SOLVED with Mark Manson - 5 Ways to Hack Your Mind For Success

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

The way you think about the world and your place in it can have a huge impact on your life. And yet, when it comes to evaluating the way we think, we’re rarely able to smell our own bullshit. So today, Drew and I break down five different mindsets you can adopt to live a more examined, successful life. This requires you to reject many of the mindless beliefs you’ve been force fed your entire life. Let’s do it. Get one month of Shopify for $1 at ⁠https://shopify.com/idgaf⁠ Use code IDGAF for 10% off your health services at ⁠https://MarekHealth.com/idgaf⁠ 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.app. That is purpose.dap. Drew, I want to be successful. I'm really trying

to get it together. You need to get it together. I just things have not been falling my way for the past 12 years at all. You know, the internet is full of a lot of hokey pieces of content talking about life hacks and mind hacks and success hacks. And, you know, most of them involve some configuration of alarm clocks and ice and bathtubs. And, yeah, they didn't really work for me. So let's actually talk about what the psychological research shows can completely hack your brain towards being more oriented towards success. So we've got five topics here.

And I want you to walk me through these and explain. how I'm finally going to be successful enough that my mom is proud of me. Okay. I'm teaching you today. Okay. All right. Let's do this. This wasn't on the job description when you applied.

This was not. I need a researcher, podcast producer, and life coach. The podcast that's saving the world, one fewer fuck at a time. It's the subtle art of not. Giving a Fuck podcast with your host Mark Manson find the pain you enjoy mm-hmm we all have a

little bit of masochism in us there's like a certain area of our lives that we become masochistic in a in a to a certain degree and I personally think that that's probably the area of our life that we're going to end up having an advantage in another way to think about it is just like what is the bowl of shit that you don't mind eating that most people do. And a lot of this is, it's personality-based. Like, you don't teach yourself to like a bull of shit that you don't actually like. Like, there are going to be some things that you just naturally enjoy doing or don't mind doing

that most people fucking hate doing or it stresses them out or freaks them out or scares the shit out of them. Find those things because that's going to be your competitive advantage. it's almost like I think when when thinking about skills or talent people again tend to

focus almost entirely on the positive like what am I good at that other people maybe aren't as good even if you're good at something there's going to be a lot of other people who are good at it but it's like what what can you stomach that most other people can

like what's the bullshit that you kind of secretly enjoy that you get like a satisfaction out of that most people don't And that's probably the secret sauce. Yeah. You know, and I think in my case, it's two things. One is just, I think the self-consciousness or the anxiety and self-doubt that comes

with writing or creating in general, I enjoy it to a certain extent. Like, I just, I really love the creative process, the actual process itself, like, not just, like, fantasizing about ideas, but, like, actually making the thing and seeing how bad it is and then trying to make it better and seeing how bad that is and then trying to make it better, like that's, that really enlivens me.

And then I think the other thing I think I'm just built for is, I don't know, I don't really mind the haters and the feet, like the bullshit, you know? Yeah, that come at me.

Like, I don't. You don't let it bother you. I mean, it affects you, but you don't let it bother you, I think. Yeah. It'll, like, ruin my lunch,

but that's about it. And then you're over by lunch. Whereas me, I'm still thinking about, like, that thing I fucked up 10 years ago. Like, so, yeah, I totally,

I get it. That's what's keeping you up on night. That's what's keeping me up at night. No, for real. Yeah. Yeah. No, I get that. I think for me, I like the, I think, I think I'd call it like the pain of learning. Yeah. For whatever reason, I've always just like, I've just, that's just one of my kind of core values is like learning. And there's a lot of like discomfort that comes with that too. You know, just that's what got me through school. I don't think I was ever actually the smartest person. I was just like always like, so like I had to figure this out. You know, I had to, I like to sit down and figure it out. Do you think your tolerance for boredom is higher than most? Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, totally. I believe that. Knowing the academic papers I've sent to you to have you read instead of me, I believe that. Yeah. Oh, God. If you get a good one of those, man, yeah.

Hell yeah. It's fucking rough, dude. I, somebody called it, I like what somebody, I heard this years ago, they called ass power. You have an ass power. You can sit your ass in a chair and, like, work through, um, just figuring shit out. And whether that's like an academic paper or like some new software or something like that,

I love figuring out like a new program, like just get in that. Like there's people who just hate that. Yeah. Or like spreadsheets. I'm good. This is, oh my God. This is. I'm with you there.

I love that kind of stuff. There was this, there was this story I heard years ago about this. It was the, the state patrol. I went to a talk for the state patrol and they had a canine unit there. Okay. And they were talking about how they train and select dogs and everything like that. So what they do is they'll, they'll, go out to a field and it's like full of just brush and, you know,

bushes and it's whatever. And they take their favorite toy and they'll throw it out there and it's hidden buried. They don't show them where it is or anything like that. And they turn them loose. And they don't select the dogs that necessarily find it the fastest. They select the dogs that don't quit, which I thought was really interesting. And when I heard that,

I was like, yeah, I'm not the fastest or smartest dog. I'm the one who won't quit until I find the ball. That's so interesting. Yeah, I love that story. So, yeah. Wow. There's like,

there's so many areas of life that, that applies to absolutely absolutely whatever that is that seeking or that i got to figure this out i got i i know there's an answer to this yeah and i have to figure it out especially when i know there's an answer to something i'm like i know this is figure outable yeah i can do it it's like that sets me off i feel like sometimes my advantage is just it's not even i like i think people think that i don't give a fuck of what other people think whereas it's more accurate to just say that i'm oblivious to what other people think like I'm just so in my own little world like I remember I was in high school and I I'm like I'm super unathletic and I went to a I went to a small school that because

there were so few kids we all had to sign up for a sport yeah so I signed up for cross country because the only alternative was football and I didn't want to get the shit knocked out of me so I signed up for cross country even though I was a terrible runner and I was so fat and slow and out of shape. I was the worst runner on the team by a large margin. And I remember we went out for the first cross-country meet.

I think it was like four or five miles or something. I had never run that far in my life. So we start to race. Everybody runs out in front of me. I'm just like trotting along. I get maybe like two miles in and I'm exhausted. I just start walking.

And I'm walking and I'm walking. I'm by myself for like 30, 40 minutes. The race that started after us, us begins and those kids start passing me and I'm just like at this point I'm like way off in the woods by myself yeah and I'm still walking it's like I remember all these like high school girls are running past me and they're like don't give up keep going and I was like go fuck yourself and I just keep walking and walking and like finally I get to the finish line after the next race had finished and and it's literally just my dad and my coach there. Yeah. And, and I'm like,

this sucks. I want to go home, whatever. And so I go to school the next week and we used to have these like announcements and they kind of announced like the sports from that weekend. And my coach gets up and he announces, first of all, nobody, nobody on my school's team placed or won anything. And like everybody knew that. Yeah. And but then the cross-country coach gets up in front of like the whole school. It was like a hundred people. The whole school. And he's like, I want to give out a ward today. And I'm like, oh, maybe somebody did finish. And he's like, he calls my name, Mark Manson. Everybody starts clapping. And I'm like, I'm like, are you like, I thought he was trolling me. I thought he was like trying to embarrass me.

And he told me it was, he said it was the most inspirational thing that he had ever seen. Because he said that half of the team quit after like two miles. Oh, yeah. And like nobody placed. And like it was just this horrendous and embarrassing showing. And I walked the entire route. And I let all the next race fast me. And but the funny thing is he was like telling me how inspirational it was.

And I remember I was sitting there like I went up and got like this like trophy or something. I remember thinking I was like it never occurred to me to even quit. Like, I never even, yeah, yeah. It didn't even, I was just like, whatever, okay, this race goes by, whatever. Like, anyway, it's obliviousness can be an advantage. Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. Focus on what you can control and ignore what you can't. I think this one, to use your phrase, people give too many fucks about the wrong things.

Right. I think. And a lot of times what that is is that we're trying to control things. We just can't control. Yeah. Right. People's feelings. People's actions, other people just in general.

I think we try to do that a lot. Those are kind of obvious ones. If you're aging, you're getting older, stuff like that, people worry about that kind of saying. Worrying about the past, you know, all these ones are pretty common. I would say, though, too, like your emotions. You can't really control your emotions,

though you can control your reaction to your emotions. I hate that term. Okay. Control your emotions. Yeah. I think it is a complete misnomer, and I think it really leads people astray. I get, I couldn't not tell you how many emails I've gotten over the years of

people saying, And how do I control my emotions? And I'm like, you can't. That it's the animal part of you. It just happens. And what you have to do is take the, like, the smart human part of you and tame the animal part of you and be like, don't shit on the carpet. Bad dog. Go to your room.

I mean, that is essentially just what self-discipline is in a nutshell is kind of like the higher order. Your neocortex, like training and subduing. your more animalistic side. But yeah, I mean, this is the classic stoic thing, right? Focus on what you can control, be at peace with what you can't. And I would throw in there most things you can't control. So beware of obsessing too much or getting too caught up and all the things that are going on outside of you that can simply be distracting or draining on you. The emotional piece is super important.

You can't control the emotion, but you can control. the response to the emotion. You can't control other people, but you can control your response to other people, right? Like, I can't control if a friend is an asshole, but I can control how I confront him. I can control the conversation I have with him around his behavior.

I can control whether I hang out with him again or not. I hate to bring this back to responsibility. It feels like we always fucking bring everything back to responsibility. But like that's where the responsibility piece comes in of like by focusing on what you can control, you are then forced to take responsibility for the things you can control. Because once you recognize the things you can control

and change, then the only excuse for not changing is that you didn't do anything. Yeah, yeah. I've noticed a lot lately, since I've talked about my sleep problems a lot. And a lot of times if I wake up in the middle of the night and I can't go back to sleep, my mind starts to turn. And a lot of emotions start coming up during that too. And it's usually like, I'm worrying about something.

and getting like real fatalistic about it. And it's like kind of, it's, it's pretty intense emotions sometimes too. I've really trained myself to be like, ah, this is this, this will pass. Yeah. This too shall pass. And that's the reaction I've chosen with that. That's helped me a lot. And I go back to sleep a little bit better.

That's, that's been part of my, uh, sleep journey this year too. Yeah. Um, just doing that whole reframe like, oh, this is a temporary thing. It's like tomorrow is not necessarily going to suck when I wake up or the, my life is not going to get any worse actually yeah this will pass I'm gonna let that you know it's funny you bring that up like one of the best thing you know as we've talked about before my wife fernanda she's struggled with sleep her whole life one of the biggest things for her was when she started meditating and what she realized it was really interesting because I think a lot of people who struggle with sleep part of it is that they

fall into that doom loop of like you know maybe you lay down you put your head on the pillow your mind starts worrying about something and then you realize your mind is worrying about something and you're like, oh God, I'm worrying about something I'm never going to sleep. And then you like, then that kicks the loop in the gear and you're like, well, now I'm worrying that I'm worrying. Oh God, now I'm worried about everything

and now I'm never going to sleep. And it becomes this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. And, you know, she's not a huge meditator, but one of the most effective things that she found was simply meditating for 10 or 15 minutes before bed because it helped her, you know, if she put her head on the pillow, that worrying thought came up,

it allowed her to just let that thought go and not get caught in that loop and just simply by not getting caught up in that loop, it like made everything else flow much easier. Yeah. So those are things you can't control necessarily. I think there's a few things that people can control that they don't though too.

Okay. Things like boundaries, that sort of thing. What you consume, like media consumption, I think people get caught up in, you know, news cycles or whatever it is, and they're like, well, I can't control all these crazy things going on in the world. Yeah, you're right.

You can't, but you can control what you consume and what you pay attention to. Can I just go on a tangent here? Oh, please. I'll allow it. So I have this weird thing where bad TV shows. I know all the platforms have analytics and they're measuring watch time and they're basing their production budgets on watchtime of previous shows. So if I start watching a Netflix show and it's bad,

I turn it off as soon as I possibly can because you don't want to reward bad content, right? It kills me when people I know are like, yeah, that show was terrible. And I'm like, yeah, I turned it off in episode one. And they're like, I finished the whole season. I'm like, stop doing that. You're promoting bad behavior. I'm like, this is particularly salient for me right now because three body problem came out recently. And it's one of my favorite sci-fi books, favorite fiction.

series ever and the show was complete garbage and everybody I know watched the whole thing and didn't like it. And I'm like, they're going to make more. This is why we don't have nice things. So anyway, don't finish bad Netflix shows. Carry on. There is a larger conversation under that. The personal responsibility around your media consumption, if you don't like the landscape, change your own behavior. And it does have an impact. I know it's small and whatever and it's individual on the individual level, but it does have an impact. And I think we all have a responsibility around that. And again, that's paying paying attention to what you can't control. The biggest thing you can't control is your attention. Yeah. In today's media environment,

I mean, I joke about the Netflix thing, but in seriousness, like the social media algorithms that the news companies rely upon, they notice your engagement, right? So it's like block them, stop following them, stop reading them, stop clicking on articles, stop watching videos. of people you don't respect or you don't like, because that simply reinforces to all the algorithms that, hey, we should show this to more people. I feel like everybody should understand that in 2024, but sometimes it seems like people don't.

Like if you hate something, the best thing you can do is block it and not engage with it. Right. I got another one for you. This is an example that a lot of people, I think, think they don't have control over it, but they do, which is who you love. I think that's more of a choice than most people think. I think it's actually almost entirely a choice.

There's that whole kind of a cliche, like, oh, you can't help who you love. You can't help you like. And actually, I think there's a lot more control over that than we think. And I first came across this idea actually in Derek Sivers's book, How to Live. And he had this whole section on. You can choose to love anybody who's around you. That is a choice you can make. In a relationship, it is.

It's a constant choice you make on who to love. But it's also just like if someone's around and you don't even like them. I think you could actually choose to like them eventually and love them. them. Because there's that emotional side that we've already talked about you can't control. But I think there's a deeper type of love that you can control that you choose. I think you can choose to empathize. Okay. And I think you can choose to take on the perspective of somebody completely openly and non-judgmentally.

If you do that in a very radical and compassionate way, is that the same thing as love? I don't know. Like, as you know, the definition of love is super murky, especially in the English language. but I agree with you that your disposition towards somebody is largely within your control. And I would even say, so to your point, those unconscious emotions that emerge, you know, if you go on a date with somebody and you just like find yourself completely infatuated and kind of head over heels with them, a lot of that is because they are reflecting back to you certain values and characteristics that you have chosen to seek and prioritize.

I look back at this, like I think back to some of my, some of the women that I dated when I was younger and it really did not go well. And I can see that part of the reason it didn't go well is because I was prioritizing the wrong things in a partner that I look for. I, like most young, immature people, I prioritize really superficial things. And that gets you in the trouble. And I think as you get older, you realize that you should deprioritize those things and prioritize other, you know, deeper, more intimate things. And then that will be reflected in the emotions that emerge around the right person. So that's a very long-winded way of saying, you're right, Drew.

How wise. In some way. How wise? Yeah. How does this make you, how does only focusing on what you control make you more successful? I think part of this is it's almost like the essence of productivity of like expending your time and energy on things that. that will generate positive change for you. If you're expending most of your time and energy

on reacting the bullshit that's outside of your control, then by definition, that is a waste of time and energy, right? So I think it's almost like the crux of productivity is this ability to focus on what's within your control and then what's also like the highest leverage thing within your control. But some of it too is just like freeing up that mental, and emotional space, like not getting bogged down in distraction, not getting bogged down in outrage and emotional overreacting and drama with people that ultimately you kind of don't

really care about. It's almost like it frees up your energy to be directed in the most efficient direction possible. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I think too, there's a, the concept of locus of control in psychology. Yeah. Do you have an internal locusts of control where these are the things I can control and you look for the things you can control versus external locus of control these things are happening to me I have no control of it this trains you to kind of find the things you do control in your environment yeah and can't have an impact on and like you just said be more efficient with it yeah and can generalize to other areas of your life it always blew me away how much internal locus of control just like maps onto almost

every positive life outcome yeah in the research like it's just happier more successful more productive better relationships like boom boom boom boom you can go down the entire list and it's generally internal locus of control so that's what we're here to do yeah yeah people internal locus of control so what's the next one uh the next one turn off the autopilot i need some help with this one mark what's what's your autopilot i i'm very much a creature of habit yeah um and if they're healthy habit sure that's fine um but i just notice any change in my environment i don't like it like you know out here to L.A. and stuff like, oh, I don't have my gym and I don't have my, you know, my whatever, my little coffee shop that I like or all that kind of stuff. And I definitely get into those

routines and I feel those kind of safe, comfortable areas of my life that I really like to retreat to. I feel like, I don't know, I just feel like you're way more open to experience than I am, not way more, but quite a bit more. And you see you're more adaptable with it. That's kind of a personality thing, I think, but I don't know. I think there's there's also something to being able to just be a little bit more spontaneous than I am sometimes. I personally feel like a certain amount of chaos is probably optimal. There's a great, like one of my favorite movies is Christopher Nolan's the Dark Night and there's a scene with the Joker where he's talking Harvey Dent and he says inject a little bit of chaos in your life. And I always love that line because it's, I do feel like a modest

amount of chaos is probably more optimal than zero chaos because it's, I think, a certain amount of unpredictability and spontaneity can ignite a lot of insight, a lot of growth, a lot of excitement and meaning and purpose. And I don't know, it just makes life a lot more interesting. I also think you can kind of intentionally inject that chaos yourself. Like you don't have to do something crazy and destructive. I think we can find unpredictable. ability or disrupt that routine or that autopilot

in a way that's effective. Like I met, I was at a dinner recently and I met a professional MMA fighter and she was saying that once a year she gives herself a goal that feels impossible,

a physical goal that feels impossible and then she goes and does it. And so last year she climbed Everest with zero mountain training. I was like, okay,

I'm never going to fuck with you. No shit. Not that you were before, but you really are now. Yeah, but like she was kind of like, she was like kind of telling the table this is like an inspiration. She's like, yeah, I just always find stuff. Like one year, you know, she went, she like spontaneously, she like walked like 100 miles

or something and didn't stop until she finished. And, you know, everybody's like, oh, that's cool. And then they were like, what did you do this year? And she was like, oh, I climbed Everest. They're like, do you climb mountains? She was like, no. My God. I was like, okay.

I'm going to dial it back a little bit. Yeah. But I like that concept of pick something that is intentional, like almost irrationally difficult. And just see if you can do it. Will Smith used to have this thing that he used to say to me. He said that he was like, I used to try to bite off more than I can chew. And then I'd figure out how to chew it afterwards. And he was very aware that we tend to, our assumption of our own capacity is generally as a rule always below.

our actual capacity. And so he would intentionally set himself up to do things, do more things than he thought he was capable of. So like, he, I remember he told me he was like, yeah, when I started doing movies, I went to my manager and I was like, we're gonna do an album. And the manager's like, whoa, our schedules booked the next two years, there's no time.

And he's like, no, we're gonna do an album while I'm doing the movies. And his team was like, that's impossible. And he's like, we're gonna figure it out. And he fucking did, right? So it's, you. you intentionally set those kind of impossible bars, and then your brain starts setting to inventing

and innovating new ways to find them. Also, when I was thinking about this, I couldn't help but think about that Seinfeld episode. Do you ever see the episode where George Costanza does, like, the opposite day? Yeah, that's a great episode. Oh, my God. It's like one of the best Seinfeld episodes. So for listeners who haven't watched Seinfeld,

there's a character, George Costanza, he's kind of like Jerry's best friend in the show. And he's just kind of a loser. Like everything he does, he's just, he's a mess. He's always screwing things up. He's single. He's blowing dates. Like his family, his parents are assholes to him.

He's just a classic loser. And then there's a lot of dark psychology in them too. And then there's one episode where he gets so fed up with his own life that he's like, I'm just going to do the opposite of everything I would normally do. And so like, he goes in the work. And he starts cursing. out his boss and tell out of his boss how stupid he is. And his boss is like, wow, I really needed to hear that.

You know what? You're due for a raise. And then, like, he goes on a date. And he's, like, saying all the opposite stuff that he normally says that this, like, gorgeous woman is like, completely falls in love. Yeah, he's like, I don't have a job. I live with my mom. I'm bald.

I'm short. And she's like, hey. She's like, wow, you're so honest. That's so sexy. Yeah. Yeah. So it's the Costanza theorem. Yeah.

of like, if you feel stuck in an area in your life, try the opposite. Yeah. See what happens. It sounds so simple because it's like, yeah, you're in a rut. So just do something different, right? But we don't think of that. We don't, we get so comfortable even in the ruts. You know what I mean?

Yeah. I don't know what that is. And I'm very much, like I said, a creature of habit because of that, I think, too. It's just the, you get your comfortable spaces. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I like this because it, it, I mean, aside from pushing comfort zones,

it helps us redefine what we consider possible and impossible, right? Like if we usually kiss up to our boss, maybe being bluntly honest and borderline offensive. Yeah. You'd be shocked at what's possible. Maybe that actually does go better, right? Or, you know, putting work goals on your plate that feel impossible today. Turns out, actually, it's like you have more capacity than you thought you did. Right.

Yeah. Speaking of which, the next one, adopt a 10x mindset. What is a 10x mindset? The basics of it, though, is that we all kind of just limit ourselves. We think too small, and it makes sense because if you want to do anything big, you have to think big, right? I think you're really good at this, too. Another area you could impart some wisdom onto me, I think, here. But we do.

We limit ourselves. You know, you've several times on the podcast told the allegory about the elephant who gets tied to the fence post and doesn't realize you can break away from it. that sort of thing definitely happens a lot, I think. And we just, we set very small goals. Yeah. And then I think some of us wonder why we don't have more. And I don't know, what is, what's the key to thinking bigger do you think? You have a very good sense of the big picture, I think, a lot of times. Yeah. You tend to aim high, shoot high and you fail sometimes with it. But most of the time. What's your secret, Mark? That's my secret. I first of all I like zooming out I like the big picture that's just like my brain kind of goes that direction naturally

I like asking myself what does this look like three years from now what does this look like five years from now and I think that's an important tendency to develop because I think it's so easy to get everybody tends to get caught up in like the immediate future everybody's worried about next month or next quarter or next year and I like to ask my son like if I did what I'm doing this month for the next 10 years, where am I going to end up? And okay, how do I optimize for that? So I think part of it is time scale, zooming out and looking at a timescale. Because a lot of what, you know, the 10x rule, one way to think about it is it's to get the 10x of anything,

you're going to have to compound your way there and compounding requires time. So like what's the best way to leverage time the next? five to 10 years. So that's one element of it. I think the second element of it is just like big goals are more exciting. They're sexier. They feel, I mean, obviously if you manage to accomplish them, they feel better. And then I also, to come back to the Will Smith point, like, we tend to underestimate what our actual capacity is.

So if you were overshooting what you perceive your capacity to be, you're actually probably going to end up much close. to your real capacity. So you're actually maximizing your brain quite a bit more. And then of course there's like that old cliche, which is a shoot for the stars and even if you miss, you'll land on the moon, Drew.

I think it's the other way around. Shoot for the moon. If you miss, you'll land among the stars. The stars are further. Okay. Yeah, I see what you see. I see which thing. I have qualms with this,

with this Instagram, this inspirational Instagram quote. I'll take it up with somebody else though. But yeah, I think it's it's a combination of a lot of those things. I think, yeah, you hear about this a lot like in money and business and stuff like that. And I think there's some business gurus out there. Even like, Ramit Satie talks about this a lot where, you know, you can, this is kind of a variation on the 10x rule. I think you can cut your expenses to zero, right? You could do that. You cut your expenses all the way to zero, but that's the limit on that. On the other side of it,

though, there's no limit to how much you can make. So there's like a switch in thinking there too over like what to 10x or what to what to optimize for. But I think you can apply that to other areas as well, not just like money and business and stuff like that. I think you can apply it to, I'll go back to the relationships thing again, you can cut out the problems in your relationship and as much as you can, as much as practical, right? But is there, is there a limit on how deep your connection can go? Is there a limit on the number of things you can learn about your partner? Stuff like that. Like to me, that's like going from like, oh, let's make our relationship a little bit better to let's make this a lot better. And you're by, and you're changing what you're

focusing on. Rather than changing on the little problems you can cut out, you're changing more the focus to how can we connect on these things. How can I? learn more about you 10 x in a relationship yeah that was a thought experiment i went through with this i'm i'm like wondering what that would look like i always get wary around relationships because you you run into a lot of backwards law stuff of like trying to optimize a relationship uh yeah it's uh becoming the relationship problem um whereas if you just stop trying to optimize it it would be how happier i see okay it's funny i've run into a couple friends recently who are in new relationships

and they've gotten really excited because they've set up like Notion dashboards to track KPIs and stuff. And I'm like, stop. Fucking stop. Like just don't do it. Don't go down that road. I understand the motivation and the desire.

But I will say this. Like it's to me the, you know, ultimately the principle of the 10x rule or whatever is that there's a degree. of success available to you that is much larger than you're currently conceiving up. And in the relationship realm, the way I've experienced that is an incredible amount of comfort insecurity with the same person, which is ironic because you can't force that. It's actually the lack of forcing that gives you that.

Like it's the, the unbelievable, after 12 years together, my wife and I, we have such a, like insane level of comfort and ease around each other that you you can't achieve that you can't shortcut it and you can't achieve it in any other way and if you tried to shortcut it or achieve it in another way you would be removing the comfort and ease and so you'd be like it'd be self-defeating so anyway it's a little bit of a tangent but no I think I think you make a good point it's probably which is don't necessarily apply business principles to your relationships. Which there are...

Jesus. Tell me you're an American by not telling me you're American, right? I was just going to say, judging by my friend group. A lot of people need to hear that. It's so funny, dude. Like a lot of, you know, we don't have kids. So a lot of our friends out here in L.A., like a lot of the new friends that we've made are five, 10 years younger.

Yes. and so a lot of it is it's kind of like a lot of our friends our couple friends out here are our couples who are likely to get married you know but either aren't married or they just got married but they haven't had kids yet and but they're all you know two three four four five years into the relationship and and we're kind of like the elder couple now right so like we're we're over 40 and we've been together for longer and everybody and so we've actually had a number of couples who have kind of come to us and like peppered us with questions. And it's it's like every single time Fernanda and I are just like, yeah, maybe just don't try

so hard. Yeah, yeah. Just enjoy being together. And you know a lot of business people. So you're saying a lot of them like try to run it like a business. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right.

Well, I'll, yeah, I'll not do that from now. Okay, we got one more. What is it? Focus on fewer things for longer periods of time. So this is the kind of classic Cal Newport productivity advice, the deep work advice. We had an episode with him a couple months ago where we touched on this quite a bit. You know, there's just, there's a lot of hidden, he calls it overhead tax. you could call it like task switching tax like there's a mental tax that comes with the

diversity of information that we're being bombarded with so like the simple act of switching from email to your phone to a web browser to a phone call to a zoom call to a notification like just your attention moving between all of those things over the course of like five or 10 minutes generates much more of a mental burden than say just reading an academic paper for those 10 minutes. And it's really counterintuitive because on paper a stupid Zoom meeting and a notification on your phone

and checking a Slack message. Like those, in a vacuum, none of those actions are difficult. None of them are intellectually difficult. None of them are physically difficult. They're certainly far easier than reading a challenging book or paper. But for some reason, that series of activities will tire you out much faster than just sitting down and reading the single paper. And so, you know, a lot of Cal's advice revolves around being very conscious of, like, how you organize all your tasks, blocking out notifications, blocking out social media, staying off. YouTube, getting rid of dumb meetings or, you know, batching them together at the very least.

And I mean, I have to say, like, I really think, I think he's on to something. Like, I think this is the, he calls it like the fundamental challenge of knowledge work. And I think I think he's right about that. And I think it's hard to ignore how the increase in burnout has coincided with, work that is just kind of objectively easier than it was, say, 50 years ago. As a population, we're not out in factories. We're not like dying in coal mines like we were generations ago. We're sitting in air-conditioned rooms on computers with amazing devices in our hands,

talking to people remotely in our gym shorts, working whenever we want, however we want, with the people we want. yet we are experiencing a mental and emotional fatigue that we haven't really experienced before. And so I just, it's a really interesting phenomenon. And I just think it's so important for our generation to understand the nature of it so that we can adapt. I think that you're talking kind of on the micro level, the daily level, just getting shit done type of level. If you step back one level, though, too. and just the number of things that you're focusing on in general.

I have a problem with this because I'm just fascinated by everything. I'm interested in everything. Everything like, you know, everything grabs my attention and I go with it. I mean, even when I like out here, I'm like drilling holes in ceilings and then I sit down and I'm, you literally do. By the way, everybody, Drew built this studio. I was fishing for that. I was, yeah.

With this bare hands, I'm not even exactly. Like if you pull up the video, if you're listening to this, open Spotify, look at the video. Drew built this fucking studio with his bare hands. So I, I, apparently I hired a GC when I was hiring a research assistant and then I had no idea. But okay, that's, that's my point. My point is, though, Mark, is that I don't know. There's like, you, I feel very much like the Jack of All Trades Master of Nun type of thing, you know. And that's what I mean, that next level, if you back out and you say,

okay, I need to focus on fewer things rather than chasing every little, you know, rabbit down the hole. So this one actually, this raises an interesting question because, you know, Cal kind of bangs on the drum of specialized focus, really drill deep on one thing. There is a prevailing counter argument. There's a different, there's an opposite school of thought. There's a great book called Range by David Epstein. I think Tyler Cowan has talked about this a bit as well, or maybe it was Peter Thiel. But like the importance of generalists today, because a generalist today,

because there's access to so much information, and there's so much disparate things and opportunities and different trends and fields and research coming out and data coming out, that we actually need generalists more than ever simply to tie the thread between all the stuff out there. Right. If you're only zoomed in on your field and your,

your knowledge base, you're going to become too detached from the wider world. And actually, generalists are going to be the ones who are going to be able to keep track of everything. I don't know if I buy that. But I think it's a really interesting argument. And Epstein in particular, he tries to argue in his book. He finds examples of how some of the people that we consider domain experts were actually generalists. Yeah, like Steve Jobs was very famously kind of a generalist. Like he was really into art and calligraphy and Eastern spirituality

and like all those things really influenced his views of technology and consumer products. He talks about Roger Federer and how like Federer, you would assume that Federer was like playing tennis all day, every day, since he was four years old. But it turns out that Federer actually spent as much time playing soccer and a bunch of other sports. Or like Magnus Carlson, the best chess players,

ever lived. Like, apparently he spends, when he was like competing for world championships, he actually spends his days playing soccer with his friends the day before he goes in to actually play the chess match. And it like, it like frees up his brain to be more creative during the chess match. So it's an interesting argument. I don't, I don't know where I land or or how much I buy it, but it's, it's out there. No, and I've, I've tried that on before. I've tried to kind of take that view. And I think there is some merit to that. There's also a great little book.

It's an easy read. It's called How to Be Everything by Emily Wapnick. Okay. And she talks about kind of this same thing. She was very much a generalist and fascinated by everything and also left a PhD program like I did, you know, which is very common amongst people like us, I think. And she talks about what you're saying is, if you can find a theme across these domains. Yeah. And I do think I do really like it when I am like feeling scatterbrain, but then all of a sudden I find one idea in one domain and bring it over to another and tie the two together.

That's very satisfying to me. So maybe if I focused on that more, that would be a little bit more productive for me. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I do think we live in a time that rewards that more than ever before.

Okay. Like intuitively, that feels true to me. But that said, to be able to make those connections, you need to be able to focus on that theme. One at a time. I think it's the one at a time thing. It's the one at a time that's important. You can't, like Magnus Carlson can't be playing chess while he plays soccer. Yeah.

Like he needs to play one and then go play the other. Yeah. Yeah. Although it would be fun to watch him try. He could probably. He could probably do it. He could probably do it. Yeah.

If anybody could do it. Yeah. No, for real. For real. All right. What else? Is that it? I think that's it.

I think that's the pod mark. I still don't feel successful, Drew. Yeah? Perhaps it's just a faulty definition of success. That could be, that's a whole other podcast. That's a whole other podcast. That's a whole other podcast. Yeah.

Well, until we dig into that, until we dig into my faulty sense of success or lack of success, that's all for today's episode. Be sure to like and subscribe, leave a comment, leave a review. sign up for the newsletter. It's at Mark Manson slash newsletter. I send out a newsletter every Monday morning with a few pieces of advice and also breakthroughs from readers. Anything else you'd like to add, Drew?

That's all I got today. That's it. That's it. No quirky sign off, no... Doing this one straight. Okay. All right. All right. Well, we'll be better next time.

Until next time. Thank you.