Something You Should Know - How to Rewire Your Personality & Navigating the Fast Pace of Life

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

Getting a paper cut sucks. It looks like nothing but it sure hurts like crazy. This episode starts with a look at why paper cuts hurt so much and the best way to treat one. http://www.menshealth.com/health/why-are-paper-cuts-so-painful You might think your personality is pretty well determined already. However, it is actually changing all the time whether you like it or not. Organizational psychologist Benjamin Hardy joins me to reveal how your personality evolves throughout your lifetime and how you can influence those changes to become the person you want to be. Benjamin Hardy is a contributor to Inc., and Psychology Today and he is author of the book Personality Isn’t Permanent (https://amzn.to/3GS1ebv) The pace of life just seems faster than it used to be. And while you might long for the good old slower days, they are likely not coming back. A better approach may be to learn to manage the faster speed of life and make it work for you. Joining me to discuss how to do that is Vince Poscente, former Olympic speed-skier and author of bestselling book, The Age of Speed (https://amzn.to/2UGj8Gm). Don’t you hate it when you can’t remember where you put your keys or wallet or glasses? What is it that makes them so easy to lose in the first place? Listen as I explain WHY you likely misplaced them and the best way to figure out where they are? http://lifehacker.com/the-two-factors-that-make-you-forgetful-1563418168 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! MasterClass makes a meaningful gift this season! .Right now you can get two Memberships for the price of one at https://MasterClass.com/SOMETHING PrizePicks is a skill-based, real-money Daily Fantasy Sports game that's super easy to play. Go to https://prizepicks.com/sysk and use code sysk for a first deposit match up to $100 Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, why do paper cuts hurt so much? After all, it's just a piece of paper. Then I bet there's some part of your personality you'd like to change, but most people believe it's hard to change. My message is you're going to change either way, but you absolutely can change who you are.

Absolutely. You can even change your view of your past. You don't have to view negative experiences from the past as traumatic. You can actually choose to view your past from a positive light. Plus, when you can't remember where you put your keys, I'll tell you a great way to find them. And managing your time in the fast pace of life. A lot of things can get in the way.

There's one. Frequent email interruptions create a drop in IQ two and a half times greater than the drop in IQ from smoking marijuana. I mean, you're better off buying a bong than an iPhone. Well, that's not exactly a tip, but you know what I mean. All this today on Something You Should Know. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking,

Melissa and Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow. Melissa and Doug, the play is pretend, the skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life.

Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hey, welcome to Something You Should Know. So you know when you get a, you know when you get a paper cut? Everyone's had a paper cut. And you have to wonder, how does a simple piece of paper cause such excruciating pain. Well, according to Dr. James Spencer, the reason is because most paper cuts happen on your fingertips. And your fingertips have more nerve endings than any other part of your body. So it comes down to location. If you get a paper cut on, say, your forearm, it likely isn't going to hurt very much.

Paper cuts also don't heal as quickly, and the reason for that is because since they're not very deep, you don't bleed very much from a paper cut, and blood is full of wound-healing chemicals that help heal it. Paper cuts don't get the benefit of that. Dr. Spencer recommends using a liquid bandage to heal a paper cut. And if you don't have liquid bandage, crazy glue works just as good. And that is something you should know. I imagine we all have parts of our personality we'd like to change or that we're not really happy with. But your personality is your personality, right? Well, maybe.

But would you say you are the same person you were 10 years ago? Probably not. So your personality has changed. And it does change in kind of an organic way. But when it comes to changing your personality in a deliberate way, that seems to be a challenge. Here to discuss what your personality is exactly and how it changes and how you can change it is Benjamin Hardy. He is an organizational psychologist, a contributor to Inc. and Psychology Today,

and he's author of a book called Personality Isn't Permanent. Hey, Benjamin. Thank you so much. Happy to be with you. So before we get into why personality isn't permanent, let's define what a personality is. What is my personality? Yeah, your personality is basically your consistent way of showing up in the world. It's your consistent behaviors and attitudes.

Personality and identity are two different things. Your identity is how you've self-described. Your identity is actually a lot more important than your personality. Your identity being the way you define and describe yourself shapes your behavior, which in large portion over time becomes your personality. So yeah, personality is your consistent way of acting. And when you say personality isn't permanent, explain what you mean by that, because I think there is a belief that you are who you are. You showed up this way. These are your traits. This is what you do. This is who you are. And so what do you mean it isn't permanent? Yeah, I mean, it's not permanent from a lot of different angles. One is that there's a lot of what's called now longitudinal research, basically that studies people over time. And the idea is,

is that over time, you're going to change, even if you're not trying to. People who are in their 70s are not, they don't have the same personalities as they did in their teens. That's just true, but also your view of yourself changes over time a lot as well. There's actually a TED talk by a Harvard psychologist by the name of Daniel Gilbert, and he often asks people, do you think you're the exact same person

you were 10 years ago? And almost unanimously, people say no. Most people can see that there are changes between who they are today and who they were in the past, in how they do things and how they see things, in what matters to them. And so it's actually really important to view your current self as not the be-all end-all, because you're not the same person you were in the past, but also you're not going to be the same person in the future. But it does seem that some things are permanent. Like, you know, there are some people who are cautious, some people who are risk takers, some people are savers, some people are spenders.

Those things don't seem to change much. I think you're right. I think that they don't have to change. I think that they can change. I'm with you that the majority of people aren't going to make dramatic changes in themselves. But that's not to say that it can't happen. Someone who was a total spender could actually become educated and learn how to become a great saver. I can speak for myself on that one. Someone who's radically disorganized could learn how to become organized. The rule, I guess you could say, is that people aren't going to make such big change. And in fact, that's a rule in psychology as well, is that the most easy way to predict a person's future

behavior is by looking to their past. But there's a lot of reasons for that, and it doesn't have to be that way. Well, it would seem that it doesn't have to be that way if you believe it doesn't have to be that way, but a lot of people believe it's that way, so there isn't much point in trying. Yeah, I mean, that's what we as psychologists would call a fixed mindset, and there's a lot that comes with that. People often overly emphasize who they currently are, or they spend a lot of time looking to their past as the explanation for who they are. It takes a lot more, first off, imagination to think about who your future self would be, who you want to be. It would take a lot more courage rather than just defining your present self to say, this

is who I want to be. That takes courage to actually tell people about who you want to be and also from like, let's just say an addiction standpoint it takes courage to openly admit that you've you that you're doing things that you no longer want to be doing in the in the aa world there's a quote that says you're as sick as your secrets and often it can be difficult to admit when you either have a problem or when you want to make a change. But being open and honest about that can really open the doors. You know, when you talk about your future self, who do you want to be? Usually that comes from a place of fixing something that's wrong now,

that you want to be somebody who you're not now or who you haven't been in the past, because there's something wrong with that. And now you want to fix that and be better, right? It could be fixing something wrong. It doesn't have to be viewed that way, though. It could just be choosing something different. I mean, I don't view the person I was three years ago as necessarily wrong, even though I don't want exactly the same things that I wanted three years ago. I'm choosing different goals. Maybe I even have different preferences, you know, having adopted various kids and, you know, coming to a place

where I'm choosing to value different things. I don't think I was formerly wrong. Um, but I, but I think I can now choose something better. And is it a constantly fluid situation? In other words, when you say, well, let's talk about who I want to be. Well, then do I get there and stop? Or am I always looking to be somebody different? Have you ever read the book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl? One of his observations was that when a person lost hope and purpose for their future, the present became meaningless.

I think that absolutely wherever you are in the present, you actually need a purpose for your future. Otherwise, your present stops having purpose and you either distract yourself from the present or it just becomes too much. I mean, literally hope is a human need, um, as is purpose. And, and so you, you, wherever you are and wherever you've arrived to, if you don't, if you can't conceptualize a future self that gives your present meaning, then you're going to, you're going to be stuck. And what's interesting is even Buzz Aldrin, the famous astronaut who, this is what happened to him. You know, he went

to the moon, was one of the top, you know, first people to go to the moon with Neil Armstrong. And he came back and he stopped having a sense of purpose for his life. He had achieved his, you know, his only goal or his primary goal. And so then he stopped having something to look forward to. And as a result, you know, he went through a deep bender and became an alcoholic and lost it all because he was so defined even by a former success. And so you always need something to look forward to and something to be striving towards. Separate though, for me, who you are, your personality, and what you want. It seems like those are two different things, but in this conversation they seem to be one and the same.

Yeah, I mean, your personality is how you consistently show up. But I show up differently depending on the circumstance. I show up with my kids differently than when I show up at a business meeting. I have different personalities. Yeah, it's very contextual. I mean, there's a good friend of mine. His name's Andre Norman. And he grew up in the hood of Boston. And, you know, he was essentially a thug. He ended up going to prison. But he, when he hit his dead bottom, where he realized that his

goal was always to be the number one thug, he realized that it was not a worthwhile path. And so he decided he wanted to go to Harvard. That was that ended up happening to be the only school he'd ever heard of. But, you know, that's that. Yeah, that's how you can only choose goals, by the way, based on what you're exposed to. And that was as far as his exposure was when it came to college. But he questioned his goals because his goals drive your your goals goals drive your identity and in his case his goal at the time was to be the number one thug in prison when he was near completing that it dawned on him that if he actually got there what would that say about him you know and so he then questioned his goal and then he chose a different goal which then

redirected his identity which shaped shaped his behavior. He ultimately ended up spending eight years after he decided he wanted to go to Harvard, you know, getting help. He ended up learning how to read and write. He got a mentor. He went to therapy, got, you know, got in tune with God from his perspective, and then got out of prison, because he chose a new aim, which shaped his identity and behavior and over time changed his personality. The idea that personality isn't permanent, that title implies that people think it is permanent. That's correct? Absolutely. Yep. That's a very traditional view. So your message is that you can change who you are if you want to change who you are.

My message is you're going to change either way, but you absolutely can change who you are. Absolutely. You can even change your view of your past. You can change and you can give different meanings to former experiences. You don't have to view negative experiences from the past as traumatic. You can actually choose to view your past from a positive light. So not only is your personality flexible, your past is flexible. That's how memory works. And so, yeah, none of, and even as you described, you're not going to be the same person in every situation that you're in. So your personality is different, you know, and it's contextual. So yeah, yeah, that's definitely what I'm trying to say. And there's a lot of good research, obviously, behind that. But I think there are traditional or common views that you are hardwired at birth, or that you must discover your true self,

and that your personality is only to be understood in your past. And those things aren't actually, they don't have to be true. We're talking about your personality, and we're talking with Benjamin Hardy. He's an organizational psychologist and author of the book, Personality Isn't Permanent. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful, as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks,

and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. So, Benjamin, you said something a couple of minutes ago

about how you can only choose based on what you've been exposed to, which, if you aren't exposed to much, I mean, it seems like that's a limited hand that you're playing with. Hugely. I mean, I can speak with authority on that. You know, my wife and I adopted three kids from the foster system. The environment that they came from was radically limited. You know, their parents were high on drugs. They weren't taken to school. They were in front of a TV all day, they were eating very, you know,

when we got them, they had never left their county out in the middle of nowhere, South Carolina. And so how could they pop, you know, like, how could our son who's now completely interested in aerospace have chosen that if he didn't even know it existed? And so part of obviously, growing and making better decisions is becoming exposed to different options. That's why traveling, reading, learning is helpful, trying new things. What the research shows is that usually as people age, they become progressively less open to new experiences, less open to information that contradicts their current worldview. We prefer certainty and stability over time rather than uncertainty and change

and difficulty in learning. And so, yeah, I mean, it is definitely an invitation to try new things. That's why kids learn so fast. You know, we have two twins who are 18 months old. We live in Florida, so we don't want our two beautiful girls to drown in our swimming pool or someone else's pool.

So we've put them through swimming lessons. Obviously, in the beginning of those swimming lessons, they hated it. You know, being dropped underwater and not knowing what to do and being scared and figuring out how to swim. But now, three or four months later, they jump in the pool. And, you know, that type of learning experience, often people stop putting themselves through such experiences out of choice. When you're a kid, you often have to do so out of necessity. Well, that, yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at it. That, yeah, once you become a grown-up and no one makes you jump in the pool

anymore, you're less likely to jump in the pool, whether it's a real pool or something else. It's how the brain's wired, my friend. The brain is literally a prediction machine. We form memories and things like that to create stability in our lives. And how I view it is personality and comfort zone are basically the same thing. You know, it's what's safe, it's what's comfortable, it's what's predictable. You try something new, you're now in a state of uncertainty. You know, even people who are addicts stay in addictions, even though, even when they know the addiction is probably killing them, because to leave the addiction would create more uncertainty than to stay. And so, you know, but that's actually where learning is, you know, from a neuroscience perspective, there's a concept

called prediction errors, which is when you incorrectly predicted what would happen and that's where you learn you know it's like when a child touches a hot stove they didn't expect that to happen definitely didn't enjoy it but they certainly learned something that changes how they interact with the world and that's where learning happens but as you know William James he's one of the basically one of the like he's considered like what's called like the godfather i think of american psychology he was back in like the early 1900s but he believes that people's personality stopped developing at age 30 because usually at that point people's lives become so

routine you know they've got their career their job they've got their narrative about themselves their story that they keep saying they stop developing really not because they don't have to not because they can't have to not because they can't but because generally that's when society stunts them from growing do you think if you ask people generally the person you are now is the person you will always be that most people would say yes no or gee I never really thought about it this is what they would say according to the research. The question's a little different,

so I might want to go back and forth with you on this. I like your question, so let me share with you this thought, and then we'll keep going back and forth on this, because I really like your question. So basically, Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist, asks people slightly different questions, but very similar. He asks people, are you the same person you were 10 years ago? Almost everyone says no. But here's the rub. He says, do you think you're going to be the

same person in 10 years? And most people say yes. So most people acknowledge that they've changed to some degree, or at least from their perception, they've changed in many ways from who they are in the past. The problem is, is that we often think that who we are right now is who we're always going to be. We overemphasize the present. He calls it the end of history illusion. It's just the tendency we have to think that who we are right now is who we're always going to be. We don't think it's who we've always been, but we think that who we are right now is who we're always going to be. So he has a statement for that. He says, human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. And I think a lot of that has to do with identity, that we're so definitive

with the labels we use for ourselves, which then leads us to think that who we are right now is who we're going to be in the future. And we don't project out who we think we're going to be. But to project out who you might be in 10 years seems a stab in the dark. I mean, if I'm going to be a different person than I am now in 10 years, it's hard for me now to imagine what those differences will be. There's a lot of research on two subjects in particular. One is decision making, the other one's learning. But Hal Hirschfeld, he's a psychologist at UCLA. He says that when you view your future self as a different person, you can then think about how they would handle situations versus how you would handle situations. You know, on a very simple level, I go home from work, I'm exhausted, my kids want to

play, and I'm tired. My current preference is just to sit on my phone and say, no, thanks, kids. Like, you guys just play without me. But if I think, what would my future self prefer me to do? Then I can make a different decision in the moment. You know, learning is the same way. You can't actually curate learning. You know, you're someone who's done thousands upon thousands of interviews. At some point, you decide you want to be a great interviewer and you've gone to, you know, you could correct me if I'm wrong but these these thousands of interviews you've done have led you to becoming a great interviewer but at some point or another you you did want to do that and

so this learning that you've gone through to allow you to do what you do was driven by a goal and that's why I believe you've gotten good at it is because it was targeted in a direction so I think it's the first step is just literally thinking about where you want to go. What, what would you, what would you like your life to be like in relationship, in circumstance, in situation? You could think about it three years into the future. Um, obviously having a future self, even beyond this life from like a spiritual perspective guides people's decisions here and now. So we use the future to shape our behavior, but on a really practical level, thinking three to like, let's just say two to three years

in the future. What would you like your life to be look like? What would you like to be doing? How would you like your relationships to be? What would you like your day to day life to be like? Taking the time to imagine it. You know, Albert Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. Imagination actually is the basis of hope. You wouldn't hope for something if you can't imagine it. And so imagination is incredibly important. It does get shattered through traumatic experiences. And so it's called mental flexibility in a lot of ways. It's a skill to develop. But I think journaling about it is a good place to start, writing about what you would want pondering on it reflecting on it maybe talking to people about it maybe if you have zero clue what you would want which i

don't think i think anyone listening to this could could conceptualize aspects of their life that they would like to see different even if it's just they're more happy and that they're spending their time in ways that they want to more but you actually have to define it before you can predict it um and then once you've actually laid it out and you it have to define it before you can predict it. And then once you've actually laid it out, and it's not like it's a one-time process, you know, like it's a draft. It's like drafting a book. It's going to be different as you keep exposing yourself to new things, as you go through experiences, as you maybe have highs and lows, as you fail, you'll be able to clarify and

better direct it, but at least give yourself a direction so that then on a daily basis, you can do something in the form of intention towards that. The next step would be honestly just admitting to people that that's what you want, openly acknowledging that there's aspects of your life you want to see different, or there's something specific you want to accomplish. As for myself, when I was a first year graduate student, I started telling people I wanted to become a professional author. We have a desire as people to be consistent with what we say. And your identity is based on the narrative you tell. And so rather than telling people over and over about who you are today, maybe start telling people about who you want your future self to be. And then that would maybe lead

you to more curated experiences to maybe moving in that direction. Another obviously big one would be investing money into your future identity, investing into your goals, whether that be education or experiences or mentoring or learning. You know, actually investing in that leads to commitment and it also solidifies your identity that this is something that you're serious about doing. It's really interesting what you said a moment ago, how people behave in their life often based on what they think, you know, Judgment Day will say about them when they die or, you know, in the next life. Very true. Very true.

Why wait till then? Why not just project out three years and think about that rather than when you're dead, because we don't know what happens when you're dead. I love that. Dang, that's a huge compliment. You can thank Hal Hirschfeld at UCLA and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard for that one. Well, I like that. I mean, I've never thought of that. It's because of their religion or, you know, their church teachings of, you know, you have to lead a decent life here in order for things to be better in the next life. Well, how about just your future life?

Not necessarily the next one. It's just the future one of this one. I love that. It's great. It's a different way of looking at it. Your future self, in my opinion, is actually way more important than your current self, as weird as that sounds, because your current self isn't the be all end all. You're not, you know, human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. So Carol Dweck, she's among the best psychologists who's ever lived. You know, her thinking has influenced more people than most people. But she's the one who did the growth mindset fixed mindset thing but she would give students most of her research was on kids and she would give them situations that they would all fail far and away like they every student would fail and she was just interested in how they would react and the kid the kids with the fixed mindset the kids that viewed themselves as fixed, unchangeable, when they failed, the meaning that they gave to the experience was, I'm dumb.

I can't get better. This is the end of this for me. And so they were fully defined by the present. What she actually said is that they were stuck in the tyranny of now, tyranny of right now. Whereas those with the growth mindset, they would fail, of course. They all failed. But the meaning that they gave to the experience was, I don't see them as different people than they were five years ago. And yet, clearly, personality is changing. Their personality is changing.

My personality is changing. And your personality is changing. And I guess how it changes is up to us. Benjamin Hardy has been my guest. He's an organizational psychologist, a contributor to Inc. and Psychology Today, and he's author of the book Personality Isn't Permanent. You'll find a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Benjamin. Hey, Mike. Have a great day. This is an ad for betterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly.

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And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue.

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With technology, it seems we can and do things a lot faster, and consequently the speed of life just seems faster. And while you may not like it, while you may long for a slower pace, that's not always possible. You pretty much have to cope with life the way it is. Vince Passenti is the author of a classic New York Times bestselling book called The Age of Speed. And he's really zeroed in on this, and his message is that rather than fight it, you should embrace and harness this speed of life and use it to your advantage.

Hi Vince, so there's this philosophy that slow and steady wins the race, that too much speed leads to mistakes, that the better way is to take things slow and deliberate. That speed is in fact the enemy, to which you would say what? Speed can feel like the enemy. And, you know, I raced in the Olympics in speed skiing. I went 135 miles an hour. And you don't win a race if you're in the state of fear. You don't win a race if you're trying to cope or manage the situation. You thrive when you're on top of the situation, when you can actually embrace it. And

so instead of speed being the enemy, how can we have things faster? How can we go anything from automate to make sure we really have a lifestyle of being able to feel like we're in control and not in chaos? But it does seem to me anyway, just looking at the people I know that I know very successful people who seem to be very slow and methodical and nothing rattles them and they go at their own pace and they do just fine. And I know other people who can't sit still, they just got to go, go, go, go, go. And they do pretty well too. So, so isn't it more of kind of what, what your, what your personality is? Well, that's the alignment piece. So if I'm very slow and steady wins the race kind of person, and I'm just going to methodically go through then great. Uh, but when we start to resist

the speed that's going on around us and say, well, that's not going to work for me, or I'm not going to engage in learning how that technology works. Maybe as somebody that's very slow and steady delegates the stuff that is going faster and faster to people that, that, that dig that kind of thing. And so, you know, it's, it's this accountability to step up. And if the world's going so much faster, yet we're trying to resist along the way, you're not a jet. You know, one of the profiles in the book is the bottle rocket. You know, I'm from Canada. I didn't know what a bottle rocket was until I moved down to Texas.

And I realized that you light this thing and you first identified everybody in the surrounding you. Hey, I'm going to light this thing. I don't know where I'm going to light this thing. I don't know where it's going to go. And then you light it and it goes all over the place and people are ducking or whatever. And then what does it do? It blows up. So that's somebody that's saying,

well, I'm just going to go fast. Well, you know, a case in point would have been Dell. Dell Computers was celebrated for how fast they addressed the supply chain management and got after things. And they took people on tours on how fast they did things, but they were really not identifying with their customer and got stepped on and stepped over by Apple because, you know, there was the, we could go down that rabbit hole, but definitely Apple stepped over Dell because it

wasn't just about speed is about that alignment issue. What do people want? Where do they want to be? How do they want to feel? So it's not just about speed. Something I remember from a previous conversation we had was the example you used in explaining all of this about learning to ride a bike, that you can't ride a bike. You can't learn to ride a bike if you don't have speed. You want to balance, but you can't balance it without the speed. So talk about that. Well, I was teaching my daughter. The best is to kind of give you a story.

And our daughter, our middle daughter, Alex, she would be kind of a bottle rocket of sorts. She just wanted to go get after it and do it. And she got on the bike and was nervous because it just wasn't staying upright. It kept falling over. And Alex, you got to speed up. You got to get some momentum. And our instinct is not to pedal. Our instinct is to get balanced first and then pedal. That's the human condition. Okay, let me get balanced. Let me get my awareness of where I am. And then I'm going to start picking up speed. Well, on a bicycle, you got to pick up speed to get the balance. And the second she got that, I mean, she was ready to quit and skinning her knees. I don't want to do this. She's about four years old or so, five maybe. And as soon as she picked up speed, the smile came back on her face because she got the balance she was looking for.

And she turned, daddy, daddy, look, I got it. And bam, she went right back in the back of the Tahoe. So we can, yeah, whoops. Well, you know, in the age of speed, yes, we have to pick up speed, but we have to have such an awareness of everything around us. But we can have that balance at speed. So much of the talk about everything speeding up revolves around technology as if we have no choice, that we just have to have all this technology and we must have it on all the time. And then we can complain about how we're always on call 24 set. Well, not if you turn it off. Yeah. We have to be so much more deliberate today than we've ever been. And, um, I, I meditate twice a day and I, I started when I was 14

and I stopped there for a while. And I found that when I take a step back, when I turn my phone off, when I turn the technology off by my design and then step back in when I want to, things start to settle into place and start to feel like I have some of that equanimity back. And if we're always on the go and always busy and always complaining about being busy, you're not the architect of your time. You're basically being pushed around by technology. And this isn't easy. I mean, I was in, I was at a grocery, this was years ago when the book came out and I was visiting the grocery store and I was standing in line with a bunch of people. And what was new off to the side there was a self checkoutcheckout and nobody was in the self-checkout line. Why? Because they didn't understand the technology and I had just written the freaking book on it. And so I went over and I went, do it, do it, do it. And I was out of there. I went, wow. And now I had 10 extra minutes that I didn't have before. And what did I do? Do I, do you fill that extra time with more busy work

or I spent that extra time. And, um, our youngest wanted to keep saying, daddy, can we take the dog to the dog park? And I thought, you know what, by my design, we went to the dog park. We took a minute, those 10 extra minutes that I had. And then we did that. And so that's more life balance. That's the balance that we seek by our design rather than being pushed around by, like I said, technology. Well, I've always wondered why there's this such an emphasis on efficiency. We've got to get more done. We've got to get more done in less time for the purpose of what? to get more done in less time and then to take that time you saved and get more done i mean it does what you just said about going to the dog park nobody does that

they just figure out now i can do more work in that time that i saved which kind of defeats the purpose of it it does i mean if i'm not much a math guy, and so it took me a while to figure this out, that the fact that if we can get more done, so let's say we could get two things done in an hour. And now with technology, we can get 10 things done in an hour. But with everything that we need to get done, let's say there's two more things that make it more complex. So if I got two things done in an hour, there would be four things added to it that would kind of complicate it.

Well, now if I'm getting 10 things done in an hour, that's 40 things that complicate it. So that's the mathematics of chaos. We end up creating more chaos for ourselves. It feels good to get more stuff done. We all like that feeling. But when you've added on 36 other things that make it more complex and more complicated, that's the feeling of chaos. That's the feeling of being out of control. And if you've ever skied, like I have at 135 miles an hour, you want to cover the basics. You want to keep it as simple as possible. And so that you get through this race and you thrive in the state of excellence rather than even more chaos that you've impacted, which leads to you're in damage control and then you're out of control and then it doesn't feel good at all. So yeah, we have, we have to be more than

ever. We have to be the architect of our own time and to be able to how we use our time and be so deliberate. And you just, just by a few simple deliberate decisions up front, like I said, keep the cell phone in a different room, set it aside, switch it off. I mean, and some people say, well, you know, my, my boss is expecting to hear me. Well, now we're into the conversation mode or the boundaries. And this, this is a boundary after 8 PM at night. I'm, you know, I switched my phone off. You know, if that's a boundary and everybody understands, then we're, we're good. If we feel that somebody else is pushing around our time, again, we're back into out of control. And that's a horrible feeling.

Yeah. One of the things that I think people are afraid of turning off their cell phone as you do, or turning off their computer as you talk about to meditate or whatever, is that fear that someone's going to try to get them. And then everybody has those people in their life. I tried to text you five minutes ago and I haven't heard back. Well, so then you feel compelled to always be available. And I agree with you that, you know, I don't want people to think that I'm that available. And yeah, maybe there's a learning time till people have to learn. But like you, after eight o'clock, chances are I'm not going to get Vince. And so you learn to live with that.

You know, if you really talk to anybody that's having issues at work or issues at home and their primary relationships or whatever, the first question you need to ask is, are you communicating? Have you communicated a boundary? Is this something that you've said? Or are you just getting increasingly frustrated because not only is that one person trying to get a hold of you, but maybe 10 or 20 or more. And then all of a sudden your life's out of control and you're feeling the chaos and say, I want to get off. And then that's frustration. And that's not what life's out of control and you're feeling the chaos and say, I want to get off. And then that's, um, frustration. And that's not what life's about. Life's about doing what you love to do with the people you love. And, and, uh, if that's not the case, then, um, how deliberate are you going to

be about that? It's interesting too, that sometimes I think people, you know, they, how you doing? Oh, I'm really busy that it's almost like a badge of honor that like they yeah they could really they could turn it all down but but then they're not as cool as as they used to be when they didn't turn it all down yeah it's almost comical you'll see people how you doing i'm busy oh well i'm even busier it a competition. It's like, I don't think that's the point. But anyways, it's funny. You know, the people who you're talking to the person and they have that ear thing in their ear for their phone. And are you talking to me?

Are you listening to like, how busy can you possibly be? I know. Or sitting on a plane when somebody five rows back. Make sure everybody's hearing this conversation. Say, the love of god shut up yeah well it's a good lesson I I think it's it's good that people stop and think about it because it isn't necessarily about slowing down it's it because you know we're all on the treadmill it's going as fast as it's going. It's dealing with the speed that it's going rather than trying to jump off. Right.

Learning how to thrive in the age of speed is the essence of the human condition today. You know, it's we cannot expect to manage our way to excellence. You just don't manage a situation and expect extraordinary results. So how do we thrive in this rather than just cope? And there's all sorts of ways. Just start with one thing, email, for example. If you're looking at emails and you're reading them two, three, four times, are you the architect of your time? Are you being deliberate or are you, you know, just keeping up? And then so that would be just one thing, you know, multitasking. There's another one. There's one interruptions, frequent email interruptions create a drop in IQ two and a half times greater than the drop in IQ from smoking marijuana.

I mean, you're better off buying a bong than an iPhone. Well, that's not exactly a tip, but you know what I mean? It's just we could really overwhelm ourselves if we don't manage, let's say, interruptions, for example. Well, why is that interruption happening? What can I do next time to mitigate that and be more deliberate? Yeah. Well, as we said right at the beginning, things aren't going to slow down anytime soon. So learning to live with and take advantage of the faster speed of life seems like great advice. Vince Pacenti has been my guest. He is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Age of Speed.

And you will find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Vince. Hey, good spending time with you. Have you ever misplaced your keys or your wallet and have no idea where they are? Of course you have. Everyone has. The average person spends at least 10 minutes a day looking for things they've misplaced. And keys and wallets are at the top of the list.

After those items, most of us waste time looking for our car, our shoes, our phone, glasses, or the remote control. The reason we misplace stuff is usually because we're focused on the next task at hand. The reason we can't find them later is because we've changed our state of mind. For instance, you might be hungry and headed for the kitchen when you put your keys or remote control down. Then when you're no longer hungry and you start to look for your keys, you've lost the mental association. That's why retracing your steps and your feelings can take you back physically and mentally and help

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