Modern Wisdom - #655 - Polina Pompliano - The 10 Habits Of The World’s Most Successful People

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Polina Pompliano is a writer, entrepreneur and author known for her insights into habits of history's highest performers. Deconstructing the habits and mindsets of the world's most successful people gives us an insight into how to expedite success and avoid pitfalls. Presumably the people who made it to the top have found effective ways of operating that we can all use in our lives, today we go through some of the most useful. Expect to learn the best way to channel creativity and inspiration, the secret to building mental toughness, whether there is such thing as taking too much responsibility for your actions, the best way to write and tell a story, the keys to being an effective leader, what you should do to get better at taking risks and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied)  Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Polina Pompliano, she's a writer, entrepreneur, and an author, known for her insights into the habits of history's highest performers. Deconstructing the habits and mindsets of the world's most successful people gives us an insight into how to expedite success and avoid pitfalls. Presumably, the people who have made it to the top have found effective ways of operating that we can all use in our daily lives, and today we get to go through some of the most useful. Expect to learn the best way to channel creativity and inspiration, the secret to building mental toughness, whether there is such a thing as taking too much responsibility for your actions,

the best way to write and tell a story, the keys to being an effective leader, what you should do to get better at taking risks. And much more. Paulina writes a fantastic sub-stack, and on it she covers the most famous and most successful people from history, which means she's got an incredibly broad view. And I love the fact that the stories from history make you feel a little bit less caught up in the chaos and this modern media versions of the way that we talk about people, it feels a lot more slow and pedestrian and well cemented and well-foundationed. So yes, lots and lots

to take away from today. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Gymshark. Gymshark make my favourite Gymshark. Everything that I wear when I'm travelling, when I'm training, everything is Gymshark. Even if you watched me on the Chris Bumstead vlog a couple of weeks ago, that was gym sharks new graphic tees range. I love it. The quality is fantastic. They've got 30 day free returns, international shipping. It's phenomenal. Plus, they finally updated my sales page with all of the products that I use and recommend for men and women. And you can go and check out absolutely everything including their crest hoodie, which I adore and their studio shorts, which are the best shorts ever made for men in the history

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So you can buy it for free, try it for free, and if you don't like it after 29 days, they'll give you your money back. Head to join.woop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.woop.com slash modern wisdom. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome My favorite quote that I've found so far is if you win the rat race, you're still a rat. What does that mean to you? Yeah, so I shifted my definition of success after I read Anna Quinlan's commencement speech and in her commencement speech, she says something like, you know, if success looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart,

then it is not success at all. As Lily Tomlin says, if you win the rat race, you're still a rat. It just to me means like, if you've gotten to the top of the career ladder or the top of your industry or whatever, like cool, that's amazing for that one part of your life. But does that mean that you've lived a fulfilling life? It depends, like how's your personal like, how's your personal life? How's your social life, whatever. So to me, it's like, I was, I recognized it myself

that I was playing that game, and I was on that, in that rat race, and the next step didn't look that exciting to me in my traditional media job. So I asked myself, like, is this it? And then I realized, like, no, like I can, I can choose a different path and I can play a different game and I don't have to be a rat.

Wasn't there something about continuing down the same path would be true failure, but changing and not succeeding would be more like success? Yeah. In a way like, I see success is trying many different things and also like getting a variety of perspectives rather than just doing this one thing that you know. In some ways, I felt a little bit of a hypocrite because I was working at Fortune magazine covering tech and venture capital and startups. I was talking to these entrepreneurs all day long and I was analyzing their companies and talking about the leadership strategy moves they were making and I was like, I myself

have never started anything and I've never run a business. Who am I to evaluate these people? Like, of course, there's a time and place for that. But I felt like I want to do this myself and only then will I feel successful. Okay, so how do the best performers channel their creativity? Creativity. Oh, in so many ways. In the book I talk about how true original creators have three kind of characteristics. The first is they have a unique point of view on the world. The second is that they have this like audacious, ambitious goal they want to achieve. And third is that they're willing to fail spectacularly

in the name of achieving this goal. And a really good example of that is Ed Katmoa Pixar because he talks about how most people are told when you have an idea, you need to like perfect your elevator pitch. When you're in the elevator with someone higher up, can you summarize your idea in 30 seconds or less so they get it? But he's like anything that you can summarize in 30 seconds or less is actually not that original. It's probably derivative of something that's been done before. He's like, if I was to explain some of our top films to someone in 30 seconds, it would

have make any sense. Toy story, that could end up like incredibly commercial, right? Like toys and whatever, and America and capitals, and like, it might not do well. Or Ratatouille, a rat in a kitchen that can cook, like that's probably disgusting. And he's like, it doesn't have to make sense. And I think the thing that he says that I love is like, they go through this iterative process

to make the film from really, really bad, to less bad, to less bad. And then he's like, even when we put out the film, we still think it's shit. But like, we just got to the best possible version that we thought we could get it to, but it's not the best, you know? So like sometimes you have to let go and just put it out into the world and see what happens.

What do you think about somebody that can release a multi-award-winning series, many multi-award winning series, many multi-award winning series on Pixar and still not feel confident in the final product? It's just like creativity is just a living animal. I think I don't at least I don't know any creative person who's ever like, this is the perfect final version of my creation. ever like, this is the perfect final version of my creation. And like, I think even DaVinci was like, you just got to put it out there. It's never fined. Yeah, actually, I think it

was DaVinci who said, like, great art is never finished only abandoned. So like, it's really, you just, you get to the best possible version that you can live with. That's interesting. Yeah, I'm trying to be as positive as possible at the moment, just generally, in everything to try and counteract some cynicism that I'm seeing a lot on the internet. And there is a bit of me that thinks too much positivity, not necessarily positivity, but too much satisfaction kind of loses the edge that drove you toward the maniacal, obsessive focus that created the competitive advantage in the first place. Whether or not you can find a balance, a delicate balance between being driven by the desire to do

more while not fearing the insufficiency of not being good enough, but if the head guy of Pixar says that he's struggling as well, then I don't know. Maybe there's no hope for any of us. But when it comes to inspiration, what have you learned about where that comes from, whether people should wait for it to strike, if they need to create an environment that engenders it? What about that? Yeah, I really do believe that creativity is a skill and it's not a muse or it's not something external.

And I agree with your point that a taste of success, a taste of something working or a creative act working can bring about complacency. And that's, you know, every one hit wonder. And then they feel the pressure of the second album or the second film or whatever. And or they became complacent and they just can't produce again. The thing about creativity that I found is an insane hungry, it's constraint, and like forcibly, or forcing yourself to start over in various ways. So for example, in the book I talk about grant accords,

who's like one of the most innovative chefs in the country. He's kind of a linear restaurant in Chicago. And he makes his staff no matter how popular the menu is. He makes them every six months, just blow up the whole menu and start over. And it's just like they hate it because they're like, but this works so well. And he's like, that will make us complacent. I want originality, I want creativity and I want innovation.

And the only way we can do that is if we create these constraints upon ourselves, that we don't have to, but you're forcing yourself to reinvent constantly. There's a quote that says, unstructured freedom is the enemy of true creative achievement. Find and learn the rules. You can break them afterwards. Yeah, there's a lot of direct, like film directors and like creative people in general, who believe that rules and structure can actually augment creativity. Because if you know what the rules are,

you can only then break the rules. If you don't know what the rules are, you're just like, you're a finger painting. You don't know where the lines are and you don't know where you can be innovative. So I think like every great company, like Spanx, she knew what the rules were, but she was like, I wanna play within and without.

Like I wanna break some rules, I want to play within and without. Like, I want to break some rules. I want to create some rules. So like, you can't break or invent rules if you don't know what they are in the first place. Yeah, there's a difference between disregarding convention and believing that you can break the physics of a system, right? Like on YouTube, for instance, something that we spend an awful lot of time on, thumbnail design and title design and stuff like that. We've been able to get increasingly creative and

break conventions, some conventions that we've created, but the only way that we learned what those conventions were by following them for a while. And this is why the overnight success, especially in a creative arena, just, it doesn't happen. It can take 10 years to become an overnight success, especially in a creative arena, just I don't it doesn't happen. It can take ten years to become an overnight success and the latent leverage means that the inflection curve is so vertical that it feels like you were an overnight success, but you want.

You have to learn all of these different things. The same goes with music or guitar playing, right? My housemate's a guitar player. And as his skill develops, he is now breaking rules that he had to teach himself. But if you're just trying to disregard the entire physics of the system, you end up with something that sounds like if I tried to play it, which is not good.

Yeah, and just one thing, I started listening to your podcast really early on, like 2018. When did you do that? 2018. 2018, okay. So I was listening really, really early on, like 2018. 2018. 2018. 2018. Okay. So, so I was, I was listening really, really early on and even though the format, the video, like you added video, all this stuff, everything's changed, your, the essence of it, your creativity and your questions have remained the same. And that's why people like me still listen because I love the way you think, therefore,

like the fundamentals are there, even if you've broken the rules along the way. Yeah, there's another one as well from Stephen King, which I really, really love. Reminded me a lot of Stephen Pressfield, War of Art, type scenario. There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room.

He lives in the ground. He's a basement guy. You have to descend to his level. What does that mean? Yeah. OK. So many people, especially in creative spheres, they talk about like, oh, I can't do this

because I don't feel inspired. I'm not in the right mood to create. And it's like, I guess because maybe, because I've been in journalism and there's deadlines, there's no like, oh, I don't feel inspired to write. It's like, you got to write now because you have to turn this in later. So to me, like, it's creativity has always been like,

yes, you can be creative, but also you got to sit down like butt in chair and do the work And I think that for example when I have complete unstructured freedom without deadlines and without any sort of structure I get lost and I never get anything done and I think like he talks about I think Stephen King has like I write 1,000 words a day. Like he has fake deadlines that he's created for himself, but he sticks to them because it forces him to sit down and work. And I think like in today's society,

like people don't wanna do the frickin' work. Jack Butcher is a fantastic example of this. So he's a guy behind Visualize Value. And I remember I had a conversation with him. He is a graphic designer by trade. So he is played with fonts and typography and colors and shapes and hues, and all manner of different ways to graphically represent something in an interesting way.

When he came to his magnum opus, which is Visualize Value, anyone that's read the Almanac of Naval Ravakant, the illustrations in that are from Jack. He constrained everything, white, on black, no color, sort of dot matrix, geometric style illustrations and the same font. So all of the degrees of freedom that a graphic designer previously would have been playing

with, had been removed. And I asked him why. And he said, I've constrained that because the highest point of contribution is, what is the concept that I'm explaining and how well can I explain it? I don't want to get lost in, should it be green, should it be red, I've changed this font and do all the rest of it. It's like, no, no, no, no, I've facilitated freedom in the most important areas by constraining freedom in the ones that don't matter. It's almost a constraint breeds creativity.

And also if you look in the business world, some of the most iconic companies like Uber, Airbnb, et cetera, started in times of constraint when VCs weren't investing a ton of capital, when founders had to bootstrap, when there was a financial recession going on, 2008, 2009, that's when those companies started, but you learn financial discipline,

and you learn how to, you learn that within constraint, you can figure out different ways to do things instead of if you're flush with money, and you're just spending everywhere, you have no discipline. What did you learn about mental toughness? So many things.

I know this is something that you're very like an expert on and you've actually interviewed David Goggins who I talk about in the Mental Resilience chapter. But I think the biggest thing that I learned that I had never previously actually thought about, I learned this while writing the book and noticing these patterns, is that some of the most mentally resilient people personified pain.

And there's several examples I include. One is David Goggins, who talks about how he goes into this dark room to face himself. And he's super honest and he's like your fat, your lazy or a liar, like what are you gonna do about it? And then he exits that dark room, a different person. Then there's Courtney doll Walter who sees pain. She talks about it as a place is like, again, similar to David Goggins, she sees it as a pain cave. And she's like, equally as a control, I'm in control

when I enter and I'm equally as in control when I leave, but it's like this place of transformation. And then the third person that I talk about in terms of this is Anthony Ray Hinton, who he was shoved into a dark place against his will because he was wrongfully imprisoned for 30 years on death row, and he often spent time in a solitary confinement cell. So again, a place of pain and suffering, but in that place, he managed to keep his mind sane by visualizing like different lives he could have had, like he talks about like having tea with the queen or winning Wimbledon or marrying Hallie Berry. And so I think that's so powerful because if you personify pain and visualize it as a place,

then you see that place as something that can transform you. So David Goggin says, when you enter that dark room and you face yourself, if you don't break, you'll transform. So it becomes like a place of like metamorphosis almost. And I love that, I love that like visualizing it in that way when talking about pain and suffering. One of the other things is this sort of fine line, I suppose, between self-criticism and self-accountability. And I think that people often get these two confused.

You know, there is a subsection of the world that often talks about you need to take more responsibility for the things, Jocker Willink extreme ownership. And I don't disagree that maybe even on average, for most people, lots of people, the majority of people, this is a strategy that's needed. But I would guess that for most of the people that are listening to this podcast, they don't actually need that.

They probably already over index for accountability. They believe that something is their fault when they had nothing to do with it. Good example. Let's say that I have a bad episode on the podcast that the guest just doesn't perform that day. I blame me, right? To my fault, I should have guided them better. My question should have been better. I should

have controlled the vibe. Should have been a vibe architect in a more effective and sort of dexterous manner. But then if I guest on a show and that one goes bad, that's still me. And I'm like, okay, so I do understand that taking ownership for things is a smart strategy, but there is definitely a way that you can overshoot that where you just like lambast yourself, you're like whipping yourself prostrated under the cat of nine tails because I don't know, you're a fucking Puritan, I'm not really too sure, but what about this line between self-criticism and self-accountability? Yeah, I think actually Amelia Boone, who she's a tough mother champion, I also talk about her in the book.

I don't include this in the book, but when I talked to her, she told me that she calls this the merry-go-round of self-flag relation, where like, you think you did something wrong, but then you focus on that thing, but then you feel bad about it, and then you feel bad for feeling bad about it, And you're just like in a constant circle of this. I think the way to get off is just like, yes, like take responsibility. But then do what David Goggins does. And he's like, what are you, what am I going to do about it? And I think if you've done all the things that you think would contribute to an episode going well, then you've done your job and then you just kind of have to let it go.

Because I'm sure you've noticed, some of your favorite conversations maybe haven't performed as well as some of the other ones where you're like, that was an okay conversation, but like, why is this popping? Sometimes that you can make all the right decisions, but the outcome doesn't match. Yes.

Victimhood mentality, this sort of pervasive victimhood mindset, which is the other side, I guess, of this blade that we're talking about. What did you learn about that? Yeah, so Edith Eva Eager, she was a Holocaust survivor and when she was on the train to Auschwitz with her sister and her mom, her mom told her,

by the way, no matter what happens in the next few weeks or months or years, just remember that everything can be taken away from you except what you put into your own mind. And Edith, as a teenager at the time, really took this to heart and it really carried her through that horrific journey. But she talks about how every single person will be on the receiving end of some sort of victimization. So she calls it like the neighborhood bully, the spouse that cheats, the, you know, the boss who yells, like those are all external things that you're on the receiving end of

the victimization. But victimhood comes from the inside. It's not external. It's only you can make yourself feel like a victim. And so I think that like this, this is such a fine line. And it's exactly what you just said. There's extreme, extreme ownership on one side. And then there's like internal victimhood on the other.

And I think most of society is kind of locked into one of two extremes. And we need to move towards the middle somewhere where it's like, I take responsibility for my own thoughts and my own actions, but there's only up to a point that I can control and I don't make myself feel like the victim in every single situation, even though I will be victimized

by life. So I keep that in mind. It's almost like a continuum or like a spectrum where you have to not over index on one. Yeah, this feels a lot like it's related to the concept of talking to yourself and listening to yourself and the difference between those two. Yeah, man, you really read my book, Chris. I don't fuck about. Also, your husband, your husband would have sent me a, a RC text if I have a, I promise. I actually, I've got it here and everything.

No, it's proof. I appreciate you. I'm sorry, I read it. I promise. Yeah, I've read it. I promise. No, so the, so yeah, so listening to yourself is basically when like you're in pain, let's say you're running a marathon and like everything hurts and you think you're dying and listening to yourself would be, oh my god, my legs are barely working, how am I still running? I should stop, whatever.

And then talking to yourself is actively like taking control over that internal narrator and not letting it run on autopilot and instead choosing what you tell yourself. So almost like a coach being like, all right, you got this. You only have like five more miles to go. Your legs got you here. They'll get you there. And it's just like pumping, like pumping yourself up to not when you hit the wall to be able to continue. Yeah, I had a really bad in the monologue, and I still, like, it still arises every so often, probably more frequently than I would like.

But why? I can try and, you know, browse psychoanalysis, it, but, you know, I was unsuccessful and largely a massive loser until I pretty much got into university. And I think that the story I told myself was that I'm not good enough that nobody likes me, why would anybody like me? You don't deserve low-over acceptance or praise or belonging. I didn't really have a community of friends to kind of ameliorate or mediate any of that stuff. So one of the advantages, which I know that you had because you couldn't

speak the language when you first came to this country, is that you spend an awful lot of time observing people, which means that you're very detail oriented and you can detect patterns, which is why I became really good at being a club promoter, because I could see what other people wanted, and then I'd reverse engineer that into a nightclub. But yeah, I had this sort of pretty bad in a monologue, I think, for a good chunk of time, which again, still arises more than I wanted to. But especially over the last two, three of the last six years, since I was meditating very consistently and exposing myself to more positive stuff, and then it's been really supercharged on top of that strong foundation

within the last 18 months since living in America, because you guys are significantly more ex-reverted and kind of positive about everything and everything is going to be fine. People can take the piss as much as they want, but it's a really useful strategy to have. George Mack just released an awesome Twitter thread about the rationalists' guide to like positive affirmations or like manifesting your dreams.

It's like basically a rational optimism justification. And I know from first hand experience that I can adjust, I can nudge the inner voice to now where it's pretty unrecognizable. Janu and he is. I did a workout this morning with Tim Kennedy and a bunch of his psycho friends at Roca. And this workout was just awful, like absolutely 45 minutes of hell. And I remember because I did CrossFit for a long time, about seven years ago. And I remember the texture of my mind then, and I know the texture of my mind now and the difference is massive. So, you know, it's nice to think

that talking to yourself and nudging it and assessing and listening back as well to what's coming what's coming up is something that can move you closer and closer toward a world that you want because we spend an awful lot of time trying to change our external environment. But the texture of your mind is fundamentally the source code of your existence. And if you can nudge that more, that's a huge increase in quality of life. That's such a good way to put it. And also like the comparison, you're able to remember what you thought back then versus now. I think it's huge because you can see the difference. What about having healthy relationships?

Well, so much. So, okay. So having healthy relationships largely, I was really interested in the research of John Gottman, who with a ridiculous amount, it's like 94%, 97%, really, really high percentage of certainty. He can predict whether couples will live happily ever after or get divorced. And he can do this just by putting them in an apartment-like lab setting and observing

them. And he found several things that can predict marital stability that are so counterintuitive and like kind of so little that you're like really that's that's it. One of those things is when you ask a couple like how they met, do they fondly remember the beginning and kind of like joke about it and have like a whatever or is it just a very clinical and like cold like out we met at this bar and that was it? Because I guess happier couples or happier people tend to romanticize like the past in the beginnings a little bit more than more negative people. The other thing that he talks about is

answering the bid. So throughout throughout the day each one of us makes bids for attention, whether it's with a partner or a friend or anybody else. So when you make a bid for attention, you're like, hey, look at this cool meme I just saw. If the person is like texting or not paying attention to you and doesn't respond to that bid, you feel slided, but it's not enough where you get upset or mad. And he's like, most relationships don't fall apart because of one big blowout fight.

They fall apart after years of chipping away at this disrespect. In a way, it's very small, but it builds up over time and then you resent each other and you don't even know why. And it's because after years of like, of this, not answering each other's bids, even it could be literally a head nod or a, or whatever, or a glance. And the way he measured this in the lab was he looked at couples who answered each other's bids. Like there was a couple who was like, oh, you know, look at this cool bird pointed out

the window. And if the person turned their head, who was like, oh, you know, look at this cool bird pointed out the window. And if the person turned their head, he was like, they're gonna last. So in that regard, do you see love is a skill that you develop? Yes. I do think that love is something that can be learned. Like I will say, like I don't think I was a very good partner

early on because I always assumed, and I think like our society does this, where you always think that everything has to be like magnificent and extraordinary in life is about big moments. When in reality, it's a lot more like, I can't remember who said this, but like, I think it was got men. Small things occasionally, a small things often is much more powerful than big things occasionally. And it's just like we all think,

like what are you doing for Valentine's Day? What are you gonna get me for my birthday? But in reality, it's like the daily, answering the daily bid for attention is way more important and significant than those big moments. So I think over time I learned that it's like actually the small ordinary moments that

make a good life than it is like the big grand gestures. I suppose even in a modern world that applaud these big gestures and you can upload them on Instagram, everybody expects it to be not totally shit on their birthday, not totally shit on Christmas, not totally shit on New Year's Eve. So you go, okay, the bar is set much higher for you to be super impressive on somebody's birthday because they were already expecting something. Whereas the daily, how you permeate the physics

of your relationship, like what is the foundation that all of this is built on? And then that stuff picks up on top. There's a quote that you had, trust compounds compounds so does mistrust, what does that mean? Yeah, well, so it's like, I talk about the compound interest of trust and how like all great returns, whether financial or personal,

they pay interest and that interest can be in the form of trust. And like for example, the Val Rovicon says that if you compound trust over a long period of time, then you can see all deals and you can do a lot of really high-impact things with just a handshake, because you trust that person so much. But the only way you can build

trust is to be consistent over a long period of time. That's why I include the formula trust equals consistency plus time. Because it's like, let's say, you know, you meet somebody for the first time and you're about to go on a date and then they cancel it the last minute. That's not detrimental to the relationship. But if they keep doing that over and over, like promising they're going to do something and they keep breaking that promise, it just becomes really hard to trust them. So, I think, and I think, Shopify founder Toby Lutke, I have to say his name right, he has this idea that I love where he's like, when you first meet someone, you meet and you have

each have a trust battery. In your trust battery, stays charged at 50%. Every single interaction you have with that person either discharges it or charges it a little bit. And he's like aimed to be a person whose battery stays charged at over 80%. So basically, most of the things that you say you're going to do, you end up doing so that it works in any area of life. In personal relationships and business, and with my newsletter subscribers, it works with every area.

How should people tell about the stories? They should focus on conflict and intent. What's that mean? Yeah. So, basically, when most people tell a story, there's some sort of intrigue. There's some sort of conflict. But what they forget is that it has to be laced with intent in order for it to be interesting. One of the great story tellers I talk about in the book is Aaron Sorkin, who's known for the film. He's known for many films, but one film is the social network, which is the inception of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.

And Sorkin's like, I'm not interested in tech, I'm not interested in startups, I was a particularly interested in Facebook. The thing that drew me to this story is that there were two different lawsuits against Mark, and he was defending himself. So there was Mark Zuckerberg, a lawsuit from his buddy Eduardo,ardo, and also the Winkle Boss twins who claims he sold their idea. And he's like, what I loved about this was that there were three different versions of the truth, and there was no ultimate truth. And if you watch many of his films, many of his films play with perspective, and there's like not an ultimate source of truth. So he talks about like, when you have a protagonist or a character, you need to show the conflict they're mired in, but also they're intent.

So he's like, the intent maybe get to Philadelphia, get the girl, get a sandwich, whatever it is, it has to be compelling enough that the character wants it and he's like, even better that he needs it. In Mark Zuckerberg's case, he wasn't chasing money, he wasn't chasing anything but prestige and social status. He had been kind of like ignored by his peers, he wasn't invited to these like fancy club parties that they had at Harvard.

So he wanted social status and Facebook was his key to that. Even though he had all this conflict, he was determined to plow through everything to get there. So anytime you're telling a story, for example, if you're a founder, pitching a company, or you're someone, you're trying to date somebody or whatever, present all the challenges and the obstacles standing in the way of what's going on now, maybe the competitors, the market landscape, whatever, and how you are going to solve that problem because your intent is why.

There was some language tricks that my housemate told me about, I think, from the creators of South Park about using a but instead of and, and I think that you found this as well. Yeah, Aaron Sorkin also says that he's like you don't have a story unless you have the words but except or and then. So like those words are what kind of make up a story. There's intrigue, there's suspense, there's mystery. Yes, I remember. So when I first started the show which you'll remember because you've been listening since the start, I was that kind of obsessed with productivity. That was my

thing. I was like a productivity bro for a good while. And Adam and if I just refined my getting things done to do list task manager and I did enough pomodoroes that all of my problems would fade away and like spoiler alert, they didn't. But I also took that across I think into the philosophy of the show or at least my like how I showed up in the beginning by thinking right my job as a podcaster is to ruthlessly index all of the key points that this guest has and then distilled them down like a blinckist or short form for whichever person I was speaking to. And over time, again, this is learning the rules

before you can break the rules. I've realized that just being a vibe architect is much more important. And getting stories out, vibe architect, yeah, I know. I should trademark it. Like trying to elicit, and not unnecessary superfluous stories, but you know, David Goggins book, his first one, can't hurt me, is a good example.

The best-selling self-published book in history, there's things that you can take from it, but there's nothing that isn't couched in a story. Like don't make a point without a story and don't tell a story without a point. And yeah, just over time, that's really sort of been reinforced to me, like try and almost be overly whimsical with it. You know, you can lean into a little bit of drama and intrigue and add unnecessary detail into stuff because that's what fleshes this thing out.

And fundamentally we're a storytelling species, which I think actually drives the point home better than if you've just given the tweet length summary of what the person believed. It's largely that we tell stories to make points because stories trigger emotion and empathy and emotion triggers memory. So I'm more likely to remember a point

that is Couching the story because I can empathize with whoever's going through whatever they're going through and I actually I Like overdosed on you and George Max content in 2018 because of exactly this like many of the podcasts I would listen to were kind of like Surface level or they let the guest just say facts like which is fine. But what I really appreciated about you that you always did is you took out the practical takeaways that I could apply to my own life because that's why I was listening. I wanted like every single time somebody's listening to a speech or a listening to a podcast or watching a video. So, officially, you know, without knowing it, they want to take something away personally.

They're not just like listening because you're a really good speaker. They're like, how can I apply this to my own life? And that's why I wrote the book this way. I'm like, yes, these are human stories. But each one of them contains a little nugget that you can like take away and implement in your own life today. Yeah, one of my friends uses the term, does it grow corn? It's like, it's lovely.

I like the idea. It's fantastic, compelling, motivating, whatever, but like, show me. Show me. Does this thing grow fucking corn? Like, can it turn this tiled ground into something useful that I can eat. And I think that, again, you know, it's the following the rules before you can break them thing. You can totally go down the emotion porn story, whimsy roots for forever, and then you look back on a conversation or a book or a movie, and realize I didn't actually take anything away from that.

It was a remotely enjoyable journey, but the outcome that I got at the end of it was no corn. No corn. Oh, I love that. Yeah, that's cool. All right. What about becoming a more effective leader? Yeah.

So, I think that the best leaders approach it from a bottom's up perspective rather than a top down approach. One good example is Spotify, founder and CEO Daniel Eck. He is very much, he wanted to create a culture of like bottom's up leadership. He's like the employees are the lifeblood of this company. I want to as the CEO be there so I can guide them and give them resources and kind of fuel their ideas, but their ideas drive the company. So this really came to a head when there was this team that was working on a new feature and they're really excited about it.

They were like, what if we created a personalized playlist for every single listener of Spotify? And Danu I heard this idea and he was like, honestly, I wasn't really excited about it. I thought this kind of stupid. Why are you spending all this time and energy on this? Oh, we're just like a tiny feature. And then they were like, eh, but they kept working on it, given even though he was not enthusiastic about it.

And then they ended up launching it to the public without telling him and he read about it in the press just like everybody else. And he was like, I remember reading about this and I was like, oh my god, this is going to be a total disaster. Can't believe they did this. But then that turned into Discover Weekly, which is like one of Spotify's most loved features. And he's like, that would have never been possible if they didn't feel the freedom and like have the agency to do that. Because like, if you're terrified of your boss, you're never going to do that. You're never going to ship something without telling the CEO. But the fact it speaks to the culture of that company, they were able to do that and

that it was successful. What's the difference between that and that it was successful. What's the difference between that and servant leadership? It's similar, servant leadership, but was something popular by Robert Greenleaf, which is basically the CEO is there to serve the employees of the company. And Mark Bertolini, who is now co-seo of Ridgewater, but he used to be the CEO of Etna, the large insurance company. He has something he calls the four levels of Taoist

leadership. And he's like, the first level is that your employees hate you. The second is that they fear you. The third is that they praise you. And the fourth is that the company runs itself because you're invisible. So if you think about it, most leaders,

they don't want to become invisible. They want to be needed. They want people to say like, this company can't operate without this person. But actually, the highest level of leadership is that you've run this organization so well and you've trained everybody so well that the company can go into the future without you

and he and his final chapter at Etna ended really successfully because he was able to kind of shepherd the sale to CVS health and then the company went on without him. And it's just like, I think it speaks to the priorities of certain leaders and why some of them do much better than others. Ben Francis, CEO of Jim Shock on the podcast that I did with him said, when your ambitions for the business are bigger than your ambitions for yourself,

that's when you'll truly be a leader. Basically that he founded the company, then became CEO, then stepped down as CEO, and then got reinstated as CEO, all because those were the best decisions for the business. And he didn't have the ego to hold on. This is my company and it's my position, and I want to be at the head. So I just wanna do whatever's best for Gymshok,

when I grow this company. It's the part of the cloud way down, because you have to put your ego aside, which is like the hardest thing. Yeah, you mentioned there about making us all redundant as the ultimate goal that all owners or founders, I think, should aspire to. And everybody is addicted to systems and trying to automate what do you think gets overlooked when it comes to designing systems and automations for our lives.

For our lives. Yeah, and for business as well. Like the way that we interact with our professional and our personal world. Yeah, I think so. I think most of us get too focused on the outcome versus creating the right system. And chess players talk about this a lot. When they evaluate a game, they look at the systems, not necessarily that one mistake that they make, because they're like, OK, if I just focus on the mistake, I can focus on not making that one exact same mistake again. But if you think in terms of systems, you're like, where did the the fundamentals break?

And then you can focus on not making that mistake and like future of hundreds of similar mistakes like that one if you get the fundamentals right? Can you think of a less Chessie analogy that might be more like obvious for people to follow? Yeah, okay, so for example like let's say you want to run a marathon and the outcome is, I want to run a marathon, I want to keep running marathons, whatever. But like, you can train for that one marathon and you can do it and then that's it. You're never going to run again or you, I ran a marathon then didn't run it all for a

year. But I think like the point is, if you get the systems right, you can, I think James Clear says, you don't win once, you win every single day, you become a runner if you have, it becomes a way of life instead of just focused on this one outcome. So you have a training plan, but also,

you find a way to build it into your life and that's what, for example, James Cleartock's about with identity-based habits is you become the person and you don't just focus on the one outcome. Yeah, there's a, I remember from his book, he says, if you do a Keepee-Upy with the football, does that make you a footballer? No, if you go and play one game in the park, does that make you a footballer? No, if you go and play one game in the park, does that make you a footballer? No. Well, what about if you play every weekend for two years? Well, most people would probably say, yeah, you're a footballer now, you play football.

And so there is a line at some point that is based off the back of repetition, routine, consistency, commitment, why it's indicative of commitment, right? That's what the consistency is like the projection of the internal commitment. You can be as internally committed to being a footballer as you want, but if you never kick a football, then you're not. There's a cool quote as well.

Don't look at the scoreboard, play the next play. I love that. Yeah, Nick Sabin from his college football coach, Valvama, he's often reminding players not to look at the scoreboard, but just to focus on doing their one singular job because they're all part of a larger system. Because if I do my job and you do your job and the third person does their job, then the outcome will take care of itself. It's like stop looking at the scoreboard, just like play the next play correctly and execute it right What about taking risks? How can people become better at taking risks? Oh

Man, so so risk taking there if there's so much I Think we live in a very uncertain world at the moment and there's There's a lot to it's like it almost feels like there's a lot of like information coming in and we don't have enough answers. But what I found is that a lot of times you have to evaluate and calculate risk properly in order to make the best decision. In the book I talk about several stories, but one of them is Jim Koch, who's the founder of Samuel Adams Beer. He worked at Boston Consulting Group as a consultant and he was making $250,000 a year, which in today's dollars is like a million dollars a year.

And he was like, ooh, I really want to quit my job and leave this amazing salary and start a brewery to make American beer. You not being from the US, you know how the jokes, especially in the 90s and early 2000s, was that Americans can't make beer. American beer tastes like water and water can be arguably stronger than American beer. German beer is normally, yeah. So he, his great great great grandfather had immigrated from Germany to the US and when Jim was like looking in the family

attic for something he came across an old beer recipe from his great great grandfather and he was like what if I take this recipe and make an American beer that actually has flavor and and so he kept like toying with this idea, but it was a really big risk for him to leave his cushy job to do this. And so he started thinking about two words which are scary and dangerous. And he was like, the scary decision is telling my boss, telling my wife, giving up the salary, like whatever. But scary only lasts like a few days. Like you'll get over telling your boss or disappointing your college professor, whatever it may be that you're scared of. But dangerous

is staying in this job. And then when I'm 80 years old looking back and be like, damn, I wish I started that brewery. So it's like, you want to make the scary decision. And then in terms of like, you don't want to stay in the dangerous one because that could be forever. And so if you were like making a decision right now and you think is a risky is it not, a good framework is, is this decision scary or is it dangerous in which path am I on right now? Before I made the move to America, I rang George, and George had already pulled the pin to go out to Dubai, because we'd spent a month in Dubai to flee British lockdowns in 2020, and he loved it, and he was having a great time out there, and I was like, oh, dude,

I'm going to have to let go of this previous version of me that I thought I was, this club promoter and this success and accolade and notoriety and I'm thinking about going and doing this thing in America, but you know, I started talking to people in the internet and accidentally made it a job. It doesn't exactly fill me with tons and tons of like, oh, this is definitely going to work. And I'm so naturally risk averse, like unbelievably wouldn't believably prudent as a decision maker. And he introduced me to reversible and irreversible decisions. Yeah. And he was like, look, what's the worst that happens?

You go out there, it doesn't work out. You come back with your tail between your legs and in a couple of weeks' time, everybody's forgotten. But the alternative is, I think that the, whatever, scary and dangerous, risky and dangerous, scary and dangerous and reversible and irreversible sort of map over the top of each other quite a lot too. I also include that question in there too. Basically, you want to make reversible decisions quickly that you can learn a lot from, but

make irreversible decisions deliberately and slowly because some of those, you know, may not, they're irreversible. You can't go back. If you have a child, you're going to be a parent for the rest of your life. But if you move or like if you quit your job, you can always go get another job. That's reversible. So it's like, if you don't have a ton of prior information, just make the reversible decision quickly. What about that story from Chris Hadfield? Yeah. So, Chris Hadfield's crazy, incredible and interesting, but he's an astronaut. At one point, he was on a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station holding

on with one arm, doing work on it, when his left eye slammed shut. He was like, what the hell just happened? He went temporarily blind on a spacewalk outside of the ISS. And the reason that happened is some small, there was a mixture of soap and oil that they used to clean their visors. It got caught inside of his helmet and into his eye. But because there's no gravity,

that thing just became a blob, and then it went over into his other eye, so he's now totally blind outside of the ISS and most people would panic in a situation like that but the way he saw it was like I know that my first reaction is panic but I can give myself optionality and I think that's what people forget a lot when they're in like uncertain or risky situations it's like what can I do right now what action can I take to give my future self optionality? And he was like, okay, right now I have three options. I can call Houston. I can get my fellow astronaut like Scott Personski to rescue me. Or I can cry a little bit and let a dilute

out of my eye. He ended up doing a fourth thing, which is opening a vent on the side of his helmet to let some oxygen out, help it evaporate. And then he continued working. And Chris has been in kind of like impossible situations to most of us. He one time fixed an ammonia leak on the ISS another time. He broke into a space station. I think, yeah, another one, not the ISS,

a space station with a Swiss Army knife. In a third time, he disposed of a live snake while piloting a plane. So like all these things, obviously you can't plan for, but when they happen, you have the skills because he's an astronaut or a pilot or whatever he's had training, you're competent enough to figure it out and give yourself options

And he always says competence breeds confidence. So even when you're in like seemingly impossible situations It's important to remember like by the way This is not the first risky thing I've done or uncertain situation I've been in and all those other times I figured it out and I'm here today. So like it wasn't a done or uncertain situation I've been in and all those other times I figured it out and I'm here today so like it wasn't a life or death situation. So he talks about how when you're little and you're learning to write a bike, the bike is really dangerous and you see it as this like death trap. You're like I could get on, I could fall, I could break a leg, break my head, but then as you get more competent and better,

the bike gets become silly to be afraid of. So he says people No, things aren't scary. People get scared. So another way, another way, in other terms, the bike itself never changed It's just as dangerous as it always was, but you are the one who changed and I think like that's how it is in life as you get more and more competent, it's silly to still be fearful of uncertainty because you know you have the skills to figure it out. Well, that's the problem, right? The asking for confidence without competence is wishful fantasy. Yes. And having no confidence whilst having competence is self-delusion. You know, you can have, I call it imposter adaptation, which is the imposter syndrome continues to persist even as you disprove it every single day.

And after a while, after you've disproven it enough times, you end up realizing that it's got nothing to do with your ability to do a thing, and everything to do with your ability to feeling like an imposter. Like you're addicted to feeling like an imposter. Yeah, absolutely. Louis Hamilton as well, another person who performs high speed, very risky maneuvers. You had to look at him, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's fascinating because he sees himself as like a master of his craft. So he, you know, he's a race car driver, but he's like, I'm never done learning and improving. And you'll find that the most successful people, like just really enjoy tinkering with their craft until they feel like they're masters of it.

But I think the point with Lewis is like, you're never done learning and you're constantly getting better and better and more competent. And like you said, confidence is hollow without having the things to back it up. And I think you see it often with podcast hosts who are just starting. They want people to perceive them as confident and to respect them immediately, but it's like you have to earn that respect and through reps

and like many, many conversations. So, so I think like I love the idea of Lewis of just constantly, what does he call it? He calls it like painting a masterpiece or something, but you're constantly putting little splashes of paint on that masterpiece. Yeah, I wrote something down for a potential newsletter. It's sat in my notes at the moment and it says, you're not ready for the audience you want to have, which is a lot of people, and me too, right, for so long, was adamant, the shows under subscribed, the shows under subscribed, I would listen to this, why more people not listening to it, and I still think that that's the case. But I wasn't ready to have the level of scrutiny that I do now, because when that thing kicks in

and when 25 million people are month of watching you, you'd better have some skills, because the level of scrutiny is going to be so high that if you don't, you're gonna get eaten alive. You're not ready for the size of platform that you want to have. That is so true. And you haven't had you're going to get eaten alive. You're not ready for the size of platform that you want to have. That is so true. And you haven't had the time to develop the thick skin necessary to emotionally deal with

that. Correct. So clarifying your thinking, one of the reasons that I love this chapter, apart from the fact that I'm big, into clarity of thought, is that Will's store and Rob Henderson, two of my boys were in it. Yeah. I love this chapter. I feel like this chapter.

I feel like this chapter doesn't get enough. I've done a few podcasts and nobody ever asked me about this. I love that. The reason in 2018, I think I was drawn to your podcast is because I was trying to force myself into becoming a more rational thinker. I was very much driven by emotion. And I think you and I have like some similarities in terms of like feeling like outsiders or bullying or things like that. Like I get it. So when I was trying to like become like a more rational, logical thinker, I came across

several things. But one of them was, I was always obsessed with the idea of like, well, why people join cults? I'm like, what kind of person does it take to join a cult? And it's very much like built on a belief system and like a black and white tribal, like, we believe this, you will become this type of person. And James Klier talks about how how the reason it's so hard to get people to change their beliefs even though they are absurd is because you're not asking them to change their beliefs, you're asking them to change their tribe. So the people that they've surrounded themselves with, whether it's politically or however you attach your identity to whatever, you are asking people to leave those people, find a new

friend group, find a new support system, and that's really hard to do. This whole chapter just breaks down. How can you become more of a scout instead of a soldier when talking about beliefs and information? How can you better gather the facts and then analyze them and create a more accurate picture of reality versus being a soldier, which Julia Gailiff talks about how you protect, you defend, you want your piece of information, your belief to win, and approaching life more as a scout is much more powerful. How do you go about separating what are our beliefs compared with what have been absorbed just from others or societal norms or pathosive least resistance or trauma

responses or whatever? How do we actually know, how do we get clear enough in our thinking that we know what we think? Yeah, so, okay. I think Elon Musk tweeted this once and it stuck with me and it was just basically like, you need to build a really, really powerful mental firewall because whether you like it or not, people's beliefs are gonna seep into your mind and then you're gonna confuse them for your own. And that's why earlier I asked you,

the negative in our monologue, like where you think that comes from because for a lot of people, it's actually not them, it's actually their abusive parent or the bully at school or like whatever. It's something you heard that you ended up internalizing without questioning. And I also when I read Terro Westover's memoir, Educated, she talks about like how the first time she set foot in college, she was like I had Sexist homophobic racist beliefs that I said out loud and that people were able to challenge and only then did I realize that I myself don't know why I believe this but those weren't my words

Those were my father's words because as a kid you don't question it you just like You download somebody else's software into your own hardware and then it's very hard to separate like what's yours and what somebody else's. Yeah I think especially for people that like to consume a lot of content that you know consider themselves curious, introspective, reflective, room-in-it-type of people, you can quite easily kid yourself in a way that a less introspective person couldn't. Like, there's a double-edged sword to being smart, right? That you're able to guard yourself against other sources of counterfactual information more aggressively. The fortification that you've managed to place yourself in, ideologically, intellectually,

in terms of world view is so strong that you can become a slave to your beliefs very easily because the beliefs are so in your view well grounded, yes, precisely. Absolutely. And I think like, for example, I've never held a belief so strongly that I was willing to like fight people on the internet over it or anything like that. Maybe that's a fault of mine,

but actually I think that the, like my biggest strength is that I can empathize with most people because I see different perspectives because I always feel like an outsider. And yeah, like I move from Bulgaria to Georgia and then to New York as an adult, but as a child coming to this country and then like seeing the cultural norms

and how people think in the way they whatever. I've noticed every single thing and when you don't speak English, you're forced to observe people and you're like, why do they always sit there in the cafeteria? You become really, really good at social skills without knowing it. And then you move to New York and people in New York are like, I can't believe people in Georgia believe this one thing. And I'm like, I really, I can tell you exactly why they think that. And it's like, I'm constantly like switching roles. Even if I go back to Bulgaria, people will be like,

oh, that's where you feel at home. Like, that's where you're an insider. But actually, I feel much more like an outsider there because now I'm too American. And now I have like thinking, you know, I can see why these people think this way, whatever. But I really do believe that the people who get sucked into these like ideological culture wars are people who have not had many experiences or people who haven't been around a diverse enough group of people.

I'm pretty sure that 60% of Americans don't have passports. Exactly. So you're very well-traveled worldview, going from New York to upstate New York to New Jersey, doesn't exactly give you the world perspective that you think you might, and this is how you end up being myopic, because you don't actually ever get outside

of your own bubble. And then, you know, this isn't the echo chamber that is facilitated by online media. This is, like geographically, you don't move that far. You haven't seen many other things or eaten other foods or been to different places or spoken to alternative people. But in, and even if you have traveled, look at the people that you surround yourself with. Are they really people with like a diverse set of experiences in life, you know obstacles that they've had to overcome where you can see a different

perspective and just because somebody looks a certain way doesn't mean that they've haven't undergone whatever kind of trauma in their past. What would you say talking about community building? What would you say are the biggest pitfalls that people encounter when it comes to building a community? What are the ways that you could ensure that a community would fail? If you want to grow really fast, really big, really fast without taking the time to do the work person by person by person, Troy Carter, who used to be Lady Gaga's manager, said, with Lady Gaga, they implemented this approach called,

it was the slow bake versus the microwave in terms of audience retention and audience growth. Lady Gaga would play little clubs every single night, meet the people, interact with them on social media. It was super individualized, and then those people became her spokespeople and it snowballed into a massive, massive following. But you know, they're so loyal because of the early days of Lady Gaga. Taylor Swift, another thing that I think people try to do that is like, they do the thing that scales because they think that'll bring them more people

instead of the non-scalable thing and I think it's the non-scalable thing that actually builds more loyalty. Taylor Swift, you'll notice, she has a global phone. She doesn't need to do this stuff, but she knows if she does this, these people are Taylor Swift fans for life, which is she randomly shows up at people's weddings,

which is incredibly cumbersome, like time consuming thing. She surprises fans by going through her social media, finding random people and sending them gifts and they're just like, what on earth? Or she invited, again, people, she found on her Instagram, to her house, she baked them cookies and she let them listen to the newest album before it was released.

So these are all super non-scalable things, but why is Taylor Swift doing them? She already has a massive following. It's because she doesn't want to just have an audience, she wants to build miniature communities, right? And like really, really tight knit communities. And I think the final thing, the thing that I think most creators

who have big followings should do is try to create moments of serendipity that your followers may not get in any other way. So at one point, I got inspired by Tim Urban's, he has, he has Weight But Why, which is the blog, but he created an event called Weight But High. And on the same day, all over the world, his readers got together. London everywhere. So I was like, I want to do the same thing. At the time, the profile only had 10,000 people. So I was a little bit overambitious, but still,

we did one weekend in December and there were people in like New York, Atlanta, London, Nairobi, Kenya, even if there were only two people, the thing that brought them together was reading the profile. And I remember the guys from Nairobi wrote to me and they said, we came together as strangers and we left as friends. And the point of that is, that was a moment of serendipity. There's still groups that still meet up. Like, I think the one in LA.

So it's just like, you can create these moments of serendipity, but that's a true community. And I think author Chris Brogan says, the difference between audience and community is which way the chairs are facing. So if you're only one channel communication, meet a many, As Brogan says, the difference between audience and community is which way the chairs are facing. So if you're only one channel communication, meet a many, that's an audience. But if the chairs are in a circle, and if there's constant interaction between you and your

listeners and your readers and whatever, that's community. So much good stuff. I love the non-scalable things being the high impact things because they're a costly signal. Right? You know, anybody can send out an email newsletter with a video that's been taken for everybody, but only one person can receive a personalized video that's been sent in their Instagram DMs from Lady Gaga. Yeah, we've been, you might have seen, I'm doing live shows at the end of the year, Island

and the UK. And at that, there is an incentive to sell VIP tickets, and as with a Peterson type show or a Sam Harris or a hubam that's maybe 1,500 to 3,000 bodies, they can't do meet and greet for everybody, so they need to arbitrage it. And then you just take that same model and do it yourself. That's typically how stuff's supposed to be done. And that was the advice that we were given.

Look, if you want to maximize revenue, you should have scales of ticket, VVIP. They get to go backstage beforehand and you look at the difference in terms of the bottom line because life shows don't make that much money. And you're like, wow, that would be lovely. That's just free bottom line. I don't have to do anything different. It's just free bottom line. I don't have to do anything different.

It's just free bottom line. But I spoke to my tour manager and both of us said, look, if this ends up being something that's cool and that we start doing consistently, we can do that in future. But given that these are the first ever shows that we're doing, how much cooler would it be if everybody just got to do a meet and greet?

So all, it's gonna be like two and a half thousand people over the space of four days, but you were thinking, yeah, it's a lot. But like, I don't know, that just seems cool. And there's also something as well when it comes to building a community and getting buy-in. You have the opportunity, and this goes back to you, you are not ready for the size of the audience that you want. You have the opportunity to track the journey step by step over time. And, you know, let's say that you do get to the top of the mountain, whatever industry or world

of pursuit it is that you're trying to get to. Looking back and having a cool origin story is really, really good. And honestly, the shitter, the better. Like the shitter, the first few iterations of whatever you do, I genuinely think the better it is when you look back because it creates a lower bar for the current high bar to now be compared to. And yeah, I think first set of live shows, everybody gets to do meet and greet.

That's going to be cool. It's going to feel really personal and intimate. And then if we sell out Sydney Opera House in three years time, you look back and go, fuck, do you remember when we did 500 people on a raining Friday in the middle of Manchester? And we went and met everybody in that pub afterwards? But those 500 or 2,000 people are never going to forget that. Who was it?

I think it's like, is it Will Smith? I forget who said it. But it was like, some celebrity was like, I forget who said it, but it was like some celebrity It was like I always stop and take a photo with a fan because to me it's just another photo But to them they're gonna remember this for the rest of their lives And like how do you want that experience to go? So I think like that's the non-scalable thing like these people This will be monumental to them when you are you know selling out stadiums and whatever.

They're going to be like, I was there. One of those 2,000 people and I had this experience. I think that's awesome. One of Jordan Peterson's hacks. This is for anybody that's getting more attention than they used to and getting stopped on the street. I've taken this as well. This is like when people see me that the source code is going to be revealed and ruined.

But Peterson taught me that whenever he meets somebody, because he's met like hundreds of thousands of people, the first thing, if it's in the middle of the street, the first thing he always asks is, what's your name? Because someone's meeting Jordan Peterson, and maybe they've consumed a lot of his content, and they're feeling all emotional, and they're really, really excited, but everybody can remember their name.

Everyone knows their name. So you say, hi, what's your name? Hi, John, really nice to meet you. And then the conversation begins flowing and then this was something that I added on, which hopefully is meaningful. I'm really bad at remembering names, like fucking terrible at remembering names, but I worked super, super hard. If I do do that, as I say goodbye,

it's, Tom, it was really nice to meet you. Hope you have a good day, man. And I know I hope that that it is effort. Like it's really fucking hard to remember someone's name. It's really embarrassingly difficult. But yeah, I hope that that's something that's cool. So I've taken Peterson's strategy and added a parentheses at the start and the end of the same thing.

The same way, even when I'm responding to, when readers write in, I always end with, like I always mention their name. One time I think I read the summer, somebody said like, the best compliment somebody can receive is like the sound of their own name or something, like that you love hearing that, especially from people that you admire. Talk to me about why it's important to optimize your content diet. This is something that I've been very, very big on for probably the last 18, 18 months to two years. So, why is it important to you?

So okay, so a few years ago, let's say 2017, I was like binge watching the bachelor, the bachelor ret, every dating show you're watch love island UK. I hope to eat it But I still need to watch it. I know we're not gonna be you're not gonna be friends with me anymore No, I love that different lifetime. I get like really absorbed into people's stories. So so I was like watching all this stuff and I started realizing that I started seeing the world through the prism of relationships, but in a really bad way, in a way that was like, I wonder if he's mad at me or I wonder what she thinks of me or I wonder if that insecure thing that you hear on these shows, constant questioning myself and hyper-self awareness,

instead of using my mind to think about other things So then I started thinking about this idea of like how we're so cognizant of what we eat in the portions and what type of diet and What percentage of meat what percentage of whatever? So I was like what if we did that with content and it's like a content diet which doesn't mean you can't still still watch your dating shows. It's not the bulk of your diet. It's maybe a sliver. So I think like what I conducted, I called it a content audit. So I genuinely was very realistic of like, what do I listen to? What do I watch? What do I read? And who do I hang out with on a daily basis? Once you're able to see what you're putting into your brain, then you realize, like, am I filling it with interesting ideas or am I just mindlessly going about my day? And once you do that, you

have to make it practical. If you want to read more high quality content, stop reading headlines and clickbait. For me, it was like starting the profile. I was forced every week to read these long-form profiles and synthesize it. It was a forcing function, create something in your life that you can't get out of that forces you to do that. Then I found I became a more interesting person ironically because I started reading more interesting things in talking to more interesting people. So that's kind of the idea and like since then I'm always very mindful that the people you can really tell what, what their content diet is based on how they view the world. I have a friend who said, if you want to know who somebody truly is, you don't need to

give them a personality test or take them in for psychometric evaluation, just look at their YouTube suggested feed between the hours of 10pm and 11pm at night. Oh my God, that's hilarious. So good. So something that I was playing with for a while and I use as a life hack a few months ago on the newsletters was, how do you feel after you consume a piece of content? So, you know, there are a variety of different shows you can watch on YouTube or on TV that like, limbically hijack you, right? You know,

it's people shouting at each other, it's adversarial antagonistic, itically hijack you, right? You know, it's people shouting at each other. It's adversarial and antagonistic. It's back biting, it's snarky, it's sarcastic. And it gets you compelled, but it gets you compelled in the same way as being shocked with an electrode gets you compelled. And if you feel the way that your body feels after you consume this stuff, you're uptight and

your shoulders are high and you've almost got tinnitus in your ears because everything's just activated. You're just super, super, like, sympathetically switched on and it's not good. I don't want to go outside and call my friends and tell them that I miss them. I don't want to go and play sports. I don't have a positive some mindset. I don't believe that the world is fundamentally a good place. And then I watch other things and I'm like, oh, fuck yeah. Like I should ring my mom. I should ring my mom. And I should tell that I'm thinking about or that I miss her.

And that for me is, you know, if somebody's listening and they say, oh, this content diet thing sounds great. And I wonder how to do it. But your felt sense and your remembered sense of what's going on are always going to be to be different, right? Because your felt sense, whenever you're watching anything, by virtue of you watching it means that you're not bored by it. So the felt sense is kind of, you kind of need to disregard how you feel as you watch it. And then very quickly afterward, I think, yeah, you've got the perspective to be able to see it. Okay, so I have a very similar thing, but I do it with, I've always said this, like whenever I meet somebody, even if in the moment, I'm absolutely like captivated by them.

They're so charming. How do I feel once they've left? Like for some reason, my brain can't decide how I feel about someone until after like I'm by myself and like, whoa, was that, was that just like a snake oil salesman? You know what I mean? Like you're able to evaluate it better after you've had some separation from it. So I like this idea of like, how do you feel after you've watched it? Because while you're watching it, it might be amazing and stimulating. But like afterwards,

how do you really feel? Like a piece of shit sometimes. Yeah, George is in town. I don't know whether you knew, but George is in Austin at the moment. Oh, nice. So you guys, you're a hot guy. He's going to come on, yeah, which would be the first one in two, three years, I think, and we've got so much shit to go through. But he is one of those guys when I leave having spent time with him. We were at Soho House on Sunday in Austin, sat by the pool and ordering food and just chilling out. And I leave and I feel rejuvenated.

And I've got loads of new ideas and I've been hearing stories about Winston Churchill and NASA and, you know, Cardinals what, like the Persian Empire. And I just leave and I'm like, yeah, this is nice. The sun shining a bit brighter, you know, the colors look a bit more vibrant. And there's other times when you consume things

or do even like doing particular tasks, you know, like, how do you spend your time? Like, I love, I really love being on TikTok overall or being on my phone overall or playing video games or whatever. And that's fine if you feel great afterward. But the period of life after you do a thing lasts way longer than the period of time if you're doing the thing. And largely what you're looking for are just little pokes of, what do you say? Yeah, just little nudges each day when you do a thing and it just keeps on pushing you in one direction or another and you need to make sure that you're being pushed in the

right direction. So the final chapter, which is title of the book, what does it mean? What is a hidden genius? You've got this sort of silhouette thing on the front here. I don't know if you're, are you one of these? Is that you, any of these little silhouettes? You should have been more way more egotistical and narcissistic and put yourself on the front here and back. Yeah.

No. regatistical and narcissistic and put yourself in the front mirror. So hidden genius is just really that differentiator that makes you exceptional. And I am optimistic enough to believe that each of us has hidden genius, but many of us just have not taken the time or been aware enough to discover it. And it could be like a piece of wisdom. It could be an experience. It could be a skill set, something that you've acquired that you uniquely know or a point of view of the world that you can share with others and you

can teach others. If you think about like David Goggins, maybe he's not classically intelligent on like an IQ test. Maybe he is, but I don't know, but but his hidden genius is his mental resilience and the fact that he sharpened his mind so well that it's like a weapon. So so it's just like it can be found in anybody the the packaging is not this like classical actually I remember I think when I was talking to the publisher about titles They were like I don't know like genius kind of has that connotation that people think of like Einstein and whatever And that's not at all what I what I think geniuses So in this chapter I talk about the Ingredients that you've been reading up to now and I think hidden genius starts with identity. And like, if you've noticed

throughout the book, there's been themes and layers of playing with perspectives and also like playing with identity. Who you are, if I ask you like, who's the real Chris? Is it Chris 10 years ago? Is it Chris yesterday? Is it Chris, or is it Chris in 10 years? It's so you, but who is the real you? I think figuring out that tying your identity to one single thing isn't what makes you you, helps you discover your head in genius, and then in the conclusion, I have 10 questions that will hopefully get you closer to that answer. Does this Dan Gilbert quote which he used which is so good? Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think that they're finished.

Yeah, yeah. Because if you think about it, biologically speaking, you are not the same person you were 10 years ago. I think your stomach lining is every few years, your like livers, everything regenerates. So it's like, are you, you're biologically different, but like are you spiritually, like how do you define that? Yeah, it's, I can't remember who's quoted is that says, the funny thing about life is that it has to be lived forward,

but only makes sense in reverse. And understanding where you're at at the moment, believing that you're the finished article and yet also knowing that you're a work in progress is an odd duality to try and hold. You got this, I was surprised to see Francis and Garnu in here. I mean, I know that if I fail,

I can start over and over and over and over. I have that skill and you can take everything from me, but you cannot take that. I thought that was so powerful. Yeah. I took a lot from him, even though I know nothing about MMA, I think that his brain and the way it works is fascinating. When I interviewed him, basically, he's had this crazy journey to get to the States, including like going from Cameroon to Niger, Niger to Nigeria, Nigeria to Algeria, Algeria to Morocco, in Morocco to Spain,

and from Spain eventually he was homeless in Paris, ultimately he made it to America through MMA. And I told him that my family won the green card lottery, and he was like, oh, well, I used to play that too, but I would never leave my destiny and somebody else's hands. I was like, ah, right. But.

Wait, to make me feel like a piece of shit in front of. Exactly. No, but his point was that he was like, maybe if I had won the green card lottery, I would have made it to the US, but maybe I'd be working as like a bodyguard or like a security guard or something. I wouldn't have had maybe the same success that I did if I hadn't

taken this insane journey. But his thing is that like he's been very vocal about how like UFC contracts aren't fair and like things like that. And I'm like, okay, well, and he's like, I don't, my identity's not tied to being MMA champion. And I'm like, well, who are you then? Like, what does that mean? And he's like, there have been many before me, and there will be many after me. This is not who makes me me. What makes me me is that I have the ability to reinvent.

And I have that skill set. And he's like very talented people are just really afraid of starting over. And that's why they grip so tightly to what they already have is because they're scared to start from zero again. So who knows what his next chapter is, but the beauty I think in his thinking is like, I am not these external accolades. I am Francis and I can be whatever I want to be regardless of what society tries to slap on me.

Yeah, there's a line as well you've got that says, embody the version of yourself you want to be. Very Petersonian approach there I think. But it's so, so lovely. And one of the themes I guess that we've spoken about today is this line between confidence, competence, delusion, positive thinking, realism, fantasy, trying to sort of work all of this into a big, a big blob and showing up in the way that you would do.

Like a question, I've got this written on my fridge, I've got this written on the front of my fridge and it's been on there for like four months now and it says, what would you tomorrow want you today to do? Exactly. And like me tomorrow would want me to get up on time to train hard to high-five with the boys after we complete a grueling 45-minute workout to not go and spend time on my phone once we finish this podcast But to go for a walk like that's what me tomorrow would want me today to do and that's embodying the version of myself that I want to be Yeah, it's like a living like your aspirational self. And I think like, here's the thing, like I think the way you bridge what you said, you're

like the cynicism with the positivity is not to go all into like manifesting and like positive thinking, although, you know, a lot of athletes say like they do positive visualization, which is like they focus and they visualize themselves making the play and being the thing and doing the thing. But actually, what a lot of people I've interviewed have told me, including the Salimpicks swimmer, is that what they end up doing when they're standing there on the blocks, I think that's what it's called at the Olympics, to dive in. Actually, what's more powerful than like positive visualization is looking at the past and like playing a mental movie of every where you've been, how far you fell, how much you

failed, and like what you had to overcome that led you to this moment right here. And I think that's so powerful, because that gives you real confidence versus something you haven't achieved yet. Paulina, I really appreciate you. You've got new book, you've got newsletter, you've got other things, where should people go if they want to check out your stuff online? Thank you, Chris. For my newsletter,

it's readtheprofowl.com and for the book, it's Hidden Genius Book.com and for the book it's Hidden Genius Book Rock.