From Addiction & Rock Bottom to Redemption & Purpose - Rich Roll (4K)

Rich Roll is an ultra-endurance athlete, podcaster and an author. In today’s modern world, relentless pursuit of goals often leads to being overworked and burnout. Finding the balance between working hard enough to achieve your dreams without destroying your sanity along the way is a difficult balance, but Rich seems to have found a solution. Expect to learn what it means to have “lower companions” who hold you back, why we all are so addicted to progress, why you might be more dependent than you think, who is the most controversial athlete in all of endurance racing, why Rich takes a “Manuary” sabbatical, how to deal with setbacks, the keys to resilience and much more…⁣ Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/mw (automatically applied at checkout) Get 2 months free from Levels on an annual membership at https://levels.link/modernwisdom (offer automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/wisdom (discount automatically applied) 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 #richroll #addiction #motivation - 00:00 When Did Rich Roll Start Sorting His Life Out? 05:33 What People Get Wrong About Turning Their Life Around 17:38 What Are ‘Lower Companions’ in Recovery? 28:39 The Importance of Having Friends Who Inspire You 33:54 Aligning Your Life For Authenticity 46:55 The Tension Between Striving for Success & Feeling Sufficient 58:53 Rich’s Systems for Success 1:09:25 Rich’s Thoughts on Will Goodge 1:16:31 Does the Endurance Community Like Ross Edgley? 1:21:00 Keeping Up with the Pressure of Consistency 1:46:57 How to Get Out of Your Head 1:53:04 Where to Find Rich - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - 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?

  At what age did you start sorting your life out?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  It's a good question.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  I think the moment where I began to really look inward and take stock and inventory of my life legitimately for the first time was probably when I was 31 and found myself in a treatment center in rural Oregon, faced with confronting a decade plus problem with drugs and alcohol, nowhere to escape, just a bunch of counselors,

• 0:45Speaker 01

  and a bucolic countryside and 100 days to really start to understand

• 0:55Speaker 01

  why I had ended up in this place, which certainly was not the plan for my life, I can tell you, and what I was going to do about it in order to

• 1:07Speaker 01

  create a new life for myself that would be more in alignment with a truer version of who I was. I didn't know the answer to that question, but that's where that very long journey probably began consciously.

• 1:24Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me that a good chunk of your story is a series of reinventions.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Yes. I think that we are all reinventing ourselves all the time. I've said this before, but I think the great delusion that we walk around with is that we are in some kind of perpetual stasis. We are the way we are. The world is the way that it is. This person behaves this way. They're always going to behave that way. But the reality is that everything is changing all the time. From the subatomic level all the way to, you know, the vastness of the universe, there is no stasis. Everything is in flux and is in motion. The question is, how much are you directing that change versus reacting to the world around you?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  And yes, my life has been punctuated by a couple kind of significant Rubicon changes or reinventions, to be sure. But I'm always in the process of trying to evaluate where I'm at, where I want to be, where I want to head to. But yeah, I've had a couple sort of moments in my life that were sort of line in the sand moments, for sure.

• 2:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you have this really famous tweet talking about all of the things you've done successfully and the fact that you didn't do them before a particular age. Hadn't started my podcast until I hadn't run my first endurance race until I didn't write my first book until. And I think in an age where social media allows us to see successes from people very young, it gives a good bit of solace to people who feel like I'm 40 now. I've missed, I'm in the, I'm on the back nine and I haven't even started swinging the golf club yet.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  I know what that feels like, you know, I was that guy. Certainly you can always reinvent yourself. There's always hope. There's always opportunity. I think now more than ever with all the tools that are available to people to craft their own career paths, to find ways to support themselves through pursuits that they're curious about or that light them up. I think this is a real golden age in terms of that. But that didn't exist when I was your age or when I was younger. And I grew up in a very traditional household. Education was paramount. Expectations were set very high and I learned early and often how to play that game of upward mobility.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  I was an awkward, insecure kid who had difficulty making friends. But at some point I locked in on the sport of swimming and that's a whole story I'm happy to go into. And what I learned in the swimming pool transferred into the classroom and I became a better student. I had always struggled in school, but by the time I graduated from high school, I was top of my class and. Got very good at playing the game of getting into all the colleges and going to the right place and getting the right job without ever any self-reflection on what it was that I wanted to do, or what excited me, or what was unique about me, or how I wanted to show up in the world or express myself.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  I was just trying to excel, and that path was very narrow at the time, like, go to this school, get this job, show up early, work late, you know, sort of climb that corporate ladder, went to law school, was on the partnership track at a law firm, did all of that, and had to basically suffer an existential and health crisis as a reckoning in order to look inward on myself and reflect upon the reasons why I made those decisions, why they were leading me astray, and begin the process of opening the aperture of my vision to allow

• 5:28Speaker 01

  space for something new and different.

• 5:33Chris Williamson?

  What do you think people get wrong about reinvention? Like, what is it that the people who fail to turn their life around do?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  I think people think it's a magic trick. They snap their fingers, they make a decision, and their life is different overnight. I think there's a lack of appreciation of everything that goes into the moment where you change your mind and you do something different, and then all of the work that goes in to that rebuilding phase and the aftermath of making that decision that ultimately creates the new life. I think people are impatient, they want results too quickly, they don't appreciate the amount of... Hard work that goes into actually crafting the life of your desires. And I think as a result of that, when they don't see results immediately,

• 6:32Speaker 01

  they burn out and retreat to what's safe and what they know versus welcoming failure, welcoming uncertainty, getting comfortable with risk and remaining persistent in their vision to create something more in alignment with their authentic self.

• 6:51Chris Williamson?

  I think one of the big problems, especially when it comes to reinvention is in the Rocky movies, the montage of training is two and a half minutes long. In reality, it can be a decade. And I think getting really visceral with what tough times feel like

• 7:12Chris Williamson?

  helps people who are going through them to not feel so personally cursed while they're going through them. You're not sure that the difficult thing that you're struggling with at the moment, the breaking of habits of hanging around with people who don't want the best for you, who you're getting out of a bad relationship. You maybe want to move and leave home and your parents don't want you to, whatever it might be. You don't even have the reassurance that there's going to be glory on the other side of this. And it doesn't feel as polished or as triumphant or even as noble. It just feels like confusing and dark and messy and like destitute.

• 7:55Chris Williamson?

  And, you know, even in portrayals of alcoholism and of addiction, it's really difficult to capture in popular cinema just how like mundanely desperate it is. It's like, there's not even any glory in the demise, so to speak. And I think that.

• 8:20Chris Williamson?

  Hearing about the challenges that people go through during reinvention

• 8:26Chris Williamson?

  helps everybody to feel less incapable of doing it.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. That's why we love personal stories. We love hearing stories of people who met a certain fate and figured out how to rebuild their life. I think there is something infectious about that that does give people hope for themselves. But I think you're correct. When you look in the rear view mirror, everything looks like it lined up perfectly to create the situation where I'm sitting across from you right now. But I can tell you, as somebody who has weathered more than a few large, personal changes in my life, it is a very confusing, protracted time, and it takes a lot longer than people realize. There's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of self doubt. There's a lot of judgment from other people. If you're breaking outside of

• 9:16Speaker 01

  a social expectation or a familial expectation, if you're trying something new, your peers, your friends are gonna look at you a little bit differently. Perhaps they're not going to be as supportive as you might have expected. So there's a loneliness, I think, that is part of it as well. And I think with that

• 9:37Speaker 01

  is this testing process around your level of willingness, around your level of trust in yourself. And it's like being burned in a cauldron. Like you have, as I've said many times, like

• 9:55Speaker 01

  if you're gonna be a phoenix, you have to burn first. And I don't know if there's an end run around that burning process, because that is the process that, you know, creates the new version of yourself. It's almost mandatory that one goes through their version of that. So I've been tested financially, emotionally, mentally, physically.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  And I think I'm wired for it as a result of my background, the way I was raised, my experiences in swimming. I feel, I feel like I'm well-equipped to kind of handle that, but I've been brought to my knees more than once. And I can tell you in those moments, all you feel is fear and this overpowering impulse to retreat back to what you know. And it is in those moments, those are the moments of truth that no one sees, where you're at your breaking point. And that's where faith comes in, honestly. You have to believe in yourself. You have to be able to hold that vision for the better life of your aspirations.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  And you have to also have an almost transcendent self. Transcend, you have to have an almost transcendent sense of some other force at play that has your best interest at heart. Such that if your heart is true and you are truly engaged in the process of trying to align your actions with your values and you have excavated your soul and done the interior work to try to really get honest with yourself. And you're earnest in that regard, I do believe that the universe will at some point conspire to support you. It's not going to be on your timeline. It's not going to be convenient. The results aren't going to look like you think they're going to look.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  But I've seen this play out in my life many times and in the lives of many people that I'm close with.

• 11:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a cool quote from Naval that says karma doesn't need quantum energy or spiritual woo to be real. Karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. And I think that, you know, it doesn't matter how secular you want to get with it, that

• 12:11Chris Williamson?

  if you continue to stack the deck against yourself, the only way that you end up winning is purely by fluke. And that chance of fluke begins to get increasingly minuscule. And the reverse is true as well. One of the challenges, especially when it comes to reinvention is

• 12:28Chris Williamson?

  You're fighting an uphill battle. It's the most difficult time and you have the least amount of evidence to have faith in yourself. You've never done this before. You've never actually stuck to the diet for seven days. You've never actually been able to go sober or stay loyal to a partner or turn up on time to a job, pick whatever it is, or take it all the way up to the top. You've never been able to truly have a difficult conversation with somebody, you know, at your business. You've never really been able to sit down with your business partner at this big company that you've built for 15 years and tell them that this isn't working. You've kind of sort of nudged towards it and blah, blah, blah. Reinvention, I think, happens on really small and really large scales.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Well, it happens small until it happens big. The reinvention occurs in the micro actions that you're taking every single day. The tiny little things that, that perhaps no one even notices that are creating muscle memory around new behaviors that perhaps are very uncomfortable to you. Like, hey, I'm going to engage with this person in a different way than I, than I usually do by being more direct or more honest, or I'm going to put down a boundary or I'm going to say no to this and yes to this. Tiny little things repeated over time is what produces dramatic change. And it's like this curve, you know, it's like this very slow curve until it has some totes up. And everyone wants to talk about the pivot moment when it goes skyward.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  But the truth is, the real work is in the drudgery.

• 13:59Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  And the difficult anonymous work of shoveling shit every single day. In sobriety, they say, don't leave before the miracle. And I take that as a lesson in, in persistence. Whatever it is that you're, you're pursuing to achieve or, or create or express in the world, I think a lot of people back out before that happens. And I think you're, right now, you're a perfect example of this. You're experiencing this with your show. You're having some large growth at the moment. And I think you even shared something about the fact that you've been doing this for a very long time. And most people may have backed out a long time ago, backed out before the miracle occurs or the growth spurt or whatever it is.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  So for me, it always comes back to perseverance, persistence, high pain tolerance, inability to suffer through discomfort, a welcoming of doing hard things.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  And willingness, really, you know, and that's a lesson that I learned in sobriety. Sobriety isn't for people that need it, it's for people that want it. And one of the first things someone will be asked when they enter the, the kind of ecosystem of recovery is, what are you willing to do? What are you willing to do different? How willing are you? Are you willing to make this your number one priority? And a lot of people will put words to that, but only time will tell whether those words are followed up by the action that demonstrates the level of willingness that is required to actualize anything of meaning in this world.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  With respect to Naval's quote, the only pushback I would give to that is this idea that, um, that one is deserving, or that one is entitled to anything. You're not entitled to anything. You don't necessarily deserve anything. All you have control over is how you direct your attention and how you comport yourself. What are the actions that you're taking? How you're responding to the world around you? And when you drill that down into the tiniest little things that you're doing every single day and try to repeat that with just rigorous relentless consistency, that is how you move mountains, that's how you build mountains, that's how you change your life. And that is not something that's going to trend on Twitter.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  It's not sexy, there's nothing sexy about it. It fucking sucks and I wish it wasn't that way. And throughout all of my reinventions and the changes that I've made in my life, I didn't do them willingly. I did them because I was in so much fucking pain that I was boxed into a corner and felt like the only way out was through. In other words, when the pain of my circumstance exceeded the tremendous amount of fear that I was harboring about doing something different, doing something that would change the outcomes. Because if you're, if you're doing something in a certain way and you're always getting the same outcome, another recovery trope, uh, that's the very definition of addiction, right?

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Like until you start doing things differently, you're always going to get the same result. And yet we're so.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Calcified around who we are and what we're doing. And this is my identity and this is who I am. That it becomes very difficult to break free of that and to live in a more fluid state where you are in the process of always trying to deconstruct the beliefs that you hold and really get honest with yourself about the fallacy of the identity that you hold so dear.

• 17:39Chris Williamson?

  What are lower companions?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Lower companions is another term from recovery. As the adage goes, as you pursue your drinking or using career, it starts out fun. Drugs work, right? It's a good time. Drinking is pretty reliable. It's going to produce a certain kind of effect, right? And alcoholics and drug addicts,

• 18:08Speaker 01

  they don't become addicts because it's dysfunctional on day one. They do it because it's filling a need. It is doing something positive in their life. In my case, it made me feel like myself. It was like wrapping myself in a warm blanket where all my insecurities and my fears would vanish and I was able to be a social person in social settings, which was something that was very difficult for me my whole life. And it functioned that way for quite some time until it didn't. And then your life slowly starts to degrade. You start making decisions that you rationalize that aren't in your best interest.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  It becomes a little lonelier. The chaos factor starts to increase. The negative repercussions of your behavior start to stack and escalate. It starts to get uncomfortable. Your higher companions, your good friends, the people that love you, who have your best interest at heart, start to flee from the hills and...

• 19:15Speaker 01

  You begin to search out other people who are vibrating at your wavelength, who are not going to give you a hard time for your behavior and are more than happy to do the thing that you want to do, which is to get loaded or get high. So you find yourself in really compromising, strange, sometimes scary situations with people you would not ordinarily hang out with because you share this one thing, which is you just want to lose yourself in this substance or perhaps with people who are addicted to a certain behavior. It could be gambling, it could be, you know, it's like anything, you're going to find people who are going to cosign whatever behavior it is.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  And then as the addiction escalates even more, you start to run through those people.

• 20:01Chris Williamson?

  Companions get lower and lower.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get lower and lower and lower and lower until there's maybe that one guy. And if not, you're just home alone in a dark room with the shades pulled down. And that's how it ended for me, for sure.

• 20:16Chris Williamson?

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• 20:57Chris Williamson?

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• 21:18Chris Williamson?

  The idea of lower companions, although not super romantic, I think is really useful. And the first time I'd ever heard of it was from you. And I think that even for the people that don't have a substance addiction dependency, the idea of of people who don't have your best interests at heart, who don't make you show up as your better self, the self that you wish that you were more of the time. I think there's something to take from that. And, you know, I met across my nightclub promoting career, I met about a million people face to face, stood on the front door of nightclubs. Sure, you met a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts.

• 21:57Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah. And a lot of people that, and in that position, 10pm to 1am outside of a nightclub, it's all the romance and none of the destitution, right? Because it's full of energy. They've got the girls on their arm or their girlfriends are with them. And you see them go in upright and you see them come out horizontal. Who's the guy who comes out last? Yeah. Who's that guy? Yeah. Well, yeah, the idea of lower companions, I just think there's a lot of people that listen to the show. And this is one of the things, like, if you want to make me cry by sending me a message, this isn't a request, but the messages that I get that make me weep or tear up the most are ones where people say something

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  like, hey, man, like, I'm a ice hockey player from rural Canada. And I'm 23 and none of my friends understand me. And when I listen to your show, I feel less alone. I can't talk to any of my friends about like what I'm interested in. All that they want to do is keep doing the same thing every weekend. The idea of self-actualization is getting a bag in with the boys on the weekend. Yeah. Right? And that is.

• 23:15Chris Williamson?

  You know, it's a even more, in some ways, maybe an even more pernicious type of lower companion, because

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  there's not, there's not even the red flag flying above their head. Do you know what I mean?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not necessarily a bad influence. It's just, at best, neutral. Or perhaps somebody who's

• 23:42Speaker 01

  insidiously but very gradually undermining the quality of that companion's life. Like you, I also get a lot of those types of messages and it's very meaningful to me. And I think what you're speaking about is super important. Of course, there's that adage, you're the average of the five people you're listening to.

• 24:01Chris Williamson?

  Oh, sorry. The average of the five podcasts you're listening to.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably, right? But I think it is worthy of examination, this topic, because

• 24:16Speaker 01

  most people

• 24:19Speaker 01

  just

• 24:22Speaker 01

  end up in the environment that they're in and they never try to be in the, in the pilot chair of how they're directing their community. There's a lot of talk about mentors. I want this person to be my mentor. I want Tony Robbins to be my mentor, or Gary Vee, or, you know, choose your, choose your person. But the truth is, each and every one of us in our community is surrounded by people that are wiser than us in various ways. People that can help us. And the nature of that community can be crafted and cultivated by you with a little mindful intention. People are good. They want to help people.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  I know that I feel good when I'm helping somebody. That is my primary purpose as a sober person is to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety, and that is the source of.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  My greatest sense of self when I'm in that process. So I think to the extent that you can engage with the people around you from a place of greater mindfulness and and exercise some discretion about the people that you're spending time with and not just go with the flow because these are the dudes in the locker room or what have you. I think you're you're getting yourself way ahead of the game. And listen, not everybody has a lot of high minded people around them. And I think it's, you know, important to, you know, note that. And that's why shows like yours and podcasts that are out there, I think, are so important.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  When I was your age and when I was younger, I mean, when I was a young man trying to figure out my way in the world and who I wanted to be, there was no internet. I couldn't dial up a podcast and listen to people tell stories about their careers or how they overcame hardship or how they did what they did. And I'm a guy who's embarrassingly well educated. And yet that was not available to me. So when I'm creating a show, and I know you do this as well, I'm very conscious of that person who lacks community in their respective region.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  And trying to make tools available to that person that they ordinarily wouldn't have access to. And it's incredibly powerful. It's such a gift. There's an enormous library of people sharing their stories about how they did what they did or why they chose this career and why it's important to them and and how they think about their relationships and what it means to, you know, be a man or be a woman and, you know, walk the planet with integrity. And those are the things that I'm always thinking about in terms of the conversations that I'm having. Like, I want to put out that high vibration. But to your point, choose your companions wisely. And if your friends are not raising the vibration of what you're trying to achieve

• 27:14Speaker 01

  or they're just giving you shit and making fun of you. And whenever you're earnest and share a goal or a dream, they put you down. It might be time to upgrade and that's harsh.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And there's gracious ways of doing that. But I think it's important to seek out people who support you and find older people who are a little bit further down the path, who can say, here's how I did it, or I see where you're struggling. Plenty of those people are around and it doesn't have to be one person. I think everybody should have a board of advisors or a council of directors. Like, I don't call, when I'm having an issue in my marriage, I will call one person. But when I'm having a professional issue or an issue around sobriety, that's going to be an entirely different person. Everybody comes with their own unique set of experiences and wisdom and accrued knowledge as a result of how they live their life.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  And these are not famous people. They're just people in my community. They're friends that I've chosen, simply, in many ways, because of the vibration that they carry and the way that they hold themselves out into the world. And I can tell you, as somebody who's been practicing that for a very long time, it's improved my life in ways I couldn't possibly tabulate. Like, it is incredibly important who you spend your time with.

• 28:37Chris Williamson?

  I tweeted this a little while ago, saying, I'm in the very fortunate position where most of my friends are also my role models. And that's not that my role models are my friends, right? It's the other way around. It's that the people that I'm friends with in the UK, in America, people that are beyond mundanely normal, do things that, on a dinnerly basis, I look at and I go, that's extraordinary. Like, the way that they dealt with a difficult conversation that they had to have, the way that they made an awkward decision with regards to their business where somebody wasn't fitting

• 29:21Chris Williamson?

  and they said it in the right way, early with courage and bravery, right up to, my housemate had his, a clip from his YouTube channel shared on Rogan a couple of days ago. So like, he's fired up for that. And I'm like, you know, each of these different people, like extraordinary in some ways and unbelievably normal in many, many more ways. And I understand, you know, if this is-

• 29:46Chris Williamson?

  If you're listening to this and it's triggering a little bit of something inside of you going, well, it must be nice, you know, living in Austin, Texas, or Calabasas, or whatever, and you're surrounded by all these people and, you know, you've got interest in blue ticks knocking on your door, asking to be friends. I do get that, but the bottom line is that you will devolve to the lowest common denominator amongst the friend group that you're in.

• 30:11Chris Williamson?

  And if you have the luxury of being able to sit and listen to pontificating podcasts for like two hours, you are probably built to take charge of that situation. And I would bet you that there are a really non-insignificant number of people that live within three miles of you who all would love to do the same thing. And yeah, I met about a million people across my nightlife career and had a handful of friends. That's because a lot of the guys that worked with us came and went, they moved on to different careers. Club promo isn't typically

• 30:48Chris Williamson?

  a long-term career. And I realized that my funnel exposure to conversion friend ratio was off.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Your funnel to conversion friend ratio?

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  So think about how wide-

• 31:02Speaker 01

  That's such like a bro-science term.

• 31:04Chris Williamson?

  We're right. Welcome, welcome to my podcast, welcome to my podcast, Rich. The size of people that I was reaching compared with the number of friends that I had-

• 31:14Speaker 01

  I understood.

• 31:15Chris Williamson?

  Was so- I couldn't believe it, right? And I was like, okay, something's up. Like this is the, something is up. And what, it was largely my fault. And the reason that it was my fault was that I was behaving in a way that I thought would make other people like me.

• 31:36Chris Williamson?

  And what that meant was the people who did like me, I didn't actually truly like in large part. And the people who I would have liked saw this person that wasn't any-

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you become, you're unlikable to those people.

• 31:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I'm unlikable to the people that I would like-

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:57Chris Williamson?

  For precisely the reason that I'm playing this persona and role.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Right. Water rises to its own level and you can't transmit something you haven't got. Another recovery adage, which basically means-

• 32:09Chris Williamson?

  What's that, what's that mean?

• 32:10Speaker 01

  It basically means if you're trying to befriend somebody because they have something that you want and you try to pretend that you're at their level to say whatever it is you think they want to hear from you so that they feel comfortable befriending you, it's very transparent that that is a false and shallow gesture, right? Like you can't, if you're sitting behind a microphone and you're pontificating about a whole bunch of bullshit, but it's not a result of earned experience in your own

• 32:48Speaker 01

  life, then it's not going to have the resonant effect that you think it would have because you didn't earn it, right? So in recovery, it means walking your talk, basically. And when you walk your talk and that talk and that walk is integrated with a value system that is slowly improving your life, then the water in your glass raises and the level of your companions will raise in lockstep with that. So I think it's important that if you want to attract a certain caliber of person into

• 33:29Speaker 01

  your life, then you have to live your life in accordance with the kinds of values that would be attractive to that person. And as somebody who's spoken a lot about dating, like this is the same thing with relationships, right? You're not going to attract that mate. Who is living a more aspirational life than you until you can level up your own life?

• 33:53Chris Williamson?

  There's a quote from Alex Hormozi that says, "People are attracted to authenticity, but it's hard to define for me. Here's my best attempt: true alignment of what you think, what you say, and what you do. The hardest part is realizing that our thoughts are fucked, and that we have to fix them instead of faking the next two."

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:13Chris Williamson?

  What we think, what you say, and what you do. And a lot of the time, you do and say things that you don't think in an attempt to try and be liked. I know that you had a background in school of bullying, and this is something that I still need to dig into more, but that was like, that was childhood for me largely. That was school. And like loneliness, like again, there wasn't even any fucking glory or triumph in the

• 34:45Chris Williamson?

  in the loneliness, or in the, in the like solitary nature. It was very mundane, very vanilla

• 34:56Chris Williamson?

  sadness.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:58Chris Williamson?

  Right? And I think what the undertone that that taught me was fundamentally, the world won't love you unless you can offer it something. Because before you didn't have anything to offer it and it didn't love you. So now you need to offer it something. Which is why if I look back on the career that I went through in my twenties, every single thing that I did had a shit ton of social monetary value on the other side of it. So I became a model before I came to uni. Then I kept working as a commercial model and then moved into editorial. Then I became a club promoter because people like models, people really like club promoters. You want to get in VIP? You want to skip the queue? You want to know where the prettiest girls are? You want a free bottle of champagne? You got

• 35:40Chris Williamson?

  to come through me. Okay. Then I became a DJ. DJ literally makes the crowd have this collective effervescence altogether. Then I go on two reality TV shows, right? Two reality TV shows. Blue Tick on Twitter, Free Chocolate Toothpaste, Fullworks. Because maybe if I can accrue sufficient social capital.

• 36:01Chris Williamson?

  The world will actually feel, believe that I'm worth something.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  And where and at what point did you have a reckoning with that? Like, where did the bottom fall out on that for you?

• 36:13Chris Williamson?

  So I got to this second reality TV show. And what I'd been doing for a long time was playing a persona. Like, my business partner knew who I was truly, and the guys that worked with me knew who I was truly. But largely, the public facing Chris wasn't honest about his curiosity about the person he was. But I was always able to sedate myself with distraction with

• 36:39Chris Williamson?

  YouTube and social media and partying and girls and stuff, right? And then I go on this TV show and they take everything away from you. There's no books, there's no calls home, there's no internet, no phone, no TV, no nothing. And all that you have to do for a month is talk to people who are the hyper extroverted party people that I thought I was. So I got delivered what I call a fatal dose of contrast. I saw staring me in the face, inescapable, a team of 13 other people who were the person that I'd been pretending to be for a decade. And I realized that I wasn't that and I thought,

• 37:22Chris Williamson?

  okay, I, I literally can't escape this. And it wasn't that, and the skies opened. And then I realized that my true path was to become a podcaster and talk shit into a microphone. Wasn't like that, but it did make me think, right, there's something up here. Like, there is an incongruence between the person you say you are and who that, that sort of person actually is. And that really was the beginning of it rolling downhill. But again, even with that, you said it before, like,

• 37:52Chris Williamson?

  life needs to be lived forward, but only makes sense in reverse.

• 37:59Chris Williamson?

  And when you're staring into a bunch of unknown, it's, there's no romance. There is no glory medley, fucking like reel that you've got some cool, like Jamie Foxx motivational quote over the top of it, telling you about where you're gonna go.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  No, and you can't put it on a calendar, you know, the endpoint of this because you don't even know which direction you're heading. You're flailing before you find any kind of trajectory for yourself. And I think it requires, you know, a deep level of commitment to self and again, faith to walk a path where you don't know what the, the next brick is gonna look like that's getting laid down in front of you. And I think a lot of people want to know what the destination is before they take that first step. And that's why they never get out of the gate. But I think, you know, your story makes perfect sense. Mine is certainly analogous. I was bullied,

• 38:58Speaker 01

  but it was very vanilla. There's nothing like super interesting about that, other than it was pretty much as you would expect it. But I think as a result of that, my interior experience was to feel like being myself was not safe or okay. I was already insecure. And so as a survival mechanism, you have to figure out a costume or a mask to wear to avoid the pitfalls of being bullied and just survive and navigate the day. That's certainly what I did. And like you, it showed up in people pleasing. I'm a chronic people pleaser. Only in recent years have I

• 39:40Speaker 01

  really worked hard to try to deconstruct that. And it's something that, that is also pernicious

• 39:48Speaker 01

  The lie you tell yourself is like, I'm a nice guy. Like, I just want everyone to be happy. And so you got in your way to make everyone else happy. But as a result of that, none of your own needs are getting met. Met. You're developing resentment. You're disconnected from who you are.

• 40:03Chris Williamson?

  It's also, you're not bothered about making them happy. You're just desperate for them to like you.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the fuel underneath the whole thing. And it's an empty fuel because then you get it. It never sates the appetite, though.

• 40:15Chris Williamson?

  There's a quote from Aubrey Marcus where he says, "The persona is incapable of receiving love. It can only receive praise." And what he means by that is if you're playing a role, any of the accolades that you get and any of the care that people give toward you isn't going to hit you existentially. It's like people don't love Russell Crowe. They love Gladiator. People don't love Chris Hemsworth. They love Thor. And this is how you can feel alone in a crowd and hollow in victory. Because if you do a thing without genuinely putting yourself into it, whenever people praise it, and I can promise you, I have tried. I have been there. I have achieved the things that haven't been existentially connected to me.

• 40:58Chris Williamson?

  And I didn't feel satisfied. I'd achieved in my twenties, pretty much all of the things that society tells a young man that he should take pride and pleasure and fulfillment from, right? Like renown, goals and money, all this stuff. Not in a fucking Dan Bilzerian, but like just a, just an acceptable, normal person amount of that that would put you close to the top of the tree.

• 41:25Chris Williamson?

  Didn't fulfill me. It didn't fulfill me and I could have done it for eons and it still wouldn't have fulfilled me. I love and I'm proud of all of the things I did in terms of the business, but that's not, that's not what society told me. It wasn't about, I was never told you are going to adore working until three in the morning with your business partner, trying to get this copywriting exactly right so that you can do a thing that's, that's cool in your business. What they said was you should leave at 1:00 AM and go to the cool after party because that's where people are going to see you. And that's, and that wasn't the case. And I, it was really, really tough. I'm glad, you know, thinking about the time when you were that age and my age now.

• 42:06Chris Williamson?

  Had it not have been for influences that I did get access to on YouTube and podcasts and stuff like that, I don't know where I would have been given a different frame. I don't know how I would have been ripped out of it.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  So that hole that you were trying to fill, what does that look like now?

• 42:26Chris Williamson?

  It's a good question. I, I ask myself sometimes in my more uncertain moments, whether I've replaced offering people my Instagram followers and queue jump in a nightclub for cool quotes and photos of me with Jordan Peterson. I ask myself that sometimes. The difference is when I do this, all I feel is joy and excitement. And that's the lead indicator. I think that I'm doing something right. I'm not thinking about, look at how many plays this is going to get. I'm fired up because I get to sit down with Rich and have a cool fucking conversation about this thing. And it's genuinely how I feel.

• 43:11Chris Williamson?

  I did this three hour podcast with Hormozzi yesterday and I'm sat there grinning to myself like an idiot, just thinking this is so much fun. Like if you asked me to do anything else right now, anything, you could offer me to do anything and I wouldn't, I wouldn't leave. Leave for a family emergency. But if it was something else that was supposed to be better or more fun, I wouldn't leave. And I don't know, like that, just using that as a heuristic seems like a good start. And I think a lot of the time, especially young guys, lost young guys,

• 43:46Chris Williamson?

  they do things that they think other people will think are cool or will think are impressive. And when you actually ask them, okay, how much joy do you take from this? I don't really have a particularly satisfactory answer.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  I think that's astute. I'm glad that you found this thing. It certainly wasn't something that you could have whiteboarded in the aftermath of being on that reality show. It's a process, you know, and it's a fluid thing. And I would suggest to you that that there's more. And I think the more that you can bring a sensibility of service to what you're doing, that sense of wholeness and oneness and

• 44:45Speaker 01

  and sense of of meaning in your life will only escalate. Because truly, for me, it's all it's all about service. You know, what I do is a commercial enterprise, of course, but when I get away from the service aspect of it and into the ego part of it is when I stray from my values and that hole starts to gnaw, you know, on my soul. And just to kind of go back to, you know, my version of your story, you mentioned that Aubrey quote about praise and love. And I think for me, as a young person, those two things were

• 45:28Speaker 01

  one in the same. I lived in a house where love was essentially conditioned upon achievement. And I got good at achievement, but I did it unconsciously in search of love. And it was never enough, no matter how much I achieved, no matter how fast I swam. I was always just shy of getting it. And it wasn't until adulthood that I could reflect back on that and have some self-awareness around it. Because when you're young, your brain is informed. You don't know why you're, I'm competitive, I'm ambitious. But in truth, I just wanted to be loved unconditionally.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  But that was never going to happen because I was a sensitive artistic kid who had all these weird interests and would rather hide in a corner and read a book. But I adopted the persona of an athlete and an academically inclined person. And I got the accolades and I got into all the schools and perpetuated on that that hamster wheel as long as I could until it, you know, the axle broke and the whole thing fucking collapsed on top of it of me in order to, you know, have a reckoning with it and understand that we don't have to earn love, like love is unconditional.

• 46:52Chris Williamson?

  I've got this idea called insufficiency adaptation, like imposter adaptation. I'm going to read you this. "One of the most common tensions I talk about at the moment is between a desire for success and a desire to feel like we're enough. Success is a strange thing. Presumably, we want success because we think a more successful life will bring us more happiness, meaning and fulfillment. Here's the problem: we sacrifice the thing we want, happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, success. Failure can make you miserable, but I'm not sure success will make you happy. One of the most common dynamics I see amongst high performers is this: parents want their child to do well. Parents encourage their child to do well by praising when they succeed and criticizing when they fail. The child learns that praise and admiration is contingent on succeeding.

• 47:35Chris Williamson?

  That lesson metastasizes through early adulthood into, 'I am only worthy of love, acceptance, and belonging if I succeed.' Now, powered by an internal feeling of sufficiency, this person is driven to achieve many things. They're prepared to outwork, out hustle, and out suffer everybody else because they're not just running toward a life they want, they're running away from a life that they fear. Success and progress ameliorates the feelings of insufficiency. Therefore, success and progress become prioritized above everything else."

• 48:06Speaker 01

  That sums it up.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  I'm certainly somebody who would fall into that category.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  I've pursued success in a variety of areas as an athlete.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Then as a lawyer, that was a disaster. Then again, as an athlete, now as a podcaster. It's funny, you know, I went through like a seven year financial dismantlement. Like we almost had our house repossessed. I had our cars repossessed. I couldn't pay for the garbage bins. Like it was bad. And I think with that was a tremendous amount of emasculation.

• 48:48Chris Williamson?

  Protect a provider.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a huge resurgence of all the insecurities and fears that I harbored as a, as a, as a child. And I became utterly convinced that I was incapable of success, at least financial success. I just, I just didn't believe that it was possible for me. When I was a drunk, I could never pay my bills. I ruined my credit. Then I get sober and I can't figure out this career thing. And I was as broke as ever. And then I'm trying to

• 49:17Chris Williamson?

  Not even drunk this time.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Trying to, I'm not even drinking and I can't figure it out. And then I'm like, oh, I'm going to go be an ultra athlete when I have little kids and a mortgage. There's no career path in that. And I just thought, maybe I'm insane. Like I honestly thought, like I found, I would find myself, you know, at times

• 49:39Speaker 01

  on a weekday afternoon at the park with my small children, pushing them on the swings. And having this dual, this tension between these two ideas. On the one hand, recognizing that by leaving the comforts of the partnership track on a, at a big law firm, I had the privilege of being able to spend time with my young children in the middle of a weekday afternoon at this park where it was a bunch of moms and I'm the only guy, while also believing at the same time. That I was an utter failure because I didn't know what I was doing with my life. I didn't have a sense of what I should do or shouldn't do.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  And really starting to believe that nothing was ever going to happen for me.

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  So this is one of the problems that I have with the modern move of asceticism, right, of recanting worldly success. Because I believe that inbuilt in almost all humans is a requirement for the world to validate them genuinely through actual achievement. And this is another Naval quote where he says, "It is far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them." And the difference is, had you have had the material success now,

• 51:06Chris Williamson?

  then how much more present would you have been with your children, pushing them on the swing?

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Well, had I had material success earlier, I wouldn't have grown and evolved mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically

• 51:24Chris Williamson?

  Because of the phoenix and the flames thing.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had to endure that process to be worthy of the growth curve that I've been on. And frankly, you know, the, the success that I have now is, is embarrassing because I never would have thought it possible. So my relationship with success now is, is very different than it would have been had I, had I achieved it earlier or, or easier, I guess.

• 51:51Chris Williamson?

  In other news, this episode is brought to you by Levels. One of the single biggest predictors of how long you're going to live and how good you will feel whilst living is your metabolic health. The single best way to understand how your daily decisions are impacting your longevity and your vitality is by tracking your glucose. This is why I wear a continuous glucose monitor from Levels. It allows me to understand in real time whether the foods that I'm eating are having a positive or a negative impact on my health. The Levels app interprets your glucose data and provides a simple score after you eat a meal so that you can see how different foods impact your health and develop a diet which Is custom and personalized, perfect for your body. The main realization that I had was eating cereal at any time of the day spiked my glucose through the roof, but if I took a walk for about 15 minutes, I could bring that back down.

• 52:36Chris Williamson?

  I would have never realized this if I hadn't been wearing a continuous glucose monitor. Right now, Levels has a special offer for my listeners by going to the link in the description below or heading to levels.link slash modern wisdom. That's levels.link slash modern wisdom. I've heard you say, I still find myself with this sense that success has to be earned. And the only way to earn it is to inflict pain on yourself. And if you're not in pain, you didn't try hard enough. And it would have been better if you'd suffered more. And I think that's a lie. And I want to find out if it's a lie or if it's true. That resonated with me so much.

• 53:20Chris Williamson?

  Tell me what you meant by that.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  I don't think that I'm particularly gifted in any kind of traditional way. I don't think I'm that much smarter than anyone else. I don't think that I'm a super talented athlete. But if I do, if I had to identify a talent, it would be a capacity to suffer, a willingness to do hard shit and a very high pain tolerance. And I learned this as a young swimmer entering into the kind of club ecosystem of swimming in the Northeast where I lived and realizing quickly as a 13 year old, that I was not

• 54:09Speaker 01

  the most talented swimmer, that there were a lot of young gifted swimmers who were much better than me.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  But I also realized very quickly that there was an equation between work and results. And that equation was pure arithmetic for me. And the more I worked, the narrower that gap, that talent deficit gap became, to the point where, as a senior in high school, I was one of the best swimmers in the United States, getting recruited everywhere, and was able to match all of those peers that previously I thought were much more talented than me. So the message that got inculcated in my mind was, talent doesn't matter. You have the ability to outwork everyone in the room.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  That is your gift. And your job is to double down on that in all areas of your life. And this is what is going to create a trajectory for you. And the truth is, it worked. It worked in the pool. It worked in the classroom. And I was able to achieve some pretty amazing things as a young person.

• 55:19Chris Williamson?

  Outsize results beyond your talent.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was world ranked in the 200 meter butterfly. I went on to Stanford. I said no to Harvard University and went to Stanford, where I was a member of a two-time NCAA championship squad, where every single day, I trained with world record holders, American record holders, NCAA champions, and Olympic gold medalists. These were my athletic heroes. And by sheer force of will, I told myself, I was able to manifest a situation in which now I was a member of a team, in which I got to spend five hours a day, every single day, with the greatest swimmers in the sport. What does that do to a young mind?

• 56:04Speaker 01

  It tells it, you're capable of anything, but the only way that you're going to get there is by suffering. Suffering is your success equation. And I would do things in the pool in high school that my coaches, to this day, still talk about. They're like, remember when you did this set in 1984, like 40 times 200 fly on, you know, like, I would do insane sets that no one else would do, because I knew no one else would do them. And I picked the hardest, the event that creates the most suffering, because that was the easiest to distinguish myself in. And that was a success equation. And so I've carried that my entire life. And to this day, as somebody who doesn't believe

• 56:46Speaker 01

  they're particularly talented, it's all the more important that I outwork everyone in the room. And I believe that in many ways, I've done that. And I kind of continue to do it. I've done it with the podcast. I've done it with books that I've written. If I don't suffer, if I'm not completely depleted at the end of a project, and I turn it in, whether it's a book or whatever creative thing that I'm working on, then it's not good enough. You have to bleed in order for it to be the highest expression of what you're capable of. And the truth is, through a lot of therapy, a lot of work, I have realized that that is in fact, a lie. Now untangling that knot, and trying to create new neural

• 57:30Speaker 01

  pathways, is extremely uncomfortable. What does it feel like if you sit down and you write something, and you do it from a place of of ease and presence and awareness, and you turn it in, and it didn't cause you to suffer, and you didn't experience pain? I'm instantly going to feel like, well, that's shit. I didn't work hard enough for it. I didn't earn it. Give me that back, and let me rewrite it until four in the morning. You know, and I've done this many, many times. And then I'll look at it with clear eyes the next day, and realize, you made it worse.

• 58:01Chris Williamson?

  First draft was better.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. You made it worse. It's a hard pill to swallow. It's been a very difficult lesson for me to learn. It's certainly not something that I've mastered. But I have created systems in my life that make that process of ease, more accessible and conducive in my daily schedule to try to disabuse me of these old patterns that that are reliable, but ultimately are short term strategies, because they lead to exhaustion, and burnout, and disaffection, and all of these things that are at cross purposes with the goal

• 58:46Speaker 01

  of having any kind of longevity, or continual growth, and whatever it is that you're trying to do.

• 58:53Chris Williamson?

  What are the systems?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  I surround myself with a team of very talented people. So for a long time, I did my podcast, which I've been doing 11 years, almost 11 years at this point. For many years, I did almost every single aspect of it myself. My stepson Tyler would edit it, but other than that, I handled everything about it. And I was very resistant to letting go of any aspect of it and letting, you're laughing, letting anybody come in to help me.

• 59:22Chris Williamson?

  I can see some of my team over your shoulder.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Well, you have an amazing team here, right?

• 59:26Chris Williamson?

  But they know that they have to rip tasks out of my hands. I fucking nail my nail.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  I would rather forego nights of sleep.

• 59:37Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Then let any invite anyone else in because you know what? I'm the only one who knows how to do it. I'm the only one who can get it the way that I want it to be. I'm the only one who's qualified to make it as good as I know it can be. And I'm the only one who's going to care enough to go that extra mile to make it great. Right? And the reason why you're, I know.

• 59:59Chris Williamson?

  Constopgrinning.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  But the reason why that is so romantic and powerful is that there is some truth in it, because no one is going to care about modern wisdom as much as you. It doesn't matter how much you pay people or how talented the people are that are around you. So you're faced with a choice. Either you loosen the reins, you let people in, you find people who are better at their respective skillsets than you are, you train them, you empower them, and you get out of the way. And then you are freed up to do the work that only you can do, which is to prepare for and conduct the conversations to the best of your ability. Everything else can be handled by someone else. In my case, I did the show for years

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  before, I was kicking and dragging in order to let go. But as a result of going through that process, I now am able to focus on those things that are most important. And as to the freedom point.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  The systems that I have in place create the added

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  time for the headspace required to contribute to the creative work that only I can do. And I create rules for myself, like you have to stop after two hours, or you're not allowed to edit while you're writing, or you have to put this away and not look at it for a week. Like, I have to create stopgaps.

• 1:01:38Chris Williamson?

  Like a crazy person.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Because I am a fucking crazy person.

• 1:01:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Chris, I don't know if you know, but I have spent quite a bit of time in a mental institution. So I am certifiable.

• 1:01:50Chris Williamson?

  My equivalent of what of the story that you told with regards to swimming was with my first business in nightlife. So I didn't draw the correlation between practice and game day ability throughout my entire athletic career. So I played at a very high level of cricket because I'm a gentleman and I'm refined.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:16Chris Williamson?

  I played.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  That game that no one understands or cares about in the United States.

• 1:02:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, look, if you weren't such Philistines, if you weren't such Philistines, maybe you would be able to get on board.

• 1:02:28Chris Williamson?

  I never once, I trained a lot, but I trained a lot because it's how I found my friends and it's what I did. It was habit. I never ever had it taught to me. No one ever sat me down and said, if you train, you get better. And I just, I didn't feel that lesson. I knew that it was what you're supposed to do, but I just didn't, I didn't, anyway.

• 1:02:46Chris Williamson?

  So I get to university and we start this events company. And it's the first thing that I've ever really felt like I excelled at and got social renown for. So very quickly, I begin to attach my sense of success to the success of the business. A lot of young, especially guys who want to be accepted. If you do have a business and you do find some success with it, you will do this. And it's a pitfall that you need to be aware of. And I imagine it's the same for girls, too. You do a thing, the world tells you that you are enough, or that you, it praises you because you do the thing, therefore you become the thing. So it wasn't just, I run, I ran a good or bad club night last Saturday, it was, I am a good or bad person.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  No, you're self identifying with the achievement as a referendum on who you are as a person.

• 1:03:31Chris Williamson?

  Correct. And because I'm British, I've got a Puritan work ethic. And what I did was, this was the pernicious bit. And this is the pitfall that people really need to watch out for.

• 1:03:42Chris Williamson?

  I realized that reliably, my, the quality of my work was better if I suffered.

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  Therefore, if I suffered, I usually got better outcomes.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  And you feel, and you feel good about yourself because you suffered.

• 1:03:58Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  You worked for it, you earned it.

• 1:03:59Chris Williamson?

  So the lead indicator of what would be a lagging measure, the lead indicator was suffering, the lagging measure would be success. Then, this is the thing that I did. I short cutted the success part and went straight to the suffering part. And if success came without suffering, I felt like it wasn't worthy. I felt like I hadn't worked hard enough to get it. And I then had two things that I needed to do. So not only did the event need to be good, not only did it need to run well, if it wasn't a success, I was a failure. And if the success came and I hadn't suffered, I was also a piece of shit. So there was two ways that-

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Well, that's, that's sort of a can do imposter syndrome, right? Like, it was successful, I didn't really work for it, I don't really deserve this, people are going to find out that I don't really know what I'm doing. Or is that something different?

• 1:04:50Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps. I feel like there's probably a veneer of imposter syndrome in there too. But this felt, it felt more visceral than imposter syndrome. And it wasn't anxiety around it not happening well next time, I mean, not being good enough. It was just that I needed to suffer. And that's what this Puritan work ethic thing does, man. And it's a hell of a drug, especially if you're, if you're from one of the imperial colonial powers. You can imagine, you know, in the Middle Ages, these priests and they're hoeing the ground and the sun's beating down on their back and they're doing it in service of God. It's not about the work, it's about the suffering, you know, and they've got a cat and nine tails and they're flagellating themselves.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  We're, we're sinners, we're bad people, we need to be punished, let's flog ourselves, let's do it in the context of our work and make that a spiritual practice.

• 1:05:43Chris Williamson?

  But without the spiritualism, without any of the spiritual payoff. And that was where I got to, you, you've also said two other things that I thought was really, really interesting. And this, I thought about this when I, I spent a bit of time in CrossFit and I saw a lot of people in CrossFit talk about, uh, suffering and discomfort and stuff. But if I told them to sit on the couch for a full week and not train, they would have completely gone crazy. And you said, the real discomfort is to see what it would be like without the suffering. And Tim has this, what if it was easy?

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Chris Williamson?

  Uh, line.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's the discipline. People always say to me like, how do you do these ultra distance events? And how do you have the motivation to get up every day and train? And the, the math in their mind is that that's where the discipline comes into play. But they don't realize is like, that's what I want to do. That's what I prefer to do. Actually, certainly there's days you don't want to do it and you have to call on a little bit of discipline, but that's my joy. The discipline comes in when, yes, you're like, today's a rest day. You're not allowed to go do that thing that you enjoy doing, or, you know, you're going to sit and meditate for 30, for 30 minutes, or you're going to write something and, you

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  know, you're going to walk away from it and not edit it, or you're gonna maybe only spend half the time you would ordinarily preparing for a podcast.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? That's hard.

• 1:07:16Chris Williamson?

  Fuck.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Doing that, going the extra mile is rote. That's second nature to me.

• 1:07:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. I find this quirk of a particular type of human very, very fascinating.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  But I think a way in is to think of it in the context of flow states. And by that, I mean, can you inhabit a state of allowing? Can you be an open channel and in a disposition of surrender? Where you are receiving almost like an antenna as opposed to willing things, trying to make them happen. Again, I'll take it back to recovery. I mean, one of the first things you learn is your powerlessness over drugs and alcohol. And that the solution is not going to come as a result of you applying your will to this problem.

• 1:08:15Chris Williamson?

  Or taking more drugs and alcohol.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  It's like self-will run riot is what, yeah, it's like, it's like, I read that book. You guys, I get it, whatever. I'll figure it out. Don't worry about it. And you're trying to solve a problem of the mind with the mind that created it. And you're going to do it by applying this incredible self-will that you have, only to discover that you're digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper until you're so broken, you let go and you give up and you say, I can't do this alone. Please help me. Not only do I need help, I want help. I'm willing to receive help and I will take the instruction that's given to me, which requires a tremendous amount of humility.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  So are you in self-will? Is that self-will out of balance with your life? And what would it feel like and look like to release your attachment to that self-will as an engine of identity and instead be in that very uncomfortable state of being and allowing?

• 1:09:22Chris Williamson?

  You've talked about your relationship to endurance racing.

• 1:09:28Chris Williamson?

  Mutual friend of ours, Will Gooch, recently ran across America.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of Will Gooch?

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  I love Will Gooch. I think he's great. I think he is an interesting and compelling breath of fresh air into the ultra running community. Just by way of background, I have some experience in ultra endurance events. I've done a bunch of hard races over the years. So I have a connection to that community. I know a lot of people in that community. I have a lot of friends in that community. Will's BFF in ultra running is our mutual friend Robbie Ballinger, who ran across the United States, has done a lot of hard things, set the record, the FKT for the central, how many

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  laps of the central, how many miles you can run around the loop in Central Park in one day. Like, he's done a lot of crazy, wild stuff. And those guys couldn't be more different, and yet are the closest of friends, train together, race together, they crew each other's endeavors, and it's a really beautiful friendship that I've been sort of privy to witnessing and observing. I know Robbie a lot longer than I know Will, but I followed Will, it was Robbie who introduced me to Will originally. So I started following Will online, and I just found him to be so unique

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  as a figure in this strange little subculture of ultra running, because that is a culture that historically has been populated with, you know, guys that, you know, live in the van down by the river, know how to grow a nice beard. It's a granola crowd. It's a very, it's a very, it's a very, in a beautiful way, it's a grassroots community that has...

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  That has participated in and helped grow a sport where typically there's no media coverage, there's no prize money, nobody's doing this for glory or media attention. You pitch a tent at the starting line the night before, you wake up, you do your 100 miles and you go home and nobody else in the world knows what you did except for you. And there's something really pure and amazing about that. And that's sort of woven into the fabric of what this sport is about. Here comes Will Gooch, male model, six pack abs, looks a lot more like a rugby player than an ultra runner. He's got the shaved torso and the skincare routine that he's happy to share with you.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  He's walking the catwalks. He loves a nice bathrobe and a five star hotel and tea service. He enjoys the finer things in life.

• 1:12:19Chris Williamson?

  Good British gentleman.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Yes. At the same time, he's an absolute beast when it comes to ultra running. Fueled by a desire to make peace with the early passing of his mother who died of cancer and to raise money and awareness around cancer research, he begins participating in these ultra runs. Mostly, I think he started doing some marathons and he did the John O'Groats run, he did a couple of hard things, but then created some self-styled adventures for himself, ran around Lake Como and this past summer ran across the United States. No small feat, 3,000 miles. Robbie was there every single day supporting him.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  Reese Robinson was the guy who created the weekly vlog on the Audacious Report, which is the YouTube channel that they have. Reese used to work for me, he lived at my house, he created videos for me. So I know these guys really well and it was super fun to watch Will throw down day after day, 52 miles, 54 miles, 56 miles and do it with a smile.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  And a certain flair and a passion for fashion. This guy looks good. And as hard as that was, there's something inside me that was thinking, he's kind of making it look easy. And this in turn ruffled some feathers out in the ultra running community.

• 1:13:51Chris Williamson?

  I fucking love this. I want to know about these feathers.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  That, you know, there's a certain idea of what an ultra runner looks like, how they're supposed to be. And Will isn't, Will is very different from that. And I think people don't like different. And so there was a sort of, who is this guy? And what is he doing? And then on message boards, people started taking shots at him. And there was a little movement about whether or not he was actually doing this legitimately.

• 1:14:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So skepticism around the actual achievements.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  A lot of skepticism. Yeah. So much so that one guy flew from the United Kingdom and showed up. They were, I don't know where they were in the middle of the Navajo Nation or something like that, convinced that Will was cheating. And that he was there to root him out. It's a story that Will shares on my podcast. I don't know when this is going up and I'm not sure when my conversation with Will is going up. But, um, and Will had to kind of weather that on top of the difficulty of just actually competing this very difficult task. And so, which he did, and he did it again with flair.

• 1:15:03Chris Williamson?

  Do you have a, I think it's a British record perhaps? It's not a world record, but I think.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  I don't even, I don't remember offhand. I could have looked that up. I think that was part of what ruffled feathers, that he was going to be the fastest British guy. But there was this other guy, it's like, who cares? Like Will doesn't even care. You know, he just wanted to go do this hard thing and raise money and experience it with his friends. And you can watch the weekly vlog on The Audacious Report and see how it all went down. But I respect Will for his conviction and his sense of self to just be who he is, unapologetically.

• 1:15:41Chris Williamson?

  Do you know, he reminds me of Ross Edgley.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  A little bit. Uh, I love Ross.

• 1:15:47Chris Williamson?

  Ross is great. My, my, not so much in the way he looks or the way he dresses. Ross is like permanently in.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Ross is Ross is a lot sillier.

• 1:15:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  He's an absolute animal in the way that he trains. Uh, mad respect for Ross and, and, and his accomplishments. I think he's just in.

• 1:16:03Chris Williamson?

  You see his new one in, uh, Italy?

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. And now he's back in Byron Bay training. Um, but Ross is, Ross is, I think Ross has a, a more childlike nature to him. That's very endearing. But yes, similar in that they've cut their own path in endurance sports, not so much by participating in other people's races or sanctioned events, but by creating their own self-styled adventures.

• 1:16:30Chris Williamson?

  What's the endurance community's response to Ross Bean? Cause he did, he's for the people that don't know, Ross swam for about 200 days, six hours on, six hours off without stopping.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:45Chris Williamson?

  Around the UK.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  He circumnavigated the UK.

• 1:16:47Chris Williamson?

  The first man to ever swim around the UK. He has recently tried twice unsuccessfully in combination with Jim Shock to complete the longest ever single duration swim. Uh, first time in Loch Ness, too cold. Second time in Italy, too hot.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Chris Williamson?

  Uh, this African heat wave comes in and the water temperature is 32 degrees. The air temperature is 40 degrees. It's unbearable. Anyway. What was the endurance community's response to this guy who trains Chris Hemsworth, looks like a bodybuilder, crossed with a salty old sea dog, but is always laughing?

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  I didn't see any, any, uh, negative stuff about him, but I wasn't looking for it either. I don't know.

• 1:17:32Chris Williamson?

  It surprises me.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, he's a, he's a very affable guy. Um, people, especially in open water swimming can get very particular about rules and how these things are conducted. There's a whole controversy around, uh, Diana Nyad when she, uh, did her Cuba swim to Florida. Some people say she broke the rules. It shouldn't count, et cetera. So there's, there's some persnickety kind of, you know, attitude around these types of things. I don't have a sense of negative blowback on Ross. Um, maybe there is, maybe there isn't, but I think to your point of. The similarities between Will and Ross, like Ross doesn't look like an endurance athlete

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  either. He's built like a tank. And yes, he trained Chris Hemsworth for Thor. He's just an absolute unit, this guy, which is not the kind of physique that you want to have for long distance open water swimming. And I've told him, I'm like, why are you putting on all this bulk? You're making this harder for yourself. If you lost 20 pounds of muscle, your shoulders wouldn't get tight. You'd lose a little bit of power in your stroke, but when you're going for ultra endurance, that's not important. What's important is efficiency and your ability to conserve energy. But he is who he is. And I love him to death. I just think he's a delight to watch and I'm always cheering for him.

• 1:18:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I've really enjoyed watching Ross. His book, The Art of Resilience, for anybody that's going through a bit of a tough time, if you've read or listened to The Obstacle Is the Way, enjoyed it and thought, I want more, like a spiritual successor to that book is The Art of Resilience from Ross. So Stoic Sports Science, I think he called it.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:22Chris Williamson?

  And it's this sort of semi-autobiographical diary of his swim around the UK where he applies both Stoic philosophy lessons and sports science to the narrative. Fucking awesome.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  And he's a great writer. He was a contributor to GQ. Like, he's been writing for a long time. I think he has a sports science degree. And he's done a lot of crazy stuff. Like, he did a

• 1:19:46Chris Williamson?

  Log swim?

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  triathlon, like, yeah, log swim. He pulled a car, you know, like, he's done a lot of kind of Jack Lalanne type stunts over the years.

• 1:19:54Chris Williamson?

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• 1:20:35Chris Williamson?

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• 1:21:08Chris Williamson?

  That pressure of potential and pressure of consistency to me in all areas of life. You know, you were specifically not talking about racing. You were talking about this on off burn and coast workloads thing in professional life. How do you deal with that? And you've got this engine inside of you. I want to work. I care about the work that I do. I care about the things that I do. I want to serve all the rest of it. How have you learned to switch yourself off and what's the journey been like to

• 1:21:48Chris Williamson?

  releasing that right foot from the accelerator pedal?

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's been an interesting lesson

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  that I have reluctantly embraced, I guess I would say. But you can't serve to your maximum effect if you're not also serving yourself. So you have to tend to the vessel if you want to be a vessel of good in the world. And when you're a workaholic or you're someone who's prone to suffering and feels like your self-worth is tied up and going the extra mile. Being in that place of letting go and allowing yourself to

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Take time and step back is the most counterintuitive thing that you can possibly do. Again, that's the discipline. But the truth is, to the point of that quote, "The prize doesn't go to the fastest. It goes to the person who slows down the least." That was originally said to me by my coach, my endurance coach. In ultra endurance, there's nothing about it that's fast. You could go out and run a mile right now faster than any of these ultra runners. But if you were to run a 10-minute mile, which is easy

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  for most fit people, 130 times over, then you would crush the bad water and probably break the record. So it's not about fast. It's about the ability to persist. And your ability to persist is correlated with your capacity to conserve. You have to be able to meet out your energy in small bits in order to go the full distance. I'm somebody who's always thinking about the long term. I'm not somebody who's trying to create a

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  viral hit or make a big splash tomorrow. I just do my daily work every single day, and I trust that as I continue to get better at what I do, that I hone my craft and that my focus is squarely placed on the things that are most important, that the success will come eventually. And as a result of that, as opposed to engineering success in some kind of fast-track way. I think that's misguided. It may be effective in the short term, but what are you doing 10 years later? And I want to be somebody who...

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Can continue to do this thing that you and I both do for as long as possible. I've been doing it 11 years. As you know, it's taxing. It's a lot. I don't think it's as, is easy as people think. I think there's so much work, more work that goes into it than people realize. And in order to run that marathon, you have to take breaks. And it's scary to take breaks because if you're not doing, then who are you? The world is passing you by. You're going to miss out. All this forward momentum suddenly gets arrested. But I have learned that

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  taking that time ultimately becomes a growth accelerator. Because that time is necessary to not only recharge your battery, but also to develop clarity around the how, what, and why of what the fuck you're doing. So about four years ago,

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  I decided to take a month off sabbatical.

• 1:25:34Chris Williamson?

  Terrifying.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  I went to Australia for an entire month.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  And yeah, it was terrifying. I mean, it was great too. I was in Australia. What's not to love? But

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  to not open the laptop, to not

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  edit the blog post, to not engage in any of that was perhaps the most uncomfortable I'd ever been. And it's not a switch that can just get switched off. And it's not something that

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  gets easier even a week later. Like you really do need a lot of time. Like I needed that entire month. Like it wasn't even actually until the last week where I started to feel a little bit more grounded.

• 1:26:17Chris Williamson?

  What did you do?

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  I kept it really simple. I mean, I have friends. I was in Sydney that year. I've gone, I've gone to Australia twice. So I've done this every year. I've gone to Hawaii twice. And all those places, I have lots of friends, lots of opportunity to do fun stuff and see lots of people and blah, blah, blah. But I really treat it like a retreat. And so I live those days quite monastically. I do what I enjoy. I'm in a tropical location. I get up, I make my morning smoothie, and then I go out and I train. I ride my bike for four hours.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  I go to the ocean and swim. I, I push myself physically. And then I come back, I eat, I would, I go to the beach, I read, watch a movie, go to bed at eight o'clock and, and try actually not to talk to anybody and to not be online. If there's any output at all, it's just in journaling with intention and those pages ultimately creating the foundation for an idea or something later. But besides that, no work.

• 1:27:32Chris Williamson?

  What have you learned about your direction or your goals or yourself through these manuaries?

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  On a very tactical level, I've learned to trust my team and that I can let go. So that in and of itself, that you can take a step back and the whole castle doesn't cave in on itself and the world continues to spin and the work gets done, is incredibly comforting and empowering. Because it taught me that I can step away and it's not going to be a disaster.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  I don't think that you can have the level of clarity on who you are and what you're doing when.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  You're in the machinations of the creative process. There's a myopia, like you're what you're doing six interviews in four days or something like that. And then, I mean, you're on a hustle grind, right? When you're on the hustle and you're on the grind, there's a sort of euphoric feeling that comes with that and a sense of pride and accomplishment that are that's all good. But you're not seeing the forest for the trees because you're staring at the leaves on one particular tree. And so in order to have that perspective, you have to stop. And if you don't, you're robbing yourself of the greater opportunity that's right in

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  front of you because you've created your own treadmill for yourself. And it becomes very easy, especially if you're getting success, to just keep doing that thing. But sometimes you have to pattern interrupt in order to identify the greater opportunity or the orthogonal opportunity that you can't see when you're in the midst of the grind.

• 1:29:42Chris Williamson?

  There's a cognitive bias, I guess, a framework, a mental framework called direction over speed. And the lesson is that if you are going in the precise right direction, regardless of how quickly or slowly, you're always making progress. If you're not going in the right direction very quickly, you can actually push yourself further away from the goal that you ultimately want. There's another insight from Chris Sparks, who is a world champion poker player and a productivity expert. And he says, there can be no growth without goals. And it's a really nice counterbalance. He came out with it just after James Clear's Atomic Habits. And I thought I would love to get those two

• 1:30:23Chris Williamson?

  guys together to talk about this. They don't conflict. They mesh nicely, but I do think it's an important redress. As soon as James said, you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. As soon as he said that, I think that and the success of the book, which was phenomenal.

• 1:30:45Chris Williamson?

  And is in one of my top five.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  It's still like the number one New York Times bestseller.

• 1:30:49Chris Williamson?

  It's phenomenal. Yeah, it's a powerhouse and rightly so, right? It's one of my five books on my 100 book list that you have to read.

• 1:30:58Chris Williamson?

  As soon as he said, you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, I think people stopped thinking about goals. And he made a really great argument, which was everybody at the start line of the 100 meter race has the same goal, it's to win. So it's not the person who has the best goals, it's the person who has the best systems and preparation. And that's true.

• 1:31:19Chris Williamson?

  As you dig in a little deeper, it forgets about direction over speed. And this is what, there can be no growth without goals that Chris meant, which is that it is just personal goal, mental masturbation for you to frenetically do self-improvement, not in service of a thing, or not in service of even a direction that you're going toward. And it was a really important reframe for me. And I think that it plays into what you're talking about. Why would you take a sabbatical if not that there was some direction that you were going in?

• 1:31:56Chris Williamson?

  I think that the discomfort of relinquishing control over the day-to-day work, especially if you enjoy, even if you don't enjoy what you do, like it buttresses your self-worth in a lot of ways. And yeah, taking, taking the manuary holiday, that would be, I think that would be my equivalent of an ultra endurance event. I hate running. I hate running. I got invited on a gymshark run. We're out here in LA and I got invited on a gymshark run with Noah Olson and like some other cool people that I'd probably love to meet. I couldn't think of anything worse. I don't want to go running. I would rather do, I would, I would genuinely rather prepare for an ultra race than try and take a full month off.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  Which is exactly why you need to do it. Or you can ride this pony until you fall off and you're about to crack and break. You're young, you're robust. I'm sure your capacity to handle a lot of stress and an extreme workload is very large. But I think there's a breaking point to all of that. And I guess my point is that you don't need to get to that point to recognize the value of stepping back. And I think if you reframe it as... As not a break, but as call it whatever you want that makes you feel better about what

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  it is that you're doing. Um, I think it's important to do that short of now I do it, whether I feel like I need it or not. It's a prophylactic against burnout and stress. And the only ripple I would say before, let me finish this thought, uh, to the, the kind of James Clear thing that you were, that you were talking about.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  Just to be clear, like I'm not using that month to set goals per se. I may, but that's not the intent that I'm bringing to it. The intent that I'm bringing to it is to step back, look at my life in all the categories and ask myself, what the fuck are you doing? Like, why are you doing this? And to really deconstruct that why? And to figure out if there's a more evolved way of doing what I do, or maybe a new direction altogether. I don't set five-year goals. I'm not somebody who's like, I'm trying to do this thing. I'm

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  trying to be nimble and responsive in the moment to what is happening. And the more I am in connection with myself, then the more trustworthy my instincts are about that directionality. And I've learned over time to trust and rely upon that as the barometer of not just the, the tack that I'm taking, um, but the steps that I'm executing on to get there. And I think that's served me well and has allowed me to pivot and to, uh, not be afraid to experiment, try new things, play with the format with the pot.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  It's like, it's successful. Don't change it. Just keep doing the same thing. Right? But if I'm doing what I'm doing in the exact same way I was doing it. Six months ago, then I'm not growing. So it's an embrace of experimentation, a healthy relationship with failure and holding things looser, not holding on so tight. It's the tight hold that I think you probably have right now that you're so resistant to releasing.

• 1:35:48Chris Williamson?

  It's way, what you're talking about, and I'm glad that you clarified, it's way bigger picture than goals. It's way further up.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  What's important to you? What are your values? What is the quality of the relationships that you have? Where were you six months ago? Or six months ago, where did you think that you would be now? And is that lining up? And if not, why? What's the missing piece in your life? What's the thing that brought you joy as a kid that you've pushed aside? What is the most uncomfortable conversation with yourself that you've been running away from your entire life? Do you have the courage to engage with that? Are you willing to do

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  a little bit more work? Can you pull back another layer on who you are? Are you man enough to do that? We all have stuff we don't want to deal with, stuff we compartmentalize or we think, well, I just put that one away and I'm not going to worry about that. I'm good. True growth, true expansion, and ultimately, your highest expression and the manifestation of your greatest potential is inextricably connected to and linked to that willingness and courage to do that stuff that you don't want to do.

• 1:37:14Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you say, do you feel that to enjoy your life is an indulgence that's fine for other people, but you're on a mission so you can have a different relationship with those aspects of life that other people find important?

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can fall into that trap and have.

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  It's convenient. It's also ego satisfying. I don't need to take a break, take a day off. That's for other people. I'm doing this thing and this thing is important and people care about it. And I'm willing to sacrifice my personal health in the short term. So that I can get that person on at the last minute and put that episode up. And so many people are going to be impacted by that. There is a outsized sense of self that gets packed into that.

• 1:38:08Chris Williamson?

  Kind of narcissism.

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a, there's a maniacal narcissism with that.

• 1:38:13Chris Williamson?

  I like that. I like that.

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  And so you're not really that important. The internet's not going away. Nobody's waiting for your content. They may enjoy it. They may get a lot out of it. It might be very meaningful to them. It might have changed their life, but ultimately that narrative, that story that you're telling yourself is really just a convenient excuse for avoiding a level of self honesty and self connection that will ultimately create a stronger, better version of that person you're deluding yourself you already are.

• 1:38:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I really think that you take your

• 1:38:58Chris Williamson?

  endurance athlete perspective, it definitely seems like you're applying it to most of your other pursuits as well. And, you know, in the same way as doing a, a race for 250K. No one's going to do it in one go. Okay, so when are you going to break and for how long? What's that going to look like? And what are you going to do during it? One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is protecting your passion.

• 1:39:27Chris Williamson?

  You can continue to put your nose against the grindstone and sacrifice on the altar and flagellate yourself for the thing that you see as your calling.

• 1:39:38Chris Williamson?

  But it becomes progressively harder as you erode your passion and protecting that, just tempering that foot on the gas can allow you to use a much more potent fuel, which is the passion side of it, which is getting fired up and being excited to go and do the thing. And I got this conception of an hourglass shape to a lot of independent creation pursuits. So at the very beginning, everything is kind of easy because there's no expectation. You're doing it exclusively for the love of it. You're only doing it when you want and nobody cares. And then as you start to achieve success, you get squeezed more and more and more because

• 1:40:19Chris Williamson?

  there is expectation and maybe you're making money from it or maybe people, your sense of self-worth is attached to it or maybe it's your identity. It squeezes and squeezes and squeezes and squeezes. And then it gets to this point in the middle of the hourglass. And I do think that as you break out onto the other side, that is largely a function of revenue, but it can be a function of other things as well, including experience, that you can afford to delegate, that you can learn to delegate, that you can learn to relinquish. And as you come through the other side, you go, okay, well now, maybe I don't need to do absolutely everything. Maybe I can have somebody that can keep everything ticking over while I'm away. And this can happen in business. This can probably happen. I would imagine that mothers feel this with children when they need to have faith that

• 1:41:03Chris Williamson?

  the father, they can go out with their girlfriends, you know, 12 months deep into the baby being born and they can leave it with the father and the father knows which way up the baby's supposed to be and how to change a nappy and when it needs feeding and so on and so forth. There are a lot of things that I think occur within this.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  Sure. What I would say to that is you can be on the upper end of that hourglass metaphor.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  And you could still be a fucking asshole and be fueled by anger and resentment and spite and ego. Yes, if you have a successful enterprise and you have enough revenue, you can hire people, you can delegate, you can create convenience for yourself. That's all fantastic and it's something that I'm doing now and I'm reaping the benefits of that and I highly recommend it. But I'm getting at something deeper, which is, what is your fuel source? There are lots of different sources of energy and motivation for why we do what we do. Most people, I'm convinced, are navigating the world reactively,

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  completely decoupled from who they are, without any self-awareness of why they're responding and reacting to the externalities of their environment in the way that they do. And I think a lot of people live their life that way. There are other people who invest in themselves enough to try to understand, like, hey, when I do that, this happens, maybe I shouldn't do that. I wonder why it is that I do things that way. That excavation can lead to a healthier

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  way of responding to the world and decision-making, et cetera. But you can still be acting out of resentment and ego, et cetera. This process never ends. It's the worst. It's the most annoying thing. There is no end to the amount of self-understanding and kind of behavioral modification that we can engage with. But I think for me, that top end of the hourglass is a situation in which one has transcended the lower energies of motivation because they're unhealthy

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  and also they're unsustainable. Anger is a very powerful fuel source and it will catalyze a lot of activity and in some cases, a lot of success. But at some point, that fuel source is going to either run you into a pit or you're going to run out of that fuel.

• 1:43:51Chris Williamson?

  I had this exact conversation with Alex yesterday, saying,

• 1:43:55Chris Williamson?

  he's a big proponent of use what you have. And most people have way more resentment and anger than they do hope.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:03Chris Williamson?

  I do agree.

• 1:44:07Chris Williamson?

  For activation energy, to get yourself out of whatever the zero to one stage is, you need to use what you have because zero to one is the hardest. The first thousand subscribers, the first blog post, the first whatever it is that you do is always the most difficult one. So use what you have. The problem is, if you find that that fuel source is potent, you can end up relying on it over time. And the problem is it's toxic when you use the fuel.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  It's its own addiction.

• 1:44:32Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:34Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  And it has its own euphoric byproduct. When you engage with that anger, there's something exciting about that. And when you have success doing that, you're going to go back to it and you're going to go back to it. And you're going to have to run into an obstacle before you decide to change that way.

• 1:44:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I called this the vestigial pattern bias. It's technically referred to as the Einstein effect. But basically, the thing that you did when you started that gave you success, you refuse to let go of when you no longer are served by it. And a lot of people find success by grasping on really, really tightly.

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  But the delusion or the lie is that that is the source of this success. In the same way that a lot of people, a lot of creative people, when they get sober, think they're never going to be able to write another song or be able to perform in front of people or, you know, paint a picture or whatever it is, because it was the drug that was giving them the inspiration and the spark that that allowed them to be their best, most artistic self. It's the same lie, whether it's anger or resentment. And the fear is, if I clear that out. If I transcend my anger, if I make peace with the people in my life and I let go of

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  these resentments and I'm in a place of forgiveness, then I'm going to have no ambition.

• 1:46:05Chris Williamson?

  Where's my fuel?

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, my business will crater and my life will be over. And I think that's a very real fear that a lot of people have, and I under, I understand that. As counterintuitive as it may sound, my experience has been quite the opposite, and I've been lucky enough to witness people's lives blossom and explode in the best way, in miraculous ways, by overcoming those character traits or character defects that they once thought were sources of, of fuel, only to learn that they were hindrances and, and anchors. When liberated from that,

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  there is a sense of capacity that expands, that then creates a life that's ultimately bigger than the one they could have imagined for themselves.

• 1:46:57Chris Williamson?

  What would you say to a person listening to this podcast or your podcast, who spends a lot of time in their head, that enjoys the power of their thoughts and being able to wrangle, wrangle the world using cerebral horsepower and cognitive effort, and feels like, I probably need to kind of get out of this head and kind of down into this heart and be able to actually hear me, not just hear my thoughts. Sam Harris talked about having ideas and systems and the equivalent of someone who is reliant on their cognitive

• 1:47:40Chris Williamson?

  horsepower, letting go of those would be the equivalent of them being hit over the head with a hammer. And so I love my ideas and my systems. You would, your life would, you should try them. You should, your life would be amazing if you only had systems and ideas like mine. What do you say to that person that's kind of praying at that altar of cerebral horsepower?

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  I think there's so much. To be learned and gained from engaging with the heart mind. I myself, as somebody, I, you know, I lock myself in my head. I'm very enamored of my own ideas and my ability to articulate them and write them down. And my ego loves it when I turn a certain phrase, et cetera. I get that. I understand that. And our brains are pattern making machines and our intellectual capacity is what we leverage and rely upon in order to make sense of the world around us and who we are. We create rules through our perception that gets processed through our mind.

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  And that becomes the definition of ourselves and what the world is and the expectations that we have of others. To mute or quiet that and instead attune your attention to the heart is a very esoteric and challenging notion to even understand, like, what does that mean? Or what exactly, what's the tactic? Like, how do I do that? There, you're back in your mind already, right? Was there a page in Tools of Titans about this? Yeah, I know, right? So what's interesting about this is my, my wife is like all in her heart.

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  And I think with certain men, I'm perceived as somebody who is very heart centered. But my wife looks at me as, as a guy who lives entirely in my head, like, because the contrast between us is pretty significant. And she's been an amazing teacher and helping me to, to make that connection that I find so difficult. And in times of stress and anxiety, I will inevitably default back to because it's so hardwired. But I found that when I'm When I give myself permission to get quiet through meditation, through mindfulness practices, to listen to myself and doing and try to, if there is a practice to it,

• 1:50:09Speaker 01

  it's really, um, not necessarily like a rebirthing, but trying to connect with that child. You know, what is your earliest memory? What is it that brought you joy as a young person? What did you like to do that you even, that you forgot you even liked doing? And the more you can kind of ground it in that context and learn to listen and be silent and get out of the way as opposed to allowing your, your ego to intervene or to make people understand that you're here and you have something to say. Um, quiet. Can you get

• 1:50:49Speaker 01

  quiet? Can you be with yourself? Are you good company for yourself? Are you haunted by your brain? Is your brain working on overdrive? What would it feel like to let go of that? And listen to the subtle energies, that internal voice that you know, lives inside of you, but you're so quick to snuff out because you have stuff to do and you're an important person and you gotta call that guy and you gotta check your bank balance and you gotta go online and see how much that car lease is, or when am I going to be able to upgrade my condo to this house? All that bullshit is just getting in the way

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  of that authentic, real version of yourself. That's kind of down there going, hey buddy, I'm here. Don't forget me. That feels very feminine and I think it's probably challenging for a lot of guys. It just feels antithetical to what it means to be a man or their notion of masculinity, but ultimately I think is just an unbelievable source of strength and growth and capacity and creativity.

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  That when nourished, uh, really might surprise you. And I know that when I, it's, it's counterintuitive for me, Chris. Like, I like to live in my head, but when I allow myself to do that, those are the moments that have been fundamental and critical in these transformations that I've had in my life. They have not been functions of the intellect. They have been functions of the heart and appreciating

• 1:52:46Speaker 01

  what that aspect of myself is trying to tell me about who I am, heating it, taking action on it. Those have been,

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  that is at the foundation of every quantum leap that I've made as a human being.

• 1:53:03Chris Williamson?

  Rich, I love it. Let's bring this one home, man. Uh, it's been a very long time coming. Really, really, really glad that you came to see me today. I feel like I, uh,

• 1:53:13Chris Williamson?

  letting go of that cerebral horsepower is something that very, very many people, myself included, listening to this podcast probably need to take heat off. I'm really, really glad that you've got this other side of you. This other contribution. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the stuff you're doing? What's coming up next?

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  Uh, everything I do is at richroll.com, Rich Roll Podcast on all the places, Rich Roll on YouTube, et cetera. And, uh, that's it. Check out my podcast, similar to Chris's, but different. Uh, and I really appreciated this today. I really thought you asked amazing questions and, and, uh, you forced me into some uncomfortable places. So I hope I acquitted myself, uh, adequately, but I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks, man.

• 1:53:59Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  Cheers.