The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Ben Hardy Talk Family, Self-Improvement, and How to Take On a Challenge

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

In today’s episode, Ryan and Ben Hardy, the author and organizational psychologist, talk about the path of self-improvement, being a parent to foster children, and how to make permanent positive change.Ben Hardy is an organizational psychologist who has written multiple books and articles on the power of changing your personality to achieve success. From 2015 to 2018, he was the most popular author on Medium with over a million people reading each one of his posts. Ben also speaks at multiple leadership and entrepreneurial events each year. Ben and his wife have fostered three children; together with their new twins, they live in Orlando, FL.Get Ben’s latest book, Personality Isn’t Permanent: https://geni.us/AjG8This episode is brought to you by GoMacro. GoMacro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors—the perfect fuel for your summer expeditions. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order over $60, plus free shipping.This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business. And right now, LinkedIn is helping companies like yours find the essential workers that they need in these trying times. Visit http://linkedin.com/stoic to post your healthcare or essential job for free, or to post another job for your business.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Benjamin Hardy: Twitter: https://twitter.com/BenjaminPHardyInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/benjamin_hardy_phd/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/benjaminhardy88/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. of necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for.

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From Bloomberg and Wondering comes Spellcaster, a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable.

I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story

that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the

world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stove Podcast. Today's guest is Ben Hardy. Ben is, and I don't say this lightly, one of the sweetest, nicest people that I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. He reached out to me many, many years ago when he was thinking about writing his first book. No one seemed to be particularly interested in it despite the fact that he had an enormous online following. He wasn't one point, the most popular writer on all of medium. You've almost certainly read many of his viral articles

over the years. And he reached out for some advice and we ended up doing a number of sort of strategy sessions. I'm always really impressed when people are good at one thing and realize they're entering a domain of knowledge or a system or an industry that they're not as familiar with and they seek out advice from people who have had success in that realm.

And so obviously, as a consultant and advisor to writers and people over the years, I've gotten to experience that it's actually helped teach that habit in me because that's not sort of how I was raised. This would have been seen by parents doing stuff like that. So I spent a number of hours with Ben on the phone over the years. We crafted this proposal and we crafted the idea that became his first book, which is called Will Power. It doesn't work.

And it's a great book. I strongly recommend you check it out. And then over the last two years, he's been working on the sequel, which comes out here this week. And that's why we've got this episode. This book is called Personality, Is It Permanent? So Ben is, unlike a lot of self-help writers,

actually trained in the stuff that he's talking about, he's a psychology PhD, really smart dude, he's done the work. And as I said, a nice person. I don't know many people that have adopted three children out of the foster care system as Ben and his wife did. I don't know many people who are as successful and talented as what they do as Ben is, but sort of remain as humble and self-effacing and interested in learning. It's just always a pleasure to talk to. As you'll see, he sort of soft-spoken and understated,

but I think there's a lot of wisdom underneath that. So we talk about stoicism, we talk about the idea of change and evolution and growth, which I think you'll hear Ben talk about Carol Twacks, the growth mindset several times. I think that's sort of a core idea that I try to live my life by, that I feel is responsible for a lot of my success. You'll hear Ben talk about the adversity that it came from. His father was an addict, and I think what's interesting about Ben is that as he talks about it in both of his books, it was revealing for him to see his brother respond to that adversity and difficulty. In one way, it, he struggled under it, you could argue it made him worse, and then Ben sort of went the other way, right? And how we react to trauma, how we overcome adversity,

how we persevere through things that are not our fault, that we didn't cause, of course, is part and parcel to stoicism. So I'm happy to talk to Ben. I can't wait for you to listen to this episode. And of course, check out his new book, Personality Isn't Permanent, which is published by Penguin Portfolio, which

is actually my publisher. So I'm happy to welcome Ben to the fold and of course to this Daily Stewart podcast. How have you been doing the last couple of months? It must be a lot of kids in your house. Yes, there are five kids in our house and one more on the way. It's a little crazy. Oh, man, and a book coming out, so it must be absolutely no stress. Yeah, it's been stressful, but I actually am really glad I got, you know, the first book

out of my system. So I'm less attached to various things. I feel actually a lot better than I did on the last book. So I know that you've written about this as well, but my wife is very epic. And so it allows for situations like this. She handles it. It's without her, this would make no sense.

So what do you mean by epic? That's really interesting. Well, I mean, I remember you wrote an article once about how like having an amazing wife is like the ultimate life hack. Um, sure. Yeah, so my wife is just, I mean, she can handle this. She's, she's super mom and like, that's what she wanted to do her whole life. She's very crafty and stuff like that. But so our oldest son, Caleb, who's 12 years old, so we adopted our first three, you know,

that, but she was homeschooling him anyways. So we've got our two twins who are 17 months old, but she was already homeschooling Caleb because he was just struggling in the academic system. He was getting in fights. It was just not really the right fit for him. So she's been homeschooling him for like a year anyways. It's been really good for him.

Like we've been getting him in like private baseball lessons. He's just an athletic kid. And so when the other two Jordan Jordan and Logan, who are 10 and eight, needed to come home because of COVID, she kind of already had the system. Yeah, that's interesting. It is weird. I feel like for ambitious people in the modern world,

in our times, there's sort of this stigma against relationships and kids, like it somehow it sort of holds you back or somehow not part of the stigma against relationships and kids, like it somehow it sort of hold you back or somehow not part of the equation of having the career success or life success or impact that you want, which is interesting because when you look back historically, like most people were married, most people had kids, and sure that they had different sort of arrangements and expectations of what sort of each gender was supposed to do, but I'm never quite understood that. To me, it's actually a form of balance and stability

that actually draws some of your best work out of you. Yeah, I'm on the exact same page. I think like, just as an example, like Kobe Bryant, Steph Curry, I'm a big NBA fan, and Kobe was married young, and I think like just you know as an example like Kobe Bryant Steph Curry like I'm a big NBA fan and Like Kobe was married young and I think you know He was obviously very good at basketball and there's a lot of NBA players or even just athletes in general who get married but You know he and others who are married they actually do have that stability which allows them in my opinion to go all out on their craft But because they've got like this foundation to go home to,

whereas other people, you know, where they go, when they go home, they're kind of like to themselves, easy to get distracted, or something like that. So I think it's good to have a lot of meaning in other aspects of your life. So this might be a little bit of a personal question, but how much does your wife care about your actual work? Is she very interested in it, or is it actually sort of, it exists outside the home

and therefore allows you to sort of compartmentalize a little bit? Yeah, it exists totally outside the home. She doesn't read, she'll read the books, like she's read, you know, she's read my books, but she won't read my articles.

Like she just, you know, work quite into like our faith, but like she won't read my articles. She's, you know, we're quiet into like our faith, but like she doesn't read self-help. Like it's just not even her genre, like even though, like I would, you know, like in the form of stoic, like I would consider her actually quite a stoic as a human being, but she doesn't read this stuff.

And she has no interest in my writing. I mean, she has interest in me, and so she like, she respects and honors it, but like she won't sit and like read my emails or anything like that. So it's totally compartmental. Yeah, and I think to someone who's not in a relationship like that, that might sound very strange, almost like a bad thing, but I think it's actually very healthy and very balancing, because it's like the work consumes you and it's there for you all the time. It's of the sort of primal importance. And then, so to have someone who isn't obsessed with it is very sort of refreshing

and it allows you to put it down. But then, I think also there's kind of a difference, like I write about soicism, you write about psychology and self-improvement and all these things. I think part of the reason you and I are attracted to writing and reading about those things is it's something we actually need a lot of help with and as you sort of asceticus as you learn while you teach. And then so sometimes having a spouse or a partner or a friend who is just sort of very intuitively good at those things or naturally good at those things, that's refreshing and helpful too because you're not necessarily on the same journey together. Yeah, no, it's funny because I was just talking to a friend of mine on this topic. So, one of the things that drew me to my wife was that she challenged me from the beginning. Like I dated a lot of girls before Lauren,

and like they like kind of agreed with everything I said, or like they never, and like, Lauren's very, I don't know, like she doesn't agree with everything I say. And like she'll like push back like, and like, I mean, I don't know, she challenges me, which sometimes makes it difficult, because like I want to just just be affirmed and accepted.

But it's like one of those relationships. If you, so like a lot of people they think you have to like find that perfect fit, and like that can be good in the short term, but in the long term, it decreases the opportunities for growth, whereas if you've got someone that's way different, it's kind of like having a culture where there's a lot of differences so that you can

actually become more creative. And so you have to be flexible with each other, but if you're flexible with each other and you're very different, you can challenge each other, I get a lot out of it. I mean, she pushes me in a lot of different ways, and I can, and it's never easy. Like I'm always fully accepted in the relationship, but it's like, she, I don't know, like she just doesn't, she never makes it easy. In other words, like, no, no, I totally get it. I love it. Okay, so that idea of challenges is interesting to me. Obviously, with Daily Stoke, we do all these different challenges. I think that word challenge is an interesting

one. If I were to define sort of the thing that ties your two books together, personality isn't permanent and willpower is not enough, it's, they're unusual in that instead of telling people something they want to hear, like let's say a positive affirmation, you chose with both those books to essentially challenge, let either a commonly held assumption

or the status quo in some way, even though it's ultimately done in an inspirational way, I think it's interesting that with both those books, you are stepping up and saying, hey, this thing is not true. Yeah, I mean, that's why I wrote both books is because I felt like with Will Power doesn't work. My younger brother Trevor was kind of the inspiration for that book. Like he's someone who I've always admired.

We had a pretty tough childhood where my father was an extreme drug addict growing up. And it really absorbed my brother. And so he actually literally two weeks ago, I took him to a treatment facility. And he's someone over the decades, he's 30 now. I've just watched him fall on his face over and over. He struggles with addiction. You would consider talent, charisma, all the best desires, but he just falls on his face over and over and over. Obviously, from an addiction standpoint, trying to gut it through willpower is the opposite.

You actually like need, they say that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It's connection. So like you need to seek help. You need to actually like admit that you can't do it by yourself. And to some degree, the inspiration of that book, and you know, we live in a very individualistic society and a lot of the self-help is very individualistic. So I just felt like I needed to write a book that focused on context or environment. I think that's really interesting.

And yeah, it's like, you'll see sort of studies that try to debunk like a 12-step program, which is always interesting because the, no one is saying they're perfect, they're saying they're better than the willpower route, which is essentially impossible. And I think that's an interesting expression that the opposite of addiction is community. route, which is essentially impossible. And I think that's an interesting expression that

the opposite of addiction is community. You might also say, sort of the opposite of bad habits is not necessarily good habits, or just sort of wanting better habits. Maybe it's sort of its systems and its environment, and it's sort of a lifestyle that draws you closer to where you want to go. I feel like that's sort of what your book's about. Yeah, and I like the thing that pushed me, you know, and obviously you helped me a lot with conceptualizing this book. But like when we became foster parents of three kids, it was interesting from both dimensions. It was interesting to watch them change, but it was also interesting to watch me and my

wife have to have to figure out how to change. Cause we had never been parents before. I hadn't studied it much. Like we were interested in it. Obviously we made the decision, but if you take my kids and put them back in their former situation, where they're with their drug addict parents,

living in a trailer out in the middle of the boonies in South Carolina, like their potential is radically limited in that situation no matter how much effort or innate potential, whatever you wanna call it. Like, when you put them into a new situation, all of a sudden they have new options, new potential, new resources, new support systems,

all of a sudden they have new, you know. And then, so obviously that can change them very quickly, but on the second note, the big quote that kind of really got myself thinking was the will to rank quote, which is the ability of the average person could be doubled if the situation demanded it. And that was kind of,

no, that's a big psychological concept, but when my wife and I became parents of these three kids, we were forced, a lot of people may think that they're, you know, a lot of people may think that they're good people or a lot of people may think they're really patient or happy, big in my opinion because those attributes are never put to the fire. Like, I thought I was probably a patient person before I had these three kids, but then you put myself in the situation where it's like, no, we can't take them back to the babysitter. Like, these are our kids, they're throwing chairs, tantrums,

all sorts of crazy stuff. And I failed many, many times and actually still do to this day. And as a parent, you get that. And but like, I was forced to change. My wife was forced to change in many different ways because the situation required it. And so it's just a different approach at looking at change that the situation actually matters way more

than just you as an individual. No, and I remember when I was reading your book, I showed you a quote that I liked, and it might have ended up in the book, but it's that Churchill quote of like, we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us. And I think that's a decent sort of metaphor analogy for habits and life. It's like, because you choose to adopt kids

or you choose to move across the country or you choose to cut a toxic person out of your life. Or you have to choose to make these decisions. Your brother chooses to go to the treatment center, but then it's the interplay between you and the consequences of that choice that sort of can create either a positive feedback loop or a negative feedback loop. And I think when I see a lot of people that

are sure struggling to do what they want to do in life, what I tend to find they have in common is some bad decisions about sort of how they live, where they live, sort of who they spend time. You know what I mean? And I think it's amazing the small decisions you can make that can spiral in a very big positive way. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, and the fun part about just opening yourself up to new situations, new opportunities.

Obviously, it exposes you to things you wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to, but it allows the element of surprise. Like, there's a lot of things I just wouldn't have expected. Even if I had read books on the subject, and obviously I love reading books, but there's things you can't fully predict or anticipate. We obviously anticipated many elements of this.

And it did take us in many directions we hoped or predicted it would go. But there is also so many elements of the situation that were up for surprise that I think it's really good to be surprised, as people get older, like for example, our 217 month old twins. You know, being down here in Florida, there's a lot of swimming pools. We have a pool in our backyard. So like, our girls have to learn how

to swim just because you don't want to find a, find a bad situation. And so like, we throw them in the pool, not necessarily us, but like, they're in swimming lessons. And so like, it's fun to watch them go through that extreme, like, adaptation where they they're not enjoying being in that situation but figuring out how to learn. And I think that often people stop doing that because as they get older, they're not required to do it. And so I think there's a lot of benefit

in also being surprised by new situations. Yeah, did you read David Epstein's book, Range? Yeah, I read, I honestly read half of it. Well, no, he has this great expression he calls it, the rut of competence. And I think that's where a lot of people get. So we talk about your comfort zone, but that sounds like sort of settling.

He's talking about what happens when you get really good at one thing, you sort of decide to stay only with that thing. And so you get in a rut. And then yeah, I think these sort of shocks your system, whether it's taking a dramatic shift in your career or it's your whole world gets shaken upside down by a pandemic, it forces you to have to develop new competencies very quickly. And so again, yeah, I think this idea of challenges are important and shouldn't be, with the Stoics would say you sort of embrace them because even if you didn't choose them,

they are forcing you to develop new competencies. And I think you're an interesting example of that in that you're sort of studying to be an academic and you started to write online. And I imagine that was a difficult transition, but it forced you to develop a whole set of skills in a way of communicating ideas that your average academic or PhD just simply doesn't have. Yeah.

And I actually went into the PhD, cause I actually started blogging during my first year of my PhD program. So I went in with that knowledge that I was gonna develop a different skill set and it actually created a lot of conflict. I was kind of an outsider the whole time I was in my PhD program because I was not one of them.

You know, like, yeah, it was a transition. I'm glad I did it. And, you know, to your point, I think, you know, with the range idea, I'm like one of my favorite quotes is, never be the former anything. It's a quote from Condoleezza Rice. She says, I firmly believe you should never be the former anything, you know, and whether that's being an alcoholic

or like, you know, you can get caught in a former persona, whether that's like, you know, you being a best-selling author, you know, me being the number one writer on medium, like it can be easy to keep doing something just because it worked in the past and because you've, you've kind of attached to that perspective of yourself to kind of to the detriment of what's possible, you know, on that next level of growth. No, I think that ties into your next book, this idea of personality, not being permanent. But when you're talking about personality,

you're not saying like, oh, I'm a happy person or I'm a funny person, although you do mean that. I think what you're really referring to and what Condoleezza Rice is referring to is this tendency we have to identify with things, to say like, oh, I'm a loser, or oh, I'm a creative person, I'm a writer, I'm a persecuted minority,

we pick these sort of identities in life, I'm fat, I'm an addict, I'm not smart, I'm not good at math. And then we sort of, once we get these labels, then those labels sort of become who we are, and we're either despondent that we can't change it, or we're really scared that we might lose it. Is that sort of what you mean by personality not being permanent? That's a big part of it.

Yeah, it's a really important distinction. Identity and personality are two different things. Identity is kind of your self concept, how you define and describe yourself. It's kind of the narration, just everything you were saying. I'm a loser or I'm a time. And identity is actually, in my opinion, infinitely more important than personality, personality

does become the byproduct. And identity is, like personality is the unintended side effect of identity. But identity is one of the key pieces of what your personality is. And it is huge. Like your identity is basically how you describe yourself, it shapes your behavior, and then ultimately your behavior over time becomes your personality. And the reason people, you know, have a hard time letting go of it is because your identity is so personal that you defend it. I mean, Paul Graham talked about that

in this little lecture about keeping it small, but it's like you defend and you seek to confirm your identity rather than disconfirm it. And so your identity shapes your goals, which obviously limits, it's essentially a fixed mindset if you keep your current identity too seriously. Like a lot of the science goes a lot of different ways on this in personality, but it's better

from a scientific perspective. It's better to view your former self as a different person than you are today. You're not the same person you were five or ten years ago. You actually would make different decisions now if you were in former situations. You see the world different. But it's also important to view your future self the exact same way, that they're not gonna view things the same way you do right now. Just as an example, my future self

is gonna disagree potentially with a lot of the things I said in personalities and permanent. And that may actually be a good thing. And so hopefully my future self is more mature and so as a result, I shouldn't be so focused on my present self, is where does that sound? Your present self, like Carol Deweck says, it's the tyranny of now, that, you know, like your presence, if you hold it too tightly, then it essentially becomes a fixed mindset.

No, I think that's really important and sort of two ties to the ancient world come to me. So one, you know, in meditation's markets writes about, he says, escape imperialization. He says that that indelible stain. And what he means is imperialization, he says like, don't become the emperor. He's like, even though you've been named emperor, don't let that sort of meld with your DNA and who you are.

He's not saying, don't change, but he is innocent saying, don't be changed by the fact that you happen to have this job right now. And his worry was that when you look historically, people tend to be corrupted or broken by power. And this other interesting idea from Cicero and one of his dialogues, somebody tries to go like,

hey, what you just said contradicts what you said, you know, two years ago, and he says, you're trying to like pin me down by what I've said in the past, but he's like, I'm a free agent, meaning I say what I think is true now, and I'm more than willing to accept something else's true in the future, it's weird how in politics we sort of label people flip floppers, but ideally,

you want people to be evolving and changing and growing and adding new beliefs to who they are. Yeah, I actually didn't write. So I went on a church mission for a few years and that's when I got into journaling and that's when I got into writing or really reading. I got really into reading and I decided at that point that I would be a writer. I actually thought I was gonna write more religious style books for a long time. I'm interested.

But so I got home from that experience in 2010 and I was, you know, going to college, I started college at 22 and, you know, I started writing in 2015. So like five years passed by where I was thinking about it and wanting to do it. And one of the reasons I didn't start sooner is because I was worried about saying the wrong thing.

I was worried that I would say something that made it like lead a person astray or just that it wouldn't be right. And then eventually I just kind of came to the conclusion it's better to be anxiously engaged in a good cause, like doing your best. And I definitely, in recent months, I've reread WorldBlog posts. I'm sure you've had this experience

where I definitely disagree with some of the things I used to say. But I don't actually, I'm not mad that it's on the internet. I'm actually glad it's there, and I'm fine with it being there because there's a quote that I use in the book. It's like a painting is never finished. It's simply an interesting place. And none of the work we ever do is ever finished. It's just done. And I think it's actually good to view your work that you're not the same person you were a few years ago and you think differently and you have different beliefs. And so I can use that same

perspective with my future self. And so I can use that same perspective with my future self. And so I can actually be less attached to my current work, even though I very much love it and believe it. I actually hope in the future, I see things very differently. Hopefully a lot better. Hopefully I can make finer distinctions, make better decisions. And it doesn't offend me.

In other words, the work I create isn't perfect. Yeah, I don't know if I'm offended when I look at things that I've written in the past, but I do one lesson I've taken from it, I'd be curious what your thoughts are. It is when I read stuff that I wrote, particularly now that I've been publishing online for something like 15 years,

like almost an inconceivable amount of time to me. What I, I think there's things that I see that I'm like, wow, I can't believe I wrote that. I'm sort of proud of it. I'm pleased with it. I can see flashes of potential. And then, then I see things where I think what strikes me most negatively about things that I've written in the past is the certainty of it. And so this sort of ties into your point, which is, it's not that I regret being right or wrong. What I regret, what I want to change in the present or try to address for future writing is that I want to be more humble in what I'm saying, less attached to it and certainly more nuanced and empathetic in how I say it.

Yeah, and I definitely agree with that to many degrees. I mean, when you're a psychologist, you almost have to put caveats on everything you say. Well, at the same time, good writing in a lot of ways comes from a really powerful place. Or not necessarily powerful, but like often sometimes certainty is more effective than not. So it's, it's a, I actually agree with you because I mean, I've said things very, in very certain terms, even in this book, you know, that, yeah, may or may not actually be, they're

definitely not always true. They're true in context. And so, yeah, I think it's a great experience, really, to see the growth. Yeah, it's like when I look at, say, obstacle versus ego versus stillness, each one of those books got longer. And I think one of the reasons that they got longer, I don't think it was me being more self-indulgent. I think that as I, when I knew less, I was able to say things much more black and white

because I didn't, and so there's this interesting tension where the more you know, the more ideally intellectually humble you become. And I think that's an important idea of sort of personality being impermanent is that ideally you should be growing and changing and learning things that makes you question who you were in the past.

And if you're not, like if personality is permanent, what's strange is the idea that like, here's an example, I've written this before, but you know when people go like, oh, you know if if 15 year old me saw me today like they'd kick my ass who being a sell-out or you know for For like for doing this or like I can't believe like they saw me acting this way They they never let me live it down and it's like I try to think about Why would I be valuing the opinion of a 15 year old, who's only been on the planet for 15 years,

you know, who doesn't really know things? And so the idea that you would simply be who you began as, there's this great quote from Sena Curry says, like too many people lack the fickleness to live as they should and simply live as they've begun. And I think like the idea that who, the random events of your childhood and your high school experience formed you to be, that seems like you're, you're calling it really early to stay that person instead of growing and changing. Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree. I mean, not only maybe you would you not want to take a 15 year old, you know, either version of yourself or someone else's viewpoints.

You would take them with salt. You actually, from like a trauma perspective, because former traumas can really shape your identity in how you see the world. You actually have to let go of how your former self felt and saw a negative experience. And you actually have to reinterpret it. You have to, meaning is an enormous aspect of

identity, you know, like as an example, like Carol Carol Deweck talks a lot about how people with a fixed mindset like when they experience difficulty, the meaning they give to that experience is that they're not smart. Whereas the meaning that someone with a growth mindset has when they experience difficulty is I'm getting smarter. that someone with a growth mindset has when they experience difficulty is I'm getting smarter. So like, meaning is pretty much everything. It's your interpretation of something. And so what trauma actually is, is it's just, it's a negative interpretation or a negative set of meanings that you give to a former experience because it emotionally was painful and you chose not to reframe the meaning. But one of the things that is like key, like in letting go of various things, like, you know, that 15-year-old version of yourself is to recognize that, you know, as the 32-year-old version of you,

you don't have to see things the way that the 15-year-old version of you saw him, you can actually reshape the context, the meaning, so that you're no longer affected by it. And you also can give your former self a break because they weren't you. Like they were, you essentially have to give them the benefit of the doubt. Like everyone from your former life deserves empathy. Like even myself, my dad as an example,

like he was a total drug addict when I was age 11 through 20. And I basically had him not there. But looking at him now, like obviously he's gone a long way, he's no longer that guy, but also we've developed such a great relationship and I've actually had to come to conclusions about why he became that person. In order to do that, I actually had to ask him about it and ask him why he made those decisions. And I was very surprised. Like I learned things about my dad that I couldn't have known at the 11-year-old version of myself. And I couldn't

create meanings as the 11-year-old version of myself that I can create now based on the knowledge or context. But he I learned so many things about my dad that made me completely empathetic towards why he would make those decisions. And I don't have to view that memory the same way the kid version of me did. And I shouldn't. And if I did, actually, that would be a problem. And I don't know about you,

but I think one of the things that having kids does is it like, you can go like, oh, this must have affected me when I was little. Like something that you know happened. It's very hard to remember what it was like to be seven or three or 13. So then when you actually start spending time around a three-year-old, then you see how, you know, if your parents are still around, you see how a three-year-old interacts with your parents.

You go, oh, now a lot of these sort of vague, deep-seated feelings inside me, I can put a name to them, I understand their roots, and you can sort of seek to comfort that part of you that is either in pain or that struggling or confused or has sort of deep emotional reactions to things that are perhaps not appropriate. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a key thing that we all need to do is choose to reframe how we view former things, choose different meanings.

In my opinion, it's best to view the past is something that happened for you, not to you. That's a buyer-up-cady concept, but like, that's genuinely how I feel about my past. Now, there's a good book called Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart. It's by a guy named Gordon Livingston. He was a psychiatrist for a lot of years. He also studied grief because I think he experienced a lot of death You know, he talks a lot about narration and about how essentially the past is a fiction and you know It's it's just a view and that's a really healthy approach because of someone else would have viewed it or interpreted it some way else But not only can you choose to view an experience as positive or negative

But you can also choose to view the former people in your life as either villains or heroes. But looking at my own situation, it's so much more beneficial to my president, my future to view the past as something that happened for me, and also recognizing, because of what I went through, it is actually what attracted me to my wife, because she had been in an extremely abusive marriage for three years. And so I was attracted to her in a lot of ways because I knew she had gone through hell and back. And I had to, and we were both interested in creating a big future together. And so I wouldn't have married her

if I hadn't gone through my past. And we definitely wouldn't have done a lot of the things we're doing now. And so it's obvious that the past was something that happened for me. Because I wouldn't be making choices today that are beneficial to my present, had I not gone through that?

Well, no, and I think that that ties into where we are right now, it's probably a good place to wrap up, which is you're putting this book out into an environment that you wouldn't have chosen to put it out in, I'm sure, right? Like you would have liked to be going on book tour, you would have been liking the, you know, the news cycle to not be the sort of overwhelmed by negative news. I talked to Chris Gilebo a few months ago. There's the same thing. And one of the benefits of studying the past,

this, this idea like, Oh, okay, I can choose to see how this, I can choose to reframe how this happened. One of the things you have to take from that, the real lesson is, okay, if when I look back at my own life and I see all the bad things that happened and I see how in the end, they created a positive outcome, they created who I am today, how can I try to do that now?

So it's like, if I'm gonna pay off the credit card eventually, I might as well just pay it off now and not have the debt on top, not have the interest stacked on top of it, right? And so I think that's one of the things I try to do. And I would just be curious, how are you thinking about this book going into the environment? I mean, one option would be like the sucks.

This is in pair. This is my fault. And then the other, I think we're still a option would of course be, you know, this is happening for me. How are you thinking about it? Yeah. For a long time, I framed the launch of Will Power as a failure. And in many ways, it didn't meet my expectations, but it comes with many lessons.

And so I'm like, I like the quote, expect everything attached to nothing. Because obviously from my perspective, it's actually good to have good expectations. Like I think that just as an example, like Steph Curry probably expects his shots to go in. But you kind of, they also say you have to have a short memory. And so, yeah, you know, with this situation, you know, I'm lucky enough to learn from like

mentors, people like you, etc. that like, I think I'm not as attached and I can honestly say that to like what the initial launch is of this book. Like I'm definitely more focused on what could happen in the next six months or what can happen in the next two years. And so I think I'm definitely in a place where I can have that confidence. And so to me, however this launch goes one way or another, that's not really what's going to define the success of this book or me as a writer. So I don't really, you know, I listened to Warren Buffett talk recently about just the

market. Someone was asking him, you know, talk recently about just the market. Someone was asking him, where's the market going to be in 10 months? He said, I have no clue. I have no clue where it's going to be in 10 days or 10 months, but I can tell you in 20 years from now, it's going to be way better than it's ever been. So that's just my approach at this point. I'm committed to a longer game, and I feel really good about that. And so, yeah, whether it's in the, I really don't care about the pandemic, it's weird as that sounds. It hasn't, I'm very care about, you know, the bigger picture of hopefully, hopefully everyone

is safe, but it doesn't change my goals. No, I think that's a good way to put it. I think, look, you put yourself in a position to think that way by writing a book that isn't like, how to master TikTok and Snapchat, right? You wrote a book about a sort of a timeless part of the human experience, the sort of struggle that we've already had. We've always had. And it's based on, sure, like the latest academic research, but it's also based on sort of something, something deeper and more perennial. Oh, for sure. Yeah, I mean, research, I view every quote,

scientist or psychologist views, quote, you know, they've used science or research through a lens, you know, and I have an extreme bias. You know, I have every every scientist does, but my bias is towards growth and learning and so like I Interpret research from that perspective and so any new research that comes out obviously it could have some surprising findings But it if it's good stuff It's gonna obviously harkened back to like true principles that you could find in history So you know to me, I'm just looking for important or useful ways of looking at stuff that you could find plenty of other places.

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