Daniel Pink ON: How to Master Time Management & Turn Procrastination into Productivity

You love On Purpose because it inspires your life. Have you tried Jay’s Genius workshops and meditations to access even deeper well-being? Learn more at https://shetty.cc/OnPurposeGenius Dan created a phrase he both loves and hates: performative complexity. His definition of this term is the performance of making our lives seem more complicated for no other reason other than, well, to seem complicated. On this episode of On Purpose with Jay Shetty, Jay Shetty speaks with author and lawyer Daniel Pink about creating a healthy relationship with time, procrastinating productively, and simplifying your life. Want to make time your friend, instead of your enemy? Check out Dan’s most recent book WHEN: THE SCIENTIFIC SECRETS OF PERFECT TIMING. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

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• 0:43Jay Shetty?

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• 0:53Speaker 01

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• 1:22Jay Shetty?

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• 1:57Speaker 02

  The best lives in some ways are unadorned lives, that lives that are not adorned by the trappings of wealth, or posturing, or status seeking, but are the simplicity of, do you have people who love you and do you have people you love?

• 2:18Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen, learn, and grow. Now, today, I'm super excited because I have been reading these authors' books since my teenage years, and I found them fascinating. They totally inspired me when it came to behavioral science, understanding the mind, how we think, how we make decisions, how we get driven and motivated. And I've been a fan ever since. So this is a true fan moment for me. Our guest today is none other than Daniel Pink. He's the author of six books about business and human behavior. His books include the long time running New York Times bestseller, When, which we'll be dissecting today, A Whole New Mind, as

• 3:02Jay Shetty?

  well as the number one New York Times bestseller, Drive, which was actually the first book that I read from him, and To Sell Is Human. Dan's books have won multiple awards and have been translated into 40 languages and have sold more than 3 million copies. Now, Dan has been a contributing editor at Fast Company and Wired, as well as a business columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. His articles and essays have also appeared in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and other publications. And in 2019, London-based Thinkers50 named him the sixth most influential management thinker in the world, and he lives in Washington, DC with his family. And today, we're here to talk about his latest book, When, called The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, which I know you're gonna love. So Dan, thank you for doing this.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Jay, it's a pleasure to be with you.

• 3:50Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, you, literally, you were like one of the first people I ever thought of interviewing before I even had a podcast. And I remember saying to, I believe, our mutual friend, Dan Chabau, who I believe you know well as well.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Sure, of course.

• 4:02Jay Shetty?

  I remember saying to him, I was like, I would love to interview Dan. And he was like, yeah, I can introduce you to him. I can introduce you to him. And then, I didn't have a podcast then, so I didn't interview. So we waited.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely worth the wait.

• 4:15Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, well, thank you so much for doing this. I genuinely enjoyed your book. What you've helped me understand about human incentives, drive, and now timing, which I think is the most fascinating. I recommended this book last year as one of my top 10 books.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Oh, thanks.

• 4:30Jay Shetty?

  And pushing it out as much as I can. So I'm excited to dive into it. But I want to actually start off with something that I saw on your Twitter profile. I think it was yesterday or a couple of days ago where you actually recommended Trevor Noah's audiobook, "Crime," for a book to study for high school students. And I was understanding why particularly that book?

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's interesting. There's a large presence on Twitter and other social media of educators. And those are educators among the few people who I actually enjoy interacting with on Twitter. And so there was a fellow who I think was a high school principal, who was looking for recommendations for books for high school students to read. And I thought that Trevor Noah's book, including the audio edition, was just a great choice for high school students. I mean, I'm the father of a high school student. My son has read that book. It's just a gripping story of this kid. And I think that what he is telling us gives us all kinds of insight into our world today.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  He, Trevor, was the son of a black mom and a white dad, German dad. Growing up, he was born in apartheid-era South Africa. And so simply for Americans, especially white Americans, hearing about that is just... I mean, even though you know it, it's just kind of mind-boggling. And then what happens after post-apartheid? How he decides what he wants to do, what his relationships are with his mother and father. But I actually listened to the audio edition of this, of his book. And it is, Jay, I think, the best audiobook I've ever listened to.

• 6:11Jay Shetty?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  And the reason for that is that Trevor Noah speaks multiple languages. And so he goes into some of these languages, but also his ability to do characters and accents is just extraordinary. It's a virtuosic performance and just a gripping read. I can't imagine a 17-year-old not being, 16-year-old not being mesmerized by that as I was. And I'm way older than 17.

• 6:38Jay Shetty?

  I love that. No, it's a great recommendation. I think that's awesome. And it's always nice to hear authors and very successful authors recommending other authors and audiobooks. So I think that's brilliant. Now, now you've made it really, really clear. That's, that's great. Tell us about, I want to start, you know, about with your fascination with human behavior and the mind and, and the way we think and why we do certain things. Like where did that come from for you? Because, you know, like I said, you were the first person or one of the first people to introduce me into that whole school of thought. And, and I just think like when you're young and you're at college or you're at school, you don't really, you don't really get exposed to these kind of topics. So where was it for you? And, you know, how did that start for you?

• 7:23Speaker 02

  I guess I'm not totally sure. I think part of it comes from being a pretty quiet kid growing up. I won't, I won't say shy, but just kind of a quiet kid, more of an observer, a reader, it's a kid who went to the library all the time. And, and so always feeling like I wasn't quite in the center of things, but was kind of on the periphery observing. And who was I observing? I was observing these crazy people. And so that I think was, I think that was part of it. I also was fortunate enough when I was in college to, I studied a lot of economics, a lot of psychology. And, but I ended up, I actually majored in, in linguistics, which is a, which is a, which is another social science. So I was always keenly, keenly interested in it. I think if I had my, if, if my, I can totally see in retrospect of my life

• 8:07Speaker 02

  that I would have become a professor rather than doing the, the noble hackery that I'm doing today.

• 8:15Jay Shetty?

  No, that's awesome. I, I, it's interesting always how, how people got to where they got to. And, and I'm fascinated that you haven't fully dissected your journey and, and like broken it up into little pieces. And I quite like that. I think it's, I think it's, it's very humble of you, actually.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Well, I, I also think it's, thank you for that. I'm not sure that it's humble as it is accurate. I think a lot of times these, these, there, there are different vantage points in, in looking at these journeys. And I, and I like the metaphor of a journey, the different vantage points in, in looking at these journeys. So if you're in it and you're in your, your, your, you're navigating your way, at least for me, there was much, much less intention than one would think. And much greater kind of half-assery.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Luck, that kind of thing. I think that in some cases, just because it makes us more comfortable existentially, we look back on these things and say, oh, there was a clear narrative to that journey.

• 9:11Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  And there might be. I think that retrospective look is actually valid, is valid too.

• 9:17Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I know that you spent a lot of time in Japan, right? Or you've spent some time in Japan.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I spent some time in Japan, sure, yeah.

• 9:24Jay Shetty?

  What's that, what's the culture like? Or what kind of influences have you taken from that culture in your life?

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a really, really interesting question. Probably more profound than I realize. I think that one of them is the virtue of simplicity. In Japanese design, in certain sorts of forms of just Japanese culture, there is a premium on that simplicity. And I think in many cases, in many realms of particularly American and particularly kind of elite, well-educated American circles, there is this kind of performative complexity. I mean, forgive, even that phrase performative complexity is an example of. Well, no, it's total BS because it's an example of performative complexity. Basically, what it is, is that people want to feel smart.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  And the way that they want to feel smart is by making things really complicated. And to me, one of the things I absorb from spending time there is actually the keenest form of intelligence is to make things as simple as you possibly, simple and clear and elegant as you possibly can. Whether you are writing a book, whether you're making a film, whether you're building a house, whether you're raising a family, anything like that, that there's a virtue in that kind of simplicity and clarity. So I think that's probably the thing that sunk in the most for me.

• 10:45Jay Shetty?

  That's so profound. I'm so glad you shared that, actually. I didn't know what answer you were going to give and I.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Neither did I.

• 10:52Jay Shetty?

  And I love that because I've always thought that for a while, like, you know, I was, my, all my work is inspired by two statements. One statement is, a statement often attributed to Martin Luther King, where he said that if you want a new idea, read an old book. And so I have this fascination with timeless wisdom and kind of truth from the past.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:14Jay Shetty?

  And then the second one is from Einstein, and when he said that if you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough. And so I've always been fascinated with simplification, and your work does that very, very effectively, apart from performative complexity, which I believe, I don't know if you just made that up right now, but it's a great.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  I did, I did, I did. You can have it, because I don't want to ever say it again.

• 11:35Jay Shetty?

  And sometimes I feel like, I feel this pressure as a thinker, or a sharer, or whatever you want to call us, you know, I have this pressure of like, oh, well, maybe I'm making things too easy to understand. And actually, hearing you say that is so like refreshing for me, because I'm like, no, I want people to be able to practice it and just get it in one, you know, so that's a beautiful part of culture. And what part of the culture did you feel that? Was it architecture? Was it language? Was it, you know, where was that in the culture?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  I didn't have any mastery of the language. That was hard for me, too. That was hard for me, although I think there is something, you know, even in the pictorial aspect of the language, where a single character, a single image represents something that's actually, that can actually, something be fairly complex. So if you take out some, a notion that is complex, like luck, okay, there'll be a character for luck. Now, that's true, obviously, in Chinese, that's true, obviously, in Chinese as well. I just, I just thought that when the, if you look at even Japanese aesthetics, it's, even Japanese cuisine, it's unadorned. You know, like really good Japanese cuisine is unadorned.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  It isn't French, where there's like lait and l'enclos and all kinds of stuff on it. It isn't, you know, heavily garnished and displayed in this grandiose way. It is pure, it is simple, it is unadorned, the essence speaks for itself. And there's, there's a There's a, there's a lot to be said for that. Even if you look at, uh, like even Japanese cuisine where you go into a place and all they serve is ramen. Okay, so not trying to do everything, but there, you're gonna get the best bowl of ramen you've ever had because that's all they serve. Um, uh, a- and so I, I think that that has been, that way of thinking has probably had a bigger effect on me than I, than I realized.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  In fact, in some ways, Jay, your question is making me understand that, that had a, that had a bigger effect. Because I do think that there, that, that simplicity is clarity and simplicity to me are, are such, th- those are things that I as a, as a, as a creator and as a consumer apprise very, very deeply.

• 13:47Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I mean, you're, you're a phenomenal public speaker as well. And if anyone's never seen Dan on stage, just go on YouTube and just watch him on stage, whether it's TED or, or other events. But how, have you ever reset simplicity or clarity out of interest? Like, are they themes that you see yourself writing about? Or do you ever, have you ever been down a rabbit hole on one of those and, and discovered anything fascinating about simplicity or clarity? Because I think you're spot on that really those are the two things we're always seeking out, right? Whether it's decision making or, or whether it's in how we feel about ourselves or a relationship we have in our lives. I, I'm intrigued because I, I've definitely studied those from a meditation, mindfulness.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 14:29Jay Shetty?

  But I'm intrigued to hear about if you found anything scientifically that's, that fascinates you.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's another really interesting question. I, I don't think I've ever intentionally, uh, gone, gone after that. But there is, there is a decent amount of, there's a decent amount of, of research showing aspects of this. So for instance, um, so, so for, I, I, I give you, I give you something profound and something mundane.

• 14:57Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  So, so on the, on the, on the mundane is, um, it's a concept, it's a concept in linguistics, uh, which is, which is known as processing fluency. Uh, processing fluency. And all processing fluency means is that the message, the words, like the communication you're making goes down easily. Or, all right, so, so it's, it goes down easily. Now, that's a virtue in and of itself. Uh, but one of the things that we know from, from linguistics and some, from some social psychology is that...

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Processing fluency enhances believability, not only understanding, but believability. And there's a dark side of this, of course. And so what you see is that things that enhance processing fluency are effective in getting your message across. An example would be repetition. Okay, we know that like repetition is effective. Repetition increases people's understanding. It increases their believability. Now, there's a downside, there's a downside to that. Even things like rhyming, there's some brilliant research showing that messages that rhyme are not only considered more understandable, but actually more believable. Alliteration, lists, and things like that.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  So, so we do know something from science that that clarity and simplicity are obviously extraordinarily, are extraordinarily effective. That's the mundane. Rhymes increase processing fluency, okay? The, I think the more profound thing is that when you look at, say, things like your listeners, your, some of your listeners are probably familiar with the famous Grant study out of Harvard where they followed a group of men, it was, at the time it was all men, I think it was all white men, graduated from Harvard in 1940, something like that, and they followed, I might be a little bit off in the years. Sure.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  They, they, and they followed them through the course of their lives. Checking, you know, massive longitudinal study, they also did it with, they later did a group of working class men, all men from, from Boston. And one of the things that you see from the Grant study is that, you know, like what makes somebody satisfied? What makes somebody happy with their life? And it turned out that it's completely unadorned. It's basically, do you have somebody you love and do you have people who love you? Period, full stop. That's it.

• 17:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's and that, you know, so so the adornment that we were talking about in Japanese cuisine, that the lack of adornment in Japanese cuisine is that are are the best lives in some ways are unadorned lives, that lives that are not adorned by the trappings of wealth or performative complexity or posturing or status seeking, but are the simplicity of do you have people who love you? And do you have people you love?

• 17:54Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that that that is truly one of the hardest things to understand right now as well, because,

• 18:00Speaker 02

  it's very hard done.

• 18:01Jay Shetty?

  I was literally speaking to on another podcast, I was interviewing Peter Diamandis recently. And, you know, he's obsessed with the future and we're talking about how, you know, he thinks the world's improving and the future's changing and and like we could we could live on another planet and we could, you know, do all this kind of stuff. And and it's, you know, at the same time, I remember a couple of years ago, I got to visit one of the Blue Zones in Sardinia. I don't know if you've come across Blue Zones, I'm sure you have.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  I know, I know, I've actually ordered, I've actually, there's a, there's a, there's a wine from that, from Sardinia, a red wine. The grape, I'm spacing out on what the, what the, what the, what the varietal is, but there's a, I've actually gone out and looked and ordered wine from Sardinia because for that very reason.

• 18:45Jay Shetty?

  Oh, that's incredible. Okay, what a small world. So I don't drink, so I have no idea what that wine is, or does it help you out? But, uh, but yeah, so when I went there and I was, I was, you know, I lived with some of the people in the town and the village, and I was looking at their lifestyles, and I also interviewed Dan Buettner, who talks about the Blue Zone. And and, you know, it's, you look at that simplicity and you look at that, you know, that stability of like growing up in a village, farming the land, natural exercise, not needing to do any HIIT workouts or any any weights exercises. It is, it is really, really special to see that. And I like trying to entertain the paradox of what parts of our lives are better simpler and what parts of our lives are better with some, and maybe complexity is the wrong word.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:26Jay Shetty?

  Maybe complexity is not even the opposite of simplicity. Maybe there's another.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Great point. That's a great point.

• 19:31Jay Shetty?

  Element. Yeah, maybe there's another element to like, not the opposite of simplicity, but a complementary paradoxical version of simplicity that, because I find in in and of myself, and I'd love to hear what you think, like, I, what I get fascinated about and excited about is the.

• 19:50Jay Shetty?

  The correlation between simplicity and then strategy, right? Like simplicity and then like ambition or drive or focus. And, and I find like often today, people, you know, people may connect simplicity with laziness or lack of focus or, you know, that, but we are speaking at a much more deeper, essential level of clarity.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. It's interesting. There is a, it's, it's an interesting, it's in some ways a linguistic question, no joke, about like, what's the right word to describe what you and I are talking about? Cause I feel like you and I are talking about something, well, at least what I think is important and quite interesting. But our vocabulary, the, or at least in English, might be impoverished and doesn't have the quite the right, the right, right term for that. I think you used a really important word there, essential. You know, I think it's, it's partly about what's essential. It's partly about what, you know, what is, what is, what is fundamental. And I, and I do think that this idea that, that we know that simplicity and ambition

• 20:58Speaker 02

  can be easily twinned, no question about it. I mean, you, you mentioned that one of your guiding quotations was from, was from, was from Einstein, who was talking about simplicity. And he ended up, I mean, among his, among his breakthroughs were, was something that is so profoundly complex that most of us don't understand it beyond the equation we memorized in seventh grade.

• 21:23Jay Shetty?

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• 22:06Jay Shetty?

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• 22:50Jay Shetty?

  Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Mazda, more of what matters to you. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. If you're talking about quality food, you can't forget Whole Foods Market, who've been holding themselves to the highest standards since they opened in 1980. That means you'll see thousands of organic products across their stores, from the produce department to the aisles. It also means you'll never see certain ingredients. They've banned artificial sweeteners and colors, high fructose corn syrup, and more, so you can shop with peace of mind.

• 23:35Jay Shetty?

  Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online. Talking of essentials, I do want to talk about, because I think this book is so essentially driven. So for everyone who hasn't read it, and I have recommended it before, we have this book, "When", that I want to talk about. I think time is one of those things, you know, how we use time, spend time, create time, what we make time for. Like, time is one of those things that, of course, is... and the way we use it, an essential, essential, essential part of all of our lives. And I think when we're talking about simplicity or clarity, I think one of the biggest things we lack simplicity and clarity on is time. And for me, I definitely noticed how, over life,

• 24:19Jay Shetty?

  especially when your book came out, I've tried to remove... People from having to live their life based on a timeline. Or an expectation and and I realized that because my life went in a completely different direction whereby I became a monk at twenty two and didn't have my first job until twenty six. Uh, and today lead one of the most meaningful, fulfilling lives in the world, thanks to all my experiences. And so it's just, it's fascinating. There were times in my life where I felt like I was behind people that I should be in line with. There are times in my life where I felt I was ahead of people. There are times when I felt like I was trying to figure it out.

• 24:59Jay Shetty?

  And I think a lot of people usually feel like they're behind, ahead, or equal to. And that's kind of how we make sense of stuff. And that's why when this book came out, which I know was like, maybe a year ago, year and a half ago, maybe a couple of years ago. It's to me, that was, I was fascinated that you were able to pinpoint, you know, and go so deeply into time, which I always thought was so much more fluid. And so I guess the first question I want to ask you, and and please take this wherever you like, like, don't feel constricted at all, because I like what we're kind of co-creating right now. Is is just, you know, why, what fascinates you about time the most that you were so deeply drawn to actually write a whole book about timing?

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so so that is actually, um, that I'm gonna put the answer to that in more of the mundane category. The reason for the impetus for it was just frustration, um, more than anything else. It wasn't any kind of deep conceptual fascination. So so here we are, um, you know, I'm talking to you from, this is, this is my office here in Washington DC. It's the refurbished one car garage behind my house. I live there, like, right there. Um, and so, you know, I would come to my office and and do stuff, do work. Um, and

• 26:19Speaker 02

  At a certain point, I realized I would have a to-do list and maybe I would have appointments on the calendar, but I wasn't intentional at all about when I was doing stuff. I like, like, like, I would write when I felt like writing. I would make phone calls when I felt like making phone calls. I would do interviews when I felt like doing interviews, you know? And I wasn't intentional about it. And that, and I said, that's, that's cra- that's crazy. Like, I, I'm actually a fairly kind of ration, I like to think I am at least, fairly rational, evidence-based guy. And I'm making these decisions about when to do things. I'm not even making decisions, I'm just kind of stumbling my way into it. And so I said, well, there's got to be some guidance out there on, on like, when we should do things. And I found to my surprise that there wasn't.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  And that got me really curious. I said, well, I wonder if anybody's ever researched this. So I started looking around for research, and it turned out there was a huge amount of research on this question, but it was splattered all over the place. It was in literally two dozen different domains. So it wasn't like you say, oh, there's a sociologist who studies timing. Well, there might be, there is, there are, but there are also biologists who do that. There are economists who've studied that. There are microbiologists who have done, studied, epidemiologists, there's a whole field called chronobiology. And so what you had was you had literally two dozen different fields asking very similar, in some cases, identical questions. And what I said is like, hmm, maybe, you know, it was painful, but if I go wide enough and deep enough into this research, I can begin to piece together the evidence-based

• 27:48Speaker 02

  ways to make better, smarter decisions about when to do things. When to do things in a given day, but also to your other point, Jay, when we think about our lives, our lives are episodic. Episodes have beginnings, the episodes have middles, and episodes have ends. The whole idea, the journey metaphor you introduced earlier, is like journeys have beginnings, they have middles, and they have ends. And it turns out that there is some fascinating research on how our cognitive abilities change over the course of a day, and then more episodically, how beginnings affect us, how midpoints affect us, how endings affect us. There's research on how groups coordinate in time. There's research on... How the way we think about time affects our behavior. There's research, again, all roads lead back to linguistics.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  There's research based on, on the, some, some interesting research showing that the way that languages configure their verb tenses, it can predict people's savings behavior, as crazy as that sounds. And so, so it ends up being something that is, going back to another one of your, another one of your words, it ends up being essential. It ends up being fundamental. Because we are temporal creatures. That is, we have, we talk about colloquially about biological clocks, about a biological clock. But essentially what we have, we know from, from biology is that, especially chronobiology, is that we essentially have clocks in every cell in our body. I mean, we are walking time pieces.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  And again, depending on your notion of time, sort of philosophically, existentially, we are in some ways moving through time. At the very least, our conversation began in the past. That, right? It's going to end in the future, right? The people who are going to listen to the recorded version of this are listening to something that happened in the past. But they had, but those people haven't done anything yet because that's in the future. And, and so we're sort of swimming in this essential element of our lives. And so what I was just trying to do is just make it understandable.

• 29:53Jay Shetty?

  I'd say my assumption is that the most common relationship, and I believe everyone has a relationship with money, we have a relationship with time, we have a relationship with anything, knowledge, wisdom, et cetera. And so our relationship with time for most people is, I always feel like I don't have enough. Right? That is a very clear relationship that we all have with time where it's like, I don't have enough time. I can't make enough time. I can't find time. Like, we say all these words which are all about making, finding, creating, having. What does that do? What is that mindset toward time? How does that actually affect our behavior?

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Our relationship with time, we can think of it as an ally. We can think of it as an enemy in some ways. That's over, that's oversimplifying in that case. But I think what we're trying to, and one way to make time your ally rather than your enemy, is to recognize the effect, often invisible, that it has on your life. So if you look, so I'll give, I'll give you an example. What we know from, let's just take the unit of a day. What we know very clearly from a whole array of research is that our brain power does not remain constant over the course of a day. Our brain power changes over the course of a day. So doing something at 9:00 a.m. is not the same as doing something at 3:00 p.m. Period, full stop.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Now, there's some complexity underneath that, but the main idea is that our brain power doesn't remain constant over the course of a day. The best time to do something depends on what it is you're actually doing. So, once you understand those kinds of hidden invisible rules, you can begin to make time your ally rather than your enemy and end up mitigating some of those feelings that you never, that one never has enough time. In many cases, people who don't feel like they have enough time, sometimes, not always, sometimes, it's not a, it's not a sufficiency of time issue, it's a sufficiency of priority issue. What they, they actually don't have any clarity about their purpose or their priorities. And so they're, the other thing that we know is that when time becomes extremely salient

• 31:56Speaker 02

  in our lives, we underperform. And I'll give you, in certain circumstances, or we're unhappy in certain circumstances. So, a great example of that is in professional services, but particularly in the practice of law, is the billable hour. What we know, so if you are a lawyer practicing in a law firm, not working for the government or doing that, or a nonprofit or something, you bill yourself out by the hour. And so what you do is that you have, you know, a way to, well, I'm going analog here, but you have on your computer or, you know, scribbled down, an account of what you're doing, literally, in some cases, in six-minute increments. And what we know from research there is that that makes people, that is incredibly rewarding

• 32:41Speaker 02

  to people's sense of autonomy. And so, so there are all kinds of things in our relationship with time that if we reconfigure it, we can feel a little bit better, do a little bit... More and better.

• 32:58Jay Shetty?

  Is productivity even the goal of time? Because I feel like today, one of the biggest challenges that I get asked at least, and maybe your children experience this, or maybe what I see outside in the world of social media is, a lot of people today spend a lot of time overthinking and procrastinating, and that's seen as a negative thing, and people are often scared of overthinking, scared of procrastinating, or they judge themselves and then they start getting into this vicious circle and cycle of feeling like, "Oh, I'm wasting a lot of time here." Tell me about what you've found, or even your thoughts on productivity as a goal of time versus the effective use, if possible, of procrastination and overthinking.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Procrastination and productivity, okay. Let's talk about what productivity is. I'm going to be literal, let's say. Productivity is the amount of units you produce over a given amount of time. So it is inherently time-based, because time is in the denominator of productivity. Okay? So, again, I'm not sure that productivity is necessarily the best measure. I say that as a writer, okay? So I could be a product... Like, suppose I wrote more words per hour today versus yesterday. I would literally be more productive. But am I a better writer? I don't know. It doesn't matter. Like, what are the words? Right? And so, in some ways, productivity is...

• 34:27Speaker 02

  The notion of productivity in that very literal sense is an artifact of our being in an economy where we were producing identical, mass-produced goods, and so efficiency was the highest value, because everything was the same. And so what you wanted to do was, in a given denominator, make the numerator larger. Okay? That's how you increase... That's a way to increase productivity. Or keep the numerator the same and shrink the amount of time in the denominator. So... So that's what productivity is. I think a way to, you know, a looser way to measure things is quality and quality contribution, impact, those sorts of things.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  And certainly for certain kinds of professions, like being a writer, writing more words is no measure of my contribution to the world.

• 35:18Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, so if anyone's listening or watching right now and is like, Dan, I just feel like I procrastinate a lot, I overthink a lot, and I waste time. What would be your response to that?

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Okay, so that's the productivity thing. Now, let's talk about procrastination, because we know a lot about procrastination, okay? Okay, procrastination is not always bad, okay? Sometimes you're procrastinating for a reason, because you haven't worked it out, because you're still incubating an idea, okay? So it's not inherently bad. It's not like all procrastination is bad. The second big idea here is that procrastination is basically, in general, the downside, the negative procrastination is just an emotion regulation problem, right? It has nothing to do with time. It means that you are unwilling to confront something and therefore are not competing. Something is so disturbing to you that you would rather actually sabotage yourself than confront it.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  That in some ways you're making a quasi rational decision, that the pain of confronting, man, can I really write this, is greater than actually not writing it in the first place. And so we know this from a lot of research. Procrastination is an emotion regulation issue. And so what you have to think about is, what is the emotion that you're avoiding? And is there a small step, is there a way in some ways to trick yourself into either confronting it directly or to do something to just get yourself going and that the action ends up confronting the emotion? But a lot of times, but again, in certain circumstances, it's hard to say, the fact that you're not ready to start is a signal that, it might be a very, very positive signal.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  It could mean that, hey, I'm still incubating this.

• 37:03Jay Shetty?

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• 37:38Jay Shetty?

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• 39:12Jay Shetty?

  I think as soon as you start labeling and going, oh, my procrastination's bad, and this is not a good place to be in, you're right. You just, every, all of that is just avoiding the actual emotion, which is a signal, or a sign, or an alert that's kind of trying to get your attention. And, and, and you just keep putting it away. And I think what that leads to, and this is something which I found fascinating in the book, it's like, starting things. Like, I feel like, you know, knowing when to start a business, or knowing when to start a project is like, the hardest thing in the world. And, you know, I'm sure you get asked this a million times, but like, tell us about the research behind starting something, and, and what you found was most critical there.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  There's very rarely, prospectively, a perfect time to start something. But there are ways to give ourselves a little bit of a different, it's like a lot, a, a, a little bit of a psychological edge. Uh, and this is the work of Katie Milkman, Jason Reese, and Heng Chen Dai. Um, they did it at Penn, University of Pennsylvania. And, uh, they had this idea of, of, um, what they call the fresh, it's called the fresh start effect. And a way to understand the fresh start effect is like this. That certain dates, certain days, certain dates are what social psychologists call temporal landmarks. Temporal landmarks. That is, they are, they stand out in time, the way a physical landmark stands out in space. So, again, back to the journey metaphor. You're navigating your way, you're trying to find your way. Oh, there's a landmark, I know where I am.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Oh, there's that building, I have a sense of where I am. Temporal landmarks are navigational tools in some ways. But certain temporal landmarks have a peculiar psychological effect. What they do is essentially, they, they operate as kind of a restart. What they say is that, on certain days, that are fresh start days, you essentially relegate your previous bad self to the past, and open up a fresh ledger on your new self. All right? And so there's certain days that actually are more, you're more likely to start something, and you're more likely to succeed while starting it. So, what does this mean? Let's, let's be concrete here. You want to start something, you're probably better off doing it on a Monday rather than on a Thursday. You're probably better doing it on the day after your birthday, rather than three days before your birthday.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  You're probably better doing it on, on the, like, the, the first day of summer, rather than three days before the first day of summer. Uh, uh, let's say you're, uh, if it, if one is a religiously observant, you know, uh, you know, the day after, uh, or the day of a religious holiday, rather than four days before that religious holiday. Uh, and so you can, in some ways, use, have that sense of where you are temporally, and pick the right date to start something.

• 41:46Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I, I can so relate to that, and my, my problem is, I'll try to start something on a Monday, I'll fail on Tuesday, and then I wait till the next Monday to start it.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Well, okay, so, so that's, that's, that's a mixed bag. That's a mixed bag. It depends on, it depends on, on how deep the failure was on, uh, it depends on how deep the failure was on Tuesday. Now, there's another strategy for all of this.

• 42:09Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, please.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Is, which, which on all of this, I mean, it's, it's reasonably well-known, and in some ways, it, it's, it's interesting, because I think it's analogous to our conversation about simplicity and the opposite of simplicity, or simplicity and complexity. Uh, in that I do think that in many cases, we have been, um, seduced into the idea of moonshots and big hairy audacious goals. I think that they're important, but I think that they're oversold, in a way. And what's undersold, just think about it, just think about it as a pricing issue, okay? So, the, so, so the big hairy audacious goals, moonshots, I think they're overvalued. And I think what's undervalued is small wins.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Uh, and once again, there's a lot, there's a lot of evidence of that, starting from Carl Weil, uh, 30 years ago. Small wins are enormously important, because what small wins do is that they, small wins can overcome that procrastination problem. Small wins can then lead to other small wins, and other small wins that cascade into something, into something bigger. So a strategy for overcoming procrastination, a strategy for many things, is to go, is to go for small wins. Let me give you an example of that. So, so, uh, the one strategy that I, um, that I've heard of, I, I, I mean, I just, I called it this, it's not, originally for me, it's just sort of, you know, out there. I call it J5M. J5M, not JY, and that stands for Just Five More.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Okay, and so if you don't feel like doing something, you say, okay, you know what I'm gonna do? Oh, man, okay, so I'm so I'm doing some research right now, okay, I have these papers. Some of them are incredibly boring, okay? You know what? I can't stand it, I don't, I wanna quit, you know what? I'll just read five more pages, just five more pages, I'll read that, okay? Oh, my God, I got a boatload of email here. Ah, I can't deal with it, I just wanna go inside and have a drink. You know what? I'm gonna just do five, five more, five more emails and we'll do that. Uh, you know what? I'm tired of writing, okay, just five more sentences, that's it. And that, you know, that can get us going, give you a small win. And what happens a lot of times is that just five more becomes just 10 more, just 20 more, something like, uh, something like that.

• 44:18Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I really like that one, that's, that's an awesome strategy, I think that's a great.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's very simple, I use it all the time, I, I'm not joking around, I use it today. I use it today when I looked at my email file and I was like, oh, God. I've already answered enough emails, I'm like, okay, just five more. And you know what I did? I just, I did that and I got it done and I probably ended up answering eight or something like that. Another one, a very well-known technique, I use it, I have no shame in using it. You're probably familiar with it, your listeners are probably familiar with it, is the, is the Pomodoro technique. Um, which is, which is, you know, Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. Uh, and so, um, you know, you set a, a timer. I, I have one on my computer, uh, that I use in, on very dark days. I set a timer for whatever, uh, I do it for 25 minutes and like, I just can't bear this, okay?

• 45:07Speaker 02

  I can't research this anymore, I can't read this anymore, I, I'm sick of writing. Okay, here's what we're gonna do, just 25, 25 minute, I'm not gonna do anything else, I'm just gonna do it for that 25 minutes. And, and that can, um, and, and that can, and I, and I think, let me, let me extract from this, as always, a large theoretical lesson. And it's this, all right? That a lot of times in our understanding of what makes human beings tick, we think that belief precedes action. That you have to convince yourself and then that is the impetus to act. And in many cases, more cases than we realize, the arrow runs in the other direction. That getting yourself to act can actually trigger the belief.

• 45:50Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  And that's a very, very important, that's a very, very important lesson.

• 45:54Jay Shetty?

  That, that's so true. And that's really, it's, it's kind of like when we're like, I can't make my mind up. Right? Like even that saying is exactly in that belief where you're just spending so much time trying to make your mind up and decide something. And, and what I love about what you just said is, is around that whole, the small wins element of just, I always feel like when you can get into a good rhythm and pattern of keeping promises to yourself and keeping small commitments to yourself, you start to trust yourself. And when you start to trust yourself, you can then trust yourself with bigger trust. The problem is, like you said, is that we go for these moonshot goals and naturally we fail at them. And therefore we don't trust ourselves. And, and I feel like self-trust is like the big issue

• 46:37Jay Shetty?

  when it comes with time, is that you're like, well, do I even trust myself with this much time? Do I even trust myself to complete that? And you're right about the small wins, whether it's making your bed or just five more or, you know, all of these principles that you're laying out, like that just builds trust with yourself.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  I'll give you something else that, that builds trust with yourself that's, that's related to this concept, which is, again, is research-based, it's built on, I've, I've, I've written about this, I, I wrote about it in that book, I've talked about it before, is the work of Teresa Mobley at Harvard Business School. And she found that the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress and meaningful work. Okay. So the days we're making progress, the days we're motivated, we come back the next day feeling motivated. But one of the challenges is that, is that we never have a good, we often don't have a good sense of how much progress we're making. And so one of the, so one of the things that I've done for, this is now for like eight or nine years now, is at the end of every day, I have a progress, you know, called a progress ritual.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  And all I do is I just basically say, what I, what, what'd you get done today? And I just list what I got done today and I keep a record of that. And I have to say, I almost never look at the list, but it's the act of doing. I mean, seriously, I almost never look at the list, but it's the act of doing it. So I sit, so I just take a moment, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a ritual. All right. And, you know, I don't have to tell you, former monk, the importance of rituals in. In human understanding, right? So it's a ritual. It's a punctuation mark at the end of the day. What'd you get done today, Dan? Okay, this is what I got done.

• 48:12Jay Shetty?

  What? I love that. How do you do that for other people? So if you're leading teams, if you've got a small team, a big team, a company, how do you kind of help people realize the progress they're making? Yeah, there's something you can do for yourself. Yeah, how do you do it for others?

• 48:28Speaker 02

  I mean, you could do a version of what I'm talking about for your team. I mean, what I would want to do is I would want to build that habit in others. Rather than have them rely on me for that, I would want to build that habit in others. So what you could do is you could ask your team to send you that at the beginning, not as a way to monitor them, but as a way to

• 48:52Jay Shetty?

  Build the habit.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  As just as a way to build that habit and then eventually have them continue the habit without sending it to you.

• 48:59Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. I'm actually gonna try that out. I'm 100% gonna try that out.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  What'd you get done today? Just write down the things you got done. I mean, it's a very simple concept. We often have a to-do list at the beginning of the day, like have a done list at the end of the day.

• 49:13Jay Shetty?

  And it's almost like gamifying your mind, right? Because you know that if you got three things done yesterday, you might want to get four done today, so you'll push a bit further.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Right. I think a lot of times also when we're scrambling around, we don't have a sense of what we've accomplished. And so sometimes it can be, and sometimes it can be affirming. So I know that many days where I feel like I haven't gotten anything done during the course of a day, I stop and I do my little progress ritual. Again, we're talking like, Jake, 30 seconds, 60 seconds.

• 49:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  Not anything elaborate. I'm like, oh, okay, I actually got more done than the day. And then on the days where I didn't get much done, you're like, oh, come on, man. You gotta do a little bit better than this. Come back tomorrow.

• 49:55Jay Shetty?

  You're coaching yourself. You're coaching yourself.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good way to put it. In many ways, you are. What you're doing is you're just giving yourself, you know, you're coaching. If you think about it like a sport, it's like in track and field or in swimming or something like that, your coach is there with a stopwatch saying, here was your time today. Okay. Or, you know, here's how much you lifted today.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  You have a sense of, you know, are you making progress or you're not making progress?

• 50:19Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, one, I love that. One thing I want my audience, everyone who's listening right now or watching, I want you to be aware of is that literally Dan in this book breaks down everything from like productivity. I've done some of the tests with you guys before and I've shared the book when we talked about, you know, all of the different productivity times for different types of people, based on what time you sleep and what time you wake up. The naps breaks. I'm not going to ask Dan all those questions because they're in the book and that's why I recommend the book. I want to ask Dan stuff that isn't in the book or is extending the book. And part, I think one of the biggest questions I do get asked that I do want to talk about is relationships. Because I think dating and getting married and knowing when to either pop the question

• 51:02Jay Shetty?

  or when you should expect the question, like these are like, these are like some of the biggest challenges in the world for, on a personal, individual level for people. And so tell me about some of the work that you found when it came to not just like, when's the best time to get married, but it's almost like, when did people, when did, or what did you find when people said they knew or they felt they'd found the right person?

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that one is, that one is more inscrutable, I have to say.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  I wrote about that only very, very tentatively because I wasn't sure about the research on that. I mean, it, you know, what it says is that in general, in America, marriages are more likely to last if people get married after age 25 and before age, I think 34, somewhere around there.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  But again, that doesn't mean if you get married at age 35, you're going to get a divorce. You get married at 28, you're, I mean, it's just like, there's a slight, there's a slight effect there. There is some interesting effects on education. So that, one, one big effect is, is that, especially in America today, people with more formal education are more likely to get married and stay married. People with less formal education are less likely to get married and less likely to stay married if they are. And there's also seems to be an effect, whatever your level of education, on getting married after you complete your education rather than before. But again, I don't think you take those large population. Insights to make a decision about whether you're going to spend the rest of your life

• 52:34Speaker 02

  with someone you love. I can recommend a book that is, well, one of the leading scholars of marriage, really the social psychology of marriage is at Northwestern, his name is Eli Finkel. He wrote a very good book called The All or Nothing Marriage, about how marriage has changed, a lot of what we know about healthy marriages, and also how marriage has changed in America over the last 200 years. It's a really, really, it's a very, very interesting book.

• 53:03Jay Shetty?

  All or Nothing Marriage?

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, The All or Nothing Marriage by Eli Finkel, which, you know, there's a lot of really good research, a lot of good research in there. And there's some relationship advice in there, too. You know, among the most important things are, you know, what do you attribute to someone's inherent personality and what do you attribute to circumstance? So if your spouse snaps at you, say, you say, "Oh, my God, my spouse is the biggest jerk there ever was," or you say, "Oh, my spouse is having a bad day." And people who make the attribution that it's circumstantial, not surprisingly, end up better off than people who say, you know, attribute the behavior to someone's inner jerkiness.

• 53:43Jay Shetty?

  Right, yeah. No, it would be fascinating also to look at things like amount of time couples spend together, but amount of time couples spend arguing on useful arguments, maybe, too.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's other, there's other, there's other research out there. There's a guy, I'm spacing on this, there's a guy named Gottman, I think it's.

• 53:59Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, John Gottman, yes.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's done some research on marriage. And, you know, one of the, not, this is not surprising, one of the biggest things that you see is, if I'm not, if I'm characterizing it right, is not only, not arguing per se, but how people argue.

• 54:17Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  And so somebody has to do with the attribution. The other thing, one of the biggest signals, I think, in Gottman's research, is when people express contempt for their partner. Not surprisingly, that's a marker of things gone awry.

• 54:31Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, you're right. He talks about learning how to fight is the number one skill needed in a relationship, not knowing how to plan date night, or how to, you know, just how to communicate, but how to specifically fight. And, yeah, really useful. One thing I want to definitely dive into today is around this, and you talk about it in the book, is about, you know, when's the right time to end something? Because I think we're always fascinated by, and we talked about that, like, when do you know when you should start something, when's the perfect time to start?

• 55:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:03Jay Shetty?

  I think one of the things we're not very aware of when it comes to your business, work, leases, whatever it may be, is ending. What have you learned, and not just in the book, but what have you learned from just your own life and experience, and just like when you found is the right time to end something?

• 55:19Speaker 02

  That's a harder call to make. One of the things that I do know for sure, though, is that endings are much more important than I realized before I did this research, that endings have a profound effect on our behavior, endings have a profound effect on how we remember entire experiences. So, you know, famously, you know, this fairly well-known is that how an experience ends has a disproportionate effect on how people remember the entire experience, and also even how we evaluate people's lives, too. So, there's a famous piece of research on where they gave somebody a description of a fellow who, for 29 years, was a wonderful guy, great CEO, generous and whatnot, and

• 56:00Speaker 02

  then, in his 30th year, he became a jerk and then unexpectedly died. And they said, you know, they had people say, "How moral of a life did that person lead?" And then they had a different set of group people evaluated a different character. This character was a total weasel and jerk for 29 years. In his 30th year, he decided to become a good guy, being more generous, and then he suddenly died. And so, what they, what they found was that someone who was a good guy for 29 years and a jerk in his last year was rated as a slightly less moral than someone who was a complete jerk for 29 years and happened to be a good guy in his, in his final year. So, so, so how something ends has a big effect on us, on, how something ends has a big effect on, on how we remember it.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  The presence of ending has a big effect on our motivation. So, when we see the end of something, we end up kicking a little bit harder. So, it's, so, a way to, a way to get yourself up to dime in certain kinds of procrastination situation is to impose an ending. So, so, but endings, endings matter, endings matter a lot, and I think that one of the things that we need to do in organizations and our family lives and whatnot is, is mark endings and, and establish rituals around endings, because that ends up being a deep source of meaning for people.

• 57:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, great answer. I love that example. That's super powerful. And I think everyone needs to think about that because often it's like we put so much, what you're saying and what I'm learning from this, and you're so right, and it's only hitting me now too, is we put so much effort into starting something, like so much effort, like whether it's a business or a relationship or whatever it is, like we're excited and all these enthusiasm. And then when you break up or you end a business or you reject someone or someone gets fired or whatever it may be, that process is always handled really poorly.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:46Jay Shetty?

  And that's actually what people remember.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Absolutely right.

• 57:51Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and that's scary to think about when you think about that for a moment. But yeah, no, it's absolutely brilliant and I hope we can continue to talk offline as well. I'm gonna end with what we do, which is two rapid fire rounds. They're super fast. You've got to fill in the blanks for this one. So these are just fill in the blanks. Are you ready?

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:10Jay Shetty?

  Awesome. Time should always...

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Be on your mind but not obsessing your mind.

• 58:15Jay Shetty?

  Okay, good answer. Okay, second one. Taking breaks.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Taking breaks is one of the most powerful bang for the buck things you can do for your mental, physical, and professional wellbeing.

• 58:28Jay Shetty?

  Number three. Every day I must.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Every day I must contribute.

• 58:33Jay Shetty?

  Okay, I love that. You excel in your career when?

• 58:37Speaker 02

  People excel in their careers when they contribute.

• 58:39Jay Shetty?

  I love it. Brilliant. Okay, these are your final five. These are answers in one sentence.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  All right, I'm sweating now.

• 58:44Jay Shetty?

  Well, one word, yeah. Okay, ready?

• 58:46Speaker 02

  You gotta make it to the end here, yeah.

• 58:47Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. So the one lesson you feel helped you the most throughout your career?

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Not caring what other people think about me.

• 58:53Jay Shetty?

  Great answer. I love that. What do you want to leave your kids with that you didn't have growing up?

• 59:00Speaker 02

  A deep and unshakable work ethic.

• 59:03Jay Shetty?

  Nice, okay. If you could create a law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Say please and thank you.

• 59:11Jay Shetty?

  Nice, great, awesome, okay. Two more questions left. Fourth question. What is something that you know to be true that many people disagree with you on? So something that you're so sure about, but a ton of people will be like, nah, Dan, you're totally wrong.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  The world is less fair than it seems.

• 59:28Jay Shetty?

  So you believe the world is less fair than it seems? And people disagree with you on that?

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:33Jay Shetty?

  Well, that's a whole nother conversation then.

• 59:35Speaker 02

  I know, I know, I know.

• 59:36Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that one we have to...

• 59:37Speaker 02

  And when I say people, I might be reflecting my own kind of biases here. But I think especially well-educated American people.

• 59:46Jay Shetty?

  Sure, great. It's a good answer. I mean, it's an intriguing point. Okay, fifth and final question. What is the biggest lesson you've learned in the last 12 months?

• 59:55Speaker 02

  It never works to go against the grain of who you are.

• 59:59Jay Shetty?

  Wow, very profound.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  Wow, those are tough questions, man.

• 1:00:03Jay Shetty?

  Well, you answered them pretty quickly and well, so thank you.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Well, I answered them quickly.

• 1:00:09Jay Shetty?

  I love it, Dan. This is so brilliant. I really hope we get to meet in person.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'd be wonderful.

• 1:00:15Jay Shetty?

  And yeah, thank you so much for doing this, everyone. Dan's got a ton of great books to sell a human, drive a whole new mind. When? Go and dive into these books. They're absolutely incredible. He's an incredible storyteller. I mean, incredibly accomplished. I can't even start. But I'm just grateful that Dan took this time to be with us today.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  I'm grateful that you had me, Jay. It's been a lot of fun.

• 1:00:45Jay Shetty?

  Hey, guys, this is Jay again. Just a few more quick things before you leave. I know we try to focus on the good every day, and I want to make that easier for you. Would you like to get a short email from me every week that gives you an extra dose of positivity? Weekly Wisdom is my newsletter, where I jot down whatever's on my mind that I think may uplift your week. Basically, little bits of goodness that are going to improve your well-being. This short newsletter is all about growth and sending positivity straight to your inbox. Read it with a cup of tea, forward it to a friend, and let these words brighten your day. To sign up, just go to jayshetty.me and drop your email in the pop-up. If you have trouble finding it, just scroll to the very bottom of the page, and you'll see the sign-up. Thank you so much,

• 1:01:28Jay Shetty?

  and I hope you enjoy my Weekly Wisdom newsletter.

• 1:01:35Jay Shetty?

  This podcast was produced by Dust Light Productions. Our executive producer from Dust Light is Misha Youssef. Our senior producer is Juliana Bradley. Our associate producer is Jacqueline Castillo. Valentino Rivera is our engineer. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions. And special thanks to Rachel Garcia, the Dust Light Development and Operations Coordinator.

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  Hey, it's Brianna Stewart here with Ally Bank. Whether it's at work or with family, life never calls a timeout. Sometimes you're ready, and sometimes you have to react on your feet. Unexpected travel, retail therapy, and of course, the kids need new kicks right now. Ally gets it, and they build banking around real life. So even in those clutch money moments, you can spend and save confidently with the bank that's got your back. Ally: Do it right. Ally Bank. Member FDIC.

• 1:02:31Speaker 05

  Mr. President, my company formed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami.

• 1:02:38Jay Shetty?

  They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:02:40Speaker 05

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:02:47Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:02:51Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:02:55Speaker 06

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:02:56Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 1:03:01Speaker 07

  Espolón Tequila. It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead. Espolón Tequila. Balanced, delicious. Perfect for nights out, nights in, and people who like to drink tequila. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. Then hold on tight. 100% acave, 0% eagle. Espolón Tequila. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 1:03:25Speaker 05

  Espolón Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compaia America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.