The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 139: "Your Inner Voice Is Limiting You!" How To Control The Negative Inner Thoughts: Mo Gowdat

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

In this moment, ex-chief business officer for Google X, Mo Gawdat asks the question, ‘what are the illusions that you are living under’? Mo believes, that for all of us, our view of reality is an illusion, and this can often become limiting or imprisoning. Too often this viewpoint of reality can lead to an identity you form that you feel that you have to stick with and cannot break away from. Furthermore, Mo says that for a lot of people, inner conflict comes when your actions don’t match with the inner feelings you have, so you don’t feel as if you’re fully complete. To overcome this, Mo says that we need to find balance within ourselves and that this balance can be broken down to smaller, more manageable sections that you can improve on every single day, as ultimately, this search for inner balance is a constant journey. Listen to the full episode here:  https://g2ul0.app.link/n9c6KH2qlFb Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Mo Gowdat: https://www.instagram.com/mo_gawdat/?hl=en https://www.mogawdat.com/

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. The basics here, which is the title of the first chapter of your book and it's and it feels like the first chapter really kind of introduces some of the inspiration behind you why you wrote wrote the book you talk a lot about your wife and the illusions that you live under what are the illusions that you you live under or you lived under? Again, let's think about the bigger picture first.

Everything that you haven't visited and investigated and arrived at a competent, confident conviction that this is your own view is probably an illusion, okay? Which is quite striking because for a man like me, who spends a lot of his time reflecting, we're submerged in illusions, okay? Everything from the value of a branded bag all the way to what the TV is telling us, what the government is supposed to do and all of that stuff. Unless you've reflected on it and said, okay, I'm being told this, I'm behaving this way, which might be contradicting what I've been told, but I'm feeling that way, which might be a third contradiction. And where is my reality? It's safe to assume that this was an illusion. So a big part

of that little voice in your head is an admission of all of the mistakes I made using that machine in my life, or not all, but many, not even many, but many mistakes that I've made using this machine. Not all of them, there are many more mistakes. One, I think the biggest of them was a conviction in my early years that my kids were a burden.

My family was a responsibility, okay? Which does happen when they come to life when you're very young. I mean, I had Ali when I was 25. I was just turned 26 and I got married when I was 25. So basically you start to feel responsible. You start to prioritize work. You start to go out in that treadmill, you know, the hedonic treadmill and just run, run, run, run, run, run. Okay. And the pressure that you put on yourself when you do that

makes you start to think, okay, they are the reason why I'm working so hard. They are the reason why I'm stressed. Okay. When in reality, if you had asked them, they would have said, Papa, just come play with us. Right. We don't want more than what we have. It's me losing context and running like crazy that made me think that way. And the basics of the challenges we have with our brains is that we believe what our brains tell us. So when my brain tell me they are the burden, they are the challenge, my whole being responds to that. My whole being starts to behave that way. And I think what the reality that we miss

when we do those things becomes what you have seen in the, if you like the movie Inception, when his wife had that thought, we're waiting for a train, a train, basically that kept playing in her head over and over and over that convinced her that this is not the real world, that they are in a dream and that the way to go out of it is to die, that actually led her to

committing suicide. And, you know, big opening of the movie that my favorite movie line of all time is what is the most resilient parasite, okay? And the most resilient parasite is not a bacteria, it's not a virus, it is a thought that you implant deep in your brain and believe in it over and over and over through your life. And it shapes everything. Shapes everything, interestingly, without you even knowing why you're doing what you're doing is because of that thought, because of that belief,

because of that ideology. And people do the weirdest things. I have a very, very dear friend who's a brilliant engineer, brilliant engineer, who had that thought in his head, he's now in his early 60s, that if I tell my ideas to a businessman, he's gonna steal it. So every startup he ever attempted, he wanted to be the

engineer and the CEO. Okay. And as a result, everything he started failed, even though the ideas and the engineering, the rigor was incredible, but he just couldn't get that idea out of his mind. And you can go all the way to people who have ideas that lead to wars or to destruction or to terrorist acts or whatever. It's just one idea seeded deep enough in our head that really leads us to become who we are. And digging out that idea and finding it, that's the basic. The basic is to find those thoughts

and how you can deal with them so that you eradicate them so that you can actually live true to who you are, not the thoughts that have been implanted in your brain. And how does one go about even knowing where to start that search for those sort of limiting or imprisoning thoughts that are, have become the satellite navigation of our lives? It is, it's a moment of truth.

It's a moment of honesty. You know, I think you started with that very, I can't believe I spoke about that, about the very personal question about my relationship choices, right? But that's a moment of truth. It's not that I don't want someone in my life, but it's that if that someone contradicts priority A, then priority A is actually what I stand for, right? And you get those by comparing what you're thinking to what you actually do and what you actually feel. And it's a very interesting exercise. If you're coherent in something, if you say, I am vegan, for example, okay? If you identify yourself as vegan, but you crave eating animal protein,

and you feel that you're pressured, then you're not a vegan, okay? You could be a striving vegan, you're trying to be vegan. You could be an ideologist vegan. You believe in the ideology of veganism, but you're not, don't call yourself, I am a vegan. Okay. You can then change that thought and say, I want to be vegan. Okay. That's a different thought than I am vegan. And you can apply that to everything, to every part of your life. I am in that partnership.

I love her and I want to stay with her forever, but I'm looking at every other woman and I feel that I am in jail. Okay, great. Have that conversation with yourself. Have that conversation with yourself because what you're feeling is contradicting what you're doing is contradicting what you're thinking. So much of my life is filled with contradicting. What does that say? So I'm thinking about, you know, I say that I want to be in a committed relationship, but then what I do is work all the time and want to work all the time and choose work all the time. So what does that mean?

What does that mean? You can tell me, I don't care. I'm not going to cry. It is, it's really, it is, look, you're not alone. All of us are, and it's not on one topic. It's on every topic. Okay. So, so there are, as I always talk about, there are three compartments in our brains. Okay. One compartment is what I call compartment one, which are things that are true and we know are true. Okay. The other is compartment three, which are things that are, that are not true. And we know they're not true.

And the majority of what's happening inside us is what I call compartment two, which are things that are undecided. We either don't know them, or we know that they're not aligned, but we can live with them for now. We don't prioritize them. What matters is not solving them. What matters is marking them as compartment two. If you mark them as compartment two in your head, you go like, okay, hold on. This topic is unresolved. It's not within my priority today, but I need to come back to that topic. Just like my choice of relationships, right? It takes a long time and a lot of experimenting after my separation with my

wife to try and get to a point where I actually know that I'm gonna put in the time and investigate where I am in life. During, throughout that time, I acknowledge to myself and I say, this is compartment two, I don't know what I want. I don't, right? And the point is, so many of those exist. If you live assuming that it's compartment one,

you're completely messed up, right? Because your actions are not matching your feelings and your feelings are not matching your thoughts. Okay. You're not complete. You're not full. You're not settled. You know, that idea of equilibrium. Most people, the easiest way to imagine it visually is to imagine a pendulum, right? If your life is in equilibrium, it's in total balance, that total balance is the point at which minimal effort is needed to live. If you're in balance, you're not struggling, okay? Just like the pendulum, the pendulum when it's at its equilibrium point, you literally need zero force to keep it in the equilibrium point forever. You don't have to apply any force to it. You want to push it a little bit to the right. You have to apply a force and keep

that force for as long as you want it to stay within that place. And that's what we do with our lives all the time. That our nature, our balance, our equilibrium is not exactly how we're living. And so we're constantly applying effort, constantly trying to be in a place that is not our natural place to be. We want to be there. So we apply the effort. Is there anything wrong with that? Absolutely not. Because life is cyclical. Okay. And life is all compromises as we start. But the trick is to say, when I am in that place, I am aware that this place is not my natural tendency. And I am okay with that because that place gives me A, B, and C. that I'm heading from that place to that point of equilibrium. That could be by saying, in the next seven years, I'm not going to do anything about it, but in seven years time, I'm going to start to head in that equilibrium. Or you could say, I'm going to take a step every day for the next seven years, whichever way you want.

And or you, by the way, or you can also tell yourself, I don't care. I know it's not my equilibrium, but I'm going to do it anyway, because that, I don't care. I know it's not my equilibrium, but I'm gonna do it anyway, because that's what I believe in. I think that's very much the state I'm in. If you ask me, I'd like to be in, you know, 50% of the year doing absolutely nothing, okay, with someone I absolutely love, with a very simple life,

but that's not my life every day. And I know that to be true, and I will do it for a while to go, but that's not my life every day. And I know that to be true. And I will do it for a while to go, you know, because I have assigned myself something that I believe requires that effort. Okay. The other thing that humans do, most of us, is we leave a lot of pendulums out of equilibrium. So it's actually quite easy to tell yourself, look, my number one pendulum is my work, okay? I'm gonna put that in equilibrium. Then my second, you know,

pendulum in importance is relationship or reverse them if you want. The third is my impact, the fourth is my friendships, the fifth is my health and so on. And then the game is, if you want your work to actually benefit, put the others in equilibrium, okay? Or acknowledge to yourself that they're not,

but don't complain about it, don't feel bad about it, okay? And if you do that, you manage to then simply focus yourself on the one that is your most priority, and then life is in an interesting way, linear that way. In physics, it's basically, instead of the parallel processing of trying to fix all of them at the same time, you're simply saying, I'm gonna process them in series.

I'm gonna fix this work element pendulum first. And when it's done, I'll fix the next one. And then when it's done, I'll fix the next one. And it's a constant journey. So you're not alone. I'm exactly like you. Constantly, constantly searching and constantly reflecting and investigating and finding that equilibrium.