6 Principles To Stop Feeling So Frantic - Brad Stulberg | Modern Wisdom Podcast 377

Brad Stulberg is an expert in peak performance, a coach and an author. The pressure we put on ourselves to achieve can be intense. But what is the point of success if it crushes your spirit while you're doing it? Brad has coached some of the world's top performers and come up with 6 principles for groundedness - a path which feeds rather than crushes your soul. Expect to learn why your performance will improve if you come from a place of enoughness, the crucial difference between playing to win and playing to not lose, Brad's framework to ground yourself in your life, why you shouldn't be ashamed by taking things seriously and much more... Sponsors: Get a free gift from Tiege Hanley when you try their skincare range at http://tiege.com/modernwisdom (deal automatically applied) Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy The Practice of Groundedness - https://amzn.to/3m4oMPF Follow Brad on Twitter - https://twitter.com/BStulberg 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 #peakperformance #flow #confidence - 00:00 Intro 01:59 Downsizing Your Life 06:29 The Practice of Groundedness 14:30 Relax to Win 21:49 Cultivating Acceptance 31:16 Benefits of Being Present 39:54 Finding Real Value 50:52 Patience for Long-term Success 58:32 Vulnerability in Building Trust 1:11:38 Where to Find Brad - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Sometimes you feel like you're doing something because you have to and you don't really want to, but that have to is wrapped up in self-worth, or numbers, or sales, or getting promoted, or having the opposite sex be attracted to you. Or you're doing something by choice, because you're making a deliberate choice in the moment to do something because it's what you actually want to do. And I think that the more that we can do the latter, the happier, healthier, and more sustainable our performance will be.

• 0:25Chris Williamson?

  Brad Stulberg, welcome to the show.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Hey Chris, it's a pleasure to be here.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  How do you describe what you do for work?

• 0:32Speaker 00

  I coach and I write. I wear those two hats. So in my coaching practice, I work with executives, entrepreneurs, and a handful of physicians, and I help them on their performance and wellbeing. And in my writing, I am very interested in exploring those same topics. So what makes for sustainable performance? What does it actually mean to be well? How can you marry performance and wellbeing? And I explore that in my books and in my magazine work.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  What are, among the high performers that you work with, what are some of the most common errors that you see people making?

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that there's a lot of selection bias in my own coaching practice, because the people that come to me for coaching have almost unanimously read my work. So I'm fortunate that people come to me wanting to find a little bit more fulfillment in what they're doing. And I think it's a lot of people that go into whatever it is that they do off the bat for all the right reasons, but then it can get noisy later on in your career, and it's hard to find that signal. And I think a lot of people come to me very successful by conventional standards, but perhaps wanting to feel more internally successful, if that makes sense.

• 1:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's something that I think all of us play with, this desire for success, but also the happiness to be where we are and to just have our feet underneath you. I read this Cal Newport article about how you downsized your life. Can you explain how you decide what you let in and out of your daily routine now?

• 2:11Speaker 00

  So that Cal article focused on a couple of years back, my partner Caitlin and I and our young son Theo decided that we wanted to move out of a high cost of living urban area. We were in the Bay Area where it's very expensive to live, to go to a place that afforded us a little bit more autonomy. So we felt that we wouldn't have to necessarily work as hard as often, perhaps could start saying no to things that we didn't want to do if we didn't have to pay a gazillion dollars in rent every month. So we moved to a small mountain town in North Carolina, and that's definitely the biggest thing that we've done

• 2:52Speaker 00

  to simplify. Some of the other things that I try to do to simplify my life, I am very structured in how I separate coaching in my writing work. So I only coach on Mondays and Fridays, and then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday I have for writing in more creative activities. What I have found, both in myself and with a lot of people that I work with, is that oftentimes the switching between tasks is the thing that actually drains you, not so much the task itself. So in my own life, I found that if I had a coaching client

• 3:33Speaker 00

  and I was in a writing groove, I would resent having to coach someone, and that is not what you want in a coach. It's not what I want in myself. And if I was in a coaching groove, like just talking to clients, really being fully present, helping people, the last thing I'd want to do is have to go work on an article on deadline. So something that has been really helpful is, again, really compartmentalizing those two components of my work. And you're talking to me in the middle of a book launch, so it's an aberration, I'd say, for the few weeks after a book comes out. But in the normal world of Brad, just really making sure that I prioritize physical practice. So something that I'm

• 4:15Speaker 00

  doing with my body, where I am not online, I am not thinking about work, time outdoors with my dog, and then in the evening, really trying to shut everything down by 6:30 pretty religiously.

• 4:30Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to think about someone who decides to give up the high expenses in order to have the the more simple life. I think people get stuck on the hamster wheel a little bit and they just can't get off. What is it about? How hard was it for you to let go of that? How hard is it to let go of the the nice house and the good postcode with the expensive cars and the nice neighbours and stuff like that?

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. I feel like I didn't really have to let go of that because I still feel like, if anything, we have a house that's much larger than we could have afforded there.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  So I think a lot of it was just like letting go of this idea that, you know, there's all this energy in a place and therefore one should be in that place. The hardest thing about moving was leaving behind some really close friends. And I think that's hard regardless of where you move. But I didn't struggle. I'm not like a status seeking person. So for me, like the allure of living in the Bay or living in New York City, that was never really a thing for me. So I didn't find it very hard. If anything, it was it was just leaving those friends and it became like the very rational thing to do.

• 5:40Chris Williamson?

  What's the problem that you're trying to solve with your new book?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Right now?

• 5:45Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's the perennial problem of any new author, or excuse me, at least any new book, is trying to get people to read it. I am not only competing with a bunch of other great books that people could be reading, but I'm competing with Netflix, with Hulu, with podcasts, with true murder stories. So in in a game where people have limited attention and there are so many various things preying on that attention or vying for it, the problem I'm trying to solve is how do I make the case that, hey, I want you to give me, you know, sixteen to thirty dollars or pounds or euros, wherever you are, and a couple of weeks of your time?

• 6:27Chris Williamson?

  And what's the problem that the book is trying to solve itself?

• 6:31Speaker 00

  The book is trying to solve the problem that I mentioned that I see quite often in my coaching clients and something that I've clearly experienced myself, which is this getting so caught up in what you're doing because you like what you're doing, but having the inertia of that caught up-ness, in the book I call it frantic activity, frenetic energy, just completely un-moor you. So it feels like instead of having a solid foundation, instead of being where you are, you're constantly being pushed and pulled around by all the activities in your life.

• 7:02Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think, is that just inherent? Is that inbuilt in humans? Is that a malaise of the modern day? Is it a combination?

• 7:10Speaker 00

  I think it's a combination, for sure. I think that we always have a propensity to focus on bright shiny objects and to neglect like the fundamental foundational principles. You look in sports, it's much fancier to work on, you know, your crossover dribble and your three-point shot than it is the fundamentals. You look in weight training, no one likes to do stabilization exercises, everyone wants to squat or bench press. So I think that some of it is just human nature, that we're attracted to things that are bright and shiny and sexy, and that's fine, so long as those things don't cannibalize time and energy spent for our foundational, our basic principles.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  So this book is really a call to get back to those basic principles and argues that you can still strive and you still get to the same place, but the texture of the striving is a lot better and a lot more fulfilling. To use that sports analogy again, you can, you can train really hard for a competition and your chance of injury goes way down if you've built a solid foundation. It's not to say that you can't win without the solid foundation, but it's going to be a lot more angst provoking, whereas if you do the work of building that solid foundation, when you really go for it, you've got a lot more robustness, anti-fragility and durability.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  And I'm trying to apply that kind of thinking to one's whole life.

• 8:38Chris Williamson?

  What does a foundation look like in this context?

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a foundation is really being able to practice a couple of key qualities that create this way of being in the world, which I call groundedness. And those qualities, in brief, are acceptance, presence, patience, vulnerability, and deep community. And then I also incorporate this notion of really inhabiting your body. I think this is true if you are in more of a traditional knowledge work type role. It's so easy to think of your brain as this thing that is in your skull. It's like a machine, and that is not what we are at all.

• 9:21Chris Williamson?

  What about the tension between being happy and then striving to be where you want to be? I think a lot of people in the productivity world, in the biohacking world, longevity space, fundamentally, I believe that a lot of their motivations comes from a fear of insufficiency, a desire for more, that when I get, when I do, when I achieve, when I am, I will be X, Y, Z, I will be happy, fulfilled, have a partner, feel enough. So it is a motivating force. That sense of insufficiency can cause us to be motivated to move forward because we're fleeing from something that we don't want. Is there a fear that by getting rid of that fear, you're now no longer motivated to go and get something?

• 10:04Speaker 00

  So I think it depends on the person. I think a very small minority of people perform better from a place of insecurity because they feel that motivation really strongly. I don't think it makes them happier, but perhaps they perform better. Most people perform much better from a place of freedom, or love, or true confidence. So the way that I think about it is this, if you are on the start line of any metaphorical race, could be a marathon, but it could also be trying to be a CEO of your company, a bestselling author, top podcast on Apple, you name it. If you feel like you have to achieve that goal to have self-worth, or you have to achieve

• 10:46Speaker 00

  that goal to have an identity that you're proud of, you are going to be pretty tight along the way because there is a lot at stake. Whereas if you are on that start line and you already feel good enough, and you already feel loved, you already have self-love, you already feel loved by members of your community... I argue, and the research supports this, that you have a much better chance of really easing into like that flow zone where you are having fun along the way and as a result of that, you're performing better and it's significantly more sustainable. You know, I, I, I do think that it's a huge misconception and I'm glad that you asked me about it, that you, you have to

• 11:29Speaker 00

  like feel like you're not enough to get better. And I think a big paradox is you have the best chance of getting better when you're doing it from a place of not, um, excuse me, of already feeling enough, of not having that insecurity.

• 11:42Chris Williamson?

  What was some of the evidence or the research that you looked at to do with that?

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, um, a lot of that comes down to this notion of getting into a flow state, which I'm sure prior guests have, have spoken about. But in short, it's when you're in the zone, perception of time and space changes, um, you're really playing to win instead of playing not to lose. And in order to play to win, you have to have a secure sense of self. And if that secure sense of self isn't there, then of course you play not to lose because the stakes again are so high. So it's a much more joyful, fun way to go about, um, to go about trying to be your best.

• 12:21Chris Williamson?

  How does that relate? How does a flow state relate to holding on too tightly and being too tense?

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that if you're holding on too tightly and being too tense, by definition, you can't get into a flow state. So a flow state is, um, often characterized by a loss of ego. So you cease to exist, right? You are one with your activity and this can be very acute. It can be you're playing chess, you're doing a math proof, or flow states can ebb and flow for years. Like you are a researcher that is developing this, um, this new technology or this new medication or this new vaccine. And of course you're going to have some bad days, but you are in a hot streak in your career, let's say. And Again, a huge quality of these states is a loss of self.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  You're not worried about yourself because if you're worried about yourself, you can't become one with your craft. And if you are insecure and if you're tight, you're worried about yourself. So in order to get into a flow state, you have to let go of the self. This is what modern science shows. It's also key across all the ancient wisdom traditions. So in Tibetan Buddhism, in so many different traditions of that practice, they conceptualize nirvana or enlightenment is orgasm. And the reason that they do that is because during orgasm, you lose a sense of self. You cease to exist. And what the Buddhists call nirvana or enlightenment,

• 13:56Speaker 00

  what the Taoists call the way, even what the Greeks in the West called errete, or the sense of like really fulfilling excellence, millennia ago, today, modern researchers call flow. But key to all of these things is you can't be worried about yourself.

• 14:13Chris Williamson?

  Naval has a quote where he says something similar, where he talks about if you care too much, if you grip too tightly at the task that you're doing, you inevitably end up not being very good at it because there is a looseness that's required.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, you gotta, for sure, you have to relax and win.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  And that's not my quote. There's a famous coach called Bud Winter, and he would say, relax and win. Or it's like the paradox of trying, which is trying really, really hard works until it gets in your way.

• 14:46Chris Williamson?

  I like that. I guess whenever you think about an athlete that's got the yips, that's just completely off in their game, the cricketer that just can't hit the strip anymore when he's bowling, the guy that's just missing every move. That's why. It's not because they don't have the embodied knowledge. It's because they've got too much cognitive horsepower trying to wrangle it around.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Yep, there's too much self-associated. And you know, the example I always come back to, it sucks because it's something that most adults experience. And if you're like really worried about like how you're performing, or what your partner thinks of you, it's not, it's not gonna feel good and you're not gonna do well. Whereas if you let go, you get in the zone. And in my reporting, I talked to mathematicians, I talked to No, about math.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  I talked to athletes, I talked to executives, and they all say the same thing, that when they can really let go, that is when they hit stride. And again, what's fascinating is in my reporting, I found it's not just in the moment, but it can be for months or even years at a time.

• 15:50Chris Williamson?

  I read a study shared by a guy called Deegan Rolfe, who if people aren't following him on Twitter, everyone needs to go follow him. He's fascinating. And he was talking about the reason that women don't achieve orgasm during sex a lot of the time. And the most common reason that was reported was self-ruminating, self sort of internal monologues, that people just can't stop thinking, ruminating, self-ruminating, ruminating. Imagine if you're paying yourself for sex, self-ruminating. And that this was the reason. And a lot of, some women believe that physically, they are not

• 16:30Chris Williamson?

  constructed in a manner that allows them to achieve orgasm in certain ways, and others are. And what the research seems to suggest is that it's got far less to do with your physiology, and far more to do with your psychology, specifically during sex.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it makes, that makes a lot of sense. And to take it out of the bedroom, you can also think about anxiety and depression, which are both disorders that are very self-focused. So anxiety is all about what's gonna go wrong with me in the future, and I need to protect me, or I need to protect the things I care about into the future. It's a very like inward looking focus. And depression is all about what's wrong with me in the past.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Regrets or things that I can't stop thinking about. David Foster Wallace has written so beautifully about how the depressive person is in some ways a disorder of ego because there's so much inward focus in being trapped with your ego with yourself is is a lousy way to be. And I think a lot of people at a subclinical level are kind of feeling exhausted all the time, not feeling so fulfilled because they're constantly trapped in this state. And I also think that it's not any individual's fault. I think we have an entire culture that is set up to trap you in that state. I mean, the whole consumer culture is you don't feel good and then you buy this thing and you feel better.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  You don't feel enough, then you achieve this thing and you feel better. And if people actually felt really good, then the whole thing would go to shit, or at least a lot of it. Bingo.

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's the problem of a meritocracy, right? The more that I think, because I love it. I love the fact that you can be anything you want to be and that your hard work gets you your rewards and stuff. And then on the flip side of it, the more that I think about it, I'm like, oh, man. There are some negative side effects of this. There are some things where if the people that win are worthy of their successes and the people who lose, what does that make them? And it's not a, the outcomes aren't very nice. And then talking about individualism, you have a heroic individualism that you talk about in the book. What's that?

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's the, it's the basic syndrome that I classify as being in a never ending game of one upsmanship against yourself and others. So constantly needing to beat yourself, constantly needing to be others, where measurable results are the main arbiter of success. So back to your point about the meritocracy. And the key point is the finish line is an illusion. So you think that the goalpost is 10 yards down the field, you get there and then you realize that it's actually 10 yards beyond that.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  We briefly touched on this in the beginning of the conversation. It's like if then syndrome. If I achieve this, then I'll be fulfilled. If I achieve this, then I'll be confident around my neighbors. If I achieve this, then I'll be worthy.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  And what the research shows is that that kind of thinking just keeps you on the hamster wheel.

• 19:44Chris Williamson?

  So what's the alternative?

• 19:46Speaker 00

  The alternative is to develop a sense of groundedness, a sense of being where you are, being strong and confident where you are, that does not eliminate ambition, it does not eliminate striving. I am a huge, I wouldn't write books if I thought that it did. Like, writing a book is a big ambition, it's a striving pursuit. It just situates that striving so that the texture of the journey becomes more fulfilling and more sustainable. Quick metaphor, two ways to reach the top of a mountain, right? You've got one climber that is constantly obsessive about the peak and can't wait to take a selfie on the peak, can't wait to tell all their friends that they're on the peak, and if he didn't

• 20:26Speaker 00

  reach the peak, then he's a failure. So he's gotta get to that peak. The other climber, he is very much focused on where he is. He's enjoying the journey, he is meticulously consistent about, you know, executing the right pitches at the right times, and in the evening, he's chilling out, he's enjoying the side from the top of, or excuse me, he's enjoying the view from the side of the mountain. Both of those climbers can reach the top of the mountain. But I argue that the one that's enjoying the way, that's grounded where they are, they're gonna come back and do it again and again. Whereas the other guy, even if he reaches the top of the mountain, he's gonna be so exhausted from the anxiety, he's gonna be like, "I don't really wanna do this." The other way to

• 21:08Speaker 00

  think about it is you're doing something from a place of choice, or from a place of compulsion. And I think probably all listeners have experienced this, I certainly have. Sometimes you feel like you're doing something because you have to and you don't really want to, but that have to is wrapped up in self-worth, or numbers, or sales, or getting promoted, or having the opposite sex be attracted to you. Or you're doing something by choice, because like, you're making a deliberate choice in the moment to do something because it's what you actually wanna do. And I think that the more that we can do the latter, the happier, healthier, and more sustainable our performance will be.

• 21:44Chris Williamson?

  All right, so the principles, acceptance, what are we accepting?

• 21:47Speaker 00

  We're accepting our situation as it is. It's as simple and as hard as that. We're not deluding ourselves. We're not pushing back against something that we don't like. We are taking very clear stock of where we are, what's happening internally and externally. And really, this is a practice to do every single day because your situation's always changing.

• 22:08Chris Williamson?

  It seems like a lot of therapies use that as the fundamental, like try and get rational about exactly where you're at.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, try to get rational. Or if you can't get rational because depression or anxiety is preventing you from, accept that right now you can't get rational. I think that the the goal of acceptance and how do you actually practice this in real life really comes down to creating some space between a situation, be it internal, a thought or a feeling, or external, something happening in the world, and a deeper sense of yourself so that you can see that situation clearly. What so often happens is we fuse with our situations. And when you're fused with something, you can't see it. But if you can create some distance between you and it, then you have the ability to do something wise and discerning and thoughtful about what's happening.

• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  What is a way that you would create that space?

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's, there's three ways that I like to kind of introduce to people that are new to this concept. The first way is some sort of meditation practice. And I'll be brief on it because it's the Wisdom Podcast, I'm sure listeners know. But just in case you're new or you don't know, a lot of people come into meditation and think the point is to like chill out and calm down. And maybe you'll get that occasionally, that's a nice byproduct. But for most new meditators, you're basically just realizing what a clusterfuck your mind-body system is all the time. Because thoughts, feelings, doubts, what am I going to have for dinner? I haven't talked to my brother, I need to call him, my, you know, my colleague hates me.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  All that stuff comes up. And the whole practice is to go back to your breath. Now, why? Because what you're doing by going back to your breath is you're centering yourself in a way that's separate from those thoughts or feelings. And you do this often enough and you can start to see thoughts and feelings as being separate from you. And when you see them, you can choose, do I want to engage in this or do I just want to let it go? Two other ways to do it. Um, one is to pretend that a really close friend is in the same situation as you, and then give advice to that friend. We are much, much, much better at giving advice to friends than we are ourselves. And that's because there's some distance.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  And then the third way to create that space is to imagine an older, wiser version of yourself, looking back on you right now. What would that older, wiser version tell you to do? And all three of these strategies fall under what researchers call self distancing. So creating some space between, I call it like acute self, or the self that's experiencing something, in longer term or deeper self, which is aware of what acute self is experiencing.

• 24:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Corey Allen calls it the mindfulness gap, that beat in between stimulus and response. And yeah, I mean, if that's the only thing that I develop from meditation, if the only thing that I ever get is the fact that there's a little bit of a mindfulness gap, like a half second break sometimes when a thing happens, and I notice it arise inside of me and I have a little bit of time to consider how I want to respond to it, I'm going to consider it a win. I think that was a time well spent.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think the other thing that is um, is part and parcel of acceptance that I would, I would loop together or merge together with what you just said, is also some self compassion. So acceptance only works if you can have some self compassion, because otherwise, um, you're just going to constantly be beating yourself up for shitty situations. And we know that beating yourself up does nothing to actually help you mobilize and take productive action. Um, so I think in addition to creating that space, you realize that like, yeesh, like my brain is a crazy machine, and you can start to be kinder to yourself. You can start to laugh at yourself more often.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Um, there's a quote attributed to a woman that um, was um, was dying of cancer and talking about her meditation practice. And she said that every itch not scratched was a lesson in self compassion. And I just think it's so beautiful because I think what that means is that every time you have an itch and you don't scratch it, but you watch it, you get curious about it, you watch it ebb and flow and crest and then start to recede, you have to be kind to it. Like it is hard. There are so many itches that we just want to scratch. And if you can realize that, then you kind of have to start to intrinsically be kinder to yourself. And I think that's a big part of acceptance.

• 26:57Chris Williamson?

  How can people pattern interrupt if they've got a bad monologue, if there's someone who has quite a negative self-talk? What are some of the ways that people can try to break that?

• 27:07Speaker 00

  So, you know, I don't love the word hack because I think that most things require consistency and practice. But if there is one quote unquote hack, it would be to replace the word should with want or wish. So, language shapes so much of our reality is a species. It's in large what separates us from other species. And the word should is so judgment laden. So, as I write in the book, don't should all over yourself. I should do this, I should do that, I shouldn't have done this. Replace that with want or wish. I want to

• 27:46Speaker 00

  do this. And if you don't want to do it, then you shouldn't. Don't. Or, I wish I would have exercised today. I wish I would have been kinder to my spouse today. That just has such a transformative effect, even after like a week or two. And then the other thing that I would say is be really mindful of judging yourself for judging yourself. So anytime I have someone that gets going on this notion of trying to be a little bit kinder and break out of the pattern of judgment. Well, what happens is you realize how often you judge yourself. And then, as I said, you judge yourself for judging yourself. And then you judge yourself for judging yourself for judging yourself.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  This is all normal and part of the path. All that you need to do is pay really close attention. And eventually, you just start to laugh at yourself. And that, to me, is the beginning of self-compassion.

• 28:42Chris Williamson?

  I read this Taylor Pearson blog quote a while ago. And he was talking about this story from when he was in Singapore 20 years ago. And he's some young kid who's just left college and he was going traveling. And he had to make a decision between whether he wanted to work on his website or whether he wanted to go out for beers with his friends on the evening time. And he wrote down, um, what sort of fucking person decides to have a three-hour debate with themselves about whether or not they should go out for beers with their friends? And it was the first time that I'd ever heard anybody openly express shame at their own self-judgment. You know, the judging about judging about judging. And you're right, you can really make a hell of heaven if you're not careful doing that. Like ostensibly, everything can be going right.

• 29:27Chris Williamson?

  But your judgment about the situation can be judged by you and you can then wreck everything. I was having a perfectly fine time. And that, I guess, leads us on to the second principle, which is presence.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, one more thing on the judgment, because I think it's a really nice metaphor. So in Buddhism, they talk about the second arrow. And it's this notion that the first arrow is a thought, feeling, event, circumstance. You cannot control the first arrow. But the second arrow, which is your self-talk or your judgment or your repression or your denial or your magical thinking, that you can control. And the Buddha taught that it's the second arrow that hurts worse than the first arrow. And the second arrow is so often judgment. And then, as you said, it becomes the third arrow, the fourth arrow, the fifth arrow. So acceptance isn't passive resignation. It's being able to say like, oh, this thing happened or I had this thought. Okay, I see it.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  What should I do about it? That's it. And the more quickly you get to that. The better you'll be and the better you'll feel. All right. So yeah, just second arrows because that's been helpful for me often when I catch myself judging or repressing or pushing away, you're not wanting to confront and then getting mad that I'm doing those things. I just tell myself like you're firing more arrows and that helps snap me back to the present moment.

• 30:50Chris Williamson?

  I like that. Yeah. James Altucher has a similar one he calls not useful. So whenever he has a thought that arises in his mind, he just labels it as not useful. And he's like, look, if this thought isn't useful to me, what the fuck am I doing? Like, why am I even considering this? It's a complete waste of time. It's not useful. Yeah. So presence.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  So presence and the simplest description of it that I can offer is being where you are, both physically and psychologically. And, you know, a common theme in my work and a common theme in this book is that simple is not easy.

• 31:28Chris Williamson?

  What are, well, I guess that if you're accepting first, if you're not, if you're not able to accept, you're going to be in your own head so much, the judgment's going to be there that's going to drag you out of the presence.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. So that is the first, that's why it's the first principle and it's the doorway to presence.

• 31:44Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What are some of the practices that you use for presence?

• 31:49Speaker 00

  So I am, well, shit, I don't have to tell you, I've been using metaphors all along. I was going to say I am a big fan of metaphors. So here's another metaphor. Peanut M and M's and brown rice. You've got a bowl of peanut M and M's in front of you and a bowl of brown rice in front of you.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  What are you going to pick up and eat? If you're a normal human, the peanut M and M's. They taste so much better. They taste better for the first bite, for the fifth bite, for the first 10 minutes. After an hour of eating peanut M and M's, you might start to feel a little sick. After a day or a week or a month or a year, you feel like shit. Whereas the brown rice, first few bites, they're not as gratifying. But if you make brown rice, a staple of your diet, and brown rice is arbitrary, any whole nourishing food, you actually feel really, really good. Impresence in today's world is like brown rice. There are so many sources of novelty and distraction and just dumb stimulus bombarding us from all angles all the time.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Those are the peanut M&Ms, and they taste really good. It's easier to check your comments on YouTube, or to refresh Twitter, or even to go to a news site to get some jolt of excitement than it is to focus on writing the story that you wanted to write, or build the financial model that you've been putting off, or have a very intimate conversation with a close friend or romantic partner. Yet, those things, they are the things that give meaning to our life and over the long haul make us feel good. So, what's the practice? The same exact thing I'd say to someone that's struggling with eating too much junk food. Get the junk food out of your house.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  So, to the extent that you can, find those sources of novelty and stimulus that are impeding on your ability to be present and cut them out. Take the apps off your phone. I know people that have a separate cheap computer that they just use for big work projects, and it has no internet on it. So, like, that distraction's not there. Boundaries are so important, right? Because there are actually physical things that you can do. Again, take the internet off your computer, take the apps off your phone, but also psychological. So, X PM rolls around, I am done with this, and now I'm shifting to that. And that can be family time, that can be physical practice, that can be reading.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  But if you are in a candy store trying to eat brown rice, it is very hard. So, the first practice that I'd say is just get out of the candy store. That works really well for external distractions. Internal distractions are a little bit harder to control. You can't control your thoughts or feelings. So, there, it's very similar to acceptance. It comes back to this ability to be mindful, to be able to see thoughts and feelings without immediately jumping into them and engaging on them. And then the final thing is to pay close attention to the supply side, to speak in economic terms. So, demand side is what's demanding your attention. Supply side is what are you

• 34:58Speaker 00

  doing? And if you are choosing really meaningful, cool endeavors that interest you, that you're curious about in your life, it should be easier to pay attention. So if you're really struggling to pay attention, yeah, maybe it's all the distractions, maybe it's that you're stuck in your head, but it could also be that you're not spending your time on things that you truly value.

• 35:19Chris Williamson?

  We saw this in Cal's New Yorker piece, right? He was talking about, was it called the great redundancy, or the great leaving, or the great resignation, that was it?

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  And people, knowledge workers, leaving their jobs in droves, presumably because they've had a little bit of a break. And they go, actually, this, this, this job's bullshit. I don't, I don't want to do this anymore. But you needed that space, right? You needed the phone locked outside of the room equivalent, which was you being quarantined at home away from your job for a while.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, getting out of the candy store. Exactly. This gets like way off the, the topic of conversation today, but this is why I'm becoming increasingly a big fan of universal basic income. Because I think that if technology and innovation continue to accelerate, a lot of jobs we just won't have to do. And I think the notion of having somebody do work that is kind of bullshit, just so that they're working and kept busy, is like a complete misunderstanding of how incentives work. And I'd rather people that own the capital, you know, get gazillions of dollars in their tax, and then everyone gets 60K or whatever it is. And those people can go make music, or make art, or start podcasts, and do all

• 36:35Speaker 00

  these things that are more meaningful and better for them, and arguably, in some cases, better for the world.

• 36:42Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that everyone has the ability to find a passion or a pursuit that they genuinely feel resonates with them? That's a lot of hard work. What we're talking about at the moment, the people that mostly we're speaking to are the ones who have degrees of freedom to choose a direction that they're going in their life. But if you were to look back ancestrally, someone getting a craft or a trade of some kind, you know, being a wheel worker or a stonemason or a farmer, these are the sort of jobs that people would typically have had. Now, they give you a sense of meaning and belonging and purpose, but they're also not the thing that you would have chosen. So my only real concern, or the major concern that I would

• 37:23Chris Williamson?

  say that I have with UBI, would be a lot of people are bestowed their sense of identity and wellbeing within the world from their job, even if it's not necessarily the first thing that they would have chosen. I wonder how many existential crises we're going to see if you take that option away from people.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure. I think we'll see plenty. And like, it's not like, you know, a 100% win, 0% loss. I think it's a mixed bag. I think that those examples that you're giving, I think they have one very different thing with so much of the work world today. And you alluded to it, but those jobs were meaningful. They weren't bullshit. If you're a stonemason, you get to build a freaking house. If you are a VP of product in the left wing, on the right side of the company, half the time, you don't know what the fuck you do. And you see this, there are entire layers of knowledge work organizations where the whole job is

• 38:24Speaker 00

  to go to meetings and to have multiple minions report to you so you can feel powerful. And it's utterly unfulfilling. And I think that it is like, it is nuts. I'm so glad you mentioned a stonemason, because the other day, I don't even know how I got on this topic, I started Googling like the median income for a stonemason and saw it was like $35,000. And that is, I don't know, a third of the starting income for most knowledge workers. Yet stonemasons, they're freaking building houses. So I do think that like, there's a disconnect between real value and fake value. Now,

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Who am I to say that, right? I write books. Like, are books really valuable? They're certainly not houses. But I can tell myself a story that it's a lot more valuable than trying to like, win the game at some Excel spreadsheet.

• 39:14Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I know that you're buddies with Cal Newport, and one of the big things that you take from his work is the cranking widgets example, the fact that you can see the work that is done. And the problem that we have with knowledge work is it's this big fuck-off amorphous blob, right? It's just this ephemeral cloudy bastard that's just floating around, and no one actually knows if I've done it. No one knows what done even looks like. You can't even define what done is. It is this constant conveyor belt of just like vanilla paste that's constantly being pumped into your computer. And when you're done, it's when the end of the day is there. And sometimes it's not even then. So

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, can I, can I continue down this, this like little road for a little?

• 39:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep walking.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  So I have, I have this mentor named Mike. And for the last year, Mike's answer to most questions that I had was keep deadlifting. And the questions had nothing to do with fitness. It was like, you know, next book deal, should I do this? Should I do that? Should, should I focus on growing a podcast? Just keep deadlifting. I'd be worried about the political situation in this country. And Mike would just be like, keep deadlifting. And it occurred to me that that's the wisest advice he could have given me. Because what he's saying is do something real in the world. And that grounds you, that centers you, that keeps you here. And I wrote a piece for our newsletter,

• 40:44Speaker 00

  and there's a little bit of this worked into the book, that I think particularly so much of a problem with a lot of people in power that have gone totally off the reservation as of late. And, and I do think just statistically, they happen to be men. And it's probably not an accident. Andrew Cuomo, Donald Trump, to an extent Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, they've done great things, but they're also trying to go to space. And, and like, Bill Gates is another example. He built great things, but like now, maybe he's like harassing workers. I wonder, I can't help but wonder if what happens is you get to a point where you're so powerful. That if you don't do real things in the world, you never fail.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Because people are always saying yes to you, people are telling you how great you are, you can throw money at any problem. But if you deadlift, every once in a while, you're gonna miss the lift. It's gonna be really hard. And it doesn't have, there's nothing special about deadlifting. Run. Try to garden and like see your flowers die. Don't hire a gardener. Do it yourself. Mow your lawn. And I think that like, a lot of our problems come down to people not doing real things in the world. I think the total clusterfuck quagmire that we see on social media about politics, some of our politicians are batshit crazy, but a lot of people spend their days in this argument instead of doing real stuff in the world. So, especially of knowledge workers.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  So yeah, I think it's like, it's a really important point to harp on, and I'm glad that we've hit on it, is just the value of protecting some time or space to do something that is real, where you will succeed or fail, because it has a way of working on you that keeps you humble.

• 42:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, what's the, what should be the, the things, the elements that people are looking out for there? Is it to try and have something that manifests physically? Is it something that you're likely to fail at? Have you got any prescription around that?

• 42:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, so here I'm gonna quote the philosopher Matt Crawford. And what he says is, you should try to do things where you don't have to offer half-hour-long chattering vindications of what it is you do. So if someone asks you, what do you do at your job? And you're the VP of this, that, or the other, it might take you 20 minutes to explain. If someone asks you, what'd you do in the gym? You could say, I either lifted, the bar went up and I locked out, or it didn't. The tree grew, or it didn't. The lawn is mowed, or it's not. The lights turn on, or they don't. The motorcycle engine's running, or it's not. So I think that's the ultimate barometer, where you can say, I either did it, or I didn't. And failing is every bit as important as succeeding.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Cause otherwise, you get in this world where everything can kind of be massaged with words and talked into success, or nothing's ever your fault, or everything's always your fault, where... Some things like it hits you in the face, you don't get a lot of room for interpretation.

• 43:40Chris Williamson?

  Man, I've been on this flex for a while, thinking about the beauty of sport and why it's so perfect. And sports people don't understand the blissful situation that they're in with this, that the objective metrics of success, the parameters for success and failure are so obvious and tightly bound and they're there in front of you. You know, what you were hitting in training, you know, your percentages that you were working up, you know, what you should be expecting on the competition floor, you know, how the last team played, so on and so forth. You just know, you know whether or not you've succeeded or failed. And we don't have that in pretty much any other area of life. Even if you were to think about other physical manifestations of things like music or art, like who's to say that you played

• 44:24Chris Williamson?

  that piece of music objectively better or worse than last week, or objectively better or worse than that person that was also going for the job. It's so subjective. Like, everything is bodybuilding, except for a few sports that aren't bodybuilding. That's it. Because it's all just fucking subjective. And this

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:42Chris Williamson?

  causes everybody to not prepare as efficiently as they could do or should do for their chosen pursuit. Because who's to say that the fact that you only slept for six hours last night is the reason that that podcast's not quite as good as it could have been. Drawing the line from preparation to performance is so messy and it's so complicated that the degrees of freedom just give us a pass, always. They always give us a pass. And I lambasted myself about this, saying like, look, you say that you want to be really, really good at this thing, but you're not turning up the way that an athlete would do. Athletes cover every single base, nutrition, mindset, game tape, drills, they're working on their individual

• 45:23Chris Williamson?

  elements, they're working on their team performance, their social networks that way. Everything that they do is geared towards maximizing their performance. And because you think that you can get away with not doing that, you don't bother. And

• 45:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:38Chris Williamson?

  that's why athletes, it's a hell of a drug, man. Like, it's such a perfect world to exist in, even if it's only for a while.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm so glad that you're bringing this up. You know, it's funny because a huge part of this groundedness is being where you are and not worrying too much about external validation. And yeah, I'll tell you the external validation that I'm here for. Yesterday morning, I woke up and my inbox had five emails from NBA GMs in front office people asking if they could have books for their teams. And it started off, there's a guy named Brent Barry, he's the VP of Basketball Operations for the San Antonio Spurs. And he read the book and he is just like, oh my gosh, like, this is what we need, this is what the Spurs need, like, this is what we achieve to do, this is what we strive

• 46:27Speaker 00

  to do, to care about results, but to be present where we are. And for me, as a writer, and part of it is I'm a sports fan, but knowing that people who actually, let me step back, what made me feel so good to see these emails come in is sure, like, maybe it'll help sell books, blah, blah, blah. But these people have skin in the game and they're in the arena. And there is nothing better than when you're wrestling with ideas and you're making an argument and people that have full skin in the game are like, oh yeah, like, this is the path. And I think that there's a reason that the book resonates with those sorts of people is because the book isn't like full of hacks or quick fixes, like, everything is simple, not easy. And man, going back to your analogy of sports or weightlifting

• 47:11Speaker 00

  or being on the pitch in soccer, like, there's nothing that complex about these games. The rules are straightforward, everybody knows them. You literally, if you hack, you get penalized because hacking is cheating, it's doping. So it's bounded and you have to show up in simple, not easy, simple, not easy, simple, not easy, day in and day out. And of course, those people are fulfilled and happy.

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  Dude, this is why, I've got a buddy, Mike Kazu, couple of times CrossFit Games Champion, and now he's just bought a ranch, actually, three units down from Ryan's ranch in Austin.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Oh, nice.

• 47:47Chris Williamson?

  And we were talking about going out to see him at some point and I was saying, dude, man, like, if you need someone to come and help with fences, or hoe a trench somewhere, or whatever, d-weed stuff, I am so all over that. And I looked back at that conversation a couple of hours afterwards, and I was like, hang on a second. That's what would be classed as the most menial, low-entry job in the world. And you are going out of your way to try and offer your time to do that for free, like some sort of mindfulness exercise. But why is that? It's because I want to manifest something in the real world. I want bounded metrics of success and failure.

• 48:29Chris Williamson?

  I genuinely think that we're going to see more and more people come upon this realisation.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  And that helps around you, like, because, again, like, you're actually in the real world.

• 48:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Like, by definition, there's gravity there. Like, you're not in your head. You are working, in that case, you're literally working on the ground. Um, I am so excited to see you're excited, it's getting me excited because I love this topic. I, um, part of the biggest benefit of moving to the smaller mountain town in North Carolina is now I've got, like, some, a lawn and some land. I'm not in a high-rise apartment building. And I mentioned deadlift, so I deadlift. I'm a pretty big guy. I'm into, I'm into, to strength training. But I've also gotten super into gardening for the same reason. Like, I love planting flowers and watering them and, like, trying to pay attention to, like, the weather outside and the angle of the sun.

• 49:20Chris Williamson?

  What good shit have you planted?

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Oh, man. Well, it's funny because this is all brand new. So I planted a sugar maple, which is doing really well. But I just go to the garden store. I got in this kick. I'm going there, like, every weekend, and I don't know the next, you know, next to nothing about flowers. And I got all these flowers, and they're so freaking fragile. And I have no idea why they're dying. So I walk down the street, I ask our neighbour Lynn, who's like a master gardener. I'm like, what am I doing wrong? She's like, you bought pansies. So you know, like growing up, right. But you know, people, at least in the States, people call you a pansy. Like if you're soft.

• 49:53Chris Williamson?

  Oh, they're fragile.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're the most fragile flowers. I didn't know that. I thought they looked nice. Um, so, so I'm learning. Um, but, um, marigolds do great. But anyways, like, the point is that it, it, it, much like you had that aha moment, it's like, why am I so into this? Especially around the time I'm launching a book. Because launching a book is publicity and trying to get a list and asking people to tweet about it. It's all this stuff that has like, is not real.

• 50:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  It exists in fiber optic cables on computers. Planting in the ground is as real as you can get.

• 50:30Chris Williamson?

  Bounded versus unbounded, man. You should get, I should mail you a, a cutting of my clematis montana, which is fantastic. It's just, it's just flowered. It's just about to flower again. Um, it's not my, it's my mom. My mom comes around and does all manner of nice things to the garden. And then I just get to go and enjoy it. All right. So the next principle, patience.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So patience is giving things the time and space to unfold. Uh, and not always feeling the need to make things happen, but sometimes also letting things happen.

• 51:09Chris Williamson?

  Is that short term and long term? Is there a different mindset that you need for within the moment versus with plans and goals and projects over periods of time?

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Yes, there is. And I think that the letting thing happen versus making thing happen is definitely, um, a long-term view. And just taking that long-term view, right? Realizing that any kind of sustainable performance requires patience. Because otherwise, the temptation to engage in heroic efforts where you crush yourself. It's really strong because those feel really good. They feel heroic in the moment, but they're not sustainable. So you see a lot of people do great things for a very short period of time and then burn out or worse, end up depressed. And I argue that a better approach is to be like consistently good enough.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Over a long ass period of time and that's how you get sustainably great. You see this again, going back to sports because it's so bounded, you see this in athletics all the time. Like you always, always, always want to stop one rep short. So if you're training intervals for running, if you could do eight, eight, eight by 400, stop at seven because the eighth one's the one where you're going to box yourself or injure yourself. If you're squatting and you could do four sets of six, do four sets of five. And like the way that you build capacity is by making yourself challenged, but not boxing yourself. Because if you box yourself, then it's much harder to come back the next day. And sports people have figured this out, but in the corporate

• 52:49Speaker 00

  world or in the more creative intellectual world, this has not yet been figured out. And people push themselves all the way to fatigue all the time. And then they wonder why they burn out. When if they would show the discipline and the restraint like an athlete to stop one rep short, they'd have a much easier time being sustainable.

• 53:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, you don't know where the boundary is as a knowledge worker. You don't know, and you can kid yourself into thinking, I can do more. I've got more in the tank. I've seen Cal Newport's book. I can get more out of my work day. If I can just down regulate my sleep or up regulate my deep work session, I'll be able to get it done. Again, there's just not visceral feedback in the same way as there is in the gym. Like you know, if you're an RPE nine, nine point five, you know what that feels like.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  But I would argue that you don't when you start, you have to pay attention. Like it, learning RPE is a skill.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  As a newbie, RPE six and RPE 10 can feel a lot of like, they can. And, and, and it's a skill to pay attention to. And in the book, I argue that the same thing is true for knowledge workers. That if you pay a really close attention to how you're feeling in the outcome, what you get out of it, then you can start to dial in it. So for me, when I'm writing, yeah, when I'm writing, if I start to hunch over at the computer and if my eyebrows kind of start scrunching up and if my, my wife might like say something and like I have a very like impatient response. That I'm pushing too far. Now, it's not to say, listen, sometimes you want to go to the well,

• 54:28Speaker 00

  right? You're at the powerlifting meet, you're on deadline.

• 54:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Love it. But that should be the exception, not the norm. So for me, those cues are like a physical tightness. And as a writer, it's not that hard to know, because I know when I'm having to work really hard to get sentences out versus when they're just kind of happening. And if I pay attention to this over time, which I have, I realize that it's generally at about the hour and forty five minute mark that I'm tempted to go check Twitter nineteen times during a sentence. I'm doing this scrunching thing. And that's when I'd be better off just stopping, doing something else, coming back to it later in the day, coming back to it tomorrow. Same thing with meetings in a workplace. I've been talking about this in the context of the more traditional workplace with various organizations. And

• 55:16Speaker 00

  most people, when you ask them to pay attention to like the right number of meetings, they don't say zero. Like, they're honest about it. But generally, they might say three or four in a day. So why are you scheduling five or six? So I love your analogy of being easier in the gym, but I think it's only easier in the gym because you're forced when you have a bar over your chest to pay attention. And if we pay as close enough attention in other pursuits, we get to know ourselves pretty well.

• 55:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I thought for a long time, when I was in my twenties, working, so I run club nights, I have done for a very long time, hectic sleep schedule and heavy work and a lot of anxiety around performance because it's such a fickle industry that moves faster than anything else. And I kept

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Wait, when you say club nights, is that like nightclubs?

• 56:07Chris Williamson?

  Correct, yes. So rather than owning the nightclub itself, we go in and operate individual events in that. You're kind of like a, kind of like in a polyamorous relationship with a bunch of different venues, and then you go and drop your Thursday here and Friday here and so on and so forth.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it.

• 56:23Chris Williamson?

  So we're awake till three in the morning, and we're designing the brands, and we're speaking to the networkers, and we're getting people in, and we're booking DJs, and so on and so forth. But constantly, you know, like for fifteen years, we've done this. And I used to have this period where I would just after freshers week, which is what we're in right now, just after the period where everybody arrives in the city and you you make your stamp as a company and your events, you want to set the tone with the kids that are going to be there for the next three years. You want to own that Thursday. You want to have the the cheap student night on a Thursday or the the pretty girl bougie night on a Friday, whatever. You want to just own that. And then every start of October, I'd be in bed for three days in a row and I wouldn't know why. And I'd always blame

• 57:05Chris Williamson?

  it on being psychologically too fragile, or I hadn't done the work, or I should be stronger than this. So we've got the guilt and the judgment about judgment in there and sort of that self shame. But what I realized after a while was I was like, that's a miniature breakdown. Like, that's just a little breakdown that you've had there. You've worked hard to the point and you've stressed yourself and you've wound yourself up so tight that you've had a little miniature breakdown. And it's actually quite functional, because your system is telling you, you done push too much. You need to take it's a mental equivalent of getting injured in the gym.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  Yep. Or overreaching, or being on the bounds of overtraining and just needing a little bit more space to recover.

• 57:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  And that's okay. Like I said, it's my goal is just to help people bring awareness to this. Like, there's nothing wrong with doing that. The problem is if you're trying to do that all the time. The way that you mentioned it, it's kind of like you've got your big marathon once a year. And after you run the marathon, you need to take a week or two off. That's fine. If you're in a situation where every day is a marathon, it's not sustainable.

• 58:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So I suppose that there's patience in that as well, that I don't need to try and PR every single day. But also, I can have patients waiting for the cup final or the the world's championship to come around. And I can send it then.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 58:28Chris Williamson?

  All right, vulnerability.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So vulnerability is being real with yourself and others as a way to build trust with yourself and others.

• 58:38Chris Williamson?

  Elaborate on that for me.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke has this beautiful line in one of his poems, where he says, "Wherever I am folded, there I am a lie." I want to unfold. I want to unfold. Wherever I am folded, there I am a lie. And what that means to me is that if there are parts of us that we fold up over, that we try to hide, that we don't expose, we're lying to ourselves. And intellectually, you can lie to yourself. But your subconscious mind, it's going to know that there is an insecurity there. And if you don't explore those insecurities, you can never trust all of yourself. Because you don't know all of yourself.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  So at first, vulnerability is really about knowing all of yourself, being willing to go to those places that you normally fold over. There's an allegory in Greek mythology about the god Pan, who lived just outside of the village boundary. And oftentimes villagers would get lost. And they'd stumble into the forest, and then they would see Pan. And Pan was so terrifying that they would freeze to death trying to run away. They would be paralyzed by fear and die trying to escape Pan when they stumbled on him. But every once in a while, some villagers would go intentionally to visit Pan.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  And when they went to visit him intentionally, Pan bestowed upon them timeless wisdom. To me, that's what vulnerability is. If we try to run away, if we try to ignore and hide our vulnerabilities, eventually they're gonna come up from the surface and completely uproot us. If we actively go seek them, sometimes, often, with the help of community members, spiritual leaders, therapists, psychiatrists, if we can go see our vulnerabilities and face them, they often have so much to teach us. And paradoxically, we grow much stronger because we know all of ourself.

• 1:00:42Chris Williamson?

  There's a story about King Arthur and his knights of the round table. And the way that they went into the forest, at the end of which was supposed to be the dragon and then the treasure, each of them had to enter the forest at the point which looked darkest to him. That was how they chose it. They chose the point of maximum fear for each of them individually and for each of them it was different. But within that, there was a dragon, which was the thing that they needed to face. And then beyond that was gold, which was a treasure that they wanted to get. What's a practice for people, vulnerability?

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the first thing is just to face those vulnerabilities. And I think that often it is helpful to do this with trusted friends, or with a professional, with a therapist. But not just to face your vulnerabilities, but to ask yourself, what's on the other side of that fear? Because those are your core values. So if you fear death, on the other side of death is life. So that tells you, you better show up and live your life. If you feel, if you fear being alone, on the other side of being alone is connection. So live your life in a way that maximizes connection. If you fear emptiness, on the

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  other side of emptiness is fulfillment and love. So go pursue love. So I think these vulnerabilities are really, really helpful, because they also help show us what matters most to us. And then we can pursue those things. We can also connect to other people, because so many of the vulnerabilities that a lot of people experience are very common. They're part of the human condition. It's those ones I just mentioned. It's generally some sort of fear of aging, illness, or death, some sort of fear of not being known, or loneliness, and some sort of fear of emptiness. And when you can see those things in yourself, you can see them in others. And when others can see them in you, that's

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  how you bond. And it's often these bonds that overcome those vulnerabilities. So it is going through the dark part of the forest to come out stronger and more connected to other people. Brene Brown has done a lot of work on this. Her books are great. I think that what has happened is that

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  Over the last 10 years, in large part because of Rene Brown, even amongst dudes, definitely amongst women, vulnerability became this thing to aspire towards, which is great. But the pendulum has swung so far.

• 1:03:20Chris Williamson?

  Performative vulnerability, yeah.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Bingo, performative vulnerability, where it's so easy to spot, but it's people posting on social media because they want someone to like them. And, you know, and what I write in the book is the litmus test is real vulnerability should feel hard. If it doesn't feel uncomfortable, it's probably performative.

• 1:03:40Chris Williamson?

  That's a nice yardstick to use. I guess vulnerability leads into community as well, that vulnerability is assisted and aided and stress tested and comforted by having people around you that support you.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  Yep, and vulnerability creates community. So we think that you need to really know someone well and trust them in order to be vulnerable with them. But research shows it's actually the opposite that's true. So by being vulnerable with someone, that's how you build trust. A study that I write about in the book was out of the University of Manningham in Germany, and they had individuals sit down for a conversation, and they instructed one person to be extremely vulnerable, not performative. Talk about experience with depression, anxiety, bipolar, divorce, loss of children, loss of parents, feelings of loneliness. And after the conversation, they had each party give feedback.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  And the person that was doing the sharing vulnerably, they said that they felt weak, they were ashamed. The person on the receiving end said that they had so much respect and admiration for the person that was doing the sharing, and they thought that that person was strong. So back to what's performative versus what's not, it should feel uncomfortable when you're doing it. Yet that is what helps people come to know you and respect you and trust you and admire you.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  The other thing on community is that, as you were alluding to, like, being a human is freaking hard. Trying to figure this stuff out is hard. We're all gonna go through periods of meaninglessness and emptiness. We're also gonna go through periods where everything's clicking and our egos are huge. And without a community, you like, reach escape velocity when things are going well and you become Donald Trump, or when things aren't going well, you like, you get buried. And community is, like, it's gravity, and it's also a safety net. In the Pali Canon, which is the oldest recorded Buddhist text, there's a line in there where the Buddha's loyal attendant, Ananda,

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  also the name of my German shepherd, he goes up to the Buddha and he says, "Buddha, Buddha, blessed one, I've heard that friendship is 50% of the spiritual path. Is this true?" And the Buddha says, "No, Ananda, no, you are mistaken. It is not true." And Ananda says, "Blessed one, blessed one, tell me what is true?" And the Buddha looks at Ananda and says, "Ananda, friendship, community, it's the whole of the spiritual path. It is 100% of the spiritual path." And I just think that that is so beautiful, because people think about any religion as being all about the beliefs or the connection that you have individually with God or some higher

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  power, and it really is also about the community that's here and now.

• 1:06:35Chris Williamson?

  It's an interesting one, man. The people that are high performers, that are hardworking, go-getters and individuals, I think, believing or having a lack of belief that you can't do on your own is quite worrisome. You know, you want to be able to bear that burden all on your own, you want to be able to carry the weight on your on your own shoulders. I had this conversation with Jordan Peterson, and I asked him about the pain of losing friends as you grow, so you change, and you kind of need to let people from previous epochs of your life drop away. And the YouTube comments are so interesting on the video. There's so much... Low key resentment in there, a lot of messages and comments from people saying

• 1:07:19Chris Williamson?

  things like, "I've tried connecting with people and it's just not right for me. I'm gonna make it on my own." And it was, it's hundreds, there's thousands of comments on that video and there's hundreds of them that are like that. And I think YouTube skews towards a particular type of personality, which is selecting for that. But, you know, even within the YouTube community, it really shocked me that so many people had been burned by friendships or had struggled to make them. And out of the other side of that, this was that, like, that was their takeaway. Their takeaway was, "I don't need anybody. I can go far and fast on my own." I saw this meme, Ryan Mitchler from the Order of Man podcast

• 1:08:00Chris Williamson?

  shared this meme the other day, and it's two sort of like Chad, drawings of like Chad men looking at each other saying, "We were hurt by women and we didn't reconcile our pain." And then on the next stage, it says, "Let's call ourselves alpha men." And it's like, that's what's happening a lot of the time, that people, whether it's in the sort of MGTOW community, or the feminism movement, or men's rights, like, a lot of that is people that have been burned by a relationship or a situation with a woman, and they now want to lay this blame at the feet of all women and cast themselves out of the situation. Look, that burn, that injury was so bad, I don't want to ever try and open that wound up again. And the same thing goes for the way that people deal with friendships.

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  But that's the paradox, man, because it's that vulnerability that is what's gonna bring you into future relationships. Being able to cry and say, "I was burned by this woman or by this friend and it hurt so bad and I felt so lonely and so worthless." Guess what? The person down the streets can be like, "Me too." Because like, we're all humans playing the same game. So I think that rather than running away from those things, we need to open up towards them. I also think, and I wonder if there's some of this going on too, that True relationships in community are not means to an end, they're ends in themselves. So if you're building relationships because like, you know, you want someone to help you professionally

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  and then they burn you, that is very different than having a good relationship with your neighbors or the barista in your coffee shop who doesn't know that you have 10 books or one book and doesn't know that you're a CEO or you're working a minimum wage job. And those relationships, I think, are in some ways easier because they are ends in and of themselves. So I don't care how busy you are, how much you're trying to optimize, how many books you've written. Like, deep community for me starts with like knowing your neighbors and knowing that barista in the coffee shop and having a relationship that has nothing to do with the size of your dick.

• 1:10:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  And metaphorically, how many books you've written, your CEO, whatever.

• 1:10:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  Because that's the stuff that grounds you.

• 1:10:09Chris Williamson?

  Speaking about that, man, the lady across the street, so funny that you've got some motherfucker of a gardener for a neighbor because so have I. And she's a beast, an absolute beast. She's got these sunflowers that are seven feet high and this rose wall thing. Yeah, pretty, pretty legit. And every morning she'll be outside waving and you think it's such a, it was never something that I got taught while I was at uni, you know, where he's a young sort of alpha chad lad banging and slinging money around and trying to get status and stuff. And then you realize, you're like, actually, that's pretty cool. It's pretty cool that Julie across the street knows my name and that she can come over and compliment me on my clematis Montana and stuff like that. It's, yeah, it's weird, man.

• 1:10:53Chris Williamson?

  I guess this is, this is part and parcel of growing up and finding something a bit more timeless.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's it. And realizing that, you know, it's good to have your podcast and to want people to listen to it and to want to get a bunch of downloads and to land guests 10 times as big as me. That's all good. And having Judy from down the street, that's also good. And if you're only focused on the former and not the latter, you run into problems. And, you know, maybe that's the message of groundedness in the message of the book is make sure that like you also know Judy down the street. Make sure that you're still deadlifting once in a while.

• 1:11:31Chris Williamson?

  I like it. Brad Stulberg, ladies and gentlemen, people who want to check out your stuff, where should they go?

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  Thanks for asking. The book is everywhere that books are sold, so on the internet, it's on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, local booksellers. It should be in most places in the UK and I think broadly in Europe now, if not soon. And my website is just my name, www.bradstolberg.com.

• 1:11:56Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. Thanks very much for today.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks so much, Chris. Enjoy this.