Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #56 Dr. Isaiah Hankel

Episode Date: October 22, 2018

Isaiah Hankel received his doctorate in Anatomy & Cell Biology and is an expert on mental focus, behavioral psychology, and career development. He is the founder and CEO of Cheeky Scientist®, a career training company that specializes in helping PhDs transition into corporate careers; he is also the director of Hankel Leadership®. Through these ventures, Isaiah has consulted on career development, employee management, entrepreneurship, focus, and motivation at several Fortune 500 companies. He has been invited to speak at top institutions including Harvard Medical School, Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, University of Chicago, University of Oxford England, the Marie Curie Institute France, and the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Check out The Science of Intelligent Achievement | https://amzn.to/2EBLuYa Connect with Dr Isaiah Hankel:  https://www.isaiahhankel.com/   https://cheekyscientist.com/ Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/isaiah_hankel/ Twitter | https://twitter.com/isaiahhankel Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/isaiahhankelphd Youtube | https://www.youtube.com/user/isaiahhankelphd Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk   Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/   Connect with Onnit on: Twitter | https://twitter.com/Onnit      Instagram | https://bit.ly/2NUE7DW   Subscribe to Human Optimization Hour Itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY    

What's up, y'all? I want to talk to you about the Aubrey Marcus weekend coming up. It's going to be in Los Angeles, November 10th and 11th. We've got a laundry list of dope coaches, including myself, Kyle Kingsbury, Mr. Aaron Alexander, who's been a guest on my show, as well as Aubrey's, to help with yoga and movement patterns. Christine Hassler, who's an incredible coach. Whitney Miller, Aubrey's fiancee. We'll be talking about relationships and many other personal ways to transform your body, your mind, your emotionals, your spirit. We'll be talking about personal transformative practices from physical optimization to mental, emotional, and spiritual. Chris Ryan's a fucking man. I would love it if he showed up. So we've got just a laundry list of great people there. We're going to do all sorts of practices from walking meditation, breath work out on the beach, ecstatic dance, yoga, how to stretch and move properly, and just really anything

that we find to be the best practices we know of personally, we're going to share with you guys. And we'll have intimate conversations, the ability for private dinners, and all sorts of cool things are going to go down here, November 10th and 11th in Los Angeles. Go to aubreymarcus.com slash weekend for more. Yo, thank you for tuning into the podcast. We've got Dr. Isaiah Hankel on the show. He's got a couple of great books out, The Science of Intelligent Achievement, How Smart People Focus, Create, and Grow Their Way to Success. He has a TED Talk, really we'll start with People Focus, Create, and Grow Their Way to Success. He has a TED Talk, really with Start with the End in Mind, and we take a deeper dive into that.

Long-Term Mindset, Being Flexible to Try Different Ways of Doing Things, How to Be More Creative. Dr. Henkel works with a lot of PhDs. He's a PhD himself and didn't want to get stuck and locked into academia. You may not be a PhD yourself, but it's really cool to find somebody as intelligent as Dr. Henkel, come in and drop knowledge in different ways and how he tries to bring people up in his universe and how those things can be extrapolated into our universe. Thanks for tuning in.

All right, we're on. Dr. Isaiah Henkel has joined the show. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Hell yeah, brother. Yeah, good to be here. I'm pumped. I was watching a TED Talk you did on Start With The End. Yes. And it actually, I just mentioned it in a podcast I did two days ago with David Rutherford.

And I was talking about how that's something I've never really thought about it in terms of goal attainment and setting and how to not be a sheep, but just get to the shit that you want to do. Right. And I want to break down and unpack all of that. But I use it in, I don't want to say arguments. I use it in conversations I have with my wife or conversations I have with somebody that I care about. OK.

Start with the end in mind. Right. So like that, look, whatever we're disagree with somebody that I care about. Okay. Start with the end in mind. Right. So like that, look, whatever we're disagreeing on, I love you. And I want, you know, like, let's just throw that out. What's the end goal? This is, this is what I love you. And we're, we're arguing over this thing.

I just want you to know that. And let's, let's figure out like how we can find common ground here, you know, but like at least setting the table with that, like, look, this is ultimately where we're at. I'm not upset with you as a person. I'm just, we need to iron this out. I think that's paid dividends for me in my communication. I love that because a long-term mindset has a way of diffusing immediate stress in a really, really instant way, right?

So you have a lot of stress right now, argument, whatever it is. And if you can rise above that, look at where you're actually going, realize that, oh, I've gotten through this before, makes it all easier. And it's funny, probably serendipitous. I was on the plane today coming here and I needed something to read. So I bought this little booklet, something from Brian Tracy, right? Like one of these like godfathers of personal development. And there was a study in there and it said that more than anything else, your ability to think in the long term affects your success. They've done these long-term longitudinal studies, peer-reviewed, and that is the one single factor that really determines above

and beyond everything else. And I know you probably heard different factors for different things, but in terms of your ability for success, especially in goal-setting, business, et cetera, long-term mindset. And I think a lot of people struggle with that, especially today. Yeah, yeah. Most people, I mean, well,

especially in our society now where the attention span is getting shorter and shorter, we really are just looking at what's right in front of us or maybe one step ahead of that instead of just really trying to plan out and archetype our ultimate life. But break down your TED Talk for us because I think – and we'll link to it in the show notes. But it was fascinating to me how when you start with the end, you really can. And the way that you worded it was absolutely critical in my mind because of the fact that so many people, when they start with whatever that end is, it's like, yeah, I'm going to be a millionaire or I'm going to be this or that. They don't think of travel, if the relationships are going to have humor, the amount of time they'll be in nature, like all the things. Yeah. If you were to really construct a beautiful life that would include all that, money being one small piece of it, right? Yeah. And so the key of starting with the end is to actually start at

the end and work backwards. Most people are really confined to their day-to-day now. And so that particular talk, the TED Talk that you're mentioning is, you know, the goal is to have you revamp your life with the end as your starting point, not where you are now. So I always take people through the process of like mapping out their perfect day. Nothing revolutionary about thinking about your perfect day. But what most people do is they take their day as it is now and then they tweak it. And I have people do this in like seminars and exercises. I work with a lot of PhDs to help them kind of reframe themselves as academics into being like business people, for example, could be anything. What they

do is they take their life as it is now, and you map it out across a 24 hour period. And they just add little things like if I can get an extra hour lunch break, if I can find an hour in the morning to meditate, that is their dream. That's what they want, right? I tell them that anything's possible. That's what they do. Because why? They're starting with the right now. And our brain locks in on reference points. There's a lot of stuff in pop culture, whether it's like, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's talked

about this. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics. It's a book, Thinking Fast and Slow, killer book. We think in terms of reference points, if your reference point is where you are now, you're just going to move a little bit beyond that. But if your reference point is, if you can break free from that and your reference point can be where you want to be 20 years from now, right? Why can't you be on a beach somewhere while somebody else is doing everything that you're doing at work right now? That's totally possible. But most people don't think about it because

they're tied to this current reference point, which is here. They're starting at the beginning, not the end. And if you take on top of that our proclivity to copy other people, right? Like, so if you write down your, there's this great study where if you write down your goals right now, like your biggest life goals, I read them and then I write down my goals. They're going to mimic your goals

versus if I go into a separate room, I don't read anybody else's goals and then I write down what my goals are. That's crazy. I mean, if you really think about it, right, because these are your big life goals, this is a scientific behavioral study. And it's finding that just like that, just by reading somebody else's goal that's sitting next to you, being the people you're around, it's totally affected, right? So we get this image of somebody like walking in a desert and they can walk in this direction for five years. If they move two millimeters because they're influenced by

somebody they're around, they're going to end up in a completely different place, like five, 10 years, miles and miles and miles apart. So again, that's why starting at the end, instead of starting where you are now is so crucial. Yeah. You spoke a bit about, I mean, it's funny, right when you mentioned that it brought me back and made me think of the mirror neurons, you know, and what does it take? 5% of sheep to move in any one direction and all the other sheep follow, right? Yeah. Yeah. And the same can be said for humans, right? Likely because of our mirror neurons. I have a thing for sheep because I worked with them, right? So I was a sheep farmer and it's a great experience. First of all, working on a farm is incredible because you don't have to deal with a lot of the stuff you have to

deal with when you're just staring at a screen. Like you're out, you're working with actual animals. It's very physical. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Some people look at me like I'm just a weirdo for working with sheep, but it was incredible. One thing that we did every year though, was that we'd have to shear the sheep. And so you get like a hundred head of sheep, 200 heads of sheep. How do you get them, all these sheep, these wild animals that are stronger than you, into a, you funnel them into this little cage, basically. It's not really a cage, but at the end of it

is only one sheep can go through at a time so the shearer can shave them and release them, right? They're fine. It actually cools them down in the summer. But how do you get them there? You go behind them, you bang a couple of sticks, right? A few of the sheep will hear the noise. They'll start running in the direction,

the opposite direction where the gate is. All the sheep will follow. And so studies have been done on how many sheep do you have to get moving for the entire herd to move? 5%, like you said. Crazy thing is they've done the exact same kind of experiments to humans. And if you've ever been in a crowd on like Mardi Gras

or whatever else, you know this. Like all of a sudden you're walking somewhere and you're like, where am I going? You're just following everybody else, not even realizing it. Have you ever walked around with, you know, a friend and you both head out to the parking lot and you think the other guy knows like where the car is and you're just following, and then you both realize you're following the other person? We naturally do this.

And so you have to constantly be like, am I just following the idiots around me or am I doing what I really want to do? Not that any of you are idiots. Yeah, I do. But I do wonder, you know, like they say what you're, I think Ferris has talked about this, but you don't think he was the one that created it, but like you're a product of the five people you surround yourself with. Yeah. Right. Like how critical does that become then if we truly are influenced by other people's behaviors and goals and what, you know, where our focus goes to is largely dependent upon those that we look up to

and those that we're surrounded by. Yeah, and how do you know the effect that other people are having on you until you remove people, right? I don't mean going to like an island by yourself. There's one thing I like to talk a lot about that throws people for a loop when I first say it, but going on a relationship fast,

because you do not realize the extent that other people are affecting you at all until you remove them. And I know at Onnit, you talk a lot about different types of fasting, like intermittent fasting, et cetera. That's kind of what it's like. You don't want to fast anymore with food where you're not eating for a month, not healthy. You don't want to isolate yourself from people in general. But temporarily, can you do it for a few days? Can you step away from a group of people for a few days? Can you step away a certain friend that you think might be a bad influence or making you like go after their goals, which are really not good?

Step away, it'll help you gain clarity, right? That emotional distance helps you gain clarity in terms of what you actually want. I think so few people do that, especially today, because you're not going to have any trouble finding people to tell you to upgrade your network, but who's telling you to step away from your network altogether and really figure out what you want? Yeah, that's true.

That was the first time I've heard it was in your second book. What was the title? The Science of Intelligent Achievement. Yeah. And your first book was Black Hole Focus, correct? Yeah. I'm not all the way was Black Hole Focus, correct? Yeah. I'm not all the way through both of them, but I'm loving what I'm reading.

Yeah. So many big points in that. I was just kind of scratching my head like, shit, that makes a lot of sense. And I've done that at times where, whether it's going on a plant medicine journey in the Amazon, or I spent a month in Central and South America away from anybody that I knew, solo mission. And then coming back to that really, you know, back to the States, back to the grind, back to whatever my life looked like. Yeah. It was very easy to put things into perspective, to have gratitude and appreciation for the things that I enjoyed and loved.

And also to know like, all right, that no longer serves me. Yeah. Right. It's easy when you, when you pull out for long enough and reintegrate. I completely agree. And I think the amount, I mean, that's why they say, you know, travel is one of the best ways to learn because you're getting away from all your reference points, everything that's familiar to you and people constantly underestimate context. Your context is influencing your life right now. To the point of, there are studies where they've done, where people have held a warm drink for 30 minutes. Other people have held a cold drink for 30 minutes.

And then they've been asked or put in a situation where they want to help somebody. The people that held the warm drink, more likely to help people. Like statistically significant, bonkers, right? Drink hot coffee. Drink hot coffee, yeah. You'll be more, unless you're going into a negotiation, then drink like really cold water. Right. So it just depends, but that's how much it affects you. They've done same studies where putting on a

white lab coat will make you perform better on a test because you'll take it more seriously. And you'll see yourself as smart, smarter. It's nuts. Holding a large, like a clipboard or document, right. Actually makes you perform better as well. So little things like this, like the way that you carry yourself, the people you're around, even the inanimate objects, right? Not just living, breathing things, but everything.

Context is huge. And I think most people underestimate it. How can you find out how much context is affecting you? Change your context. That's crazy to me. I'm picturing like all these college students showing up for their non-science classes in a white lab coat to do better on their test they would right i mean they might be embarrassed right at that age but uh yeah but it's it's it's it's like why not you

know we used to have to think about that and like in wrestling and football look good feel good perform good yeah you know so like exactly i've had coaches that are like oh you don't need all that garbage take your gloves off and all that shit. When I'm back in my day, we had leather helmets and blah, blah, blah. And then other coaches that got it and they were like, you wear as many fucking straps and wristbands as you want. Yeah. If you're making interceptions and making plays, I don't give a shit. Right.

You know, like if that's what it takes for you to fucking lock it in and feel like you're a champion, do it. Put on all the accessories you want. You know, because everybody's an individual. Everybody's so, you're a champion, do it. Put on all the accessories you want. Because everybody's an individual. Everybody's so, you know, in science, right, when I'm talking to my PhDs, we always talk about sample size. It's such a big thing, right? If you read a study, like 200 people did something, so what, right? You want a study of like thousands of people doing it over the course of many, many years, right? A much more intelligent study. You can trust it more. But there's this thing where you have to also look at yourself as a sample size of one. So sample size is an end value. There might be

studies where you're reading an end value of 2,000, 3,000, whatever, more trustworthy study. That's great when you want to find trends. But when things that work specific for you, there's only one you. There's an end of one. And I think a lot of people have a hard time bridging that gap. They want to just be one or the other. And so if something's helping you in your context, who you are, it's helping you get to where you want to be at that endpoint, do it. But don't ignore the trends. Yeah, yeah.

That's funny to me. It's reminding me of, there's a lot of people talking shit about the ketogenic diet right now online. Mike Dolce, different people. And it's funny to me. I've spoken to Mike about it, but he's a former fighter just like me. It's helped me so much. Even if science didn't back it, which it clearly does,

that would be my N of one. I don't need to hear anything else because I think more clearly on it. It's easier for me to lose weight. My cardio goes up. Maybe I'm not making the best strength gains or, you know, able to max ever deadlift the most when I'm lacking carbohydrates. That's fine. Right. But I can pick, pick my battles and know where it's useful, but that's my end of one. Like, I don't, that doesn't matter fucking what you tell me. Right. Like I feel better doing it. And, uh, and I, I think it's, it's interesting as we, as we really move towards, um, I don't think anybody has a problem with, with appreciating

science for what it does. Right. But we do tend to negate that N equals one is, oh, that, that, that doesn't mean shit, you know, whereas it really does. It really does matter. Yeah, of course it does. I mean, you wouldn't have people course it does. You wouldn't have people like Muhammad Ali. Back when he was boxing, they said, well, if your heart rate gets up to this level, you're going to die. The four-minute mile, you can't do it, you will die. These are N of 1s, the first one to do it. And then people follow, and I guess the N value increases. But I think it's that human side where you can break through the statistics and do something new. It doesn't mean don't you ignore the trends.

You don't ignore the data. I always say, show me the data, right? You have an N of one, show me that that's working for you. Ketogenic diet works for you, great. Show me your blood panel, show me your gains, show me your weights,

like what's your goal you're trying to achieve? And are you measuring your progress? And if you're making progress on it, it works, right? That's really what it's about. And I think most people, they just want to ignore the data and talk a bunch of garbage

and they don't really know what they're talking about. Yeah. It is easier for us to quickly state whatever the fuck we want to thanks to the current state of social media rather than actually thinking things through or maybe trying to have a conversation where we listen to the other person. And I was talking with David Rutherford about that. Like the art of listening has been lost, you know, so much of that. Like I don't maybe necessarily need to agree with the person sitting across from me, but I'll at least hear them. I should at least hear them first. Sure. Before I have the knee-jerk reaction of you're wrong, I'm right. You know, just, just really appreciate whatever it is they're trying to communicate and hear them

out. And then we can have an intelligent conversation. Yeah. You know, and I hate right, you know, just really appreciate whatever it is they're trying to communicate and hear them out. And then we can have an intelligent conversation. Yeah. You know, and I hate the, I hate the word balance, but really it is about like, dude, I want you to be opinionated. Like come at me with what you believe for sure, but also be aware of things like confirmation bias. Like you are going to go look for stuff to confirm what you think, you know, go out there. And this is really what it comes down to for being a real scientist, is look for the things out there that are going to disprove what you know, because it's just going to make what you know, if it's right, even stronger. And you're going to be prepared for arguments, et cetera. How do you do that? You listen to what other people are saying. And I think it's something a lot of people can't do. There's a quote that I really like. It's

the sign of an intelligent and mature mind is the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it. And I think a lot of people, they fear it. Like, I don't want to hear that because it might change my mind and I'm freaked out by I'm a fill in the blank, right? And then if anything moves slightly against the grain of that, it feels like we're losing a piece of ourselves rather than just staying open to all the possible abilities. That's deep, man. No, for real, that is. Identity is such a powerful force. And it's something I talked about in the TED Talk. If you break your identity, people bug out. I mean, identity crisis has been a thing since, what, like 60s, 70s? Huge thing. So just like you said, they're afraid to listen because it will break what they believe. And our beliefs are super powerful.

We've had people on here that have talked about what that does psychologically. Break your beliefs, you break your identity. I love that you brought that up because going back to what we talked about in the beginning is to get to that end point, you have to break free from your current identity. Like who you are now is different than that person you want to become. And you'll never be the person you want to become if it's a real level up unless you can start there first in your mind and work backwards on how to get there. If you try to take this person who you are now and like baby step your way to being that person, never going to happen because this is your reference point. And this identity is going to fight you from becoming that new identity.

Yeah. The ego never wants change. No. It wants to stay the same. I mean, it's easier to see it in others than it is to see it in ourselves. But if you've ever seen, and this is not true of all elderly people, but if you ever see an old fart who's stuck in his ways, who has to have everything done the same shit and the same routine, and this is when I do this and I'm not fucking breaking it for anybody, you know, it's like me, there's a little resistance there.

Right. And, and with that, it's easy to point and laugh and be like, ah, that guy's old, you know, instead of, um, being able to shift and go with the flow and take life as it comes, you know? And so like that goes back into that thought process on how you view yourself and how you move forward in actually trying to archetype change and positivity. You have to let go of what you've known and what you've been in order to find something new. And the harder you cling to that thing, the harder it's going to be to change and shift. Completely agree. And I love that because whenever, when you say that, I'm always like, I do that because it's always such a balance of like, I want to be consistent. You want to have

like a morning routine, all this stuff, because that's how, you know, consistency gets you to your goal where you want to go once you figure out that line. But you have to be flexible at the same time. You know, you think you have to really kind of set your mountain peaks, but be very flexible on the path you take to the mountain because it's going to change. You're going to have to get off the trail sometimes, start a second trail, but at the same time, have enough resolve to still go to the same peak. And I think that's where people get stuck. They want to try a different way. Like they are flies trying to get out a window, just slamming. I mean, this was me for a long time, just slamming their heads into the window. And we underestimate the value of creativity. We think hard work is just working

hard or more or whatever, but it's actually working smarter, more creative, thinking about new things, get into a new context, go somewhere away from people and meet new people, right? Break your mental patterns. That's what's going to help you level up more than anything else because it puts you outside of your current self and your current context and helps you think about that new who that you want to be, right? It's tough, man. It's hard to do. I want you to just unpack that a little bit. Describe what life was like for you when you were a quote unquote sheep, when you were the fly hitting the window and how you shifted out of that into archetyping the life that you have now?

Yeah, it was a struggle. So I was really good at, you know, I call it chasing carrots or running away from sticks. And I think in today's world, a lot of people chase carrots, whatever they might be. It might be the approval of a friend or a parent. It might be a certification. It might be entry into a network of people. You know, for me, it was like degrees. I thought, well, I got to be a doctor, right? In some way, like that was going to be a carrot I was going to achieve. And then the next carrot, the next carrot, the next carrot. The problem is that other people start holding these carrots and using them because they see that you want something, so they just keep moving them. And after a while, you're like, did I actually set that carrot up for myself? Or is this somebody else just holding it out in front of me? And sticks, right? So the sticks that you're running away from are letting somebody down, right? You don't want

disapproval. You want to fit in, these kinds of things. It's all very short term and you can get lost that way. And this is what happened to me when I was in grad school getting my PhD. I thought I was going to be a professor. I thought the lifestyle of being a doctor, it was very different than what it turned out to be. And so I had this identity crisis because I realized I don't want that. I'm not even good at some things that have to do with that. I need to do something else. And so it was this real breakdown because we're talking like 20-some years in academia on a career path, gone.

And it was a tough time. I started having some physical things that happened to me just from stress. Stress-induced kidney function started to go down and some things that were, when you're a young guy, shouldn't be happening. And it was- Kidney should be perfect. Could be perfect. Everything. Yeah. No matter how much you abuse them. And it was a real wake-up call because for the first time in my life, I felt de-energized, like mentally de-energized. And one thing I talk a lot about in the books

is that mental energy is your most valuable asset. And this was the first time that it was rock bottom. And I'm a pretty high energy guy. I mean, you know, borderline spaz maybe even. But it was a moment where I'm like, why are my energy levels so low? It's because I didn't know who I was anymore. And that's when I had to start thinking backwards, started thinking at the end. I was trying to take who I was now, inch it forward, fit myself into somebody else's

mold, fit it into a different job title, mold, whatever, but I needed to change who I was. And so I think starting at the end really means starting with who you want to become. That seems kind of elusive. Really, if I'm breaking it down, what it means is defining what your perfect day looks like if anything was possible. Actually map out the 24 hours. There was a really good publication a few years ago where it had these circles of famous people from anyone from, who am I thinking of? Charles Dickens to Darwin to Steve Jobs, et cetera, how they spent their day. Some of them would wake up and work like four hours and then take like a three hour walk

and then they would do something physical and then they would work for two more hours at night, whatever, right? Others had weird back, like Nietzsche, I think, would sleep most of the day and then wake up and work most of the night, et cetera. But there was these certain patterns that were there that made these people successful.

Have you actually done that for yourself? Like, have you mapped out what your perfect day would look like if anything's possible? And maybe you won't achieve it for a while, but what if you broke from who you are now and anything was possible and you started to map that out, you would find a different person there than you would find if you took yourself and just tried to make some changes like an extra

lunch hour, right? Yeah. And I have an example. One of my favorite examples is I was given a seminar in the UK, and this guy came up, and he was actually a trainer. He's Grenade J, so a good person to mention here. So he was a trainer. He came up. He has a good following in the UK, and he took his perfect day. And I always have them do it first, just with very little direction in terms of, you know, write down your perfect day. What does everybody do? They take their day now. Like, let's say they're working four hours in the morning, lunch break, four hours at night, whatever. That's what he basically did. He added an extra hour if he could have an extra hour here. And

then he wanted like 10 more clients. And I'm like, this is your perfect day. If anything's possible in your life, like this is the pinnacle. And you make them think about it. And I said, okay, go back. And I tell them, okay, why do you have to be getting 10 clients? Like, why can't you have your team doing this again while you're sitting on a beach? Like, what do you actually want to do? Two hour lunch break? Why not an eight hour lunch break? Why not every day? So he went back and what I always try to encourage them to do is like break from their identity, like create a different name for yourself. It's, I call it the Tyler Durden experiment, right? It's like create a like alter ego for yourself. And a lot of people are writing about this and do really great stuff. I, I forget the name, somebody who did something,

um, has a book coming out about alter ego. It's, I'm really looking forward to that book coming out, but are you talking about, uh about Dr. Jim Fadiman? He talks about it too. There's a lot of it out there, but what it helps you do is it helps you just step outside yourself. So anyway, he came back, long story short, he came up with the alter ego Adventure J

and he wrote like, I wake up on the beach, my own personal chef cooks for me. I go out and jet ski for like three hours in the morning, which sounds awesome, right? And then he says, and then I go for a hike over to this river with these rope swings. And then I do this other stuff at night. And then I play capture the flag with night vision. I'm like, dude, first of all, this is like every dude's dream, right? It sounds great. But that's what happens when you make that break. And it might sound kind of wonky, but I think it can help you step outside yourself for what's really possible because people underestimate what they can do

in months and years, but they overestimate what they can do in days and weeks. Yeah. So your boy Grenade Jay is on a jet ski somewhere now. So he's somewhere. Yeah. He's doing pretty well. He's doing pretty well. But I was like, first of all, it's a great name and I'm jealous. I didn't think of it. And I'm totally going to steal that as where I want to be in 10 years. Because it sounds awesome. It's creativity. And I think if you look at today's world, even right now,

we were talking earlier about not just the blogosphere, but the podcastosphere or whatever it is. Podcastosphere. What everybody's talking about is morning routines is a big thing, which I'm totally on board with. But I think there's a group of people out there that are all about a very regimented morning routine that's great for the body, that's great in terms of making sure you tick off all these boxes.

Cover all the bases. But what about your creativity? The things that are going to give you your biggest breakthroughs in life, especially from, I would say, you know, 27, 28 onwards is the creativity. And when are you your most creative? It's actually in the morning, right? You have different brain waves, those alpha waves when you're in that alpha state, like if you've ever woken up with like in a eureka moment, you were thinking about something real hard and then it just kind of came together in the morning or you're falling asleep and you had this great idea, right? That's because your brain hits this alpha state where there's like a certain number of waves per second. It's really low.

It's like eight to 13 waves per second, as opposed to like your beta state. When right now we're probably in a high beta state of 40, like wave cycles or waves per second. But that alpha state is where you have a really, your best ideas come to you. And it's not, you can't really achieve it through hard work or through regimentation.

I read an article about Pharrell, right? Pharrell's the rapper, singer, producer guy. Hat guy. Hat guy, he has the crazy hats, right. He said he wakes up, zero distractions, goes somewhere by himself. He'll take like a 30 minute shower or something and just no stimulus, but he's in his brain,

like really exploring that state because it only lasts for about a half an hour after waking up. And that's when he says he has some of his crazy best ideas for his, the songs that have done the best. And so I think that's how the happy song came to him. Wow. So I think where's the creativity in the morning routine and you need to get creative. If you want to define that, who you're going to become, you can't just do it through hard work. I'm trying to tweak where you are now. Yeah. You're not going to be, people have this idea that they'll climb the corporate ladder and I'll be an IBMer for four

years and blah, fill in the blank on, on how you attain success. But it's usually not from grinding away and busting your ass and putting in more hours. It's usually from thinking outside the box, being creative and working smarter. And really, I would say punctuated versions of both. So big creative breakthrough, you realize you're doing something the wrong way, you figure out, you comprehend it, and then you start executing. Consistency, right? And then you start, you do a grind for a while, and then crazy creative breakthrough. Same thing, you comprehend it, you start executing, you start making it forward in a while, and then crazy creative breakthrough. Same thing. You comprehend it. You start executing.

You start making it forward in a while. Then again, crazy breakthrough. The people that have the crazy breakthroughs and execute afterwards, those are your killers. My boys at Mind Pump, who we had on a couple months ago, they do that. The three of them will go somewhere. They travel and they get out of their heads with some plant-based medicine and really shift their consciousness in a way. And they brainstorm. They'll just spend the weekend together getting creative. And then they'll come back and they'll grind out whatever the new plan is for their programming or for anything they're doing online to capture their audience and deliver more.

And they'll grind through that, and then they'll have another, after six months or so, they'll go back to the drawing board and create something new, by getting out of their heads and doing the same thing. And whatever your release is to do that, I mean, some people,

like I have a friend who needs to go to Vegas every month and blow like five grand to get out of his head and to have that release moment, just on gambling and whatever. I mean, really, I have people that just- Not the Moonlight Bunny Ranch? Not that I know of. But I have other people that need to go to Europe, they need to travel or just need to take a break and like lay around at home, whatever it is. But breaking that pattern is a common theme. And that's what helps you get out of what you're currently doing. Like I have my

best ideas, not when I'm grinding it out in the office with this startup that I'm working on. I have them when I have to get on a plane and it forces me to not be in the same environment and work and grind. I'm really good at the grinding, but I need to set triggers for myself to step away from that, get in a new environment, new context, again, get around new people. And that's when things really start coming together. And people always say, what is the secret to success?

Success here being getting to that end point that you want to get to. Comprehension and execution. What is your delay time between those two things? What do you think? Some people, horrible at comprehending, great at execution. Other people, great at comprehending. I especially experienced this with scientists and PhDs. Not so good at execution. Other people are great at comprehending. I especially experienced this with scientists and PhDs. Not so good at execution. You have to have both and you have to eliminate as much of that delay time as possible. I mean, how many people do you know

comprehend something, right? They learn something, listen to a podcast, whatever. They're like, oh my gosh, that's amazing. I really love what I learned there. Then nothing, no change at all. That's the common problem. So what's? At all, right? That's the common problem. So what's your comprehension to execution time? That's my question. That's a good question to think about. You talk about the most precious resource being your mental energy. How do we protect that? Yeah. There's a lot of ways. There is, there is. And that's the key question. And going back to what we talked about earlier, the first thing I really recommend is stepping away from the things

that are sucking up all your mental energy right now just to see how much of it you really have. Even if it means you go nuts for a little while because you don't have all the stimulus of information that doesn't matter, people, right? People that are sucking your attention, just creating drama, that's nonsense. I think a lot of people get confused about why mental energy is your most valuable asset right so you're the way

that you feel like even after a great workout right the way you feel after a great workout is that is that really just your physiology or is that like your brain telling you that you feel good it's your brain i mean it's your your mental energy your brain that's if you're trying to consolidate everything down to the one thing that's the most important it's your brain. I mean, it's your mental energy, your brain. If you're trying to consolidate everything down to the one thing that's the most important, it's your mental energy. It's like seeing the movie Moneyball, right? So what do they do? They narrow everything down to that one key statistic that matters, really just on base

percentage. And it totally revolutionized the sport. Same thing here. If you took it down to mental energy and realize that's your most valuable asset, not time, right? Because how many times have you been exhausted after a workout or a long day, whatever, and you watched the rerun of a TV show or watched some YouTube video, whatever it is, right? Watched a movie for the 15th time. Time's not your most valuable asset.

How about money? I mean, if you have a watch and a phone, why? Your phone tells you time. But money's I mean, if you have a watch and a phone, like why? Your phone tells you time. But money's not it either. And then the last one that's really been popular, like we talked about, is your network. Everybody says your network is valuable. Human relationships, crucial, of course,

but have you ever wanted to give more to a relationship, but you didn't have time or you didn't have the energy to do so? You were spread too thin? I mean, we all reach that point where we have to turn things down because we're spread too thin. I mean, we all reach that point where we have to turn things down because we're spread too thin. So really it's just mental energy.

How do you protect it? You have to first realize that it's your most valuable asset. And then you got to start being selective. You have to start not just saying no to things, but realize the impact. I read a study recently that said that 40% of our waking time now

is spent filtering through information. Half of our time, right? Filtering through information. So I always, when I'm working with people, you know, especially when they're higher level and they have a business that's at least off the ground, they're starting to try to hire their first employees, whatever. I'm always like, you just got to hire somebody to go through all of your 20 inboxes, train them to filter through all of that information. That is going to be your biggest game changer because right now half, almost half of your waking day is spent filtering through information, which is bananas if you think about it. And then the people, right? Go on a relationship

fast. Which relationships can you do without it? The book, the chapters that talk about relationship fasting, it all kind of pivots around this study from MIT that talks about how half of your relationships are fake or non-reciprocal. And that could go either way. And we all have, sometimes there are these people we don't even realize that are really, really good to us, spend a lot of time and mental energy on us, right? And we don't even realize that they're trying or what's going on. Maybe we're not a good friend to them, whatever. So you always have to hold yourself accountable first.

But there's also people where you really put a lot of effort into, right? And then they don't even realize you exist. These are the non-reciprocal relationships and nobody really takes stock of them because it seems weird and like sociopathic to like make a list of all your friends and like check off whether or not

they are reciprocal friends. Who's keeping up?'s doing that yeah who's paying their dues let's do a friend audit who's made a deposit into the friendship bank recently creepy right but wasn't creepy for these scientists uh and i'm glad i'm glad they did this experiment because it actually showed like wow half your relationships non-reciprocal meaning that they're not equal they're not real you A good friendship, a good relationship at any time, both people are adding value. And that makes sense. It has to be that way. Right. How much time are you giving to relationships where there's no value,

or you're adding all the value, or they're adding all the value? You need to step away either for their benefit or your benefit. That's going to free up more of your time than anything. And nobody's talking about it. Why? Because they don't want to seem like a sociopath. But you can step away from people temporarily totally normal right i think a lot of people are just scared to be alone with their own thoughts or the idea that they have to come up with what they should do with their life on their own but do it you're stronger than you think you are yeah and nobody can archetype your perfect life right you know that you're the only one exactly the only one that knows exactly what you want right and you may not necessarily have to know how to get there yeah as long as you can figure out

exactly what you want it's a little bit easier to navigate that path at least knowing where the end goal is i mean sit down for 30 minutes like when's the last time you've sat down for 30 minutes with a blank piece of paper and just like you said brainstorm some of the things you wanted to accomplish who you could be 30 minutes most people. I mean, what we actually try to, it's almost like a subconscious thing to stay busy enough so we never have to confront that. But if you do that once, I mean, the world, this is another quote I'm paraphrasing, the world gets out of the way for people who know where they're going. Most people don't know where they're going. They're the sheep following those first 5% that took off.

Man. Too much, too much. I love it. I love it. How much has wrestling paid off for you? I mean, because you're a driven guy, you're type A, but you've also seen the benefit of rest. And I think if there's any sport, you know, having fought, wrestling practice was still the hardest day of the week. It wasn't boxing. It wasn't sparring. It was always wrestling, right? How much has that paid dividends for you in your life in terms of discipline and being able to grind? And in that also recognizing the benefits of recovery, the benefits of taking a break. Yeah. I mean, the biggest lessons you learn in life are through your failures

and had lots of those in wrestling. Wrestling is amazing because it's one of those things where there's a lot of self-reliance involved. Like you get the camaraderie of a team, which is great. But at the end of the day, it's just you out there alone. And it's all on you. There's nowhere to hide if you lose. Like you just did not do X, Y, or Z, the end.

And so I'm very pragmatic. And I like that because you can't evade reality. It's just like, well, he didn't, my coach, no, you just lost because you didn't train hard enough or you didn't train and those changes will work. So I think a lot of people struggle with causality, which is a very basic concept in philosophy. They struggle with it and that keeps them from taking risks because they think, okay, if I do this, will there be a result? There always will be, but our brains hate uncertainty. So a lot of people don't start something new. They don't change their training pattern.

They don't make any adjustments. They keep doing what's comfortable. That was me. I was a fly trying to get out of the window, just banging its head against the wall. I didn't train smarter. I didn't do different. I trained harder and harder and harder. So I was a great, what we call as a third period wrestler because I was in better shape than anyone, but I wasn't working on like technique or little two millimeter shifts I could have done in my training that would have had a huge impact. All right. So what I learned is, you know, but I wasn't working on technique or little two millimeter shifts I could have done in my training that would have had a huge impact. So what I learned is self-reliance, crucial. It's very, very important

because if you're trying to start, get anything off the ground, start your business, get into any new field, whatever that goal is, a lot of people think that somebody is going to help them or that somebody owes them, right?

So they feel entitled to help because that's kind of what society tells us. They don't realize that you have to create value first and then value will be attracted to you, right? Like attracts, like most people forget that and they don't want to take the risk of working hard to create something. So that's what I mean by causality, cause and effect.

They want the effect without the cause. They want the success, everything else without the cause, which is working on yourself, self-reliance, et cetera. Training, you have to be flexible. We talked about this earlier. Like if I could go back and talk to myself, I would have said, you're doing like 5% of all the different types of training that are out there. You've done very little experimenting. Like you just started with the style and you didn't really change it. That's really what I learned too, is I learned that you got to be flexible.

Hard work is not enough. You have to work smart too. But the benefits though, and I think a lot of people are, Jay Robinson, you know who Jay Robinson is? Famous wrestler from Minnesota. He has the J-Rob camps, like the biggest wrestling camps in the world.

And he says that if you work hard, you automatically put yourself ahead of like 95% of people in any area. Because most people just simply don't know how to work hard. Like they don't. They don't know how to put in even like a 12-hour day. Most people don't. So right away, you rise above 95%. Most people are just lazy. They just talk. They really don't know what to do, right? And that's why you see these, there's a lot of these kids camps for kids that get off course and stuff. What do they do? They have them wake up at 5 a.m.

and work all day, like 12, 18 hour days. What does it do? It straightens them out because it teaches you self-reliance. It teaches you what you're actually capable of. And so that's the biggest thing that I learned was discipline, hard work will get you ahead of 95% of people.

But if you want to get a few more percentage points ahead, you've got to be creative. You've got to work smart. You've got to be flexible. Oh, yeah, brother. Yeah. Well, what else have you got coming up? You got anything?

You're basically now traveling. Do you do group promotions? Are you working with different companies on ways they can level up, things like that? Yeah, so I do some work with companies. One thing I'm focused really intensely on right now is a startup called Cheeky Scientist. And so this is something where, you know,

you heard me mention PhDs a few times. You're like, why is he bringing up PhDs? But there's an overabundance of PhDs today compared to before. And a lot of countries are competing with each other for who can be the most educated country. So they're producing more higher level degrees than ever before. So like every day now there's like a thousand PhDs produced, which is actually pretty insane. Was that going to be like the new bachelor's degree? It is. I mean, in a sense, but the crazy thing is why do I love, why do I love the PhD career track? Because to get a PhD, you actually have to push a field forward.

So it's differentiated from like a master's degree where you have to master a field. You actually have to discover information for the first time. And what a PhD is, and a lot of people don't know this, it's a doctor of philosophy. Philosophy's knowledge and the ability to ascertain knowledge. So really, you become a doctor of learning. And I think today, more than any other skill set, how fast you learn, right? How fast you go from comprehension to execution is crucial. And what I want to see is I want to see technical people that are looking at the science, right? Just like you guys look at the science. I want to see them in high level positions. I don't want to

see like, you know, huge pharmaceutical companies being run by, you know, some nitwit MBA, like that guy who is overcharging for the EpiPen, right? I want to see him run by people who have done the science, right? There's no reason that if you learn at the highest technical level in science, you can crush the business stuff. I mean, you guys have evidence of that here, right? And so that's really something that I've been working on a lot recently and just a little bit passionate about it. That's awesome. And is that because most PhDs either wind up going through the professor route and they lack the ability to kind of create what they want in their lives? Well, see what we're doing now, the podcast, people are learning in a different way. So

academia is in trouble, right? Like you see a lot of academic institutions. I mean, they're even starting to have to teach students virtually. I mean, there was a time when you would never have something that you could get a degree online, right? You can do that now. In the PhD field, professorships are just plummeting. Like the number of full-time professorships today compared to 50 years ago, I mean, it's cut in half at best. And there's not even full-time professorships. They just don't exist. So all these highly intelligent driven PhDs have nowhere to go.

And they've only learned in one domain, academia, that one context. They've never been out of that context. They've never been in the business world. They don't have any idea what to do. And what's amazing is that no matter how smart or driven somebody is, they get a little nervous when they get outside their domain, outside their context, right? So if I was like, all of a sudden, I want you to start really getting into architecture, right, there'd be part of you that'd be like,

oh, how do I do this? Whatever. But if you've taken that step before and taken risks, you know you have these skills, these transferable skills that you've applied to be highly successful in your training, right? You can apply those same skill sets, just like you're asking me, to any field.

You can dominate anything that you want that you put your mind to, because it just comes down to, again, comprehension, execution. Oh yeah, brother. I love it. Yeah, good. I love it.

Where can people find you? Well, cheekyscientist.com, or my personal brand is IsaiahHankle.com. If you can spell my name, that's great. We'll link to those in the show notes. Yeah, that'd be helpful. We'll take the guesswork out of it. Cool. And Black Hole Focus and The Science of Intelligent Achievement.

Awesome, brother. Be the longer title next time. Make it a little bit longer. Yeah. Are you working on any other books coming up? You got anything in mind? I got another book and it's going to dive a little bit more into some of the things we talked about today with like context and trends. I think there's these underlying factors that really

influence where we end up going and most people don't realize. And what do we hear a lot of? How passionate you are, your strategy, right? But we don't think of things like the sequence in which, there's a great book by Dan Pink that just came out, When, like when you actually do something is crucial, nobody talks about it. They just think about the what. So yeah, something new is on the horizon. Hell yeah, brother. It's been excellent having you. Thank you for having me here. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you guys for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed the podcast with Dr. Isaiah Henkel. Get his book, The Science of Intelligent Achievement. Check out any links we've got here in the show notes and make sure you go to onnit.com slash podcast for 10% off all supplements and foods.