The Jordan Harbinger Show - 367: How to "Fix" Your Relationship without Nagging | Feedback Friday

Episode Date: June 19, 2020

Your significant other has picked up some bad habits while self-quarantining during the pandemic; how can you fix your relationship without nagging? We'll figure out this -- and more -- here on Feedback Friday! And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at [e-mail]. Now let's dive in! Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/367. On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss: First, let's address some reactions to the advice we gave to the ex-self-help cultist/current registered sex offender featured on a recent Feedback Friday. Moving across the country would afford you better business opportunities, but leave you without the safety net of free housing you enjoy now. How can you be confident enough to take this big, scary leap and ensure you do it right? Your significant other has picked up some bad habits while self-quarantining during the pandemic; how can you fix your relationship without nagging? You seem to show appreciation more than verbalize it, but you want to be good at both. How can you improve your ability to verbalize appreciation? You're working at one of the top places in your field and it's making you second-guess your choice of career. So is it time to find a new career entirely, or just a new place to work? You work for a well-known, rapidly growing startup, and former colleagues, peers, and friends of friends are reaching out for referrals. So how do you honestly deal with the ones you're not entirely stoked about referring? Are you thinking about confidence wrong? Don Moore, author of Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely joins us to find out and, if so, offer some course corrections. A shout out to Christina (and Elisa and Garrett) for letting us know how our episodes with BJ Fogg and Ramit Sethi helped them change up their habits and their money! Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at [e-mail]! Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger. Connect... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to Feedback Friday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Gabriel Mizrahi, and I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt because I just want you to relentlessly make fun of my wardrobe and haircut or lack thereof. But I am getting an underground haircut, Gabe, this coming week. Oh, nice, dude. The Corona cut. I know. Is that technically a Hawaiian shirt you're wearing? Because it's actually pretty dope. Yeah. It's different. It's not a Hawaiian shirt. That's something else. It's like I haven't quite hit my midlife crisis level Hawaiian shirt. Yeah, or you're like early stage Florida Cool Dead shirt.

Early stage Florida Cool Dead shirt, yeah. Anyway, enough about me. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most brilliant people, turn their wisdom into practical advice you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We want to help you see the Matrix when it comes to how amazing people think and behave. High performers, if you will, although that term's getting a little played. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinkers, so you can get a deeper understanding of how the world works, how your own brain works,

and make sense of what's really happening. And if you're new to the show, on Fridays, we give advice to you and answer listener questions. The rest of the week, we have long-form interviews and conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes to authors, to thinkers and performers. And this week, we had Benjamin Hardy. He is a psychologist.

It's telling us about why personality tests are essentially unscientific garbage most of the time, and they can do a lot of harm. If you have a personality test that says, oh, you're the type of person that isn't creative, you're more of a logical thinker. There's evidence that these people who take these tests in like sixth grade when they're hungry choose entire career paths based on this.

And you can take the same test the same day or on another day in a different mood, a different time of day, fed, unfed, slept, unslept, you get a completely different result. So spoiler alert, their kind of pseudoscientific, counterintuitive episode

with my friend Benjamin Hardy. We also had Bill Nye, the science guy. That was a particularly interesting interview for me because we did it in a recording studio that had just reeked of weed. Anyway, I tell the story during the show. It's just kind of a funny situation that I found myself in.

And I also write every so often in the blog, the latest post is how to ask for advice and make the most of it. A lot of people have been asking for advice from me, from you, from a lot of other folks, and I'll tell you, they're making a lot of mistakes. Do you have any general tips on this really complicated topic?

I wrote all the mistakes I could think of that we're showing up over and over again and we put them in this post, how to ask for advice, and it was such a commonly referenced post in the past few weeks, that I made the URL, Jordan Harbinger.com slash advice. You don't even have to go to the blog and look through the other articles. Just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash advice and find out why the thing you probably just asked me was actually not a good way to ask for advice.

So I know I just started this episode in a little bit of a, I made fun of myself, I made front of a national hero, I made fun of a psychologist, and now I'm making fun of people asking me for advice. I'm kind of a garbage person today. I'll concede that. Make sure you've had a look and listen to everything we created for you this week. Of course, our primary mission here on the Jordan Harbinger show

is to pass along our guests and our own experiences and insights along to you. So the real purpose of this show is to have conversations directly with you. That's what we want to do today and every Friday here on Feedback Friday. We want to place one brick in the structure that makes up your life.

You know, I want to help you avoid a lot of the mistakes I've made, including wearing Hawaiian shirts. Maybe we can make that one of the next articles on the site. How to pick a wardrobe that doesn't make you look like a douche. Totally. That's it.

Nailed it. First try. I'm good at titles. You can reach us Friday at Jordan Harbinger.com. And before we dive into this week's feedback Friday, last week, Gabriel, we had kind of a crazy letter. Do you want to kick this one off? It was a doozy.

Yeah. Yeah. We got a crazy letter last week from a guy who had gone to, basically gone to a culty, large group awareness training program. He hooked up with his bandmate and best friend. and then later confessed, according to him, to sexually assaulting her, because according to him, his creepy large group awareness training program basically hijacked his mind and made him willing to confess to a crime that he says he didn't commit.

Yeah. So the guy wrote in asking us for advice on how to mitigate the legal disaster he had created for himself and how to find work and how to live a normal life. Now that, again, according to him, he's been wrongly placed on the sex offender registry. Right. So it was a very tricky letter and it was a long letter. And it was a letter that made it difficult to understand exactly what had happened between him and this other person, but made it abundantly clear that after it happened, he made some disastrous choices and desperately needed some advice to help navigate his way out of.

We got some feedback from y'all, which was, hey, what about the victim? And here's the thing. I do have sympathy the utmost for anybody who's been a victim of a crime, especially a sexual assault. But when we get letters on Feedback Friday, all we have is one person's version of one side of the story. So we only have as much information as that person provides. Yes, we try to read into the situation, but remember, our goal is to help you no matter what, not to shame you, judge you, say, look what happened here, because we don't actually know. I mean, his version of the events was, I didn't even do this. I confess to this in a weird way because of this weird cult awareness training thing that I had just taken.

But I didn't do anything. Nothing happened. And that was a confession that was taken in court. So this guy didn't see like a fair trial in many ways. He confessed to something that he says that he didn't do. And while that's tragic and while there is a victim's side of this, it would have been ashamed to end the question by going, well, you confessed and, you know, there's a victim here maybe, so you're screwed.

We wanted to help this guy. Because look, at the end of the day, even if he was guilty, this guy needed help, right? He needed help moving forward, even if he was guilty. So a lot of people felt like that really wasn't addressed. I kind of wanted to say, look, even if you did something horrible, like you killed someone, and then you said, oh, I guess I shouldn't have joined that murder cult, I'm still going to try and help you move forward here on the show.

Yes, I probably won't invite you to Thanksgiving dinner, but I'm still going to try to help you to the best of my ability because you're reaching out to me for help and you're still a human being. You still have things that you want to accomplish in your life. And this letter to me sounded like a tragedy, multiple tragedies stacked. on top of one another. Yeah, there was a lot going on. On top of that, what's hard is that any first person's story is going to be biased. Like anyone can say anything they want in these letters. But the format that we're working with on the show is you tell us a story and as long as it doesn't sound

absurd or completely irresponsible, we'll engage with that letter assuming that it's true. And in this case, we had only the information he wanted to share to go on. If he did write in though, Jordan, I feel like if his story were, hey, I got into the situation of this woman, I actually did this crime. I did it. I served my time and now I want to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I think our answer would have been very different. But that's not what happened. And of course, we can't fact check it. There's no way we could do that. We're also not judge and jury in this criminal trial. But given the set of circumstances and the reason he was writing into the show, we wanted to at least meet him in the place where he was, without trying to figure out if what

he was saying was actually 100% objectively the true story of what happened. Although he did seem very credible, I will just say, there's absolutely no way to know where the gaps in that story really are exactly so look it's not that we ignore the other side of the story when we get a question like that and if you have no clue what the hell we're talking about and you're frustrated right now go back and listen to last week's feedback friday or just give up on feedback friday if you're new to the show and listen to an interview with mark cuban or something like that come back to this later i just wanted to clarify that because i want everyone to know like look we're going to help you no matter what and we're going to look out for you no matter what but it doesn't mean in looking out for you

that we're ignoring the other folks we just don't have their input you have the mic so to speak when you write in. In any event, I knew this one would draw some strong reactions. I appreciate all of those reactions. Some people were shocked by what happened to this guy. Some people were disturbed by what he had done. Some people were totally at a loss. Anyway, I love hearing from you guys. I'm always open to considering other points of view. That's the spirit in which people write into the show. And that's the spirit in which I try to engage with them and with you as well. So that said, we've got some great new ones this week. Let's dive in. Gabe, what's the first thing out of the mailbag? Hey, Triple J.

I'm a digital sculptor two years out of college who just hit the infamous two-year mark at a high-profile company. I'm also lucky enough to live on the East Coast in a family-owned city apartment that no one was using. Hmm. That sounds nice. Yeah. Free rent in New York. Okay. That sounds dope.

My problem is that I have only worked for this company and it's the biggest one in my small industry. I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket. The best way for me to grow professionally by far is to move to L.A. Related industries like animation have more opportunities for the work I do. My good friends are all artists in the big Burbank Studios, and the options for free networking and education are great. I did a test run living there for a month last year and made a ton of great connections. Meanwhile, the East Coast has absolutely nothing for me professionally,

except maybe for a little seasonal depression. I've been planning to move when COVID dies down, but after living basically rent-free in New York, the high cost of living in L.A. terrifies me. Despite my steady stream of work, I'm constantly scared that the projects will dry up and I'll be left scrambling to pay rent. All my professional work is also non-disclosure. By that I think she means that she can't use her existing work to show potential clients. So the more work I do paying living expenses, the less time I have to make good portfolio pieces I can show to potential clients.

And there's only so much I can cut down on rent when I need space for a large computer art setup in my room. Okay, so financial constraints and some work stuff that makes it hard. Every time I think about moving, my anxiety spikes through the roof. But if I stay where I am, I'll just stagnate professionally forever. And my network in LA will fade out. Do you have any advice on how to tackle this? Thanks so much. Stuck with sculpting.

Well, first of all, what is a digital sculptor? I've never heard of that. So digital sculpting is 3D sculpting with software that sort of pushes and pulls and manipulates objects as if they were made of real substance like clay. But it's all digital. That's cool. I wonder if you wear like Nintendo Power Gloves.

and you move it around or if you use like the mouse to do that. Like a minority report glove. Yeah, like a minority report glove. That sounds really complex, but really cool. His whole setup sounds like minority report, except he gets paid. All right, so, Gabe, you left a stable career to be a screenwriter, which by all accounts is generally ill-advised. What was your plan?

The greatest way to tea up that question. That is true. It's very ill-advised. Well, let me just call out the fact that I was born in LA, so that was a huge advantage. I didn't have to move there, and I think if I had to move to L.A., my experience would have been very different. It's extremely intimidating and difficult to move here. But it sounds to me, if I had to just separate out these things, it sounds to me like you're

stuck right now between a comfortable but unsatisfying life in New York and potentially uncomfortable, but more satisfying life in L.A., right? That's basically what the question is. Your choices between safety over fulfillment or whether I want to be happy or if I want to be steady. What's interesting to me, though, is that you already feel. feel anxious in New York right now. Like you're scared that your projects are going to dry up, even though there's no sign that they will. You're also anxious about stagnating in New York. So I guess

my question is if you're already anxious and a little scared, even when you're safe, why not choose the anxiety and the fear that's going to advance your career in your life, the one you feel in your bones that you want? Because it sort of seems like a false choice, like either I feel okay or I don't. But you're sort of feeling not great either way. So I think all else being equal, you probably want to choose the form of instability that matches what you want to do with the rest of your life, right? I think that's basically what this comes down to. Yeah, of course. How to go about this practically.

If we're going to choose unsafe, there's a right way to do this. We see these people that go, yeah, you know, leap in the net will appear. And then they end up on Venice Beach making sand sculptures and being like, hey, I need money because I don't have a place to live, except right next to this sand alligator that I just made. there's a right way to do this so that you're not totally screwed if you hit a speed bump. Yeah, I think there are a few things that you could do. I mean, one thing is give yourself a set period of time in New York to develop your portfolio now while you have the time in security. Like give yourself three or six months to create a foundation of work and the relationships that you'll need to make it in L.A.

So whatever that means for your website, your portfolio, your branding, all that stuff, front end load that now. So you're not moving to L.A. and then scrambling to do that while you service your client work and then wondering, oh, man, why am I not? making it in LA when you could have given yourself that advantage three or six months ago. I don't want to get into personal finance stuff because you haven't told this what your situation is, but I do think it's probably generally wise to save as much money as you can, seriously. Like, you're not paying rent right now. That's a huge gift. Build a little buffer. You will need it at some point. It'll also give you some psychological relief if things in LA take a little bit longer than you think they will. What else should you do?

I think keeping relationships alive, a lot of people when they move, they think, I've got a network and they want to do it in the new place, or they move and they go, oh yeah, I lost touch with everybody from my old place, and I'm just so busy. I just moved here. Then three years later, you're like,

oh, I need to call my old boss. Oh, wow, I've never bothered to talk to him again. That's kind of a problem. You should really make sure you stay connected. Otherwise, things are going to fade. You don't want your relationships to fade. It's a wasted opportunity. Continue helping people,

continue taking an interest in them in both locations. I think it goes without saying, Try and find your job before you move. It requires some extra hustle. Maybe you should fly out there, do a little job hunting, do some interviewing, set things up before you go there. It'll be worth it. Stay at a freaking youth hostel if you have to.

Couch surfing, whatever you need to do. But get a job lined up because it might take months or you might hear, oh, you know what? We're not hiring generally until X season because that's when we hire all of our new people and it's a cohort and we don't hire until July and you're like, oh, crap, I just moved out here in February. So now I'm working at some canteena for four months. That's not ideal.

Yeah, exactly, especially with the COVID situation. These things might have been pushed. Right. Also, you have a very specific skill set, which is a huge advantage because your work can speak for you before you physically are in LA. So it's not like you're interviewing for, I don't know, let's just say a sales position or something where your personality in the room is probably going to determine 80% of whether you get that job. But here you can share your work ahead of time. You can meet with people. You can point to work you've done before, especially if you take.

a little time to develop those samples in advance. That's a huge advantage in one column for you. So I will just throw this out there, though, as somebody who grew up here, moved away and moved back. In LA. In LA, yeah. I want to say that you might mentally prepare for the fact that this move will not be easy, even if it goes spectacularly well. L.A. is notoriously difficult to move to, even for people who are sociable and productive and have jobs and are good with meeting people like know that it will take maybe a year or maybe more. I hear it all the time to find your feet. I don't say that to intimidate you. I think you can totally do it. I just want you to know because I feel like I talk to a lot of people who move here and they are not prepared for how hard the transition

is sometimes. But it is a great city and it will be worth it. And if you have a good circle, it'll be amazing. The anxiety you feel about moving is real. The flip side is that if you do make it out here with your skill set, you will feel so thrilled about your success. Sounds like you're sort of professionally dying or stagnating in New York and slowly killing you a little bit, and I think you know what you have to do. So if you do it smartly, I think you can totally make this happen if that's what you want. The coolest part is you'll feel even prouder of yourself, I think, more fulfilled and connected to your work.

I say do it, but do it intelligently. Weren't you one of the first people when I moved to L.A.? I remember this story, actually. I moved to L.A., and I reached out to you, I don't even know, a few months after we met, and I said, hey, we should do something. And you said, yeah, I'm having a dinner party. Why don't you come by or something like that? And I think the day before, the day of.

Yes, yes, yeah. I remember this now. Yeah, what was it? I said, you know what it was, dude? It was one of the sweetest memories of our friendship. We had dinner a few months after you moved here. I think you didn't even have a car and you walked six miles in your converse or something from your house to this restaurant. I didn't know that.

I would have chosen a restaurant closer to you. I was like, thanks for picking me up, D-Beg. But I think the day before we texted, we had like made dinner plans like four or five days in advance. And the day before I texted. Is that what you were talking about when I was like, hey, are we still on or something? And I was like, yeah, but. I was going to text you the same thing because literally people don't even show up and then they don't, they ghost me in L.A. And I was like, what?

Like, I didn't even know that because I grew up here. So I guess I didn't know that many flaky people. Oh my God. I just was like, really? That's happened to? And you're like, dude, that's happened to every single person. Every person I was supposed to meet up with. That's happened.

Yeah. Me and my old business partners, when we moved to L.A., we had a housewarming party. And the only person that showed up was one girl that I invited. And they were like, yeah, whatever. I didn't even care. I didn't even invite anyone. And I was like, yeah, you did. We did this together.

You invited like 20 people. Zero people showed up. And I just ended up hanging out with this girl, and we went out to dinner. I never felt like more of a loser, although I guess those guys probably felt worse and tried to hide it. And she also lived in L.A. And she goes, this is totally normal. And I'm not surprised.

And it doesn't make you look bad because it really just doesn't even matter. But I was shocked. That makes me so sad. It was weird. You have a party in New York, dude. People are showing up who were not invited. You invite 30 people to a party in L.A., no one goes. It's so weird.

It's weird. It's like there's like a bad social contract in L.A., I think, when it comes to that particular thing of like, oh, can we resched like 30 minutes before you're supposed to reschedge? It's a baseball game. I'm at the stadium. I'm holding a hot dog in my hand for you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like I'm sitting here with your drink and your ticket.

No. The anxiety you do feel about moving is real. I think you're right. You will be fine, but you need. to lay the groundwork, don't show up thinking you're going to get a job in the industry that you want. Because if LA is such a mecca for a 3D digital sculpting, you bet you're not the only person who moved to L.A. from anywhere in the world trying to find a gig in digital sculpting. So while you have free rent, definitely make sure you lay the groundwork so that when you get there,

you have a soft landing. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show, and it is Feedback Friday. We'll be right back. And now back to Feedback Friday on the George. Jordan Harbens your show. All right, what's next? Dear Jordan and team, I'm in a relationship with an engineer who works very long and odd hours, and we've been together for over a year.

We first met at the gym and bonded over active dates and workout classes. Fast forward a year later, he's completely fallen out of an exercise routine, sleeps until 12 on work days during the pandemic, and works all day with some video game breaks. I work in the wellness field, and I'm getting annoyed by his habits. He claims he doesn't have time to exercise or to take a break, and spend some time with me, but he'll work until 3 a.m. or start playing video games at midnight until the wee hours of the morning. Then he falls asleep on the couch most nights because he can't

wind down, and it feels like I'm waking up to a roommate instead of my boyfriend. He also gets so consumed in work that he loses track of time and won't eat until dinner time. It's hard for us to get in some quality time because he gets so zoned in. I know I've brought up a lot of complaints here, but I do love him, and he treats me amazingly when he's present and puts his work down. He's the first guy I fallen in love with. This is my first serious relationship. And I had hopes of seeing a future together, but these habits are starting to cloud that vision.

My question to you is, how do I bring all of this up without sounding like a nag and only focusing on the negative? I realize that relationships evolve and annoyances will pop up, but I know the love is there for both of us. Sincerely, missing the honeymoon habits. Well, I get this. Normally when we're in relationships,

we see all sides of people and things can get a bit less romantic. You know, the honeymoon phase is over. That said, I think you're a little justified here. This isn't Jordan leaves his underwear and socks on the floor. I guess he's a real person. This is more like this isn't even the same person that I knew before. I don't know what you think, Gabe.

This guy sounds a little depressed. Yeah, a little bit. I enjoy video games as much as anyone. Maybe not like a gamer, but it sounds like he's gotten into a rut having traded physical fitness entirely for video games, terrible sleep habits, it wouldn't surprise me if there's some junk food involved here because I get it. You bringing this up in a list is going to seem like you're a nag and you're on the attack,

but I think if you bring it up in a way that's more concerned, you might get him to open up a bit. Instead of all you do now is sleep in and play games and you never spend any time with me, I think a better approach might be, hey, so I noticed your sleep patterns are kind of weird and you're not able to do much outside these days. Are you feeling okay? Do you feel a little lethargic? you're feeling a little slovenly. You know, then once you've had a conversation with him about how negative habits might be affecting his performance and his life, then and only then, should you move on to how those same habits

might be affecting your relationship with him? And getting people to make big changes at once can be rough, but I think if you set it up so that you're actually doing something together, such as doing a workout in the morning, you'll achieve a few things. One, you get them up early, you know, hey, let's wake up at 8, and do a workout tomorrow. You know, you wake him up early. It's good for his productivity.

It's good for his sleep habits. You both get that workout in. You spend time together. And don't let him off the hook easily. If he works till 3 a.m., get him up at 7 or 8 anyway to do that workout and get to work afterward. You don't need too many days like that

where you go to bed at 3 o'clock in the morning or 4 o'clock in the morning and you get up at 8. You don't need too many days like that before you start going to bed at a reasonable time. My guess is that night he goes to bed at a reasonable time. And I know that some of what he's going through

sounds a bit like depression or possibly the beginning of depression. So definitely chat about that. But to me, this sounds like it could also be just the consequence of a person losing their regular schedule and slipping into bad habits because you don't have a commute. You don't have to get up early. You can kind of fake it with the whole work schedule thing because of that lack of structure as opposed to somebody with a clinical issue. If you suspect things are worse, though, definitely talk to a doctor because I'm not a doctor. I just play a crack. one on this podcast, but it sounds a little bit like pajama syndrome where it's, oh, I don't have to go to work, I'm working from home, let me just wear my PJs today. Three days later, you got pizza stains

from Tuesday on your shirt and, you know, you haven't slept a night in your bed and, you know, you're 12 hours into some adventures of Zelda remake on your Xbox or whatever. I think that it just sounds like the schedule's gotten out of hand for him and he has recovered. He might need a forcing function and you're not a nag, especially if you make it about him. What do you think, Gabe? Totally agree. I think if she approaches him with compassion and patience and leads with her love for him, which she said is still there, which is amazing. And she articulates what she's seeing without too much judgment on her part, then this will go very well. I have a good feeling about it. Definitely invite him to articulate what he's feeling, ask him what he wants, how he feels about all this,

get him to acknowledge the things that you're seeing more objectively. That'll make it a little bit easier for that information to go down. I would say, be honest. But be kind. I mean, he might be in a more fragile state, especially if he's in a little dip right now or just off his usual routine, maybe not sleeping well, not taking care of himself. I don't know. Maybe he's not doing so well in Fortnite right now. I don't know. That probably doesn't help. Getting killed out there. getting killed out there by his squad. So invite him rather than tell him to develop these better habits and then give him a chance to remember the guy he was when you guys first met. And if he doesn't after that or after a couple tries, then it's a different conversation. But he definitely deserves a chance. And it sounds like you definitely still love him and want to give him that chance. And it'll probably be super grateful to you for helping him get back on track. All right. Next step.

Hey, guys. Do you have any recommendations on how to be better at verbalizing appreciation? In the past year, I started working in grants administration at a major prestigious university. I make it a point to outwork everyone, but also to help anyone I can to succeed. After a couple months, I was presented with Spot Awards, which are basically awards for exceptional contribution to the school, which were accompanied by private speeches of appreciation for my coworkers. I smiled, I nodded, I said thank you, and let them know I appreciated everything they taught me. But this all makes me very uncomfortable. I don't feel like I said enough or went deep enough.

in my responses to them. On the other hand, when I see that my colleagues are stressed, I'll often just take on their task or give them some of their favorite candy, which I bought when they told me they liked it. I think I show appreciation more than verbalize it. I want to be good at both. I notice this extends out to romantic relationships, friendships and family as well. When I analyze people who are good at this, I notice that they're far more willing to be vulnerable than I've been. Thank you for any insight you could provide, stay awesome, signed showing, not telling. Well, I'm the same way. I'm not a huge believer in like the five love languages or anything like that.

There's some truth to that kind of thing. And some of us are great at giving gifts and showing affection and other people are good at words of encouragement and all this stuff. It's actually quite true. I'm not good with recognition myself. I don't come across as warm. I often feel guilty about that. And then I try to follow up with people one on one because it's easier for me to do that later. But of course, I wish I could do that in the moment more often.

I often feel like, uh-oh, I'm being weirdly introverted on this trip or on this bus ride or in this group. And then later on I'm like, oh, yeah, I was just doing something on my phone that I had to get done. Wanted to follow up personally. I'm not as great with that myself. So I get it. I don't think there's anything really wrong with the way you're handling this. If you feel these pangs of guilt, follow up with the people you spoke with privately and thank them. I think that leaves just the right kind of impression without putting you on the spot and trying to turn you into some extrovert that's really good at,

being fake in front of other people and when it's not your nature. I totally get this. Yeah, so here's the thing. I have a little bit of a different read on this person. I think, first of all, life is about showing and telling. I might argue that showing your appreciation is more important than just talking about it. Because like you can be the guy around the office who says every nice thing in the most perfect voice and like articulates flattery beautifully. But if you're not actually backing that up with actions that mean anything, then you're just the guy who talks. So I would say the fact that you take on people's tasks and remember what candy they like is actually like really meaningful. And all else being equal, it'll mean more than you saying nice things.

Words are just words. Anyone can say them. But actions are real. That's it. If you only show and don't tell, then your actions might not have their full impact. Like they might come across as a little random or a little hard to understand. For example, if you just got a candy from somebody who like never told you why he appreciates you, then you might just be like, why is he giving me chocolate? right now, you know, or your actions might feel a little distant or unemotional. Like, oh, he just

wants to do my work for me, I guess. Like, there's a reason human beings like to hear nice things, because words actually do matter if they're backed up by actions that honor those words. So I would definitely invest in the skill and practice it in small ways first. I love Jordan's idea of doing it one-on-one, because I think that's a little bit less intimidating. I would go a little bit further and say, make this a little bit of an exercise for yourself when you talk to people about whatever it is. If you're trying to explain to them why you're grateful for them or what you appreciate or you're trying to thank them for something they did, tell them what you like, what you admire, why you admire it. When you thank somebody, don't just thank them broadly, but thank them specifically,

mention what you specifically appreciated, why it moved you, why it was what you needed, what you did with it. Consider doing that by email, maybe at first, if that's a little bit easier for you. Sometimes public appreciation can be a little intimidating and it can actually mean more and it will last longer if it's in print. So you're absolutely right. This is about vulnerability to some degree. My question for you is, what's the fear there? Like, what's going on beneath that? Is it, are you concerned about coming across this week? Are you concerned that expressing yourself in front of other people will be awkward or strange? Or is it feeling like they won't reciprocate the appreciation? Is it just lack of experience verbalizing yourself? I mean, if you work on those questions, a lot of this

will automatically resolve. I would use it as an opportunity to dig a little bit deeper into yourself and to connect more authentically with other people. And I think then expressing your gratitude openly or connecting with the people in your life or at the office will probably seem easy in comparison. I love that you're asking this question. We need more of that kind of thoughtfulness in the world right now. All right. What's next? Hey guys. I'm a 23-year-old who has been working as a hairstylist for five years. I got into one of the best salons in the area and climbed the ladder. After about five years, I realized it was time to move on and seek growth elsewhere, leaving financial, comfort, and professional security behind.

I ventured into the city and am now at the best salon there with great future financial potential and a better lifestyle. But I had to take a step down as an apprentice and further develop my skill under my mentor. Problem is, I've been here for four months and I'm no longer thriving at work, which is really hard. My mentor is not a mentor at all and has literally and honestly told me to my face that he just doesn't have the time to mentor me. So most of my learning is on my own, though I definitely learn best interacting and engaging with others. Furthermore, my new co-workers are not warm and fuzzy to say the least, and I sort of feel like I don't fit in. This new place honestly has me second-guessing my passion, and I am wondering if I should go back to college and find something

else. I know I'm capable of great things, and maybe I should be somewhere where I will thrive. What is your advice? Signed, looking for a trim. So I'm a little confused here by this one. do you not like being a hairstylist or do you not like the place where you work right now? So if you don't like the hair industry, retrain, do something else. But if you don't like where you are right now, then I would suggest going to another place with a better cultural fit. Because it's a little confusing, right, Gabe? It's kind of like, I don't like this. This place has me second guessing my passion.

But it's also this place has me second guessing my passion. I can imagine that if I got a job working and doing a show and I was on like Vice, I'd be like, is so fun and this is so cool. And then if I got a job working at some other place, I might be like, this is terrible. I don't like anyone here. You know, everyone's really annoying and bugging me about stuff. This isn't a good cultural fit. Often the best places in town, quote unquote, are crappy places to work because everyone is stressed beyond belief. The place is run poorly or it has a bad culture or all of the above. This isn't just true for hair salons. It's true for law firms, hospitals, anywhere. Are there consulting firms, Gabe, that have, like, the sweatshop wrap?

There are definitely law firms where they go, yeah, you're going to make an additional 20, 30 grand a year, but you will work 100 hours a week, and it will be awful, and you will get yelled at, and people are going to throw books at you, and you walk into the partner's office because they hate their lives, too. You know, we have that. It's Scaden Arps, actually, is the name of that firm. I don't know if they're still like that. Funny story, my friend Jason Flom was been on the show. His dad started that law firm. It used to be Scadden Arps and Flom, and they'd dropped his name because I guess it wasn't back in the day, believe it or not, you didn't put Jewish names on law firms because it was considered a little bad branding. Now I think they're all

Jewish names, if I had to guess. But there's got to be consulting firms that had that rep too. Like, oh, work at Deloitte if you want to have a growth experience and da-da-da-da, but work at maybe McKinsey if you want to get your ass kicked. Yeah, probably. I mean, I don't know what the reputations of the firms are now, but yes, there are definitely places that are more work-horsy than others. So I would perhaps just bounce out of this salon. I mean, if you've been there for four months, which is a while. It's not like you're a month in and you want to leave, but you're four months in and people are not helpful, they're not friendly. It's time to find another place to train, grow, and learn. It sounds like they don't necessarily want to be there

or they're not open to you being there. Thus, it doesn't matter if this is the Harvard of hair salons. If you're not learning anything, go somewhere where you will learn something. You probably need to work somewhere else with a good culture and start learning once again. If you find, if you go to a new place, you find that you're learning once again, you have a good culture and you still don't really like styling hair anymore, then maybe it's time to find another industry. But you should not let a bad workplace trick you into thinking that you don't like the work when really you just don't like the environment in which you work. Totally agree. You need to distinguish the place you're in now from how you feel about your passion. I don't think you would have

followed hair to this new city and to this new place if you didn't really care about it. So there's no need to let this place, which sounds kind of like, I don't know, I mean, it could either suck or it's just not a fit for you specifically. And that happens. That's okay. It's like a whole personality dimension to finding the right fit. And if it's not a right fit for whatever reason, like it's okay to move on. If you let a bad workplace infect your dream career, then you'll make a decision you regret. There are tons of salons around the world. Maybe not open right this moment, although I hear they're reopening and we'll be opening up again soon. But you sound really driven and very confident and also humble in the best sense of the term. Like you were down

to take a step back in order to learn. And I don't think you would feel that way if you didn't really care about hair. Like if you were just a dilettante and you were just like, oh, this could be a thing I could do. You wouldn't, you wouldn't be willing to make that investment. So yes, go somewhere you will thrive. It's just not a fit. That is okay. Move on. This is the Jordan Harbinger show, and it is Feedback Friday. We'll be right back. Stay tuned after the show. We've got a trailer of our interview with Caesar Milan, the Dog Whisperer.

Caesar tells us how he went from impoverished Sinolaan kid to homeless immigrant to world-famous dog training guru. We'll also learn how to communicate better with animals by understanding the priority of their senses compared to our own. This and more after the cut, so stay with us for that. Thank you for listening and supporting this show. your support of our advertisers is what keeps us going. To learn more and to get links to all the great discounts you just heard so that you can check out those amazing sponsors for yourself, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

And don't forget that worksheet for today's episode. The link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the conclusion of Feedback Friday. All right, next question. Hey, J-Team. Long-time listener, first-time caller. I recently joined an incredibly well-known rapidly growing startup where a pre-IPO unicorn valued over a billion dollars, and it's been an amazing experience thus far. We're hiring for a ton of roles right now, and with some recent changes to the economy and high-profile mass layoffs like Uber and WeWork, I've had a lot of former colleagues, peers, and friends of friends reaching out to me asking for a referral.

I'm generally happy to take calls and talk with people for a bit to see where they're at, tell them about the company, see if they would be a good fit. Most of these people are great, and I'd look forward to working together. Plus, I have a lot of faith in our recruiting process, so I'm not worried about letting a bad egg in. What I'm a little on the fence about is that there are some folks I'm not super stoked about. They aren't bad people, per se, but they just aren't a great fit or don't have the level of experience or caliber we're looking for. I'll take a call with these people, chat with them for a few minutes,

and then they ask for a referral, and I say, send me your resume, making no explicit promises to refer them. I feel like I have a few options here. submit them for a referral and leave a less than great comment to the recruiter. The upside is it outsources the disappointment to our recruiting team and maybe the hiring team likes them. The downside potentially damages my reputation with recruiting and creates more work for them, that kind of thing. Second option, don't submit them for a referral and just pretend like nothing happened. The upside there is it's easy to tell a white lie that they weren't a good fit.

The downside may be lying. There's maybe a chance it gets back to them that nobody in recruiting even saw their info or that I never submitted a referral, which honestly is egg on my face. Option number three is don't submit them and give them the hard, honest feedback directly about why I'm not submitting them. The upside there is that it gives them the opportunity to grow and it lives both my and my company's values of transparency and radical candor. The downside, of course, it might be uncomfortable for me or for them. My sense is that number two is the safest option, number two being don't submit them for a referral and just pretend like nothing happened. I can just pretend like I submitted it and the recruiting team didn't reach out.

But what I want to do is number three, which is to write them an email back that basically says, you know, hey, I chatted briefly with the hiring manager about you and we agreed this might not be the best fit right now. We'll be hiring more in the future. So here are some things I would work on if you wanted to apply again later. What I like about this is it gives them the opportunity to work on things and grow and it's an easy way to get rid of the bad slash lazy people, which frankly, a lot of people are. I'm curious to hear your thoughts and advice here. I am all ears. Thank you so much for everything you do. I'm kicking myself for not starting six-minute networking sooner as it's been great to reconnect with folks and reach out to others I want

to deepen my connection with. I recommend the podcast to everyone and I'm so happy and proud of how well you weathered the transition from the previous podcast. Keep up the great work and stay safe in these crazy times, sincerely hiring hangups. Well, I like the way you think here, man. This is a well-articulated thought process. So to reiterate, one, you submit them for a referral, and you leave, you tell the recruiter, hey, you know, I'm submitting this guy, I'm not super crazy about him, but here you go. Or two, you don't submit them and you go, yeah, I guess we just never heard back. I guess you weren't really a good fit.

Sorry about that. Or you don't submit them and then you give them actual feedback about why you are not going to submit them. Now, I love how he says what I want to do is number two because that's the easiest. Don't submit and then say like, guess you weren't a good fit. Sorry about that. But you're right. Three is definitely the best thing that you can do. He's correct. Submitting people who aren't a good fit to recruiting is not a great idea because

recruiting will go, oh, this is the guy that submits all his dumb friends and they're always a waste of time. Then when you submit somebody that is a good fit, it might even be a strike against them. And anytime you bring up anything to recruiting, they're going to be like, oh, not this guy again, not this yet. So you got to be careful about that. That said, if you're on the fence, you can submit them and just leave it to recruiting. This is their job. You're not really wasting their time if you yourself aren't totally sure about that person. If you are sure the person is not a fit, then you're right. The easy way out of this is to not submit them.

Pretend it got lost. It's low risk for you, but it's not totally honest. And worse, it doesn't allow the person to grow at all because they never find out how to make themselves more competitive. What would you want to happen if you were in their shoes? I would do number three, which is, of course, not submit them and tell them why you are not going to submit them. Yes, it might be uncomfortable for you or for them or for both you.

and some folks might have a negative reaction. What it will do, though, is give you a chance to keep in touch with these people and add them to your network in a stronger way. They will also trust you because you told them something that was risky for you. If you're honest with them and help them identify holes or weaknesses in their skills or resume, not only do you get to help them avoid taking a job that might not be successful for them, but you also told them something that most people would never have the guts to say to their face, and they will be a stronger candidate for the next 20 years for having heard that.

If you're up front about this, reasonable people should really appreciate it. When I was in college, I had a professor or an assistant, what do you call it, like an associate, I guess TA, sort of like a junior level, not quite a professor yet. He told me, he'd give me a letter of recommendation he did, and then I asked him again, he gave me another one, and then I asked him again, and he goes, hey, you know, real talk, I had you for like three Russian classes, so I'm going to give you this. letter, you won't come up short, but the purpose of letters of recommendation are so that you get really strong letters from people that you've been working with for a while, and then whoever's

reading them says, oh, okay, this person has developed good relationships with this teacher or that professor, and they're good in this field. So, again, you won't come up short on your number of letters of recommendation, but you should probably find somebody who you've worked with more. And I remember going, oh, I had no idea what letters of recommendation were for because I'm 19 and I'm in college and these are just another dumb requirement hoop that I have to jump through. It never occurred to me to even think about why letters of recommendation were important. And candidly, now that I'm older, I have a sneaking suspicion that letters of recommendation are something that nobody even reads half the time.

They just look at it and it goes, okay, all right, he's got his three letters of recommendation. Check that box off the application and move on with my letter. But he eventually didn't need to write me letters of recommendation because I did focus on building relationships in the future with other professors for when this requirement popped up again. And those relationships with other faculty and professors led to real opportunities, not just me going, oh, who's the guy that I go to to get a letter of recommendation when I need a letter of recommendation? Oh yeah, this guy. I know it's uncomfortable, but being truthful, telling people why you won't do something for them,

this is exactly the reason why taking a bit of personal risk builds trust because it is risky. Therefore, it is so rare. So when somebody says something that is almost against their own interest because it's going to be awkward, it's going to be a troublesome conversation, a tough conversation, that's what builds trust and deepens your relationship. Also, once you have this conversation, you can pop back into their inbox every 90, 120 days, 180 days, whatever or so. use something like connection fox.com,

which by the way I just made, I didn't make it. Somebody who works with me made this. If you use contractually, and if you use Airtable, I guess this is my awkward way of announcing it right now. If you use Contactually or Airtable for a CRM or for connections,

go to ConnectionFox.com. We just made this. It's free right now. It does more than Airtable does, and it's, again, free instead of $80 a month or whatever Contactually is. You put your contacts, in there, it'll remind you within a certain time period, whatever you program, to talk with

these people, to re-engage them, you can mark your interactions in there, you can tag people, you know, dog lover, tennis partner, this kind of thing in there. You can put notes in your conversations. So connectionfox.com. We'll link it in the show notes. But anyway, put them in there every 90, 120 days, circle back with them. That way they know you're not just blowing them off. It's not like, oh, I asked Gabe to do this job thing for me, and then he said no, because your resume is not strong enough because you don't have any sales experience, that guy's a jerk. If you keep popping into their inbox, they'll realize, oh, not only did you care enough to be honest with me, but you care enough to follow up. So this was in my best interest, and I really

appreciate that. You're actually invested in their future success. So this will deepen your relationship. They'll be a little bummed at first, but I think most people will go, okay, there's a reason for this. You really can highlight your honesty and integrity and be better for them long term. It's kind of like parenting. Why don't we let our kids do whatever the hell they want? Because we want them to grow into the right kind of person who gets what they want through hard work and integrity, not just because they're a little shit, right? So this is the kind of thing that's going to deepen your level of trust and your relationship with somebody else. Gabe, anything to add? No, I totally agree. If you deliver this right, you'll not only be doing these

candidates a great service, but you'll be doing right by you and the company and you'll be building these relationships. My only recommendation is to do it kindly, you know, and humbly. Like, which I think you would do. Like, I really want you to know why it's not a fit and what you could do to improve. I know that's what I would want to hear if I were in your shoes. So here are the things you could do. And let's revisit it in three or six months, that sort of thing. It's almost like a little litmus test of who actually has the chops and, like, the dedication to actually become the candidate they want to become. Like, if you offer somebody meaningful feedback on how they could improve and then you circle back with them, if they have totally ignored you or whatever, then like, they're not really serious about getting a job there if that's what it takes. or just being good professionals in general.

But if they do and you stay in touch with them, then you know that you're developing a relationship with somebody who takes themselves seriously and takes your advice seriously and actually wants to put in the work, which I think is great. So I love your thoughtfulness about this. You sound very smart and level-headed

and interested in connecting with people authentically, which most people don't want to do, surprisingly. So I would use your knowledge to build those relationships and help the people around you. And if you do that, you can't really go wrong. I thought we'd end the show today with a segment from author Don Moore. author of Perfectly Confident. We'll discuss how we're thinking about confidence wrong and thinking

in probability distributions, which tends to be more accurate. So here we go, a little segment to wrap the show this week with Don Moore. Don, thanks for coming on for the segment here. Pleasure. When I read this, you had me at you're probably thinking about confidence wrong, because as somebody who started a business decades ago about how to be more confident, you know, confidence is a hot topic no matter what sort of shade of the definition you're using. And when I read what you had written me, it sounded like a nice, interesting, and unique-ish take on thinking and bets from Annie Duke. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love thinking in bets. Andy Duke is brilliant. One of the things I love about her message is the encouragement to challenge yourself and others by

asking, want to bet? How serious are you? How confident are you? You ready to put money on that? And that sort of discipline is enormously useful for forcing you to think through how sure you are and helping you get closer to the truth, especially if you do put stakes on it and keep track and keep score. So why do we do this? Is it because humans usually make binary decisions, right? Like, this is either good or bad, or I'm sure, I'm not sure. The probability is definitely or never. We get used to thinking in black and white terms, in making,

predictions about the future, as if we can anticipate what's going to happen with perfect confidence. That's just confused. The future is fundamentally uncertain. And thinking about it as a probability distribution is so helpful for getting clarity in lots of things, including how to calibrate your confidence in that uncertain future. Well, a lot of people are mixing up correlation with causation. We talk about that a lot. Or we think that fooling ourselves into being more confident will actually improve our performance. What's that phrase like, fake it till you make it? And it's like, well, no, now you just have lower levels of qualification on something that might require a higher level of qualification. Now look, if you're constantly underestimating yourself, that's one thing.

But I think for a lot of us, we realize like, okay, this actually is something that requires a lot of confidence, or you should be reasonably sure that this is going to work because it's your life savings or the rest of your life in terms of a career or marriage or like maybe you should think about this harder. This obviously gets us into trouble. Yeah. It's easy to observe the tight association that we see all around us between confidence and performance and get confused between correlation and causation. Just because confident people are more likely to win athletic contests and succeed in business and get elected to political office does not mean that their confidence was causal in those outcomes. The evidence suggests that at least as often,

it's the underlying ability or strength or advantage that contributes both to people's confidence in their likelihood of prevailing and their ultimate success. Now, you said something that got my interest here, that it's tempting to think that their confidence had a hand in their success. And often, I can see myself even getting fooled by that. Like, wow, look at this person really confident in their business. Look at this person, really confident in their athletic ability. But what we don't realize is that for everyone who sounds confident, like they knew they were going to do it all along, or that they always blew a lot of smoke and they happen to succeed, it's not necessarily one of the ingredients. It can just be a side effect of some people that are successful in that they sound confident.

That is exactly right. And fooling yourself that way, thinking that it's confidence, their confidence that made them successful, can lead you to want to trick yourself into being more confident. And although there are some circumstances in which more confidence might increase your chance of success, if it gives you the courage if you had been underconfident and giving yourself a pep talk convinces you that you should enter the competition. And then you stand a good chance of winning because, you have what it takes, that's obviously a good move. But fooling yourself into being more confident, that's a brittle confidence that puts you at risk of taking bad risks that don't ultimately pay off. And convincing yourself that you're going to succeed also runs the risk of undermining that very success if it persuades you that you've got it in the bag and you don't need to do the hard work to prepare. It is the students in my class who are most sure they're going to ace the test and therefore don't think they have to study who are not getting the good grades. Confidence is either a side effect of success or a non-causal relationship or it actually causes you

to be less successful because you were overconfident. That's interesting. So we want to think in probability distributions and we talked a little bit about that with Annie Duke, of course, saying I'm 70% sure instead of either I'm definitely sure or I have no idea. right? So we want to do that. You suggest keeping these bets, tracking these bets so that we keep score so that we can learn from them and get better at forecasting from experience. How do we do that? Well, one way is if we actually put money down on a bet with someone who's willing to take the other side. That introduces the interesting wrinkle that we have to ask ourselves, oh, who's this other person who's willing to bet against us? I mean, investors think about this all

the time asking, if I'm going to sell this stock, who's on the other side of the trade, who thinks that it's worth more than I think it is? What do they know that I don't know? So it's useful to think through that whenever you're placing a bet. But when you do place that bet, you've got a record of what you said you believed. Writing down your forecast, your probability estimates and then how they come out is very useful. If you do place a bet, that'll help you track it. But even when you don't place a bet, thinking want a bet to yourself, thinking about what you anticipate is likely to happen, and then tracking later, following up with yourself and seeing what actually happened. Comparing that to your predictions is useful because it helps avoid the hindsight bias, which we're all vulnerable to where when we see the outcome, when we see either our success or our failure, we're tempted to think, oh, that was inevitable. No, it wasn't.

It happened with some probability. Did you get that probability right? If you have a large enough set to look at, you can get better at calibrating your confidence. In calibrating confidence is important, right? Because we want to get as close to the truth as we can. We don't want willful self-delusion where we're overconfident. Of course, we also don't want to come across as, well, I can't do anything. I'm such a schmo.

Why even try? The underconfidence that plagues most of us, I think. We want to get to a reasonably, would you say, accurate level? realistic level of confidence, like the one that's closest to our ability level? Is that what we're shooting for? Yeah, that is going to be the most empowering situation for helping you make wise decisions. And I don't want that encouragement to be honest with ourselves to be taken as a dispiriting message to lower our sights. The truth is, all of us have vast, untapped potential. And as you note, there are lots of circumstances in which we're prone to under confidence.

The imposter syndrome leaves many of us feeling routinely like, oh, maybe I don't have what it takes for this. When in fact we do, it's on hard tasks where everybody performs poorly or everybody's challenged that we're most at risk for suffering the imposter syndrome. So by way of practicality here, we get serious about forecasting uncertain futures that matter. So we place bets on the future, keep track of the outcomes, keep track of the outcomes, score and get better at thinking about uncertainty. Another tip you give is consider the opposite.

What does this mean? Consider the opposite as in like what happens if I fail? What happens if this doesn't go right? You consider the opposite is the single most general and useful debiasing strategy that psychologists have offered for a number of the cognitive biases that human minds are vulnerable to. At its heart, it's an invitation to think why you might be wrong. Think about other perspectives. You're sure that some plan is great. Well, what about your critics? Think about ways of understanding the facts differently. Consider different perspectives. Which of your assumptions might not hold up to scrutiny? Explicitly asking yourself why you might be wrong is enormously useful for helping debias a lot of the confirmation biases that human minds commit so quickly.

And we talk about these biases all the time. I mean, there's everything from confirmation bias to selection bias to, well, there's dozens of these. And in fact, I have a deck of cards around here somewhere that have all these logical fallacies on there that me and everyone else has been great at for the last, however old we are, decades of our lives, right, to try and make decisions. And we go, oh, you know, 2020 hindsight, after I turned 40 or 35 or whenever I became really painfully aware of these, it was like, oh, shoot, yeah, I do this. And the whole, deck of cards as you flip them over, you can think of examples when you've engaged in it. It's a little disappointing. It's a little depressing sometimes. Roger that. Last but not least,

capitalizing on disagreement. What do you mean by this? Because generally, I think as humans, we like to try to be agreeable. I mean, there are obvious exceptions and they're all, those people on the news, they don't seem to have any problem capitalizing on disagreement. How do we make this an advantage? Because I think a lot of us, our common knowledge says, look, when we disagree, there's a problem. And sounds like you don't agree with that necessarily. I disagree, Jordan. Disagreement is useful in ways that we fail to appreciate when we regard our critics or those who disagree with us as our enemies to be argued against and defeated.

In fact, our information is imperfect. We're prone to bias. We make mistakes. And the wisdom of crowds is enormously useful for getting closer to the truth. listening to our critics, those who have different perspectives from ours, can help us achieve insights that can bolster our arguments, make them stronger, help us achieve insights that otherwise we would fail to make. And so listening to our critics and trying to understand what they know that we don't. Sometimes their arguments will be weak, right? So your enemy who says you're ugly and your mother dresses

you funny, that's not so. useful, but the person who says, here's the logical argument, and they're right, getting that perspective and adjusting your views in light of that, maybe reducing your confidence in the argument that you'd made earlier, or maybe modifying it to make it more robust to the sorts of criticisms and complaints that your critics have leveled against you, well, that'll make your argument stronger and help get your beliefs closer to the truth. Ironically, we kind of have to lower our false confidence, right, our arrogance in order to be able to take in these inputs from people that disagree with us in order to further lower our confidence

in order to then increase our confidence that we actually have the right answer. Indeed. Thanks to Don Moore, his book is called Perfectly Confident, How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. Hope you all enjoyed that. I want to thank everyone that wrote in this week. A link to the show notes for the episode can be found at Jordan Harbinger.com. A lot of people thanking us for the Rameet Catee episode that's episode 199 and episode 306, B.J. Fog, Tiny Habits.

Is it really great for changing up your habits and your money? A lot of people have revamped their lifestyle because of that. Thank you, Christina and Elisa and Garrett for the notes. I really do appreciate you appreciating us appreciating other people here on the show. So go back and check out the guest, Benjamin Hardy and Chris Hadfield, if you haven't yet. If you want to know how we managed to book all these great people, and manage relationships using systems, using tiny habits, speaking of BJ Fogg. Check out our six-minute networking course, which is free over there on the think-ific platform at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Don't do it later, do it now. Once you need relationships, you're too late to build them. The drills take a few minutes a day. This is consistency.

It's a habit. You've got to dig the well before you get thirsty. Find it all for free at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'm also on Instagram and Twitter at Jordan Harbinger. You can add me on LinkedIn. in. It's a great way to engage with me and the show. Videos of our interviews are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. We're going to start filming Feedback Friday as well, so that's going

to be there. You can see all the goofiness that we are up to here doing these and letting loose a little bit because we can retake things. There's no billionaires or generals standing in front of us. This show is created in the association with podcast one. Thank you, Gabriel, for your sage advice and question curation here. This episode was produced by Jen Harbinger, edited by Jay Sanderson. For the episode by Robert Fogarty. Additional voiceover by Peter Oldring, music by Evan Viola. Keep sending in those questions to Friday at Jordan Harbinger.com.

Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own. I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. I'm not a psychologist. I have no clinical authority whatsoever. Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found this episode useful, please share it with someone who can use the advice we gave here today. We've got lots more in store for 2020, and we're excited to bring it to you.

In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. We'll see you next time. When I was 10 years old, I told my mom, mom, when I go, I'm going to be a drug dealer, and she's shook. Oh, wow. Slap me across the face. I said, if you want to kill me, that's what you do. And when I was 13 years old, I told my mom, you think it could be the best dog train in the world. She turned around. She said, you can be whatever you want. So I spent Christmas and New Year's at the border trying to jump it. You get this reputation as the guy who can walk 30 dogs. That's when I can't. So that it was in San Diego.

You were kind of this underground guy for a while that could walk all these dogs in L.A. In L.A. with no leash and the gangbangers are hanging out. Like there goes the crazy guy with all the dogs. Don't mess with the guys. My customers were NBA players, you know, NFL players. So your word is for age. point. Yeah.

Nicholas Cage? Nicholas Cage, Ben Diesel. How did they hear about you? The Mexican guy in the street. You're washing limos and you're like, yeah, I want to be on TV. Yeah. People must have been like, okay, buddy. Most of them.

I was first interviewed by the L.A. Times. At the end of the conversation, the lady says, so what would you like to do next? I said, well, we like to have a TV show. So I manifested the TV show way before producers came. And I have no idea. I didn't know that dishonesty part in Hollywood. you better have a good pack of lawyers. For more from Caesar Milan, including how animal behavior is reflective of their human owners,

check out episode 162 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast. focused format, Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like

why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.