Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How To Create Healthy Habits, Think Clearly & Effortlessly Achieve Your Goals with Shane Parrish #402

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

How would you like to think with greater clarity, feel confident in your choices, and finally be capable of sticking to good habits? Today’s guest might just show you how.   Shane Parrish is the entrepreneur and wisdom seeker behind Farnham Street and The Knowledge Project podcast, where he focuses on mastering the best of what other people have figured out. He is also the author of the wonderful new book, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results, in which he shares timeless insights and actionable tips, to help us all make better decisions in every aspect of our lives.  When we think about decision-making, we probably think of those big choices in life as the ones that matter: what subjects to study, which job to take, house to buy or partner to settle down with. But Shane asserts that it’s the smaller, everyday decisions that really shape our path. Choices like what to eat, how to respond to a tricky email or how to tackle a tricky conversation with your partner. And why these matter is because they become our customary, quick-fire responses – behaviours or habits, which we struggle to change because we don’t fully understand that we’re even doing them.   This doesn’t mean we have to take time to ruminate over every situation in life. Shane introduces the concept of personal rules as a powerful tool to override the ‘four defaults’ driving most human behaviour: emotions, ego, social pressure and plain inertia.    Overcoming them usually means relying on willpower. But rules – such as bedtimes, food choices, or technology limits – help us easily align decisions with our values and goals. Rules are just one of the super-useful hacks Shane shares. We discuss the difference between high-stakes decisions and quick-fire choices. He introduces the powerful notion of playing life on ‘easy mode’ to put us in the best position for success – like setting the difficulty level on a video game in your favour. Shane also talks about the importance of separating problems from their solutions. And he advises appointing your own ‘board of directors’ – real, historical, famous or fictional people whose opinion you’d value. ‘Consulting’ them on dilemmas will give you new perspectives. Shane’s ethos is all about finding the hidden opportunity in ordinary moments. In a world where our lives and minds feel increasingly cluttered, his advice can cut-through and help us find clarity. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://boncharge.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/402 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The most powerful story in the world is the one that we tell ourselves. And we all have this inner monologue, this voice in our head, this loop. It's the song you have on repeat, right? We start beating ourselves up. And that voice is not productive. That voice doesn't help us do hard things. It doesn't help us reflect on our mistakes. It just becomes this loop that keeps us in place.

And so you have to recognize when it's happening. And then all you have to say is not this time, three words, not this time. I'm not going to listen to that loop this time because I've listened to that loop my whole life. And that loop hasn't gotten me what I want. That loop is not getting me where I want to go. I need new music. I need a new song. I need a new loop. Not this time. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. How would you like to think with greater clarity, feel confident in your choices, and finally, be able to create healthy habits for

good. Well, today's guest might just show you how. Shane Parrish is an entrepreneur and wisdom seeker behind Farnham Street and the Knowledge Project podcast, where he essentially focuses on mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. He's also the author of the wonderful new book, Clear Thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results, in which he shares timeless insights and actionable tips to help us all make better decisions in every aspect of our lives. Now, when we think about decision-making, we often think about those big choices in life as the ones that really matter. What subjects to study, which job to take, which house

to buy, or which partner we should settle down with. But Shane asserts that it's the smaller, everyday decisions that really shape our path. Choices like what to eat, how to respond to a tricky email, or how to tackle a difficult conversation with your partner. And why these matter so much is because they have usually become our customary quick-fire responses, which we struggle to change because we don't even understand that we're doing them. Now this doesn't mean we have to take time to ruminate over every situation in life. Not at all. In our conversation, Shane introduces the concept of personal rules as a powerful tool to override the four defaults that drive most of human behaviour. Emotions, ego, social pressure and plain inertia. Overcoming them usually means

relying on willpower, but rules such as bedtimes, food choices, or technology limits can help us easily align our decisions with our values. Now, rules are just one of the super useful hacks that Shane shares during our conversation. We also discuss the difference between high stake decisions and quickfire choices, the powerful notion of playing life on easy mode to put us in the best position for success, and the importance of separating discussions about problems from our discussions about solutions. He also explains why he recommends we appoint our own board of directors and how consulting them, even if some of them are no longer alive, can give us powerful new perspectives. Shane's ethos is all about finding the hidden opportunity in everyday ordinary

moments. His book is fantastic and in a world where our lives and minds feel increasingly cluttered, his advice can cut through and help us find clarity. When I think about everything that is good in life, health, happiness, relationships, that is good in life, health, happiness, relationships, all of those things I feel require clear thinking and the ability to make good decisions. Now, one of the concepts you outline early in your book is that often we are unaware that circumstances are thinking for us. What do you mean by that? Well, if you think about the big decisions we make in life, like where to live or who to work for or who to marry,

we know we're making a choice in those moments. And so we're generally, we think, I wouldn't say clearly about them, but we're generally thinking. But if you think about your relationship with your partner, you can pick the best partner. But if you don't invest in that relationship and you don't put in the work and the effort in the ordinary moments, it can multiply all of our progress by zero. Yeah. Let's think about relationships, for example, we make the big decision by choosing

our life partner. But I guess we don't think, do we, about the row over the dishwasher or who's doing the washing up and how those things compound over time. Is that what you're getting at? Yeah. So if I were to tap you on the shoulder during one of your domestic arguments about the dishwasher, the laundry, the chores, who of your domestic arguments about the dishwasher, the laundry, the chores, who does what, picking up the kids, anything, it doesn't matter. If I tap you on the shoulder and say, hey, you're about to pour gasoline or water onto this situation, what do you want to do? Well, you would instantly go water. Why would I pour gasoline on this? This isn't important. This doesn't matter. But in the moment, you both start slowly escalating

and you start slowly escalating. And then what happens? Your whole night is gone. Your weekend's gone. And you have to spend all this time sort of just getting back to where you were, all this investment. Instead of that time going to

meaningfully increasing your relationship, instead of that time going to connecting with your partner, instead of that time going to something more your partner, instead of that time going to something more productive, now all of it's wasted. And we don't think of those moments as choices, but they are choices in a way. And they impact the quality of the relationship that we have. I guess one of the problems in that moment,

when let's say a couple is having a disagreement over something that with hindsight will appear very trivial, but in the moment feels the most important thing in the world, is they don't have self-awareness. So often it's ego or proving that someone is right that comes to the forefront. And I guess a huge theme in your book is the importance of self-awareness, the importance to take a pause and just, I guess, regulate your emotions and make sure that the action or the words you're saying are aligned with what you want to actually happen. And I don't know if this is a good time to talk about these four behavioral tendencies that you write about at the start that often get in the way,

I think one of them is ego, right? Yeah, let's rewind just a little bit. So we're animals, and we share these biological instincts with animals. We're self-preserving, we're territorial, we're hierarchical, we're ritualistic. All animals are all of these things. The difference between humans and most other animals is that we have the ability to reason before we react. If you infringe on our territory, we have the ability to pause before we respond to that. And our territory isn't physical. It's not like we're a wolf and we're walking around peeing on trees and somebody comes into our territory and we attack them. Our territory is our identity. It's how we see ourselves, how we want to be seen to others. I want to be seen as a loving, caring partner.

So if you do something that infringes on that, I'm more likely, it's not for certain, but I'm more likely to respond without reasoning than otherwise. And so I've sort of amalgamated these into humans in terms of ego, emotion, social bias, where we just do what everybody else has done, the social default, and also inertia. We keep doing what we've always done. So we stay in a bad relationship or a bad job because it's comfortable. It's sort of too good to leave and too bad to stay. And then we just, we get complacent in that. We don't do anything about it. We're not conscious about it. And so what those four defaults have in common is that they just tend to reduce our ability to think in the moment. And then if you think even before this, which is what most people miss about

decision-making, we think about decisions at the point of the decision. We never think about what came before the decision. And what think about what came before the decision. And what comes before the decision is your positioning. And your positioning determines whether you're playing on easy mode or hard mode. And this is the language I use with my kids, but it's so relevant. And I'll give you an example. So one of my kids came home. He sort of did his exam at school.

And my kids get exams very early in school. And he comes home and shrugs his shoulders, he's 12 years old, and he passes me this test and he gets a really terrible mark on this test. And it's unlike him, right? Like it's not like him to get a bad mark. And he's just like, I did my best. And this is what we tell ourselves too, right? Like I did my best. And then we shrug it off and we absolve ourselves of responsibility. So we're not accountable to ourselves. And then I was like, okay, well, we're not going to talk about this in the moment because I realize what happens is most kids quit sports in the moment, right?

They don't quit on the field. They don't quit if they suck. They don't quit if they had a bad game. They quit in the car ride home because they're emotional. They're feeling things. And the parents just like start up a conversation. Not the right time for that, right? So I wait, wait, you know, the emotions dissipate a little bit

because we're emotional. We're not going to be thinking. And so later on that night, I was like, walk me through this. I really want to know when you told me you did your best, I want to know what that means. And he's like, well, I sat down at 10 a.m. and I looked at 10 AM and I looked at my questions and I looked at all the points and I allocated my time and I answered

them to the best of my ability. And I was like, that's really interesting. So you think about that the same way that a lot of people think about decision-making. Now I was like, let's rewind 72 hours. Did you study? No. Did you sleep well? No. Did you eat a healthy breakfast? No. Did you get into a fight with your brother? Yes. All of those things that I just mentioned entirely within his control. So I was like, you chose to play on hard mode. You chose to play life on hard mode.

You could have done these things that are within your control. And that's what doing your best is. What are the things that I can do to position myself so that I'm in the best position when the test happens? And how this is relevant to us is we're going to get angry. We're going to have an ego. We're going to have all these things. It's a lot easier for us to manage that,

to better design ourselves around it if we're playing on easy mode versus hard mode. Yeah, it's a great example. When you were talking about what you were saying to your son, you said to him, you chose to play on hard modes. Now the word choice is interesting. Did he know in the moment that he was making a choice or... So an ordinary moment. Yeah. in the moment that he was making a choice or... So an ordinary moment, right? And he just falls into his environment,

falls into a default pattern, not thinking about what he's doing, just going along, doing the easy path, which may or may not make sense. I don't give my kids judgments about what to do. I just point out what they're doing. So when I'm like, you chose to play, that's your choice. You put yourself in that position, but you didn't think of it as a choice. And we don't think of life as that either.

When you're working for an organization and a promotion comes up and you don't get it because you're not prepared for it, you don't think about all of the six months before that promotion came up, all the things you could have done, all the skills you could have acquired, all the relationships you could have developed, all the anticipation, all the proactiveness that you could have put into that. Yeah. It reminds me of the conversation I had with my brother a couple of years ago when he was doing his 5k park run on a Saturday morning. And he said to me afterwards, man, I'm really frustrated. I just couldn't run fast today. I couldn't get where I wanted to get. I don't understand what it is. I'm doing the same thing

as always. And then I said, hey, okay, tell me a bit about your week. And it turned out that actually it'd been an incredibly stressful week at work, finishing work late, not eating as well as usual, not getting as much sleep as usual. So of course, naturally, there's going to be on Saturday morning, the potential for that to negatively impact your race. But I guess in the moment, he's trying his best in the 5k race, like your son was trying his best during the actual test or the exam, but we don't think about the position we were in before actually that took place. And if you look at sort of what I did

was look at the titans of industry and the people who consistently get better results than everybody else. And the one commonality they had that I've never heard anybody really talk about is they're never in a bad position. They're almost never forced by circumstances into doing something. They're almost never in a bad position where even though they get angry, just like us, even though all

these things, the life happens to them the same way that it happens to us, they're always playing on easy mode. And so it seems easy for them, but they're always doing the things in advance they need to, to be playing on easy mode. The fact that, you know, your brother didn't sleep well doesn't change the fact that he's going to get up and do a race. But had he slept well, had he ate well, had he sort of concentrated on what are the things that I can do within my control that put me in the best possible position for this race would have made the race maybe a different outcome. Maybe it wouldn't have made the race a different outcome, but it sounds like it would have. What are the things that you do in your life regularly that help you play life in easy mode? Yeah. So there's a couple of things and I look at this in different domains, right? And in the

domain of life, one of the things I do is like, I have a regular bedtime and it sounds so weird, but I have a rule around my bedtime and we can get into rules later about why they're successful and why they work. But I know that if I don't get sleep, I'm just more heightened about things. Everything, little slights and little comments get to me a lot more if I haven't slept. So I sleep well, I eat well, I invest in my relationships with my kids and with my partner and with everybody else. And what does that mean? Well, that means that when something happens, that it's inevitably easier to overcome. And investing in your relationship, my friend Peter Kaufman gave

me this great sort of analogy, which is imagine a patch of grass between you and everybody else in your life. And that grass, if you water it, is going to be wet of grass between you and everybody else in your life. And that grass, if you water it, is going to be wet. And if you don't water it, it's going to be dry. Well, what happens to dry grass? If there's a problem, we get a spark and that spark starts a fire. But if the grass is wet, the spark just dies. And so I think it's important to do all of these little basic things. And then if you look at other domains of life, because those are sort of in one particular domain, it's like, I invest every month into an index fund. Why do I do that? Well, that sort of puts me in a position for the future.

Where do I want to be in the future? How do I accomplish that? And it's like, I want to be financially independent. So what does that mean if I'm patient about being financially independent? Well, it means I have to save more money than I spend and then invest the difference in financially independent. So what does that mean if I'm patient about being financially independent? Well, it means I have to save more money than I spend and then invest the difference in an index fund. Well, so that puts me in that position. Another thing that I do is I work out every day. I sweat every day. And that's my rule. Another rule that I have is that I sweat every day. Well, let's get to rules actually, because I think it's really interesting how you talk about rules.

Before we do that, Shane, you mentioned the sleep example, which I think is a really great example. Sleep is one of those keystone behaviors or good quality sleep that if we are able to get it right, automatically makes so many other aspects of our life better. Our performance, our relationships, our creativity, our productivity, our ability to resist temptation, whatever it might be, is better when we have slept well. So you have a rule in place that helps you to sleep well consistently. Great for when you do sleep well. great for when you do sleep well what happens though when despite the rule because of circumstances that you can't control you don't sleep well so that's where most people stop they

wake up and they they acknowledge the fact they haven't slept and they acknowledge the fact that they might be on guard today and then they don't do anything about it, right? So the question then becomes, is that knowledge enough to get you through the day in the way that you wanna get through the day? And so for me personally, what I do is I look at my schedule and I try to find these little moments. Oh, I can bump this meeting till tomorrow

without a consequence, without disappointing somebody, without having an effect. And I can use that time to sleep. So I'll be better in the afternoon. I can have a quick nap. And so I start looking at my day with that knowledge. What do I do with that? I have to do something with it. What are the things that I can do that are within my control that'll put me in the best position possible? I know if I have underslept, and we all do this, you wake up some days at 3 a.m., you don't go back to bed. Well, I probably don't want to be making decisions in the afternoon.

So can I move the afternoon decisions up to the morning when I'm still energy and I'm still perky, right? I can do these things that are within my control, but you have to, it's not enough to just know that you're tired. You have to do something about it. And what that looks like for different people will depend on your job, your circumstances. So it's hard to give a prescriptive answer. When I worked for an organization, I would move meetings around. When I worked for myself, I often cancel meetings. And I'm like, you know what, we have to postpone this till next week. I'm sorry. And, you know, I don't do that lightly. So it's only when I feel like I'm going to be impeded in this particular meeting. Yeah, I really like that. And if you have the luxury of being

able to move things around, that's fantastic. For people who don't, let's say they work for a boss and, you know, they don't have any choice over their schedule. What would you recommend they do? Well, there's a couple of things. One, you can have a rule for a day, like going back to rules, because it's so hard to catch yourself in the moment about these behaviors. And we'll talk about rules more in a second.

But the rule can be before I respond to anybody, I'm going to take two breaths. Before I respond to any email, I'm going to take two breaths. I'm not going to respond to an email past to take two breaths. I'm not going to respond to an email past 5 p.m. I'm not going to, you know, you can come up with these little things. You can delay sending stuff. So you can even type your email. You can give it a couple minutes and then go back and read it. You can have somebody else proofread your emails just to make sure

there's no tone in them. Because these are little things, the ordinary moments where you're not thinking gets you in trouble, right? And if you're tired and a colleague slights you, what are you going to do in a meeting? Well, you're going to hit back. That's the animal inside of us. And what we try to do is we try to eliminate these things. We can't eliminate them, but we can manage them. And managing them in that day, in that moment might mean I'm going to take a breath before I respond. hey, in that moment might mean I'm going to take a breath before I respond. And I'm going to ask myself in that moment, is this going to get me closer or further away from the thing that I'm

trying to accomplish here? Do I want to throw gasoline or water onto this situation? And I'm not judging what people do. Sometimes, you know, gasoline is maybe the best option. But being conscious about what you're doing is very different than letting that situation determine what happens for you. Yeah, I think if people take nothing else from your book apart from that gasoline v. water analogy, I still think it would improve the quality of their life immeasurably if they can learn a pause in the moment and actually go, is this pouring gasoline? Is it pouring water? Even that pause just breaks the kind of pattern you're in, right? So you can choose actively a different choice. You literally need milliseconds, right? To give your brain time to catch up to your automatic reactive response. And then your brain can circumvent that. I like that idea about a rule for the day. What I tend to do in this situation is I have a

little morning routine that I do. And I've spoken about it many times on the show before, but essentially I've realized I'm a better human being when I have a bit of time to myself each morning. And if I haven't slept well, at the end of my meditation or journaling, I'll often ask myself the question, what quality do you want to showcase to the world today? And it's a reminder to me, every day it's something a little bit different, but on some days when I'm underslept, I will say to myself, I want to showcase the quality of patience. And it's a reminder to me that I'm going to be reactive. I'm likely to misinterpret things. Just be mindful, Rangan, throughout the day that you're patient, that you don't fall into the trap that is being set for you. Now, that's, I think, effective, but I'm only

doing that once in the morning and I'm trying to remember throughout the day to apply that. to remember throughout the day to apply that. So I think you then making a rule or a series of rules for that day actually is probably a step up because it actually gives you something to consciously keep going back to say, no, you don't do this today. You're not going to reply to an email after 5pm. And your rules, you can literally write them on a post-it note and stick it on your monitor. So you're reminded of them. So you don't have to be conscious. But rules are so fascinating because we've been taught our whole life to follow rules. And, you know, we're taught the speed limit, the tax code, all of this. Nobody reminds us every day to follow the speed limit. We're taught once to follow the speed limit.

That's what we do because we're taught to follow rules. Instinctively, this is bred into us since we're children in school. But we've never thought about how we can use rules to our advantage. And I was with Daniel Kahneman at his penthouse in New York. And I remember he was on the phone and this is how this idea came to me. And he was talking to this person who was asking him to do something. And he just said in passing, like my rule is I never say yes on the phone, I'll get back to you tomorrow. And then he hung up and I was like, tell me about this.

What is this rule? And he's like, well, I found myself not wanting to disappoint other people. So going back to the defaults, we talk about social default, part of that. You don't want to disappoint other people. I didn't want to say no to other people because I feel bad about saying no. And so I devised this rule where I would just dissipate the situation. And then I would go back the next day. And he's like, I went from saying yes, 80% of the time to saying yes, like 10% of the time. And I feel much better.

I'm much more in control of my schedule. And it works out for everybody because now I'm not saying no to their face. I can have an assistant do it. I can have somebody else do it. Or I can reply over email and just say, sorry, that doesn't work with my schedule. But when I tell them it's my rule, he's like, they don't argue with me. If I tell them, oh, let me check my calendar. They'll be like, hold on a second. Yeah, no problem. I'll wait. If I tell them I'm not available that day, then they'll start arguing about another day.

And so he's like, I'm in this conversation. I don't want to be a part of, but if I say my rule is I never say yes on the phone, I'll get back to you. Nobody pushes back on rules. We don't push back on our own rules. And we just automatically, they circumvent our behavior. So he's like, he's not conscious about saying yes or no in that moment. He's just following his rule. And his rule is, I'm not going to say yes on the phone. Now, let's take that. Afterwards, I was like, what other rules do you have? He's like, none. I was like, this might be the most powerful thing you've done.

And I don't think you quite understand that, right? Because this circumvents choice. And it can allow us in these ordinary moments to turn our desired behavior into our default behavior without conscious processing. desired behavior into our default behavior without conscious processing. And if it can do that, then we can do all of these things where you can wake up and you can set a rule for the day and have your rule be that, you know, you're going to take two breaths before responding, or your rule can be, you're not going to send an email that's longer than two sentences, or you're not going to send an email after five, whatever that rule is that works for you. And you pick one or two for the day, and then you can throw it out in the morning. But the fact that

you have that rule, you won't even think about it during the day. You just won't do it. It's so surprising. Try it. Like I encourage everybody to try it. Yeah. There's something about the word rule, isn't there? That's very black and white. There's no shades of gray there. You know, let me have a think about this. Let me check my calendar. It's like that. Then you're, you're using willpower, right? Conscious choice. And then all of a sudden, but now you've circumvented it. So when you think about how people want to handle anger or ego or social situations, most books tell you, you have to recognize that you're in the moment and then you have to make a conscious

choice. And that works maybe 20% of the time. And so that's great. If you can do that, brilliant. But if you can't do that, well, can you create a rule so that you don't even have to recognize that you're angry? You just don't do the thing that you would do when you're angry. And that might be the rule is I take two breaths before I respond and that allows you the time for your conscious brain to catch up to your unconscious brain and now you're reasoning before you respond if I think about that through the lens of health and as a medical doctor of course how this impacts people's ability to make good decisions about their health is of huge interest to me. Let's take diet for example. There's so many debates about the best diet which I think is the wrong debate to be having anyway.

I believe it's more the question should be what is the right diet for me in the context of my life and my lifestyle. But one of the reasons I think that rules work, like I'm following a low-carb diet or a low-fat diet or a vegan diet or a whole food plant-based diet, one of the reasons I believe that they can work for an individual person is because in a world where there is an overabundance of food available to many of us at all times, it forces an element of restriction. And for some people, simply saying, I'm on a low-carb diet, that eliminates a whole host of foods that they would otherwise be tempted by when they're out and about. And you could apply the same reasoning to other diets. Do you think that that is one of the reasons why so many different diets appear to work for different people? Because they've applied a rule.

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live more. Yeah, you're not making a choice. When you go to a restaurant and you're, I'm not a medical doctor, but if you're following a particular diet plan and you go to a restaurant, it's eliminated a whole bunch of choices for you and narrowed down the options available to you. And so you're not consciously eliminating all these options one by one. You're just blanket eliminating them. So the rule is super powerful. Now, I don't think that way in my life. I don't think in terms of diet, but I've applied rules to eating with hundreds of people because I've tested this idea over the years. And it's so effective in social situations, in all these different types of situations.

We were talking earlier about one of my friends who's a salesperson. Yeah. And, you know, we were working because he was trying to lose weight. And I was like, well, why don't you just create a rule, an automatic rule? I call them automatic rules for success. Why don't you create an automatic rule for success that you just choose the healthiest thing on the menu every time you're out at a restaurant and you never eat dessert. And he was skeptical. And six weeks later, I get an email from him. He's like, I've lost weight. I'm healthier. I got more energy than ever. This is the best thing to ever happen to me. And I was like, how are you, you know, what are you doing? And he's like, I'm doing exactly

what you said, because he was like, I was eating, you know, generally pretty good in the morning and the afternoon, but he's always out with clients and always out in these situations. And for the client, that's like a great night out, right? That's wine. That's a lot of food. It's dessert. It's all these things. And he's like, I just said to the clients, like, my rule is I don't do this.

He's like, I'd have a drink or two with dinner, but I wouldn't eat dessert. And I'd order the healthiest thing on the menu. And he's like, that's it. Those two simple things. It's like, I'd have a drink or two with dinner, but I wouldn't eat dessert. And I'd order the healthiest thing on the menu. And he's like, that's it. Those two simple things. It's like, they never push back. He's like, when I used to be like, I don't feel like dessert tonight. It's not just the people around you

pushing back though, is it? It's also something it does to yourself internally. Because, I don't know, let's say for example, people are trying to eat well and they're tempted by dessert if they're out. The rule principle, what I like about it is it signals to the people around you that this is black and white. I don't do desserts, for example, but it also sends yourself that signal as well that I don't have to choose here. I'm just going

to follow my rule. Totally. So you're not consciously thinking in that moment. You're just following a rule. You're not making a willpower choice. You're not doing anything. People will not push back against you. So they won't argue with you in that moment, the first time they might sort of push back just gently, but the second time they won't push back at all. And so then it's so powerful, right? Because not only are you signaling to yourself, you're the type of person who doesn't eat dessert. So part of your identity, part of your ego in a positive way, but you're sort of not getting the social pressure that you normally get when you're like, I don't feel like dessert tonight.

Well, what happens when you're out with a group of your friends and you're like, I don't feel like it. They're like, oh, come on, you can have a piece. Or if you say, you know, I just started this diet. I'm not doing this thing. And they're like, oh, you can start tomorrow. And so the social pressure is really gets you to do these things that you don't want to do. And because you're a good person, because you're a social, you know, we've been brought up to be social creatures to get along with the tribe. Because if we couldn't get along with the tribe, we didn't survive. And so this has embedded in you over thousands of years.

These defaults, right? Emotion, ego, inertia, and social. These are the defaults that may be working against you in your current environment. Yeah. And so you can turn them into a positive thing, right? Which is the rules allow you not to think. You don't have to recognize that you're tired and you don't have to use willpower. And the reason why we want to try to avoid using willpower is just that eventually everybody loses the battle with willpower. So if we can get out of situations

where we have to recognize and use our willpower, or, you know, if you consider that sort of like a battery and it runs down during the day, the further along in the day you get, the worse choices you're going to make. The more social situations you get into, you know, the worse choices you're going to make because you're going to feel pressured in doing these things. But if I don't have to use that willpower battery, and I just say, that's my role, I don't do that. Also, something I talk to patients a lot about is that every choice you make is using up some of your cognitive reserve, which I guess speaks to what you just said, which is if you're constantly making choices throughout the day, you're not going to have

that much energy to make reasoned rational choices at 4pm, 5pm p.m. So one of the reasons I'm a fan of morning routines that stay the same every day is because of the consistency. So I know every morning when I get up what I'm doing for my morning routine. I don't have to decide, well, what am I going to do today? Am I going to do a strength workout? Am I going to do flexibility, yoga? No, I'm going to do a five-minute strength workout whilst my coffee's brewing. That's what I do. It's not a choice. So I'm not using up any load on my brain first thing in the morning. And you're not negotiating with yourself. And so I used to, I know people like working out. I'm not one of those people who love working out, right? Like I don't, I'm not ecstatic to go to the gym. I'm not like, you know,

there's people running on treadmills and they're running at like twice the speed, I'm not ecstatic to go to the gym. I'm not like, you know, there's people running on treadmills and they're running at like twice the speed that I'm running at. And they're not even sweating. And like, I'm dying, right? Like just chugging along here. And so I don't look forward to going to the gym, but I want to be healthy.

And so how does this sort of tie in is I had this rule. I was going to go to the gym three days a week. And so I was going, you know, sort of Monday, Wednesday, Friday, loosely. And I would wake up and I'd be like, I'm tired today. I'm really behind on work. And I would start negotiating with myself. And then I would have a conversation where I'm like, oh, I will, you know, I will do

extra tomorrow, you know? And then, so I get out of doing it today and then tomorrow comes and what do I do tomorrow? Well, tomorrow I'm like, I'm even more tired. I'm even more behind. And you know, this spiral. So I was like, in practice, I went and pulled my report from the gym. I was like, how often am I actually going to the gym?

And it was not two or three days a week. It was more like 1.5 days a week. And I was like, this isn't working because it's not getting me where I want to go. How can I change this? It's applied a rule, right? This was right after I met with Daniel Kahneman. I was like, okay, I'm going to have a rule where I sweat every day. I go to the gym every day. And so it doesn't mean that my workouts are 60 minutes every day. It doesn't mean they're 90 minutes. The duration or scope of my workout can change, but the fact that I sweat every day

does not change. And I think that that's really important because now the negotiation with myself like you isn't, am I going to work out today? It's what does my workout look like today? Yeah, it's so, so powerful, that idea. It's really interesting that I've been talking about this five-minute strength workout for many years on this show

because I've used it successfully with many of my patients. I've used it successfully with myself. And I often use the analogy of toothbrushing, which I think really speaks to what you just said, which is, you know, you don't debate with yourself each day. Am I going to brush my teeth? Yeah. Ah, you know, today's busy. I'll skip it today. You don't even make choices each day where you think, what am I going to do? I'm going to brush my teeth. Am I going to floss? You know, what am I going to do today for my dental hygiene? No, you know, you've got a routine, you brush your teeth for two minutes in the morning, two minutes in the evening, seven days a week. We never think we're too busy. So at the weekends, we'll go in for a one hour

deep clean. We know that a little bit each day keeps our teeth healthy for life. That's how I see my five minute strength workout. Sure, I can do extra. I can go to the gym. I can do other things. But just like toothbrushing, I know it means that I'm doing five minutes of resistance training every day without fail, pretty much every day of the year. It's interesting, over the last few years, I've tried to get into endurance running and I've had a few injuries and I'm working with this wonderful coach called Helen. And just last week, we were looking at things and looking at the log of how much I actually run, just not very much. And so we've completely changed the approach. And just a few days ago, she said, wrong and right, I think what we need to do with you is you need to commit, because you want to do a marathon. I'm hopefully going to do the London Marathon in April next year. You need to do an hour a day.

So every day, an hour a day. It doesn't mean you're running the whole time. Some days it'll be nine minutes walking, one minute running, nine minutes walking, one minute running. And the log will come up with different things you can do on different days. But I love it because instead of me now looking at my work load going, I can't fit a one hour run in because then, you know, I'm going to be tired. I'll have to shower. I've got that going on. It's like, no, it's simplified the thought process, which is no, I am going out for an hour each day. No questions. And so we're only a few days into it. So I have done it every day for the last few days, but I can already feel how that will transform my relationship with running. Well, after a while, it just becomes a ritual for you, a habit, if you

will. And once it does that, then it won't even require conscious processing on your part. You'll just wake up and know you have to run that day. And the question will be, what does it look like that day? And if you think about it, so often we say our priority is something that it isn't. And I have this saying, which is, don't tell me your priorities, show me your calendar. So if it's important to you, then it shouldn't have a problem fitting into your calendar. And if health is important to you, then that should be a component that's just built into your day, like brushing your teeth. And it shouldn't be something you have to find time for. It shouldn't be something you struggle to find time for.

If it really is important to you, then it should just have time every day dedicated to that. Whether you block it off in your calendar or it's the same sort of time every day and you don't need to book a meeting for it, it doesn't matter. Yeah. And then if you think about like a goal, like in this case, right? So let's work backwards. Everybody has a goal. Everybody listening has a goal, whether it's a marathon, whether it's just being healthier, whether it's improving their relationship with their partner, whatever that goal is. Well, what are the rules that I can put in place to get me closer to that? And what are the rules that put me in a position where that's going to

happen? And the positioning is really important, right? Because I want to play this on easy mode. So if my rule is that I'm going to work out every day for an hour, or I'm going to run every day for an hour, well, now I also need a rule where, you know, what's going to make that easier, that running easier is if I go to bed on time. So I can create a rule where I go to bed at 10. And it doesn't mean I'm going to sleep the whole night, but my rule is I go to bed at 10 o'clock. It's consistent across the board. I'm doing it every day. It's not a choice

because that's going to put me in a better position the next day to do that run. Yeah. In the section on making decisions, you write that decisions are different from choices. What does that mean? Well, decisions are, we're consciously processing something, whereas choices were sort of like, it's quick, it's easy. And so if you think about it that way, it's like if you're in the, what are they called here, pharmacy, and you're buying toothpaste and your toothpaste isn't available, well, you'll make a choice for another toothpaste.

But you're not going to stand there and consciously evaluate all the options and all of the different data points with it. So you tend to make choices when the stakes are low or when you think the stakes are low, and you tend to make decisions when the stakes are high. So is a decision a conscious, well-thought-out choice? Yeah, I think you want to reserve most of your decision-making power in terms of like evaluating options, defining problems, doing all of that. You don't want to use that for everyday sort of things where the cost of failure is really low. Jeff Bezos has this concept of one-way door, two-way doors. And a one-way door is you sort of make this decision and it's really hard to go back. He says you can't go back, but

most decisions you can undo. It's just the cost to undo them is really high. But a two-way door, you can sort of walk out and be like, I don't like this and come back. Trying a new brand of toothpaste would be a great example of a two-way door, right? So you don't need to spend ages deciding on a two-way door, but you do need a bit more conscious thought when it's a one-way door. Yeah. So if it's a one-way door, you want to make those decisions ALAP. And if it's a two-way door, you want to make them ASAP. So ASAP is as soon as possible and ALAP is as late as possible. Why do you want to make two-way door decisions as late as possible? Unless there's a real need to make it today, you want to gather more information. You want to define the problem really well.

You want to know what the criteria is. And you want to wait until you're basically forced to make a decision. And then when are you forced to make a decision? We use stop, flop, or no in the book, which is you stop gathering useful information. Flop is your first lost opportunity. Or you know what to do. And I think that those are, they get you out gathering useful information. Flop is your first lost opportunity, or you know what to do. And I think that those are, they get you out of analysis paralysis,

they allow you to keep moving, and they allow you to park these decisions. So often what we do is we just keep all these decisions in our head, and our head can only keep so many things going at once. And so when we treat every choice or decision the same way, we're using the same kind of process to make those decisions or choices, then all of a sudden we have this

backlog in our head and we start getting emotional. We start getting tired. We start getting mentally drained. And then we make rapid fire decisions about what we're doing. And when we do that, we end up not thinking clearly about what we're trying to achieve, how to achieve it. Are we evaluating based on the criteria, how to achieve it. Are we evaluating based on the criteria that we think is relevant? Are we confusing decisions and choices? And are we getting to the destination that we want to get to? That's a really nice bit where you write about the importance of defining the problem and exploring the solution. You describe that these things need to be done

separately. First of all, I wonder if you could explain why that is. And then I thought it would be fun to go through some common health scenarios that I see where we can start applying these principles. So let's do that one second. So why are we talking about automatic rules? Why are we talking about defining the problem? Because your environment determines your behavior. And so your environment can be virtual. It can be artificial. It doesn't have to be your physical environment. It can be the information you consume

and it can be the structure by which you make decisions. But what you're trying to do in all of these cases is turn your desired behavior into default behavior. So if you think about making a decision, well, what's the desired behavior? The desired behavior is we make the best decision possible. Well, what kind of artificial environment can I create where I'm more likely to make the best decision possible? And having worked with thousands of people across decades who make decisions, including myself, and putting this into practice,

one thing that people do all the time is they solve the wrong problem. Well, that's not making a very effective decision. So how can we reduce the odds that we're going to solve the wrong problem? Well, we can separate problem definition from problem solution. And if you work with really smart people at work,

what tends to happen is you have this one hour meeting and you go in and there's maybe eight people in the room and you say like, here's what the problem is. And somebody else says, here's what I think the problem is. And the first person that sort of hits on something that sounds really reasonable, you start solving that problem because you're type A people and you are knowledge workers

and you get paid for solutions and this is what you do. And you start solving that problem because you're type A people and you are knowledge workers and you get paid for solutions and this is what you do. And you start the social signaling that you're contributing to this and you're a part of this and you want to solve the problem. And all of those things are super positive, but they all also increase the odds

that you solve the wrong problem. So artificial environment, let's create a firewall between the problem definition and the problem solution. And that firewall is just two separate meetings. And I used to have them, you know, we, I worked in an operational environment at a three letter agency. I would have one, one meeting in the morning, one in the afternoon. They don't even have to be on two separate days. They work much better if there are two, you know, a day apart and you have one on

Monday and you have the other on Tuesday, but you can do them on the same day. And what you're doing is you're spending the first 30 minutes. So you're still spending the same chunk of time, but the first 30 minutes is we're not here to solve anything. We're here to get clarity on what the problem is. And the person who's making the decision has to be the one to define the problem. So everybody can provide input into that, but it's only the person who makes the decision that gets, they're the one who's responsible. They're the one who's accountable. So it has to be them who decides what the problem is to be solved. Once that happens, you sort of go away and you're allowed, this is what happens. Your rational brain kicks into you, right? You get out of the emotional response that you're in in

the meeting, get out of the signaling. Introverts can contribute afterwards because often people process things differently and they think about things differently. And what you're getting is a different perspective on the problem from everybody else. And then you decide what the problem is. And then the next meeting is, okay, how do we solve? This is the problem. How do we solve it? Yeah. It's putting in a pause, isn't it? Exactly. It's like what you were saying before, when you haven't slept well, how can you create a rule that means that you're going to take a deep breath before you reply to an email? It's the same logic that you're using. Yeah. So you're basically taking advantage of creating

an artificial environment. I consider rules part of an artificial environment where you're structuring things in a way that makes it more likely. You're structuring it when you're at your best, not in the moment. So you structure it when you sort of are not under pressure, you're not sort of tired, you're not emotional. You create the structure for what's most likely to get us to the best decisions.

And then you just follow that when you have the process, when you have a decision, when you have something come up. Let's apply that then through the lens of health. So let me think of, I don't know, common scenarios, right? A common scenario would be someone, for example, would say, I want to meditate, but I can never stick to it. That's very, very common that I hear that. I know all the benefits of meditation, but I just can't make it work. That's one scenario. Another scenario might be, I know that stimulating my mind or being on my devices last thing at night doesn't help me sleep well, but I just can't help it.

Do those seem like reasonable examples to try and unpick a little bit? Totally, let's take the second one first. So if you're on your devices late at night and you don't wanna be on your devices late at night, and that is a choice that you're making and you're relying on willpower to make it. You're never going to make it.

Right? So you have to change things. And what can that change look like? Well, the first level of change can be, I'm just going to leave my phone outside of my bedroom. Right? I'm not physically going to have my phone in my bedroom. Okay? Well, now does my behavior follow?

Do I use it on my couch now instead of in my bed. Okay. Well, now does my behavior follow? Do I use it on my couch now instead of in my bed? Okay. Well, if that's happening, the second thing you could do is take Apple and just be like, I can't use these apps past 8 PM, get your partner or your spouse to set the password. So you don't even know the password to override it. So you can create these rules, these little constraints, this artificial environment, which is really what we're doing. We're using the environment to dictate our behavior. One is a software environment, one is a physical environment, but we're using that to change behavior so that we're not consciously using willpower to make a choice.

Or I guess if you have iPads or tablets in your bedroom, again, this idea that the environment is influencing our behavior all the time, whether we think it is or not. Again, coming back to your four defaults, these things that are constantly going on around us. If you have an iPad in your bedroom, it's just going to be a lot harder to exercise the restraints. Yeah, you're playing on hard mode. You're playing on hard mode. And I think that's it, isn't it?

And I know, although I don't follow it all the time, I try to, but when I leave my phone in my kitchen downstairs to charge, it is transformative what that impact has. I sleep better. I'm more rested in the morning. Of course, I'm not going to go on Instagram just before I'm in bed because I have to go out of my bedroom, downstairs, into the kitchen. And just that little bit of friction means you're infinitely less likely to engage in that behavior.

Totally. And it's so powerful, right? And with my own kids, I have a no devices in your bedroom policy. So nine o'clock, everything goes downstairs. There's no laptop in your room. There's no iPad in your room. There's no watches in your room. There's no phones in your room. There's nothing. And the reason is I don't want them in that habit. I don't want them relying on willpower to turn those devices off because I know that's nearly impossible. It's nearly impossible for us as adults. Of course it's impossible for teenagers. This is a really interesting point because I know that many parents say that the biggest source of their arguments or disagreements with their kids are to do with devices. Now, thankfully, that hasn't become an issue yet for me. My kids are 13 and 10, but I know some of my friends who've got slightly older kids,

they're saying there's constant battles. And I guess this is where a rule can come in, right? A rule that maybe the parents follow as well, right? So if you have a household rule, that may change the whole idea of whether we're even negotiating it. Like there is no negotiation. There's a rule in this house that at this time, we're not on devices. Yeah. And if you have it that way, where everybody's following the same rule,

it's very hard to have a surface area to argue with. If you have it in a way where you're following a different set of rules, then you've created a large surface area to argue with. I'm in the same boat as you. I mean, my kids are 13 and 14. I haven't had any problems with this yet, but I see other kids having problems. And also like I,

every parent makes the best choice possible for their kids. And you know, so when I speak about what I do with my kids, that's me at my house and this works for me right now. Might not work next week. You know what it's like with teenagers, but it works right now. And so my kids don't even have phones yet. And our rule has been, you don't get a phone until grade nine or grade 10, depending on how responsible you are with technology and how responsible you are doing your schoolwork. And you need to show me that you can handle this responsibility and you'll have opportunities to show me you can handle that responsibility through a watch that allows you to text but doesn't allow social media. Right?

So I've created a constraint. So the kids want to text. They need to text. I need to know where they are. And they need to be able to call me. Well, I can get a watch with a cellular connection. And that enables all of that. But it doesn't bring the downside.

Now, the downside has already started. My kids are in grade 8 and 9. And what happens is starting in grade seven, actually starting in grade six, their friends basically started getting cell phones. They have Snapchat, they have Instagram, they have all these things that my kids don't have. And the conversation becomes, you know, with the kids, which is all my friends have this. And I'm like, I don't care what your friends have. And I sound like my parents, right? Like this is what my parents told me. But I was like, our rule is we don't do that until we can handle it responsibly.

And that's just what we do in our house. And that's how we try to live by. Just as you have family rules, right? Our rule is we're kind to people. Our rule is we have a responsibility and obligation to give back to other people. You know, you have all these family values. Well, why haven't we included technology into that?

Well, I think we we included technology into that? Well, I think we're sort of fast learning that we need to introduce some rules and some principles about how we use technology. It's exploded so quickly, you know, faster than many of us have been able to put in rules. We also have particular rules in our family, again, that work for us. But it is a tricky one that I think more and more We also have particular rules in our family, again, that work for us.

But it is a tricky one that I think more and more people are going to be struggling with, is how do you manage this? And I think the uncomfortable truth for many people is also that kids often will do what they see us do as their parents. So sometimes we want our children to change their behavior without changing our own behavior. If you're on your phone at dinner, it's very hard for you to tell your kids not to be on their phone at dinner. I mean, that is a recipe for disaster or resentment at best.

And so you have to live by the behaviors that you want your kids to live by, just the same as you have to live the type of life that you want them to live. But you're also explaining to your kids why, which I think is really lovely. So it's not just, this is a rule with no explanation. It's like, this is the reason why. And once you show me that you can handle this responsibility, I will give you more responsibility. I like that. I also like what you said before

about, you don't really tell your kids what to do. You're teaching them that when you behave like this, this is the consequence that when you behave like this, this is the consequence. When you behave in this other way, this is the consequence and allow them that autonomy to actually learn that for themselves. So the two questions I ask my kids the most are water or gasoline, or is this going to get you what you want? Is what you're doing right now going to get you to the outcome that you want to get to? And often when they make mistakes, we have this idea in the book, right? Making the invisible visible. So when they make mistakes, so I want my kids to fail.

I'm pro them failing. I'm pro them struggling. I'm pro all of that. When they make a mistake and it's a conscious choice on their part, I'll give you a great example about this in a second. I get them to write out three questions. What I did, what was the outcome? What will I do differently next time?

And I get them to write it out in their handwriting. We call it a learning journal. And that allows them to reflect on their experience. So why is this important? Because if we think of how we learn and we don't really understand how we learn, we think we learn from experience, we don't. We don't really learn from experience.

So I have an idea called the learning loop, which is we have an experience, we reflect on the experience. From the reflection, we compress the experience. And then from that compression, we have an action. So you have these four steps, right? You have experience, and then from that compression, we have an action. So you have these four steps, right? You have experience, reflection, compression, or abstraction, however you want to think of that. Then you have an action, and this loop feeds itself. So often we skip the reflection

part, and the reflection part is where learning happens. So the reflection is, I made a choice, in this case with my son. I had an experience. What was the result of that experience? Did I get what I wanted out of that experience? What will I do differently next time? And then we periodically just go through this book and it's really effective. It's much more effective than me telling them what to do. And it's much more effective

than them trying to figure it out without consciously processing the reflection. Yeah, I love it. Two questions I have encouraged my patients to ask themselves each night for a number of years now, which is, what went well today? What can I do differently tomorrow? And again, similar themes, I think, which is just in a very compassionate way, just bit by bit, encouraging them to self-reflect and go, you know, simple things like what went well today? Well, you know, despite being mega busy

and super stressed, I still found time to cook my family a home cooked meal, for example. What can I do differently tomorrow? Oh, well, the reason I was super stressed today is because I stayed up late watching Netflix till midnight. So I was cranky. I was super stressed today is because I stayed up late watching Netflix till midnight. So I was cranky. I couldn't get my work done. I had too much caffeine. Tonight and tomorrow, I can go to bed on time, which is going to mean I'm calmer and less stressed the following day. And they sound deceptively simple, these exercises, but when you practice them regularly, I think they transform how you see the world. Well, they're simple, but not simplistic. And we tend to discount things that are simple because we assume they're simplistic, but simple is very effective. What are you going for? You're

going for effective. These are effective. And if you find yourself saying the same thing over and over again, I stayed up late, I did this thing. Well, now I can use a rule to avoid that whole problem to begin with. And if you reflect out in a journal, like writing, then you can see these patterns emerge. Whereas if you rely just on, again, no judgment on my part. You want to stay up all night playing video games? Go ahead. I have no problem with that. But if you're choosing, that's happening and it's causing you trouble. It's causing you to wish you were doing something different and wishing is not enough to change that behavior. What can I do in my environment? Maybe I get rid of my PlayStation. Maybe I cancel my Netflix subscription. Maybe I create a rule where I'm in bed at 10 o'clock. Maybe I create a rule there's no devices in my bed. Try that for a month.

Just because you create a rule doesn't mean you have to follow it for life. But try it for a month, try it for a week. See what happens. Does it change your behavior? Well, I know it'll change your behavior. And is that effective to the things that you want to accomplish? What would you say to someone who says, okay, Shane, I'm with you. And they apply a rule. They say, right, I'm going to follow this rule. I'm going to go to bed every night, or I'm going to be in my bedroom by 10 PM every evening

without a device, let's say. What happens if they follow that for the first four days of the week, fifth day, for whatever reason, they don't follow it. A human tendency is to beat ourselves up and go, wow, that rule didn't work for me. I did it for four days, but it didn't work on the fifth day. So it's the wrong rule for me. What would you say to that person? wrong rule for me. What would you say to that person? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the

architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health, and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life. And I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve

sleep, lead to better decision-making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most things it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves

every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast.

But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. Well, two things. James Clear has this idea, which is never miss twice. Yeah, it's brilliant. So I love that idea, right? Which is, you know, don't miss the next night. So don't do two in a row. You can get back on track. That's fine. That's easy. The second thing is this voice in our head, this loop, and we all have this inner monologue. I think what we don't appreciate is that the most powerful story in the world is the one that we tell ourselves. And so if that loop starts to become, I can't do this, this doesn't work for

me, all of these things, you need to hit pause on that loop and be like, not this time. I'm not going to listen to that loop this time because I've listened to that loop my whole life. And that loop hasn't gotten me what I want. That loop is not getting me where I want to go. That loop is not getting me the things in life that I want to get. I need new music. I need a new song. I need a new loop. Not this time. Yeah. And when you say not this time, you can start replacing it with a different loop and that loop becomes not this time. Yeah. That inner voice gets in the way a lot, doesn't it? Well, it's repeat. It's the song you have on repeat, right? We start beating ourselves up and that voice is not productive. That voice doesn't help us. It doesn't help us do hard

things. It doesn't help us reflect on our mistakes. It just becomes this loop that keeps us in place. And so you have to recognize when it's happening. And it's easy to recognize because you're like, oh, I'm saying the same things to myself over and over again. And then all you have to say is not this time. Three words, not this time. To recognize these things though, as we've already mentioned, requires self-awareness. It requires an ability

to step out of the moment and reflect, to take yourself almost out of your life, to look down onto your life. Clearly there are practices which are going to help us do that. You've just mentioned how important writing or journaling can be to make the invisible visible. Is that something you do each day? I write every day. And sometimes I burn it. I don't even show it to anybody. I'll just write out, like, especially if I'm really emotional, really angry, I'm really upset about something. I have two ways to deal with that. One way that I deal with that is I just run until I'm not upset. And then I turn around and come home. It's really effective. It's surprisingly effective. I can ruminate on whatever I'm angry about and I just run. And as soon as I'm no longer angry about the issue, I just turn around and come home. The other way that I found really effective, because what we tend to do is

suppress these feelings. And it's that suppression that leads to them coming out in unexpected ways later on. You want to feel these feelings. When you feel them, they don't really last that long. So writing about these feelings, writing about when you're angry, why am I angry? What happened? You don't have to show that to anybody. You don't even have to keep the paper.

Write it, throw it in the fireplace. It doesn't matter. But you're getting it out of you. You're reflecting on that. And then there's other ways that we can find out about ourselves because it's really hard for us to see the system that we're in

because we think that what we see is all there is to see. And if we remember grade nine physics, we're all sort of taught that, you know, if you're traveling on a train with a ball and you're holding the ball and the ball, the train is moving at 60 kilometers an hour. How fast is the ball moving? Well, you're looking down and you're saying the ball and the ball, the train is moving at 60 kilometers an hour. How fast is the ball moving? Well, you're looking down

and you're saying the ball's not moving at all. But relative to somebody standing outside the train, the ball's moving at 60 kilometers an hour. So how can we reduce our blind spots and get a different perspective into our life? And so this self-accountability, self-awareness starts to kick in. And so we can do that in many ways, right? We can have our friends who call us on it, who point out what

we're missing. We can create a personal board of directors to sort of adapt different personas. And these different personas will allow us a different lens into the situation. So now all of a sudden we're stepping outside of ourselves. Like you said, we're looking at a different level top down. Sometimes it's easier for us to pretend we're somebody else looking into our life than it is to just abstract ourselves. Like I used to call this director mode. And so I would do this

when I was having a really tough conversation with an employee and it was really hard for me. But what I would imagine is I'm an actor in a movie and I'm looking at this camera in the top corner of the room and i'm looking at this person who's me playing a part and that person is an actor in this movie and this is their sort of like conversation they're having with somebody and that allowed me to see things that i couldn't see before yeah and i think that if you can't do that you can say what does my life look like from my best friend's perspective? What does this look like from, and you can, they don't have to be alive. You can be like, what would Marcus Aurelius say about my life? And with chat GPT, you can have a lot of fun with this now, right? Because you can sort of play around with it a little bit and you can be like, adopt the persona of Marcus Aurelius. I have this problem. How would he think about it? Or this other person.

And then what you're doing is you're really just stepping outside yourself and you're getting a different lens into your life and you're reducing your blind spots because the source of all bad decisions is blind spots. If we had perfect information, we would make perfect decisions. Now, that doesn't mean we would get perfect outcomes because if like think about playing poker, right? If I knew everybody's hand, I would play perfectly every time. Doesn't mean I would win every outcomes. Because if like, think about playing poker, right? If I knew everybody's hand, I would play perfectly every time.

It doesn't mean I would win every time. And it's the same thing in life. We want to reduce blind spots, but we can't eliminate them. Yeah. How can we get more perspective on our life? There's a number of ways you've suggested that. The first one you suggested was,

if you have friends who can maybe not call you out, but offer a different perspective, then as you say in the book, grab hold of them. They're the ones you want, right? They're not going to keep you in victim mode. They're going to help you make positive changes. But some people push back against any form of feedback. And I think this is where, you know, out of those four defaults you mentioned at the start, this is possibly where ego comes in, whereby some people, and I guess I was probably one of these people 10 years ago, I found criticism really hard. So you take it as a personal insult on you rather than seeing it for what it is. Is this a problem you've seen in your work and how do you help your clients

navigate that? So the three words in the book that I use around this are outcome over ego. And I think that you have to keep in mind, if I'm not getting the, you have to recognize this yourself. I can't get you to listen. I'm never going to be able to, I might tell you the one thing holding you back at work or the one thing getting in the way of your life or the one thing that's preventing you from having the best relationship of your life. That doesn't mean you're going to listen to it. And if I say it three or four different ways, you're not going to hear it because you're not ready to hear it because your ego is blocking that information from coming into you. And that's fine. There's no, like, that's just the way life is. You have

to ask yourself periodically, am I getting the results I want? Am I in the relationship I want? Am I doing the things that I want to be doing? Am I, and if I'm not getting the results I want, well, now I have to like, Hey, maybe that person is right. Maybe there's something that's not quite working here. And so, so often we think that we're right and we spend all of our time and effort trying to prove that we're right. And because we're focused so much on proving that we're right,

we miss all of the signal from the real world coming into us that says, you know what, you're not quite right. You need to change this one thing. And if we become open to that, and the way that I remembered this is outcome over ego. I don't care who gets the credit. I just want the best outcome. And that best outcome can be for me myself. So if you come to me and you tell me something, I don't instinctively say no on the spot. I don't argue with you. I say, thank you. And then I digest it and I reflect on it. And I'm like, is there some truth to that? I read all the Amazon reviews, right? I read all of the

comments on all the articles about me. And maybe that's not healthy and maybe it is, but I'm like, there's pieces of wisdom in this, right? Oh, I could have explained that better. I could have done this better. And if you just throw all criticism out or you throw everything that people say out, you're not going to get the most effective results that you want to get. Yeah. I think whether one reads Amazon reviews or not, I don't think we can say good or bad.

It depends on the impact it's having on us and for what purpose are we reading it? If we're allowing negative reviews to affect how we feel about ourselves, affect our relationship with our partner and our kids and affect our sleep, yeah, we could argue that it's possibly not the best thing to do. But if we have, I guess, done the emotional work

to be able to look at things rationally and go, yeah, you know what, that's a good point. Possibly, if I was rewriting that chapter, I could have made that a bit clearer. Next time I talk about that idea, I'll make it a little bit clearer. We can use criticism actually as a way of making us better. Oh, totally. And you can use negative reviews as a way of making you better too. And, you know, Josh Wolf has this saying, which is chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. And I tend to be motivated that way, right? I tend to, you know, there was this,

I made the New York Times bestseller list. I saw that, congratulations. And well, it's really interesting, right? Because the first, one of the first thoughts that went through my head was in 2018, the New York Times wrote a profile on me. And one comment from Portland, Oregon, from some random

person said, I am confident Mr. Parrish is enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. I remembered that comment in that moment. And I remember that comment because somebody had framed the New York Times profile and given it to me. And I had put a piece of tape on that comment and stuck it right under that profile. So I hung it on the wall because somebody gave it to me and I felt obligated, social, right? To hang it up because somebody gave it to me. I thought it was a bit pretentious.

So I stuck this comment on it. And every day I saw that comment for years until I took this picture off the wall. And that comment kept me going. Again, not today. Yeah. Right? I'm motivated by this. This is a fuel and it's a positive fuel because it gets me through some dark periods. It gets me through some struggles and it just helps me persevere. Now that's an anonymous person in Portland, Oregon who commented on this article. And it was also one of my first thoughts. So you can turn people's slights against you into fuel

for success. But you've created a, you created there an empowering story, right? So you said before that the most powerful story is a story you tell yourself. And I'm totally on board. I think a lot of us don't realize that we have the power to choose our story in any situation. us don't realise that we have the power to choose our story in any situation. And so you could look at that comment where someone's taking a dig at you and you could choose a self-defeating story of, yeah, they could be right. Yeah, I'm an imposter. I mean, what the hell's going on when the New York Times is writing an article on know, I knew this would never happen. That person's correct or whatever it might be. That's a disempowering story. Or you could flip that and go, wow, that's what that guy thinks. Well, I'm going to show that guy that I've got

plenty more where this came from. I've got all kinds of ideas that I'm going to go and share with the world, right? So the same situation, but you are creating a powerful story that helps you rather than a story that harms you. Your mindset is going to determine everything that happens to you in life. And how you take criticism, how you take positive news, how you understand all of this depends on your mindset. So you need to change your mindset, right? You can turn everything into fuel that fires you if you want to. You just have to look at it in a different way

than you're looking at it. My grade nine teacher wrote in my report card that Shane would be lucky to graduate from high school. And she was 100% right. But had I taken that and been like, oh, I'm just gonna give up, then I would never have got through high school. You have to interpret that

in a way that fuels you. You decide how you interpret that. This is back when teachers, I don't know what they do here, but this is back when teachers were allowed to write their actual comments and not pick from this like pre-described list about approved comments for kids. This is when they said what they thought. That was her only comment in my report card. And she was 100% right. How I interpreted that in that moment was going to determine whether I gave up at school, which then it becomes this self-fulfilling, then she's guaranteed to be right. get to tell me the ceiling on what I can and can't do. You don't know anything about me. You know what I look like in social studies class, right? Like you don't know my life. You don't know my situation. Who are you to tell me this? So I can choose how I interpret that. And it can be a positive thing. Like often when we receive these comments, these negative comments, and everybody gets them, right? You go one of two ways, right? On the

extreme end, you sort of like paralyze yourself. You don't do anything. And on the positive end, you turn it into fuel that never really runs out because you remember it, it gets etched into your brain, but not in a way that you don't like the person. The comment could even be correct. It doesn't matter, right? It can still fuel you. You need emotional maturity though for a lot of this. And as I read through the book, and as I said to you when you came to the house, I think it's going to help so many people. There's so much wisdom in there. As I read it, I think this is a book about knowing yourself better. This is a book about intentional choices. This is a book about better emotional regulation.

Yes, it's through the lens of clear thinking, but actually if you can apply these principles, you're going to be calmer. You're going to be more rational. And yes, you're going to think better and execute better decisions. It's in many ways, for me, it's a book on happiness and philosophy and how to live a contented life, really. I don't know how that

lands with you. No, I mean, that sounds brilliant. I wish you were doing the jacket design for the book. I genuinely mean that. Honestly, I think the principles are really, really powerful. And even that section there on ego in the start, when you talk about these four defaults, I think ego gets in the way of so much. Ego could make criticism, floor you and turn you into a victim or empower you and train yourself to get better. And there is, in that section on ego, you do talk a lot about the victim mindset. That's something I'm really passionate about because it's something I feel I've changed

in my own life over the past few years, hugely influenced by a conversation with the Auschwitz survivor, Edith Eger, who taught me that you can reframe anything in life with your mind. And I thought, wow, she can do it in Auschwitz. I sure as hell can do it in my life. Mindset. Mindset. Yeah. So maybe talk a little bit about that victim mindset and how we

turn that into a more empowering mindset. Well, a couple of things I'll say about this. One, if you're surrounded by people who are victims of circumstance, you will inevitably adopt that behavior. And so that's one thing to watch out for is who in my immediate circle, like if I'm hanging, the four people I hang out with are all victims. And victims being, you know, I'm powerless. I don't have any control over this situation. Bad things always seem to happen to me. I can't do anything about them. And you're not like that.

You will become like that. So warning number one. Well, let's just pause there, Shane, if you don't mind, because the word victim gets quite triggering for people. And let's explain what you mean by that. And then also make sure we speak to that person who is listening now and does think that, yeah, but you don't know my life. This is how I was brought up. This is how my boss treats me.

You don't get my life. So it's easy for you to say this. So when I say victim, what I mean is that your circumstances are mastering you and you are not mastering your circumstances. And so you always feel like you have no control over the situation and you are never at fault for the outcomes of your life. And so we grow up and we start when we're kids and we go into a household and we have no choice over that household. It's luck, pure luck, where we live, who our parents are, what our socioeconomic status is. But at some point, you know, that puts us on a trajectory. And at some point we take control of that trajectory ourselves, whether it's 18, 26, 30, whatever. At some point you become an adult. And when you

become an adult, you take over your own life and you're responsible for that trajectory. And you might be starting lower on the grid than somebody else, and that's all luck. But that doesn't mean that you can't change your trajectory positively. And it doesn't mean you can't maximize your potential and your outcomes. And so what you have to do is what are the things within my control

that I can do to put myself in a better position to be successful. And there is always something you can do to position yourself to win. There's always something you can do to set yourself up to better master your circumstances rather than be mastered by them. I'm a firm believer in that. And that accounts for everybody. It doesn't matter where you are on the grid. It doesn't matter where you start. A lot of people who are born really lucky, go negative on their trajectory. But you take control of your life and you are responsible for these decisions and you're an adult. So you know that this isn't serving you because you're not getting the outcomes that you want. Yeah. That ability,

that inner knowledge that you have the power to influence your life is critical for a well-lived life. 100%. So to go back to your comment about, I don't know your life, I don't know your situation, it doesn't matter. I don't need to. I don't need to know that, to know that there's something you can do today to improve your position tomorrow. There's's something you can do today to improve your position tomorrow. There's something that you can do today to help you master your circumstances and change your trajectory. I don't need to know anything about your life to know that because that applies to everybody. There's always something that you can do. And when you're focused on all the things that you don't control, you're focused on all of the wrong things and you're a victim in the sense that I'm talking about being a victim.

What you're doing is you're spending all this energy staying in place and all the energy you're spending staying in place and complaining and getting feedback from people in your life. That energy can be better spent changing your trajectory. Yeah. How do you think about stress and its impact on decision-making? I think stress is a good thing, right? Like I don't have a pro-con thing about stress. It's,

you know, it can be debilitating and it can be terrible and it can be positive. Again, your mindset will determine a lot of how you handle stress. And so if you think stress is bad and then any stress is automatically gonna cause you anxiety and you're less likely to make good decisions, you're less likely to sleep, but a little bit of stress can be a really good thing. And I think that we don't think about it that way. And so you probably wanna avoid

making certain types of decisions when you're really stressful. And if you're really stressful all the time, that's a moment to pause and reflect like, wait, what's going on in my life? Just the same as if you go really stressful all the time, that's a moment to pause and reflect like, wait, what's going on in my life? Just the same as if you go to work on Monday and you don't want to go to work, well, that's fine.

But if you go Monday after Monday for year after year, well, now all of a sudden it's like, well, this is not changing. Is this really serving me? Is this getting me what I want? Same thing with stress, right? A little bit of stress is good. It should sort of like either be a low level or it should sort of ebb and flow positively and then no stress and

then positively and no stress. And then you teach yourself that you can handle stress as well, right? So there's positive angles to all of this, but life is full of stress. There's no warning telling you there's going to be a financial crisis or Brexit or anything that's major that's going to go on in life. There's no warning you're going to get cancer. There's no warning that this stuff is going to happen. And so you have to be in a position, again, coming back to positioning, being a key element to how we think clearly. You always have to be positioned to withstand a wide variety of future outcomes. And that future outcome could be a crisis hits tomorrow. How am I positioned if it happens? And what can I do to position myself better if it does happen?

Yeah, that whole section on position is so good. And I think you use the example of an investor and it was basically like anyone can look bad if the position's poor, essentially. and it was basically like anyone can look bad if the position's poor, essentially. So when you're in a good position, everybody looks like a genius. And when you're in a bad position, even the smartest person in the world looks like an idiot. If you look at the people

who tend to get really positive outcomes all the time consistently, that we often think of as lucky or brilliant, they're really not much smarter than we are. They're not much luckier than we are. What happens is they're never forced into a bad decision by circumstances. And so talking about what we talked about earlier, they're playing on easy mode. You look at Warren Buffett today, Berkshire Hathaway, perfect example, right? He's got $150 billion on the balance sheet in cash. Stock market goes up,

he wins. Stock market stays the same, he wins. Stock market craters, he wins. Now he's created an environment where that's likely to happen. What do I mean by that? He owns 36% of the company, you know, he used to own more of it. He's given so much away to charity, but because he owns so much of the company, he can dictate what happens to it. And it. He's given so much away to charity. But because he owns so much of the company, he can dictate what happens to it. And it doesn't matter what other people say. He controls his circumstances. He'll never be forced by somebody outside of the company into making a bad decision.

And so when we think about positioning and environment, these are things we have to think about. How does that apply to someone who goes, okay, that example's great, but I'm not Warren Buffett, right? I don't have 150 million in cash or 150 billion or whatever, some astronomical number. I'm just trying to get through my week. Okay. My finances are tight. I'm worried about my job and whether I'm going to be keeping it in six months or so, how does positioning impact that person? Oh, this is like such a fun question, right? Because like, let's

think about this through different lenses. So if you think about it through a financial lens, maybe I should be saving a little bit more money now in case I do lose my job. Okay. Right. And if I'm not worried about losing my job, maybe I'm saving money now because I want financial freedom in the future. And we know the path to financial freedom is to save a little bit of money, dollar cost, average it into index funds and wait a long period of time. Problem is we don't want to wait a long period of time. So a lack of patience in this case can change the outcome, but we know the path to financial freedom for nearly everybody. The second thing is I'm going to lose my job. That fear can paralyze me and it can prevent me

from being the best person I can be at work, but it'll also motivate me to be like, oh, what are the skills I need to learn right now? What can I do while I'm working to make myself more marketable for the next job, for the next promotion, for the next sort of thing that comes in my life? What are the things within my control? Right? Again, it all comes down to what can I do about this? So this might or might not happen. I don't control whether that's going to happen.

But what I do control is what am I doing at work to make myself invaluable? What am I doing at work to learn the skills that I know they need? What am I doing at work to make sure that they see the ideas and the contributions that I have? What am I doing at work to put myself in a position to leave that job and leapfrog the next one? These are all things that you can take control of this very minute today. Yeah, it's changing your mindset, isn't it? What can I do in this situation? I guess really zooming out and thinking about position. And I guess my bias here is someone who believes that health massively impacts happiness and our productivity and our decisions and all those

things. Well, if you are able to pay attention to your sleep and your food intake and your movement, you are naturally going to be in a better position than anything that happens in life because your body is working better. Your brain is working better. That's positioning as well, right? A hundred percent.

They're lead dominoes, right? They affect everything down the line. And they're small, simple, but not simplistic things that we can do today to put ourselves in a better position. Again, you think of positioning as easy mode or hard mode. You don't do those things. You're choosing to play on hard mode. Doesn't mean you're not going to get through it. Doesn't mean you're not going to get the results, but you're going to spend a lot more time and effort getting them than you otherwise need to. So I would prefer to play life on easy mode if I can. It doesn't mean I always do, but if I have the choice, there's no points for difficulty.

Yeah. I love that. Easy mode, hard mode. It's something I may borrow and use on my children, if that's okay. Of course. It's funny that my son has had a few late nights recently, and we went to France to do a swim run Of course. tell him off was more to say, hey, look, this is what happens when we don't sleep, right? We misinterpret things. We get a bit emotional. And for me, it was, again, I think similar to the approach you take, I was just trying to help him draw the link between fatigue and sleep deprivation and mood. A hundred percent. So when you, what happens with a lot of parents in that situation is you shouldn't be angry. You shouldn't be, you shouldn't be, you shouldn't be.

And that just causes a fight, right? Because that just, you react one way, then there's an escalation. And now all of a sudden you're like blowing up in the car at each other. I like your approach where it's like, hey, when you do this, this is what happens. You're drawing a causal link. And you can also turn that into an easy mode, hard

mode, which is like, do you feel like you're playing on hard mode today? Why do you feel like you're playing on hard mode? What are the things that you did that would contribute to, what's your contribution to that? It's never zero, right? And no matter what the problem is, no matter what the situation is, I need to, you know, as a parent, I want my kids to identify their contribution to it. When my kids are fighting and it's obviously more one kid's fault than the other kids, that doesn't mean there's no contribution from each of them. So I try to say, what's your contribution to this problem? Each of them has to identify their contribution to it. Again, like in this case, it's like, what's my contribution to playing on hard mode today? I didn't sleep well last night. Okay. Was that within my control?

Yeah. And if it wasn't, okay, there's nothing I can do about it. But if it was, now I draw a link or even if it wasn't like, how do I put myself in a position where I don't let that happen again? You're talking a lot about honesty and accountability, right? This idea that, you know, two people are fighting. It's never 100% just down to one person. We can apply that with our spouses, with our partners and anything in life.

We always contribute in some way, but it's easier, and I guess maybe this comes down to the ego default again, to believe it's the other person. But we are always contributing in some way. And I think what your book is going to help people do more and more is develop that ability to be honest with themselves and go, yeah, you know what? Yeah, I didn't like that behavior from the other party, but I also, you know, maybe put a bit of gasoline on the fire rather than water right at the start. I didn't need to say that, for example. The first thing to recognize is that we're not perfect. I mean, like we're the hero of our own story, but we're all far from perfect. I don't make perfect

decisions. One of my objections to titling the book Clear Thinking was I don't want to be held up as somebody who always thinks clearly. I'm human, right? And we're all human. And what does that mean? It means we make mistakes, but we get better

and we become the best version of ourselves when we identify what our contribution is, what is within our control, how we're interpreting this situation using our mindset to get us to a better place. And those are things we all control. Those are, I'm not asking to change outcomes. They will change outcomes.

Those are the lead dominoes to changing your outcomes. That'll happen inevitably. There's a book written by a famous coach called The Score Will Take Care of Itself. Don't focus on the score, focus on the things within your control that you can do on this particular play to put yourself in a winning position. Yeah. There was a section in the book where you talked about these rituals that sports people may have to prevent them

allowing, I think, these defaults to get in the way. So, but perhaps you could talk about that because I found that really, really helpful. And I think it will help people think about rituals they can put into practice in their own life. Anywhere where temperament is involved in sort of outcomes of what you're doing, you will find hidden rituals that are hiding in plain sight. Whether it's the CEO who takes a breath before responding or the tennis player who bounces the ball the same number of times before a serve or the basketball player who bounces the ball the same number of times before a free throw or the basketball player who starts their routine the exact same way or the baseball player takes the same number of practice

swings. What you're seeing is a ritual. And what does that ritual do for you? That ritual allows the pause between stimulus and response. And that ritual centers you on the here and now and in this moment. And so if you think of a tennis player, it doesn't matter if you just made the best play of your career or the worst play of your career, you're bouncing the ball the same number of times. And what are you doing in that moment? You're centering yourself. You're catching your breath. You're orienting to right now. You're forgetting about what just happened.

What just happened doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if it was the best play. Doesn't matter if it was the worst play. What matters is the next play. Think of the CEO who's taking a breath. It doesn't matter what somebody just said to them. It doesn't matter anything. What matters is what comes out of my mouth next. Basketball players, same thing.

Doesn't matter what the circumstances are. It doesn't matter if it was the best play or worst play. It doesn't matter if it was unfair, the ref made a bad call. None of it matters. What matters is you can focus on your next move. You can focus on your next serve. You can focus on your next move. You can focus on your next serve. You can focus on your next shot. You can focus on the next thing out of your mouth. And you can always take a step to bettering your position, to bettering your trajectory, to mastering your circumstances in those moments. This is where rules come in, of course. So instead of Daniel Kahneman saying yes on the phone, because he felt a social obligation to do so, he has a rule. It brings in

the pause. It allows him to reflect. It allows the next day to come and go, yeah, you know what? I really don't want to do that or whatever it might be. So anywhere where you're using discipline or willpower to do something, you can use rules and rituals to effectively change your behavior. A great example with my kids is homework. I don't know what it's like here, but I mean, my kids get a lot of homework and they have since grade seven. They get about 90 minutes a night. And it was always this battle. They would come home and they'd be like, I don't feel like doing my homework. And then, you know, it's like eight o'clock all of a sudden. And I'm like, you have 90 minutes of homework to do. What are you doing?

And, you know, this lasted about a week. And I was like, this is not going to work. How do we figure this out, right? How do we ritualize this behavior so that you're just automatically doing the things that you need to do? I can't make it a rule because I think that wouldn't have been effective with them. But what I was like was like, okay, you get home, you get off the bus, you go upstairs, you shower, you come downstairs and you start your homework and I'll give you a snack. And I had to force this for about a week. And then all of a sudden, like it started, I was there, but it started like taking over by itself. By the end of a month, I left the house just to see what would

happen. And they just follow the ritual. And this is what we do, right? So if you think of inertia, right, we talk about inertia in the book being one of the defaults. Well, inertia by itself is not positive or negative. It's just reinforcing the status quo. So if I can use a ritual to create a status quo or use a rule to create a status quo, well, now all of a sudden I have positive inertia instead of negative inertia. I don't have to overcome it. I just have to let it do its thing. And it's so powerful that we're not thinking in those moments.

My kids weren't coming home and making a conscious choice about whether to do homework or not. They were just following the inertia of what they've done. Yeah. Momentum. Momentum, yeah. Building momentum. And I think that speaks to what we were saying before about, I guess, my five-minute workout each day. There's a momentum there. It's easy for me now to do it than not do it. I'd actually feel a little bit odd if I didn't do that in the morning. And at the moment, trying to get this one hour run in each day, yes, at the moment, there's going to be a little bit of inertia because I haven't quite ritualized it, but hopefully in four weeks or so it will be, yeah, I just do that.

Well, I used to wear an Apple watch. And you know how it gives you that feedback. You checked off all three of your goals today. Once you've done that a few days in a row, you want it the next day. Once you've done it like 20 or 30 days in a row, you can't miss it. Right. It becomes this thing where you've created this inertia that you just need, you actually have a loss now instead of, it's not like whether I want to do it or not. It's like, I have to do it because I want to keep this streak alive. And so at some point you just create this positive inertia that just takes over for itself. And then instead of like forcing yourself to do this thing or even just finding time to fit it in, you actually would feel a loss if you didn't do it.

Let's go back to meditation and that example or that hypothetical scenario we mentioned earlier on about the person who hears all the benefits of meditation, but says, I can't stick to it. I think there's multiple ways we can look at that, but I really liked this whole idea of decision-making where you need to actually define the problem properly, clearly, concisely, and then pause before exploring a solution. So I guess what I'm getting at, Shane,

is someone who says, I want to meditate, we don't necessarily know that they actually want to meditate. Maybe they've not even defined a problem. Maybe they just heard something on the radio or on this podcast or whatever and thought, yeah, I need to meditate. And then a week later go, no, I can't do it. I knew I couldn't do it. Whereas maybe the problem is, okay, I've got too much stress in my life. Some I felt I can't eliminate from work. So can I do something in my life that helps me to manage that? So it could be that the problem is I want to find a daily practice that can help me manage stress. Do you see what I'm getting at? It's like, well, maybe that's the process they need to go through. Maybe meditation is one of five options. do you see what I'm getting at?

It's like, well, maybe that's the process they need to go through. Maybe meditation is one of five options. So what you just did was spend time defining what the problem is. Once you've identified what the problem is, now we can go into solution space. What you do when you're like, I don't quite understand this,

but I need to meditate, is you're in solution space. Yeah. You haven't defined the problem. So you don't know if you're solving the right problem and you're likely not. And if you are solving the right problem, there's multiple options available to solving that problem of which meditation might just be one of them. Yeah. So let's say they've defined the problem. Let's say it is stress reduction for argument's

sake. And they go, okay. And they make a list of the four or five practices that they could do, meditation, journaling, breath work, mindfulness, whatever it might be that appeals to them. You've obviously got this four-step process in the book of defining problem, exploring solutions, evaluating options, and then executing the best option. how do they know if they're executing the best option or not? Well, you use the criteria to figure out. And the criteria in this case could be, do I have time to do it? Is it going to be something I can stick with?

Is it biggest bang for the buck, right? Like exercise might be the biggest bang for the buck, even though it's the thing that I least like. So you can weigh these different criteria for how long it's going to take, what the likely impact is that it's going to have on you. And you could try them and then you execute and you have to give it a chance though, right? And how you give it a chance is make it a rule and then use reflection to gather your feedback on the situation and see that it's working for you. Nothing is going to manage your stress for you

if you're stressed about it, right? So you have to like go into the process and be like, I'm going to do something about this. My goal is now to pick the best thing to do about it. And I have to think about the different scenarios, right? So often we just grab something and we run with it and it doesn't work for us. Well, maybe it doesn't fit in with our lifestyle. Maybe it doesn't fit in with other objectives we have. And now all of a sudden we feel overwhelmed. Well, maybe working out is the answer because that solves two or three different things that I'm trying to solve at the same time. And I can dedicate actually less time to these things than I would individually. And biggest bang for the buck is also important, right? Like out of these things, which is most likely to help the most number of people.

That doesn't mean it's going to work for me, but let's start maybe with the thing that is likely to impact people the most. And then the other thing is like, if I'm not sticking with it, and is it because I'm not getting the benefits out of it, right? And if I'm not getting the benefits out of it, then why am I doing it? And so at some point you have to cut a line off. Maybe that line is like 30 days. If I'm not seeing that, I'm going to make it a rule. I'm going to do this for 30 days. And if I'm not seeing the benefits by the end of 30 days,

I'm going to switch to option number two. And I'm going to do that for 30 days until something sticks and I get some traction. Yeah. I love it. Really systematizing the process, you know, instead of it just being, how do we feel? Say, oh, it's not working. You know, that's not clear thinking.

Well, consistency dictates a lot of this too, right? Is we are, in most areas of our life that we have problems, we're inconsistent with our behavior. If we have trust issues, we're inconsistent with our trust. You know, we don't do the things. If we're unreliable, you know, we're playing on hard mode. If we are consistently not doing what we say we're going to do

when we're saying we're going to do it, we're not going to get the opportunities that we feel we deserve at work. And so how do we become more consistent in the things that are most important to us? So if this is important to you, then the automatic rule makes it consistent. Most of us tend to be consistent.

You know, Duolingo is a perfect example. I have lots of friends who've used this. They log on for six or seven days and then they, you know, stop going. And then all of a sudden it's like three weeks later and they've gone maybe like 10 or 12 times and they're not learning as fast as they thought they were going to learn.

Well, of course you're not learning as fast as you thought you were going to learn. You're not being consistent about it. If it's important to you, you make the time for it. If it's not important to you and it's just this casual thing, don't beat yourself up about not being where you want to be. How does intuition fit into decision-making? Well, I think it fits in, you know, I don't dismiss intuition. I think that you can think of intuition in a couple of ways. One is, if you think of emotion on one end of the spectrum and intuition being part of emotion,

and you think of reason on the other end of the spectrum, you never want to be 100% rational in all of your decisions. You never want to be 100% intuitive in all of your decisions. The question is, what type of decision am I making and where should I be on that spectrum? Maybe it's 70-30, maybe it's 90-10. If you're making a financial decision, you probably wanna be more rational and less intuitive. If you're making a relationship decision,

maybe you wanna balance between rational and intuitive. Not all decisions are the same. The second thing about intuition is most of us overestimate our intuition. For an intuition to develop into a really good intuition, you need a constant environment, a lot of reps, and rapid feedback. And if you think of business and the workplace, we get that in very few domains of that. So what do we develop instead of a real solid intuition is we develop pattern matching,

associative pattern matching. This looks like this, and then that can give us an insight, but we want to create a pause between that insight and actually following through on it. That pause doesn't need to be long. A pause can be short or that pause can be acute to follow the process, right? And so we want to, we just want to make sure that we have a pause where we're checking our intuition. And the best way to check that is just to create that space between stimulus and response. Yeah. Personal board of directors, you mentioned that earlier about how that can help give us perspective, take us out of our life, zoom out a little bit so we can see things differently or from a different angle. What is it exactly? And how can people start, you know, creating their own? So before we get to the personal board of directors,

let's just rewind a little bit here, right? So we talked earlier about being born into a household. You adopt these worldviews and rules, these hidden rules that you get growing up from your parents. Some of us are lucky, some of us are less lucky. That doesn't change the fact that you can't take control of that. And so the standards that we grow up with are sort of the standards that we have. If we grew up in, say, an average standards household, then we're going to have average standards for ourselves. So what do we want to get out of a personal board of directors? We want to reduce our blind spots. We want to gain insight into the situation. And we want to hold ourselves accountable. And we want to hold ourselves to a higher standard than we otherwise would hold

ourselves. So there's three aspects to that personal board of directors. And the cool thing about the board of directors is they can be real people that you talk to and you could actually have like a quarterly meeting with some of your friends or your mentors or your colleagues, or they can be dead people, or they can be people that are alive that you'll never actually talk to like Elon Musk. And they don't have to be people

that you like everything about them. You can use them for one specific trait. You don't have to like everything about Elon Musk, but if you like the way that he thinks big, he could be on your board of directors and he could be the person asking you, how do you do this faster? How do you do this bigger?

Yeah. Right? You don't have to adapt his lifestyle. You don't have to adapt his controversy. None of that stuff. That doesn't matter. We throw away the orange because of a blemish on the peel. It doesn't make sense.

You can take specific aspects of people,mish on the peel, it doesn't make sense. You can take specific aspects of people, put them on your director. So how do you use these people to get better results in life? Use them to look into a situation I'm faced with a decision. Well, I can visualize this table of my board of directors, and I'm going to walk through the problem from every one of their points of view. And what does that do? It reduces my blind spots. I see different insights into the situation that I wouldn't have otherwise seen. Second thing I'm going to do is I'm faced with a moral dilemma. I'm faced with this sort of thing. Well, I'm not, you know, I'm going to use a subset, a special committee on my board of directors for that. I'm not, maybe Elon's not on that, right? And somebody else is who, who maybe has a better

compass for that stuff. And I'm going to be like, how would they handle this situation? Again, what am I doing? Reducing my blind spots, holding myself to a higher standard. And then if I imagine reporting what I'm doing to these people and I go to them and I say, hey, I'm not getting the results I want, but by the way, I'm on TikTok from nine till 10 p.m. every night. Well, all of a sudden my board can be like, we're not doing that. Are you sure that's what you want to be doing? And so you can raise your own standards just by reporting to these people. And nobody has to see this reporting. This can all happen in your head. It can all happen in

a coffee shop when you're just sort of walking through these things. It could be as simple as someone enjoys what you're saying on this podcast and they have a difficult decision in a few days to make. They could have you on decision in a few days to make, they could have you on their board of directors go, well, what would Shane say here? How would Shane advise me here? Simple as that. You don't need my permission. Yeah, you don't even need your permission or your email address or your mobile number. You can use, you can almost get into the head, you know, as you said before about actors and imagine you're playing a different role or you can, you can literally imagine, I guess, people who others respect or they've heard

their podcast lots of times or whatever, they feel that they know that person. What would he say here? What would she say here? How would they behave here? So it's one of the first times in history where you can get direct from the source thinking. Yeah. We've almost never had this before, right? You would always have this middle person, this journalist or sort of a biographer or something like that. But what you can now is like, if Toby Luque is one of your heroes,

you can follow him on Twitter. You can read his letters. You can sort of get direct information from him about how he thinks about different things. And so you can curate your board of directors based on this, right? And so how do I adapt the persona of these people? Well, I have to learn about these people and I have to learn how they handle different situations and how they think. And the better I get at learning that, the more effective they're going to be as members of

my personal board of directors. And that speaks to what you said before about environments, right? Your environment influences your behavior, not just your physical environment, but your mental environment, right? So if you're surrounding yourself and exposing yourself online to great thinkers, people who inspire you, as opposed to negativity and gossiping and whatever it might be, then that almost becomes how you start to think. So what you let into your head will determine what you think in the future. If you do not curate to the point where you're getting high quality, high fidelity information into your head

and you're consuming the mental equivalent of junk food, well, how are you going to think differently than that in the future? You're not. If you're consuming soundbites, if you're consuming sort of opinion pieces, if you're consuming rage pieces, if you're consuming all of this stuff, then you have to think about how that's affecting how I interpret everything else going on in my life. If I'm consuming information like news and I'm emotional every day and I'm sad and I have despair, maybe it's time to stop reading the news, right? Because that's getting into my head. It's affecting what I think about everything else. And so often we're not conscious about curating the people that we... These people

have a direct line into your brain. You need to pick and curate the people that we, these people have a direct line into your brain. You need to pick and curate these people. And the inertia default comes in here again, because if we're used to doing things a certain way, watching the news in the evening, just accumulating people that we're following online more and more, you have to break the pattern of inertia

to actually make a change here. What's your rule for Twitter? So I have a rule that I can't follow more than 250 people. And so if I'm at 250 and I want to follow somebody, I have to remove somebody. Yeah. So you're fighting inertia because inertia would be, well, I just keep accumulating people I'm following. And then in a year that'll'll be 500. In two years, it'll be a thousand. But you have a rule that, again, speak as one of your core principles, which is, how do you turn your desired behavior into the default behavior? That rule means that you are always having a highly curated Twitter feed. Yeah. You should spend a lot of time curating your inputs. Nobody does. And this is like so

weird when you think about it. The quality of those inputs are going to determine the quality of your thoughts. The quality of your thoughts are going to determine the quality of your choices and your decisions. And they're going to shape how you see the world. They're going to shape your mindset. They're going to shape everything. And so where do we focus? Well, we focus on mindset and we focus on the downstream thing, but you know, we also have to put some effort and thought into the upstream thing, which is wait, all of this stuff is seeping into my head and I'm relying on myself to catch it the last minute. That doesn't make sense. What if I backtrack a couple of steps here? Can I change

my environment? And again, your environment is not physical. Your artificial, your online environment, these dictate your behaviors. You can use them to strengthen your behaviors and you can use them to curate who's got a voice in my head. And the way that I would advise everybody to do this is unfollow everybody. Yeah, that's the simplest way.

Don't try to remove people, just remove everybody and start your list over and if you want to do it do it every year and if you want to do it quarterly or you don't want to have a limit of 250 people because for whatever reason you think that that doesn't work for you then every year you just delete everybody and you start from scratch yeah you've just hit such a key point because as i've been trying to do this, you can be looking at it for ages. Shall I follow? Shall I unfollow? Yeah. Why did I start following them in the first place? You're using up all this energy and you're right. It would be much easier to cull,

start from zero. Unfortunately, these apps don't make it that easy for you to do that, or Instagram certainly doesn't. Well, no, they want you to do it. But if you're following 800 people on Instagram, you're not seeing everybody's feed anyway. So why are you following them for a different reason? Which could be strategic, right? It could be like, we do business together. So I want to signal that, you know, we're doing, but I don't really want to see their feed. So like, but then you can follow and mute for that, which I have also done sometimes where you think, you know, again, the social default, how will it appear if I'm not following this person?

So you can keep following them and have it muted so you don't actually see their feeds, which again, I'm not saying is perfect, but it's super, super interesting. I mean, Shane- We get this on Instagram, right? I get this all the time, which is why aren't you following me

on Instagram? And the best response is I only follow two people and they're both company accounts, right? So- That's a rule. Yeah. That's a wonderful rule. Right? So, but it prevents the social, oh, I followed this friend, but not this friend, right? And so it just gets out of that whole thing, which is like- Yeah, I love it. I love it. It applies everywhere. Shane, big picture on your book again is that clear thinking and better decisions is going to improve the quality of your life. And I really like the final section in the book where we talk about, I guess, what it means to live a quality life. You know, what is happiness? What

does death teach us? All these things. I've heard you say in a recent interview that you pretty recently suffered with Lyme disease and you were really sick. I thought I was going to die. Wow. Like legitimately. So just to put this in context, I had Lyme. I didn't know I had Lyme. I had Bell's palsy on the left side of my face. So full half face paralysis. So like on the camera, you can see my, you know, the indents in my forehead. Well, I have pictures of myself that are perfectly symmetrical where this side of my face is moving and this side of my face is not moving at all. When I smile, there's nothing on this side of the face. When I raise my eyebrows, nothing on this side of the face. When I blink, I see my eyeball go up, but my eyelid doesn't move at all because I had-

When was this? Two years ago. No control over my face. And so I go to the, long story short, go to the hospital. They're like, here's some prednisone. Go home, you'll be fine. And I'm like, well, wait, why does a healthy 42-year-old male at this point in time ever get this? This doesn't make sense. Like, why is nobody looking into the backend of this in terms of, and so a week later, what was the next symptom? I couldn't stand. And so there was so much pain in the back of my legs. So if I moved, I was fine. But if I stood still for more than 10 seconds, I was literally on the floor crying in pain, the most pain I've ever had in my life. It's like somebody took two knives in the back of my knee and was like stabbing them. And then a couple of days later, I couldn't open my

mouth. And so I like booked a flight to the States. And luckily one of my friends came and like saved the day. It was, who's an amazing doctor and sort of got me a Lyme test because I couldn't even get a requisition in Canada for a Lyme test, which was ridiculous. And so I actually thought towards the end of that, that like, this is the end. Like I can't stand, I can't open my jaw. I can't eat food.

You know, I'm sleeping 18 hours a day. I have facial paralysis that's not getting any better. And so, I think I was like, oh, if this is the end, like, what do I think about that? And so how has that experience changed what you do on a daily, weekly basis? How has that experience changed or updated your perception of what life is all about and I guess what happiness is?

Well, for the most part, it was actually reaffirming of what I was doing. Because I was like, if this is sort of the path that I'm on, what would I have done differently in the last year? And I mean, there's little tidbits here and there, but the last year was sort of COVID. It was all about kids and family. And it was the most time I had ever spent

with the kids because they're home, they're not in school, all of this stuff's going on. And so, you know, I'm like, I think, I think I did okay on this. And I think that what it really caused me to think about is what does society want us to want? And what do we actually want at the end of the day? And the thought experiment that I sort of use in the book is like, you can imagine you're sort of on your deathbed, you're lying in a hospital and maybe you're unconscious and everybody's around you and they don't know that you're awake,

but you can hear everything they're saying about you. And what is it you want them to be saying about you? And are you doing the things today that are encouraging them to say those things? Or you can ask, what would they honestly say about you today? And is that what you want them to say about you in the future? And I think that so often society has nudged us

into wanting power, money, and fame. And those are the things that we're taught to go after. And we're taught to go after them in a way that is no holds barred, in a way that's not win-win for other people, in a way that puts me first. And I think that who do we know that did that, right? We know Ebenezer Scrooge did that, right? The fictional character, but we all know this person in real life. And what did they want at the end of their life? They wanted a do-over. Ebenezer Scrooge wanted to go back and do it all again.

Why? Because the way that he accomplished these things, the way that he pursued them, even if they're the things he wanted to pursue, it was the means by which he went about pursuing them that was mutually exclusive from living a life of meaning, living a life of relationships, win-win relationships with everybody. And so we can start thinking about our own life.

Like you can think of a good decision as getting what you want, but a great decision as wanting what's worth wanting. And so it's not enough to get what you think you want. You have to make sure what you want is worth wanting in the first place. And I think so often we're just unconscious about this until later on in life. I talk about Karl Pilmer's book, Lessons for the Living. He went around, interviewed people close to death, all over 80. What advice would you have to people living today?

And they gave their advice, which is play by your own scorecard, be yourself, spend more time with family. These are the things that you will determine matter, but you will determine it too late. One of the ideas that I have in life, mastering the best of what other people have figured out. Why do I wanna do that? Because I wanna take their hindsight

and make it my foresight. I can learn from them and avoid mistakes. Why wouldn't I do that? Well, if people near death are telling me these things matter and they're doing it consistently and it doesn't matter what culture they're in and it doesn't matter what socioeconomic status they're in and they're saying the exact same things, that sounds like it's something worth listening to. Yeah. So inspirational. The book is honestly fantastic. Clear thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. Shane, I really appreciate you making the journey up, coming to the studio. Thank you for writing such a wonderful book. Oh, thank you for having me. This has been a wonderful conversation.

Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain

the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails

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