SOLVED with Mark Manson - 5 Ways to Be Self-Disciplined Without Making Yourself Miserable

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

We often think self-discipline requires massive action and a lot of pain and sacrifice—but the reality is a lot more boring. Today, we tackle some common misconceptions about self-discipline, arguing that real change comes from setting up your environment for success, not grinding through endless struggle. We explore the hidden dangers of romanticizing pain and why true self-discipline is more about boring consistency than epic feats of endurance. Hopefully, this episode challenges you to rethink how you approach your goals and habits. If you're ready to stop punishing yourself and start seeing real, lasting change, you won’t want to miss this. Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help you be a less awful person:https://markmanson.net/breakthrough Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose. That is purpose. Dot app. Drew, it's taking so much willpower to be here right now. That's it. Do you know how many amazing video games there are on my PlayStation at home?

I don't. Come on to hang out with me isn't enough? I don't be Elven Ring or Zelda or? Yeah, you're fine. You're fine. It's okay, though. I'm like, I'm disciplined. I'm an adult.

I'm disciplined. I'm here. You know what I've discovered? So this is my most recent self-disciplined discovery. And it relates to this podcast. It relates to podcasts in general. So I, for months and months and months, I had like all this like nagging housework that needed to be done.

Like, you own a home. You know how it goes. Like fucking gate latch breaks and blinds need to be replaced. and screen is fucked up. Like all these little things that I kept putting off. And I made a rule for myself, which is I can't listen to podcasts unless I'm doing housework.

Oh. And magically within like two weeks, all the house shit got done. Wow. Okay. So there you go. There's a hack for you kids at home. Pair is something you'd like and you don't like

and like put them together and voila. I like that. All right. In the show. You're welcome. Device. That's it. I'm going back to Eldon Ring.

Well, no, we got, I wanted to do this one because, you've written about this before. You've written about self-discipline. But there's still, there's always this, this idea out there that we have to, self-discipline, discipline has to be really hard. You know, we need to like punish ourselves in a way. It's difficult. We see all these people. We see David Goggins out there, you know, on Christmas morning at 5 a.m.

Running. And, oh, that's what self-discipline is. And it's just, it's not that. That's what psychotic discipline is. Yes. Yes. I love David Gagins, but yeah, he's psycho. Shout out David Gaghanz.

God bless him. You know, this is the funny thing is I think self-discipline is difficult, but like it doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be hard or painful. I've actually found that discipline tends to actually be boring. It's almost like making something painful feel, at least it's something. Like people would rather something be painful than boring. So they just like convince themselves that they need to do something like they need to overdo it and do something really painful. But the truth is is if something's painful, it's not going to be sustainable.

And you're going to give up, you know, within a few days. For sure. In most cases. Yeah. Cool. I have like five things here. They're a little bit counterintuitive. Not really so much the hacks or the tricks to how to be more self-discipline or anything like that.

But kind of the ideas that we have about self-discipline and where we're. we might be wrong about those. I want to go through those. Okay. And we can kind of pick them apart, okay? Cool. I was hoping for hacks, but, you know. Well, we'll get into that.

We'll get into that. You are not known as a very, I'm not a hacky guy. A hacky guy. So we're going to keep on brand with this. If you want the correct iPhone app, you know, go listen to somebody else. I never understood that. Anyway, anyway, I digress.

This first one, though, self-discipline is not the same as willpower. What do you mean? that. So this is actually super, super important. And this is like, it's foundational for sure. This is foundational. If you look at all the research on discipline and behavior change and people who stick with new habits or new behaviors, willpower and self-discipline are different things. And I think most people assume they're the same thing. Willpower is your short-term emotional energy that you leverage to do something that is difficult or unpleasant or new or challenging, right? So it's like, you want to start a new gym habit. You don't really want to get

off the couch, but you know you should do it. And so it's like, it's that energy that you use to force yourself into doing something that you kind of don't already want to do or you don't have the momentum to already do. Because that's how you start, I think people just assume that that's how it always is. But the truth is, is that it shouldn't always feel like that. Like willpower is limited. you run out of it. You get like a willpower fatigue after a certain amount of time. And so predictably, as most people listening to this have probably experienced, you give up. You get like five days in or a weekend or two weeks in and you're just tired.

You're like, I can't do this anymore. And you give up and you go back to your old behaviors and you go back to your old tendencies. So willpower is a, it's a short-term fix. It's like if you are three months into a streak, and you don't want to lose the streak, you summon the willpower to, like, get you through that next day to keep the streak going. You never depend on willpower for behavior change or have a change overall in general. Ultimately, what self-discipline relies upon is you have to find a way to make things

feel easier, find a way to make them feel fun, or manipulate your environment in such a way and that the behavior ends up being inevitable. So if it feels hard, you're doing it wrong. Right. Yeah. And I think when people hear this one, sometimes they think that, oh, we shouldn't pay attention to willpower at all. That's not what you're saying. Yeah.

It needs it. You need it in certain situations. It's a short-term tool, and you will definitely need it, I think, early on. Any new or difficult behavior, like, you're probably going to need it early on, but you can't rely on it long-term. What do you think, though, too, about I think you need to be very conscious with your willpower, especially early on that too. And instead of just like, okay, I just, the willpower to get me up off the couch. Yeah. Right.

There's that. But then there's also the willpower to let me set up my environment while I have this willpower. Yes. Set up my environment in a way that's going to give me more success. I think that's where we often misplace our willpower. Absolutely. And we try to use it. We try to overuse it.

It's like the difference between having all the junk food in your fridge. and try and have the willpower to not eat it every single day for days and days and days, that's inevitably going to fail, whereas you should instead use the willpower at the grocery store and not buy it in the first place because then if it's not in the fridge, you don't need to use the willpower every single day to not eat it, right? So it's finding those little leverage points that you just described is 100% true. Right. So using the willpower kind of in the one-time situations rather than repeated situations.

And this is the funny thing about discipline or, or being disciplined in an area of your life, it's usually not about the thing you wanna do. Like if you wanna create an exercise habit, most people assume, okay, well the effort, all my effort should go into, I need to get up and go to the gym three times a week. When actually, most of your efforts should go into,

okay, what activities are gonna be fun? Do I have friends who are doing anything, like who are willing to do something with me? What sort of like goals and metrics can I set for myself that will make this more interesting. You know, is there a way I can, I can commit to something in advance, you know, sign up for a class or something and commit to X number of sessions to make sure I go in the future?

Like, those are the things that you should actually be thinking about. Like, think about the things that are going to make the thing easy, not put all your focus on just doing the thing as much as possible. Right. Yeah. If that's the closest to a hack, I think we're going to get. Yeah. It really is just setting up your hand.

That is the hack. And this is where like, so I mean, it's, we're kind of teasing and making fun of, like, I always think of like the, you know, like the kind of the Tim Ferriss stuff or the Huberman stuff. Like those guys, like, they love to get into the nitty gritty of like, okay, like, what kind of pen do you use? And like, what's your favorite to do list app, you know? And like, I hear that stuff and I'm just like, who cares? But I think what they're getting at is they're trying to find how other people have manipulated their environment. and what they've used. You know, it's like, because it's ultimately, like, there are a lot of options for apps

on a phone or, you know, for different workout equipment or whatever. And it's like if somebody likes one over another, you should go with the one you like because that's going to make it easier to do. Like if there's a certain type of, if there's a certain piece of software that's more enjoyable to program in, you should use that piece of software because the fact you enjoy it more It's going to be less friction. It's going to be easier to do it more often. You're going to stick to your goals.

You're going to be more productive. So there is something to it. But it's like those are, in my opinion, those are, those are the marginal adjustments. They're not the thing. It's like, I think where people get mixed up is they, they, you know, they're like, oh, if I buy this pin, then I'll like finally sit down and write the book that I've wanted to write the last five years. And it's like, no, the pin's not going to make you write the book.

The pen will just make it slightly. more enjoyable. Yeah. Yeah. I think so many people use the apps and the hacks and the tricks and whatever to cover up the underlying problem too. And I think that's the risk. I think you're right. I think what they're trying to do is really say, hey, you know, this is where you can leverage your environment in a way. But what it ends up doing for a lot of people is, oh, this is going to fix my procrastination problem or whatever it is. Right. It becomes it becomes another form of avoidance, right? Where it's like, well, I can't start yet because I don't have the perfect apps, you know, so I need to do more research on the perfect apps. Then I can start.

And it's like, no, you're just, it's just a more complex form of procrastination. No, for sure, for sure. Okay, this next one, this is, this is a good one and hits pretty close to home. Self-discipline does not involve shaming yourself. This is one I really had to come to terms with the last couple of years, I think, yeah. It doesn't have to. I mean, it sure can. Yeah. It sure can. I think there's a tendency. I'm curious to hear what your experience is with this. I've never struggled with this side of it.

I tend to be good at not shaming myself for things. But like we have a tendency in general to associate moral judgments with discipline for better or worse. I think it's logical that we tend to see very disciplined people as good people. There's something really admirable or respectable about them. But I think we run into trouble if we attach too much moral judgment on people who fail to be disciplined because we all have areas of our life that we're like very, we struggle with compulsion, addiction, obsession, bad habits. Maybe we grew up in an environment with like, you know, terrible options around us. And so, you know, life's very complicated. And so I think there's a tendency to like associate moral failures with somebody who can't control their weight or somebody who can't get.

work done on time or somebody who shows up late for stuff. It's it doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad person. It's just like this happens to be the area that you are struggling with managing your own behavior. So the danger is that when you make those moral judgments about yourself, again, it's one of those, it's like willpower. It's a short term thing. Like you feel really bad in the moment. And so that can be very motivating in the short term, but you're basically training your brain to just feel bad about yourself all the time. And so in the long run, you just develop this identity of never feeling good enough for anything. Does that map to experience?

Yeah, no, 100% it is. Yeah. And just over the last few years where I've been much more conscious about my health. And early on in that process, it very much was, oh, God damn it. I ate that dessert. I missed that workout. We'll get to this here in a minute. But there's kind of a self-correcting way that you can handle that.

But what happens is if you beat yourself up, that's just, it's another form of emotional drag. Yeah. And really is a self-reinforcing downward spiral because, yeah, if you eat that piece of cake, now you think, well, I'm just a piece of shit fat kid. And so why bother with a self-discipline in the first place? Yeah. And you can go down that spiral very, very, very quickly or start missing. I missed two workouts.

Well, I'm just a lazy fuck, so I'm just going to stay on the couch anyway. Yeah. And I think that that's a real dangerous spot to be in if you're, if you're not. not very aware of it and you're more, I don't know, if you're just, me, you know, like I've talked about, I'm a perfectionist. Yeah. That doesn't help. Yeah. But there is a lot of like moral, I wage a lot of moral judgments on myself. And I've gotten way better at that, though. And if I would have stuck with that, there's just no way, if I would have stuck with that mindset, there's just no way I would have been able to stick with anything. It's funny because I've always been on the opposite of the spectrum.

And it's also been a problem. Yeah. Which is that I would have. eat the cake and I wouldn't judge myself. I'd be like, I kind of deserve cake today. And I was very good at justifying bad behavior and not judging myself for it. And so it created the opposite problem of just like, I always deserve some cake. So I kept eating cake. I think this is one of those things. There's like a real fine balance between judgment and self-forgiveness, self-judgment

and self-forgiveness. Let's put it this way. I think the optimal amount of judgment is not zero. I think there is some judgment is certainly healthy. Yes. What strikes me as more important is how you package the judgment and how you respond to the judgment. So I think to me, like what a healthy form of self-judgment would look like is like, hey, I fucked up. I ate that cake.

You know, I'm trying to lose weight. I've got these goals. I fucked up. I shouldn't have done that. And I'm a little bit disappointed that I did that. but that's okay. I'm going to use this disappointment and remember the next time I'm in this situation to not do this. I'm going to remember how I felt in this moment.

To me, that's kind of like a healthy, that's a healthy form of judgment and a healthy reaction to the judgment. It's not, you're judging that the, first of all, you're judging the behavior and not yourself as a person. And second of all, you're leveraging the feelings of disappointment and anger and embarrassment to correct future. actions. I think the unhealthy version of that is, wow, I just ate a piece of cake. I'm such a piece of shit. I never stick to my goals. I never get it right. I never, oh my God, like, why even try in the first place? And that's like, that's when you go to a really dark place, I think. Yeah. That self-discipline is about self-correction, not perfection. Yeah. Right. I think so many times we get, we think that self-discipline, what it means is perfection.

Yeah. We eat the perfect diet. We hit the workout every time. We do exactly what we're going to say every time. That's not at all what it is. Actually, self-discipline, the definition is contained in the word itself. That discipline is when you discipline someone, you correct their behavior. Right. It's a self-correction. So self-discipline is self-correction.

Yeah. So it's not about perfection. It's about correcting when you do get off, right? I just had a weird thought. Go on. About Goggins. So, and let me preface this by saying, like, I fucking love David Goggins. Like, there's, he's just, he's like the mascot.

Like, I, I want to make him like the mascot of our industry. But, but I would argue he's not healthy. Like, in terms of, like, he's not optimal, right? Like, he's talked about, like, his knees are all fucked up. His bones are fucked up. Like, he's got all sorts of joint issues. He's had, like, tons of surgeries. I believe he's had lots of relationship and marriage problem.

Like, he's clearly. not a balanced guy, which is fine, like, you know, who is balanced. Right. But I'm going to use him as an example of how, like, that inaccurate definition of discipline is actually not discipline, right? Like, discipline is what you just said. It's like correcting the suboptimal things in our lives to make our lives better. Whereas just like developing the ability to put yourself through painful shit. over and over and over again, by your definition, that's technically not discipline. You could argue that that's another form of compulsion or another form of being out of control.

Right. Like, I don't know Goggins, but he strikes me as somebody who compulsively exercises. Like, I don't think he knows how to stop. Right. Or at least it's strike from the outside of he strikes me as somebody who doesn't know how to stop. And so I think anything in your life, whether it's, you know, know, eating cake or smoking crack or exercising or working or, you know, partying, sex, drugs, whatever, if you feel like you can't stop and you have all these narratives around stopping

that like you're a piece of shit if you don't do it and you're a failure and oh my God, you'll never amount to anything, like that's not healthy. It's just like we're used to compulsive behavior is being like very clearly and obviously unhealthy. Right. Whereas if you replace it with something that on the surface is very healthy and admirable, which is like running ultra marathons and fucking like doing insane workouts every day. I think it kind of slips by people that like that actually isn't discipline either, even though maybe up from the outside it looks like it is.

Well, is it, I mean, is self-discipline just trading addictions? One addiction for a better addiction? We've talked about this before. a rich role we had on. Is that what it is? Are you leveraging? Because I think you're right. I think David Goggins is a compulsive guy just personality-wise. Sure. He's talked before he was overweight. He had issues with food and alcohol and everything like that. And then he turned his compulsion into becoming a Navy SEAL and an ultra marathon runner. Is that what self-discipline is? Is it leveraging your addictive tendencies? Your addictive tendencies? Yeah. Yeah. Like finding one

finding healthier outlets. I honestly, I don't know. I really don't know. I do know that like I have definitely had it. I don't know if I would call myself like an alcoholic or an addict, but like I've had very addictive relationship with both food and alcohol in my life. And I, one of the most effective things I have found is replacing those compulsive behaviors with better

compulsive behaviors with healthier compulsive behaviors. So, like, I definitely don't. That was one of the first things when we had Rich on, he, like, asked me, he was like, when you stopped drinking, did you find yourself doing other things compulsively? And I was like, yeah. Yeah, I definitely did. Sure. I started working more.

I started exercising more. Start running a ton. Like, things, it definitely changed. So, I don't know. Like, maybe that maybe, maybe different people have kind of a set point of addictive energy in our lives. And if your set point is extremely high, you have to be very, very careful, like, where you direct that, that energy. Because wherever you direct it, you're probably going to have very compulsive tendencies, where some people have, like, a very low addictive set point,

and they can be more lax about it. Okay. Okay. Well, then this next one. That's a hairbrain theory, by the way. I have no. I like it. No, I like it. I just pull that out of my ass right here. Right here. So we're not giving a fuck podcast exclusive. I could point in entertain that one. Yeah. There you go. I could entertain that one. You heard it here first, folks. This next one might, well, I don't know, I might challenge that one a little bit though, too, which is real self-discipline isn't painful. It's boring. The boring part. If it's an addiction, is it boring, you know? I don't know. That's maybe reaching a little bit. Yeah. I mean, again, I think people think, oh, there's that willpower again. We've got to

grit through this and just fucking grind. And yeah. That's not. not really self-discipline either, though. Well, I think that, so I think it's boring. This kind of comes back to is like, how do you actually change your behavior? And I would argue that you know you've changed their behavior when you don't notice you're doing it anymore. When it just, you just do it unconsciously without having to think about it, which I guess by some definitions you would call that boring. When it doesn't, when it's not a thing, like, it's just like, oh, it's 8 a.m. I, you know, I do my workout class or, you know.

I, oh, it's Saturday afternoon. I call my parents. Like it's, when it just becomes such a natural part of your reality that you don't have to think about it and you don't, it doesn't require any extra energy or anything. Yeah, then it just becomes a mundane part of your life. Right. I guess, you know, I don't know if it's not, not, I don't know if saying it's not painful is necessarily true. And I don't know if saying it's boring is like the most accurate way to describe it. But it's more like, you know you've become disciplined with something where it's like it doesn't even register on your radar as like a thing. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think early on, especially people will look at the painful part of it and say, oh, this must be super valuable maybe and kind of romanticize the pain. Yes. Where over a long period of time, the pain, like you're, I think what you're getting at, the pain actually doesn't necessarily diminish, but it just. you see it differently. Yeah. Okay, that's a really good point because the pain can be like very, the pain can be seductive.

You know, we were talking about this on a previous episode. Like, so I did CrossFit years ago, like 2017, 2018. And it was funny because I was very, I was much less experienced with exercise at the time.

And I kind of had this like romantic view of like, the harder your workout, the better it is, the better you're doing. And so I would go to this CrossFit gym And I would just put like I would literally work out so hard that I I couldn't get up off the floor afterwards And at the time, I'm like, man, I'm fucking killing it. I'm crushing it. And the truth is that it's a little bit of a red herring like it's one of those things like it feels more valuable because you sacrifice more when actually it's not It's actually not more discipline. It's not more valuable like you I was using a lot of willpower and the irony

is that those workouts exhausted me so much that it like I never developed a consistent habit. I never developed better life. So too tired for the next workout. Yeah. Or I was so tired, I would like go out and just like pig out on a massive meal, have a bunch of drinks, you know,

because I'm like, well, I had this killer workout today. Like, might as well order a second dessert, you know? Like, and that's the interesting thing too is that in a lot of the research about willpower, like willpower being finite, you know, they find that, you know, there's a relationship between like blood glucose levels and feelings of willpower. So like on a literal biological basis, it's like if your body is sapped of energy physically, you will have less mental. I mean, in everybody's experience, everybody's like, everybody knows that when you're hungry,

you make worse decisions. Or like you're, you're like less disciplined or you're, like, less disciplined or you have less willpower. So anyway. Yeah, I think that that was that was my point, though, is that the romanticizing of the, this has to be a painful, momentous thing. I want to make a big change and therefore I need to have, I need to feel that. And pain is a good way to feel that. And actually what it is is more about the boring consistency. Like the consistency, yes. I'm doing CrossFit now and we've talked about this before too. But I really, early on, it was definitely like that. It was definitely like, oh, these big workouts, I'm so exhausted. I can't go to another workout for three days.

Yeah. And I figured out very quickly that was not sustainable. So I'm reducing my weights. I usually don't do the recommended weight or the recommended intensity just because I know I need a little bit of gas in the tank for the next one. Yeah. And that's been a huge one for me too. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I think there's something that like because, and maybe this comes back to how we just romanticize the change we want in our lives itself. right. So we kind of convince ourselves, we have a tendency to convince ourselves like, oh, if I could just, you know, get a raise, everything would be so much better. If I could just buy a house, everything would be so much better. Or if I could just lose, you know, 10, 20 pounds, everything would be so much better. And so there's all this emotional investment on the outcome of the change that we want. And because there's so much emotional investment in that, we assume that the sacrifice must be proportional to that emotional investment. So it's like, okay, you know, my life's going to be so much better if I lose 20 pounds. Therefore, I've got to be ready to, like, give up so much and, like, suffer and go through the shit. When it's like, actually, if you just fucking, like, cut a few things out of your breakfast and go for a walk every day for six months, you'll probably get there. And it wasn't painful at all, and you didn't have to suffer that much. And it wasn't a huge sacrifice. But it's boring, and nobody makes YouTube videos about that. Exactly. Exactly. Nobody listens to a podcast about, you know, you know,

having one fewer pancakes and going for a walk after lunch. Right. That's just a cautionary tale. Yeah, just throwing that out there. Okay. So this last one, which I think is kind of the final boss, let me see if you agree with this, but self-discipline involves forging new identities.

And this one gets a little scary. 100%. Yeah. 100%. And it's like, and again, I think this is like, this comes back to the boring thing because it, when a new behavior doesn't even register on your radar,

as like a thing, it's because your identity is shifted and that new behavior is now part of how you see yourself. And ultimately, like, that's where you want to get. Like, if you want to, if you want to exercise regularly and be physically healthy, you have to be a person who exercises regularly. Like, it's not just enough to do the thing. You have to be the person who does things like that. And that requires shifting how you see yourself, how you think of, you think of yourself how you relate to yourself and ultimately that's going to have repercussions on how you relate with others this is why people often have the experience of when they go through a significant life change it sometimes fucks up some of their friendships because what happens is like it turns

out you know you decided to stop drinking and to do that you had to become a person who stops drinking or become a person who doesn't drink and it turns out that some of your friendships were very much based on drinking together. And so like your, and your friend, your friends have identities around I'm the type of person who drinks with my buddies. And so when you, when your identity shifts, it throws those relationships into disarray and causes a lot of tension. And in some cases, you lose, you lose the friendships and relationships. Some cases, it causes drama and people get pissed off at you. So I think this is, this is at the core of like that, that common experience of like when you change, some people don't come a lot.

along with you. And it's, and it's not because they're bad people or you did anything wrong. It's just like, you're a different person. By definition, you are a different person. You see yourself differently. You do different things. And therefore, you're not going to relate to the people in your life in the same way that you did before. Right. I think this is also an argument for why an argument, but this is why change can take so long to because when you are aiming for like an identity change, that doesn't happen overnight. No. Right. And I, I, I think, think for me anyway, that really was like, oh, okay, this is going to take a long time. This might take a year to really get into this and really, really change my mind around that.

That helped me say, that helped me kind of push through those times where I didn't want to do it. Where it's like, okay, this is an identity change. This is, I'm becoming a different person. I don't know. For whatever reason for me, I was like, okay, that made it so I wasn't so impatient all the time. Yeah. What do you think of that? Yeah.

Because you've went through identity changes. in your life, you know, like you went from, you know, a young kind of party boy, right? Sure. And that was a painful experience to go through when you changed that identity, right? I think, yeah, it's the behavior, it's very clear and obvious. It's like you're either doing the thing or you're not doing the thing. Ah, okay. Whereas the identity, it is a very gradual, long-term thing.

And there's an emotional process with that too, right? So it's like early on there's an excitement. then there's maybe a little bit of tension and stress. Maybe you backtrack a little bit or you like relapse. And also there's like a period of grief, I think, because to become a new person, you have to let go of who you used to be. Like you kind of have to let the old person die. And the same way you would grieve a friend, I think you have to grieve the former version

of yourself. And so there's a little bit of a sadness that comes with it of like, wow, I'm never gonna be that guy again. Like I feel that sometimes too, like when I think about kind of my previous identities, I definitely with the party thing, like I struggled with that a lot

because I really, really enjoyed that phase of my life. And then when I hit a point where I stopped enjoying it, I just became very sad. And it's not that I like wanted to go back to it because it's like, I didn't enjoy it anymore.

It just kind of like, it's that realization of like, I'm never going to be. be that again. And it was a great time and I really enjoyed it, but like, it's gone now. Kind of like thinking about your childhood sometimes, right? Like it's like sometimes, I don't know if you do this, but like sometimes I'll get like really nostalgic for something from my childhood. And then like I get kind of sad because I'm like, wow, I'm never going to be young again. Yeah. Yeah. Or like you go back home and it's different and you're like, oh, this isn't the same.

Yeah, yeah. It's sad. There's a sadness to it. I think though, too, it should be a slow. process though. This identity change, I don't want anybody to think that that can happen overnight. I mean, it can happen overnight, I guess. You could just decide to be somebody different. That's, I've tried to do this before, though, where I've tried to make big change in my life and do it kind of all at once and there's a big identity change around it that needs to occur. And usually what ends up happening, you know, like I've, I don't know, I've sold everything I've owned a couple of times at least and just kind of like moved and got new friends. And that's happened in my life a couple of times.

And you get a couple months into that and you're like, oh shit, I've, you know, I didn't think of all these other tradeoffs. I've made a mistake. I've made a mistake. There's certain things that I value that I didn't realize I valued and I gave that up. So I think it should be slow. Yes. I'm actually thinking about like, you know, because there's a lot of promises in our industry of like, you know, you can be a new person like, you know, after a weekend retreat or whatever. And you also run into people who claim that, right?

Like you run into people are like, oh my God, it was life changing I'm a totally new person now. I have always been very skeptical of those people. And to me,

to me that feels like another form of avoidance. Yeah. Is that like, if you have managed to delude yourself that you have become a completely different person in like 48 hours, um,

it's likely because you're like, I don't know, you're avoiding or running away from something. Like that's just my gut instant on that. Yes. I have been there. Yeah. Yeah, I have too.

The exception might be, I don't know, like psychedelics. Yeah. Like that, things can happen very, very quick with psychedelics. Even then, though, I'm not sure because I get what you're saying. I've been thinking lately, too, about the ways I've changed in the last 10, 20 years, whatever. And at the end of each one of these little thought experiments, I usually come to, I'm like, I'm not sure if anybody would notice that. Yeah. But me.

You know, it's more of an internal change. It feels like an internal change where I have more, but I feel calmer. Some people in my life who have known me for a long time. Sure. Yeah, you've calmed down quite a bit. Well, sure. That's the thing, too, when I run into these people who, like, they're like, oh, I went to this retreat and it was incredible. I'm a completely new person.

And, like, then I'll hang out with them and they'll behave in the exact same way. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. They used to behave and I'm like, oh, okay. So they feel that they're a different person, but like, ultimately their behaviors haven't changed. Right. And their values and priorities haven't changed significantly. So are you really a different person? I guess this comes back to like, you know, ultimately you are what you do repeatedly. That's how you achieve identity change you think, right?

It's not the other way around. It's like you're not here I'm going to change my identity and then all of a sudden I'm going to start doing different things. I think that's what people think psychedelics will do. It will change my identity and then I will change my behavior. You need to change your behavior first and then the identity follows. Absolutely. 100%. It's, yeah, it's, you don't just believe your way into being a new person.

That's called delusion. Right. Yeah. Like, I can believe I'm president of the United States. It's not going to make me president of the United States. I do think social validation plays a role. Like, ultimately. Ah, yeah, we didn't get into that.

We are a social species and it's like it is, we do care what, how people see us. And so, you know, again, if you're going to be a person who doesn't drink, I think it's very important to go to a bar with some people and be the person who doesn't drink, right? Like, that's a validation of the behavior with how you see yourself. Right. That's all I got, Mark. I think, yeah, I think we did that one.

Well, we were, you know, this episode itself was a paragon of discipline. rigor to we followed the outline example sitting right in front of we followed the outline we nailed the talking points we made the jokes I would say overall

it was a successful episode like and subscribe the subtle art of not getting a fuck podcast is produced by Drew Bernie it's edited by Andrew Nishamura Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer

thank you for listening and we will see you next week