Afford Anything - Lessons from High-Stakes Decisions, with Polina Marinova Pompliano

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

#567: What happens when an astronaut goes blind during a spacewalk? For Chris Hadfield, this wasn't a hypothetical scenario. While working outside the International Space Station, cleaning solution from his helmet visor spread into both eyes, leaving him completely blind in the vacuum of space. His response? Stay calm and methodically evaluate options. He could call Houston. He could have a crew member rescue him. He could try to cry to flush out his eyes - though that's tricky in zero gravity. This story opens our conversation with Polina Marinova Pompliano, former Fortune Magazine reporter and author of the new book "Hidden Genius." Through her interviews with high-performers across fields — from astronauts to investors to extreme athletes — she uncovers patterns in how people handle uncertainty and build resilience. Take trust, for example. Reid Hoffman's formula is simple: Trust = Consistency + Time. It's not enough to show up sporadically when it's convenient. Trust builds through meeting deadlines, following through on commitments, and maintaining clear communication — even during challenges. Reliable consistency compounds over time, much like interest in an investment account. Or consider Charlie Munger's approach to beliefs. Rather than defending positions "to the death," he argues you should only claim to believe something if you can argue the opposition's viewpoint better than they can. This forces you to genuinely understand different perspectives rather than just reflexively disagreeing. The conversation explores how people navigate major setbacks, from Conrad Anker surviving an avalanche that killed his climbing partners to Polina's own experience of quitting Fortune magazine right before COVID hit. A key theme emerges: resilience isn't about avoiding difficulty, but about training yourself to handle it through small daily practices. Former Navy SEAL David Goggins calls this "callusing the mind." By deliberately doing one uncomfortable thing each day - whether that's running in the rain or having a difficult conversation - you build your capacity to handle larger challenges. The goal isn't to become superhuman, but to expand your comfort zone step by step. Other topics include: - How immigrant experiences shape risk perception - The shift from institutional to individual trust in media - Reframing "failure" as redirection - Building competence as an antidote to fear - Finding signal in the noise of information overload Enjoy the conversation! For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode567 Resources: James Clear Episode 156: https://affordanything.com/156-how-to-build-incredible-habits-with-james-clear/ Annie Duke Episode 281: https://affordanything.com/281-the-art-of-decision-making-with-annie-duke/ Annie Duke Episode 424: https://affordanything.com/424-the-power-of-knowing-when-to-walk-away-with-annie-duke/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine that you're 250 miles above Earth. You're floating in the darkness of space. And suddenly, you go completely blind. Your heart rate spikes, your blood pressure surges, but you have to stay calm. Because in that moment, the difference between life and death comes down to how clearly you can think when you're under extreme pressure.

You and I are probably never going to be in that position. But the best investors and business leaders, they know that they need to study more than just finance and economics. They need to draw insights from everywhere, from biology, from psychology, from sports, and from space. And they build this into a rich web of mental models that helps them see patterns that others miss. The great investor Charlie Munger talks about building a latticework of

models that comes from this interdisciplinary look. And that's what we're going to do in today's conversation. We're going to peek inside the minds of people who regularly make high-stakes decisions. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything but not everything. Every choice carries a trade-off. And that applies not just to your money, but to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention, to any limited resource you need to manage.

This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. It's double eye fire. Today's conversation focuses on the letter F, financial psychology, by examining high-stakes decisions and learning from the people who have had to make them. Now, our guide through these stories today is former Fortune magazine reporter Polina Marinova Pompliano. During her years at Fortune, she interviewed some of the most accomplished leaders in the world, people like Melinda Gates and Richard Branson. And she began noticing fascinating patterns in how they handle uncertainty, build trust, and bounce back from setbacks. She profiles this in her newsletter, called The Profile, and in her book, Hidden Genius,

where she unpacks how lessons from these leaders can help all of us become better at the the skill of thinking and make better choices under pressure. Enjoy this conversation with Paulina. Paulina, tell me about the astronaut who went blind in space. Yeah, so this is a crazy story. His name is Chris Hadfield. He was very experienced. He used to be a pilot.

At one point, he was working on the International Space Station outside of it. when suddenly he felt his left eye shut. What happens is the astronauts, when they clean their visors or their helmets, they use this soap water mixture. Some of it got into his eye. The problem is in space there's no gravity for the stuff to come out. It somehow spread to his other eye. So at one point, he's completely blind outside of the International Space Station. Most people would panic in that situation.

He says that his body reacted immediately. His heart started beating fast. His blood pressure started rising. The next thing that happened is my rational brain took over. And he asked himself, okay, what are my options? It's a good lesson because most of the time when we find ourselves in an uncertain situation or a dangerous, objectively life-threatening situation, you panic, you tend to freeze. You cannot think rationally.

But his point is, because of astronaut training, they do something called dress rehearsal for catastrophe. They hadn't ever thought that somebody could go blind outside of the space station. But he knew that he had options. So his first thought was, okay, I could always call Houston and say, help me out. I have a problem. I'm blind. He could have his colleague, Scott Parasinski, like, conduct an incapacitated crew rescue in which he would

drag him and get him back in the ISS. Or he could cry a little bit. And if he forced himself to cry, the stuff would come out of his eyes because of the tears. But how can he cry in a zero gravity environment? I have no idea. I think you just like make yourself cry and it like dilutes it. What he ended up doing is he opened a side hatch on his helmet to let some oxygen out. And that cleared it up.

One of the best quotes that he said that has stuck with me, is things aren't scary, people get scared. So if you think about, the best example he gives is think about when you're a child learning to ride a bike. At first, you get on that bike, you could fall, you could break your knee, you could hit your head, all these things could happen. The bike, it looks really dangerous. But his point is, the bike itself is not dangerous.

You're the one who's scared because as you become more competent and you learn to ride the bike, it becomes silly to be afraid of the bike. But the bike and the danger of the bike never changed. It's you who changed. So he says the antidote to fear is competence. How do you know when you have achieved that competence? Because we know from the Dunning Kruger effect, often it's the people who are novices, the people who know the least who are overconfident. And it's the people who are competent who believe that they are not. There's this bifurcation. So yes, the novices think that nothing could go wrong or everything could go wrong. You start learning. You realize that you're really, really bad, and then you get really insecure. Then you get a little bit good and you start to get overconfident. And then there's a level of you're so good at this, like driving a car, that you're doing it without even thinking about doing it. People like astronauts and free divers. it's like your life is on the line. It's almost like you cannot ever get overconfident.

You just have to constantly rehearse for a catastrophe. Dress rehearse for catastrophe. Now, the reason that I'm asking you this, of course, is because you've specialized in interviewing hundreds of people and finding lessons from their lives that can be applicable to everyday situations. So we may not be astronauts, but that dress rehearsal for catastrophe is something that we can apply to our own lives. Yeah. Most of us, the things we encounter on a day-to-day basis are not life-threatening, but we act as if some of them are. So how can you not plan for uncertainty, but mitigate uncertainty by still taking risks, but knowing that the outcome isn't going to be this

crazy, life-threatening, dangerous situation, and the whole idea is learning to differentiate between what is objectively dangerous and what we perceive to be dangerous just because we're fearful. Right. We've been talking a lot about risk management. As investors, we're not dealing with crazy life or death situations. But to your point, it does feel that way, particularly when you've traded hours and hours of your life battling traffic at age. a.m. going to a job with fluorescent overhead lighting, giving up parties and living far away from your family, right? Many of us trade our lives away for money. And so then the loss of that money can feel a bit like, in some symbolic way, the loss of a portion of our lives. Can you talk about

some of what you've learned from all of these people that you've interviewed, these very extreme risk takers. How can we manage the emotional reality of that? Yeah, that's such a good question with so many layers. So I used to work at Fortune Magazine where I would interview a lot of investors, entrepreneurs, philanthropists. And the thing that I noticed as a thread through their lives and also the people that I included in the book are how do you define success? And it's very obvious when you talk to someone, whether they define success as, whether they measure it as money, status, achievement, something that can be taken away from them. And once read Oprah had in her book, she said something like, don't ever tie your identity to something that you could

lose in the blink of a board meeting. That's part of the reason a lot of Fortune 500 CEOs once they're terminated or they step down for whatever reason. And they have, been a CEO for so long, then comes this almost crisis, whether it's emotional or identity, some sort of crisis where they don't know who they are because they've identified with this thing for so long. Right. So I think part of emotion management is understanding that that's kind of a facet of your existence and not your whole thing where you've tied your identity around the performance

of a stock or the performance of a company that you invested in early. someone who is married to someone who was early in Bitcoin, I've seen volatility to the nth degree. It always helps to have an outsider looking in saying, hey, you're either invested in this, just go all in and see what happens, or someone who, if you're the gas, they're the brakes. when an investment becomes your whole life and you tie your emotional well-being to the performance of a stock. Right. I mean, that's dangerous.

At some point, you need to step back and evaluate how am I living my life and who are the people I'm surrounding myself with that can provide that perspective. But how do you do that? And I love a quote about something that can be taken from you in the blink of a board meeting because it strikes me that so much of what people sacrifice for. can be taken from them in a courtroom or in a fraudulent scheme, right? It can be stolen from them by fraudsters or scammers or litigious business partners or anything. And it creates a bit of a paradox because on one hand, we are taught to, I don't want to say defer happiness, but we're

taught to sacrifice today for the sake of a better tomorrow. And yet, that tomorrow might not unfold in the way in which we hoped it would, even if we did all of the right things. Right. Yeah. I personally learned that lesson many times. Uncertainty is something that everybody grapples with, whether you're an investor or just living your life. Delayed gratification is a good thing for many reasons, but it's also like, you know, going through the education system. If you do all the right things, you will pass this grade. You will go on to high school, then you'll go on to college. The problem is that that external gratification can sometimes teach us that success is just around the corner. And it's always just out of reach. I was born in

Bulgaria. My parents won the Green Card Lottery, moved to Atlanta, Georgia when I was eight. So I grew up there coming from a former communist country. I never imagined. in my wildest dreams that I could be an entrepreneur or anything like that. That's not how I define success. How I defined success was I will go get a stable job with health insurance and like everything will be certain. There won't be anything like lurking until I did that. Right. Until I made my way. I was a perfect student, elementary school, middle school, high school college. In college, I did all the right things that were guaranteed to get me a job when I graduated and they didn't. I interned at USA Today. I interned at CNN. I was the editor-in-chief

from my college paper. I graduated waiting for a job and non-materialized. So I had to move back in with my mom, live on her couch. I was the cliche. And at that moment, I learned a really valuable lesson that I still think about, which is that you can check all the right boxes, do everything perfectly, and things still may not work out. If you tie your identity to that external success, then you will always be miserable. Before Fortune, I worked at a startup. That ended up being a fraud, objectively fraudulent. So I know what it's like to work at something and then have it be stolen from you even though you thought you were doing the right thing. I was only there for six months, so I didn't know too much. But I could see it. Even as a 22-year-old, I was like,

something's off here. After six months, I was like, I got to get out, got the job at Fortune, looked back. Once I was at Fortune, I thought that that was my dream job. Tech reporter at Fortune magazine sounds like amazing. When you walk into a room, you kind of command respect. Then, after a number of years, I started being like, wow, I'm doing the same thing I did in college when I graduated with no identity, which is I'm tying my identity around something that I could lose, which was a job title, which many of us do. I quit my job at Fortune in March of 2020 and then was hit with a pandemic a week later. I had no idea there was going to be a global pandemic after I left my job. Did you quit March 1st, 2020? Yeah, like very, because I wanted to give them three weeks

notice instead of two, and then it caught me by surprise. That was not on my radar whatsoever. What I hear in your answer, and particularly with the example that you shared about how in high school, If you just pass your exams, then you move on to the next grade, it paints this picture that life is going to be linear. One of the major components of learning somebody's story, especially in the long form, is that the path is so nonlinear. How do you make order of that chaos? I mean, when you look at any given person's life and including each of us as we each look at our own lives, adult life is not linear in the way that school is. there is no steady step-by-step progression. And yet we construct these narrative arcs because we need some type of a through line to make sense of our story.

How do you do that? Yes, I love how do you bring order to the chaos? The stories I'm most gravitated too are like the thorny, gritty, nonlinear stories because that's probably the truth of all of our lives. One of my favorite examples is I interviewed Francis Inganu. He is an MMA champion. So he was born in extreme poverty in Cameroon. He was a child laborer in like digging sand mines. And throughout his childhood, he kept being like, I am going to be a professional boxer and I'm going to move to America. To the point where his friends made fun of him, called him American boy. That was his nickname. But he truly, truly, like, believed it. And he was like, while I was working in those sand mines, I would be daydreaming about one day what I would do. His story is very remarkable because he said, first, you have to realize who you don't want to be. I think when you ask a person, like, what do you want to do with your life? It's harder to imagine all the possibilities. But if you ask them, who do you not want to be?

It's easier to say, this is who I definitely don't want to be. So he said his best teacher was his dad because his dad was this like violent guy who abused his mom and was a street fighter. So he said, I definitely do not want to be like that. And he never drank. He never smoked because he started acting as his like aspirational self. And his aspirational self was a professional athlete. They don't drink. They don't smoke. They don't fight in the streets. They take it very seriously. It's a profession for them. So he took that very seriously as a young person. And he was like, okay, well, I have to find somewhere to train because it can't be a world famous boxer in Cameroon. So he decided to somehow try to get to Europe and he crossed the Sahara Desert multiple times. He was stopped

because he kept trying to cross from Morocco to Spain as a refugee. But if you got caught in the water trying to do that, they either drive you and drop you back in the Sahara Desert and like find your way back or they put you in a Moroccan jail for a period of time. So he did this multiple times until he finally reached Spain. From there, he ended up homeless in Paris living in a parking garage, but he found a gym. He got noticed by one of the trainers at the gym. He was like, this is a big guy. I'm going to help him. It was a boxing gym. But right as he got there, it was shutting down, so he was like, you should try MMA. He didn't know what MMA was, a mixed martial arts. And then he ended up becoming the best in the world at MMA in a sport that he didn't even know existed nine years prior.

And he ultimately did make it to the United States in this crazy winding way. So when I was talking to him, the thing that was really interesting in the way he thought, which is the way a lot of successful people think, is that it's not that they're lucky. It's that it's the framing of the word. So when I got on the Zoom call, he was asking me where I'm from. And I was like, we won the green card lottery. And he was like, oh, yeah. I applied for that every single year, but I never won. And he was like, but actually for me, not winning was the luckier thing.

And my crazy path was way luckier because if I had won the green card, super easy. You come to the U.S. But then I would probably have to be like a security guard or something. but because of the path that I pursued and the things that happened to me, that way I was able to reach my goal way faster than if I had come the easy route. So I thought that that was an interesting perspective on, hey, my story begins here. But to you, the lucky thing may be this, but to me it was actually this really, really hard, thorny winding path. So part of making order from the chaos is reframing things that didn't go your way. right reframing outcomes that in the moment you found really negative reframing those in hindsight

to understand how they fueled a different direction that ended up ultimately being better yeah and I think as an interviewer you probably notice this all the time you listen to the subtext of a story when somebody tells you a story you pay attention to what do they emphasize what do they downplay what do they try and avoid and not talk about those things that are what tell you how they have shaped the narrative in their mind so that they can create order from the chaos because you can't just be bouncing around. You have to have some sort of cohesive story of your life. Exactly. How do you notice what's not being said? I pay attention to the little things that people do. They give me insight into how they think.

For example, I was interviewing the former CEO of General Electric Jeff Emmelt. Under his tenure, because he succeeded Jack Walsh, who was this famous celebrity CEO, Jeff came in and over the course of his tenure, the stock plummeted, shareholders were pissed. It was just chaos. His first day on the job was September 10th, 2001. Oh, no. That's worse than quitting your job on March 1st, 2020. It's so bad. It's bad.

And it was crisis after crisis then. he had the 0809 financial crisis. He was blamed for it because he was the CEO. You're doing things this way. Your predecessor, the stock went up. People were happy. He wrote this book was so good. I've never seen anything like it because at the end,

he went mistake by mistake that he made and took responsibility for every single thing and explained why he made those mistakes and what he learned from it. He said so many people hated me in my professional life. But then I got home. Thank God I had a very solid personal life. So I interrupted him and I said, can I just ask you something you probably have never been asked? And he said, sure. In my mind, a lot of successful people, investors, CEOs, when something is going wrong professionally, you tend to assume that their personal life is also imploding. A lot of them are on their third

marriages. Things don't go well. Because it's hard to compartmentalize that. pressure. His voice cracked and he was like, yeah, I just would go home and my daughter and my wife, they did not care about that stuff. But it was nice to know that even though thousands of people hated me, there was one person who loved me and that was enough. And his voice cracked. And I was like, wow, this is a very human moment. And I think to like answer your earlier question, It's a lot of investors, a lot of CEOs take these things so seriously that they almost become like a caricature of themselves. And I think our job as interviewers is to bring out the human and to humanize them and be like, actually, yeah, you're this hardcore activist investor, but then you break down. And you have these emotions that you struggle with to maintain.

The biggest thing that I've learned from that is to pay attention to the voice cracks, the glances away, when somebody gets super uncomfortable in their seat, things like that. It's like, let's go there. Let's talk more about that. Pay attention to the subtle cues that speak to how someone is feeling. Wasn't that Al Pacino when he played The Godfather? He has a quote there about how he focused not on. what his character was saying and not even on why his character was saying it, but rather what his character was feeling.

Yes. In that specific moment. Yes. And I think Al Pacino is such a good example because Al Pacino was never the good guy. You kind of end up rooting for the bad guy. But he points out that each person has so many layers that make them them. For example, yes, in the Godfather, he's this. mafia boss like ruthless and senseless, yet he's doing it to protect his family. To each of us,

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Ikea. Bring home to life. There are a lot of people who are listening to this right now who enjoy learning. That's the whole point of the podcasting medium. There are a lot of people listening who enjoy learning and they like learning from inspirational stories. But as we take in these stories, to what extent do we project or overlay our own interpretations on to somebody else's story,

particularly if we're learning from someone who we ourselves, any given person listening to this, can't directly talk to, either because they're too big of a celebrity or, I mean, celebrity in a broad sense of the word, maybe a big CEO, or maybe because they've passed away. You're saying how much of what we learn is our own projection?

Yeah, exactly. And how do we filter for that? Yeah, I think that's a great question. So I used to do this series called the Profile Dossier. So every single week I would choose a thing that I wanted to learn about. So let's say it was uncertainty and how to make good decisions in times of uncertainty. I chose Annie Duke, the poker player, because I was like, okay, that's a good person who can teach me about uncertainty across any application. I've done hundreds of these.

What I learned is very, very interesting. And it's that one of my strengths is that even though I've interviewed people like Maloney's, Linda Gates and Steve Schwartzman and Richard Branson, I don't idolize these people. And I never go into it thinking, wow, there's such a big deal. What can I ask? And for some reason, I've, from a very young age, known that the perception isn't the reality. So I often say my goal is to learn and humanize not to idolize. And because idolize is very dangerous when you idolize somebody like Jeff Bays. Zos, and then you read, below the belt selfies, he's sending. And you're like, what?

Or like Melinda and Bill Gates, relationship goals, and then they divorce. You never actually know what's going on. So with every single story that I told, I try to find the things they had to give up compromise on. Al Pacino is a good example. He often says that he became this legendary actor, but at the expense of a solid, healthy family life. And he was like, that's just a trade-off that I made. Don't regret it, don't whatever, but it is a reality of my life. So I think you do project. And I think the things

that you often find annoying or dislike is something that you yourself have, it's a bad habit you're trying to avoid. I remember specifically, I went into a profile dossier. I went into a profile dosse. on Danielle Steele, the author. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, oh my gosh, she's written so much. She's so prolific. She works so hard.

And then I read her story. And I was like, wow, that's not a life I want. But I still learned from her as a person, even though I think that she probably doesn't have a life that a lot of people would want. She's very isolated. All she does is right. I think it probably has to do with the fact that she lost the child. And then after that death, she kind of started creating these fictional worlds that she could escape to. And so writing to her

is a form of escapism. And she works so hard because she doesn't want to face the reality of it. Again, it's a human story. Yes, she's a celebrity author, but she's also very much a flawed human. Have you ever profiled someone who's subsequent... actions have surprised you? After? Yeah, afterwards. Yes, actually. I would say Melinda Gates is probably one of those people because I interviewed her. I saw her on stage with Bill Gates. They did an interview together. And then I also wrote the dossier on her after listening to a lot of the interviews that she's done. It taught me, again, the idolizing thing, but also that people are people. They're going to emphasize things that they want you to kind of look away from.

I learned that the healthiest thing that we can do as a society is approach things with skepticism. Neil deGrasse Tyson, he has something he calls the crystals test. You're walking down the street, you see somebody who's selling crystals. And he's saying, buy these crystals and they'll guarantee to change your life. So what do you do? Do you say, this is BS, of course, they're not going to change my life? Or do you say, oh, my God, amazing, I'm going to buy seven of them. Whatever your answer is, he says, that's intellectually lazy.

So even if you outright rejected it or if you accepted it as truth, both are wrong because you haven't asked the questions, done the research, really vetted the situation to know maybe they could change your life. But the intellectually lazy response is the one that goes without any sort of probe and skepticism. And I think in our society, we want to put people on a pedestal and believe what they say in their story is the truth. With the Neil de Grasse-Tyson Crystal's test, the reason that so many of us are quick to either reject or accept an idea is because we're inundated with hundreds of ideas every single day. and we just need a heuristic. We need a shorthand to be like to do. Of course.

Yeah. It's just in what areas of your life are you doing that? Right. The other thing alongside that is especially if you're an investor, especially if you're running your own company, for example, it's so important to kind of curate those information streams. Ultimately, the things that you watch, listen to, read, or the people you surround yourself with,

that's going to be the lens through which you see the world. I used to watch a lot of reality television. After a while, you kind of subconsciously start to view the world through the lens of, ooh, like relationships. Is he mad at me? Why does she text me that? The drama amps up. And it's okay to watch, I call it the junk food content, right? It's okay to have that. It is a sliver of your content diet if the majority is something actually productive or helpful to your thinking patterns. So doing a content audit like once a year requires you to sit down and objectively look at your calendar, look at the things that you're consuming on a day-to-day basis, because I bet like a lot of us are on Twitter constantly inundated

with things that may or may not be true, but we don't have the time to be skeptical and probe each one to find out whether it is. So it's like either filter that, world or put some other sources of content in your diet. James Clear, I interviewed him, the author of Atomic Habits, and he told me that he has optimized his environment to be conducive to good ideas. So he's never out of ideas and his mind is never filled with bad ideas or false ideas, I guess I should say. He said that he'll have a stack of books everywhere in his house. So on the dining room table, on his nightstand next to the TV. And he's like, if I'm ever at a shortage for an idea or something like that, I just pull a book and I start reading.

You have to create an environment that is conducive for good, high-quality ideas versus the crystals of ideas. How do you do that then? And by the way, both James Clear and Annie Duke, who you mentioned earlier, have both been on this podcast. That's awesome. And they're both just absolutely wonderful. Annie Duke's been on, I think, two or three times. Okay.

So you can teach me that. I'll mention that for any of the listeners who want to go listen to those episodes. We'll drop those links in the show notes. Both excellent, excellent guests, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, they're incredible. We live in an environment where sources of information are mistrusted. Many sources of information are mistrusted. But there is wide variation in who trusts what.

And in addition to that, we don't, in today's society, even have a common set of facts that we're starting from. It used to be that there was a set of facts and then you would have 30 different opinions about that. But now we don't even have an agreed upon set of facts. We have three or four, there's my truth, there's your truth, there's some other truth. And that, oh, you can speak your truth and then I'll speak my truth. And it's like, that's a poor use of the word truth, but yes. Right.

So we don't even have an agreed upon set of facts. And then there's a wide variation of opinions. about which facts are facts and which facts are not that. How do you cultivate a wise content diet in today's context? Yeah, it's very hard. So when I was at Fortune, I was sending a newsletter every single day called Term Sheet. It was just venture capital deals, who's raising money, who's buying who, who's whatever, private equity funds. That was coming from Fortune magazine, term sheet with fortune. But then I realized that people trusted me, in my perspective, over the institution. They liked having a person to talk to and tell when they're wrong or say,

oh, yeah, I agree with that. So I think I learned like, okay, hold on. I think people are starting to trust people more than these faceless institutions. And from there, we've seen kind of the unbundling, the people going out on their own and the rise of independent media. And I really do think it's because we are way more likely to trust a person with their flaws that we know and we know their biases versus this faceless institution that says we are the source of truth. So yeah, I do think for better or worse, you pick who you trust and you may know that, hey, from this set of scientific facts, they have it right or they have it wrong. but you can kind of form your own opinion about them. Well, that makes a lot of sense because when I think about content creators, I do know, or at least I think I know, the biases of a variety of different content creators.

And so I know that if I listen to something that's been framed by this individual, then I also would want to seek out that same topic framed by this other individual because they're coming from two very different sets of biases. Yes. Yeah. Wow. And I subscribe to newsletters with people who have wildly different biases, but at least I know. Right.

And then I see, okay, well, maybe the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but I can make up my mind because everybody has biases. Right. Exactly. Hack the holidays with the PC holiday insiders report. Try this PC porquetta. Crackling, craveworthy. You're going to eat them? Who are you?

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Please feast responsibly. People who have been reading the newsletter for a long time know that I grew up in Bulgaria, but my dad's side of the family was very very, very, very radically anti-communist to the point where communism was there. They spoke out against it when a lot of people would just keep their mouths shut and not say anything. They actively spoke out against it. They went to labor camp. Some of them were killed. Some of them were imprisoned. I come from that sort of mentality into, wow, look at America and, you know, things like that. We have freedom

of speech here. I could never be a journalist in Bulgaria in the same way I could be here. That's my bias. I put a premium on freedom of speech, whereas some people don't, I don't know, I find it liberating to put your cards out there and be like, this is where the things that I am saying are coming from, take it or leave it. But I think most people are informed enough to know. It's another perspective to consider. I think when you are upfront about this perspective was formed through this channel, it's this set of life experiences that has gone in. into forming this particular perspective. I think when you're really upfront about that, people can empathize more.

They can see how life experience X could lead to perspective Y. Yes. Yeah. And the other thing when we were talking about risk and uncertainty that I thought about is like it really depends. Some people seek out risk simply because their lives have been more static and they're looking for adventure and they're looking for things to do. and feel that adrenaline.

For somebody who is an immigrant or the child of immigrants, I think you actually seek to eliminate risk and uncertainty, at least for me. My parents took the ultimate risk of moving us here, no money, nothing. And then my vision of success was no uncertainty. I want to stay at this company for the rest of my life. Because I thought that was certainty until you realize, in the face of a recession or a pandemic or something like that, you may lose your job,

which is 100% of your revenue streams. Whereas if you are an independent entrepreneur, content creator, you can have several channels of revenue. So if one or two dry up, the other four are still viable. And that's actually less risky than working at one job in hoping you don't get laid off or fired. Right, right. So your definition of risk instability changes over time. Yes. As it becomes more refined and more nuanced, right? And as you start unlearning some of the social conditioning. Yeah, totally. Right. Morgan Housel talks about that. He refers to that tail risk of what are the low probability but high magnitude events that would truly ruin us. Those are the things that we need to guard against. Totally. One of the

stories that you told is of a mountain climber named Conrad Anchor. And he, and I'll let you tell the story, but he ultimately, A, it didn't seem as though he could guard against what ultimately happened to him and Alex Lowe. And B, the thing that the reason he's alive today was really dumb luck, despite all his training. So Conrad Anchor, when I was doing my research on him, a lot of times you would Google like, how did Conrad Anchor? And then the first search result says, how did Conrad Anchor die? He's not dead. He's very much alive. He just has had some terrifying circumstances in his life. One of them is him and two fellow climbers were climbing Mount Shishapinga, I believe is how you pronounce it. But they were climbing and there was an avalanche and he happened to go

right and they went left and he survived and they didn't. And the whole point is that sometimes the training, the everything, you can do everything right, but the outcome may just be as a result of dumb luck being at the wrong place at the wrong time, things like that. And I think that that's actually much harder to grapple with because you may have done everything right and things still didn't go your way and then you have to like cope with the consequences. Right. It's that random Right. What lessons can we draw from that in terms of how people can steal themselves against variance that goes askew and, in this particular instance, fatally so? Yeah, I really do think that there's what happens to you and then there's kind of the aftermath of

how you deal with it. There's another story. Again, it's a climber. He's a skier, but they do a lot of mountaineering. And when he was younger, he had two kids and a wife. He was on an expedition and his wife and two kids were in a plane. That plane crashed and they died. So he lost his whole family. Then he got close with another mountaineer, Hillary. There were both athletes. They went together. And just two years ago, I believe, she was swept away by an avalanche and he survived. And so he's like, I don't know what to make of this other than I have to evaluate my life and try my hardest to draw lessons of why this is happening to me. I used to say a lot of times that I got lucky doing something or things are lucky or, man,

that's just such bad luck. And what you learn, and I have learned, is that sometimes it's, you just have to kind of reframe that. So if you and I are walking down the street and we both, exact same time we both get hit by a bus. I can go to the hospital and somebody interviews me. It's like, what do you think? And I'd be like, my God, I was so unlucky to be standing right there when that bus came and hit me. But your answer may be, my God, how lucky that we were standing such a precise angle where the bus hit us, but we didn't die. So one person comes across, or it takes away that they got really lucky in that situation, the other person just really unlucky. And I think that that perspective and depending on how you look at the world shapes how you're going to live the rest of

your life. I think these extreme scenarios, unfortunately, do seem like life-altering events, but then from that, what will you do with that experience? Conrad, he's become kind of a motivational speaker. He's written a book. He gave commencement speeches. And I really do think that as unfortunate as that experience was for him and his best friends, he's formed it into something that can at least not just shape his life in the negative, but inspire other people. Right. So when you were at Fortune, you were able to do something that I think many people in this audience would be quite jealous of, which is that you got to see Warren Buffett, who was a frequent guest at many Fortune events. Yeah. But I actually want to shift off of Warren Buffett and talk

about Warren Buffett's business partner, Charlie Munger, who has some incredible insight into what we've just been talking about, which is finding trusted sources of information. Yeah. Charlie Munger was big on trust. He often talked about how the highest form of civilization is a web of deserved trust. And we've been talking about how do you find good sources of information. How do you make good decisions in times of uncertainty? How do you shift your beliefs when the information changes, for example? He has talked about all of that. And one of the more interesting parts was about beliefs and how we're all kind of the unreliable narrator of our own life, because we do minimize things, we emphasize other things to make order of the chaos, as you

put it. So, Charlie Munger, so first of all, I heard James Clear once say, why is it so hard for us to change our beliefs? Let's say even political beliefs. Why is it so hard for somebody as they gain new information to change their prior belief? It's not because the actual changing of the belief is hard. It's that when you're asking someone to change your belief, you're actually asking them to change their tribe. So you're actually asking the person to, change out their friends, have different conversations with family members suddenly, you're not asking them to just change your belief. So Charlie Munger often says, he says that we'd all be a much better informed society

if instead of saying, well, I believe this and to the death, defending that to the death, it's you can only say you believe something if you can argue the opposition's side better than the opposition. because then that actually means that you're probably informed. Do you know the rebuttal you have taken your time to do the research? Otherwise, your opinion is probably not as valid as somebody who is well informed on crystals, for example. Right, right. And so he often talks about that. And then another investor slash entrepreneur, Reid Hoffman, says that in terms of gaining people's trust,

it's that you have to be. consistent over a long period of time. He says the formula for trust is trust equals consistency plus time. So it's not enough to just be consistent for a week. And it's not enough to just say, hey, you should trust me because of my credentials. It's like you have to show people. So for example, I started my newsletter, the profile in February of 2017. And I told people my promise to the reader is I will not miss a week of sending this thing to you. I don't care what happens in the world. I have not missed the single Sunday of sending the profile since February of 2017. And what is that now? Seven, almost eight years. But that was important to me because when my free newsletter

added a paid layer to it, I knew that people who trusted me enough to not run off with their money because they said, okay, I've seen her put this out every single week. I'm not worried about backing her financially and then her stopping. So, of course, in that period of seven and a half years, things have happened. There have been family emergencies. I've had to travel overseas. All these things that would normally be a very good excuse to not send the newsletter. I knew trust equals time plus consistency. So even if that Sunday edition wasn't as robust as I'd like it to be, I'd still send it or I'd have a backup edition that I could send in case of emergency. But I just knew that sending it was better than not.

And I think that's true for any product you're selling, anything that book you're publishing, podcast you're producing. If you can fulfill the promise to the people that you have made once a month, twice a week, whatever it is, if they know that you will make good on that promise, then trust is almost inevitable. And the consistency element makes me think of compounding returns. Yes. Right? Because the challenging piece, the sometimes frustrating piece about consistency is that when you're at the beginning of it, you feel as though the rewards aren't there.

You're at the beginning of it and you're like, man, I've been so consistent for three weeks. Where's my sticker and gold star? Exactly. Yeah. And sometimes, yeah, you can do all the right things. and it's just not that idea's time or the audience is just not there yet. But then once that trust flywheel starts, then it compounds. And I do think it spits off trust as a compounding mechanism.

Right. Essentially trust is the result of compounding, compounding consistency. Yeah. Right. And compounding consistency is everything. You profiled David Goggins, who he was two hundred, 197 pounds. I never knew that he was, that he once was overweight. Right. Right. Because he's so fit for people who don't know David Goggins, he is, how would you disagree? He's like,

he's a well-known extreme athlete, distance runner, former Navy SEAL. Right. Yeah. He's the epitome of fitness. And one of the things that I want to leave your listeners with is that Studying people, sometimes you think you have to copy them one to one in order to achieve the same results. But what I found, and I don't think that you should be David Goggins 100% in your life, I think maybe you should be David Goggins and 10% of your life. If you don't ever want to do something hard and you know it's good for you, just do it. And one of his things is that you should do one thing every single day that you don't want to do, that absolutely sucks. So if your goal is like, I'm going to run two miles every single day, oh, wait, I can't today because it's raining outside, still go on a run even though it's raining and cold. Because that, again, it's almost like you're building trust with yourself in that consistency and that keeping a promise to yourself, that you're going to do what you set out to do.

Right. I've been trying to teach myself to drink black coffee, which I absolutely hate, but I'm trying to like make myself do it. Yeah. And I read the David Gagins chapter right as I was like pouring a black coffee. And I was like, okay, okay, do one thing a day that sucks. Exactly. Exactly. Not putting cream into this coffee is going to suck. But it's the little S. People have done much harder things. And I think one of the themes of our conversation in particular is that David Gagins talks about by doing small things, you're like, oh, this is an inconsequential thing. that I just did. But actually, it's teaching your brain. He calls it callousing the mind. You're introducing friction in your day, whereas normally there wouldn't be. You would do anything to feel comfortable and to have your coffee taste amazing. But by doing small things every day

that suck, you actually teach your brain that you can handle friction and you can handle things that are going wrong. So that's why I think in our culture especially, people have become very fragile in the moments that matter most. His point is that by doing uncomfortable things every single day, you're actually creating friction for yourself so that you don't buckle in the big moments. It's not just athletic feats or things like that. For example, in business, you're going to have to negotiate. You're going to have to negotiate a deal. You're going to have to have hard conversations with someone. As an employee, you have to negotiate your raise. How can you practice the skill of negotiation that you hate so much. You can't reserve it for that one super

important conversation once a year. You have to practice every single day so that your brain gets used to it. For example, go sell something on Facebook marketplace and try to negotiate with the other person. It's an inconsequential, like you said, small S suck, but you are doing something uncomfortable and you're practicing. So the more you practice and dress, rehearse for a catastrophe, the more that those big uncertain whack you in the knees moments don't make you just collapse to the ground. Right. I love how you brought it back.

I brought it back. I had to forget it. Yeah. Good story symmetry. Dress or hers for catastrophe, but do it in the small ways because you're right. So much of the time, we negotiate when there's 10,000 or 20,000 or 40,000 on the line. Yes. which is when we're accepting a new job offer, when we're buying a home, when we're buying a car,

it's these really big ticket moments in life. And then if we don't get that tiny practice, that tiny daily or weekly practice, then we're unprepared for those few big moments that do matter. Exactly. And you don't want to practice on the very consequential $40,000 deal day. Right, exactly. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Thank you, Paul. I loved it. Where can people find you if they'd like to read more of your work?

Yeah, you can find me on readtheprofile.com, which is my newsletter or you can find the book at hidden genius book.com. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Paulina. What are three key takeaways that we got from today's interview? Key takeaway number one, Reed Hoffman's formula is trust equals consistency plus time, which is another way of saying trust is compounding consistency. And this applies whether you're building trust with clients, with employers, or with business partners. Small, repeated demonstrations of reliability on a daily basis compound into a valuable

professional asset. Charlie Munger often says, he says that we'd all be a much better informed society if instead of saying, well, I believe this and to the death, defending that to the death. It's, you can only say you believe something if you can argue the opposition's side better than the opposition. Because then that actually means that you're probably informed. Do you know the rebuttal? You have taken your time to do the research. Compounding consistency.

Compounding gains aren't just for your public equities investment portfolio. It's also for the professional capital, the social capital that you build. at work, at home, and in your communities. So that compounding consistency is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two. Job security is not what you once thought it was. What feels secure might actually carry hidden risks. Having one single full-time job, one single source of W-2 income,

that might feel secure. It might give us the illusion of security. But without diversified income streams, It represents what in the investment world is known as concentration risk. By contrast, having multiple income streams can provide more stability, despite the fact that on the surface it seems quote-unquote riskier. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that you should quit your W2 day job. If you love your day job, keep your day job, as long as that's what makes you happy.

But you can still mitigate that concentration risk by development. developing multiple income streams to supplement that day job income, which means not only will you be earning more, and the more you earn, the more you can invest, but also you've actually reduced risk by eliminating single source failure. I think you actually seek to eliminate risk and uncertainty, at least for me, my parents took the ultimate risk of moving us here, no money, nothing. And then my vision of success was no uncertainty. I want to stay at this company for the rest of my life.

Because I thought that was certainty until you realize in the face of a recession or a pandemic or something like that, you may lose your job, which is 100% of your revenue streams. That is key takeaway number two. Finally, key takeaway number three, use the small stakes to prepare for the big stakes. You don't want to wait for high-stakes moments, like your salary negotiation. You don't want to wait for that to practice having those tough conversations. Because asking for a raise, asking for a raise is a five-figure conversation.

You currently make $110,000 a year, and you'd like to make $125. That's a $15,000 request. Do you want to go in cold? Do you want to practice that for the first time right in the heat of the moment? Or do you want to start in a controlled environment? We're not the astronaut that went blind on the ISS. Most of us are not going to be in that type of a life or death situation. But we are going to be having five-figure and six-figure conversations.

We are going to be applying for jobs. and that hiring manager is going to say, what's your salary range? How much are you looking for? And we're going to have to be confident, be prepared, be calm in that moment. Or we're going to make an offer on a house and the seller is going to come back and say,

this is what we're looking for. And we're going to have to make a quick decision that carries consequences with zeros on the end. many zeros on the end. So practice for those moments because when it counts, you want to be ready. It's not just athletic feats or things like that. For example, in business, you're going to have to negotiate. You're going to have to negotiate a deal.

You're going to have to have hard conversations with someone. As an employee, you have to negotiate your raise. How can you practice the skill of negotiation that you hate so much? You can't reserve it for that one super important conversation once a year. You have to practice every single day so that your brain gets used to it. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Polina Maranova Pompliano. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things.

First and foremost, subscribe to our newsletter. Affordanithing.com slash newsletter. We send fresh insight there that you won't find anywhere else. That's afford anything.com slash newsletter completely zero cause. Second, open up your favorite podcast playing app. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever that app is. Maybe it's YouTube. Open up that app and make sure that you hit the follow button so that you don't miss any of our amazing upcoming episodes.

And while you're there, please leave us a review. Unless it's YouTube, in which case, leave a comment, a like, and hit the notification bell. And number three, share this with the people in your life, your friends, family, colleagues, siblings. college roommates, share it with your barista, or with the person at the front desk of your condo, share this with the people around you. It is the number one way to spread the message of double eye fire. Thanks again for being part of this community. This is the Afford Anything podcast. My name is Paula Pan, and I'll meet you in the next episode.