maybe what they're doing is they're saying this because they want everybody else to realize that they believe it and such, it identifies them within a particular in-group or out-group. Everything kind of changes. It becomes a lot more about signaling. It becomes a lot more about. Just seeing what the internet interprets your actions as being, or what another group interprets your actions as being. And it kind of explains why people can hold such ridiculous ideological beliefs, simply because it's tribal signalling.

• 6:11Chris Williamson?

  Next one, this is Zach Talander, my new roommate. You are training for the difficult. So this is Karakos Grisly, who is, if you don't know, I think he might be Greek. He is a incredibly large man that lifts very heavy things and has become kind of a super meme, I guess, on the internet. And what Zach's talking about here is Karakos was once asked why he trains. And he trains incredibly heavy. It's a very unorthodox way of training. And he was asked why it is that he trains so hard. And he said that he was training for the difficult. And Zach dragged this out a little bit and said that he thinks creativity stems from difficulty.

• 6:55Chris Williamson?

  So if you search for difficulty in life, in the processes that you're doing, then the creativity will find you. And the thing that I really resonated with was the difficult is going to come in life. No matter what it is that you're trying to do, no matter how optimized you've got your day and your life, the difficult is going to arrive. You want to be able to greet it like an old friend. You want to invite it through the door and then lean into it because you know that this is exactly why you've been training. You don't want the difficult to come in and for you to not be prepared. It's the same as the motivation versus discipline thing. You want to be able to have something steadfast that you can rely on. And if you're training at a five and life can sometimes come in at a 10, you're not going to be sufficiently prepared. Now, there's some stuff to do with creativity in here about the fact that

• 7:41Chris Williamson?

  overclocking how hard it is that you train allows you to see things that other people don't see. So Zach uses this example of Jack White from The White Stripes. Might be getting this wrong, but this guy who is a keyboardist singer and guitarist, he often makes his sets more difficult than he needs to when he's on stage. So he doesn't have guitar picks on his mic stand. He actually has to run to the back of the stage to get them and pick them up. He doesn't have his different instruments nearby. He has to sprint around the stage. He has other restrictions that he places on himself when he's writing songs and when he's trying. I don't think he allows himself to get new guitar strings and stuff like that. The reason being that the increase in difficulty forces him to have an extra degree of creativity.

• 8:26Chris Williamson?

  It allows him to see things that other people don't see because the stimulus that's coming in is another one. Here's something that I didn't write down actually that relates to this and it's a Jack Butcher one. And this is so important. Jack is a guy that created visualized value. So if you've ever seen those white on black images that are kind of everywhere on the internet at the moment, Naval tends to share them a lot. And it's a sort of a geometric pattern and a particular type of font. And I asked him about where his creativity comes from. And he gave this really interesting answer. He's a graphic designer by trade. His background is in graphic design. So you would think he'd be very seduced by fonts and colors and making things look pretty.

• 9:07Chris Williamson?

  And what he ended up doing was constraining all of the things that he usually would rely on as a graphic designer. So it was one color, white on black. It was one font that he'd pre decided. It was one particular type of drawing style, this sort of geometric pattern. It looks like Space Invaders from the eighties. And the reason that he did that was that by constraining the degrees of freedom that he has in certain areas of creativity that he decided in advance didn't make a difference. What it forced him to do was get his creativity really dialed in and maximized in the area that he thought did make a difference. So that was his messaging. How insightful is the visual representation of the quote that I'm talking about?

• 9:51Chris Williamson?

  How well can I display something? What's my selection of the concepts that I'm going to put out there? How good is that? And that to me is such a useful way to. It's like an essentialist's mindset when it comes to content creation or really doing anything that you're producing. Where can I restrict the degrees of freedom so that I don't need to make this decision again? And where can I focus on the highest point of contribution that is actually going to make the difference? So for us with the channel, we have one colour for the font, we have one colour for the clips, we have one font style that we use, we have one layout that we particularly use. There's a reduced number of degrees of freedom, which allows us to focus on the stuff that matters. What does it look like?

• 10:36Chris Williamson?

  What does it say? What's the titling? What's the design? What's the image that we go for? And it just makes things easier. And also, obviously downstream from this, you end up with a kind of a signature style, which is pretty cool, you know, having branding, branding that looks like something recognisable is pretty important. And that's super easy to do by restricting the degrees of freedom and then allows you to have more bandwidth to be able to focus on the stuff which genuinely makes a difference. All right, next up, achieving happiness through success is self-defeating. So this is a Alex Hormozi tweet that he came up with originally, and then I repurposed it into something that I've been thinking about for ages. If you haven't checked out Alex's stuff, I highly recommend you go and follow him on

• 11:19Chris Williamson?

  Instagram, he's phenomenal, he's a super smart, insightful guy. There's also an episode that we did with him, which you can watch somewhere up here. So one of the most common tensions that I talk about and I see is this balance that people have between a desire for success and a desire to feel like we're enough. So success is strange because presumably we want success because we think that a more successful life will bring us more happiness and more meaning and more fulfillment. But the problem is that we sacrifice the thing that we want, which is happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, success. We sacrifice the thing we want, happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, which is success.

• 12:01Chris Williamson?

  So failure can make you miserable, but I don't know that success can make you happy. And high performers often have this dynamic where they're, as a young child, their parents want them to do well, so they encourage their child to do well by praising them when they succeed and then criticizing them when they fail. And then what the child learns is that praise and admiration is contingent on succeeding. So. The, as they go into an adult, this lesson turns into, I am only worthy of love and acceptance and belonging if I succeed. And they're prepared to outwork and out hustle and outgrind pretty much everybody else because they're driven not just toward a life that they want, but they're

• 12:40Chris Williamson?

  running away from a life that they fear. And success and progress, it dissolves, ameliorates those feelings of insufficiency that they have. So, success and progress have been prioritized above everything else. And I don't deny that a lot of high performers probably do love the work that they do. And a lot of them will be driven by this well-balanced and simple desire to maximize their time on this planet. But if I was to place a bet, I think that the majority of high performers are driven by fears of insufficiency rather than a holistic desire to be better. And I think that people that are high achievers, on average, are more miserable than the average person. So, what does it mean that the people we most admire are the

• 13:24Chris Williamson?

  ones with the least desirable internal states? If the pursuit of success is in an effort to make us happy, and in the pursuit of success, we make ourselves miserable, why not just shortcut the entire process and be happy? Is that, I don't know if that's possible, because external accolades, they genuinely actually count for a lot. They, we need to have some degree of external material success that makes us feel validated and respected and satiate our desire for status and stuff. But I don't think that external success will fill an internal void. So, this is the insufficiency adaptation that I've bro-science. So, if your drive comes from

• 14:08Chris Williamson?

  a fear of insufficiency, and you continue to disprove those fears with success in the real world, and yet, the feeling of insufficiency persists, what makes you think that the answer to this problem is more success? There's no clean answer here, obviously. The world is messy, and we're hopelessly irrational. But you don't need to let go of all success goals. You do need to spend some time working out whether there's a shorter route to the life that you want by removing obstacles rather than just pressing harder on the accelerator. So, I mean, that quote, I can't remember what it was originally about. It might have been to do with money, I think. But, we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing which is supposed to get it. Happiness for success. I really, really like that.

• 14:53Chris Williamson?

  If you're hoping that your success is going to make you happy and in the pursuit of your success, you make your life miserable.

• 14:59Chris Williamson?

  What are we doing here, you know? Next one. Where are we? Out groups are more popular than in groups. So this is from Scott Alexander. The oldest pattern in human history is here's a problem and here's a bunch of people who are different than us. Let's blame it on them. So I think it was around about the 2012 US election. They were looking at the voting habits of Democrats and Republicans. And up until about 2012, when they surveyed them, what they found out was that Democrats preferred their party to the conservative party. And the reverse was true as well. But in 2012, there was a flip and people hated the other party more than they loved their own.

• 15:42Chris Williamson?

  So you could see a lot of the votes that have occurred since then as kind of protest votes. It's you. It's you voting not for another, not you voting for a same, or it's you not voting for an out group, not you voting for an in group. And that is kind of dangerous. And it's also one of the ways that you can quite easily spot charlatans on the internet or grifters or people who are disingenuous, or at the very least are weaponizing particular types of dynamics to encourage you to behave in a way that you might not actually want to. If all of the time what you're hearing from someone online, I mean, this is almost all

• 16:25Chris Williamson?

  of the internet at the moment, is someone pointing a finger at another group of people and saying they're the problem. This is why we need to stick together so that they don't take over. Hang on. How fragile is it that the reason that your in group is bound together is over the mutual hatred or distaste of an out group? That doesn't work. That's not going to work very long. It's simply too fragile, right? It's going to fracture and break apart because all it takes is one person within the in-group to identify another person who's on the edge of the in-group to now be the next out-group, and they're going to get shaved off. And then the next person's going to get shaved off. This is the purity spiral. It's kind of the ridiculousness,

• 17:06Chris Williamson?

  I guess, of the intersectional ideology that, I mean, we did this video not long ago about white gay privilege, that being gay, if you're white, is no longer enough to be a part of an oppressed class, that you actually need to have multiple intersecting grievances, right? But the same thing happens on the other side as well. Like, you can see this on the right, that people point at a group of, like, "These are the people that are coming to take over the whatever." And that should give everybody pause. Do I agree with this person, or do I have a sense of affinity with this creator, this rhetoric,

• 17:47Chris Williamson?

  this ideology, this group, this movement, whatever, because I genuinely care about them? Or is it because my fear, my innate tribal fear of the out-group has been weaponized, and I've been limbically hijacked, so that I'm now focused on them? That's a very interesting dynamic, and that Scott Alexander thing is bang on the money. Next one. Productivity obsession is immortality by a different name.

• 18:15Chris Williamson?

  This is Oliver Berkman, who wrote 4,000 Weeks, fantastic book. If you're into productivity, but have kind of transcended the autistic side of it, and are now moving into a more holistic view of productivity, this is fantastic. This quote is, "The drive to become more efficient at all costs usually has, consciously or otherwise, some kind of fantasy endpoint, where you're able to do everything. Everything that you could think of, everything that people could demand of you, everything you feel obliged to do, you could do it." That's really just eternal life by another means. One option is to live forever. Another option is to do an unlimited amount in the time you've got. They both amount to a superhuman

• 18:55Chris Williamson?

  approach. That's Oliver Berkman from 4,000 Weeks. I really like this idea, the fact that...

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the people who, like me, get seduced by the idea of productivity are doing it because they feel like getting more done in less time is going to give them a greater sense of satisfaction. And there is no end point that they've actually defined when enough is enough. The same thing happens with money, right? Going back to Holmose's tweet earlier on, the same thing happens with money. People don't give themselves a set amount that they're going to be happy at when they're able to do it. And productivity can be the same. It's like, look, how much work do you want to get out per week? Is it this many hours? Is it this many studies? Is it this many podcasts? Is it this many videos? Is it this many whatever?

• 19:49Chris Williamson?

  And what happens if you're able to, you manage to ratchet and dial in your productivity system until you're happy to do that? What happens then? Well, for the most part, what you do is you go, well, look at all of this opportunity that I've opened up now. I can fill it with some more work. And you go, right, okay. That is a never-ending way. It's a treadmill that you're going to stay on, and it is a way that you will continue to fill all of your spare time until you can't fill it anymore, which will be when you're dead. So I think a big insight here is you need to set yourself a goal of what would a productivity endpoint look like? The same thing is really smart to do for money. Morgan Housel says the number one first goal that you need to make sure of when you're

• 20:34Chris Williamson?

  setting yourself financial targets is to stop the goalposts from moving. Every time that you earn a little bit more money, you move the goalposts further away from you and then want to earn more money, that is a never-ending chase to continue to just acquire more stuff, work harder, do whatever. And this doesn't matter whether you want to do your work or not. The goal of life should be to maximize your freedom to do the things that you want all the time. The number one advantage that you have with productivity, when you combine that with financial freedom, is that you can wake up on a morning and say, I can do whatever I want to do today. And if there are some things that I don't necessarily fully want to do, I can get them done in a small amount of time so they impact my day in a minor way. There's another element of this that Douglas Murray fell in love with.

• 21:20Chris Williamson?

  Productivity dysmorphia. So this was Anna Codriarado and she came up with this idea, which is the same way of body dysmorphia. Productivity dysmorphia doesn't allow us to see the fruits of our labour on a daily basis. So you spend all day working and you're pretty productive, maybe you get distracted, maybe you don't, but whatever, you've spent the whole day working and you get to the end of the day and you look back and you feel like you've done nothing. You can't remember what you did. You're very disappointed with your successes and your failures and whatever it is that you achieved and you're driven the next day to go and do even more. And it's just a cool way of looking at the fact that we have this warped view of what

• 22:03Chris Williamson?

  we do on a daily basis, especially people that are knowledge workers. You look back at the day and you don't have a bucket of widgets, right? This is the stuff that was to do. This is what's being done and this is the stuff that was done. It's not like when your dad was a mechanical engineer and he was cranking stuff, right? And he could show you a car at the end of the day. Like you very well could have worked all day on your emails and gone to bed with more unread emails than when you woke up. That's not typically the way that work is to be done. And yet, productivity dysmorphia, all of this combines together to give us a very misaligned view of what we've done on a daily basis. So productivity obsession is immortality by a different name. Pick yourself an end goal in terms of what you would like to be able to achieve from your

• 22:48Chris Williamson?

  productivity system and then productivity dysmorphia, just make sure that you're trying to be as rational as possible when it comes to actually choosing what you're doing and reflecting on the amount of work that you've achieved in a day. Next one, you cannot control the mind with the mind. So this was the first question that I asked Andrew Huberman and it's the essence, I think, of his work.

• 23:12Chris Williamson?

  Pretty much until he came around, I'd always thought that issues that I had internally, emotional states,

• 23:24Chris Williamson?

  lack of ability to focus, lack of ability to sleep, to rest, to switch off, to switch on, all of that, was something that I kind of needed to, I don't know, like clinch my mind around, you know, before you're going to do a big lift and you're doing that. And he highlights the fact that the vast majority of the reasons that your mind is acting the way that it is, is because of an external stimulus, or at least something that you've done in the body. So it just reminded me that, look, if my mind is a little bit messy, if my thoughts are muddled, if my sleep isn't too good, rather than trying to think my way out of the problem, I should probably just go back to, am I eating right, sleeping right, getting enough water, training, getting sunlight exposure?

• 24:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay, then what are the things I'm eating? What's my supplementation look like? Like, have I spent enough time with friends? All of that stuff. None of this really involves trying to think your way out of the problem. You cannot control the mind with the mind, you have to control it with the body. It's so much more empowering, right? Because

• 24:29Chris Williamson?

  all of our internal processes are pretty opaque to us. Even the best meditators in the world, they can't see their own minds. They have a clearer window into them, but this, you go to the gym, you lift some weights, you know that you've done it. There's nothing anywhere near as concrete when it comes to the mental processes that you've got going on. So yeah, you cannot control the mind with the mind. Great one. Next up, fame ain't what it used to be. This is a blog post that I talk about all the time from Kyle Leshenroda, and it's called, "What Do You Want to Want?" This insight is probably my favorite one from the lot. And he said, "Do you want to be someone or do something? The two aren't mutually exclusive, of course, but they're a lot less cohesive than you might think.

• 25:14Chris Williamson?

  Fame ain't what it used to be. Traditionally, people became famous because they achieved something great, maybe even heroic. Because fame was such a powerful signal, we all started wanting it. Who wouldn't? But this was the downfall of fame. People stopped wanting to do something and started wanting to be someone, regardless of why. The goal is not to deserve fame just to be famous. The goal is not to deserve fame just to be famous. Once upon a time, fame was bestowed on those who earned it, such as the heroic general who risked his life in battle, or the famous doctor who restored sight to the poor and afflicted. It was heroic deeds that made one famous. Today, fame is only granted to those who seek it. And that's from the New Philosopher magazine.

• 25:58Chris Williamson?

  So fame was, it's been separated from what it was supposed to indicate. It used to be a trustworthy signal of honour, or courage, or creativity, or hard work, or anything else. Why is it that we chase it now so much more? It's because modern fame is the promise of obligation-free status, right? It gives you the opportunity to take advantage of all of the brilliant things of fame without any of the hard bits of having to earn the right to be famous. If you could shortcut the work bit and just get the reward bit, then why wouldn't you? And obviously, this gets fed into by the rapid ascension that we see of people becoming famous.

• 26:43Chris Williamson?

  Like, if you can be famous for drinking juice while skateboarding down the street on TikTok, or being picked out of obscurity to go on to reality TV, why wouldn't you try and game that system? You know, why wouldn't you look at someone? It's kind of like a lottery or the Hunger Games.

• 27:01Chris Williamson?

  It's pretty much like that. If, you know, if you don't like the idea of working hard at doing something, or even not that you don't like the idea, it's simply that you see other people who have been given this obligation-free status, why wouldn't you lean into it? Well, hang on, he didn't work for his fame. I believe that I work harder than him, so maybe I can get some of that free fame, and I'll dial my work back as well. And one of the reasons why this is so dangerous is because when someone becomes inflated with fame, everybody else has it in our power to deflate him. "Other people's heads are a wretched place to become the home of a man's true happiness." That's Arthur Schopenhauer.

• 27:46Chris Williamson?

  And basically, to become famous is to volunteer to be a scapegoat, because you're going to be treated like a king until you screw up or people get tired of you, and then you're sacrificed at the altar. You give the public someone to hate altogether. And when you put this kind of power into the hands of people around us... Our entire sense of self becomes an abstraction, right? We have to check Twitter engagement in order to measure our self-worth instead of the action that we took. Like abstracting what, how you feel about yourself and putting it in the hands of other people, just generally, that's a bad idea. Roll it forward into a modern era with social media and tribal signaling and shows of

• 28:30Chris Williamson?

  fealty and absurd ideological beliefs like Gwyneth mentioned earlier on, that it is such a risky position to be in. You're checking Twitter engagement to measure self-worth instead of the action that you took. This has always been my problem with, or one of the reasons why I think that bodybuilding shows are so, you have to have such a particular type of mindset to be able to go into that competition and come out of it feeling healthy, because your entire success within that is an abstraction, right? You could objectively be bigger, leaner, with more conditioning and better proportions or whatever than the person stood next to you, but it's so subjective.

• 29:15Chris Williamson?

  The success criteria for winning a bodybuilding show is so subjective. It's not powerlifting. That's 300 kilos. Can you pick it up? Yes. Did he? No. Right, you win. It's nowhere near as cut and dry, and that's one of the reasons, because bodybuilding is kind of like a microcosm of what we're talking about here. Our sense of self-worth is abstracted into other people's heads, and then we measure our sense of self-worth by checking their reaction, not by looking at the actions that we took. And again, like I said before, like fame can make you happy if what brought you fame also brings you happiness. What that means is that if the fame were to diminish, you would still be happy.

• 29:57Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the time, people are doing things that they're only happy to do as long as they continue to receive fame for it. So a great question to ask yourself here, if you're considering a career that you think might be born a little bit out of status is, look, if I got zero status for this, if I got absolutely no fame, would I continue to do it? I mean, that's a pretty good marker, that the thing that you're doing is internally generated and not something that you need to worry about. But there's a quote from John Boyd, that is this fighter pilot, super disagreeable fighter pilot who used to have, he was in the...

• 30:32Chris Williamson?

  50s, 60s, 70s, like the golden era of fighter pilots. And he used to put cigars out on his superiors ties. Like this, like crazy, real angry swearing American dude. And he says, to be somebody or to do something in life, there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision to be or to do, which way will you go? And it's the same thing again, like, do you want to be somebody or do you want to do something? And that's not to say that by doing something, you can't be somebody. But being somebody without having done anything, that the, that's the reason that people have a particular sense of distaste for like dynasty wealth and trust fund kids.

• 31:17Chris Williamson?

  We don't, there is something in, especially in a meritocracy, inherently uncomfortable about people that do that. So yeah, do you want to be somebody or do you want to do something? Next one, the negativity bias is no longer serving us. So this is Roy Baumeister, who was on the show a couple of weeks ago. And this had nothing to do with anything that we spoke about, which was the social psychology of sexual interactions. This is from a different book of his. And he said, life has to win every day. Death only has to win once. So the negativity bias, which you may be familiar with, is the fact that bad things seem to affect us more than good things. Right? So you can get 100 compliments and one criticism and you will happen to remember the one criticism

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  more than the compliments unless you've done a ton of mindfulness. When emotions of equal intensity occur, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on our psychological state than neutral or positive things. Something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. And the best example of this that I got was Michael Malice told me about this. He's a fan of Margaret Thatcher and has been doing a ton of research about her era recently. And he told me about the Brighton Hotel bombing, which happened on October 12th, 1984. Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet Ministers were targeted by the IRA at a Conservative Party conference. A long-delay time bomb was planted in the hotel by Patrick McGee before the Prime Minister

• 32:45Chris Williamson?

  Thatcher and her Cabinet arrived at the hotel. Although Thatcher narrowly escaped the blast, five people were killed, including a Conservative Member of Parliament, and 31 were injured. After the event, the IRA released a statement. "Mrs Thatcher will narrowly realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today, we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always. Today, we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always." And this is the fundamental asymmetry, right, of all anxiety.

• 33:25Chris Williamson?

  The reason that we fear change and new things, because... Yeah, sure, the new thing might make life a bit better, which would be good, but it also might make us a lot more dead, which would be very bad. That quote, and that, "We only have to get lucky once, you have to be lucky every day", is fantastic. And, given the fact that we're finite creatures, surrounded by infinite complexity, the fears and worries and concerns that we have, while painful and completely illogical, are there for a reason. But the problem is that the reason is a few million years old. Human existence has never been as safe as it is now.

• 34:08Chris Williamson?

  So, whatever problem it is that you're facing, it's probably not going to be an issue, and that you're going to deal with that issue even if it happens. You're here, you're listening to this right now, what does that say? It suggests that all of the challenges and the neuroses and the problems and the overthinking and the sleepless nights and all that stuff, kind of didn't make much of a difference, because whatever it is that you came up against, you dealt with it. Now, you could say, "Well, maybe all of the overthinking and neuroses contributed to me getting through the thing, and without that, I wouldn't have been able to do it." Like, what are we talking about here? Like, the lions are not at the door when you need to have an awkward conversation with your boss tomorrow.

• 34:46Chris Williamson?

  Response that we have internally to a lot of the things that we deal with is completely disproportionate to the impact of the thing that we're concerned about. And that's what this story and sequence of things, the fact that life has to win every day, death only has to win once. Well, death's pretty hard to find now in the first world. Death is really, really difficult. You know, we've nerfed society. The entire world is created in a desperate attempt for death to be as far away from us as possible. And yet we respond to stressful situations with that mortal fear. It's not needed, right?

• 35:27Chris Williamson?

  You've got here, whatever it is that you've gone through, it's been okay. Therefore, you should have at least a good amount of faith that whatever comes up against you in the future, you should also be okay with.

• 35:40Chris Williamson?

  Where are we next? What got you here won't get you there. So this is something I've reflected on a bit more since the show's grown. And it's to do with where I spend my time and a little bit of brushing up against having a puritan work ethic. So I like to work hard and I always considered that working harder and doing more, it's like quite a British thing, I think, is the solution. And one of the problems that you realize is that, another whole Mosey quote, he says, beginners overvalue thinking and undervalue doing. Advanced people do the opposite. Beginners overvalue thinking and undervalue doing. Advanced people do the opposite.

• 36:24Chris Williamson?

  Reason for that is that when you first start out at something, for the most part, you're doing all of it, right? Your HR, your marketing, your mother, your cook, your cleaner, your, all of those things. And then over time, what happens is you, your lifestyle starts to change and maybe becomes a little bit more comfortable. Or perhaps the business or the project or the family or whatever it is that you're doing grows. And that permits you to be able to start thinking about different things. And yet, because you've ingrained this particular style of work where you're completely obsessive and overworking and all of that. You try to map a previously useful mode into this new position that you're in. But what you don't realise is that's causing you to bounce off the limiter, right?

• 37:09Chris Williamson?

  There's only so many hours in the day. If you decide that you're going to do absolutely everything by hand, you're not going to delegate control, you're not going to relinquish anything, you're not going to have faith in other people that they can get the job or the babysitting or the cooking or the cleaning or whatever done. If you don't do that, you are limiting your ability to ascend to the next level. And what got you here won't get you there is me reminding myself that the strategies that made me successful or gave me any particular type of advantage in the first place aren't necessarily the ones that I need to hold on to. The principles behind them of maybe being detail oriented or perhaps being prepared

• 37:52Chris Williamson?

  to do the work or understanding the fundamentals of whatever industry or lifestyle or situation it is that you're coming up against, understanding those and scaling those, those are great. But saying that you're going to be the person that's always going to make sure that the client has, you're the first person the client's going to ring. And you go, well, if you've got a thousand clients in whatever company it is, that you simply cannot do that. Well, I was the guy that the client spoke to all along in the first place. Yeah. But the situation's changed. You're the owner or you're the guy that's the training manager or the salesperson, whatever. You can't do the thing that you used to do.

• 38:30Chris Williamson?

  And there's this quote, again, out of Kyle's blog post that he did. And he says, "In the early stages of training, an aspiring Confucian gentleman needs to memorise entire shelves of archaic texts, learn the precise angle at which to bow and learn the lengths of the steps with which he is to enter a room. His sitting mat must always be perfectly straight. All of this rigor and restraint, however, is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated, but nonetheless genuine form of spontaneity. Indeed, the process of training is not considered complete until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought or effort." So you could talk about system two to system one from Daniel Kahneman here.

• 39:12Chris Williamson?

  You could talk about doing and thinking, you could talk about cognition and intuition. The point is that. Everything's deliberate and effortful when you begin. And after a while, you're supposed to tap into some degree of mastery. Right. You're supposed to spread that out and aggregate it and widen your view. And just see things with a little bit more ease and grace. And yet, if you're totally myopic about stuff, you're not going to be able to see that. So yeah, what got you here won't get you there. Next one, romantic desirability has almost no predictive power for a long term relationship happiness. So this is Seth Stephens Davidowitz. And his book, Don't Trust Your Gut is fantastic.

• 39:54Chris Williamson?

  So he looked at the research work of a lady called Samantha Joel. She teamed up with 85 of the world's most renowned scientists, combining data from 43 studies, mining hundreds of variables collected from more than 10,000 couples and utilizing state of the art machine learning models in an effort to help people pick better romantic partners. And these machine models basically were completely unable to have any predictive power over whether couples were going to be happy long term, especially using traditional or what would be typically thought of as desirable traits in a partner.

• 40:34Chris Williamson?

  So height, income, their job, conventional attractiveness and sexual tastes, basically all of the things that people optimize for in online dating. It turned out that they had the lowest correlation when predicting long term relationship happiness. All of the things, right? Like you can literally set, I think it's Bumble or Hinge, you can set a height filter. Height has zero predictive power when it comes to long term relationship happiness. And yet it's one of the things that you can look at on the front end. Income, job, these are the sort of things that get listed on your dating profile. Or you ask someone like, what's your name? What do you do? It's one of the first things that comes up. Conventional attractiveness, again, it's something that's not only displayed on online dating, but also if you meet somebody in the real world.

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  Sexual tastes, you know, for the most part, that's going to be something that people will encounter before they get into a long term relationship with someone. None of those have any predictive power. It's basically a rounding error, that nothing. So you might say, well, what qualities did have the most predictive power? And these were psychological stability, growth mindset, satisfaction with life, conscientiousness and a secure attachment style.

• 41:46Chris Williamson?

  I mean, no one is listing any of that on their dating profile. And yet it's the most important stuff when it comes to long term relationship happiness. Now, there's a caveat here, which is that you need to. One of the pushbacks against this is, well, that's all well and good, but you need the first things, the height, the job, the income, the attractiveness, the sexual taste compatibility, in order to get yourself through the door, to then be able to take advantage perhaps of being conscientious and having a secure attachment style and blah, blah, blah. But what it highlights is that there's potentially a completely untapped market of partners that are not at first obvious as someone that you might go out with,

• 42:30Chris Williamson?

  especially people of different racial groups, people who have unconventional jobs, people who have varying degrees of income. They don't have predictive power long term, which means that for most people, sorry, they don't have predictive power long term, and yet most people are selecting them, which means that if you go for someone who doesn't have that, that is a completely untapped market, potentially full of people who are psychologically stable with a growth mindset and satisfaction with life and conscientious and stuff like that. So you can optimize for an untapped market of people who genuinely have qualities that will ensure long term relationship happiness, or at least contribute to it, whilst not going for the things that are kind of all show and no grow. Now, another one of the problems that you come up against here is that

• 43:15Chris Williamson?

  when you're online, especially with the advent of online dating, this is kind of all that people see. This is all that they're really bothered about. They're completely myopic about these particular, these particular figures. But the synopsis that they came up with in the study was algorithms can work out what you'll click on, but not who you'll click with. So they had unbelievable predictive power. If you put up a bunch of different profiles, they could work out based on height and income and attractiveness and stuff like that. They could say this with real accuracy, you're going to swipe right or swipe left on this person. And yet they were unable to work out whether that relationship is going to be happy long term. So I think there's just a really big lesson to take away from that,

• 44:00Chris Williamson?

  that if you are dating and if you're looking for people. Not being completely categorical with the idea that you have going into a date or scouting the market for what it is that you want in a partner. I think that's a very smart way to go about it. And here's another thing, I remember.

• 44:21Chris Williamson?

  Man, going on Love Island, one of the most common questions that you got asked was, what's your type? And I always used to think it was kind of a dumb question because what they wanted you to say was, here are a very narrow band of physical characteristics and maybe some emotional ones that sound pithy. And like, I like petite blondes who've got, who go to the gym and from Wigan. I don't know, right? I don't know what they wanted, but I feel like it was that. But it always made me think, it never really resonated with me. And people that have got a really locked in type that they go for always just, I don't know, like, do you really know, how well do you know yourself?

• 45:07Chris Williamson?

  Do you know yourself well enough to know the person that you don't even know if they exist yet, but to give them some particular list of attributes that you think would vibe with you? Just how well do you know yourself? Okay, and now you're creating this imaginary person that can be compatible with yourself? I don't, I don't know. That's not to say that we can't have preferences and also not to say that we can't learn from previous relationships. You know, if you're in a relationship with an incredibly disagreeable person, that that is not good for you. Or if you're in a relationship with somebody that works all the time, or somebody that isn't into fitness, or whatever it might be. But what's your type and having a really sort of serious type?

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  And then, if nothing else, after all of this time, the state of the art machine learning models, looking at 10,000 couples backs up what I say, right? That basically having a type is completely pointless unless you're talking about secure attachment styles and stuff like that. Next one, this is another Huben one, and this actually came out of the comments on the episode, which is.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  So cool. This is one of the reasons that I'm so proud of Modern Wisdom and the audience that we've built because it's super wide ranging, right? When people ask me, when people ask what's Modern Wisdom about? It's a 60 second answer of me going, well, it's interesting because there's porn stars, but there's philosophers, there's psychologists, and then sometimes there's people that are trying to maximize our ability to do spaceflight. And then there's like this whole other area of health and fitness. And then I've got these two mates from the UK and we kind of talk about how to make the best toasted sandwich. So yeah, the kind of that. And what they wanted to hear was, oh, it's about football or something. But I don't give them a sufficiently good answer. One of the advantages of that is that it's created an audience which has really, really

• 46:55Chris Williamson?

  smart insights and it gets pulled out of left field. So this was really cool. So Huberman was talking about the fact that he has tattoos and yet doesn't show them. And one of the reasons for that is that you can't control the perceptions of other people. The quote was, be careful, you can't control the perceptions of other people. One of the comments really pulled this out and it was really smart. He said, this is such a wise statement. Despite some people being vocal about the subject, they consider outdated, like a negative opinion of tattoos. It takes many years for a shift in the public's eye, despite us wishing it was otherwise. Perhaps then it's in our own best interests to act in accordance to how the world is, rather than how we wish the world was or how we think it ought to be.

• 47:41Chris Williamson?

  So good, right? So fun. Like, I wish that I'd said that on the podcast. But just great insight about the fact that you are unable to alter the way that your actions are going to be interpreted. Now, there's the Stoic fork thing here, which is, look, you just do the thing that you do, and you can control yourself up until the bounds of your body. And then after that, it's all out into the ether, right? And you're just relying on that to kick back to you. But another thing is that you go, well, how is the world at the moment? And how should I act, given the way that it is? Because an idealistic view or the hope that, maybe you know, maybe

• 48:21Chris Williamson?

  you know, for an absolute fact, that life for all of humanity would be better if this stopped or this started. But it's not, not yet. And if you're doing something like getting tattoos that you can't cover up, or like making any serious life decision in the hopes that society is going to catch up to your view of how that should be interpreted, even if the way that it's, I don't think that, I don't think that tattoos should really matter that much. I don't think that it is that big of a deal if someone's got tattoos that shows. I think we're kind of, it seems like we're past that. And yet you can't deny the fact that there are certain areas of the world that are, like a newscaster, someone that's doing the nine o'clock news with a neck tattoo,

• 49:06Chris Williamson?

  is, is going to cause a lot of people to think, that's a bit strange, that's a little bit off, that doesn't look like a newscaster. Should that be the case? Maybe not. But you can't deny the fact that that's the way that the world is. So you need to act in accordance with the way that the world is, or at least get yourself close to it, right? This is one of the problems with people who are like super disagreeable, heterodox, cynical, Lone Ranger-y types. Because, yeah, I respect the fact that you care more about your approach to something or your desire to do something in a certain way than in the way that it's going to be perceived. And you can say, well, this isn't the way that it's supposed to be, and I'm going to continue to do it until things change.

• 49:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, I get that. But the world is going to be able to stay ignorant or stupid a lot longer than you can stay resilient. And if nothing else, you're not, you're not stopping the, you're not cutting the costs, or you are, you are bearing the burden all on yourself in the hopes of what? Changing the world around you? That's the way that campaigns happen, that's the way that stuff goes on. But when it comes to things that aren't existentially important, perhaps like the decision of the way that you present at work, maybe, I feel like acting in accordance with the way that the world is, not the way that you would have it be, is probably smart. Next one.

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  When you get bored with the process, you negatively change your trajectory. That's Shane Parrish. So I've had this for ages, playing around with this quote, and I couldn't really work out what it meant to me. And then I realized that...

• 50:48Chris Williamson?

  If you start doing something which is supposed to be a love, right? Which is a hobby or a pet project or whatever. And then you turn it into a labor. If you monetize it, if you commercialize it, if you make it into something. A lot of the time you can turn that love into a labor and kind of destroy the motivation for it. The desire to do it really overall. I know someone that loves to knit on a weekend, right? Or wants to, enjoys doing Kung Fu and decides to sell their knitting or open a Kung Fu studio. But before long, they're now spending most of their time doing emails back and forth with sales

• 51:32Chris Williamson?

  or dealing with membership requests for their Kung Fu studio. And they're practicing less Kung Fu now than they were when it was a hobby. That's not to say that you can't take something that you're passionate about or a recreation and turn it into a business that you're going to love. I just think that you need to protect the love bit at all costs. That's the important part. The important part is the fact that you love the thing that you do. And maybe, maybe having an unbelievably successful business is incompatible with the amount of degradation of love for that pursuit that you would have to put up with. The price that you would have to pay in terms of how much you would now start to hate the thing that you do

• 52:16Chris Williamson?

  would be so high that it doesn't make sense for you to get a business out of it. Or it doesn't make sense for you to grow a business past a particular place. Like, let's say that your tolerance for doing Kung Fu, teaching Kung Fu and a little army of Kung Fu teachers that work at your studio, maybe that's enough, right? You could put up with that. But what if you wanted to open up one in the next town over or four in the next cities over? Okay, there's going to become a point where it's now no longer about it being a recreation. It's actually about it being a business. Now, you might find out that you love business more than you ever loved doing Kung Fu or knitting. And if that's so, then fantastic. But my point being, protect the process that you go through. Protect the...

• 53:00Chris Williamson?

  Protect the daily, the way that you show up to do the stuff that you love. And know that if you try and turn the thing that you love into a commercial opportunity, you're inevitably going to change the nature of your relationship with it. It's going to start to feel, it's definitely not going to feel less like work when you make it into work. Right? You turn knitting into a job, it's not going to feel less like a job. The very best you can hope for is that you somehow manage to fluke it out. And the business runs totally smoothly, or you've got an auntie that's an ops director or something, and she can step in and do it all for you. Brilliant. But for the most part, just protect the things that you love. Uh, next up, the reverse role model. So this was something that I reflected on, uh, after having done some therapy

• 53:45Chris Williamson?

  with a timeline therapist, a guy called Vinnie Shorman. And we were talking about my past and the place that I'd grown up, which didn't have a whole lot of people that were kind of similar to my mindset. And it meant that I didn't have a massive amount of, um, admirable inspirational figures when I was growing up. Uh, there was people that had fantastic elements here and there. And, you know, I could pick parts of things that I wanted. But there was a lot, a lot of people that were really like the person I didn't want to be, rather than like the person that I did.

• 54:26Chris Williamson?

  And there was a chip on my shoulder for a while because I felt, I felt like it was unfair that I, I hadn't had the, I don't know, the, um, ground grooved in front of me in the way that I should have done. So I could have just seen the path, you know, at nine years old, because my whatever teacher decided that he was going to take me under his wing as something, that like romantic story. Um, but I realized that.

• 54:53Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the time, what we're looking to do in life, or you can achieve a lot of success in life by avoiding stupidity rather than trying to be smart. Almost all of your successes in life will come from avoiding being stupid rather than trying to be super, super smart. You can get a huge way through existence simply by avoiding ruin. And what you can do is use the people that you don't look up to as warning flags in the ground to direct you away from areas that you don't want to be. Let's say that it is more important to avoid destruction than it is to chase success. Right? If that's the case, the fact that you have a ton of people around you that are pointing in the direction of destruction is fantastic,

• 55:38Chris Williamson?

  because that's warning flag, warning flag, warning flag. Okay, I'll weave my way through this. I'm not going to have my relationship like this person. I'm not going to pick up a gambling addiction like this person. I'm not going to deal with my finances like that. I'm not going to have a lack of control of my emotions like that person, or lack of ability to express myself, or whatever it might be. All of that, right? These are all individual markers in the ground that highlight to you things that you don't want to have happen in your life. That's pretty useful. Is that more useful than a positive role model?

• 56:11Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, but I think, I think there's an argument to be made that it's not far off. Right? It's definitely, definitely up there. So if you're in a place, or if you had an upbringing where you don't feel like you've got the sort of role models that you want, look around and see if there's some idiots that you can use instead, because they're kind of just as useful. Next one, this is James Altucher, who was on the show maybe three years ago, quite a while ago now, but he had this, he's like a weird guy, unique fellow, built a ton of businesses, lost all of the money twice,

• 56:55Chris Williamson?

  chess master or grandmaster perhaps as well, also a trader, also an author, also a blogger, does podcasts, interesting dude. And he said, "Your weirdness is your competitive advantage." And this is from Naval, "That no one can beat you at being you."

• 57:12Chris Williamson?

  If you have a unique collection of idiosyncrasies and background and the way that you talk and your past traumas and your life experiences and all of that stuff, that's what sets you apart. As far as I can see, and James put it forward as well, that the weirder you are, the more unique you are, which means the more competitive and interesting you are. Because if you fully inhabit all of the things that you've got, there is no one else that has your collection of life experiences and upbringing and genes and all of that, right? No one, literally. So by design, the best way to be competitive is to try and funnel everything that you are in as much of an unencumbered way, as frictionlessly as possible. That's the best way that I can see to do it, and it seems to work for James.

• 57:55Chris Williamson?

  Brian Greene, "The moment to moment of almost anything you're doing is a grind. It is only upon completion in reflection where you can see the glory." Brian Greene is a physicist, and that sounds like, I don't know, some basketball coach, or like some David Goggins shit. "The moment to moment of almost anything you are doing is a grind. It is only upon completion in reflection where you can see the glory." This is just cool, right? Coming from a guy who writes a lot of papers and does a lot of books, has been involved in academia, and he's done the grind, he's done the graft, right? You can see this guy, you can imagine him sitting at his desk late at night. You know, he's texted the missus saying that he's not going to be home, and she's put the kids to bed,

• 58:38Chris Williamson?

  and she's already asleep, and he's still working away over his desk, this big mahogany wood thing, and he's still slamming away over papers, or writing a book, or doing whatever. And I think that there is a view because of how romanticized motivation is, and also because of how we see, fuck, think about how we see the main section of someone's development in a movie. It's a montage, you know, here's the UFC movie about the kid that gets bullied in school, and then he's bullied in school and he gets bullied one too many times. So he joins a MMA gym. And then in the MMA gym, there's the call to adventure and then he tries to quit and then he decides that he's gonna go and he goes back. And that period

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  in between knows sweet fuck all about MMA to complete beast and able to take down the high school college bully or whatever, right? That is usually at most a 20 minute monologue compilation with some interactions with his family saying, you're working too hard and you shouldn't do this and blah, blah, blah. That gives an unbelievably romanticized view of the moment to moment of anything that you're doing, of working hard, of doing stuff. And yet, in reflection, what we want to be able to see is that the whole journey, the experience of it and the reflection of it was beautiful, but you don't get that.

• 1:00:06Chris Williamson?

  It's only in reflection that when you look back at all of the hard times and the late nights and the ordering the Domino's pizza with the team at 2:00 in the morning and cracking it out because you needed to get it done for 9:00 AM and we submitted the presentation with five minutes to spare and we nailed it and we got the client and stuff. That's cool. In retrospect, you can't make the 3:00 AM finish and the all nighter suck any less. The suck is just suck, right? That's it. And realizing that, especially pairing this with leaning into discomfort, training for the difficult, with using discipline not motivation, I really think, I wonder why there's been, I'm not sure why I've had so much stuff today that's about discipline and motivation and things. I'm not feeling

• 1:00:49Chris Williamson?

  particularly unmotivated or undisciplined at the moment, but it's definitely a theme throughout these. But I think when you combine this together, look, like your normal actions, the day to day reality of the stuff that you're doing is just gonna be a bit shit for most stuff. And maybe you can make it a bit less shit, but if it's really hard...

• 1:01:14Chris Williamson?

  If it's really worthwhile and if it's something that you really want to achieve, most of the other people would have already achieved it, or you would have a ton of competition if it was easy, because the easiness would encourage more and more people to go in. The barrier to entry is the difficulty. The fact that it's not a movie means that there isn't a montage that's going to get this done in 20 minutes' time. It's going to take a long, consistent, effortful journey for you to get from where you are to where you want to be. And then in reflection, you get to see the glory. But in reflection, you shouldn't feel like, oh, looking back, this was really good. Therefore, when the next thing starts, I should see all of the elements of difficulty as an aberration. This is something that shouldn't be. It's like, no, this is what it is. This is how it is.

• 1:02:00Chris Williamson?

  In reflection, it's going to be good, but at the moment, it's going to suck.

• 1:02:04Chris Williamson?

  Next one. Accept that all of your heroes are full of shit. Your heroes aren't gods. They're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else. So this was Jason Pargan, who wrote an awesome blog post. Malice disagrees with me vehemently on this. He's adamant that heroes are, or a lot of the super successful people are able to do multiple things. I disagree a little bit more. I think that you can get yourself to maybe 90 or 95, the 90th or 95th percentile of a particular pursuit whilst doing other stuff. But as you start to ascend toward the real top of anything, which is typically where heroes are, it's just, you're going to be outcompeted by somebody

• 1:02:49Chris Williamson?

  that decides to not try and do knitting whilst running a Kung Fu studio, right? The best Kung Fu studio guy is going to live and breathe Kung Fu studio stuff. The best knitting person is going to live and breathe knitting stuff. So when you try to start combining other stuff, you realize, man. I feel like it is more likely to be a disadvantage unless it's somehow synergistic and it's able to help you along the way, but I don't think that it does. And the point here is that all of the people that we admire have made huge sacrifices. They've got rid of pretty much everything else in order to get to the place that they're at now. And then you look up at them as this unbelievably worthy of admiration human, who they very

• 1:03:34Chris Williamson?

  well might be. But it's that Tiger Woods story thing again about the price that you have to pay to be the person that you admire is a price that you probably wouldn't want to put your hand in the pocket for. It's so monotonous and boring and simple that it just doesn't display itself. It's not the reality of how you, the reality of what you see your heroes doing or what you imagine them doing and what they're genuinely doing is worlds apart. Your heroes aren't gods, they're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  Family, diet, rest, social life, health, perhaps, you know, some of the best business guys on the planet. I don't want their blood pressure. Okay, so is the price of the blood pressure worth the price of the successful company? Well, that's, that's what you need to do, but it's a reminder, except that all of your heroes are full of shit. Like they're just normal people that committed themselves unbelievably hard to one or a couple of things that somehow synergistically work. Um, should I do one more? Let's do one more, do one more. The Expectation Effect. So this is one of the best books that I've read this year from David Robson.

• 1:04:53Chris Williamson?

  And in it, he just explains about how the actions that we have impact our daily existence way more than we think. And the thoughts that we have can impact the way that our bodies operate. There's this example that he uses about gluten, where people got brought into a lab and people who hadn't eaten gluten because they expected that they had done, they'd been told that the meal contained gluten, but it didn't. They started breaking out in hives and having diarrhea and having inflammation and headaches and all this sort of stuff. What's going on there? They didn't eat any gluten and they might not have been biologically intolerant to gluten, but it's because they expected it and they're able to manifest this sort of stuff. The same thing goes for a study that was done on VO2 max tests about

• 1:05:34Chris Williamson?

  how effective people were at blowing off CO2. There were people that had genetic mutations that meant that their lungs were more efficient, but they were told that they didn't have it and that they would probably perform poorly. The people who didn't have the mutation, but were told that they did, outperformed the people who did have the mutation, but were told that they didn't, which means that your expectations are literally more powerful than your genes when it comes to this. Same thing goes for longevity, for people's recovery from chronic illness and stuff like that. The expectations are so powerful and it's because I hate the secret so much and Rhonda Byrne is an awful human. I really, it's so close to that sort of woo, sending out good vibes and David thankfully addresses it in

• 1:06:19Chris Williamson?

  the book. He's like, look, I don't agree with that stuff either. And I'm not a fan of it, which made me like him even more. But there is something to be said for taking as much of an agentic, like high agency, high sovereignty, I have control over this and my destiny approach is possible. And it kind of explains why optimists tend to live longer. Like if you're optimistic, you're just going to see yourself as being more capable to get over stuff. But again, like we said before, no matter what the challenges are that you've come up against, like everything's fine. You're listening to this podcast, right? All of the issues and the difficulties that you've had, you've managed to get past. So why not expect that you're going to be able to get past this thing again? And yeah, that

• 1:07:03Chris Williamson?

  expectation effect is fantastic. The episode is amazing and you should go and check it out. It's a fantastic insight. It's very empowering as well. Like it genuinely does help to make you believe, look, I have control over the things that I even don't think that I necessarily have control over, like health outcomes when being diagnosed with something or like my ability to change how efficient I am at blowing off CO2, even if I don't have the right genetic marker for it or something. But look, I'm going to leave it there. I appreciate you all. Thank you. Jocko episode comes out this week. 400K Q and A will come out soon. It may have left that a little bit late. We might be a bit closer to 450 by the time

• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

  that comes out, but I love you all.

• 1:07:51Chris Williamson?

  That's it. Peace.