Afford Anything - How Radical Curiosity Leads to Innovation in Life and Work - with Shane Snow, founder of Contently

Episode Date: June 11, 2018

#134: We often peek inside the world of business to look for lessons about how to simplify, optimize and innovate. But what can we learn when we examine world-class people who are hacking the system in any field -- including sports, politics and music? What can we learn when we're radically curious about everything? And how can we apply this knowledge to helping us lead more deliberate, curated lives? Today, we tap Shane Snow's brain for answers. Shane Snow is a co-founder of Contently, a company that matches freelancers with publishers. But we're not going to talk about that today. We're going to explore bigger themes. Because Shane isn't just a tech entrepreneur. He's also an award-winning journalist, which is another way of saying that he's an inquisitive person who lives in the world of storytelling and big ideas. His first book, SmartCuts, explores how people avoid climbing the normative career ladder. It showcases people across a variety of industries who hack the ladder, often by making unconventional lateral moves. And that is exactly the kind of thinking that appeals to anyone building financial independence, and trying to design a meaningful, autonomous and unconventional living. His latest book, Dream Teams, explores what it takes for a group of people to come together to create something amazing. How can the whole be greater than the sum of its parts. And he looks across industries, at everything from hockey teams to businesses and beyond, to find the universal threads inside these stories. A few accolades before we begin: GQ Magazine described Shane's work as "insanely addicting," and The New York Times refers to Shane as a "wunderkind." (I had to Google that term -- apparently, it refers to someone who achieves great success at a young age.) He has also, somehow, appeared on Gossip Girl and beat Super Mario 3. Let's find out what Shane has to say about innovation, curiosity, teamwork, and hacking the system. Oh yes, and kangaroos. For more information, visit the show notes at http://affordanything.com/episode134 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything, but not everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that's true, not just for your money, but also your time, your focus, your energy, your attention, anything in your life that is a scarce or a limited resource, and I'm not saying that to promote a scarcity mindset, I believe in abundance, but the truth is that there is an opportunity cost to everything. Everything's got a trade-off.

And so the questions become twofold. Number one, what's most important to you? Not what does society say should be most important to you, but what is truly a priority in your life? And number two, how do you behave in a way that reflects this? Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice, and that's what this podcast is here to explore. My name's Paula Pant. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast and the founder of Afford Anything.com. Today, Shane Snow is joining us to discuss innovation, big ideas, and radical curiosity.

Shane Snow is a co-founder of Contently, a company that matches high-quality freelance talent with the companies that need to hire them. But we're not going to talk about that on today's show. We're going to discuss something much bigger. Because Shane isn't just a tech entrepreneur. He is, first and foremost, a journalist and an author. That's another way of saying that he's a radically curious person who lives in the world of storytelling and big ideas. His first book, Smartcuts, explores how. people avoid climbing the normative career ladder. It showcases people across a huge variety of

industries who hack this ladder, often by making unconventional lateral moves. And that is exactly the kind of thinking, the type of framework that appeals to anyone building financial independence and trying to design a meaningful, autonomous, and unconventional life. His latest book, Dreamteams, explores what it takes for a group of people to come together to create something amazing. How can the whole be greater than the sum of its parts? How can that be more than just a cliche? How can it be real? And in order to answer this question, he looks across industries, everything from hockey teams to businesses and beyond,

to find the universal threads inside these stories. So a few accolades before we begin. GQ has described Shane's work as, quote, insanely addicting. And the New York Times refers to Shane as a wonderkind. And I had to Google that because I didn't know what it meant. Apparently, a wonderkind refers to someone who achieves great success at an early age. He is also, somehow, been on Gossip Girl and beat Super Mario 3. So here he is, Shane Snow.

Hey, Shane. Hey. How's it going? It's going fantastic. It's a good day. It's an excellent day. I almost never do these interviews in person, so I'm glad that we're here. I'm honored. Thank you. Shane, tell us who you are. Tell us about your personal story. You grew up in Idaho as the oldest of five. Oldest of seven, actually.

Oldest of seven? Five brothers and two sisters. Oh, wow. Okay. So my father is an engineer. He worked on rockets, and then he worked on nuclear technology. How does someone like that end up in the middle of the desert in Idaho? It's because of there's a nuclear test reactor in the middle of nowhere, and he worked there. So I grew up in farm territory with this father who was always showing us kids how to take things apart and how they worked and taking us on tours of nuclear reactors. A really interesting way to grow up.

My mother encouraged us to read a lot. She orchestrated competitions between my brothers and I of who could read the most books. And I think this was sort of a plot to get us to stop fighting. but I grew up being really interested in science, really interested in the way the world works, and kind of hacking, I guess, for lack of better word, and also really interested in stories. And so I wanted to become a writer and I wanted to write about science. I wanted to write about human behavior and business and all of these things that kind of had to do with how the world works. And kind of made my way from Idaho eventually to New York to do that.

This is a really abridged version of the story. but after a lot of figuring out, wandering around, I realize that the way that I see my identity is someone who's an explorer, who's really curious, who wants to tinker, wants to take things apart, wants to see new places, and then come back and connect dots and tell other people about it because I'm excited about it.

So in a way, that lends itself very naturally to journalism, lends itself to teaching. It leads you to build things and to do lots of projects, which I have done. And I fully blame my parents and that dichotomy between kind of how they raised us in that strange place where it was a little out of place to be the family with the dad at the nuclear plant. And I blame all of that for this sort of interesting path I've had. So you came to New York and it wasn't easy for you in the beginning. You told a story on the James Altiger show about sleeping in your office for a while.

Yeah, when I started a company with some friends about eight years ago now, a company is called Contently. And that started because I noticed that a lot of my friends who were journalists who were better writers than me, but less resourceful in terms of having to sort of be a freelancer. So all of that industry is moving to contract work. And so we started a company to basically broker work for them. And it kind of blew up into this thing that was bigger than we expected. And first, my two business partners moved to New York and one lived on my couch. And then there was a period where, you know, finances can be tricky when you're running a company. There's a period where I ran out of money.

There's a period where Dave had to sell his apartment. Lots of things happened on the road to building a successful company. And there was a point where I slept in the office for various reasons, but you get through it. And, you know, I suspect I'm not the only one. I suspect there's more than a dozen people that have slept in the office, either because they're workaholics or because they needed a place to stay. And that's fine by me. What kept you going through those times? I mean, why didn't you just throw up your hands and say, you know what?

I'm just going to become a human resources director for H&M. You know, I did buy a lot of clothes from H&M back then. Part of it is the dream, right? And we started this company because we wanted to help journalists put food on the table. table because we thought the future of media was really important and really interesting. I still think that media and what we're doing now, right, is the biggest driver of culture, which in turn is the biggest driver of society, people getting along or not. So I think it's really important.

We wanted to be a part of that in this company that we built. And so we believed in that. We also believed that there would be light at the end of the tunnel. And then I think at a certain point, you kind of have no option. it's either trek through and endure or face sort of a worse psychological fate, which is giving up. I think being honest with yourself about when you should give up is really hard and really important. Fortunately, when it came to the thing that we were building, that was not something that made sense. What made more sense was finding another way to get another credit card or someone to help, you know, kind of bail us out, that sort of thing.

We were on a road that was proving to be the right road. But I know lots of people that, you know, you judge that wrong and then you go out of business and then you're, you know, if you leverage your own finances too far, then you're in trouble. So definitely there was that risk. I think I also, the thing that you're probably alluding to, I went through a really big personal crisis about halfway through, you know, this eight-year journey at this company. And now I'm back to full-time writing and exploring, but as of about a year ago, But there was a point when I went through a real big personal crisis where I financially was at zero and without an apartment. And those are some tough times. I think especially after having had this sort of semblance of success and from the outside, I remember we raised millions of dollars and my mom thought I was a millionaire.

And that's not quite how it works. But the company was doing well, but I was not and I was embarrassed to tell people. And that was a hard time that once I got through that, I realized I'd learned a lesson in humility, particularly asking for help is okay. How did you come to the point where you realized asking for help is okay? How did you get to that point of humility? There were a couple of people that were really important in that time for me who got me to open up, who offered help.

One was a mentor of mine who Zadley has passed away now, and another was a dear friend. Once I started opening up about my situation and my insecurities and all of that to them, And I realized that that was fine, that it worked, you know? It's like you jump off the high dive and you're like, oh, that wasn't so bad. They made it easier. So I think it's like a lot of things, actually. And a lot of the things that I write about that you ease yourself into the uncomfortable situations

only to realize that it's okay being uncomfortable and that it can be advantageous to be uncomfortable. It's actually a theme in a lot of what I write about when it comes to innovation or business that we don't change the world or our world by doing things that are completely comfortable. In your book Smartcuts, he wrote about people who do interesting things in unconventional ways. Did you draw on your own experience from that? What inspired that theme?

I think it very much is, in hindsight, looking back, inspired by my own unconventional journey and by that sort of engineering mindset I grew up with. I remember spending hours in the garage with my dad taking a lot. apart parts. And, you know, he would work on cars because he's an engineer and, you know, it's a good way to save money versus taking a car to the shop. But he would also teach us that way. And so I think there was that fascination. I also, you know, in the early 90s, I was building computers from parts that we got from the Salvation Army or the garbage or friends or whatever. And figuring out how things work was really fun. So I think that's a big part of it. And, you know,

in computers, you're putting together a computer from a bunch of. bunch of parts. You're not using an instruction manual. You're not doing it the conventional way, and you realize very quickly that you can do things unconventionally. There's a story I've told a few times. I think I might have one time on another podcast, so we don't have to recap it all here. But of the time that I saw my, well, my little brother and I, with our toy super soaker, basically helped my father, my grandfather fix a van and get it to go 100 miles to get home when a fuel pump was broken. You grow up with those kinds of experiences and you realize that the way everyone says you should do things isn't the only way to do things. Now, I think a lot of people

learn these kinds of lessons naturally growing up multicultural. Or if you grow up in different countries, or if you learn two languages, you instinctively know your brain has formed a neural pathways that basically reinforce the idea that there's more than one way to say something that's okay. There's more than one way to live and that's okay too. So I'm, I'm I'm sort of jealous in that way, but I did have a little bit of a multiple sort of lens experience growing up in my childhood. And then certainly going from that environment to a big place like New York and being insanely curious. I think all of that helps. The more that we kind of frame the world in that way, that anything is possible, the more okay it is for anything to be possible.

I think it's a big theme, right, that you talk about, right? Right. That I think it becomes this habit or this way of thinking that then can permeate other things. besides sort of what we originally thought. Like what? So in SmartCuts, I wrote about how this idea can apply to common conventional things like career paths. I think that one's really interesting because there's very much the sort of fixed mindset that we have around career paths. In my case, as a journalist, if I wanted to become a big name journalist with a column of a big magazine,

I would have to get an internship at that magazine. I have to stay there for years and years and years and slowly work my way up the ladder. Right. Become a fact checker. Exactly. Do all of the grunt work, take out the garbages and wait for someone to die and then move out the ladder, right? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there's a couple things wrong with that. One is that experience is a really bad proxy for cleverness and for talent and for skill.

You can spend 30 years doing something and not be that good at it. and yet you will climb the ladder in traditional corporate setting because you have 30s of experience. Now, no experience is not going to be, you know, really highly correlated with being good at something either, but why do we put so much stock in that? Why don't we, when we're hiring people, we look at how many sort of years, days, whatever, of experience in certain fixed areas before you even consider someone. That's not a measure at all of how resourceful someone is, how good at problem solving they are, how well they can do the job.

I think the other thing that I've been thinking out lately that is a problem with that is this leads us to systemic bias against a lot of people. Someone like me, I'm white guy from an American family, right? I show up to a job, and there's a lot of things about me that make it easier to climb up some sort of experience ladder,

and I've been provided a lot of opportunities in my life. Someone else might not, on paper, have that same profile that is sort of familiar, comfortable, standard, or whatever, and that doesn't make them a worse person for the job. And I think this sort of mindset leads us to a lot of the problems we have in business today where, you know, the whole corporate diversity thing, I think, is squarely in the targets of this kind of false paradigm that we have. Anyway, so I think that's really interesting. And you look at what I was really interested when it came to career paths, You look at some of the most successful people in the world, they often get to where they're going through not the standard path.

So when I was looking at journalism, I looked at some of my favorite writers who were writing for the New Yorker and Wired magazine, places I wanted to write. And I noticed that some of them had been there for 40 years, but some of them actually were, had not been there for 40 years and had done this really interesting thing where they'd gotten credibility as a freelancer at different magazines, kind of bounced around and leveraged that credibility to work their work. way up to bigger and better places. And then suddenly 29-year-olds who are brilliant, great writers are writing feature stories for the New Yorker. You know, I scratched my head and I said, well, how did that guy do that? And then you start to notice that this is the same way in business. Again, it's not about experience. It's, it doesn't mean that if you're 60 years old and you've spent 30 years working, then you're not going to be qualified. But it just doesn't mean that if you have that profile, that you will be qualified. Right. Right. So creativity and resourcefulness count

for quite a bit more than standard experience, and yet the way that we've set up our systems doesn't reflect that. Yeah, and I think there's also, if we want to solve problems that are new or hard, we can't do things the same way. And so having a system that kind of encourages people to live one certain way or to work one certain way and rise up through making these hand motions that probably would help for people to see, the system that's sort of this railroad tracks of how you build up levels of senior,

inside of a company, you don't get outside perspectives, you don't get outside expertise that can help you solve problems better than people in your industry had solved them before. And so part of what I write about in SmartCuts and what I've written about in my work since is this idea of drawing from, of the advantage of sort of the outside sources and the advantage of the outsider path. An interesting one that I wrote about in SmartCuts at the very beginning is U.S. presidents, which somehow, you know, the theory was right. I looked at data of the career paths of U.S. presidents and the data on why people say they vote for leaders.

And basically it predicts that Donald Trump would be Hillary Clinton. It predicts that someone with little political experience, but a lot of experience and credibility in another arena such as business, would be more likely to win an election over someone with 30 years in politics. And then after that, it says, well, then once that person is in there, what will make them a good leader is if they actually bring those other experiences in and if they're actually humble enough to listen to the people who know what they're talking about so that they can change, which is sort of the, you know, there's a lot of sad parts to that story, but you look at just history and this is the case. And so, you know, humans are funny and we're funny in that we value the wrong things. And again, actually, having 30 years

of experience in politics doesn't mean that you would be a bad president. What means you'd be a bad president is if you aren't flexible enough to listen to people, if you can't change your mind, can't do things unconventionally once in a while, which often having 30 years of experience means that you won't do that. But sometimes it might. And I think you look at the profile of someone like Hillary Clinton and actually you get a sense that maybe actually that might have happened, that she might have been very willing to change her mind as she has in the past, but maybe not. But yeah, so those are the kinds of things that I explored. I think that same idea of here's the assumptions, here's the conventions, here's the way things are done in any industry.

The same thing that I'm talking about you can apply anywhere. So you can apply it in finance, you can apply it in the same way that you could apply it to careers. You can apply it to building technology. You can apply it to learning a skill or solving any problem. Anything that's the way it's done, I think, is that's a flag to me, that there's an opportunity to take it apart and figure out a better way to do it. Right. And I can see how that would apply to any career in that there is the traditional path of working up the ladder, but the ladder is crowded. Yeah, how many, I mean, again, back to the president thing.

how many politicians have spent their whole lives hoping that they'll be the one next in line at the top of the ladder. And then over and over and over again in history, people from outside of that ladder who have found a, I guess, faster path to the top of their industry to getting leadership credibility and other people who don't know them's eyes. And then they come over and all these sad people have been in Congress, you know, since the 1980s are like, but it was my turn. This is how it's supposed to work. And then they drop out. that happens everywhere. Right. And what's interesting about making lateral moves is that you build a position of strength.

You build yourself into a position of strength in whatever arena you can. And then once you occupy that position of strength, you can then move into other arenas much more easily. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I love that too because I think it's easy to take a conversation like this and say, great, I don't need to do any work. I just need to find the easy way. And that's not what it's about either. It's about combining what you said, that position of strength with the new thing that you're going into. It's about finding a different approach.

But you're not going to make the approach if you can't, if you don't have anything to allow you to do that, if that makes sense. Right, right. And I think a lot of people who are listening to this, I know a big segment of this audience is interested in financial independence. and what is intrinsic to that is that you put yourself in a position of strength. When you're financially solvent, you're strong. And from that, you can move into whatever you want to move into, which is a completely different, like, framework and outlook on life than grasping at something because you have to. Yeah, and you also have options.

There's something that I wrote about at length in SmartCunson kind of around that time is you put yourself in that position of strength where you've got to. gained credibility or expertise or whatever it is, you have a new idea that is strong. You don't have to go one direction with that. You know, you can go a lot of places. So if you become a professional ballerina and you're really, really good at that, you could keep going in ballet, you could move on to teaching, or you could become an actress, you know, and do performances where ballet is needed, or you can, and I wrote a story about this,

you can choreograph hospital routines to help hospitals better navigate the process of transferring kids from the gurney to the recovery room. There's all sorts of ways that you can apply that expertise, and a lot of them are not the initial thing that you would think of. And I think that's super cool, but it does require you to have that sort of potential energy built up by, you know, whether it's the position of strength or, you know, whatever you would call it.

But then after that, you do have a lot of options, and that's you jump from one thing to another. You develop another position of strength by combining, you know, the last thing with the new thing, and that's the way that you see people and companies actually endure for a long time, become very successful, very quickly, it appears. And then when you dig in, you realize that this is like any great journey. This is a journey that's been a lot of time in the making, but super interesting because it was a better journey than it could have been. Right, right. It's 10 years to overnight success. But those 10 years are not readily obvious

because they might have been spent elsewhere. And maybe in a more fun way. Yes. Right. You wrote about Sunny Moore, the artist who once was a screamo artist and then later became Scrillix. So he reached the top of his game in two very different music genres. But it was his previous experience in one musical genre that allowed him to become a super famous DJ. He became kind of the Kurt Cobain of that type of music. You know, he was the face of ADM and Dubstep. And I think it's absolutely. because he took what he had learned. And when I wrote about him, I was writing about pattern recognition. He was very good at seeing what's coming, which is super interesting.

But he took what he learned from that very different genre of music and helped to pioneer a new genre of music that whether you like it or not has made an enormous impact on a lot of people and actually has flipped the record industry on its head. Those artists, because of him and kind of the, I guess the movement he helped spawn

have all of the power and the relationship now in the music industry, where it used to be the record companies controlled everything. Now the record companies have to work with artists in a way that they didn't before. Part of this was the internet too. It all kind of came around the same time. But it's super interesting the impact that thinking a little bit differently had and applying those lessons from something else worked. One theme that I've noticed is that a lot of people who make unconventional or lateral moves

that put them into a more fun position in life, A lot of them harness the use of technology in order to do so. You know, Scrillix did it. Michelle Fawn, the YouTuber, did it. Even Chequivera and the rebels harnessed the technology that was available at the time, which was the radio. And the Cuban Revolution. Yeah. So how can a person listening to this today, you know, now that the Internet is firmly established,

now that we're not riding that first wave of MySpace and Pets.com, how can a person listening to this today use technology and use technology and use. what might be down the road, VR, AR, to their advantage. So, I mean, I think this is the very simple cliche is this is about not reinventing the wheel, right? Often we do reinvent the wheel because the way that things are done, the thing that worked was doing it this way. I'm a big fan of when I think of technology, I think of it as platforms. You're working on something. You're trying to solve something or solve a problem or, you know, build whatever, looking for who's already done this in another arena or in your arena, who's already built

something that you can build on top of. The way that I like to break down kind of advice for startups is you're starting a company, do you have this idea or you have this vision, which is better than having an idea, have a vision, list all of the assumptions that are inherent to this thing. And then rank order them in the list of most important, most crucial, the assumptions that if they're not true, then this is not happening. And I like to tell people, even down to things that are just so obvious that you feel like you don't even need to put them, put them down to.

Like, people need to be alive in order for this to happen. You start thinking like that, and then you make this list of assumptions, and then you go down the list and you have to question all the assumptions. Do these have to be true? And that's where, you know, interesting innovation can happen. But you also, when you go down that list, you look at assumptions and say which of these are already solved problems. Someone has, so say, for example, starting a company,

you want to do some new crazy thing. One of the assumptions is that you can keep your accounting and books in order so that you can manage the finances over the long run. That's a problem people have solved. That's not key to this business working out. I mean, it is key to this business working out. That's something that someone else can do

or you can hire someone to do. So with that example, you know, I was just talking with a friend who is working on a really interesting company who's trying to decide, you know, how much money do I need to spend to have someone to build a website? And when we broke down those assumptions, kind of realized he could actually spend $10 a month

and use Squarespace to make the website for the year it's going to take to prove all these other things first. Why spend $30,000 building a website when the thing he needs to prove is something else, basically. So when I think of technology, I think of that. The other story I think of is when the printing press first came out, people got really excited about using it.

And one of the first things that happened in ancient Italy was these gossip writers, basically, like the gawker of Renaissance Italy, kind of showed up. And they started printing these newsletters about what was going on around town, towns like Milan. And so they'd run around, they'd collect the gossip, they'd print up these newsletters, and they'd hang them out, hand them out around town. What they found is they used this technology they were really excited about. But people who, their competitors, essentially, who started doing the same gossip newsletters, but wrote them by hand and made hand copies, actually would beat the printing presses to the news by like a day because the printing press was hard to use.

And they found that people were more interested in the speed of gossip than in the prettiness of the newsletter. And so all of the newsletter writers who were using the printing press reverted back to handwriting. It was super interesting, but I think it's a good lesson. And, you know, 100 years later, the printing press was much better than handwriting. We had newspapers and all of that came about. But often when you mentioned VR, often there's new technologies that are really exciting and really shiny and we want to use them because we think that that's going to be what gives us an advantage. Well, we need to step back and look at what does the audience actually want,

and is that technology actually giving us an advantage, or is it just exciting because it's novel? And so I think those are the tradeoffs you need to make or the calculus you need to have. Is this something that's a platform that allows me to work on the things that are really important? right now until this technology becomes the thing that is important. Are we just chasing the technology because it's cool? I think a lot of companies are working on VR stuff. I go to these film festivals with VR films, and some of them are interesting,

but a lot of them are kind of trying to shoehorn something into this cool technology. I don't think it's ready yet for a lot of what people are trying to do. With the exception of games, games are super interesting in VR, and I think that's something that's going to develop very quickly. So I'm a video game company. I want to beat other video game companies and rise quicker. I might invest a lot in working on VR.

But then I would also look at what VR development platforms are out there. Rather than build my own VR development platform, maybe I can build on top of someone else's and just work on the games, work on the stories. That's the way that I think about that question. But it's something that I think a lot of us don't take time to really break apart and break down before we go for it. We get excited.

We love the idea we have. think it's going to work. We have faith, you know, in ourselves and our ability to pull it off. We don't realize that those kinds of decisions could save us a year of work or could make the project or break the project. So what I think I hear you say is solve problems rather than chase the thing that's shiny. Yes. I think this also applies very squarely to something that I've been writing about the last few years with my next book, which is about teamwork. When we work, on problem solving with groups of people, we tend to default to kind of bring in the same gang to the next problem. You know, you're in business, you've hired people, you build a team,

next challenge comes along, you say, all right, everyone, let's get in the war room and let's figure this out. We don't think about teamwork in the same way that we don't think about kind of these technology decisions a lot of the time in the way that I think we should if we're really kind of breaking things down to fundamentals and then rebuilding them. One of the people that I interviewed in the last year that was the most inspiring was this guy named Keith Yamashita. He was Steve Jobs' CEO coach. I think now he coaches Oprah and the Starbucks guy and some really cool people. This guy is really, really neat.

He talks about team building and teamwork and problem solving as an analogy for making a movie. It says that your job is to cast the people and technologies that you need to use to solve this problem the best. in the same way that when you're making a movie, unless it's a sequel, unless it's Zoolander 2, you don't get the same people who worked on the last movie. You find the most interesting people for the job. And you also, kind of hargaining back to what I was saying a little bit ago, you also don't just pick the people who have the best GPA on their resumes and cast them in the movie.

That would be ridiculous. Right. But that's kind of what we do. So it's once again that theme of we don't have to do things the way they've always been done. and we often just don't break them apart and then think of, well, if we didn't have to do, once we now either we see the pieces and we don't have to do things the usual way, is there a better way out there? What are some qualities or attributes of a better way?

If we're talking about solving problems, qualities are attributes of a better way. I mean, one is the outcome, right? The quality of the solution itself, the efficiency that you can get to that. the time it takes to get to that, right? The tradeoffs you have to make to get to that. I think those are the elements of what you would call a better way. Those would be the outcome. What about the approach?

What are the elements of an approach that leads to a better way? Is that what you're asking? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. An approach that leads to a better way is one that takes nothing for granted. I think that's the simplest way to put it. And there's a lot that we do as human beings.

We make things for granted because it makes life easier, right? The short hands we use, there's things that we just assume so that we can process things and move forward. And that works really well if you're building an assembly line. Or well, if you're running an assembly line. If you're building an assembly line, actually, maybe it doesn't. If you're trying to build a new assembly line, taking things for granted is not good or not useful.

So I think that would be the way that I would describe sort of the answer to that. And, you know, there's this content that people talk about a lot in technology called first principles. Yeah. Which is basically boiling down things to the fundamental truths. It's kind of another way of saying what I was saying with the assumptions, you know, people have to be alive or whatever for this to work. But when you can break problems apart down to their elements that are proven by physics, you know, they're just fundamental. And then build from there, things get really interesting. people talk about the analogy of thinking outside the box,

and that's become sort of said to death where people don't really know what that means. It's a euphemism for being creative. Thinking outside the box, what that's about is getting outside of your current frame of reference and looking at it from a different angle. I think better approaches to problems fundamentally or by nature are approaches that take a different angle. So I say this a lot, and it'll sound cheesy,

but you don't change the game. game by playing the game harder. You change the game by playing a different game. So I think that is a, I guess if you keep that cheesy aphorism in your head when you're working on anything, I think it's a pretty good place to start. Hey, everyone. We'll come back to this episode in just a moment right after this ad break. I'm on the road right now and I'm recording these next two ad spots without my normal microphone, which is why the audio is going to sound a little bit different. It's not the same as when I was in a professional recording studio doing this interview with Shane. Speaking of travel, that actually flows perfectly into one of these two sponsors, which is

totally travel-related. When you're traveling as I am right now, your luggage is your best friend. It's your home away from home, so you need it to be organized, sturdy, and something that you can rely on. That's why I enjoy traveling with luggage from away travel. Here are a few of the things that I like about it. Number one, and this is actually my favorite part of it, both sizes of their carry-on luggage are able to charge all of your, anything that's powered by a USB cord, your cell phone,

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at blue apron.com slash afford, a F-F-O-R-D. That's blue apron.com slash afford to get your first three meals free. Blue Apron, it's a better way to cook. Let's talk about teams, building teams, developing teams, because that's a focus of your next book. You've talked about some teams that, like the Russian hockey team, when these guys were playing together, they were unstoppable. And as soon as they all got recruited to play on different teams, then as individuals, they started sucking. Right. And then when they reunited again, they be able to became strong again. How and why does that happen? So the thing that I wanted to explore with my new book, which is called Dream Teams, is this paradox of humanity that you see at very small levels,

partnerships, families, and you see a very big level, societies, nations. And this paradox is that when different humans come together, we either see further than we could see by ourselves, we either become smarter than our smartest member. We make breakthroughs together. We make breakthroughs together, we build things, or we break down. We stall each other, we foil each other, we blow things up. And so I was interested in this paradox because as a team leader, I wanted to do the first thing and not the second thing. And yet the bigger my team got at my company, the slower we got.

And there's this promise that, you know, that synergy in air quotes, that, you know, two heads will be better than one, that one plus one queen equal three. It almost always doesn't, but most jobs are too big for just one person. So I was interested in exploring that. And the Russian hockey team is a really good kind of entree into kind of what I discovered as I was researching for this project and eventually turned this into a book. So the old Soviet national hockey team in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they were monsters. They destroyed everyone.

They were good individual players. They played since they were kids. But there were better individual players out there. Wayne Gretzky was the best. He was in Canada, right? But when these guys would play, these other teams that had better individual players, they would always beat them.

There are a lot of reasons for that. A lot of it has to do with they had these two coaches in succession that were very unusual. One was this guy who made them learn ballet moves and do ninja roles on hockey skates and kind of see the whole world as hockey. I had this very unconventional training method. The other was this guy that was this insane taskmaster

that they all hated. He made them work really hard and pushed themselves further than other coaches push their players. A combination of that's pretty interesting. The other thing is they played essentially communist hockey, which was that it wasn't about any of the individuals. It was about the puck getting into the net.

They called themselves servants of the puck. So we're not talking about economics. We're talking about teamwork. That inside of a small group, if you want that group to be better, make sort of breakthrough progress, it's pretty interesting when the group starts to think of the group's goals over the individual's goals.

So they did all these things. There's a lot more that happened. They had this team captain who was kind of willing to play at the margins of the rules. He was kind of this sort of lateral thinking hacker like I would have wrote about in my first book. He would get himself injured in front of everyone in order to block the net. He had a heart attack on the rink one time and kept playing. Like this guy was insane. He choked his coach one time when the coach made a bad decision.

And there's these elements in this team that were super. interesting. But what you see is that beneath the surface on a team like this that was just the greatest in the world, they had all of these very different ways of playing hockey, all of these different skills and attributes and mental models between the players that when they had humility together and when they made the game about something bigger than each individual, all those things combined to make this amazing team. And, you know, an American and Canadian hockey teams were much more individualistic. Maybe there's sort of a capitalist thing there

that from the system of the financial system kind of bled into the hockey system, but they were being paid based on their individual stats. So if you had a decision of something that was good for the team or good for you, you might do the thing that's good for you.

The rewards were set up in a way that incentivized individualism. Yep. Hockey and basketball are two of the most coordination required sports out there. and today their statistics take into account much more the impact you have on the team than they did in the 70s. And that's really interesting.

But for many, many years, you get made more money if you did the thing that was good for you. So that was an element of it. There was also this element that the American and Canadian players played one style of hockey. The Russian players played 10 styles of hockey. It's really hard to defend that. And if you can make that work, and if you're not individualistic about it, then you can be the best in the world, even if you don't have the best players in the world.

So it's super interesting. So that was an exploration I went through, and it gets at this idea that if you want to see further, if you want to do better, that the way to do it is not doing more of the same thing, that when we see innovation happen in history, it's because people have reached outside of their field and brought something in,

or they've gone outside of their field and come back in. And the best way to do that is by combining your perspective with someone else's perspective. So it makes this case for, this sort of wonderful case, for the value of seeing people who are different than you, who think different than you, who've lived different lives than you as your intellectual allies, even seeing your enemies as your allies.

Someone who can push you, who can critique you, who can tear you apart, could potentially show you the thing that helps you become better. So that's what became dream teams that is super interesting to me, because it's all on this theme that if we want to make our lives better, we want to make our worlds better or the world better,

we can't just keep doing the same things. And guess what? The best way to do that is together, which I think has this sort of moral meta conclusion to it as well. So there are a couple of things that I'm hearing from this. One is that in order to have the best performance, in order to build the best thing, you need to be mission-driven and purpose-driven,

as opposed to motivated by individual interests alone. The other thing that I'm hearing is that you need to surround yourself with people who don't just fuel your confirmation bias. Yes. How do you do that while still having a filter? You know, how do you let the weirdos in while still exercising good judgment? This is a super interesting question. The last couple of chapters of dream teams are about a virtue called intellectual humility, which I think is the missing ingredient in a lot of the world right now.

It's the thing that makes a lot of corporate America suck. It's what makes Congress suck. So it makes a lot of our lives less optimal is a lack of intellectual humility. And how psychologists define this is being willing and able to revise your viewpoint in light of new information, being able to separate your ego from your intellect. So you can change your mind without it hurting, without it being psychologically painful. But also knowing when you shouldn't do that. So, you know, Greek philosophers talked about how virtues are

the thing in between two vices. So if one vice is being gullible, being too willing to change with every sort of whim and new information, that's bad, that's a vice. But other vise is being stubborn, right? And being too tied to your ego that you can't change, you can't do things differently,

that's bad too. In the middle is something really interesting. Being able to change, being detached, and yet not just changing because, right? and being skeptical. There's this thing that I like to say that the most interesting people in the world to me

are skeptical optimists, which might sound like those are opposites, but bear with me for a second. Optimism and pessimism are opposites. Optimism means you believe that the outcome of things can be better. You have faith in a better situation. Pessimism means you believe

that they're not going to be better. You think this is not going well. Skepticism is not believe, believing things, not taking things at face value. And credulity is taking things at face value, believing. So if you are a credulous optimist, you might be one of those people who fall for scams. You might be one of those people who is a very successful entrepreneur because you're lucky, because you believed everything that happened to be true.

You never happened to believe something that didn't be true. You might end up being a nun, right? Doing good work, but accepting what you've been taught. if you're a skeptical optimist, it means that you're going to work really hard to figure out how to make the future better because you think it can be better. But you're not going to take everything at face value. And I think that that's really important. That's exactly what we've been talking about, right? Not taking things for granted.

Exactly. And I think in a team, we're all naturally, you know, in some part of that sort of matrix, right? But in a team, you can have different people play those functions. So if you are a skeptical person, maybe someone needs you on their team. Or if you're an optimist, but you have a hard time being discerning, maybe you need a skeptic in your process. So I think that's pretty interesting. We'll come back to the show in just a second. But first, want to hear a sobering statistic?

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That's FreshBooks, F-R-E-S-H-H-H. And when they ask, how did you hear about us, type in Afford Anything. Again, that's freshbooks.com slash Paula. And when they ask how you heard about them, mention Afford Anything. How can a person who's listening to this who thinks, you know, I would like to be a skeptical optimist, but I'm not? How can they cultivate that? How can you cultivate a sense of openness and optimism and a healthy dose of judgment? So there's a few things that we know are correlated to intellectual humility.

And I actually talked a little bit about in the very first of this podcast. We know that if you grow up in a multicultural environment, you will rate higher on tests of intellectual humility than people who grow up in a sort of a single culture environment, which is pretty interesting. But it means that your brain has the ability, more natural ability without thinking about it, to see things two ways. but there are things that we can do to kind of train our brains to do that. One of them that's really surprising to me, when I did a big study,

we did this study and we found that people who watch lots of television actually end up having higher scores on tests of intellectual humility, but not news television, fictional television, which is interesting. So we dug into that and we did some more versions of this study. And the conclusion that I came to is that when you're watching fictional television, you're taking in stories of people who are not like you. And there's lots of research into how stories help our brains develop empathy for people,

to help give us a sense of connectedness to people who aren't like us. Stories can generate this neurochemical called oxytocin, which makes you care about someone, which was useful for our survival, and we were living in caves, and we needed each other and all that. But learning lots of people's stories who are outside of your community, outside of your culture, trains your brain to be open to other people's ways of thinking, which is super interesting. There's other things, too, traveling, moving to another country, learning another language,

those kinds of things, but getting lost in a book. So I would say if you want to increase your openness, take in lots of stories. The other thing, too, is developing a sense of curiosity. I write about this at length in Dreamteams that if we're willing to consider and explore ideas that seem crazy, we're willing to go down paths with people who we think are weird, even if those things do end up being not useful, simply trotting that path helps us to see things that we wouldn't normally see. So developing a sense of kind of almost radical curiosity,

seeing everything is useful, and you can frame it in a way that kind of tricks your subconscious brain into being okay with it, that I'm exploring this thing that seems like it's useless because I'm going to find the lesson analogy in it, not because I think it's right. You can tell yourself these kinds of things, and it gives you the excuse to live a much more fun life, but also explore different things and bring them back. Those are the kinds of things that can help you develop that intellectual humility. And, you know, the skepticism part is just a habit. You know, the knowing when you shouldn't detaching your ego from the equation is a difficult thing to do. One of my favorite

things for that is what Ben Franklin wrote about in his autobiography. He's a lot of said that whenever he was about to have an argument with someone, that he had a strong opinion about, he would start the argument by saying, I could be wrong, but, and then he'd give his argument. He said that that made people feel more comfortable, that he acknowledged his fallibility, but also for him, it helped him be more comfortable if someone started to prove him wrong because he was still right. He could say, you know, I said I could be wrong. So therefore, it's cool if we change our minds on this. And that's a little trick that if you do have a problem with ego, which we all do, I have a huge problem with it, that you can still change,

you can still look at things with a critical lens, and then change your mind, and it's okay because you've given yourself and everyone around you permission to, and it doesn't sting to do so. Your mind will believe the words that come out of your own mouth. Exactly. You mentioned earlier the difference between an idea and a vision. What is the difference? So I like to think about projects, new projects, or companies, in terms of purpose, vision, and strategy. And it's another way of putting what a lot of people have talked about,

what's your why first before your how and you're what. But I think purpose, vision, and strategy are really interesting because purpose is kind of the underlying drive for why you're doing things. And so in the case of my company contently, the purpose is to help make a better media environment to help shape culture and to help creative people put food on the table, that sort of thing. The how is something different than that. The vision is, if you imagine a sci-fi version of the future, what does the world look like or what does this thing look like?

So it's the imagination of, you know, in 10 years from now, we have flying cars and this project of mine looks like this. This many people are using it. You know, this is how happy they are, blah, blah, blah. That's the vision. So you're working towards that vision because of this. purpose. Those things ought to be pretty resistant to change. You know, the purpose, if the purpose changes, then everything changes. You're doing something else. You're probably not wrong about the purpose. You probably care about it. That's why you've established it. The vision is going to change less

often. It'll change when you have a lot of new information that says that that is not what's going to happen, but something else better should happen. But it shouldn't change too often. Then the strategy is how you get there. And that ought to change all the time. That ought to be very, very flexible. So it gives you this sort of guiding star that makes you feel sort of emotionally connected and remember why you're doing things and also a place to get to that can help you focus the decisions so you can make decisions around what matters. And again, avoid the trap of doing the same things we've been doing because we did them.

So if you write down, here's how we're going to do it and we're going to stick to this, then when that ought to change, too bad. and you're in this sort of psychological bind, or maybe there's peer pressure or whatever, social pressure to not change. But if you're saying this is where we're trying to get to, this is our vision, we'll do whatever we need to.

And then you've given yourself that same permission to change. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon guy, said something to the effect of you need to be stubborn on vision and flexible on the details. And that's a good way of putting it. Right. Since your new book is on building and cultivating a team that will take you further than you could yourself,

How do you know when someone is right to be on your team? How do you know when you found that person who will also be flexible on strategy but firm on purpose and vision? It's tough. I mean, it's one of the hardest things in business especially. But the basic framework is that two heads are only better than one if those heads think differently. There's two main dimensions that I think are important in terms of how those heads think differently. It's perspective, which is how you see the world, how you catalog the world, which is shaped by how you grew up, where you grew up your generation, how you literally see the world, you know, in case of height or disability, how the world has seen you and treated you your whole life. Super important.

And this is where all of the demographic kind of types of diversity come in. You live two very different lives if you look different. So that's perspective. is your angle on viewing a problem. And the other is heuristics, which is your approach to solving a problem. And this will be based on all of those things too, but also your education, your training and experiences you've had where you've developed a rule of thumb for doing something. So, for example, if you're ballet dancer that's becoming an actress, like I talked about earlier,

if you have some heuristics around movement that might be different than another actor. So what you want when you're building a team is to find as many different perspectives and heuristics that are applicable to the problems you're working on. So some things won't be applicable. You don't need a forklift operator in every team, right? Right. But if you say you're building a team to build a website and you know you need a designer and a programmer and, you know, a team lead or whatever, a project manager, maybe picking the project manager who once was a forklift operator over. the project manager who's always been a project manager might be interesting. That forklift operator has a different set of perspectives and heuristics than someone who hasn't

been. So all things being equal, pick the person who has that different background. But if you're picking between someone who's always been a project manager, someone who's been a forklift operator, and someone who grew up in a third world country, that one might be more interesting because that person might have more empathy for the different kinds of users that will be visiting your website versus all of the people who grew up in a first world country that are working on the project. So that's the way that I think about it.

And then you go back to that casting thing, right? So building teams is interesting because you want to build the team that has the, you need the pool to draw from that gives you the best chance of doing the best job on every problem. And then in individual projects, you want to draw from that pool, the most relevant types of people. And then you also want to make sure that if it's a really important project or really novel project you're trying to solve, that you also include people who are very much outside of the realm of what you think would be applicable to the project. You want outsiders, you want wild cards. They will simultaneously get everyone else in the room to think a little bit more critically,

and they might give you the idea, the weird thing that helps you to see further than you saw before. So that's the framework, how you find those people, how you convince them. That's harder. I think that's a lot about telling your story, which is why purpose is so important talking about that. But that's the challenge. And that ties exactly into the premise of making lateral career moves, as you were talking about earlier. When somebody is moving laterally from a different area, then they bring a new set of heuristics to an existing problem. Exactly. And, you know, like I said, if it's too far off, if it's not applicable, it's not going to work. So you do have to be smart about that. But you'll be surprised how often in the history of

invention, inventions happen because directly, because the toy designer got involved in the microbiology project, right? You never know what kinds of things will be exactly the lateral heuristic that we need. So we shouldn't dismiss them. I think that thing with curiosity, right, being radically curious, understanding that it's all possible, so consider it. Even if it doesn't work out, what have you lost? Hmm, excellent. Final question. The secret word is kangaroo. What does that mean? If you go to my website. So that's in the acknowledgments of smart cuts.

It's been almost five years, not four years now. So it's okay for me to say. In the acknowledgments, you know, I thank all these people that help me. And they said the secret word is kangaroo. Go to my website. There's a section that says bonus chapters. If you click on bonus chapters, it asks you what the secret word is. Oh.

It's a little Easter egg you planted. There's about five of them in smart cuts. There are a couple in the storytelling edge, which is the book that I wrote after that, co-wrote. And then Dream Teams has a whole bunch of them. So there are a few people. There's another page on my website called Secret Area. And if you notice, there's about 35 names on it.

It's like a high score list of people who found the secret area. So there's a cipher buried in the book. I actually close the secret area because I don't have time to update my website every time someone does it. But there's a cipher and a math problem that you actually have to figure out using different parts of the book. And you don't even know to start on it unless you, there's a certain part in the book that gives you a hint that maybe if you go to a certain

website, anyway, did that. And the first person who solved it, solved it within a week of the book coming out. And after about four years, 35 people have solved it. Wow. There's a lot of work that I started telling my publisher about it. And they're like, no, don't do it. So, you know, with my next books, I just didn't tell my publisher. Oh, I love that. That's even better than I thought it was. I almost always read the acknowledgments of every book because it's such a good behind-the-scenes look at the life of the author and what goes into writing a book. It really is. I think it's important because we often celebrate whoever's name is up front without realizing that the show was developed by a lot of people.

It's a very own theme with what we were just talking about. With Dream Teams, I wish that I could have spent pages and pages of acknowledgments, but tried to cram about 30 names in there. It's super important. Even, actually just, I can share this real quickly, I just wrote in my newsletter about the new Drake song. Just came out, it's number one, everyone loves it. And when you look at the first five seconds of the new Drake song, you hear three voices, you hear this guy from New Orleans,

who's a bounce, a certain kind of music from New Orleans, the bounce producer, you hear Lauren Hill, and then you hear Drake. Then in the first five seconds of Drake talking, rapping, he makes references to like 20 things. Sadie's Ben's to Women's Rights Movement, to Little Wayne, to a bunch of things. And then you break down this song and you see that this song is a mashup and an homage of a billion different things. And this is kind of what makes his music so cool.

And the song itself is this bounce, trigger beat, kind of smashed up into Drake, smashed up into old Lauren Hill songs. And that combination is super interesting. Everyone loves it. But then I looked into it. And when you break down the Lauren Hill song that, he samples. So the whole time she's singing in the background, that actually sampled a Wooten Klan song. So her song was built on chopped up pieces of Wutain Klan. And that Wutang

song was built on chopped up pieces of a Gladys Knight song, which in turn was a remix, a remake, of an old Barbara Streisand song. And so you see in this song, that's number one, that everyone loves, it's so great that the backstory is Drake is standing on the shoulders of Barbara Streisand and a whole bunch of people. And I think that's a cool analogy for. for any creative piece of work, any book, any movie, anything we do in life, even if we think we're doing it alone, even if we're giving credit to one person with one name, it's actually a lot more complicated and beautiful than that. Wow.

That is a perfect way to end it. Thank you, Shane. Thank you. This is my pleasure. How can people find you if they would like to learn more about you? My name's Shane Snow. You can go to ShaneSlow.com or you can Google me. There's a hockey player and a model, and then me.

So I'll probably figure out which one's me. Shane, thank you for coming on this show. What are some of the key takeaways that we got from the interview? Here are five. Takeway number one. The stock market isn't the only thing that's volatile. Everything is volatile. Your personal finances, your net worth, your relationships, your happiness, your sense of self,

your confidence, your relative ego versus humility, your faith, either in a higher power or in yourself or both, all of these things are volatile. and much of life is less in our control than we think. Here's what he said that triggered this thought. I think I also, the thing that you're probably alluding to, I went through a really big personal crisis about halfway through, you know, this eight-year journey at this company. But there was a point when I went through a real big personal crisis

where I financially was at zero and without an apartment. And those are some tough times, I think especially after having had this sort of semblance of success. And from the outside, I remember we raised millions of dollars and my mom thought I was a millionaire. And that's not quite how it works. But the company was doing well. But I was not and I was embarrassed to tell people. And that was of hard time that once I got through that, I realized I'd learned a lesson in humility, particularly asking for help is okay.

And so that's the takeaway. At a certain point, we have to surrender to the situation, let go of long-term plans, let go of ideas, and do only what is right, in this moment without any knowledge of what the future holds. And even if you're successful, especially if you're successful, you are going to go through these dark moments and in those moments, admitting your vulnerabilities and asking for help is the strongest thing you can do. So that's key takeaway number one from this conversation. Key takeaway number two, innovation, whether it's in business, technology, innovating your own life, innovation in your finances, innovating your living situation, all of this, all innovation, all change, is driven by discomfort.

So I think it's like a lot of things, actually, and a lot of the things that I write about that you ease yourself into the uncomfortable situations, only to realize that it's okay being uncomfortable and that it can be advantageous to be uncomfortable. It's actually a theme in a lot of what I write about when it comes to innovation or business that we don't change the world or our world by doing things that are completely comfortable. So that is key takeaway number two. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Key takeaway number three, get rid of old antiquated ideas about careers and work, as well as old antiquated ideas about self-improvement or life improvement. There's very much the sort of fixed mindset that we have around career paths. In my case, as a journalist, if I wanted to become a big name journalist with a column of a big magazine,

I would have to get an internship at that magazine. I have to stay there for years and years and years and slowly work my way up the ladder. Right. Become a fact checker. Exactly. Do all of the grunt work, take out the garbages and wait for someone to die and then move up the ladder, right? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there's a couple things wrong with that. One is that experience is a really bad proxy for cleverness and for talent and for skill.

You can spend 30 years doing something and not be that. that good at it. You may have heard of the idea of 10,000 hours. This is an idea that was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, and it states that in order to become good at something, you need to put in 10,000 hours worth of practice, which translates to essentially five years full time, if you assume 2,000 working hours a year over the course of five years. So the concept of 10,000 hours, theoretically, states that if you do something full time for five years, whether that's writing or playing tennis or learning how to train horses. If you put in those 10,000 hours, you will become good at it. But that's not actually what the 10,000 hour idea states. The nuance behind it,

and I think Shane is alluding to it in this answer, is that it's not just the time that you put in. It's more than that. It's the deliberate practice. It's the rapid feedback. The author Cal Newport talks about this quite frequently. You need more than just experience to become good at something. You need internal characteristics such as creativity, resourcefulness, grit, resilience, curiosity, humility, the ability to list a bunch of adjectives in rapid succession during a podcast outro. No, I made that one up. Those internal characteristics, as well as feedback from others, that's what it takes to become good at something. You need to do more, in other words, than just show up. You need more than just experience.

And that is the third takeaway from this interview. Key takeaway number four is on the concept of first principles. You know, there's this concept that people talk about a lot in technology called first principles, which is basically boiling down things to the fundamental truths. It's kind of another way of saying what I was saying with the assumptions, you know, people have to be alive or whatever for this to work. But when you can break problems apart down to their elements that are proven by, physics, you know, they're just fundamental and then build from there, things get really interesting.

The concept of first principles is the practice of taking nothing for granted. It's the practice of distilling everything down to its essence. Find what's fundamental. And you can do that, sure, in work you can do that, but you can also do that within your own life. The author Mark Manson writes about this. He asks, what would you do if there was no external benefit? to doing it. So imagine what you would do if there was no monetary benefit, there was no recognition, no praise, no applause, no external benefit whatsoever in any form, what would you do? And the answer to that question are the first principles of you. That's the distilled essence of who you are. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that question after I read Mark Manson ask it. And in my own life, the first

principles are, I know that I love nature, I love being outdoors, I love animals, I hate seeing animals suffer, and I love reading and learning. Those are the essential core of who I am. And even when there is no reward, when there's no external benefit, that is intrinsic to me. So I would invite you to ask yourself, when you get down to first principles, who are you? And by the way, for anyone who's listening who is interested in financial independence or early retirement, understanding that essential distilled core of who you are is massively insightful for helping you figure out the direction in which you will take your life once financial solvency is no longer a concern. I know that lifelong learning and self-improvement is the core of who I am and the core of what I find purpose in doing. and it's not because of any external benefit.

It's because, in a very deep, intrinsic way, I exist in order to improve. And there is no end to that journey. I will stay curious and I will be learning every day for as long as I exist. And with that said, let's transition into the fifth and final takeaway from this interview. And this final takeaway needs no explanation. Here it is. Learning lots of people's stories who are outside of your community,

outside of your culture, trains your brain to be open to other people's ways of thinking, which is super interesting. There's other things to traveling, moving to another country, learning another language, those kinds of things, but getting lost in a book. So I would say if you want to increase your openness, take in lots of stories. And that is how you become a more intellectually open, more emotionally open, more empathetic, more intellectually humble, and more skeptically optimistic person, a person who has strong, ideas held weekly. That's today's show. If you enjoyed this episode, please do three things. Number one, and most importantly, tell a friend, share it with a friend. Number two, go into your favorite podcast player, whether it's Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, whatever it is that you use, and subscribe to this podcast. That way you will get updated with all of our future episodes. And number three, please leave us a review. You can do so directly in most podcast playing apps,

Or, if you prefer, you can go to afford anything.com slash iTunes, which will redirect you to the page on the Apple website where you can leave a review for this podcast. Right now, as of this recording, we have 510 ratings. So thank you so much to everyone who has rated or reviewed us. And please, if you haven't done so yet, head on over to Afford Anything.com slash iTunes or just use whatever app you're using and leave us a review. Coming up next week, we have another episode of Ask Paula where I answer questions that come from you. And the week after that, we have an interview with Rich Carey, who purchased 20 rental properties entirely debt-free while serving overseas in the military. It's an incredible success story. You do not want to miss it. So all the more reason to subscribe to this show in your favorite podcast player. You can check out the show notes at Afford Anything.com slash episode 134.

And I'm going to make a quick plug. You can grab a shirt at Affordanything.com slash store. And 100% of the profits from the sale of these shirts will be given to charity water, a nonprofit organization that brings clean drinking water to communities around the world. So again, grab a shirt for a great cause at Afford Anything.com slash store. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast.

I appreciate that you spent this time with us. I hope you learned something. and I hope that you will be able to apply it to your life in some concrete, actionable way. Thanks for tuning in. Have an amazing week ahead. I'll catch you next week.