The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - Dr. Gio Valiante (Part 1): Discipline and Resilience

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

In the first of a special two-part episode, celebrated performance psychologist Gio Valiante calls on his vast experience working with some of the world’s top athletes and entrepreneurs. Shane and Valiante discuss developing discipline and resilience in work and life. Valiante offers his thoughts on the five ways to gain an advantage and win and how to change your habits. He also discusses the role your environment plays in discipline and how you can develop resilience in yourself and your children. Valiante is regarded as one of the most successful performance coaches in the world. He’s worked extensively with golfers on the PGA and LPGA Tours, Olympic athletes, and leading figures in NCAA football and the NFL, where he served as the Head Performance Coach of the Buffalo Bills. He has also logged over 5,000 hours coaching some of the most sophisticated investors in the world, including hedge fund manager Steve Cohen. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Our Sponsors: MetaLab: Helping the world’s top companies design, build, and ship amazing products and services. https://www.metalab.com Aeropress: Press your perfect cup, every time. https://aeropress.com Vanta: Helping you get compliance-ready, fast. https://www.vanta.com/     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And so discipline is just a habit of mind that evolves into a habit generally of behavior. And so when you're trying to give someone more discipline, one of the things that's really, really important is right out of the gates is to change the actual behavior. Because as Albert Bandura famously said, you know, behavior is a cause of behavior. Like the more you can get someone to do something, the more likely it is to repeat. So the reality about discipline is the quicker you can get it infused into someone's habits, the more likely it is they're going to sustain it through life. If you're trying to change habits later in life, you've got to go all in. And as soon as you're aware that you want to

change them, don't wait. Don't hesitate. Welcome to the Knowledge Project, a podcast, about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. Every Sunday, I send out the Brain Food newsletter to over 600,000 people. It's considered noise-canceling headphones for the internet, and it's full of timeless wisdom you can apply to life and work. You can sign up for free at fs.blog slash newsletter. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, special episodes that don't appear anywhere else,

hand-edited transcripts, or you just want to support the show you love, you can join at FS.blog slash membership. Check out the show notes for a link. In the first of a special two-part episode on the Knowledge Project, celebrated performance psychologist Dr. Giovaliente calls on his vast experience working with some of the world's top athletes and entrepreneurs to discuss how to develop discipline and resilience in work and life. Dr. Gio also offers his thoughts on the five ways to gain an advantage of win, changing your habits, the role your environment plays in discipline, and how we can develop resilience in ourselves and our children. He's regarded as one of the most successful performance coaches in the world, and he's

worked extensively with golfers on the PGA and LPGA tours, Olympic athletes, and leading figures in NCAA football and the NFL, where he served as the head performance coach of the Buffalo Bills. He's also logged more than 5,000 hours coaching some of the most sophisticated investors in the world, including hedge fund manager Steve Cohn. If you stick around at the end of the podcast, I'm going to offer a mini reflection on the episode and some of the lessons I took away and I'm going to add to them so you can take away even more. It's time to listen and learn. I want to start with the five ways to gain an advantage and compete and win.

Yeah, that's an idea I put out into the world about a year, maybe year and a half ago, that seems to be getting a lot of attention. You know, it's rooted in my experiences, first of all, as a psychologist, who studies cognition. and cognitive abilities and belief systems. And then as a sports psychologist on the PGA tour for 15 years, and now someone who coaches quite a few people in finance in the hedge fund space. And so when we talk about the five ways to win, you know, you start with someone on the PGA tour, like who I use a guy named Rory McElroy as an example.

And Rory McElroy is an example of just someone who's just talented. And people recognize that in Rory. Like, you know, if you look at videos of Rory, when he was six years old, he has the same golf swing today, you know, that he did when he was six years old. He's just rolled out of bed and knows how to swing a golf club. And people who have prodigiousness in a particular domain or arena, that's how they experience it. It's like, I could just play. There's this story about Eddie Van Halen and his brother, Alex Van Halen. And Eddie Van Halen, it's well known, you know, was a musical prodigy, particularly in the guitar. But what

happened was, as the story goes, Eddie Van Halen had gotten drums for a Christmas gift, and Alex had gotten the guitar. And after they both were playing on their respective instruments for months, Alex tells the story that Eddie picked up his guitar and started ripping on licks that Alex had been trying to do for weeks. And he picked it up. The neck and the frets made sense. And so that's what talent looks like. It's just someone shows up. It's just someone shows up. makes sense and they run with it. But where it gets interesting from there, you know, if you look at the PGA tour in any given week, there's 140 players that get to play in a given event every week. And but Rory McElroyd doesn't win every week. And so, well, how does everyone

else compete? So you're in the world and everyone recognizes often like that's just what talent looks like. And if you go into the markets, you know, great investors tend to have certain cluster of trades. It's, you know, they can remember every trade. So, memory is part of it. Great analytical skills, great logical skills. They have typically great interpersonal skills where they know people and so they know the markets. They can benchmark against risk and risk taking. So they have all these cluster of skills and abilities. Well, so the way it works is if you are not one of these people who are just pure talent, one of the ways that you can compete is just through effort, right? Through working harder, right? So I'm willing

to not sleep a lot. So I'm going to outwork you. And maybe that's going to close the gap. And through effort, I can close the gap between myself and sort of the Uber talented. So, you know, we use the language of being all in, you know, pot committed to your craft. And what you often see at the tail end of the curve. So if you move way out to the tail end of the curve to the top 100th of a percent of people. And this is sort of domain agnostic. This is sort of the profile of excellence in any domain. what you see is this, this blending of vocation and avocation. You know, what happens often in psychology is psychologists will often say, well, you know,

you are not your work, you know, who you are and what you do are separate things. And it's a healthy thing to keep those separated. And I understand the point, right, because we have a personal identity and a family identity and a professional identity. But at the very tail end of the curve, what you see is typically a blending. of vocation and avocation where work and hobby sort of fuse and like Kobe Bryant in basketball like the level of all in he went Ronnie lot in football boody miller in skiing Kelly Slater in surfing you know every side every great scientist ever right you know try to try to tell

john Nash or Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton that they are not what they do and the reason I say that is because the second way to win is is hard work and effort But often it's accompanied by love of craft, so that the work doesn't feel like work. So I give an example of my friend Steve Cohen. Steve Cohen has the reputation of being arguably one of the best traders of his generation. I mean, there's five or six iconic investors. And certainly Steve is in the conversation. And anyone who's ever sat next to Steve, they know.

It's like what he does and how he sees markets. It's just, I can't do that. I can't go there. And I've talked to, I had dinner with Steve's high school friends. And, you know, Steve got up from the table to go to the bathroom and they said, Hey, G, like, this is how he was in high school. He was in charge of the high school investing club. And so like this, this prodigiousness that gets accompanied by effort.

And I say that because over the course of 40 years, you know, assuming 250 trading days a year, Steve Cohen, 10,000 trading days, Steve took four days off. And those four days are because he was. in the hospital. And it's not because he needed the money. He's been rich since he was in his early 30s. It's the habit of hard work because what happens with people who love to work is an inversion happens whereby you start to love the hard parts of the craft. So for example, great golfers. So I use golfers as an example. Everyone loves to hit the driver at the driving range because it goes far. But if you paid attention to Tiger Woods during his run, his epic run,

and you watched him practice, Tiger Woods would camp out over three-foot putts for hours, so much so that if you went to the putting green out at Isleworth Country Club where he lived, at the end of the day, you would see the imprints where his feet were and the line that the ball tracked from where he was to the hole, he would hit so many three-foot puts that it would burn the grass out. And when you look at his track record, he didn't win those 80-something events with his driver. His statistics from three or four feet and in, that's what won it. It was the love of doing the boring stuff. The equivalent of swimming is people who practice their flip turns, right? Everyone wants to practice their stroke and all the fun stuff, but like find time

in the flip turns. So the inversion that happens of people who are willing to outwork the competition, right, in effort. So again, go to the five ways to win. Number one is talent. Number two is work ethic. It's like, I'm, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to close the gap by outworking people. Now, where magic happens, and I think people use Michael Jordan as an example, is when you marry the two. He's the best, and he worked the hardest. Like, now that's, you know, the most talent, you know, married with the most effort is, you know, can become legendary. Now, the third way to win is to have a differentiated perspective, right, to sort of see the world differently. And I'll give an example of a differentiated perspective. I'll give a couple of examples.

because I guess. So now here we are in August and it's a good time in a lot of parts of the world, you know, to go look at the night sky. If you're a stargazer, like, you know, now's a good window. But when I look up at the stars, which I did with my kids this weekend, I see the big dipper. And Van Gogh looked at the same stars and he saw starry night. Right. So the looked at thing is the same. That's the objective. But the subjective interpretation, the subjective experience, is where people can separate themselves. So, for example, if you look at college football, look at three sort of Hall of Fame coaches.

You've got Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, and Steve Spurier. Nick Sabin generally views football as an arms race for talent. Just recruit the best character and the best athletes and stack your team with talent and then coach the heck out of it. So he's a wonderful coach, no question about it. But he and Bill Belichick were really, really early on profiling players and knowing how to get the best players in the building. So talent, you know, recruiting is a way to win in college football. But then get a guy like Steve Spurrier.

If you look at the rankings of recruiting classes, Steve would always make jokes like, you know, we never have the best recruiting class, but why are we always winning? Well, Steve Spreier saw football as a game of space. So he would recruit a quarterback, had good decision making, and receivers. And essentially what he tells his quarterbacks is, you know, the field is a multi-dimensional thing. And here's the clock and just throw the ball into space and let the receiver run under it. And it worked. Ten SEC championships, a national championship, Hall of Fame. Well, then you get a guy like Urban Meyer.

And Urban Meyer came into the college football scene. And his success was, I mean, it was jarring how he would take programs and how quickly they would win. And on some level, and I'm being a little bit simplistic here, but Urban Meyer sees this as a foot rate, sees it as a foot race. It's a game of speed. And so at every position, if you're going to play for Urban Meyer, you better love to run, whether you're an offensive lineman, defensive line and quarterback, you have to run. So again, you've got three college football coaches. One sees this game of talent. One sees it as a game of spacing. One sees it as a game of speed. They're all looking at the same game, but it's a differentiated perspective. And that differentiated

perspective can really unlock a lot of different things. If you ever read a book called go fast, be good, and have fun by Bodie Miller. You can understand how he was so successful. But like he doesn't look at skiing, never looked at skiing as technique. He just saw it as speed. So essentially what he says is I put my skis on the hill and I just feel speed in my feet. And like I just try to find the speed. And whatever my body does, it does.

That's a differentiated perspective. And it happens in the markets, right? Some people see it as, you know, if I could be faster to a trade. Some people see it as a game of slugging. And slugging is a statistic in the markets where it's not how frequently you're right, but it's how big your bets are when you're right. So what you see oftentimes as investors is their hit rate is high. Like they're right, you know, seven out of ten times.

But they make every trade the same amount of money. So that plays to their advantage. Well, there are other investors who say, you know what, I don't get it right a lot, but like, I know a good idea when I see it. And that ability to know a good I see and you size into that idea, well, that gives you outsized return. So differentiated perspectives on the same job. Number four is process.

We talk about a rigorous, disciplined process, being religious about process. Even though Aristotle made the observation, what do you say, he said, we are what we do every day. Therefore, excellence is not an act, but a habit. Any observer of the human condition has known. This goes back to Freud's idea of repetition, compulsion. You know, the output of a human life is essentially the expression of a repeated habits. If you have consistency of process, what it does is it guards against the natural variability of life. And if you're making mistakes, you know where to look. And so essentially having, you know, waking up at about the same time. Consistency in food, consistency in exercise. You know, pilots talk about

a pre-flight checklist that way because what happens is any demanding job puts a premium on your cognitive abilities, particularly memory. And so when you get to the point where you're in cognitive overload and professional sports are cognitive overload, academics, cognitive overload, Mark, it's cognitive overload. Well, the degree to which you can outsource this stuff to routine and sort of go into automaticity, that creates space for actual decision making and quote unquote thinking. And so process is a way to get an advantage. So if you're not the smartest and there's a limit, you know, to your ability to work hard

and you see things a little bit differently, but not too much differently. But you know what? I can design a life that has the wash, rinse, repeat of my life. you know, I can, I can live that. Well, that's an advantage. I'll give an example. Whenever I would work with golfers on the PGA tour. One of the things that really, really worked to the tune of about 50 wins.

And so what's fascinating to me about entering sports with a degree in psychology is psychology is largely theoretical. And when you start applying a theory, it's like, is it going to work? The theory to practice bridge. And so I created what's called the fearless golf routine. And so prior to that, what you would often see is golfers being reactive to the variability around them. So they would feel differently if their score was different. They would feel differently if they were paired with Tiger Woods or a marquee player versus a friend.

They would feel differently based on their world ranking. So all the variability around them would change their psychology. They would try harder at the Masters than they would at the John Deere or like so the status of a tournament. So what I found when I got to the PGA tour in 2002 were a group of people who were all competitive, but they actually didn't know what they were competing against. So I would ask them, like, do you consider your, this is part of my psychological study. You consider yourself a competitive person. They'd say, absolutely.

I'd say, okay, who are you competing against? And line up five golfers, and you get five different answers. Well, one of them would say I'm competing against people in my group. The next one would say I'm competing against myself. You know, the other ones would say I'm competing against the field. But that's all variability. And all of a sudden, you would realize that there was no constants in their life. And so I created what's called the fearless golf routine.

And I would teach it to them. Here's what you do before you hit a shot. Here's what you do with the shot. And here's what you do after, call it 20 seconds of greatness. And by the way, Urban Meyer coaches the same thing in football, right? Seven seconds of greatness because that's about how long if an offensive lineman can hold a block. If you can hold a play for, you know, three, four, five, six seconds all the way, through and repeat that essentially 60 or 70 times, which is how many plays college football

players are getting a thing, like process is a way to win. And I would often show them a shampoo bottle, read the back of a shampoo bottle, like lather, wash, rinse, repeat. So what do you do in the lead? Pick a target, make a fearless swing at your target, let it go and just keep wash, rinse, repeat a good process. That's what wins over time, right? And then the final way to win is, And this is true more in business, the fifth ways you hire effectively. So if I don't have those other things, but I'm a good, I read people well and I manage people well. And I think you can look at someone like Ken Griffin. I don't think anyone would tell you that Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel, is like a prodigious trader.

But he's built a business system and a business model that's the ultimate meritocracy. And, you know, you hire to effectively compensate for the deficiency. that you have. And so you hire the best person at every position, it's true in sports, and you're an effective manager. And I guess there's a sixth way you get lucky. And I'm holding of a book called The Luck Factor. It's a real thing. You know, you can assign it to randomness or some people really are more lucky in life. Like you flip a quarter and a random number generator five million times. And at the end of that five million flips, you're going to get 50, 50 heads and tails. But within those five million flips, you're going to

see patterns that seem to be causal. You'll see heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads for a hundred iterations and tails for a hundred iterations. And then you'll see heads, tails, heads tails, heads tails. And the reality is there are some lives that land on heads because, you know, you're on the earth for 70 years and some people just get lucky. So like that's your path to winning. It happens sometimes. But so does the other side of the equation. Some people just, you know, on the probability scale, don't get lucky. So I don't really include that in the five ways to win. But like, it happens sometimes that, you know, you're born in the right setup and life is a series of tailings. Thank you for that detailed explanation. I want to double click a little bit

on discipline. Is discipline a matter of willpower? Like some people say I'm not very disciplined. How do you coach somebody to be more disciplined or to gain the strength and advantage that sort of comes from discipline? Great question and an important one. So the first thing that that people in performance psychology or management, you know, either do or should do is you want to get really, there are certain traits in the human condition that are fixed and there's some that are malleable. In other words, in fixed traits, you're not going to change them. And I think where people spend too much time is they try to fix the unfixable. You see this in marriages a lot, right, in marriage counseling and therapy. You know, you marry someone and you want it to change.

And when you're on the other side of the table, sometimes the answer is, hey, you know what you're married. And so you better be clear before you go in and what you're going to be able to change and what you're not. So fixed traits versus malleable traits. And so when we look at something, so we look at fixed traits like personality, by and large, you're not changing personality. Things like IQ. I mean, they shift over time. They tend to gradually move in a direction consistent with, you know, with family sort of IQ, a fixed trait like IQ. things like memory. You can improve your memory marginally, but things like that tend to have

genetic components. But where we looked at variable and malleable things, things like discipline. So you have to remember the etymology of the word discipline is disciple. What is a disciple? Well, disciple is a student. So the actual idea of self-discipline is that you're a student of yourself, right? So we think of discipline, you know, in modern times. as really the way we equate it is like the ability for delayed gratification. Discipline is the ability to withhold gratification and stay in the moment and just run some process overtime and not capitulate. Navy SEALs, right?

That in a very scary situation, your training shows up and you're disciplined. And that's all true. However, one of the things that is known about discipline is you can prime people for greater or worse discipline. In psychology, we define priming by setting up a series of conditions that's going to increase the probability of a behavior. And usually that's environmental. Can people become more disciplined?

100%. Absolutely. In fact, William James, who's one of my intellectual heroes, sort of the father of American psychology. But if anyone's interested, you can go look up William James' is, you know, what are known as has maxims on habit. And so it begs the question, if you're trying to change someone's habits, and habits are one of the things that are changeable. The problem is the longer that you've done a habit, if it's a bad habit, the harder it is to change, right? The old saying that ruts long-traveled,

grow comfortable. And so discipline is just a habit of mind that evolves into a habit generally of behavior. And so when you're trying to give someone more discipline, one of the things that's really, really important is right out of the gates is to change the actual behavior. Because as Albert Bandura, you know, famously said, you know, behavior is a cause of behavior. Like the more you can get someone to do something, the more likely it is to repeat, you know, and consistent with that, there's a time factor. There's an age factor. You know, Karl Marx said, you know, give me a child to the age of seven and I'll give you a communist for life. And we have these colloquialisms like, you know, you can't teach an old dog

new tricks. Well, why do these colloquialisms, you know, live, live. in our conscious, collective consciousness for songwood because they're largely true. So the reality about discipline is the quicker you can get it infused into someone's habits, the more likely it is they're going to sustain it through life. If you're trying to change habits later in life, you've got to go all in. And as soon as you're aware that you want to change them, don't wait. Don't hesitate. And, you know, one of the other things that William James says, he says is,

until the new habit is securely rooted in your life, don't suffer an exception to occur. In other words, just because you think you've got it beat, you don't then reward yourself with pizza. Your goal is to lose weight and you've gone a month of eating healthy. And at the end of a month, you're like, oh, I'm so proud of myself.

I'm going to reward myself with a pizza. It's like, you know, it's like what happens after Alcoholics Anonymous. You meet these people and they're like, yeah, I'm a recovering alcoholic. And you're like, well, recovering alcoholic, when's the last time you've had a drink? They're like, oh, I haven't had a drink in 20 years. You're like, how is it that you haven't had a drink in 20 years and you're still recovering? Well, what they know is that that first drink brings in a whole cluster of behaviors and patterns that cluster together in sort of these neural networks that that first drink, you know,

could lead to a bender. And so they really are recovering because 20 years later, you still have to work. hard to groove the new habit because the old clusters is often still in there. So again, if you're trying to get disciplined, which is really important, number one, you have to be a student of yourself. Number two, once you decide what you want to be disciplined on, you go all in. Number three, there has to be a behavioral component to it, not just a psychological component. And number four, there's an everydayness to it, right?

You actually have to sort of work at it every day, you know, just because a habit, gets entrenched in your life, it doesn't mean that you've won once and for all. You got to keep, you got to keep working at it. You got to keep sort of every, a little bit every day is sort of the key. I like that a lot. I want to explore the role of environment in either encouraging or adding friction to discipline. I think environment largely determines behavior in a lot of ways. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I think the psychological research would show that. You know, Howard Gardner, who's a developmental psychologist at Harvard, who was the father of the idea of multiple intelligence. He's just one of these sort of world-class once-in-a-generation scholars. You know, he's one of the,

you know, what happens in academia is wherever you end up getting your, your PhD, they never let you teach at the same institution because they call it academic inbreeding, right? So they want ideas to sort of cross-pollinate. But Howard Gardner is one of the very few people. He got an undergraduate degree at Harvard, master's at Harvard, PhD at Harvard, and then taught at Harvard for 40 years. He's so special that they said, we're not going to let you go. And he's another one of my intellectual heroes. And he said something at a conference once that blew my mind and said, when you dissect the research on nature and nurture. So you look at, you know, what we bring to the table as human beings that lead to the behaviors you're talking about shame. And then the role of

the environment. I said, what we're starting to realize is they're both more important than we think. They're both really important. And therein lies the difficulty in shaping behavior. When people call me, say, hey, can you help me? My answer is always, I don't know. But what I can do is when you look at ways of thinking, you know, ways of looking at solving the problem, that can increase the probability of helping. So I'll give an example. I had a school teacher call me one time and say, hey, listen, there was a school teacher and a parent and said, hey, you know, my son, he's a great kid. And for some reason, he keeps getting in trouble in school.

And it's starting to affect him. He's getting a label and a reputation as a quote-unquote bad kid. And I've talked to him about it. We've all talked to him. He's not trying to get in trouble. He is getting in trouble. Will you help? I go into the school.

You have to understand the role of the environment. So another way psychologists really look at this, you look at the individual and the environment around the individual. We know that the environment is constantly imposing upon us, both consciously and unconsciously. And the term in psychology we use, it's called situated cognition, situated cognition, that thinking happens in space. And so going to this classroom, take a seat in the back, large, you just try to be invisible. And after a couple of days, I'm watching.

And what was happening is unbeknown to the teacher, the teacher had sat this kid. kid next to two of his best friends, who he'd develop a cluster of habits with outside of school of shenanigans and playfulness and not mean spirit. It's just playful. And so what would happen is a teacher would be trying to teach and the best friend would lean over. The kid would try. He would really try. And he was so naive that he would look and see what his best friend was scribbling and then he would get caught and then he was in trouble and it kept happening. And the solve there was simple. It was changed the seating, right? So, you know, change the seating of the classroom the school, move the kid to a different place, and voila, the behavior got better. You put the kid

next to the teacher in the front row instead of in the back row middle. And so a lot of times just changing the environment around the individual changes the behavior. So you don't need willpower. I'll give a perfect example of that. So you take an individual, take a human being, with the greatest amount of willpower and self-discipline there is. And you put them in a casino and you cover the windows. So there's no windows. So they don't know what time it is. And there's no clocks.

So once again, you don't know what time it is. Then you pump that building full of pure oxygen. So it keeps them a weight and alert. So they're natural triggers that make them tired. They no longer get tired. So there's no windows. There's no clocks. you pump oxygen into it.

You take their money and you exchange it for chips and then you give them free alcohol. And then you play a certain kind of music. And all of a sudden, what is known on a probability level that if you can shape the environment around the individual, you can shape their behavior. So oftentimes these are the individuals that walk out of the casino at 5 a.m. watching the sunrise. And they're like, what just happened? You know, I just behaved in ways that's it.

That's not the real me. That's not who I am. And the counterargument is, well, clearly it is because this is what you did. But what you realize is changing the environment around an individual has such a powerful influence on the three biggies in psychology. The three biggies in psychology are thoughts, feelings, and actions. What you think, how you feel, and what you do. You know, if you want to, there's this great song by the band,

sister Hazel. They say, if you want to be somebody else, change your mind. Well, that's not always true. More often than not, if you want to be somebody else, change your environment, like change where you are. And by changing your environment and or the people around you, all of a sudden, the way the dominoes start to fall is, is you're a better version of yourself. I love that. What sort of things do you see with people at the top of their game and their environment that wouldn't necessarily appear with people who are not at that level. What's different about their environment? So there's a great book called The Talent Code by a friend of mine named Daniel Coyle.

And what Daniel did is he did a deep dive into what he calls talent hotbeds. So he went to the places that seem to produce disproportionate talent. So he went to the areas in Russia that were turning out champion tennis players. And he went to South Korea where all these great female golfers were coming from. And he went to the Dominican Republic where they're turning out these incredible young baseball players and a place in Texas that was turning out incredible musical musicians. And he was looking for the commonalities, like these talent hop bags. You know, if you think of Van Gogh and his group of artists, like what was it about that time and space? that was able to create so many great impressionists.

And what uncovered was really interesting and unforeseen. One of the common factors that produces disproportionate talent is what he identified with are two. One of them is called primal cues. Primal cues is that these places tend not to be identified by wealth and comfort. They tend to be the opposite. They tend to be places where the signaling of the community, community is like you better find a way to make it work. In other words, if this doesn't work out for you, like there's no plan B. Like your next best option isn't that good. You know, it's like

growing up in a coal mining town. It's like it's the old American Horatio Alger stories or John Mellencamp song. It's like you grow up in an environment and then all of a sudden that environment gives you an opening and an option and like you're going to shoot that gap. And these things get triggered in the brain and the body that are called primal cues. Now, it's not that your life is in danger, but like, this is high-stakes stuff. And so what that does is it sharpens focus. It allows the brain to what's called myelinate, so that memory and skill development, the velocity of skill development happens more quickly.

One of the test questions I used to put on the sports psychology exams for my college students, I would say, why is it that a golfer from Ioworth Country Club or Olympia high school has never made it to the PGA tour. And these are very affluent places where you go to the driving range and these kids have the best instructors in the world, most modern equipment, brand new golf balls hitting off perfect grass. And what you see is this scenario dominates junior golf and junior tennis and junior. But as the developmental trajectory goes, the game tends to weed these people out because they don't have the resilience and the grit and the fortitude because they were, the formative years happened in such comfort that when things get hard,

they don't know what to do with them. So one of the profiles of these talent hotbeds is they tend to be places, soccer, like Brazilian soccer is another example, where you have to tend to gut it out. And it's some version of natural selection where innovation and evolving your game, knowing yourself, and skill development are at a premium. So there's like a natural selection bias at the top for people who are resilient. You can't make it there without being resilient. How do we as parents develop resilience in our kids?

And also importantly, how do we develop resilience in ourselves as adults? When we talk about like resilience in grit, a lot of times people think that those are causal variables, that they are the things that happen before success. And that's not untrue, right? They are. But one of the things you have to understand are you ask the question, like, what happens before resilience, right? It's like what Anne Rand said about money.

People say that, you know, money is the root of all evil. And Ann Rand flipped the question. She said, okay, well, what's that the root of all money? Right. And the answer is people, right? So is it that money is the root of all evil or evil exists. And, you know, people use money as a mechanism to express the evil, a bit of a circular semantic argument.

But one of the things that's known about, about, about, about, resilience is it's critically important and and when you put it as a variable and psychological model it tends to wash out um you know things like you know ability or intelligence like it's more important in the course of the life cycle um right up there with delayed gratification which is another very predictive variable so if you just marry if you're raising kids and you can sort of teach your kids to delay gratification and and to be able to withstand sort of failure and hard things and have resilience like that's a pretty good set up for long-term success but one of the things one of the terms we use in in psychologists called normative

failure and the idea is that when failure is the norm resilience becomes second nature and there's a biological imperative to that so for example we know that you know when when boxers get hit over the course of time their bones calcified like like in and strengthen and If you look at any environment ecosystem, you know, for example, use Mount St. Helens. You know, in the early 80s, Mount St. Helens had a massive volcano, blew this mountain to smithereens. It was a beautiful ecosystem. And if you go visit Mount St. Helens, you know, 30 years later, it's remarkable. What it was, was, you know, 15 feet of ash and everything seemed dead.

And now it's a flourishing, thriving ecosystems. in the forestry services, they now do controlled burns because they know that it's really healthy for forests to go through fires. And metaphorically, that's really, really true of the human condition. In fact, that's captured in the Buddhist school of thought a little bit with the symbol of the lotus flower. So the characteristic of the lotus flower is that it's, you know, it's the most beautiful thing. It's a symbol of ultimate divine beauty. but the other characteristic of a lotus flower is that it only grows out of muck like if you ever look at the flower floating on the water but you look down the these things sort of emerge out of muck out of what what people would look at and say is ugliness and i think in a psychological sense certainly that's that's true you know when in psychology ericson who's a great developmental psychologist created the eight stages of life you know one of the of the things that he suggested is that to overprotect your children is to rob them of their

life because you're making fragile people. And so you shouldn't overprotect your children from the hard things in life. And Jordan Peterson, current psychologist, says the same thing. He says, hey, if your kids are taking risks intelligent, if they're being smart while they're taking risks, like you've got to let it happen. And so what happens is resilience actually tends to be born out of learning what to do with failure. And in my experience, people call me. Usually, I'm the last phone call, Shane. Like, you know, if it's a golfer, they've already fired their caddy and fired their

swing instructor. And sometimes it's the wife who will call me. And the wife will be like, like, I can't stand to be around him. The dog can't stand to be around him. The children can't stand. He's just miserable. And what you realize is when life has stripped away, all of these, you know, ego, generally ego protective mechanisms and left you perfectly raw.

You know, so I mentioned Erickson. Erickson uses sort of the yin-yang symbol that crisis and opportunity are synonymous. That they're not separate things that in crisis you get essentially the same amount of opportunity. Anyone who's been through a divorce, you know, knows that. anyone who's lost a loved one knows that. Anyone who's ever had their life blown up and had to rebuild from nothing and hit quote unquote rock bottom knows exactly what I'm talking about. You know, no one ever, no one would ever wish to be blindsided in life

and their life fall apart. But when you actually are living in the room in the therapeutic sense or in a counseling or coaching sense with people whose lives have been blown to smithereens, this happened oftentimes during the pandemic. It happens during financial crises when people lose everything. Happen with Steve Jobs when he was when he was fired from Apple, he, you know, in his speech called Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. He talks about the beautiful insights that began to happen because he was unencumbered by the expectations of being an executive. And so what happens is when you lose the baggage of your identity, of your ego, of yourself, what fills in the space,

is the freedom to create. And that freedom to create is also the freedom to take risks. And, you know, it's Janice Joplin. You know, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. So when life takes everything away from you, you get that freedom back. Great success, great fulfillment, great happiness in life often emerges from the muck, from the murk of life, from the failure, from those painful emotions that happen when we hit rock bottom. And so when it comes to parenting, it's sort of paradoxical because, you know, in the early stages of a country, it's like, well, every generation would say, I want my kids to have it better than I did because there was real suffering.

But you hit a tipping point whereby, you know, if you're still running that playbook in your middle class or upper middle class or wealthy, you know, one of the, I'm working on two books right now. The first was called Rich and Miserable. The world of wealth and the world of abundance and the world of quote unquote success is also imbued with a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression, a lot of drug abuse. And inasmuch as I could tell you, I celebrate abundance and I love success. What I can also say is that handing it to your children, making their lives too easy, giving them a glide path and protecting them from taking risk creates fragility. And if you send kids out into life, out into the world, fragile, you have done them no service and they are going to have a lot

of suffering when the world comes at them the way that the world comes at everyone eventually. And so you want to develop resilience in kids. It's got to be some version of reality therapy. Like tell them the truth. One of the things you see, I see way too much of it, and this is not just well, this is sort of a modern phenomenon. A lot of modern day parenting has nothing to do with the kids. It has to do with vanity. And so when you see these moms or dads at the club whose kid steps out of line a little bit or is being a little bit silly, the parent isn't yelling at the kid because they care about the kid's long-term development. They're yelling at the kid because they themselves are embarrassed.

Like, it reflects badly on me as the parent. And so what looks like parenting is actually a vanity project. And by the way, kids can spot that. They feel it at every level, and it's not a way to make them feel loved. If you want kids to feel loved, you have to spend a lot of time with them. You have to tell them the truth. You have to be able to do the hard work of parenting, which is taking things away from them,

which is also, by the way, going to inconvenience you as a parent. The moment you'll know you've succeeded as a parent is when your kid is able to look at you and say, hey, like, I don't need your help. Like, I got it. Like, I'm glad that you're there as a safety net if I need you, but like, I got this.

Because what you want is self-reliance, like, you know, a little bit of autonomy where they believe in, themselves. The confidence that your kids need to have to be successful adults is self-confidence. It's belief that's rooted in their own ability to solve the hard problems in life. And the only way, and the only way they're going to get that is through trial and error. Like that's not me saying that. That's like deep amounts of empirical research and social cognitive theory where the equation of success and failure, the math of it is they have to do a lot of failing and then learn how to

succeed in the face of failure because then once that happens, the next time they hit failure, their brain triggers into, oh, wait, I know what to do with this moment because the last time I failed, I kept persisting and I worked my way through it and then I succeeded. And in fact, I'm sorry for talking so long on this shame, but I'll tell you, I'm really interesting study. I took a bunch of kids. I think it was middle school kids, but it might have been high school, I think it was middle school kids. And they showed them 20 math equations. And they said, okay, how many of these problems do you think you could solve? And every kid gave themselves a score. And then the second thing they did is they asked the kids, how confident are you in your ability

to solve these problems? And they got a confidence score, which's actually known as self-efficacy. Then they gave the kids the tests. And what they found is the kids that were more confident, when they ran into problems, they worked harder to solve those problems. In other words, if I'm confident in my ability to solve problems. When I run into a difficult thing, I just, I keep working at it. This is the persistence that you were talking about earlier. So you keep reworking the problem a lot of different ways. And by working at it, I solve it. Then I get to the next one. Kids who didn't have as much confidence gave up more quickly. And by giving up more quickly, they wouldn't get it right. So what you realize is that it wasn't the academic ability or the IQ or the standardized tests

that foreshadowed the ultimate score. It was the persistence in the face of adversity. How do you develop persistence in the face of adversity and failure? You practice it as a kid. Carol Dweck, who's an academic researcher, talks about two kinds of feedback you give kids. You can either praise kids for their intelligence or praise kids for their effort.

And it's very known in the educational community that when kids are successful, you say, hey, I'm proud of you, you work really, really hard on that equation. the next time they go to work at something, they're going to try harder. If you give them praise saying, hey, good job, you're really, really smart. The next time they run into adversity, essentially what their brain is going to say is, well, I have a fixed amount of intelligence, and the smartness that I have isn't solving this. Well, I'm just going to give up because I haven't been praised for my effort.

And so one of the best things you can do for your kids is to continually reinforce work ethic, continually reinforce that, you know, they have control over their success, the degree to which they're willing to work hard. I just want to take a minute here to reflect on this episode because Dr. Gio left a profound impact on me. And one of the things that I took away from this, and I reflected on a lot, I went for a lot of runs, and I thought about, and I sort of talked to other people about was the sources of advantage. Now, Dr. Gio offered five sources of advantage. He said talent, effort, differentiate,

process, and be a talent collector. So those are five. If you go back in the episode, he explains those. I'm going to add to those because I've come up with more. Come up with 13 in total. So those are five. Let's go to six. Six is patience. Do you have more patients? Do you have the patients to know that you're making progress without visible results? A lack of patience. changes the outcome. Often, we know how to get what we want, but what we do is we want it tomorrow. We don't want it in 10 years.

We know how to get there in 10 years. We just work hard. We put our head down, do what we're supposed to do, but we don't want it. So we go for shortcuts. And that lack of patience changes the outcome. Ability to withstand pain. That pain is not physical pain.

I mean, it can be physical pain in terms of working out. That's definitely something to consider. but that pain is mental can you do something different can you be an outcast can you be the tall poppy can you stand out are you willing to differentiate yourself can you withstand financial pain if you go through a crisis the ability to take pain applies to every part of our life emotional pain physical pain do you crawl up into a ball or are you able to withstand that and what can you do to improve the odds that you can withstand these things there's no time to prepare for crisis, whether it's a relationship or health crisis or financial crisis.

Nobody says, go home, and in two weeks, you're going to get this. You know, this thing is coming. So you've got time to get ready. You don't temperament. This is something I talk about in my book, Clear Thinking. How do you manage the urges that get other people in trouble, the emotional urges and impulses? Nine, partner, your partner at home, partner at work. These things matter.

If you have the right partner, everything is on easy. mode. You bring all the baggage from your relationship with you to work and you bring work into your relationship. You better make sure you have the right partner. That is a huge source of advantage. 10 energy. That one's self-explanatory. 11. Curiosity. Again, self-explanatory. 12. I'm going to say luck, but you can't really do anything about luck. You can do most out of all of these so far, you can do a lot on each of them. 13 is positioning. are you in the right position to play on easy mode? Are you playing on easy mode?

Are you playing on hard mode? And the position you're in at the moment of the situation, the moment of a challenge, the moment of circumstance, that doesn't change the fact that there's going to be a moment. It doesn't change that you're going to get angry. It doesn't change the fact you have to make a decision. What it does change is how easy that decision is. And everybody looks like a genius when they're in a good position.

And everybody looks like an idiot when they're in a good position. in a bad position. Are you playing on easy mode? Are you playing on hard mode? I just thought I'd offer a little bit of insight into how I reflect on each of these episodes. Thank you. blog slash podcast or just Google the knowledge project the fernam street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book clear thinking turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results it's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate sharpen your decision-making and set yourself up for unparalleled success learn more at fs dot blog slash clear until next time I'm going to be. Thank you.