Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: A Peek Inside the Heart of the Internet & Self-Discipline Hacks to Achieve Success

Episode Date: February 22, 2020

Do you lose most of your body heat through your head? What’s the best way to stop the hiccups? We begin this episode with a look at these and other interesting medical myths and facts. https://www.realsimple.com/health/first-aid-health-basics/old-wives-tales-retold What exactly is the Internet – and where is it located? We think of the Internet as being virtual but there is a physical Internet – there has to be. Those network connections all have to connect somewhere. Journalist Andrew Blum author of the book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (http://amzn.to/2tAUJ8u), takes us all on a journey of the physical Internet – where it is, how it works and what it smells like. Do you know what to do when lightning strikes? Much of what we hear isn’t true. I’ll tell you what the experts say about staying safe in a lightning storm. https://www.yahoo.com/health/lightning-strikes-myth-vs-fact-93152046102.html When I say “self-discipline” you probably think of it as sacrifice and painful and not much fun. However, when it comes to achieving success in anything, a little self-discipline can be a very powerful tool. Rory Vaden, author of the N.Y. Times bestseller, Take The Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving Success (http://amzn.to/2tfQsVP) explains how self-discipline really works, how powerful it is and why there are a lot of myths and misconceptions about it. This Week's Sponsors -Automation Finance. Go to www.automationfinance.com/sysk to review the investment memorandum and sign up for an account. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, most hiccup cures don't work, but one seems to work in about 19 out of 20 times. Then, the Internet is an actual place.

All those networks have to connect somewhere. And what's surprising is that the vast majority of those networks connect to each other in a relatively short list of buildings. I found that the internet has a smell. There's a very distinctive smell to these internet buildings, somewhere kind of across between a burnt toast and a kind of new car smell. Then much of what you know about lightning probably isn't true. I'll tell you what you really need to know to stay safe.

And understanding self-discipline and how it leads to success. Self-discipline is just one of the most guaranteed paths to success, and it's not about making life as hard as possible. It's more about doing the hardest parts of things as soon as possible. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know, our SYSK Choice Weekend Edition on tap for you today. And we begin this episode with some medical facts and medical myths.

Have you ever heard that if you swallow chewing gum, it stays in your stomach for seven years? No, no it doesn't. As with most non-food objects, fluids carry gum through the intestinal tract and it passes out. According to David Pollack, a senior physician in the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Care Network. And even though gum isn't easily broken down in the digestive system, it probably won't cause a stomach ache either, which my mother used to tell me. I bet you've heard that to get rid of hiccups, it's good to have somebody startle you, scare you. Well, none of the common home remedies

like holding your breath or being scared have ever been proven to work to cure hiccups. However, in 1971, a study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine that showed that swallowing a teaspoon of granulated sugar stopped hiccups in 19 out of 20 people. You've probably heard that you lose 75% of your body heat through your head. Well, maybe if you're an infant, but for most adults it's more like 10%. So putting on a hat is no more important than putting on gloves or socks.

And that is something you should know. Of course you know what the Internet is. But what if somebody asked you to explain it? Say I came from a land or a planet or a galaxy far, far away, and I knew nothing of the Internet and asked you to explain it to me. What would you say? What is the Internet? And when you think of it that way, it's hard to explain.

But you're about to find out what the Internet is in a physical way. Journalist Andrew Blum is author of a book called Tubes, in which he explores the physical internet, what it is, where it is, and how it all works together. Welcome, Andrew. And so why did you decide to tackle this? I would have thought that there really wasn't much to tackle, that the internet is just a bunch of interconnected servers and a lot of wires, and it's all rather dull. So where did this idea come from? I was writing mostly about architecture, about buildings, and was increasingly surprised

by the idea that while I was supposedly out in the world looking at buildings, I was actually sitting in front of my computer screen all day. And yet, behind that screen, there seemed to be no physical reality of its own. You know, I was interested in the material world, and yet this place where I spent all my time had no materiality. There appeared to be nothing there. It was just this amorphous blob. And that became even more striking on the day that my internet broke, and the cable guy came to fix it and follow the wires from behind my couch out behind my building, and then saw a squirrel running along the wire and said, I think that's your problem. I think a squirrel is chewing on your

internet. And I figured if a squirrel could chew on the piece of the internet in the backyard, there must be other pieces of the internet that squirrels could chew on. And I kind of came together at that moment. I got this image in my head of yanking the cable from the wall and following it and seeing where it would go. And I figured there must be buildings out there. The Internet must have these places, these monuments. And indeed, that's what I found. Well, it is fascinating, and it's an interesting twist that your mind kind of works that way, because I think what you were thinking in the beginning of people kind of,

well, we call it a virtual world. It's not real. There's nothing there, but there must be something there. Yeah, we live, there is this kind of, you know, collective denial that there's just nothing out there. It's all the cloud. You know, it doesn't exist. You know, and we have this idea, you know, if you do know a little bit about the Internet, then you know that it's packet switched, that information is broken down into smaller chunks

and transmitted along many different paths. down into smaller chunks and transmitted along many different paths. But somehow saying it's transmitted along many different paths, then became this idea that it doesn't follow any paths at all. When in fact, you know, of course, it has to go someplace, there has to be a continuous physical path between me and you right now. But we've, we've, we forgot that, you know, we sort of allowed ourselves to get to fall into this, this sway of this of this magical vision of technology. Well, also, maybe that the path that it takes, that you and I are connected now, or that my email came in on, may not be all that interesting a path.

I think a lot of people just think it's a bunch of wires, and who cares? Yeah, I mean, of course, I mean, it is always just a bunch of wires, but I like to apply the kind of Gettysburg principle to it. You know, Gettysburg is just a bunch of fields. You know, it's hallowed ground because of what we know about it, because of the meanings that we ascribe to it, because of what comes from inside our heads. The same, not, you know, it's obviously a different scale than Gettysburg.

It's a different level of sacred place. But you could say a similar thing about Facebook's data center. It's just a bunch of hard drives, a bunch of blinking lights, a bunch of tubes and cables. But this is where important things to us, announcements of new babies, new jobs, and deaths, this is where those things are stored. This is where they come from. And for me, it was all about trying to sort of connect that physical, those physical and virtual worlds, trying to sort of connect that physical, those physical

and virtual worlds, trying to find some materiality and some meaning in this environment that I was spending all my time, and through which I was getting all my information, both sort of personal and professional. And so what did you find? Well, I found a lot of interesting people. One of the things that was most striking was how few people actually manage the Internet, how few people run the networks of the Internet and the connections between those networks. That was quite striking. I found that the Internet has a smell. There's a very distinctive smell to these Internet buildings,

somewhere kind of across between a burnt toast and a kind of used car, excuse me, a new car smell, kind of a plastic off-gassing. So every time you walk into one of these buildings on the Internet, you're greeted by this same very familiar smell. And I found a geography that is very much etched upon the ancient geography, whether of railroads or shipping paths or sort of just centuries of commerce, which is the opposite of what we think of as the Internet being something brand new. In fact, it's entirely connected to the world as we know it, the physical world.

So wait, you mentioned these Internet buildings. What do you mean by an Internet building? Well, the Internet is a network of networks, and those networks have to physically connect to each other somewhere. And what's surprising is that the vast majority of those networks connect to each other in a relatively short list of buildings. There are about a dozen buildings around the world that are the most important meeting places of networks.

There are about an order of magnitude more networks meeting in those buildings than in the kind of the sort of next tier. Those are buildings like a campus called Equinex in Ashburn, Virginia, near Dulles Airport, like 60 Hudson Street, Lower Manhattan, like Telehouse in the Docklands in London. It just had its kind of moment in the sun because, you know, this was the complex of buildings through which, you know, so much of the information and streaming video and things like that about the Olympics passed through. And, you know, they have to, I mean, it points again and again to the idea that you need to connect

networks by the easiest way possible. Facebook to a Google, a Cablevision to a Time Warner, a Comcast to a Citibank, whatever it is. And the easiest way to do it is to physically connect my router to your router, a big refrigerator-sized machine with blinking lights and yellow cables coming out of it, stringing one of those cables up into racks in the ceiling, then down to the router stored in another sort of hotel room-sized cage of the other network, and plug it in.

And that is the moment of transition. That's when information is traveling from off of Cablevision, my cable provider, say, to Google's network or to Facebook's network. You said that amazingly very few people are involved in managing the internet, but didn't all those wires have to get connected by a guy? They did. They did. But it turns out, you know, this is,

all those wires have accreted over really about 10 years or so at these particular buildings. And as an example, I was at Microsoft recently and Microsoft has 90,000 employees globally.

And I asked somebody there, I said, how many of those people are involved with Microsoft's internet work with running their own network?

And the answer was about 200. And then I asked, how many of those 200 people are involved with the connections between Microsoft's network and other networks? And the answer was five. So if you think everyone at Microsoft knows how the internet works, yes, of course, if you do, but it's really just five of them who are fully engaged with this process of connecting one internet network to another Internet network.

All these wires that are connecting everybody, how is it that they're all compatible? I mean, I have things that aren't compatible with my, you know, my telephone. Compatibility, I'm amazed how compatible everything seems to be. I mean, that is the guiding philosophical idea of the Internet. I mean, the Internet is about providing a common language for networks to talk to each other. And that common language is TCPIP, the letters you might see flash on your screen when something goes wrong. And that's really what made it. And in a very distinct moment, a distinct historical moment, a distinct historical moment. New Year's Eve 1984 was the moment when TCPIP became the

sort of established and dominant lingua franca for the networks, this disparate group of computer networks to be able to inter-network. And that's really what that's... I mean, compatibility is the name of the game. I mean, I think, you know, we think about does USB cable have

the right little thing on the end? But it's more about what protocols are traveling between these routers. What is the output? In what way is the information encoded? And how does it know where to go? And that is the defining philosophical idea of the Internet. Andrew Blum is my guest. He is a journalist and author of the book Tubes. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator.

Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. 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. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices,

and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Andrew, how manageable is the Internet? I mean, can you direct the traffic,

or is it just a bunch of connections, and anybody can go wherever they want at any time and go anywhere? Well, it's somewhere in between. You know, when we load a web page on our screen, you know, there might be a thousand different processes going on behind the scenes. You know, it might come from many different places. You know, there might be an ad from one server,

you know, and maybe a login, like a Facebook login from somewhere else. But that only happens because of those individual connections that have been made by network engineers with a fair amount of forethought. If you and I decide to connect our networks, it's usually because there's traffic passing between us. Say you own a small Internet service provider in Connecticut,

and I'm Facebook, and rather than paying a middleman, a sort of FedEx of the Internet, a backbone company, to deliver the bits, maybe we want to connect directly. And so that's a fair amount of direct control in that example over how the information is traveling. And it always comes down to these physical connections. There's always a physical path between two points. And my challenge and my enjoyment in visiting these places

was beginning to see how legible those physical paths were if you shrink your time scale enough to see them, if you zoom in enough in the right place to really say, okay, yeah, there are a lot of bits moving a lot of places, but here, unequivocally, is one of those places. Well, I've heard that there are servers for websites that are in these buildings. Well, what's so special about those buildings? Is it that they have backup power?

What is so special about putting a server in this building as opposed to in my garage? That was one of my key questions. Why is this an important place for the Internet? Why is the Internet here more than somewhere else? And for the dominant buildings, there are almost always two answers to that question. The first answer is there's some fact of geography. You know, there's some reason for this, you know, that this building on a macro scale, its place is important.

For example, in 60 Hudson in New York, it was the Western Union Telegraph Building, and it's always been a kind of pivot point for communications. In that case, it's sort of right at the elbow of Lower Manhattan, always a place that's had a lot to say to other places, and the first route out of town, the Holland Tunnel. The same thing in London. London has always been the sort of main connection point between the eastern and western hemispheres.

But if there's some fact of geography, the other characteristic and equally important with the Internet is there's always some charismatic salesperson who essentially convinced the first two networks to come and connect in these buildings. And because those two networks were there, everyone else came as well. Everyone else kind of piled on. And that history, because it's so recent,

a lot of these charismatic salespeople were operating in 97, 98, well, midnight, basically from 94 to 2002, say. It was fun to talk to them and say, why did you end up here? Why did you convince those two networks to come to this building in particular? And, you know, often it was quite ad hoc. You know, often there was some luck involved that one building took off compared to another. But once they did, you know, the network effect tells us that, you know,

that the more networks are plugged in, it becomes exponentially more important. You know, it means that now that these places are the key nodes, they will stay the key nodes. Others might pop up, but it's unlikely that any of these will decline. The wires, the conduits, the connections that the Internet uses, and you mentioned that, you know, one of the addresses is the old AT&T building. Is the Internet piggybacked on top of telephones and other wires, or is it all new wires?

It's funny. These days it's almost as if the telephones are piggybacked on top of the Internet. To our homes, the connection I'm talking on right now is an old copper cable that now is transmitting Internet as a DSL connection. Under the ocean, the undersea cables that connect continents, those are fiber optic cables that were laid all between about 1996 and 2002. And through those cables, the voice communications, the telephone, is a rounding error. It's like 1% of the total data moving through.

You know, the Internet has sort of swamped telephone communications in terms of data transmitted. So it's a bit of a combination. But, you know, we are still where we are, and the lines that connect us follow those same paths. And my favorite example of that is the first telegraph link in the U.S. was between Washington and Baltimore. Today, the busiest internet route is between Washington and New York, following that

same physical path. So we, you know, we're still, you know, we are still where we are, that the internet hasn't changed that. What else? You mentioned the people and the smells and the buildings. Is there anything else that's kind of like, you know, gee, I never thought of that? I mean, the undersea cables are something that people often don't think about, and it's incredibly surprising that we are still connected by these physical tubes underneath the ocean. You know, we think that international communications are through satellites, which they very rarely are, you know, only in very certain, only in very special cases. The vast majority of international communications are through these undersea cables.

You know, and that's certainly, I think, one of the kind of top-level surprises. But I think it's, you know, for me, it really does come back to, again and again, the idea that, you know, the Internet is a lot less distributed than we might think. We're used to thinking of it being everywhere, when in fact these dominant places are extremely dominant. In a similar way, almost to airports. If you're going to fly to Australia or fly to India, you're not going to go through some small town in France or Germany. You're going to go through Frankfurt or Paris. You're always going to go through some small town in France or Germany. You're going to go through Frankfurt or Paris.

You're always going to go through those big hubs. And that's the same is true for the Internet. If the international communications are going to pass through London or Amsterdam or Frankfurt, they're not going to take some surprising and strange route. Well, it is pretty fascinating, and I'm surprised to hear in this age of, you know, satellite communication and all that you're saying that the old kind of transatlantic cable is really how message A is getting over to point B. Unequivocally. I mean, the, you know, the satellite transmission is just not, you know,

it's a technology of last resort for a bunch of reasons. Partly the fiber optic technology is so sophisticated that it just keeps swallowing everything we can throw at it. You put new equipment on either end of the cable and the same cable transmits 10 times or even 100 times more information. The second reason is that it's a long way into space and back, long enough that there's a delay in a telephone conversation or long enough that if you're using the Internet

and you're typing an email on Gmail or Yahoo or whatever it is and you hit a key and that has to then register far away and then come back, you'll notice if that travels 40,000 miles into space and back, that that delay, which the techies call latency, is significant. And everyone wants to avoid it wherever they can. It turns out the best way to avoid it is to string a cable on the ocean floor for 6,000 miles. Well, and you always see it when they do like a live satellite, you know, talking back to the anchor on the news. There's that delay that sometimes trips them up

because they keep talking over each other. Yep, yep, no, that delay is real. And yet, you know, if that were a landline, as it might be from a studio in New York to a studio in Los Angeles, that's not the case. Those connections are, it's quicker to not have to go to space and back. All of these places, all of space and back all of these places all of these buildings all of these people where our information is flowing in and

around how safe is it I mean our people actually like you know is some guy in a building in Virginia looking at hey look at well look at what this guy wrote in his email or is it is it just not that whenever you get something to the cloud you know whatever you do something on the cloud, you know, whenever you do something on the cloud, whenever you write an email using Gmail or AOL or whatever it is, I mean, you're trusting that those companies are respecting your privacy. And there are plenty of examples of that trust being violated. The internet hubs themselves, at least the places where networks connect, they're more the distribution depots.

You know, the information is moving fast in enormous quantities. It's harder to imagine, you know, somebody sitting there tapping in and saying, oh, look at that email going by. You know, that's like looking at a molecule of water at a river. You know, it's just that the scale is different. But when it stops, you know, when it's stored someplace, when you store information with somebody else, you give up some responsibility for it and you trust them a lot. And for me, if I'm going to do that, and this is the way I look at the world, I wanted to know where that was.

I wanted to know who was responsible for it. I wanted to know why it was where it was. And it really was. I mean, that's why I wanted to go visit the Internet, to see where my things are. And if somebody tells you, oh, I can't tell you that, it's everywhere, that's not really a good answer, that's not really a truthful answer. Just because it's more than one place doesn't mean it's not anywhere at all. And that's really what I set out to visit in the tale I tried to tell.

Well, that's really interesting. And now I have a much better sense of what the Internet actually is in a physical way, not just a virtual way. So thank you. Andrew Blum has been my guest. He is a journalist and author of the book Tubes, A Journey to the Center of the Internet. There's a link to his book on Amazon in the show notes for this episode of the podcast, which, as always, you can find at our website, somethingyoushouldknow.net. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown.

I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. You have no doubt been told by your parents or a boss or a teacher that true success comes from hard work and self-discipline. But of course, it would be better to achieve success the easy way, wouldn't it? Well, maybe, but maybe not. I want you to meet Rory Vaden. He is a consultant and author of several books on success, procrastination, and self-discipline, including Take the Stairs, Seven Steps to Achieving True Success. Welcome, Rory. So is self-discipline the only way, really, to be

successful? Oh, absolutely not. No, self-discipline is just one of the most guaranteed paths to success, and it's not about making life as hard as possible. It's more about doing the hardest parts of things as soon as possible. And, you know, yet we live in this escalator world where we constantly search for the shortcut and we're looking for conveniences, not realizing that problems that are procrastinated on are only amplified. And what we learned through, you learned through studying these incredibly disciplined people is that self-discipline isn't as hard as you think when you think about it the right way. And so what's the right way to think about it?

Well, the Take the Stairs methodology is about seven core insights that these ultra-performers, as our publisher called them, think differently. For example, one of them is called the paradox principle of sacrifice. And that basically says that easy short-term choices lead to difficult long-term consequences. Meanwhile, difficult short-term choices lead to easy long-term consequences. And so most of us opt for what feels good in the here and now, whether it's the food that we eat, buying things that we can't really afford, maybe saying things that just come off the top of our head in an emotional situation, any sort of sexual temptation.

And we indulge in those things because in the moment they feel good, not realizing that over time they create actually, you know, negative consequences for our life. And the most disciplined people in the world, at some point, they came to the not so obvious realization that the short-term sacrifices, so making smart financial decisions, choosing to do the difficult thing in relationships and having tough conversations, making healthy choices, that kind of thing, the short-term difficult ends up creating the life of happiness, success, freedom, peace, and money that, you know, we all want. So I imagine that people have a sense of that, that there is no shortcut,

that taking the easy way out is not necessarily the best way, but we take the easy way because it's the easy way. Well, that's where the big insight comes through for you is understanding that, you know, we do live in an escalator world. We're going to be marketed escalator types of things. We're going to see the people around us living out an escalator mentality. But the part that allows us to choose a different path is knowing that over time that that makes life harder, that delays the things that need to be done in order to become successful. And so having that insight creates a new perspective that allows us to choose the difficult right over the easy wrong

because what we really want is sustainable success, sustainable peace, sustainable relationships. And so understanding that dynamic, and that's why we call it the paradox principle of sacrifice. It's this great paradox that what we thought was the easy way, what looked like the easy way, what everybody told us was the easy thing to do, created the more difficult life, and all of the things that we didn't want to do that looked hard and felt hard and seemed so challenging, that when we get ourselves to do those things, we find out that that creates the easier life. I imagine that as people get older, another way to say what you just said is,

if I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently because I made these easy choices and now I'm not where I want to be. Well, I think age gives us a lot. And one of the big things we realize is that procrastination and indulgence are really nothing more than creditors that charge us interest. And it's the same dynamic as going to the store and buying something on credit. We don't appropriately value the things that we do not directly pay for. So this piece of plastic enables me to have it now. And it's not till much later when the newness of the TV has worn off and I'm looking at the bill and money is tight and I'm seeing how much I'm paying in interest, that it finally resonates with me then. The total full cost of this was more than just the price tag on the TV, but it was the interest.

That same dynamic is in play in every area of our life. Our doctor's been telling us for years that we should get in better shape, and yet we kind of ignore him and say, well, I don't really like that. That doesn't apply to me. I think I'm just fine. And then one day we wake up, and we are so far away from the path that we originally set out on, and only then do we realize because we're living in the consequence that we have created for ourself. And so that's why naturally over time we become more present to the impacts of the interest that procrastination and indulgence charges us.

You just described a whole bunch of people, because that's just the way a lot of people live their life. Even though they know what you just said is probably true, they see this easier way and think, well, why do it the hard way when you can do it the easy way? And then they ultimately end up somewhere they didn't think they would be. So if you have to make the hard choices now for an easier life later or a better life later, when do you get to stop doing the hard stuff and when does it get better? Well, and I'll tell you what the truth is. And I just have to warn you that you might not like it at first, but if you hang with me, it'll come around. And the truth is that we never get to

stop being disciplined. Now, that doesn't mean that life is going to be one great big giant trip to the gym or that we're only going to eat foliage for every meal. But the reason that we never get to stop being disciplined is because of something that we at Southwestern call the rent axiom. And the rent axiom says that success is never owned. Success is only rented, and the rent is due every day. Now, success is never owned, it's rented, and the rent is due every day.

And I know that sounds like bad news, but the power is that when you embrace that as a truth, then what happens is your perspective shifts, and you enter into a resolution or a commitment or a decision, understanding that the change that you are embarking on is not a temporary one, but a permanent one. And so what happens when you have that correct mentality is your appetites begin to change. And just like your appetite for food can change, so can your appetite for discipline. So a minute ago, Mike, you mentioned that I described your appetite for discipline. So, you know, a minute ago, Mike, you mentioned that I described a lot of people. Well, one of the people I described was myself because five years ago, I was about 40 pounds heavier than I am right now. And I remember

the day that I said, I'm going to stop eating fast food. And it was incredibly difficult that day. But what happened is it got easier. It's like it's as hard today as it will ever be. And then over time, your body starts to adjust. And so now you could put a Big Mac in front of me and I really wouldn't be tempted to eat it. And if I did eat it, it would really do some damage to my body because everything has changed. The same is true for working out. When I first started working out and swimming and running, I hated it. And yet what was once a challenge to get my body to do later became the very thing that my body craved. And we see that in every area of life with all these ultra performers

that it's the whole illusion and the seductive myth of the escalator that we can have a 30-day program or a 90-day fix or a magic pill or a secret potion. And so we might be able to convince ourselves to make a sacrifice for a while, but eventually that wears off and then we gain all the weight back or we start spending again or we start making poor choices. So when you approach into, when you come into the resolution, understanding that success is never owned, it's rented and the rent is due every day, then it positions your mindset correctly to allow for the natural change in your habits and your actions. And one day you have a

new set of thinking that you have permanent changes in our actions have to be reinforced by permanent changes in our thinking. And so you have a new set of thinking, which reinforces a new set of habits, a new set of actions, and ultimately a sustainable set of results. And that is the hard truth in all of this. As you described, this instant gratification, credit cards, we want it now, and nobody wants to work for anything. They don't. And, you know, work ethic is not necessarily the same as discipline. Discipline is not just about hard work or smart work. It's about both. But it's about doing the things that are the hardest, you know, as soon as possible, which thereby minimizes their overall difficulty and gets us to the place we want to go. But you're absolutely right that the whole culture that we live in, it's a pervasive.

I mean, just as an informal research project, when you go to the mall or an airport, just stand and watch a set of escalators and stairs and just sit there for a second and watch which one people choose. It's almost a natural programmed response now. So talk about doing the hard things now, because I think people like to think they do the hard things, but maybe they do them later. You know, we'll get to the hard things, but they don't do them right now, but as long as they get to them, that's fine. Yeah, well, you know, there are a couple types of procrastination,

and it relates to this discussion, because when most of us think about procrastination, we think of classic procrastination, which we define as consciously delaying what we know we should be doing. So I have a stack of bills at home on the kitchen counter. I come home from work. I know I should be paying them. And yet I choose consciously to say, nope, I don't feel like it. I'm going to do something else.

But that is not the most dangerous form of procrastination because we know when we're doing it. There is a new, much more pervasive form of procrastination that we call creative avoidance. And creative avoidance is unconsciously delaying and allowing our attention to shift to less important tasks to where we can get busy just being busy. And one of the key insights that we learned from studying these ultra performers is just understanding that until you accomplish the two or three most important things on your to-do list for the day, everything else is a distraction. And so when we, when we, when we accomplish those things first, it sets, it sets in motion in an entire, an entire series of events in terms of productivity.

And so it really is a trap, and it's a tough one to avoid to just allow our day to get sucked up by email or conference calls or meetings or just sort of the minutia of everyday life. And so one of the other principles is called the magnification principle of focus. And the idea is that focus is power. Just to think about it, if you go outside on a hot summer day and you lay a piece of paper down on the asphalt and you hold a – nothing happens to the piece of paper, but if you were to put a magnifying glass between the sun and the piece of paper,

the piece of paper catches on fire. That's because focus is literally power. But yet focus is one of the most scarce resources I think that are around today. We are struggling from a lack of focus. There's a million things vying for our attention. And so when we come in, having that intense focus, and I like to promote two things. I found that realistically with the speed of the workplace and all of the things that are happening, come in every day with two things that no matter what, these are going to get done or these two calls have to happen and approach it with the

idea of just understanding that everything else is a distraction until that is checked off. That's a great piece of advice. And as you say, and it's actually a phrase I often use about how there are so many people who are busy being busy that don't ever seem to accomplish much. And I would think that taking the attitude that, okay, these two things have to get done and everything else is a distraction is a great way to live your life. Yeah, it's an effective way to live your life. It's where you get things done and you make forward progress. One of the strategies here is you learn to ignore the small stuff for a while so you can work on the big stuff. So it's like you have to be protective of your focus for a short window of time, which in the Take the Stairs methodology, we refer to it.

This is one of the other principles. It's called the Harvest Principle of Schedule. And it basically says that the whole idea of work-life balance is this horrible myth because balance, by definition, means equal force in opposite directions. So if we sleep eight hours a day and we work eight hours a day, then to truly have a balanced life, we could only do one other thing and we'd have to do it for eight hours every day. And it's completely impractical and it's really a horrible metaphor and I'm sure it was somebody like me who came up with it

and now everybody kind of goes with it. And so the new metaphor that we offer is more of a harvest season. And you think of a farmer, and there's a season of intense work for a short time every year. And when harvest season comes, the farmer, it doesn't matter if he feels like working, he's out there working 18 hours a day. It doesn't matter if he's sick, he's out there working. During the harvest season, it's not like the farmer is sitting around going, hmm, maybe I should evaluate my other potential career opportunities. I mean, it's a season, and working in short bursts and seasonal periods

seems to be a more relatable and pragmatic strategy for the world we live in. And it's out there in the world. Accountants have tax season. Athletes have intense seasons. Real estate agents, the summer months are a high season. And applying that even to inside of the microcosm of one day that you have a short window of uninterrupted focus on one activity, you create this season, the focused effort produces amplified results. Well, I like that. Focused effort produces amplified results. And I think that's where we'll leave it. Thanks, Rory. Rory Vaden has been my guest. His book is Take the Stairs, Seven Steps to Achieving True Success. There's a link to his book on Amazon in the show notes for this episode of the podcast,

which you can find at our website, somethingyoushouldknow.net. People are pretty much universally scared of lightning, and with good reason. You don't want to get struck by lightning. But some of the things we believe about lightning aren't really true. For example, we've all heard that lightning rarely strikes twice, but the National Weather Service says lightning can and does strike multiple times in the same place, especially if you're tall and pointy. The Empire State Building is hit nearly 100 times a year by lightning.

So are we safe from lightning if we're in a car with rubber tires? Yes, but it's not just because of the rubber tires. It's actually the metal surrounding you that keeps you safer. Just don't lean on the doors or any metal elements if you're caught in a storm on the road. If you're in a convertible or on a motorcycle or a bike, those rubber tires will not help you one bit. And if you're caught in an open field during a lightning storm, do not lie flat on the ground as some misguided people suggest. This actually increases your chance of

injury from deadly ground current from nearby strikes. And that is something you should know. That's our podcast today. As always, you can email me at mike at something you should know. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. Thanks for listening to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook.

Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run. 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times,

we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him,

but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes, so please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.