Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Recommended Title Why You’re Not Changing Even Though You Know What to Do | Mark Manson - EP 808

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Have you ever had a breakthrough that felt like it was going to change your life, only to find yourself back in the same patterns a week later? In this powerful conversation, John R. Miles sits down with three-time New York Times bestselling author Mark Manson to unpack one of the biggest traps in personal growth: confusing insight with actual change. Mark explains why reading another book, learning another framework, or becoming more self-aware can make you feel like you're changing without actually changing your behavior. Real transformation requires something much harder: doing things differently when they're uncomfortable or letting go of an identity you've outgrown. You'll learn: Why insight can become a form of procrastination The difference between personality, adaptation, and identity Why changing your environment may be easier than changing yourself How old adaptations can become identities that hold you back Why motivation isn't always the problem Why “optimal is suboptimal” How to recognize when your mental model no longer matches reality Why sometimes the best way to grow is to stop trying to become someone else Mark also shares the powerful advice his father gave him about becoming the goose instead of chasing the golden eggs—and why developing your ability to create value is more important than protecting what you've already built. This conversation is a reminder that you don't always need more information to change your life. Sometimes you need the courage to behave differently, release an identity that no longer fits, and create an environment that brings out who you actually are. Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/. Take the 90-second diagnostic to see if you're disappearing.Explore the Show: https://passionstruck.com/starter-packs/. New to Passion Struck? Start with the best episodes curated for you.Connect with JohnWebsite: https://johnrmiles.comBook John to Speak: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking/Substack: https://www.theignitedlife.net/Children’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Support the Movement: https://startmattering.com/. Every human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it.Passion Struck — #1 Alternative Health Podcast. 85M+ downloads.DisclaimerThe Passion Struck podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Passion Struck or its affiliates. This podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Have you ever finished a great book or listened to a podcast and thought, this is going to change my life, only to discover a week later that nothing actually changed. If so, you're not alone. When Mark Manson joined me on Passionstruck, he explained why that happens and why real transformation is far more uncomfortable than most of us expect. Take a listen. for a human to actually be different than they were before. It requires you to do one of two things. It requires you to behave in ways that are new and uncomfortable. Or it requires you to let go of beliefs and perceptions you had about yourself, which is also not fun because that's a form of grief. By definition, change requires either a destruction of former behavior or former identity. both of those things suck.

If you're smiling about it, it probably didn't really change your life. It's your friend John, and welcome to Passionstruck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want,

but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Welcome back to episode 808, and today we're continuing our series, The Adaptive Brain, how your mind learns, changes, and heals.

Let me ask you something. Have you ever finished a great book? listened to an incredible podcast or had one of those conversations where you thought, this is it. This is finally the thing that's going to change my life. You felt inspired. You saw yourself differently. You understood exactly what you needed to do.

And then a week later, you were right back where you started. If you've ever had that experience, you're not alone. I think every one of us has. we mistake clarity for change. We assume that because we see the problem differently will naturally behave differently. But if that were true, we'd all change the first time we had a breakthrough. That's what makes today's conversation so fascinating. Joining me is Mark Manson, the three-time New York Times best-selling author whose books have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Mark has a way of challenging the assumptions we don't even realize we're making.

In this conversation, we tackle one of the biggest misconceptions in personal development, the idea that insight creates transformation. Mark argues that understanding yourself is important, but understanding yourself isn't the same thing as changing yourself. Real change asks something much harder. It asks us to act differently before. we're ready and sometimes to let go of identities we've spent years building. But here's what stayed with me long after we finished recording. This really wasn't a conversation about self-improvement, it was a conversation about courage. Because every meaningful transformation asks us to leave something behind, an old habit, an old story, or even an old version of ourselves. We tend to

think change should feel exciting, but Mark makes a compelling case that real change often feels uncomfortable before it feels liberating. And I think that's exactly the conversation so many of us need right now. So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with Mark Manson. Thank you for choosing Passion Struth and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. I'm absolutely honored and actually thrilled today to welcome Mark Manson, someone who I've always wanted to have on Passion Struck. Welcome, Mark. It's good to be here. Thanks for having me. So Mark, over the past couple weeks as I've been preparing for this, I've immersed myself

back into your books, but I'm also a subscriber to your newsletter, to your substack, where I read your essays, and I also listen to your podcast. What has surprised me the most is that I stopped feeling like I was reading a writer, and I started to feel like I was reading someone trying to reverse engineer human behavior. Is that a good way to think about this? What's been going on over the past 18 months? Strangely, I take that as a compliment. I spent pretty much the whole early part of my career just focusing on books and writing. And I had a little bit of an epiphany a few years ago, which was that a sudden realization that a lot of the audience that I had built or cultivated online might actually be more important and more valuable in the

the long run than say just writing another three books. And once I had that realization, I actually very seriously kind of got into trying to study and understand online media, online content, and really trying to scale a content business out. So I had to learn video production and podcast production. The current podcasts were on solved is the second podcast. It started a substack, newsletters, all sorts of things. And I think I've actually been surprised how much I love it. Because as much as I love writing and I love books, it's zooming out. I think working on media in general just really forces you to think broadly and try to understand where the culture is, what people respond to. Why do certain people resonate to certain content over others? Some people prefer listening,

right? A lot of the people listening to us right now, they probably prefer listening to a podcast or a book than, say, reading 500 pages or watching a 10-part series. And then other people are the complete opposite. And I just find it very fascinating reaching those different groups of people and communicating to them in different ways. Yeah, what I found is I take an episode like this and I parse it probably into 20 different pieces from quote cards to long form substack articles to Instagram to short videos. because I think you're right. What I've discovered is different people have different ways that they like to absorb content.

Some want really quick, 30 second, 40 second bytes, and others want the long form answers. But one thing, and I'm not sure if you find it on your show, that's really surprised me is how few people apply what they hear on the show. And that's been something I've been trying to figure out. It's one thing to have a great guest like you on, but how do you get them to actually use? what we talk about. That is the billion dollar question in this industry. Yes. I'm of two minds about that. Sometimes I feel, and especially when it comes to writing, I, because I think for a lot of this, it's such a personal process for a lot of people that I try to just trust that when they're ready to act, they will. I often see my job as more of helping people shift perspective. It's like a very

cognitive process, like sharing a new idea, shifting a perspective, challenging an assumption, maybe pointing out a blind spot, and just trusting that's going to be upstream from their behavior. But yeah, there are other times where it's like pretty clear what somebody needs to do and they're just not doing it. And I think that's where you start to fall into like kind of the classic self-help conundrum where you can, where actually feeding that person more information can be counterproductive because they can trick them in the thinking like they're doing something

when they're actually not doing anything. But the truth of the matter is that I don't know if there's anything you and I can do to make people take action on things. It's you can give them the tools, you can point them to the door. or you can tell them how to walk through it, but until they get off their ass and walk through it, it's like you can only do so much.

I recently put out a substack post, and you might find it interesting because I was kind of going into what I think are some of the fallacies of the self-help industry, and I said, in it that one of them is, I think it's pushing us to live in a monastery, but a monastery where it's like

everything that you do is as an individual where if you look at most monasteries over the centuries, they involve community. And it's almost as if the self-help world is asking you to do everything without a community and then we wonder why we're disconnected. A hundred percent. I think especially, it really seems to be like the last three or four years in particular. There's developed this obsession with protocols and routines and habit stacking. and it feels like people's, I don't know, I just think so much of life is in the chaos,

is in the unexpected, and especially in a lot of relationships and community building is in the spontaneous and unexpected. And so it is, I definitely feel, I've got a saying that I say to myself a lot and I say to friends a lot, which is optimal, is suboptimal, that it's, if you are like if every moment of every day is completely optimized, then you are not leaving any slack in the system to be challenged or pushed out of your comfort zone. And yeah, I do think long term that is a problem. Someone picked up the subtle art a decade ago and fast forwarded to today. What's a belief that you held back then that you've been forced to abandon? Well, it's funny because, so we're coming up on 10 years on the book and we're doing a 10th anniversary

edition. It's going to come out, I think, January 2017. And so I've been actually going back through the book and looking at a lot of it. I don't know. I'll say this. I don't think there's anything big or major in the book that I'm like, ooh, don't agree with this anymore. But it is interesting looking back because I think there's kind of certain emphasis is misplaced in a few spots. Back then, I think social media hadn't really dominated our life yet the way it does now. Let me put it this way. I think one of the things that I've become very aware of in the last 10 years, the whole message of that book is really find something you really give a fuck about and then just block out the rest and be willing to suffer and sacrifice for it. The problem is that I think if you look at a lot of the problems in the world today,

they are caused by people who really only give a fuck about one thing and are willing to sacrifice themselves and suffer for it. So there's a little bit of, I think it's a knife that cuts both ways. And I think I was less aware of that at the time. And I think today we'll see as I can work through the book and do some minor revisions. But I think I would encourage people to remain a little bit more. skeptical of what they invest themselves into and the beliefs that they hold on to. When I first started this podcast and came up with the name Passion Struck, it actually

mirrored the message from your first book in many ways. It was really about I'd been talking to Jim McKelgo, found it square. And he was telling me about the thing he sees with entrepreneurs who don't end up hitting it big. It's because they find this thing to be completely keyed into and then they lose their way over time. And so to me, passion struck was, you find this thing, you invest everything of yourself into it, no matter if it causes your reputation harm or financial harm, because you're pouring yourself into it.

And over the past couple of years, as I guess my thinking has evolved, I've really shifted the focus to human flourishing and it being more about how do you become alive? How do you help someone live so that at the end of their life, they're not regretting, becoming alive in their life? Does any of that resonate with you? For sure. I think you and I are a little bit in the same boat with kind of both the passion piece and on my side of the values piece. It's there's a little bit of a survivorship bias, right? Because you can look at, you can look at all these founders who made it, right? And it's like, okay, well, they gave up everything. And they worked 18 hours a day. they lost relationships and they lost friendships and they had no life and they slept on a mattress

on the floor. But what you don't see is that for each one of those that made it, there's a hundred that did the same thing and essentially wasted five years of their life. And I think in my case, it's for every person who really goes all in on something, gives a fuck about something important and does something great, there's also somebody who goes all in on something that gives a fuck about something and does something terrible because they value the wrong thing. So I guess the conclusion here is just that life's very complicated. Well, I think it begs the question. If you're someone listening to us, how do you know when your own mental model or your pursuit is stop matching reality? The feedback mechanisms in your life need to be functioning correctly. And I think one way you could

look at maybe our current time is that by removing friction out of our lives, technology has also made it easy to ignore those feedback mechanisms. It's probably easier than ever to ignore reality if you really want to these days. And it's easier than ever to convince yourself of something being true if it's not. Because there's just an endless supply of algorithm that are willing to reinforce whatever you want them to reinforce. It's funny. So I launched, my podcast solved. We launched about a year ago.

And we do these massive four or five hour long deep dives into a single subject. And at this point, we've done, I think, 13 or 14 episodes. And it's been really interesting. I think one of the biggest things that I've taken away from doing all these episodes, is it's become a running joke on the show that about half the time we get two hours into a five-hour episode on procrastination or emotional regulation or whatever it is. And it just turns out that Aristotle was right. And it's become an inside joke with my audience of, all right, guess what? Guess who nailed this 2,500 years ago, Aristotle. And we've just been like collecting evidence

to prove that he was right ever since. But I've actually really really, it has shifted my views to a certain extent over to last year and that it has made me really take some of that ancient wisdom a little bit more seriously than I think I used to. I've always been a science and research guy. And I'm now far enough into my career that I've seen a lot of that science and research either not replicate or get overturned by new findings. And then meanwhile, in the process of researching these episodes, I'm like, consistently coming back to Aristotle, who just like nailed it first try in 400 BC. So it's, I've definitely found my views kind of like shifting backwards in time to a certain extent.

It's interesting. Ryan Holidays onto something. He really was. He really was. And it makes sense, right? That like if something's going to survive 2,000 years, it probably did for a reason. And as the world gets more chaotic and difficult to understand, it makes sense that people would gravitate towards stuff that is survived for that long. I've recently been rereading Thinking Fast and Slow by Danny Caneman. And as I was reading it, it was interesting as I think as I was in chapter 27 or 28, It's a long book. He mentioned something that I thought made me think of this interview.

He said that our minds are remarkably good at creating coherent stories from incomplete information. And your recent work seems to suggest that we're equally good at mistaking those stories for transformation. Do you think self-awareness has become another cognitive bias? It's a good question. I actually did a YouTube video, I think two years ago. ask the question if it's possible be too self-aware that it's like it's actually maybe a little bit maybe the optimal level of self-awareness is to not know certain things about yourself right

because then that I think leaves you a little bit more open and flexible but I do think one of the pitfalls of this industry and it's something that I've been writing about for a very long time is that people come to it wanting transformation and when you want to experience something, it's quite easy to convince yourself that you've had that experience, even if you haven't. And I think a lot of self-help content, information, seminars, etc., is actually around giving people that placebo event of, oh my God, I'm a new person, right? And if you literally did the same thing today, you did yesterday. So it's, and again, coming back to that, that point earlier about the removal of friction is removing feedback from our lives, right? If we have less feedback

coming into our conscious awareness from the outer world, then it makes it easier for us to elude ourselves into believing whatever we want to believe. And it's something I worry about, for sure. It is, I don't think people, because people who kind of do this, they get, they're really happy and excited and they feel like they're changing their life all the time. I think, and I've had this argument with people as well, they're like, well, what's wrong with that? Let them be happy. Let them enjoy their quote unquote transformation. The problem is that I think it encourages a detachment from reality that in the long run is not helpful. It actually just sets them up for more failure further on. We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Mark Manson. As you're listening today,

I'd like you to sit with one question. Where in your life have you confused awareness with action? Most of us know more than we've ever known before. We understand our habits. We recognize our blind spots. We can explain why we react the way we do. But as Mark reminds us, insight isn't the same as transformation. Change doesn't happen because we understand ourselves better.

It happens when we're willing to make different choices, even when those choices feel uncomfortable. And that idea connects deeply with the research behind my upcoming book, the mattering effect coming October 6th. One of the things I discovered while writing it is that many of the identities we carry weren't chosen consciously.

And those patterns may have served us once, but over time they can quietly become the very thing standing between us and the life we're trying to create. If you'd like to explore more of those ideas about my book, or grab the companion workbook for today's episode, go to the Ignited Life on Substack. It's designed to help you move beyond insight and begin putting these ideas into practice. Now, a quick break for today's sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Mark Manson. Do you mean because they set their expectations and the bar so high that they're easily, disappointed or for another reason? I think it removes accountability, right? So if, and I live in L.A. So I live in West L.A. Like, I run into these people all the time. Like, I literally run into people who on a Monday evening are like, I went to this retreat this weekend. It changed my life. I'm like, really. Really? You've been out for all of 36 hours. Tell me how this changed your life. But like they're very sincere. Like, they really mean it. And then of course, they go on and

behave the exact same way they've behaved for the last three years. And I think it's a problem because if you give people kind of this placebo transformation, right, if you convince people that they are constantly transforming when they're actually not, then you actually remove the responsibility for them to actually do anything different. Right? Because if you go to them, you're like, hey, you know this behavior that you keep messing up. You should probably stop doing it. And they're like, no, I just had this, you should have seen me last weekend. But like my new shaman has this new meditation practice. I'm a completely different person now. It's like, okay, right? In a weird way, like the pursuit of personal growth can be another form of avoidance of personal growth. Yeah, I heard you

recently talk about this unsolved. I think the line you said was insight is the smart person's favorite form of procrastination. Yes. And sometimes I say I also say research or learning more as a smart person's favorite form of procrastination. It's tricky. And it's like one of the things I try to remind my audience all the time is that for you to actually change, right, for a human to actually be different than they were before, it requires you to do one of two things. It requires you to behave in ways that are new and uncomfortable, which is not fun. And we resist that. Or it requires you. to let go of beliefs and perceptions you had about yourself, which is also not fun because

that's a form of grief, right? You're losing something. You're losing a piece of your life or you're losing an assumption you had about yourself. There's a sadness that comes along with that, sometimes an anger or guilt that comes along with that. That's also not fun. So by definition, change requires either destruction of former behavior or former identity. Both of those things suck. So change, like you should not be, anything that quote unquote changes your life, like you should not be smiling about it. If you're smiling about it, it probably didn't really change your life.

Well, think about seals who go through buds. One of their favorite sayings is embrace the suck. And I went to the Naval Academy. For that whole first plea year, what they're really trying to do is to change your complete belief in behavioral system. And it totally sucks. Yes. In fact, all four years in some ways really sucks because they're trying to mind-warp you

in a completely different way. So that's when I think of what change is really about. And it is extremely uncomfortable. And to me, when you're sitting in that discomfort, that's when you know that you're actually doing it. The problem is most people never reached that point. And look, there are, for example, let's say my wedding. My wedding was an amazing day. It was like one of the best days of my life. Yes, I think objectively, my wedding changed my life. But it's interesting because it's not just like joy and parties. It's the whole process of getting engaged, getting married,

making that commitment, figuring out if she's the one. That was a messy anxiety. ridden process, right, that also had stretches of self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy, sometimes questioning of, am I doing the right thing? But then, of course, you end up with this joyous day and it's amazing and everything. So, like, I think what people miss is that they only see that peak experience. They see that one moment at the end where everything's amazing. And they just want to recreate that over and over again. Whereas, like, what they don't realize is that what allows that peak experience to happen is this elongated period of struggle, questioning, doubt, frustration that enables the peak experience to emerge.

And I think a lot of what the self-help industry does is it markets that peak experience without that struggle, that period of struggle and doubt and frustration. I really agree with you here. One of the things that I often talk about is this concept that I picked up in the military called transition points. And as I experienced when I served, I saw the most mishaps, whether that was people getting injured, losing their life, bad things happening during the transition points, which I describe is there are these long periods that you're training or you're on the way to a mission or on your way back from a mission where you're not in that peak moment where you're hyper-concentrating

and everything else. And you tend to let your guard down. Other things happen. And we don't pay attention to them as much. Yet I think most of our change happens in micro choices, micro changes that we make in those transition points. And to me, it's having this awareness or this intentionality that you're trying to make better micro choices along the way during that period that lead you to that lead you to that

peak experience rather than making poor ones. I agree. One of the things, Mark, I saw is you talk a lot about personality, adaptations, behavior, value systems, and you talk about them almost as distinct operating systems. Is there a layer in those operating systems people misunderstand the most? It's a great question. I think the biggest error is that people conflate all of those operating systems. Yes, absolutely. Assume they're all the same thing, that it's your personality and your values and your identity, these are all the same things.

I like to kind of divide them up into three layers. And the bottom and most foundational layer is, in the psychological research, is what's referred to as personality. And personality is, it's largely fixed. It's largely determined. Like, you don't really get to shape it or consciously alter it. By the time you hit puberty, whoever you are is kind of who you are.

And it's interesting because, first of all, I think a lot of people don't even recognize that there are aspects of our personalities that are fairly fixed and immovable over a long period of time. But secondarily, like, the goal with personality is simply to understand yourself and then accept yourself, right? If you are, I think what I see a lot of people do is they try to take traits that are to a large extent innate in who they are. And then they think they should be able to change them. Right.

It's like introverts who think that they should be able to be extroverted. And like highly spontaneous people who feel like they should be able to plan everything perfectly. And it's when you look at the psychological research, like it just shows time and time again that no, you're not really going to be able to. shift some of these things. And so I think simply being educated on what is changeable and what's not within yourself is absolutely crucial. And then the things that are not really changeable, learning to accept them and owning them, because then you, it's all of our personality traits evolve for a reason. They're highly adaptable in some situations and like poorly adaptable in others. So if you're like naturally an extremely organized person and you love order and systems and protocol and everything,

like you should probably not be in a really unpredictable profession. It's going to drive you crazy. You're just going to feel like you're like banging your head against the wall all the time. But if you put yourself in a profession like finance or accounting or something like that where you're rewarded for that personality trait, you're going to thrive. You're going to do an amazing job. So this is true in kind of all of our areas of life. It's true in our relationships. It's true in our interests and skills and everything. The kind of the second layer, is the adaptation layer. And this is essentially like how we mediate between our personality traits, kind of our fixed traits and our environment. Right. So to help people understand this,

I'll use kind of a crude example. Let's say you're short, but you're in an environment where you have to play basketball all the time, right? What's an adaptation for that? Well, an adaptation could be that you learn how to shoot three pointers because it's okay. I'm never going to be good close to the basket because of my height. So let me figure out how to play out on the perimeter. I'll be much more successful. That skill set becomes your adaptation to your environment. The truth is that we're doing this all the time and everything we do. Maybe I'm highly introverted. I'm in an environment where I need to be social all the time. Let me find an adaptation that allows me to handle this a little bit more easily. Or I'm somebody who's very creative and spontaneous. I'm in an environment that

reward certain skills and behaviors. Let me develop a skill set that can help me adapt to this environment. The funny thing is those adaptations, those adaptations end up becoming how we define ourselves. Right. So it's developing those skills, habits, and mental habits as well. attitudes, assumptions, those things end up getting clustered, and we call those our identity. And the interesting thing about our identity is that we protect it emotionally. So if I develop an adaptation, which is, I'll give you an example for my personal life. So I'm naturally introverted, a little bit socially anxious, but I've ended up in a lot of situations in my life where I'm like, I have to be in front of people all the time. And so one of my adaptations is humor. I use humor,

to diffuse my own discomfort and anxiety. And if I can get people to laugh, it makes me feel a little bit more comfortable, right? That humor eventually becomes part of my identity. So I'm like, I'm a funny guy, right? Like I walk around. This is, it's just something I believe about myself. And it's something, because it's something I believe about myself,

it's something I try to bring out even more and get better at. Now, if somebody comes along and I make a joke and they're like, wow, you're really not funny. because it's an adaptation, it's part of my identity, I will have an emotional reaction to that. I will protect my adaptation emotionally and I will be like, wow, this guy's such a dick. I don't want to hang out with this guy. Maybe I'll try to insult him back. Whereas if somebody threatens something that is not an adaptation to you, you don't really care and you're willing to let it go. So it's people, the emotions and the behaviors are downstream from our identity.

Our identity is ultimately just an adaptation of our personality to the environment. And what's interesting is that people spend so much time either trying to change their personality, which can't be changed, or trying to change their adaptations, which is really hard because essentially you're trying to either change a behavioral habit or you're trying to change a belief about yourself, which both of those things, as we discussed, is like not fun and not easy, when actually the easiest thing to change out of all this is to just change your environment. If you put yourself in a different environment where different adaptations become useful, then your adaptations will naturally start to shift. And your military example is a perfect

example of this, right? And you probably saw this with tons of guys that you were in the service with. They come from all sorts of backgrounds. Maybe they were like getting in all sorts of trouble in school or grew up in a rough neighborhood or whatever. And then suddenly you put them in boot camp and it's like they straighten the fuck up because they're in a new environment. And it's like all of their old adaptations. Like it does not fly in this new environment. And so strangely, the environment is actually the easiest lever to change your life. I can really resonate with that.

I spent most of my career in very large companies like Dellen Lowe's as an executive, and I am like you. I am very much an introvert. I have very much social anxiety, and so I found myself going to work for years and years trying to become an extrovert. And I would get home, and I would be so freaking physically exhausted. And until I read Susan Cain's book really didn't understand why. And along the way, I became quite numb. And looking back, I figured it out. It was trying to do so many adaptations that I ended up wearing a mask really around who I was.

But when I switched that environment and took myself out of that constant having to perform the entire time I was at work, which was a shit ton of hours, my life got so much better. and I was able to, I think the strong parts of my personality started to reemerge and I felt more like myself. I think that feeling of being yourself is finding an alignment between those layers, right? It's like when your personality, kind of your natural proclivities are lined up with your behavior and your identity, and that's lined up with your environment. Like when all those things are in tune, you feel, I think that that is the feeling of authenticity. And I think that's like where people, it's also where people thrive. And I think what you're describing, right, is having to adopt adaptations that are contrary to your natural tendencies, you end up feeling either a little bit fake or just exhausted. Or like you said, numbing, right? Like I, the way that I managed my social anxiety and introversion for years was just getting drunk. And that worked for a while. But at a certain point, it's like, that's, that's, that's, I'm not. not working anymore and or at least it's not a sustainable adaptation. I think it's one of the most useful things people can do. And it's funny too because I think a lot of people, they feel a little bit

let down when they hear this, this advice, which is just put yourself in an environment that's like more catered to your natural strengths. It seems obvious. It's not very sexy. Again, I think people are enamored with this idea of like personal transformation when it's really like, yeah, just put yourself in a different room that makes everything easier. And it's, you don't have to work. You don't have to try to change all this stuff. Well, what you're saying, it's absolutely true because the more I was doing these adaptations, the more I was masking the superpowers that I had. And I was not using my inherent talents that were right there in front of me because, I was so preoccupied with trying to fix myself to fit the environment I was in. And I'll tell you,

that's one of the things that brings me so much more satisfaction today is I've actually rediscovered them and get to deploy them because I've now reorganized my whole life. So it's on my terms instead of making someone else rich. I've switched it to now I work for myself. Totally. Mark, one of the things I have studied a lot is motivation. And I think a lot of people are convinced that lasting change is a motivation problem. And I've come to fundamentally believe that although motivation is part of it, I think it's more systems problem and mechanistic.

Does that resonate at all with you? I think so. I think kind of the popular notion of getting motivated is the wrong question. and ask. It's if you're trying to motivate, it's like willpower, right? It's like if you're even having to ask about how to get motivated, then you're probably, it's probably not, it's not even the right question. You're like, you need to back up and be like, because in my opinion, if you're aligned with your values, if you're doing something that feels, that seems important to you, and you're in an environment that is, that you can thrive in, motivation should happen on.

its own. It shouldn't be something that you have to summon or go look for. I was hoping you might be able to tell us a little bit about your new application that you felt. Yeah. So speaking of starting companies and working for yourself. So last year I started an AI. So last year I created an AI app that basically helps people talk through their problems. And the reason I made this is because I noticed so many people in my day-to-day life were going to chat GPT for life advice. And the problem with chat GPT is it kind of just tells you what you want to hear. And I did some research and I discovered that over 100 million people are using chat GPT for life advice. And it's not designed for it.

It's not trained for it. It's a huge problem. So I went and I found a co-founder who's been building AI products for the last 10 years. And we really tried to build something that really challenges people to be better, can question their assumptions, can point out blind spots, can and really just be a sounding board. for whatever they're going through in life. So the app's called Purpose. People can check it out. It's at purpose.

There's a free trial. But it's been interesting because, like you said at the top of the show, most of my career, I've been a writer. More recently, I would say, I've been kind of just across media, right? Podcast videos, newsletters.

This was my first foray into the tech world. And it's given me a lot of respect for just like what those people go through. I can't tell you how many times we're like we were working on this product and there'd be like a bug or an issue or something and I would like, I would tell the team, I'm like, oh, we should just change this. And they're like, okay, cool. We can have a, we can have a new build done in two weeks. And in my head coming from like writing and media, I'm like, can't you just delete it? Like, oh my God, this is so hard. So it's been interesting.

your benefit, that is my entire background. So I was the CIO of one of those companies I told you about. And when people who don't understand these large companies, they can't comprehend what an IT budget that's around a billion and a half looks like from a project perspective, because we would have literally five, six, seven hundred projects running at the exact same time. So there, but I have that same frustration that you experienced, especially from the customers that we were trying to serve, who were like, why is it taking you so long to fix these things? Which then I understand all the spaghetti architecture

that a company like Lowe's has developed in 60 plus years that you have to contend with as well as you're breaking things along the way. I've become very accustomed to the term tech debt, which I'm sure. That's exactly. The story of your life for a long time. Mark, I want to talk to you about Robert McNamara for a second. Because as I was reading your substack, it really fascinated me that we independently landed on him, but for very different reasons. And I'll let you expand on this, but you use them to show what happens when our models become disconnected from reality.

I use them in my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, to show what happens when organizations optimize what they can measure and lose sight of the humans inside. the systems that make companies what they are. It made me wonder if we're actually exposing different expressions of the same problem. It sounds like we are. So that piece from the substack is called white intellectuals are fucking idiots. And it's true. A classic spicy title for me. But the whole point of that piece is that every, there's this classic saying that is the map is not the territory, right? And I think you can adapt that to say that our mental models are not reality. They are, we aim to make them as accurate reflections of reality as possible, but no model is perfect. There's another saying that says that no model is perfect, some models are useful.

And I use McNamara as an example of he was brought into the Department of Defense during the Vietnam War to modernize and revolutionize the defense industry and the military. and really build everything around metrics and a production line approach to how the military was run. And of course, he had spreadsheets and dashboards and was tracking all the numbers on everything. And the fascinating thing was that he,

all the numbers were coming back from Vietnam saying that we were winning. It's like they had far more casualties than we did. They were spending more munitions than we were. They had fewer supply lines than we did. It was just like everything came back showing that we were winning. the war and then obviously, as we know now, we were not winning the war. And the point I made in the

piece was that the thing, it turned out, the things that you can't measure ended up being far more important in the Vietnam War than the things you could measure, which is, for one, the North Vietnamese willingness to die is something you cannot measure, but it turned out to be much more important than what you could. And I kind of used him as a cautionary tale of there's a we all have a bias towards legibility which is that we all have a bias towards things that we can see that we can count that we can measure and because it's easy to measure and track those things we assume that they must be it's easy to convince ourselves that that they are much more important than the things that we can't count or measure but i would argue that the most important things are the things that you cannot count or measure and it's And as a result, you get a lot of situations where people's mental models don't match up to reality. And then the smartest people end up looking like idiots. I listened to the interview you did on Modern Wisdom and you guys were talking about significance.

And it got me thinking about I've been exploring this idea, whether people defend their beliefs, not simply because they're right, but because those beliefs protect their sense of significance and belonging. Do you think for a lot of people, that's part of why change feels so threatening for them? I do. Coming back to the adaptation thing, let's say you develop a skill as an adaptation. And that skill is very difficult and it like changed. It really saved your life in a lot of ways. That is going to, that's going to give you a lot of meaning and significance in your life.

And so you're going to feel extremely attached to that. I'll give you a really practical example of this. My wife grew up very poor in Brazil and we're talking, leaky roof, didn't have a phone until she was a teenager poor. And she, as an adaptation, she developed an incredible ability to plan to work really hard, become very disciplined. And she did extremely well academically. She got full scholarships in the college, and got herself out of poverty, got a good job, and was extremely frugal with money. So she developed this adaptation quite literally saved her life.

And she got into adulthood and was in a completely different place than where she grew up. But what's interesting is that adaptation, which was this kind of constant paranoia and fear around money and this almost neurotic need to plan everything, it started to hold her back, right? because once you reach a certain place of security and comfort, you don't need the plan for the worst case scenario every single day, and you don't need to count pennies at the end of every single week.

But she was still doing this, right? So she felt like it started to hold her back, but she didn't want to let it go because it was so important to her, and she was so proud of her ability to do it, and it meant so much to her that she resisted it for years, and she still struggles through it quite frequently. That's what I mean by our adaptations become our identity. And the more useful, the more embedded those adaptations are, the more we protect them and the more we hold on to them.

And it can be difficult because as life changes, our environment changes, the adaptations that used to serve us can start to hurt us. And if those adaptations are extremely meaningful to us, then we're not going to want to let them go. And so it is, and this kind of comes full circle to the question you asked about how my views have changed on the subtle art. I think in the subtle art, I really espoused meaning and values as just an unqualified good thing. Whereas I think today I realize that it's a little bit more nuanced than that, sometimes you can find a lot of meaning and value in something that's not good for you anymore, that it's an adaptation that's not helping you anymore and that you would actually be better off figuring out how to let it go.

Mark, one of the essays that I wrote, and you'll have to let me know if my memory is correct, Your father gave you some incredible advice about becoming the goose instead of fighting over the golden eggs. I have it correct. Looking back, how much of your career has been about becoming the goose? For listeners, I've often said in interviews that I think the best piece of advice I ever got was from my dad. Early in my career, I was a struggling blogger. I had a couple online businesses that weren't making any money. And I remember I wrote a piece that I was very proud of. And then a week later, a much larger person in my industry essentially just plagiarized what I wrote and passed it off as his own and got a lot of attention and respect for it. Been there.

Been there. And I remember I was just absolutely crushed and just so frustrated. And I called my dad, who's a successful business owner, and I told him about it. And I remember he just started laughing. And he was just like, he said exactly what you just said. He's like, oh, man, been there. But I remember he told me it, he said, Mark, there's kind of two ways to make it in the world. There's, you can either spend your whole life looking for golden eggs and getting good at finding and accumulating golden eggs. Or you can just figure out how to be a goose that lays golden eggs.

and if you figure out how to be the goose, then you'll never worry if somebody comes and takes one of your eggs from you. And what that taught me is that ultimately, if you're able to really innovate and find some unique piece of value, if you develop the skill of finding unique value to give to the world,

then you really won't worry about those people in the long run and you won't have that scarcity mindset or that kind of possesses. And I really try to live by that. I really try to push myself to do things differently or look at things differently or try to like be unique in some way. And not because I'm like paranoid that people are going to come take my golden eggs. But it's just it just seems like the better way to live from a like a mental health and a well-being perspective. Amen to that. Mark, very discoverable person. but if a listener wants to go to the epicenter to find out everything you're about,

is the best place for them to go your personal website or somewhere else? I'm literally everywhere. Any platform, just look for Mark Manson. Go to markmanson.net. My books are probably everywhere. So, yeah, just Google me. And then check out the app. It's at purpose.

Dot app. Let me know what you think about it. I can't keep your books in my house. Every time they're there, one of my kids finds them and takes them to read, and I never get back. Thank you so much for doing this. It was really an honor to have you on the show. Thanks, John.

I hope today's conversation with Mark Manson gave you something to think about. For me, one of the biggest takeaways was this. Sometimes the thing keeping us stuck isn't that we need more information. It's that we're holding onto an identity, a habit, or an environment that no longer fits who were becoming. And Mark made another point that I really loved. He talked about the difference between chasing the golden eggs and becoming the goose that lays them. In other words, instead of constantly trying to protect what you've already built, focus on becoming the person who can keep creating something valuable. That's a very different way of thinking about growth.

If something from today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me a message on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Substack, or share this episode with someone who might need to hear it. And if you haven't already, make sure you're following Passion Struck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or a YouTube channel so you don't miss what's coming next. Because in our next episode, I'm joined by number one New York Times best-selling author, Dr. David Perlmutter, whose new book Brain Defenders explores something I found absolutely fascinating, the immune system inside your brain. David explains how these cells called microglia can either protect your brain or become destructive and how the environments we create through our sleep, exercise, diet metabolism, and even

our relationships can influence which direction they take. And here's the question I want you to carry with you into that conversation. What if the choices you're making today aren't just affecting how you feel tomorrow, but helping you determine the future of your brain? I think you're going to want to hear this one. We're going to call those the microglia cells. And they are very sensitive to metabolism. When our metabolism is doing what it should do, keeping our blood sugar in check, our weight in check, our blood pressure where it needs to be, reducing inflammation, then these brain immune cells are supportive.

They're nurturing our synapses. They're nurturing the blood-brain barrier. They're doing their best to keep our neurons functional and firing appropriately. But they can shift on us. They can turn their back to become what I call in the book, the evil twin. Same cell. It can shift when they are challenged by inflammation or metabolism issues in the body and now they are destructive. Until then, remember, you don't have to become someone else to change your life. Sometimes you need to understand what's shaping you, decide what no longer

serves you, and have the courage to choose differently. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-strap.