Modern Wisdom - #298 - Polina Pompliano - David Goggins & Elon Musk's Performance Secrets

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

Polina Pompliano is a writer, author & founder of The Profile. Polina spends her time assessing the world's highest performing & most interesting individuals. Today we break down some of the common traits of her favourite subjects. Expect to learn how David Goggins used post-it notes to change himself, why Elon Musk is able to have truly unique thoughts, what Polina learned from The Rock, how the highest performers on earth spend their time wisely and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Polina on Twitter - https://twitter.com/polina_marinova Check out The Profile - https://theprofile.substack.com  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Palina Pompleano and we are talking about the secrets of the world's highest performing and most interesting individuals. Palina spends her time assessing humans like David Goggins and Elon Musk and Charlie Munger Warren Buffett's business partner, and she breaks down exactly what they're doing. What are the tools and the tactics that they use to get the outcomes in life that we want. So today, expect to learn how David Goggins used post-it notes to change himself. Why Elon Musk is able to have truly unique thoughts? What Polina learned from the rock? How the highest performers on Earth spend their time wisely and much more. I'm so interested in peering behind the curtain at different and unique humans, people like David Goggins and Elon Musk, and given that Polina spent so

much time immersed in what these people do, and not just like a biography of, oh, he grew up in this place and went to this school and studied this thing. It's like the daily routines and the actual habits of what they get up to. It's all the interesting stuff. I really hope you enjoy this one. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful, Palina Pompliano. I'm good, how are you Chris? I am very well. Thank you for being here. I'm excited.

I've been listening to your podcast for a long time, so when you asked me to come on, I was like, of course. Of course for being here. I'm excited. I've been listening to your podcast for a long time so when you asked me to come on, I was like, of course. Of course, of course. So you do the profile where you write a dossier about some of the most interesting people on earth. Was there anyone that comes to mind as a person who you didn't really know if you were going to like them and then after profiling them, you ended up becoming a fan. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so one that I wasn't really sure about was David Goggins, who is this ultra-athlete. He went through buds training for Navy SEALs, like several different times. And when I first came across his story, I was like, I don't know, this guy just seems like very, you know, all in aggressive, very like a man's man. I was like, I'm not sure that I'll learn

a lot from an ultra-athlete. At the time, I was training for a marathon when I first came across the story. So I was like, oh, maybe I learned something about like his regiment, his routine. But what I ended up finding out that actually David Goggins is one of the most interesting people to me because it's not just about physical, the physicality for him. It's very, very mental. And the fact that it took him so long to get in the right mindset to be able to do the things that he has done, it absolutely incredible. And I think he's a very, very good example of what somebody who's mentally resilient is. He, you know, he used to, he's faced everything from racism to physical abuse, to emotional abuse at the hands of his parents, at the hands of his classmates.

He had a very, very difficult childhood, and then he used these like mental techniques to get more mentally tough and to be able to do these like physical challenges that he imposed on himself. What is some of the techniques that he uses? One of them is he calls it the accountability mirror. So when he weighed like 300 pounds, he was, he worked as a, he was spraying for cockroaches. He came home one night with this like massive, staked, shake, shake from staked and shake. And he sat down to watch TV because that's what he did every single day.

And he came across this documentary on Navy Seals and that's kind of what piqued his interest to start getting in shape and turning his life around. But the accountability mirror basically was he posted sticky notes all over his mirror that told him, okay, for the next day you're not going to lie to anybody in order to protect your own feelings or their feelings or whatever because we all Okay, for the next day, you're not gonna lie to anybody in order to protect your own feelings or their feelings or whatever, because we all do that, right?

Like we lie every single day. He wanted to stop lying to himself and others, so that was a goal. He set these, like, and another goal was be able to run one mile. And those are super, super, super specific things, because when you look in the mirror, the only person you cannot lie to is yourself.

So he, it sounds really harsh, but he looked in the mirror the first day and he said he looked at his reflection. He was like, you're fat, you're lazy, you're unhealthy, you're stupid, all the things that he believed about himself. And those sticky notes were his kind of the steps he took to change that narrative. So when he looked in the mirror, he was proud of what he was seeing. What would you ask Goggins if you got to talk to him? So many things. Well, what was some of the things that you felt were missing? Like, let's say that you're really trying to dig deep and get into the source code of him.

What couldn't you find on the internet that you need to know? Yep. About his personal life. How he deals with relationships. I know he's engaged, but I know nothing about that journey. He very much, if you read it, he kind of almost sounds like selfish in the sense of, I'm going to improve myself to be the best person I can be,

but you rarely see a glimpse of his personal, such relationship status. And I think that's on purpose. I think he wants to keep that part of his life private, but I would be very curious. I'm actually very curious about that with a lot of people, because I think it's easy to look at them and say, wow, look at all that they've accomplished, but like, what have they sacrificed in the process? I know he's been divorced previously, but I don't know the specifics. And to me, I read the whole, like, for example, not to go off this tangent, but I read Ashley Vance's biography on Elon Musk and my one question was,

why is he in this relationship pattern? And it probably has a lot to do with certain insecurities. He has a child or whatever, but those were like the tiny glimpses of that. We're really interesting to me because I think we tend to leave interpersonal relationships out of the narrative of success. The ruthless thing about feeling jealous about somebody else

and about people that are high performers is precisely what you've touched on there that you don't know what that person's had to sacrifice to get to where they are. There's this example I always use. If you heard of Eddie Hall, do you know who he is? Strongest man on the planet.

So he's a British guy. He was the strongest man you heard of Eddie Hall, do you know who he is? Strongest man on the planet. So he's a British guy. He was the strongest man in the world, 2018, I wanna say. And he was six foot, three, 160 kilos. He was on the verge of death, basically. He couldn't walk up, like he was just, everything about him was fucked. His marriage was falling apart. His wife was about to leave him. He didn't have a relationship with his kid. He was probably about to die because of all of the stress that he was putting

his body under. And then just at the peak of that, he won the world's strongest man. And he said, he said, as he won it there and then he was like, that's me, I'm done. Like, I've closed the loop. I'm now going to save my marriage. I'm now going to save my relationship with my daughter. I'm now going to save my own health. As an athlete, I'm going to save my own health. And what we look at with someone like him or like David Goggins or like Elon Musk, the success that they have is so tightly bounded

within a very narrow domain. And we in 2020 and 2021, we applaud and put on a pedestal success to such a degree that we're able to look at someone that has that sort of a life and then think that that constitutes success. Tiger Woods was in a car accident recently the other day. Like that is a man whose life,

whose entire life is epitomized in a car crash. Other than the one thing that he's really, really superhuman at doing. He struggles with relationships, he had substance problems, he is injured all the time. It doesn't really see like he loves himself. His dad abused him for years as a kid calling him the N word. He had a safe, do you know you had a safe word with his dad? I did not. So you know like in rough sex, people have a safe word with his dad? I did not. So you know like in rough sex people have a safe word. His dad would be there on the course saying,

you're useless, this racist, you're that, whatever. But they had a word called the e-word and it was enough. Oh, I did read, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's in Ryan Holidays, one of Ryan Holidays books. But the sort of common theme there is, we look at people's performance and their successes in such a tight window, and the cult of personality and our adoration of success means that we're happy

to see someone, nearly die, nearly lose their marriage, nearly do all of this stuff, because we want them to be the superhero for that thing. But you don't want their life. If you were to ask someone, do you really want to swap with Elon Musk? You might not have had an erection in months. He might hate his body when he looks in the mirror.

He might not be able to have silence in his head when he's headed to pillow at night. Is that the price you really want to pay to be in? I always say that every time that, let's say you want to, let's say you're just out of college and you admire somebody and you're like, I would love that life, I would love that career, I would love that path. What I recommend doing is, if you can, ideally, you would call up the person or email them and try to talk to them and ask, like, okay, but what have you had person or email them and try to talk to them and ask,

like, okay, but what have you had to sacrifice and like, what does this look like? Because we're really bad at predicting our future happiness and what better way than to find the person who is already there that we think has it all and ask them about the process of getting there. If you cannot, you know, interview them or meet with them in person, I would try to research every aspect of their life. Like, that's what I did with Sarah Blakely. Try to research every aspect of their life. Look at interviews they've done. How do they present themselves? How do they answer questions about their current relationship, etc. And then try to draw conclusions about yourself of like, okay, but you're gonna have to sacrifice, you know,

having kids or not having time for your kids, all that stuff in order to get there is that worth it to you if it is, go ahead, but like, I think it opens your eyes to a lot of things that you might not want. We often don't realize that these people are real humans. Like, you look at someone like Goggins and you're like, that guy's just motivated,

dedicated, kicking ass motherfucker. You don't actually realize that there are these very, very human flaws that he has. Absolutely. I would love to know the last time he was sad. Straight up, I wanted to cry. I don't know that because we all show up as the people that

be aspire to be a lot of times and not, you know, the people who we actually are. So in like those like super vulnerable moments and I think actually I read his book and I think in there he shares a little bit of that. But most of the time it is you think of Goggins, you think this like hard to do? It's different though, when you are talking about a past sadness, like it's easy for us to say, oh well, five years ago at the beginning of my journey, when I did it this thing, it's basically talking about not you, you're still creating some distance between yourself and that. So another question, a question that I'd really love to ask him is, when he looks in

the mirror, does he still see someone who's fat and stupid and has all of the problems? There's a certain period of some formative years where I think we imprint a particular view of ourselves into our source code and Sometimes it's very very difficult to deprogram that and yeah, I want to know How much all of this stuff he does now has fixed all of the stuff he did then. Yeah, and maybe we'll get into this later, but he uses an alter ego to kind of, he used to refer to the weak part of himself that he thinks of as David Goggins. That's the guy who believed that's the guy who, the guy who was lazy and unhealthy and whatever.

And then he says, that's what he says, I was built to not born. He now refers to himself as Gogans when he looks in the mirror. And I think that over time, like maybe those two identities reconcile, but in the process, I don't know the answer to that question. Does he sometimes, in certain instances to say, oh, that was David Gargons. Like, I have to act like Gargons now. Yeah.

So he's distancing himself from the person that was that was weak. Well, I mean, that's one way to deal with it to basically Bruce Wayne and Batman it. Talking about Elon Musk, obviously, he's a super enigmatic guy and there's a lot that's been written about him. What was some of the principles that you learned that have contributed to his success? I think Elon is truly one of the most innovative original thinkers, probably as close of an example that you can get to somebody like that in our generation, certainly. He, a lot of people call him crazy and insane because his ideas are so out there, but that's

kind of what it takes to be an original thing. And a lot of people don't realize that. I read one of my favorite things that I've read is Tim Urban on a Weightfoot Y. He did this whole thing on Elon Musk and his company Nora Link. I think it's as long as a book, but it's a series of blog posts. So one of the things he says that has kind of stuck actually two things. Two things he says that stuck in my head is one, when Elon Musk looks at people, he actually sees computers.

He looks at you and he's like, wow Chris, like look, you have the hardware that you were born with, which is your brain and the genes you got from your parents. But then there's also the software, the stuff that you consume on a daily basis, the content that you consume, the things that you learn, that constantly upgrade your hardware. So what software are you installing in your mind on a daily basis?

And the way I think about it is like an iPhone, like, are you operating at the latest iPhone update installing in your mind on a daily basis. And the way I think about it is like an iPhone. Like, are you operating at the latest iPhone update, or are you still in like iOS 4? Some people choose to consume junk that kind of keeps them there, but people like Elon are constantly upgrading that hardware to make it a tool that's,

he sees the brain as a tool that's malleable, not something that's fixed in your born with. The other thing that Tim Irving writes is that in terms of the original thinking that Elon is truly like a chef. He operates like a chef who invents recipes, who's a trailblazer, who doesn't copy other things. The books are the majority of society who basically there's a blueprint. They follow that blueprint, which is the recipe, and they create something sort of new, but not truly original. So I always think of that. Every time I'm being original, I'm like, eh, I think there was a blueprint for this, and I'm just kind of revising it a little bit, but it's not a truly original thought. I know that you're a fan of mental models and I came up with one the other day that I think relates to that.

So it's called the common thought razor. Your thoughts are far less unique than you think they are. If you've had a thought assume that at least some significant minority of other people also have done. some significant minority of other people also have done. Absolutely. Okay. Can I give you an example of that? When I first left fortune to work on the profile full time, my original goal was, oh, this is great. So right now, I curate a bunch of profiles in this newsletter.

Over time, I'm going to start writing original profiles. But my thinking was so limited in that I came to the table with the assumptions that an original profile was text, a headline, text, maybe a photo, some more text, maybe a video that's relevant, some more text. That's what a profile was. That's what I wrote for Fortune. That's what a profile was. That's what I wrote for fortune. That's what I wrote to CNN. All those things had been defined way before my time. But who is to say that a profile looks or that a block of text is a profile? We saw what Brandon

Stanton does with Humans of New York. That's those are profiles, but they are profiles done in a different format. So then I was like, oh my God, okay. So then I asked my question, like what makes a profile a profile? How can you distill the essence of somebody into something that people will learn from or that kind of shows who they are as a person? And the truth is, it could be in the form of audio,

it could be in the form of video, it could be in the form of something that doesn't exist yet, but it was only when I started thinking that way that I was like, oh, interesting, like I could help define what that is. But I still haven't gotten an answer to that, I'm still thinking about it, but I think that that's like the types of question

we have, questions we have to ask ourselves instead of just assuming we know what something is, being like, oh, wait a second. Who decided that a profile is a walk of text? One of the things that I find works so well for me in terms of personal development is when I question my assumptions. And the weird thing about that is you can only really do it a couple of times a year because it's very difficult to question your assumptions when you're busy doing, get taking care of the urgent and the important, but at the end of each year, people might do an end of your review and feel this, that they actually think like,

well, I don't know, I've had this thing that I've had in my morning routine or this way that I make my food or this particular format in which my day is constructed, whatever it might be. Do I actually have to do that? Like, do I genuinely really need to do that? And when you question those assumptions, that's kind of when everything goes out and you get to go from much more of a first principles perspective. You said that Elon sort of is a true first principles thinker,

and I agree, do you think there's anyone from history that would be similar to him? Is there anyone that you found or anyone alive? Yeah, from history, I think I think you could say Da Vinci was a really original thinker. He kind of looked at two disparate ideas and allowed his brain to make natural connections between them. I think one of the examples is how he basically was, what was he doing, he threw a rock into a well and he saw the ripples in the water at the same time that a church bell went off and he heard the sound and how it kind of like was really strong and then it dissipated.

So that kind of led to his theory that sound travels in waves. I mean, that's pretty original, but you have to let your brain kind of do the work for you. I think another really, really original thinker that I was inspired by is Grant Acquits, who is a chef. He has a restaurant in Chicago called Alinea. Multiple times it's been called the best restaurant in the world. He basically challenges every sort of assumption that's been around forever. Kind of like, for example, he gets inspired by everything. So he goes to a museum,

look at art on the wall and say, why can't I eat off of that? So, okay, then he like puts, he creates the whole table to look like a painting that you can eat off of. But also, he's like, why do plate manufacturers decide how I'm going to display my food? And I don't want to be limited to that. And why do we make this motion when we eat, which is how we eat always? So he scrapped that. He created something that's like a floating food. When it floats to you, you can eat it. It disrupts the motion of eating from hand to mouth,

which is crazy. But I just, I like people like that because guess their original thinkers, but I think to your point a little bit, when you're busy, you don't have time for that. So when you're busy, you don't have time for that. So Spotify CEO Daniel Eck says that he literally bakes that thinking time into his schedule where it's uninterrupted time to question those assumptions because I agree like in the weeks where I'm super busy, I don't have time to think about what a profile looks like. But if you give a little bit of distance and time

to your brain to think about those things, it really helps. Yeah, the Explorvers is exploit paradigm, as James Clea talks about it, where you do spend more time. But as we get older and presumably more successful or more, at least we get more status around the things that we do, we become entrenched in those thinking patterns, in those working patterns. And you must see this with your business as well

that when you find a little bit of success, it's actually really difficult to let go of that because you're like, well, no, like that, that's actually worked. I've been playing around trying to desperately get something to go well. I've finally managed to do it. And there's this bit of me that's saying,

yeah, yeah, yeah, but let's see if we can do it better. And you're like, no, fuck you. Like you have just, I've just about managed to get something to not be terrible. Like, let's, let's keep going on that. You said about Elon constantly upgrading his mind. Yeah. What are some of the practices that he does for that to occur? Um, like, for example, he'll pick something and he'll start learning it from scratch.

Like, you can't learn about rockets unless you learn about physics. So he starts from like the he describes his learning process as a tree. So we have to start at the roots before you go to the trunk before you go through to the branches and the leaves. You can't start with the leaves and then work your way backwards and the leaves being the minute details of rockets. So I think that's one grant act makes his staff blow up the menu every six months, no matter how successful it is.

And so that's like, that's the whole thing because he believes that success can lead to complacency and when you're complacent, you can't be original, you can't be innovative, you can't be innovative. So no matter how great it is and his whole staff is like, oh come on man, this is the best menu we've created and he's like nope, got it, innovate. And the other person who does this that I mentioned already is Humans of New York creator Brandon Santon. He started, Humans of New York has evolved so much

that he said that criticism that he received about humans of New York two years ago never applies today because he's evolved it so much. He went from just photographing people on the street to adding a little quote to doing a whole interview, to doing a book, to doing a profile series, kind of one person, several posts.

Then when the pandemic hit, he started doing them remote. And he was like, wherever the wind was blowing, I was always willing to take what I'm working on right now and whatever has been successful, drop it and move in that direction. And I think that as long as you keep in your mind the overall mission and brand promise of what you're working on As long as you keep that in mind and you always deliver on that the how you get there can vary And I think not a lot of people are willing to drop everything and go in a different direction. Is that how you've tried to apply this to the things that you do? Absolutely always Whenever I get

Cat Cole says this she says whenever somebody criticizes something you do no matter how rude or the manner it's in if it feels mean or offensive or whatever The first thing you should do is just assume that it's true if you approach your life as like you just assume It's true. Then you can be like oh maybe like there's a green of truth here and to be honest, it's like at fortune I wrote a daily news that our end of feedback was brutal especially in the very early days I you know I didn't have such thick skin so things would get to me and I would remember I'm like damn like am I not a good writer? But once you hear something over and over again, you were like, okay, let me try this other

thing. And if it doesn't work, like maybe I'm just, it's not for me, but I found that just taking the feedback, evolving what you do, and then looking back and be like, was that a good decision? Or did I just do that because I got nervous and whatever It helps inform a lot about your business and it helps you like it helps you Not get stale Yeah, it's an interesting one that I

I've Vasili with my opinions around criticism some of the things and some of the changes I've made have actually been born out of stuff that people say. The challenge I think I would have with at first going from base, this is true, as opposed to base, this person is a complete idiot. Is that the vast majority of stuff that I see on the internet falls into category two than category one. And I had Seth Golden on the show actually and he was talking around

criticism and he said that he removed comments from his blog because he knew that if he left comments on his blog, he would make each post just a little bit longer with a couple more caveats in and he'd have some more prepositions in there and he'd try and sort of assess what people he was second order writing the article to debate against the point at which he thought people were going to and they got rid of it and people were like you can't get rid of the comments on a blog it's a blog he's like well no I just did and and now he was like my my writings got linearly better

ever since I had yeah I think criticism and the way that people deal with it is quite individual, but if you could get away with taking it like that, I think that it's very beneficial. So hold on, and let me just add this very important thing that it matters the source, right? Like be mindful of the source. I probably don't listen to 99% of the things that people on Twitter say to me, probably because they are not people who read my work on a weekly basis. They are not people who

actually took the time to give me mindful feedback. I think, like Seth said, okay, shut down the comments, but the people who go through all the hurdles to find your email, to get into your inbox, to share something thoughtful, those are the people I'm like, oh, okay, like you actually took time and you went through all these obstacles to get to me. I should probably listen. Yeah. Yeah. The source is incredibly important. Absolutely. I mean, I got this message. I still haven't replied to it. Still in my message requests on Instagram. This guy identified a bunch of stuff to do with the previous guests that I'd had on and gave me this really long rebuttal, but it was super well thought out, very complimentary, very, very mindful. And I just thought, like, I need to, the reason

I haven't replied is because I'm like, I can't just sort of dismiss this. I can't decide to delete it or say, like, thanks, mate, cheers, give me a review on iTunes. So yeah, I'm going to go back to that, but very much I think you can take it with a pinch of salt when it's needed. You looked at the rock as well, and then he tweeted you, like, first off, what's it feel like to have the rock tweet you and then what did you learn from profiling it? Insane. So the rock. In this action.

What version, how did we end up in a version of the simulation where we're talking about when the rock tweeted me? It's so wild. I can't do it. So the rock, so I published these, I call them the profile dots, which is deep deep down in individual person, comes out every Wednesday. I do a lot of these. I've probably done over 50 now every single week for almost a year, and typically the people are across industry, entertainment, sports, business, fashion, whatever it may be. But the one thing that I pride myself on is there's a section in that little profile I write about them called techniques to try. So these are super practical things you can learn from people like Elon Musk or Charlie Munger or Sarah Blakely and I distilled

them. And I'm like, here's what you can learn from the way this person sees the world. But typically they're very very specific. I wanted to do a profile in the rock because I thought he was really interesting, but when I kind of was writing it, I was like, oh, this feels a little bit like soft. Like it feels motivational and inspirational, but there isn't that element of super, super specific practical things, right? So I was like, I mean, it's good.

I like it. It's fine. But I figured I was like, I mean, it's good. I like it. It's fine. But I figured I was like, you know what? I'm going to publish this on Christmas Day, which I think was a Wednesday, when people are, you know, they're not really reading, they're with their family. Like this one, I didn't feel like it was my best work. But the thing I learned is that you can't always plan success.

And I think David Perl said this once, he said something like everything you put out into the world, whether it's a podcast, a newsletter, anything, it is a vehicle for serendipity. You don't know whose eyes it's going to get in front of, who's going to listen to it, who who's gonna forward it to the rock. So what I didn't know is I tweeted my dossier on the rock and I tagged him on Twitter. As I do with everybody that I profile, if they have a Twitter account. What I didn't know is that the rock like manages his own social media and he happened to see it in his mentions and actually I tweeted it on

Christmas Eve that it was coming out the next day and he was like can't wait to read it Paulina and I was like oh my god what and then the next day I published it tagged him again he actually read it not only did he read it and like it he tweeted about it four times he has like 15 million Twitter followers then he put it on his Facebook then he put it on his Facebook. Then he put it on Instagram where we go later. He has like more than 220 million people. And I was like literally you couldn't pay anybody to do better marketing for your work than this. And it just, I mean, it was awesome, but it just goes to show that if you take that small extra step of tying

somebody on Twitter or a phone that you know to their people, you just never know where like you'll get quote unquote lucky. How do people avoid the perfection trap when doing that? Because trying to cover all of the bases can often end up with people not shipping work at a pace which is required to iterate and grow. And I don't know whether I would be interested to know whether the vast majority of people undershoot and ship too fast at too low of a quality or overshoot and ship too slowly at too high of a quality. But Tiago Forte had this quote which you may have seen from the other day which is unbelievable. And he said, a paradoxical thing about people who consistently choose the most high leverage

activity is their efforts have a rough edged half-assed quality because polishing things to perfection is a low leverage activity. Absolutely. So good. And then this other guy replied and said perfectionism is a nice way to hide from shipping at the pace necessary to find what works. Yes, oh my god. Okay, so I think I realize this when I realize that doing good work is actually the enemy of perfection and also the perfection is a mental construct that doesn't really exist. Honestly to me that

rock profile wasn't perfection to the rock it may have been like to the fact that I never interviewed him for this and he thought his story was well told enough to share it with his audience. I mean, that's a massive compliment, right? So for me, there is nothing worse than seeing super talented people who are waiting for something to be perfect and polished and beautiful until they launch it, and they're not focusing on. Let's like put this out there, see how people react, and then the next version will be much better.

Because nothing that exists today exists in its current form without having to go through that iterative process. Humans of New York started something bad. It evolved into something amazing. But it would never have gotten to where it is now. If it hadn't gotten like, if Brandon hadn't just started and gotten all that feedback and learned, oh wait, I'm not the best photographer but I'm really damn good at talking to strangers. Like that's something you learn in the process and that's why like I've honestly, I've never been afraid of somebody giving me feedback because I know it can be better but I am afraid

of waiting for something to be perfect in my mind, putting it out there, and then getting crickets, and being like, oh, well, guess nobody saw my beautiful, perfect thing. Yeah, no one except for you knows the potential that you left on the field. Absolutely. No one at all. You, I'm going through a couple of YouTube courses at the moment, and one of the things that they're really trying to drill into all of the creators is look, even if you think that you were a bit tired that day, a bit sloppy,

you didn't like your hair, you thought the lines weren't so slick or whatever it is, no one else knows what it could have been. Only you know what it could have been, it's a very odd asymmetry, like a reverse parasocial relationship with your own creation Where you're like I'm the only one that actually knows what it was supposed to be could have been Everybody else thinks that's just what you put out there and if you go about it with enough gumption and energy They're probably going to be seduced into thinking. I mean, what did we say at the beginning of this?

like there are people out there who can annihilate their entire life and win it a thing and people think that they're great. Like if they can do that, if they can do that, you can probably get away with thinking like, well, yeah, maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough, which is what Seth Gordon says, his rule of thumb is what talk us through the specific techniques that you learn from the rock. Are you getting up at 4 a.m. and doing cat-bell swing or something? Definitely not. So let's see the rock. One of the things he says is that he, I think this is slightly similar to the complacency that I talked about, He, as a kid, he wasn't great. He was arrested.

He was like stealing. He, you know, he did a bunch of things that he's not proud of, but, and he failed that a bunch of things. But he, he says, always keep your failures at the forefront of your mind. And he says, like, by living life as if he is one week from getting evicted or one day away, like you kind of start to realize like, all of us, you never know what's gonna happen. And it is a very fine line between your great success and losing it all.

He's been there, he's seen what can happen. He had a great like football career that came to an end due to an injury. You never like Tiger Woods. I mean, God forbid for like who knows what happened in that car crash and who knows what the future of his career is. When your success depends on something external that you could lose, it's very, very hard to live in peace. But I think that his whole thing is,

I keep my failures at the forefront of my mind because I know what it's like to have been there and I'm not afraid to be there again because I know I can build it back up or whatever he tells himself. But I just, I think that there's great value and going through something really, really difficult and not kind of forgetting about it

or shoving it to the back of your mind and constantly reminding yourself, hey, by the way, like things could, things could be bad again, but I think I have all the tools necessary to get through it. That self-esteem is, it's a topic, it's a word that I just hadn't heard for ages. And then Navale tweeted it toward the back end of last year and said, self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself.

You'll always know. And we talk a lot about confidence and charisma and being outgoing and extravers. You're everyone's addicted to talking about whether you're an introvert or an extravert. But no one ever actually talks about self-esteem. And it very much is, James Clears says, decide the sort of person you want to be, prove it to yourself with progressively bigger wins. And that's what self-esteem is. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is, I've gained a lot of self-esteem over the last couple of years. And I want to try and work out where it's come from because it's quite useful. And I think a big part of it has just been progressively bigger wins. I did some stuff that I was successful at but didn't wasn't super meaningful to me throughout my 20s. And now I do something which is pretty meaningful to me. And I'm like, okay, there's only

so many times that you can succeed in the real world And you're in pasta syndrome still cut through it and say yeah, but you didn't deserve that Like after a while the imposter syndrome just has to fuck off Because you're like, well, I just I keep on you keep on saying I'm not gonna do it and then I Kind of inevitably at one point I do get there So yes, self-esteem and building yourself up like that, having faith that the future you will deal with whatever happens, like everybody that's listening to this podcast right now, no matter all of the catastrophes, the late nights, the sweaty sheets,

the neurotic thought loops, all of that stuff, no matter everything that you thought was going to end your life, you're here. Listen to this podcast. Absolutely fine. Like if that isn't a sign that you're probably gonna be okay, that the thing you're worried about is probably going to end up all right, I don't know what it is. Yes, and I call this like the, like the oh shit moment. So when I had many of those, but one that I remember very clearly is when

I was at Fortune, I was just a reporter, and the person who was writing Fortune's daily deal making newsletter, term sheet left, term sheet is a beast of a newsletter. You've got to go through all the deals, you've got to figure out who's buying, who's raising funding, which firm is raising a fund. Like you're going to all of this on top of that, you have to write something intelligent and some sort of analysis at the top for these very important people who are reading this newsletter. I was acutely aware of this. I did not think I was in any way qualified, nobody knew who the hell I was. And this person left, the writer of the news on her left, and they were like, well, Helena, like literally you're the closest we have

to somebody who may be able to write this, but like you're gonna be doing this for the inner-on-while we find somebody who's actually, you know, can do this. And so, they asked me, right? So they don't do want to, and I was like, I really don't, but in my head, want to and I was like, I really know. But in my head, my head was going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and I was like, absolutely,

I wouldn't love to give it a shot. And then I went home and I was like, what the hell have you done? But I think like the moments for me that build up my self-esteem are the moments where you drop me like in the middle of the ocean and you say swim. And I'm like, I became best friends with Google. I called everybody I knew I asked them to teach me things. I have never learned so much in the span of like a year ever but it proved to me that like if I genuinely want to be good at something I can figure out a way to do it. Typically it's not a learning problem it's a motivational

problem and I recently had this conversation with Carolyn Joyce. She's a three-time Olympics swimmer. And I talked to her and she felt like there was this one race. It was a qualifier for the Olympics. It was her third one. And she was sitting in this dark room and she had a really rough year. She had like back injuries. She felt like she was getting slower and wasn't at the top of her game. And she's sitting in this dark room about to get

out on the blocks to race. And she goes, I just felt my mind just be like, oh, but like you're not that fast and like all these negative things. And she's like positive thinking does not work for me. I can't just be like, you know what, Cara, snap out of it. Just be positive. So she said the thing that helps her is playing a mental movie of exactly those oh shit moments. The moments where somebody said, you're probably not qualified to do it, but you did it anyway. I think playing a mental movie of those is much more powerful than just like faking it till you make it or telling yourself you can do something when you have no proof for it. Yeah, so it's retrospectively looking back at times when you thought all Holy Hell was going to be unleashed on you and then somehow you came out on the other side. It absolutely have a buddy who likes to spend a lot of money and he always says future Andrew will pay the bill.

And that's basically the same. From a financial perspective, that he'll spend the money now, he'll buy the big daddy, he'll get the business class flight, he'll do the whatever, because he has faith, he has so much faith that future Andrew will get it sorted.

Interesting, wow, so like faith in your future self to not be done. Having, having faith in your future self, but I think that can really only come out of self-esteem. And what we see, and one of the reasons I think that we get triggered by people who have confidence, which is undue, or we believe is undue, is that if you're someone who is more self-critical, more realistic with your own worldview, it almost feels like that person has got self-esteem without having done the stuff to deserve it.

You're like, well, hang on a second. That person gets all of the benefits of believing in themselves, but they've done even less than me. Like, how the fuck are they able to believe in themselves? So yeah, I think there's sort of two, maybe two hemispheres to this. One of them is to try and look for positive outcomes wherever you can to avoid slipping into a negativity trap. But on the flip side of that, to actually

continue to prove these things to yourself with those small wins and then to reflect on the times where you did defeat all of the demons of hell and come out of the swim meat okay or get the news that they're done when you had absolutely no idea about this particular type of market or whatever it is. And as well, those are the things that make us feel alive. Like, you don't feel alive when everything's going fine. You feel alive when you left the dissertation

until two days before it needed to be handed in, or the project, the group project, and you order abdominals at 3am and you're in the office and you're sleeping under the desks and then you get up the next morning and you couldn't believe it, but you smashed it and like go team and high fives, like that's living. Yeah, it really is. You looked at Chris Jenner, which was a surprising one. What did you learn there?

Okay, so that was, I think that was truly one where I was like, I'm not sure how much I have to learn from Chris Jenner, but come to find out, you have something to learn from every single person. People often ask me, like, are you, you know, would you ever profile someone who isn't well like or well respected? I genuinely believe there is something you can learn from every person's experience. And Chris Jenner, I mean, she is very polarizing. People either love her or they hate her. There is very little, like, I don't know how I feel about Chris Jenner because you associate her with keeping up with the Kardashians. What you fail to understand is that Chris Jenner, she manufactured the life that she is living and

she was incredibly strategic about it. I mean, she started with Bruce Jenner, now Kate Lynn Jenner, but then Bruce. She had married him and he was like trying, he didn't have a lot of money, came out of this Olympic career. And she was like, what are you doing? You can go speak. That's how you can make money. You can be a motivational speaker. And he was like, I don't know who's going to listen to me.

So she literally handmade all these press packets and sent them all over the place. And God, I'm all these like speaking engagements. She became his agent at a time, you know, where like, what do you do? Why are you doing this? But she found ways. And so one thing I believe is that, the way, because I write these dossiers without having talked to the person, what I've found is that this mirror is a very similar process is if I was about to interview the person. So I would go through this research before ever interviewing someone. But how do you decide like what you should ask people about? When you hear them say something more than once, it's probably important to them. So pay attention to them.

One thing I noticed about Chris Jenner that she kept saying over and over and over again, people didn't press her on, was she said, whenever she was like, over the course of my life, I've learned that whenever somebody says no, that means I'm talking to the wrong person. It shows a level of persistence that most people do not have. If you get rejected a bunch of times, you're probably going to feel defeated.

She did not. And she had the benefit of her first marriage with Rob Kardashian, Robert Kardashian, that basically, she didn't have a business school education. She was just surrounded by these really successful people. So she heard things and she learned things and it was solely through the power of observation. And then she was like, all right, I can do this myself. But I just admire the fact that she, you know, her life, she didn't make great decisions in her personal life, but over time she found success in this one area and you know she took advantage of it, which a lot of people do. How much do you

think she was important in the architecture of creating the Kardashians as they are. Yeah, so she once said, I'm gonna, we got our 15 minutes of fame, my job is to turn it into 30. She was very, very, very strategic about it. But her initial thought was when they got the show on television, she was like, oh my God, we have these clothing stores, this, they're gonna film in our clothing stores,

we're gonna sell a whole lot of t-shirts, which she didn't realize is that success kind of gets success. And then the TV show would be way bigger than their little clothing stores. But she also understands the power of distribution, which is why I believe like two of her kids are maybe billionaires, maybe I have not verified this, but they all have businesses. Every single one of her kids has a business,

and even Rob, he has a sock business, but the point is she understood the value of building an audience, early on as the days of social media, having an authentic voice, talking directly to the consumer, then that develops an emotional connection, right, with the Kardashians. You feel like you're part of the family you're invested, emotionally invested, then you want to buy whatever they have. But once you have the audience, she knew I can put any product in front of them and because people are so invested in such a large audience, I mean, you can do whatever you want. It's a really interesting case that you're like marketing and communications and it's fascinating, but very, very integral to their success. I think I got sent a clip from husband, Pompeianoano talking about this new way of creating products for the

market that's creator led an audience first. George Mark is currently screaming into his air pods about what it is because I'm going to butcher it. Basically, what I think he was saying was that originally what you would do is you would do a little bit of market research then you would create a product that you think fits the market. In a age of ubiquitous communication where we can go back and forth from creator to audience quite easily and also as the creator you form the interest of the audience what he thinks we're going to see people doing as platforms continue to grow,

and audiences continue to grow, and relationships with creators continue to grow, is that you'll actually have someone who comes from an audience first perspective. Here's me with my TikTok account, or my podcast, or my YouTube channel, and then I'm gonna get to half a million subs and say, okay, what do you want to learn from me?

Like what's the teachable course, the skillshare, the product, the whatever that you want? And then they're just gonna go away and make that. It's like the inversion, it's like, okay, I have this relationship with this person. I'll pretty much, as you said, Kardashians. I'll buy whatever they, whatever they make, but that's how the Kardashians put a pole up halfway through

like during the ad break and going like, do you want pink dresses or do you want blue dresses? And then creating what the audience wants. And I think that really is, if you roll that forward, that's a good way to start to decentralize some of the earning potential away from big business to small business because big business is never ever ever going to have that relationship with its customers. They can win on scale, but they can never win on personality. The one thing I've learned from years of writing newsletters is that at the end of the day, and I don't know if this is new,

maybe it is, but I just, I see this trend, is that people trust people and people are increasingly losing trust in institutions, whether they're financial institutions or media institutions, and you're seeing like, I first hand saw people who opened that newsletter every single day, entered the time to respond to me, and I talked to them like a human being whereas I don't think that most people every day when they wake up go to like you know Forbes.com fortune.com CNN.com very rarely you probably got that you're reading that article that you're reading right now because somebody on Twitter that you trust recommended it. So it's, I think that there's people are decoupling that trust from quality of information. And I think that's

what you're seeing the rise of things like sub-stack, which is the newsletter platform. And like you said, okay, I'm 21, let's say. I'm on TikTok. Sooner me, I have millions of people, and all I've done is put videos of myself dancing on TikTok. The smart people use their 15 minutes of fame to parlay it into something else. Do you wanna be an investor? You see all these TikTok kids trying to do investing now

and learn from these people? Do you wanna sort of to start a business? Addison Ray, who is the top the highest earner on TikTok right now, is now going to be in a movie. She's partnering with the Kardashians on a product like all these things that I think, yes, you may have gotten lucky and gotten some sort of fame or audience or whatever, but the question is how are you going to do it and parlay it into years ahead? And Chris Jenner says that every single year she has sat down with every single child and she asks them what is your goal for the year and how can I help make that happen? So it's like they are very intentional, they are very focused, and they're disciplined,

and it goes, I mean, you can't deny that they've been part of the culture if not some of them setting the culture for more than a decade. It's not a surprise that they've ended up where they are. I didn't realize just how intentional Chris Jenner had been with this construction. I now almost feel like it's the Truman show and I'm living in like Christian as world and she's welcome back to Christiana Globe. Right. Yeah. You looked at Bill Gates, didn't you? Obviously, there's been, oh, was it Melinda Gates or Bill? I've done a dossier on Melinda, but Bill, I've read profiles on.

Got you. Okay. What's interesting about their relationship? Um, very interesting. So, okay. So, that's another example of people. I'm like, I'm very curious. You're two very, very influential and powerful people.

You do your work together. How, like how? And so I saw something, I read everything that's ever been written about Melinda Gates and that involved some conversations with Bill as well. But she basically said, criticize and private, but when you're in a public, you gotta be on United Front.

Like, they argue, they fight like any people, any couple, but when they are in public, they are united and then they resolve their issues, sorry, they're united in public, but they resolve their issues in private. And I think that that is so important because we all know the people who go out in public, hang out with their friends and they're constantly Bickering, they're not on the same page. Okay, now imagine doing that but like with 10 cameras in your face and tabloids and newspapers and whatever That is a recipe for disaster and I um, I remember taking a journalism class in college and my professor told me that basically the best editors um, they they um, they criticize, like in person,

they talk to you when they criticize, and they put the compliments in the praise and writing. Because you're probably going to keep that. The criticisms, if you put it in writing, it's a hit every time you look at it. So, I find the same thing, and I think there was one thing Melinda said that at their wedding, I think it was Bill's parents gave them this statue of two birds looking in the same direction, and they still have it at their house outside of their house. And the whole idea is like, we're going to feel differently about everything all the time, and we're going to have different opinions and perspectives on whatever.

The point, though, of marriage, is to always be looking in the same direction. And that means having the same foundational values, having the same similar goals and helping each other get there. I just, I think that's a very powerful way to think about if you're ever going to be in a relationship, let alone a relationship where like, when you argue billions of dollars are at stake. Tsk. Tsk.

Tsk. Tsk. The externality of most relationship arguments isn't like a significant portion of the US GDP. Exactly. I had George on the show towards the back end of last year and he talked about the single unifying principle that guides every decision Elon makes and that also guides every decision that Jeff Bezos makes or made I guess now. And he said everything that Elon does

gets put through one question filter and it does this get us closer to Mars and everything that Jeff Bezos does gets put through one filter and it does this improve the customer experience. And what I think increasingly you're seeing is the beauty of simplicity with these people that if you were trying to keep tabs on all of the different knobs and dials and charts as Bill Gates or Elon Musk or whoever, you're just going to lose your way. Whereas if you come at it from very, very foundational, the same with Bill and Melinda Gates, like imagine how much press attention, how many interview requests, all the different responsibilities they've got with their foundations and stuff like that. It's like they'll have, they may be explicit, they may not, but they'll have a couple of

foundational principles and that just allows you to cut through so much of the bullshit. I really hope, I keep on banging on about it, but I really hope that everyone that's listening has been working a way trying to discover their core values. Taylor Pearson core values, just Google it, Taylor Pearson core values, it'll take you half a day, and you will have a list of five core values. And it changes everything, because you realize that every decision that you try and come up with,

oh, should it be this blue car or this red car? Should I have cheesecake or should I not? Should I train, should I not? Do I wanna go on holiday? Do I not know all of this stuff is created by those values that drive your life and the more succinct and the more precise that you can get around those, some more exact you can get around those, I think it makes everything easier from there and out.

It seems like Bill and Melinda Gates were doing that as well. Exactly. I think we all try to invite a lot of complexity into our lives where if you boil things down to it's very, very basic things, I forget where if you boil things down to it's very, very basic things, I forget who told us this, but when Anthony and I first got married, the best piece of advice I heard was get a piece of paper and draw a line in the middle and on one side, right, like what are your, you both, right? Like, what are your non-negotiables?

Like, what will cause this to come to an end? And if it's not, like, you know, but like, the biggest things are typically, you know, in fidelity, physical abuse. Like, things like that that are very, very, you cannot forgive the other person. What are those for you? Everything else that's like, you didn't do the dishes today.

Well, this cause, ask yourself the question, will this cause us to break up? If no, find a way to move on. It's not the end of the world. I think it sounds simple, but sometimes that simplicity just puts things in perspective. I agree. What are some of the common themes among all of their high performance that you've covered? Are there any sort of common threads that you

come up against? Yeah. One of the common threads that you and I have talked about is the ability to reinvent yourself in the willingness to do it. I think that there's a lot of people who, when they fail, or they make a mistake, or they're at the peak of their success and they lose it all, there is a feeling of, oh, what, like I can just sit here and wallow in the fact that I tried.

It did not work out, but I'm just gonna, you know, get a regular job, whatever, whatever, it may be for you. But I think the most exceptional people succeed, fail, learn, succeed again, and then like whatever, whatever it takes you, but the whole point is that people were able to bounce back. And I think that that is surprisingly rare. To be honest, I find people like Sarah Blakely who found it spanks really interesting because when she was growing up, her dad would have everybody go around the table and share one thing that they failed that day. And failure, however, you defined it at 12 years old, right? failure. However, you defined it at 12 years old, right? So she was like, he would genuinely be disappointed if I didn't have like a good juicy failure to share. Because if you don't have a good juicy failure, it means that you didn't try hard enough that day or you didn't

take a risk or whatever it may be. But so because she had that foundation when she was growing up, when she started spanks, or before she started spanks, she always wanted to be a trial attorney, but then she bombed the LSAT. She wanted to be goofy at Disney World, but she wasn't tall enough to fit in the costume. So like all of these stupid things, and she was like, oh my god, but she didn't give up in the face of failure. And then she has this quote that I just like always think about is, um, she says, well, if I have aced the LSAT, spinks wouldn't exist today. So like, yes, if you had succeeded at the one thing you so bad, they wanted to, this other path wouldn't have been known to you.

Um, so I think like they are willing to reinvent themselves and the, they frame failure as you didn't try hard enough and not I failed and I am miserable and I'm stupid and I can't do this again. The other thing is that they whenever they lack self-esteem or confidence. And we touched on this with the ultra-egoes. They create a persona. That's, it's not even an ultra-ego, it's an aspirational self. So for example, Beyoncé was super introverted and shy before just all her in her normal life. But like the thing she wanted to do, which was this, you know, sing in front of hundreds of thousands of people, on stage, she had to be confident, and she had to appear that she had this massive energy,

you know, like bigger than life persona. So she created Sasha Fierce to be like, okay, in my life, I'm Beyonce, but on stage, I'm Sasha Fierce, I'm gonna, and I'm gonna embody this character. And to her, it was like a character, like it wasn't her. Kobe did this with the black momba at a time when people were booing Kobe off the court at his lowest moment in his career.

He created something called the black momba, which allowed him when he's on the court, he's like, I'm not taking this personally because I'm not Kobe right now, I'm the black momba. So over time, these aspirational cells, we kind of trend towards them, right? And we end up becoming these people. I was the same way I hated. I'm so nervous. Like, we would never be able to do this right now if you had met me 10 years ago, because I was so nervous. My voice would shake. I would get red. I would start sweating. Like it wasn't good, but I knew that in order to succeed in any sort of field, I needed

to be a good public speaker and I needed to learn how to express myself. So I started practicing, but whenever I went on stage, I would be like, I'm Paulina of this important journalist who's doing her job. And when I would step off stage, I still remember thinking, God, like I wish that in my daily life I could have that that I have on stage, which is so weird to think, but I think over time we start to get closer

to that aspirational self. That's awesome. What have you failed at over the last couple of weeks? Is there a failure that comes to mind? Or the last couple of weeks? Yeah. You're supposed to have what you're supposed to have a big failure per day. Oh, God, let me think of a big juicy one. I haven't.

So what one of my friends asked me this question. The reason I ask is one of my buddies asked me this question about a year ago. And I was like, dude, I can't think of, I mean, it sounds like such a privileged position. It's like, oh no, like everything's just going so well. And it's like, obviously, not that everything's going so well, but it did make me think. And everyone that's listening as well, think what have you failed at recently? What comes to mind is a failure. And I started to assess and I was like, well, is it just that I'm hiding my, am I failing

on a regular basis and I'm just hiding them away? I was like, no, I don't think it's that. What is it? And I was trying to work out. I'm not taking sufficient risks. I'm like, well, when it comes to business, I'm quite risk-averse. I quite enjoy being risk-averse. I'm fairly conservative with the way that I actually treat my sort of business operations and stuff. I like slow and steady wins the race. So that was just, I don't have an answer around this. But I was someone for whom the dad would be scowling at at lunchtime or dinner time every single day. Because I'd be like, no, just made it nice and safe again

today, dad. Yeah. Well, so, okay. So I feel the same way because I think like, when you think of failure, think of these like catastrophic things So but when I think of failure is like I didn't try hard enough right gave up on something that I shouldn't have given up on and so for in the last week for example, I Was trying to get someone to be interviewed for the profile. And there was promise, there was traction, and then suddenly they go sit me.

So I was like, well, what do I do? So I followed up, and then I followed up again, and it's like, I'm not getting an answer. I don't, you could consider that a failure to get this person to be on their platform for an interview, but at the same time, maybe I just, maybe I should reach out to somebody else that it would be equally as great

and I haven't done that. I think that there's something to be said about, okay, you failed at something, but did you try something else to recover or to go down a different path? So yeah, I like that. Juicy one, though. No, I don't know. I'm sure that there'll, yeah, I like that. Juicy one though. No, I don't know.

I want to, I'm sure that there'll be some, I'll end up with comments below that'll talk about some catastrophic failure that someone's just, I crashed, crashed my dad's boat or like, run over a cow and trash the cow, whatever it might be. Oh no Chris. No, that's not me.

Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, I am, I do think that the one of the common threads I'm seeing here is talking about this self-esteem, talking about this belief that we have in ourselves, like realizing that failure sort of isn't that big of a deal. And it's so interesting because it feels so catastrophic at the time. Like one thing that I wish that we could do is to be able to take snapshots of how our mental state was in the past and revisit them.

I suppose this is kind of what journaling is. And you go back and you read the sort of thoughts which appeared in consciousness three years ago or five years ago. And you go, oh my God, I was, I actually cared about this thing. I don't even know, I don't even think about this thing anymore, let alone care about it. And I think that's good, but a lot of the time we don't see how far we've come. And I think if we could, if you were able to plot your consciousnesses progression on a graph,

I think you would have far more faith in yourself than you do. That's why I think that writing in public on the internet is so powerful because it's like a public ledger of everything you've been through. I recently did this exercise where I went on tiny letter where the profile used to be hosted on tiny letter. And I don't know how to, like it on Titan letter and I don't know how to, like it's there forever, I don't know how to shut it down, I don't even know how to log into my account but whatever, I'm glad it's there. But if you look at the very early iterations of the profile in 2017

because I know myself, I was reading it in the tone and the jokes that I was making and like the things I was trying to cover up for insecurities that I had it was so painfully obvious now and I'm like oh my god like I really did feel like that back then and I didn't have a ton of confidence in my own voice and as a writer so I was trying to imitate what I thought was being cool on the internet You know what make jokes jokes that aren't even funny or that I now do not find funny. But I was trying to sound like, you know, you remember like the blogger, like I'm cool, like I make fun of things, I'm super sarcastic.

It's not me. And I was trying to imitate somebody else. And so looking back now, I'm like, thank God, like at least I gained confidence in that area in my life. But it is interesting to look back and be like, look at all the progress I've made. And I'm sure in five years, I'm going to look back now and be like, what the hell were you seeing on Chris's podcast? Yeah, maybe, maybe. Plina, thank you very much for coming on. This has been awesome deconstructing some of the high performing

people's habits. If the listeners want to check out more of your stuff, where should they go? Read the profile.com. Read the profile.com. That's it. Fantastic. It'll be linked in the show notes below.

I really look forward to doing this again. We're going to have to find something else to talk about. Awesome. It was a pleasure Chris. Thank you.