The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

We all inhabit different identities throughout our day. Perhaps we’re entrepreneurs or employees, mothers or fathers, athletes or CEOs. But how can you harness the strengths of these different identities to get the best out of yourself? And can these different identities be used to get through tough times? Todd Herman calls on more than two decades of experience working with top performers on performance, strategy, mindset, and execution to discuss his thoughts on peak performance, the value of patience, the fear that prevents us from performing our best, imposter syndrome, and how he worked with Kobe Bryant to build the legendary alter-ego of The Black Mamba. Herman has worked with elite athletes, peak performers, and entrepreneurial leaders for over 22 years. He helps them achieve their most ambitious goals by becoming more resilient, creative, confident, and courageous. He is also the author of the bestselling book The Alter Ego Effect. -- 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

If you, Shane, were to actually pursue the thing you want and start taking action on it, you're losing the excuse of hope. I think hope is a double-edged sword like everything in nature. The moment I take action on it, I no longer have that warm blanket of hope that someday maybe I'll be able to go and do it. And I think that many people stay stuck where they are, not pursuing the things that they really want to do because of hope. 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 is full of timeless wisdom you can apply to life and work. It's concise, it's quick, you can read it in a few minutes. Sign up 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, first access to our events, which we've started to run again, 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. My guest today is Todd Herman. Todd is a coach and mentor to elite athletes, leaders, and public figures on mindset and execution. I've wanted to talk to Todd since I discovered his work through Kobe Bryant and read his book,

The Alter Ego Effect. This episode is about the power of mindset, specifically around identities and what it can do for you to unlock the next level. Each of us is inhabiting different identities throughout the course of our day, perhaps for entrepreneurs or employees, mothers or fathers, athletes or CEOs. But how can you harness the strength of these different identities to get the best out of yourself? And is it possible to create a new identity for yourself to get through tough times? We go deep on peak performance, the value of patience, the fear that prevents us from being at our best, imposter syndrome, and how he worked with basketball great Kobe Bryant to build the legendary alter ego of the Black Mamba.

It's time to listen and learn. I think, you know, the theme of this podcast is probably going to be how do we get the best out of ourselves. And maybe that's a good place to start. That's a very open-ended question. But people come to you and they come to you within need. And that need is performance. I need to perform. I need to get the best out of myself, whether it's in two days or in two weeks or consistently over a period of time. Now what? Like how do we do that? What does that mean? Okay. So for the long term from my experience, the quality of your mentors and the people that you have around you plays a massive role in you not stepping in stupid more than you need to. I've been a byproduct

of mentorship. I'm a big believer in apprenticeship. I think it's one of the things that's been lost nowadays because so many people want to create the perception of immediate success as fast as possible. And it's the fast food world that we live in and drive through wins and things like that, but apprenticeship for me has opened up, you know, a very large chunk of the doors of opportunity for me because their Rolodex was better than mine. They'd already done it. So I'd say in the long term, that long view of how can I get around high quality, high value people, because typically they're going to carry with them high value ideas or philosophies or paradigms that are going to be better than mine. I think that's one thing that I would always look at first

is the underappreciation of environment and how that plays way more on your success than you because we come in right like Shane you you read amazing ideas and amazing books and we index a lot to making myself better and it's so it's a me thing as opposed to how can I design an environment around me that's going to make it a lot easier and grease that slide And so that's the one thing is I always like to evaluate people's environments because sometimes that's the easiest thing to change. And I haven't even made you the problem.

You know, I said Longview, I want to look at your environment and the people that you have around you and mentors and then in the short term. And this is, I kind of became known in the pro sports world as a quick hit guy. And so when someone is playing at the U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows in New York on Saturday. and it's a Wednesday, and I get the call in New York City where home is for me, I'll be on that subway out there. I want to look at your identity, because your identity, the person or the view of yourself that's going out to perform on that field is where all of your habits, attitudes, behaviors, your beliefs sit is on top of that identity of you as that performer. And with the tools that I was using with people and becoming known as Mr. Alter Ego when I had, I now had a better model

and a better tool to help change people's identity quickly. And so speed was always what I indexed towards. It's also because that's what my clients want. Typically really ambitious people, they appreciate speed. And so that was a forcing function on, you know, the tools that I needed to build for the clientele that I have. So I'd say first Longview, mentorship, environment. And then secondly, I'm going to look at identity. Those aren't the only things, but those are the first two things I want to take a look at for a lot of people. You know, I just want to make a comment maybe on the apprenticeship thing.

And I think, you know, when the gap between where we are and where we want to be seems really huge, we tend to gravitate away from apprenticeship because that's a long, slow, methodical process in craftsmanship. And we gravitate towards these quick hit, how do I achieve? what I want to achieve as quickly as possible. So we gravitate towards shortcuts, towards and that, you know, I think of this, and I try to teach my kids this, which is a lack of patience changes the outcome. It's like you know the process to achieve the outcome you want, but it's that lack of patience that's going to make it impossible to actually achieve the outcome. I don't know

that I would use the frame of impossible. Okay. That lack of patience can cause us to make really poor decisions, then those decisions can get us into more trouble than we need to, someone who's a hero to both of us, you know, Charlie Munger and Buffett both would talk about how success has a lot more to do with not making stupid mistakes than it ever does in making phenomenally right choices. Yeah. You know, and the easiest example is if I'm out drinking with you, Shane, me getting into the car and driving is a, could be just a subtle, stupid mistake. Nothing ends up happening. Or it could be an irrevocably, irrevocably bad decision that ruins or, you know, causes a lot

of people harm. So, yeah, I think patience is, it can be a great forcing function because it drives an immediate need right now and can force someone to finally get up off their ass and do something. or this is actually something that might resonate with you too. Shane, like I stand on stage in front of like a lot of entrepreneurs. And when I talk about my business life in building businesses and whatnot, I talk about my career,

which isn't something that entrepreneurs typically talk about. They don't talk about their career. And so I've had people ask me like when they come to the mic stand afterwards. I'm like, why'd you use career? Like entrepreneurs, that's just a, I never heard an entrepreneurs say that. And I say because I look at entrepreneurship as a career. And when you look at something as a career, then you look at it as, well, what are the skills

that I need to build? And career isn't something that's, to your point, an impatient two-week time frame. It's a very long view of things. So I take a look at that world a lot differently than I think many other entrepreneurs do and people in our world. So it's interesting. As you were saying that, you know, patience doesn't mean passive. And I think often we conflate patients with doing nothing and I don't think they're the same.

What's your, what do you think? Yeah. And I am one of the first persons to beat the hustle drum with people like, hey, when you're just starting out with something, you got to hustle. Like you've got to focus your energy and work hard at that thing. But then for many people, it becomes their identity. Oh, I'm someone who can do that. And then they get trapped inside of it. Whereas in the world of building a business to a certain level, or even building your sporting skills or any sort of skills, there becomes a time of maintenance that kind of gets baked into that process. And if you only are always hustling, that means you're typically going to add more, add more,

more is the enemy to peak performance, adding more to something, doing more things, having 17 more new ways of doing a breakaway deke on a hockey goalie is not going to make you better. In fact, some hockey trivia, the best goal score on breakaways in the history of the NHL had two moves. Every single goalie in the NHL knew his two moves, but he could execute those two moves better than every single goalie could possibly save him. So going back to the whole patience thing is there's an element of thinking time. And I think that so many people, would observe someone who's trying to be patient in their thinking about a strategy or a way of doing something as them being they're lazy with it or they're avoiding it. And a lot of amazing people,

all they need is two really great decisions a year. We're going to have so many things to talk about already, right? Keep going down this route. I want to go back to Buffett and Munger for a second. One thing that I think is very underappreciated about them is that they never find themselves out of position. They're always operating from a position of plenty or a position of strength. So no matter what happens in the environment, they can always take advantage of it. They're never forced by circumstances into a bad decision. And when we were talking about how a lack of patience leads to poor decisions, the poor decisions lead to a worsening position. The worsening position leads to fewer and fewer good outcomes. Like if you put Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger in a bad position, they're going to look

very average, but they're always operating from a really good position. Well, and my favorite takeaway that I've had from them that's really shaped my decision making is their context of assumptions where if they were, I don't know if it was Charlie or if it was Warren who said it, but if they had two investments sitting in front of them and they have an idea of what they project the outcome would be on those two investments, they then go to well how many assumptions are we making on these two things and this one over here that looks even a little bit more sexy but if we're looking at it and there's three assumptions that we're making and this one over here is only one assumption or two assumptions even with

every assumption the likelihood of success is like cutting it in half and then I kind of reflect on my own life and a bunch of decisions that were made that I thought were going to be great outcomes for me. And I'm like, oh, how many assumptions was I making? And sometimes I wish it was only three assumptions. There was like nine assumptions I was making that were going to have to be successful in order for that thing to kind of pan out for me. That's a great example of a very methodical and patient process of making a good choice. Reading, playing, learning. Stellist lenses do more than just correct your child's vision. They slow down the progression of myopia, so your child can continue to discover all the world has to offer through their own eyes.

Light the path to a brighter future with stellar lenses for myopia control. Learn more at SLR.com and ask your family eye care professional for SLOR Stellist lenses at your child's next visit. I want to go back to like the 19 different deeks to the best in the world at sports. or business get really, really, really good at the basics. And then part of what makes them the best is their ability not to get bored with doing the simple things in a world that's attracted to the highlight reel. I would actually change that and say it's not their ability to not get bored. It's for them to attack the boring things with an intention of understanding that that's what will separate them from everybody else.

I see even in the world of business, you know, especially nowadays where everything is a highlight reel on, you know, Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn. And that is just not the case. There's so much of the work that we all do behind the scenes. Like, if you want to win,

you've got to know how to execute. And it's in the execution that so many people break. They just don't want to do the things. Everyone wants the noun without the verb. They want the bestselling book, but they don't want to do the work of writing for the best selling book because it's a painful process as someone who's written it. It challenged me. Is that fear that prevents us from doing that? Well, from my experience, one of the major things that causes that, Shane, is the lack of admitting to yourself what it is that you actually want. So many people that have come to me and they feel stuck or they feel maybe they built a

business that has trapped them in some way and they're trying to figure it out and they're kind of delaying on taking some of the actions that they know they should be doing. I'll just ask them, did you accidentally build this business? We make these assumptions that, you know, we sat down and we said, I'm going to build that business right there and it was such a smart intention i'm an accidental entrepreneur a lot of people i think have gotten themselves through just great action into a corner but it's not really what they want i think that the reason that many people would have levels of dissatisfaction or they aren't maybe taking the inspired action that they're supposed to be taking is because it's not what they

actually want. And they know that. And I think most people really don't sit down and be really honest with themselves about what it is that they truly want to be doing. And one of the reasons that they don't is because if you, Shane, were to actually pursue the thing you want and start taking action on it, you're losing the excuse of hope. I think hope is a double-edged sword like everything in nature. Something can't only be good because nature tells us that that doesn't work. Hyperhydrosis and hypohydrosis. Water isn't always good. When you and I are floating in the middle of the ocean, the last thing I want is more water unless it's rainwater to help me fuel my body. And hope is the same way. Hope can't only be good. Because if I'm hoping that maybe someday I'm

going to be an actor in Hollywood. And that's always just a dream in my mind. But I never take action on it. It's actually a place of safety and security because the moment I take action on it, I no longer have that warm blanket of hope that someday maybe I'll be able to go and do it. And I think that many people stay stuck where they are, not pursuing the things that they really want to do because of hope. Is hope the difference between interested and committed then? Yeah, great question. It would play a part. It would play a part. And then some of those other things that get in the way there between interest and commitment or the things that you had brought up earlier, you know, whether it's the fear of rejection, the fear of losing face

somehow, the fear of testing your skills because we think we're kind of good at something. And maybe we're not. I'll give you an example. Well, I'm, trying to scale a software company with two co-founders for people in the coaching space. And I love putting myself back into that, what I call the field of play, constantly because I want to test myself. Okay, Todd, you can give this advice very good to other people. But how good are you at following product market fit methodology? How good are you at, you know, defining a specific target market to get traction inside of and sticking with it? like so for me going back to that whole like that fear of not taking action i have a real fear

of inaction because i want to test myself where does that fear of inaction come from one is cultural definitely cultural influences from your your whether it's your childhood i'm not a therapist i don't do that kind of work with people but ideas that people have about what the taking action is going to mean or the negative responses that they had when they were younger that really created a strong narrative about how bad it is to go and take action on something. And then again, it's the fear of losing the hope. Because if I always live in inaction, but I still have my hope of like doing it, I'm not going to lose that. That warm feeling that I have about daydreaming about that thing. And I'm not confronted with the realities.

And then the fear of uncertainty is another thing. Will I lose the money if I invested it this way into my business? And will I lose my time? And oh, geez, what else am I going to be missing out on if I actually stay committed to this one thing and become very myopic in trying to channel my energies towards that? And I always try to like to flip that with people and say that you have no idea the version of you that's waiting for you on the other side of being committed. Because the side of you that you're going to meet that only stays in the area,

of interested is going to be the very same version of you that you're experiencing right now. But the person that becomes committed, it's a forcing function on your skills. It's a forcing function on your traits and your attributes that you've already developed. And if you take with yourself a very curious mind of, no, I'm like if you just have, I have a fundamental belief, Shane, that I'm going to figure things out and that I'm, I'm going to stumble. I'm going to fall. But I also know I have the capacity to pick myself up and continue marching forward. And the reason I know that and the reason that everyone that's here listening to this right now knows that is you're here.

That's how I know that you have the capacity to pick yourself up because you're here because everybody gets knocked down. I just bunch of get knocked down pursuing the things that I want to go and pursue. I think that's really powerful, right? That sort of, I think people often think they need the courage to get to the outcome. versus the courage to figure it out as I go along the way. And there are two very different types of courage. When you're thinking about the courage to the outcome,

the gap between where you are and the outcome is huge. So it becomes very hard. And then hope is easy, right? So you can gravitate towards hope. And I'm just sort of thinking about this out loud in relation to the conversation. But courage to figure it out means I can't, like hope doesn't play a role, right? like it's the courage to take the first step that matters and then I don't care if it goes left or right. I'll just like course correct as I go along. And think about this too, Shane to your

great point about courage for the outcome. It's also very egoic for you and I to even think that we even know what the outcome is going to be in the future anyway. Like don't forget the things that you're wanting right now are coming from your current level of identity. and how you view and see yourself. But the more that you push yourself into challenging situations, you do tough stuff, you pick up hard things, you have hard conversations with people,

that's changing your level of ability, which is gonna change how you view and see yourself. And because the way that you view and see yourself is different, it's gonna open up different ideas around what it is that you want. And so now your vision is constantly changing as your, evolving and iterating. And so like what you think you wanted three months ago,

six months ago, if you're a person that is challenging yourself, it's going to change that vision. It might crystallize it better, greater clarity. You're going to figure out what you don't want. Let's bring it back to environment before we go into identity. I think you can use your environment to take your desired behavior and make it your default behavior. You've been working with thousands of people who perform consistently across sports and business, what do they do differently about their environment to maximize success? And I'm using the term success very broadly in terms of performance, not success as in like what are they doing to improve their physical performance, their mental performance? What does what do the

environments look like? What's different? one that can't be ignored is the luck of where they were born. It just can't be underestimated how critical that is to the success factor of someone. So these are choices that they didn't even make. It was just they got lucky being where they are. So statistically speaking, the best size of city or town to live in to develop your sporting skill set is around a quarter of a million people. Because at a quarter of a million people, the level of competition can be well above average in that area. The quality of coaches that you could get now increases over that of a hundred thousand person city. And so it's that kind of sweet

spot of size. Now, that's inside of now a culture that would be maybe valuing that type of sports. So in Canada, hockey, quarter of a million person city, you're going to get good coaching. But if in Canada, you were trying to play and become very good at rugby, maybe not. There's that side of things. There's many factors outside of ourselves because we want to index towards me. Like, what made me do this? And I like to tell people, like, I think about 33% of my whatever successes and outcomes I've had in my life, I'm going to index towards luck. And that's not me stealing competency from myself. It's actually, for me, it's very empowering because I'm like, oh, how can I engineer more of that?

Because there are just many fun happenstances that happen for me. But that was also because I was taking action, but I'm looking for more luck. But in the environment, getting to like what also shaped the athlete, it would be definitely the quality and the excellence of the coaching and the. and the talent that they had around them. And so I grew up on a big farm and ranch in Alberta, Canada, two older brothers. And so, you know, typically when there was a three-boy job to go and do, it typically meant that it was hard labor.

And my older brothers loved to make me do the crappiest part of it. So I didn't develop the affinity towards it that they did. Now I'm getting ready to go off to college and university and I was working for my dad in the corrals with some cattle. And we stopped just to take a quick break. He's a man of very few words, but he said, Todd, you know, it's obviously you're not going to be moving back to the farm and ranch. You're not going to become a farmer. Hopefully, mom and I have, you know, giving you some like really great foundational, like character, integrity stuff that's not going to fail you.

But you're going to go and do things that we're probably not going to give you very good advice on. So my only advice to you would be like, whatever you go and do, believe in yourself enough to surround yourself with the best. really find people who are at the very top and tuck yourself under their wing. And that has been made all the difference for me. So now going back to those clients of mine, those athletes, they had, whether it's one person or they had three people or they had a team around them. And especially when they're more into the pro ranks, nowadays, they had at least one great coach who could really help them with the technical side of their sport.

the way. The coaching thing is interesting because it made me think of imposter syndrome where you said believe in yourself enough that you can get the best coaching. And imposter syndrome is kind of a way that we maybe bully ourselves a bit. I have a really hard time with that phrase, Shane. It basically was non-existent in the 2000s. Imposter syndrome is a new term anyway. its actual route where it came from was two ladies in Texas in the 1970s. And it was actually called Imposter Phenomenon. And what it was there to explain was in this new world of work where women were both coming into and building careers for themselves and they were also still holding that main

role of being caretaker at home. They felt like they were kind of being impostors in both like they weren't good at either of them. And then in 2010, when Instagram came around, You can see it literally in Google's search algorithm. Imposture syndrome starts to take off. Well, some of that was because people were now posturing with veneers of their lives online. There was now filters to our photos to make ourselves look better or be more stylish.

And then you have the rise of influencers who now have these easily accessed, platforms to talk to people about subject matter they have no expertise in whatsoever they have no nuance of understanding around it whatsoever so imposter syndrome i think has become a catch-all term for all of the mental maladies of human beings and it's crap to me really it only is three things one imposter syndrome is or imposter phenomenon would be that you have have sort of given up all of your successes in life, your achievements to lock, right place, right time. Nowadays, it's privilege and, you know, a bunch of different, like, terms now. You're not responsible for your anything that's happened. Yeah. And you dismiss it,

basically, right? And that's very toxic to your overall level of confidence and level of self-efficacy, your belief in your ability to go and make things happen. That's what self-efficacy really means. And so to those people, I would, I always give them the same piece of advice. What you've done is you're sitting at the poker table of life. Yeah. And you've robbed yourself of your chips. And so I keep this on my desk, Shane.

So people are listening. I have a little glass jar and it has a whole bunch of poker chips inside of it. We need to do a really good job of owning our wins, owning. owning the skills that we developed, owning the circumstances and situations that we've pulled ourselves out of that might have caused other people to turn back and not enter the cave, so to speak, to use Joseph Campbell's words, you know, own those things. And there's a great story from the former CEO of Levi's where when they were going into China, he was very concerned that it wasn't going to be successful. And stressing about it,

sleeping over it. And he has this journal that he keeps on his desk. And he broke down his entire life into three year increments from zero to two and, you know, three to five and six and on and on and on and on and what he did was he cataloged all the things that he learned and all the skills that he developed and, you know, knowledge he gained, a wisdom he'd gained throughout that all these periods of his life. And he'd pick it up and he'd flip through it. And the reason you'd flip through it was because at the end of flipping through it, he would always come to the conclusion, oh, no matter what gets thrown my way, I'll figure it out. Like, look at, I've just proven that over time. Yeah. And so I say that because to that person who discounts themselves

like they do with, ah, who am I to go after that? Stack the confidence chips. Play at the poker table of life with your actual chips that you've earned over time. So that's one thing. so we discount. The second thing that imposter phenomenon is actually about is the fear and the concern or the worry of what that people are going to find you out, that you're not as good as they think that you are. Yeah. Now, that kind of diverges into two roads.

If you're someone who's posturing and positing a sense of skill sets and competencies that are not rooted in truth whatsoever, then here's the reality. You should be found out. Yeah. But for those that. feel like they're going to be found out, I just tell the same thing, stack your chips, go back. Like, are you trying to posture like this perfect persona of, you know, every single poem that you write is going to be the next raven or, well, then you've just created a paradigm and a set

of rules around yourself that's going to be really hard to win inside of. And so that's what I've often found is people have rules about what success is going to mean, which then causes them to feel like they might be found out. And I would just say, let's pull yourself right back into the process. That's why I like to index towards career. There's going to be a lot of stuff over my career that I'm going to put out or I'm going to create that just doesn't hit the mark. Here's my response. So what? I want to come back to environment for a second in terms of how much of success for our knowledge workers, get outside of the realm of athletes here for a second, but probably relates to athletes as well, is subtracting things. Like your environment,

your surface area of responsibilities naturally grows. Your surface area of projects you want to take on, of commitments that you have, of people reaching, the more successful you are, the more people reach out to you. How much of developing performance, is getting reps in what you're good at, which means subtracting all of these other things. So getting rid of priorities, you know, simplifying your life and not letting the surface area continuously expand. Well, it's undeniable that that's a major part of that process of being more valuable. Because we were talking before about success, and I don't like that term.

I think in the terms of being useful and being valuable. The more useful you are, the more valuable you are, then whatever success is going to happen is going to happen, I think. But when I'm working with people, we subtract, we remove, and we delete. So that I can get you into what I call the flow channel. Highly ambitious people, typically the main lever that they pull in their life is the lever of more. And then they wonder why they're buried under a weight of stress and overwhelm.

And then ultimately they get burned out. Happens in entrepreneurship a lot. Happens in knowledge work a lot. And that's because your ambition got in the way, which then comes down to a really poor decision-making process of like, what is the most important, most valuable, highest impact thing that I could be working on right now? And your answer to that, if you're super impatient, you typically need to be looking for dopamine hits of things that are immediate feedback loops as opposed to long term.

Like it's great to have this balance of like, I'm working on this really long term thing that it's return on investment or its return on my skills is going to be just orders of magnitude huge or return on meaning to me. And then there's these other things that you can work on that get you track. in the short term. So knowledge workers, one of their, one of their biggest challenges is absolutely not trying to do too much, not trying to add so many projects onto their plate. And I think of, now, Shane, I don't know, do you read many autobiographies by chance? A few, yeah. Well, who comes to mind?

The reason I read them is because in the nuance and the grout of those books, you hear very much a similar story. I grew up in a place. I was like kind of a bit of a fish of a water. It wasn't the best place for someone like me. Maybe I didn't have the right parents. Sometimes they did have the right parents. Those parents opened them up to a world that, you know, other kids never got an opportunity. But I felt like I was a bit of a maybe a fraud or I couldn't do what my parents did or, you know, I wish I could go and be like so and so. And there's this pathway of a lot of times people not pursuing the thing that they most wanted to do. Instead, what we hear frequently is the Steven Spielberg stories

of I got a camera when I was young and I fell in love with directing and making films and so it's a terrible narrative for you to constantly be battered with is these people who found their things super early in life because then you lament the fact that you didn't or what didn't I see when I was younger in

and then you beat yourself up and you're like oh maybe maybe I was supposed to be a caricaturist when I because I did like drawing when I was And then you question yourself and you doubt yourself. And it's like there's so many different ways that people found their thing. And I say this specifically because I love what Steve Martin had created as a frame for his life. When he was in his 20s, he resolved to live his life in decades. And he said, my 20s is going to be about mastering the craft of comedy.

And then my 30s, he got there. And he's like, well, now because of these opportunities that I have, I'm going to master the craft of acting in his 40s he's like I'm going to start mastering the craft of music specifically the banjo for him and then his 50s has been about mastering the craft of painting he's an amazing painter this long view of things could really help people not feel so rushed in I got to do this project right now it's like well we're working with a decade here, man. So Shane Parrish is working on his next decade of becoming absolutely world-class at interviewing. Now of a sudden, you don't go and buy seven courses next week on interviewing

skills or whatever. You're going to give yourself more time to sink into things. That's really powerful. I think long, when you think long term, it prevents you from doing a lot of short-term behaviors naturally that either leads you a strong-term. take you off the path of long-term thinking or otherwise get in the way, right? Like if I go to you and I'm going to make this tangible, like if I have a coworker and I go to them and I have a problem with them, the way that I address that problem is going to be very different if I think I'm going to have a relationship with them for 10 years versus if I think they're only going to be here for a few days.

And if I treat them like it's a transaction, they're going to behave like it's a transaction. And then when they behave like it's a transaction, it's going to reinforce my view that they're not committed. They're not, you know, it's just a job to them. It's not a career. And it's going to change the opportunities they get. So this one little thing can make a huge difference in not only how you treat other people, but how it actually spirals beyond that moment into something much. larger. Shane, like that's and that's a fantastic example of taking a look at two people who are

literally doing the same mechanical actions, whether it's a knowledge worker who's trying to grow themselves on LinkedIn. They're doing the exact same thing. They're posting things the same way. We've indexed so much towards habit and behavior so much recently. And I appreciate all to talk about habits. But there's a there's another side of this whole. performance world that isn't as appreciated, which is the way you're going about it. And so in that moment, that's a perfect example of the way. Your frame of mind is a part of the way that you're going about it. Now, that way of going about it is like, hey, I'm going to have a long-term relationship with this person, whether they know it or not, right? And a long-term relationship

could be, it might be just one interaction. But we've all had those moments in life where someone came along at the right time for us and just really treated us like a human being. They saw something in the moment with us. They could have been just a nice word. It could have been just a smile, like anything that it just embeds in us in that moment and time. And that's how I think about what I call it Citizen Todd. We'll talk about identity in a bit. But that's another very important identity that I have that I take out into the world. living in New York City, there's a lot of people who they put on their headphones and they think that because they have their headphones on, the world doesn't exist, right?

Well, that's a pretty terrible way to show up and be a contributor in society, I think. So I think I've got a responsibility of Citizen Todd when I go out there to, you know, who knows if today is the day that I give someone a moment that shapes and shifts them and, you know, puts them back on course or does, you know, evolve into some sort of long-term it's a long-term relationship because we do whether we like it or not we do have long-term relationships with people but a lot of times it's not physically it's just inside their own head yeah and the interesting thing about long-term too is like it allows for compounding and what what we know about compounding is like all the gains come at the end not at the beginning right so

if you take yourself off that path through a loss of trust or you know transactional behavior or not a win-win situation you immediately take yourself off the long game. And if you take yourself off the long game, you've immediately ruled out exponential returns on whatever you're doing. Shane, an example with that. An NHL client was in the Stanley Cup playoffs and it was game one, very tightly contested first game. And it did come down to overtime. He hopped off the bench, got on the ice, accepted a pass coming over the other team's blue line. And he snapped a one in a million shot over the left hand. corner, so he's coming down the right wing, snapped it over the left hand shoulder of the goalie

who was absolutely stellar that game. And fit hit the puck in between a window the size of a puck. And so everyone's like, you know, one in a million shot. Look at it. No, Ryan practiced that shot thousands of times. That exact spot on the ice. And I get chills just thinking about like the amount of effort that you're putting in to maybe one. day in a high pressure situation be able to deliver that shot, that's compounding. Totally. The compounding effect, because the compounding effect delivers confidence because there's a lot of guys who don't pull the trigger on that shot.

He was covered by the defenseman very well. The goalie was in the perfect position for him. There's nothing about that situation that says he should have taken that shot, but he did. that comes to ultimately everything I ever try to help someone with Shane. At the end of the day, Shane, I want you to trust yourself. Trust is different than confidence. It's at the DNA level. When you feel like you trust yourself, that's when time is collapsing. Think about an alpine skier who's standing at the top of a mountain that looks like it's a vertical cliff and it's in the Olympics.

It comes once every four years. So here they are. They're skis, standing in the gate, getting ready to go down this vertical face. In that moment, that's the present moment. I want to do everything I possibly can to help that person in that moment trust themselves. Well, what is the equation of trust in that moment?

well past tense that's where all of your preparation comes in did you show up did you do the work you know have you put in the reps did you prepare yourself on not only the days where it was a little bit overcast so that it wasn't too sunny and it was you know not slushy or it wasn't icy did you only ever practice with being the first person to take the run around the freshly groomed slope or did you also practice being the 26th person to go around those gates with tracks already grooved in things starting to get a little bit slushy and a little bit icy where your skis start to slip a little bit have you practiced the slipping of the edges of your if you have and all those things are an affirmative great i've built up trust in your preparation yeah then it gets to

the future do you trust the future the future is your plan do you trust your plan the way that you're going to go down those gates do you have multiple plans because oh shit today you're in the 18th slot you're not in the first or second slot it's going to get a little bit it's going to be a little sloppy going around those things right or the wind kicked up for you and it didn't kick up for the persons that went before you. And now, what are you going to do with that? I hope it's a so what? I hope it's a watch me, which is now bringing you into the moment.

So do you trust the plan that you have or the plans that you have to adjust? That's flexibility and adaptability. That's mental toughness. Your ability to be flexible and adaptable despite what you're getting as the circumstance that you're dealt with. That's mental toughness. So now we come to the moment. If you trust those two things,

then the likelihood that you're going to trust yourself, which is different, it's going to build confidence. It's going to build certainty that you've got this. And then we work out, what's your phrase, Shane? What's the thing you're going to say to yourself so that you can get into the moment, get out of your ego and trust all of these things aligning for you, your prep, your plan, and then now you're just the vehicle and the vessel to deliver those two things in the moment. And so is it let go, which is an often one? Is it let go and let God? Is it watch this mom?

Whatever it is that's going to help to alleviate any tension or pressure that's always built up. Pressure is not real. Pressure is only delivered by the human itself. Someone says this is a high pressure game. I don't let my clients and athletes think that way because I don't know that that's true. Truth is gravity. You experience gravity. I experience gravity.

But pressure, some athletes deal with it differently than other people deal with it. That tells me that pressure is very elastic. So the commentators who are saying that this is high pressure, I've found that most of those people were middle of the road performers when they played their sport. And they dealt with pressure, not like the people that are elite or legends. So there's a different door that you can walk through. That door is preparation planning movement. It's all in the bands of time.

Past, future, present. Do you have a hard time or your clients as well relating to average people? I don't think the average person, I don't think they want to get amazing at their craft or what they're doing. I think they're comfortable, I'll say that, being okay and convincing themselves and maybe relying on hope and all of this other stuff. but they don't they don't sort of like walk away from a meeting going oh what did I say what could I have said better oh here's how this could play out better or walk away from a poor performance going what can I take away from that to the next one so that I get better so that I improve and it has nothing to do with blame or anything it's just you know you don't blame circumstances

you just sort of look at look in the mirror and you're confronted with you and your performance on that day and maybe they were better that day and maybe they were better that day and maybe they weren't, but like you take away something from that and get better. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's taxes extra. Td Bank knows that running a small business is a journey from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to

entrepreneurs no matter the stage of business you're in visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a td small business banking account manager i think people like us and maybe i'm wrong just have a hard time sort of understanding people who are not like that Boy, we can have a long conversation about this, Shane. So I'm going to be, I'll be vulnerable for people. I think I struggle with this. Kobe and I would talk about this when I was, you know, building the black mamba with him. And he often said he just had no way of relating to people who just didn't want to be

par excellence, like just the best at their thing. He had a hard time relating to them. And I was, I would say I was similar. but then after I matured and I and I still have to watch myself Shane because it is such an ego response to make myself probably feel good about myself to judge someone else because they're not getting some sort of result or I perceive them as being average yeah because there's many reasons why someone might be getting average results from my own experience of going through some you know, difficult things in my life, I would hate to treat someone and make them feel like

I'm so much better than you because look at what I've done. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's all internal, right? Like, it's sort of like, and maybe it is my ego. And we can use me as an example here because I feel safe talking about this. Like maybe it just is my internally. I just, I don't understand how people can not want to get better at things or, and maybe I'm not seeing it. And there's an aspect of, you know, totally I could be blind to their process and blind to. But I also know what it looks like because I do it. Yeah. Same as like Kobe, right?

Like, he knows what it looks like. I know. To be successful on the court. It means waking up at 4 a.m. It means shooting 10,000 free throw. It means doing all the work. And so he knows when somebody's not doing that. Well, on our relationship, that was one of the things that, well, I wouldn't say it fractured it,

but we didn't speak for a long time because I challenged him on the same level of energy of excellence in being a father because we came together during the time of him going through the allegations of sexual assault in

Colorado. That's where we built the black mobba from was in that moment because he felt like he was losing his edge and then he got connected to me through my mentor, Harvey. He originally reached out from a friend of his in pro sport, connecting him to Harvey, and then Harvey said, oh, you're going through an ego death. You're not losing

your edge. You're going through an ego death, Kobe. You need to talk to a guy that is now very much indexing performance towards what I call at the time identity-based performance. Like, I help you build the identity to go and win. And then the tool I would use would be the alter ego tool. Back then, I kind of called it character crafting. After we had developed a relationship and we were having these conversations to make ourselves well maybe not to make he didn't need to make himself feel good but for me I was maybe make yourself feel good about you know judging people who were average and I said it wasn't that funny because I don't see you putting in the same energy towards your family. Kobe took that and ran with it then that was

that was the good part of the short relationship that we did have was and i always i always have this with clients is when you're working with really big egos or super egos that happen in the legendary status of athletes i need to come in and break the exterior of that a lot of times and so i can't kow to them which is what often happens with the people that are around them totally i say all that because coming back to it, I've had to battle that judgment of average when it comes to professional or career lens maybe, but then I see these people crushing it as being a dad or a mom or in their personal hobbies and things like that. And maybe that's where I was under indexing as well. So that's exactly where I was going to take this is like often people at

the top of their game, whatever field that is, they over-index on a particular, they over-index on one aspect of life. And life is an integration of multiple different parts, from health to relationships, to family, to, you know, food that you put in your body, to all these things. And they over-index on work or some sort of visible success that they're getting affirmation for. And when they do that, all these other parts of their life suffer. Did you ever get a chance to meet and talk to Clayton Christensen? No. Okay.

So he was another mentor of mine. Clayton has a great story that he tells regarding being in the MBA program at Harvard when he was in the 1970s. I don't know if you've heard this before. No. So he is a part of this Mormon group that was there. And what they would do is they'd bring in former Harvard alumni that had success and come in and just speak to their group. And he talks about in a very eloquent video online, a gentleman who came in and he would talk about their careers.

And he said, you know, a lot of you are going to come back a decade from now. And you're going to have a lot of very successful careers. It's just the nature of who comes out of this program. But you're going to find that some of your classmates have got children that are being raised by other men or other women. And now I don't think any of them planned that. They didn't leave Harvard and say, I want my kids to be raised by someone else when I do have kids. But they didn't also work on their family life.

And the reason is because in business, it's so easy for us to work another hour, work on another project in your day or at night. Because the feedback loops are so quick. I put in work now. I'm going to see your result tomorrow or next week or something like that. But when you're parenting, the feedback loop is 18 years plus. And did you produce like a really great, well-rounded, competent adult that is, you know, self-driven and all these things? And that was Mitt Romney who came in and shared that with Clayton's group. And that's, that always stuck with me.

And I heard Clayton share that speech kind of long before it went kind of viral online. And so to your point or to the point we're talking about is the feedback. loops for a lot of high achievers are so much quicker in your domain of career and they're a lot longer in other areas like health even or family or your marriage and relationship. It's typically not just all of a sudden you were an asshole on Thursday and the husband or the wife leaves you. It's like it was a long time coming. I think that's really interesting right in thinking about how we gravitate towards again quick, right? Quick feedback loops. positive reinforcement on one particular aspect of our life, to the neglect of another aspect,

which might have a longer feedback loop. And we take those other things kind of for granted. And that can come back to bite us. Yeah. I was just going to say, like, I've got very, this is where luck comes in. I think I got very lucky growing up on such a big farm. Because if you think about farm life, farm life is a rare place where you work and you live in a place that has no boundaries. That's just the way of life for you. I knew that I was going to be probably in some sort of knowledge work when I was going through my 20s and I just thought about how could I make a farm for my kids to feel a part of?

In New York City for a short time while I was moving between offices, I had my office at home and it was in the corner of our master bedroom and like any good New Yorker, you're making your space do a lot of duty for you. I'll be doing videos like this. I was doing trainings and stuff. And so I had this pop-up black photography canvas that would go up behind me. And my challenge was that I had two little girls at the time. Now they're 10 and 9, but back then they were like three and two and they just wanted to be in there with dad i got them to come in and help me set up my day so one of them got to open up my laptop that day and you know i punch in the the passcode to get in the other one was able to grab the at the time the the blue snowball mic or whatever

and bring it to the top front of the desk and the other one got my like journal out and put it on the desk too so they're they're helping me set things up and i thought it was like that's the of me loading the bales on the back of the truck, right? Like they were, and once they felt like they had contributed, then they, then they would leave and they wouldn't, they wouldn't quote bug me. Yeah. And so I think of that idea of like, how can we best integrate these different ambitions that we have so that they really overlap and do double triple duty for ourselves?

I like that a lot. I like the integration thing. I mean, I'm a big advocate of that and, you know, work in life. for me. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I think that's a good sort of segue into the relationship between identity and performance. Yeah, this comes into a bit of a language trap that we have in our world, Shane, where we refer to ourselves in I, me, you. We think of some people, if you have maybe a little bit of an unsophisticated understanding of identity, which is not a judgment. It's just, it's the nature of things. We think of that there's one me. And then in our world,

Nowadays, Shane, now there's an authentic self. There's the authentic version of you. And I love to break that frame with people because I can't look under the microscope and find one you. There is no one you because we operate in the world in many roles that we have. Even our behaviors and our attitudes, they shift and they change based on situation. So that could be I call it the field of play that you're going into or the role that you're taking into something, who's in that environment with you, how you operate with your family

or your parents. I mean, hey, I'm never going to not be the forgetful kid because I left my wallet on an airplane once coming from Disneyland when I was 10 years old. And my mom to this day thinks that I forget about everything. Right. So whatever, that's the role I get to play with her or the character. But we have many roles that we play. And I like, to give people this frame of understanding that the moment you become a lot more intentional about the who that you're bringing onto a field of play that you're designing not one that's been designed by someone or something else because our influences for how we perceive ourselves were very much created before we ever had any volition or choice in

the process because our concept of me and myself and stuff is a lot of times carried out and formed before the age of eight. Now, a child has no concept of me. They don't even, they don't think of themselves as having an identity until around seven and a half when the frontal lobe starts to kick in and we start to develop reasoning and judgment skills. So I say all this because I like to help design identities for people that are specifically designed to help them win on a field of play that's very important.

to them. The CEO who's really struggling with managing and leading people. Maybe they carry with them a great identity of, oh, I'm a great doer. I'm great at executing. And now, though, based on the stage of what their business would be at, they need to take on a new identity. And people will argue against us. I say, well, I'm not an operator or I'm not a leader of people. It's like, that's just not my strength. My natural strengths are this. Well, like, I love to poke holes in personality assessments because most people who take personality assessments like Myers-Briggs is a good example. I mean, I don't know how many more articles need to be written about how it doesn't carry very much efficacy in the world. But the reason they also don't carry much efficacy is because

when you're answering these questions, you're like, hmm, you know, I'm a really good planner when I'm at work. But when I'm at home, I'm not that good of a planner. So you start automatically. You start separating your life. And then all of a sudden, you just put a three down. But if you were to sit there and say, I'm going to take this assessment on the identity that I have as a business person or a career person or whatever, you're going to actually be able to answer those questions, A, a lot faster because you're not getting confused by all of the different selves that you've got with you. And so for me, one of the things that I indexed towards highly with helping people navigate their lives or their performance is I look I try to build an identity for people a really

strong identity that you're really clear on that you've decided and you can have multiple identities well I have the identity because I have the role of being a dad at a long career in my my business and coaching long before I became a dad and so that built up a certain level of skill sets and and worldviews and ways of operating in my day, which are really, it's like a bicep curl. Every day I'm waking up and I'm a challenger personality type in the way that I coach people, okay, because it works for the clientele that I have. Now, it'd be very easy for me, eight to 10 hours a day for decades to believe that that's who I am. I'm just a challenger guy.

That's just who I am. Like, if you don't like it, too bad. But instead, when I think of like, well, who do I want to show up for my kids? What are the qualities that I want? Well, I want to be patient, funny, and I want to be silly for them at this age and very loving and caring. And this is kind of me going into the alter ego side of things and me indexing towards mentors and apprentice. I'm like, well, who already embodies that?

And my dad had some of those qualities. so automatically okay well and i don't need to trick myself into loving my dad but the other one very explicitly was mr rogers because i can't think of anyone that sits on the other end of the spectrum of being a challenger personality type than mr rogers so that becomes my source of inspiration for that role and identity that i have and then even in business and this is why i think entrepreneurship even more so than careers inside of companies is just so challenging and it's because there are so many roles that you play. There's the marketer role. There's the PR guy. You got to sell Farnham Street. You got to get some backlinks when you're starting out. Like you got to get some

people or whatever your process was to grow the demand of Farnham Street. And even inside of my own business, I think of myself having three very distinct roles that I operate and then, oh, what, how is that guy showing up over there to win in that particular domain? And what that does for me, because I operate through these worlds of identities is it helps me then Shane bring to the surface more traits, more attributes, more qualities that could have laid dormant. And I think about Carl Jung in his work on archetypes because he formulated this idea of the 12 different archetypes. There's like the ruler archetype and there's the warrior archetype and there's the jester archetype and there's the every man or every woman archetype and there's all these different archetypes.

And most of us will get trapped inside of living through one to three main archetypes in a lot of the ways that we operate. And his sort of theory was you become a really whole human being when you can actually bring to life all of the different attributes of these archetypes. And so that's how I think about developing my different identities is I'm trying to be as whole as I possibly can. and I think the more whole I can be as a human being, that's going to make me more valuable. That's going to make me more useful to other people. It's going to also make me more useful to myself so that I don't just fall into the same trap

of thinking of only solving things a certain way because there can be a more caring way that I go about it. There can be a more challenging way that I go about it. There can be a more fun, funny way of going about it like the jester would. Does the alter ego act like a shield towards our inner ego against criticism against everything else? And it protects us. And it also, like, it allows us to put, to compartmentalize almost, to leave the family at home, to leave the problems at home, to leave, you know, I didn't sleep well at home and just get in this box. to use Kobe's words or sort of Joseph Campbell.

And the only thing that matters in that moment is this personality I've adopted because that personality is unlocking a level of performance that I can't get to without doing that. Another way of looking at it is it's the disassociation from your current ego state that you have, the current narrative that you tell yourself about you know who i am and what i'm capable of that disassociation and then being able to act through a new idea inspired by someone or something else allows us to more freely tap into the traits and abilities and qualities that we have within us that we just don't access because we have this hard crusty interior exterior of like no this is who i am This is my explanation of like why I'm this way.

Because as I have proven to my own self, through the work of thousands of tremendous people, we are so malleable. Like we are, I mean, I don't know how many more times we need to hear about gray matter, right? And, you know, the neuroplasticity of us, well, the plasticity of our identity is just as shapeable. And so the moment we sort of collapse ourselves into. to, oh, no, this guy or this girl meant to go and do this role, it becomes so much easier to shape that self. And the sort of rhetorical question I get to be when I'm standing on stages and doing speeches is, how many of you have ever been asked to create a vision statement or a mission statement for your life? Right? And I'm like, I did because I consumed a lot of

self-help stuff when I was very young and I was still consumed because there's a lot of great smart people out there. But man, a mission statement for my whole life, that just, I could never, and then I felt like I was an idiot. Like, man, everyone else is just so much better than me. And so here's a great example of, you know, Todd just doesn't get it. Like, that's very much like an honest take of my assessment of myself. But the moment I say to you, Shane, Shane, what is your mission as a father. If I let you sit with it and say like, I got you four hours, what's your mission as a dad? You'd be able to come back with a response. It's going to be pretty good. And you're going to iterate on it because no statement should ever be just baked in time forever. And that goes

to the power of isolating our identity. If I say like, hey, what's your what, Todd, what's your mission as a coach? Todd, what's your mission as a CEO? What's your mission? And then at the end, when I maybe write out these eight different missions, like what's your mission, Todd? as a husband of Valerie, my wife, I feel like I can answer that a lot easier and it's more simply. Just pragmatically, Shane, it's so useful to think of yourself through the many lenses of many different identities. I almost think of it like the map and the territory, right? Like the territory is huge and you're creating a map and that map is a distillation of the

territory, but it allows you to see things that you can't see in the territory because it's removing a lot of detail in most cases and just focusing on the essence of what's needed. So when you're saying like, what's your identity as a father and what's your mission as a father, it's like I don't have to think about work. I don't have to think about relationships with my partner. I don't have to think about anything at all except for this one aspect. So I've narrowed the playing field, if you will, into like a five by five quadrant. Now it's a lot easier to see what's in that quadrant because I can, I'm not looking at integrating all of these different things. Even just practically, Shane, look at, look at how you did it so

brilliantly with the naming of the site, Farnham Street, right? That was isolating the map of the territory down to a, hey, this is what we think that this area means. Like, they think in a different way. And so this is where we're going to index our content towards in the very beginning is, you know, you know great decision making great thinking skills great frameworks great mental models talk about luck like that whole thing was just created as me sharing what i was learning without the intent of anybody ever reading it and it was me reflecting on the experiences i was having uh if you will but why did you do it publicly though well because i'm sorry i'm not not to interrupt you again, but you don't, you don't have the sort of public avatar of someone who needs

to be followed. Like there's many people that are like, I can tell by the way that they show up on social media that they need to feed off of the energy of other people to validate their existence in life. You don't because you have far more sort of stoic way about you. So it's just fascinating to me that you chose to write in public. Well, this is super interesting in two ways. One, I hate attention. So I actually like, it's a struggle for me in a lot of ways to go on social media and, you know, write a book and put it out there and do all of these things because it's like, oh, God, it just means more attention. And then so the way that it started, it wasn't actually fs.blog, which it is now. It was 68131-1-1440. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And the reason is, so 68131 is the zip code for Berkshire Hathaway, which is Farnham Street. So Berkshire Hathaway is on Farnham Street headquarters. 1440 was the unit number. And my theory, my thinking behind this, I worked for an intelligence agency at the time. I was not allowed to have a website. I was not allowed to have a public profile. I wasn't even allowed to do what I was doing. I'm sure they're listening to this now. you know, they knew about it, but so it was me reflect, and I didn't want to put a password on it because it was just super annoying to like have to log in and like do all these extra things if I wanted to just read a quick post on my phone or while I was traveling or doing

something. And so if I was writing that's different, I could write and then just upload. And so it was really just meant for me to share. And it was only over time like share with myself. And it was back to the grout that we, you talked about earlier, it was my way of developing the grout between these ideas and connecting them together. And they're not my ideas. They're the best of what I've learned from other people. And so it was my grout to connect those. And my way of connecting these ideas was to reflect on them and put them in my own words

and connect them in some ways that were great, in some ways that were really terrible. And the website somehow caught on. And then it became Farnham Street. Right? So talk about sort of like accidental success in a way. But where did it break out? It was I think around 2010, it started to get read a lot. And then I shortened the URL, but not it was like Farnham Street blog.com.

And then it was really 2015-ish, 2016-ish, where it sort of, became what we think of it as today. And then in 2019, I'm guessing, if I remember correctly, the New York Times sort of profile on me. And that profile really just leapfrogged everything. So we went from having an audience on Wall Street to an audience of people who care about going from 90 to 90.1. Yeah.

And that includes professional sports. It includes CEOs. It includes people who manage money for a living. And what are all those people have in common? Well, a small degree of skill improvement can lead to a massive distortion in outcomes. But like in that, when I say breaking out, like, was it being passed around through email saying like, hey, you got to read this? And then was the need because you were one of the first people to sort of more ubiquitously

talk about the idea of mental models because I'll be I'll be frank I was very jealous of you because I was like oh my goodness like this is what I this is what I basically give people is a better mental model framework to view themselves with or view their performance with so I've been doing this so like I I loved your stuff and exactly 2015 was when I learned about Farnham street so I was kind of sorry I was a part of that Laguer group I guess that maybe found you but I'm always fascinating. I've always fascinated with that first breakthrough area, because it's not really investigated very often.

And so I'm sure it probably would have been email back then. Yeah, it was anonymous, too. Like, it wasn't meant for people to discover me. I was still working at the intelligence agency, and they, you know, they don't like public profiles and stuff like that. But also at that point,

there was no risk for me, right? Like, it was anonymous. I could look like an idiot. I often think the fear of looking like an idiot keeps us from doing things. that we know are probably going to lead to growth or success or not to use the word success but performance, you know, they're going to make us better and we don't want to do them because we fear looking like an idiot. And the older we get, the more attachment we have to our identity and the more attachment we have to our identity, the less likely we are to take

risks. But it's the taking of risks that also got us to where we are today. So you have this twofold thing. And I was actually talking with another entrepreneur about this a few weeks ago where they're scared to take a risk. And they're scared to take a risk because they've been taking risk their whole life. It's worked out. And now they have something to lose. And so they don't want to look like an idiot. And sometimes that loss is monetary. But often that loss is our identity, right? Our ego, our part of ourself. So the way that I relate to this, and you can correct me if this totally doesn't make sense to you is like we're animals like we're just at our core we are animals and so animals have a tendency to be territorial but with humans like I'm not

walking around my neighborhood pissing on fire hydrants to mark my territory my territory is my identity it's my ego it's my sense of self so if you tread on that territory now I feel threatened Yeah. And so then we unconsciously do things that prevent us that get in our way, right? So we get in our own way in a way of that because we don't want to, you know, if somebody slights us in a meeting, what do we do? We react and we react without thinking. Yeah. And why do we do that? Because we're animals and animals have territory. And if an animal comes on their territory, they react. They don't think that they don't have the conscious processing power of that. We do. You had said like the types of people who come to you, like I talk. about there's those people who are going to come to work with me or like buy our stuff whatever I find are people that are mature enough to know that they're the ones getting in their own way I like to use identity with people to help them perform but I also want to be very cautious with people that they don't fall into a fixed idea of who they are with their identity because that gets to the point of losing things going back to the person who's an

entrepreneur, listen, there have been phenomenal entrepreneurs that have had things taken away from them. They've lost their businesses. And if you've lost your business, you've lost your identity. No, you're not an entrepreneur. You're entrepreneurial. So if I lost everything, lost my businesses for whatever reason, I didn't lose my entrepreneurial nature. And I can come back to maybe before I go and if I'm an entrepreneur, well, then that means I'll go back out and start another business right away. And then you get trapped inside of something that you didn't actually want, but you went and did it because your identity says that I'm supposed to have that. So instead, I could ping you and say, hey, Shane.

Everything just collapsed around me. I don't know what I'm going to do next. But if you've got anything going on in your world, I'd love to come and lend my hand to those things in that. And you might go, oh, shit, shooting star. I'll grab some of that, you know, while I can. I would be fine with doing that. I'm fine with going and plugging myself into the world of someone else

because I'm still applying my entrepreneurial traits and abilities over there. I want to try to create rules in my life so that those ideas of losing things don't exist with the same weight on me as they would someone else. And so one of the things I discovered in super over-indexing early on on identity is like, oh, crap, I'm trapping people in some ways because these identities are like causing them in some ways to stay too long in their sport. because I'm a hockey player. That's my entire.

I'm a golfer. And that they do have other interests. And then they sort of retire to late or something like that. So I want to build up new. That's a huge loss, right? So again, going back to what you were just saying, if you're a hockey player and you retire, if you're a CEO and you retire and you have your whole identity wrapped up and being a CEO or being a hockey player, you literally have nothing.

And that creates like a crisis, I would imagine, inside people. Big time. How do you resolve that? Well, one of the trapping questions that we ask people, and this comes from spiritual traditions and it comes from self-help books, we're asked to answer the question of, you know, who are you, Shane? I'm more concerned about what are you. And when we say, what am I?

Oh, well, I might say you could respond in the context of I, well, I'm a, you know, dad to three little kids or, you know, I'm an owner of business. or I go, when I'm thinking about it as, you know, what skills do you have? What, like what, like, what are you made of? What characteristics do you bring out? So to specifically answer the question of if I have a CEO who is moving out of that and they are retiring or they did lose something or they got fired or whatever and they do have a crisis of identity, say like, you know, those are labels that can be easily gotten in the future

again. But what are the skills? or what are the attributes or what are the traits or what are the qualities that you have that have not been lost. I want to bring things back into the process of the person because that feels like they can own something now. And then you can also take these traits and attributes and qualities into other domains. Is that what you mean by court drivers?

Not necessarily. The parts of us that drive our behavior that we don't realize are driving a lot of our behavior. Their core that are sometimes unseen. So are being a Canadian, one of the things I, as someone who's lived and traveled around the world, you know, and Canadians have this moniker of being like awshucks and, you know, like modest, I'd say. It's the thing that I, you know, I'm not going to say I dislike the most, but I'm like, no, like own it. Like I want to see more people who are Canadian say like, no, I want to hear someone say, no, I'm, I am the best at this. But American friends, they will easily index it because that's a very American, right?

You know, greatest place in the world, but greatest country. So those things are a part of our language that ends up seeping into how we see. That's a core driver is country where you're from, even city, region, being a farm kid. I'm from the farm. So that's a core driver. It can drive a lot of our behaviors and attitudes and, you know, paradigms, philosophies about the world. Your religion is a core driver. It can shape so much of how you show up in the world, the choices that you make, your gender or your race.

Those are core drivers. And sometimes people don't look at those things and really analyze them and say, what do I tell myself what it means to be a black person? Because a lot of my clients over the years, whether it's NBA or NFL or other sports, are black. and so what is it about like is that sometimes getting in the way of your or is it an empowerment because not everything is negative because then i'll say like is it actually true is that true that all jewish people can and can't do this or all people from farms in you know can and can't do this one of the keys to performance is sort of focusing what's a good way to i wouldn't say hacker focus but get us into focus

I'd say one of the things that is very different from an elite level client versus someone who could be even great, whether it's in their sport or they can be great at what they do as well, there's a very different level of meaning and intention that this person over here has behind what this activity means to them. we throw around the word focus um say you just got to focus more and what i would say to people is i think you need to add more meaning to the activity and what it's doing for you and where it's taking you because when you really somatically so your physical body understands that me doing this practice this activity is taking you to where i want to go

That alignment between the vision of whether what you want to become, what you're trying to create, A, it actually removes a whole bunch of the friction from staying focused on that thing because you know, you know desperately why you're doing this. So I would say if people are struggling with focus issues or even discipline issues, I would say that they're very detached from the meaning that they could be adding to this thing, which then gets me to, a lot of people talk about habits and routines and the delta difference between the people who get orders of magnitude difference in their world versus people who do do the rote active habit is we talk about rituals.

And ritualization is very much lost in our culture today. We don't put young boys and we don't put young girls through the ritual of graduating from childhood into womanhood or you know like like we used to do in tribal days well religion also used to be full of ritual right and the decline of religion has we've anesthetized a lot of these things so what kind of ritual like what kind of rituals do the very best have that other people don't have and how do they use them to become better the preparation of transitioning into their role or their field of play, okay? We're going to get into like now talks about imagery, visualization.

This is where this stuff really plays a part. Language does. We haven't talked about this yet, Shane, but one of the things that makes the alter ego concept so powerful is it reunites people back into their creative imagination, which I think is the great superpower of human beings. Our creative imagination is what, sets us apart and the creative imagination is also the one thing i have found that helps people

move by the resistance that lives within whether it's your ego whether it's the fear of something creative imagination night is the is the ultimate sword that slays resistance because it's just really just um fundamentally it's accessing a different part of your brain anyway it's sort of bypassing so much of your critical thinking factor because your creative imagination is active. So the rituals of transitioning out and onto the field of play, you'd mentioned Kobe before, you know, so when we were building the Black Mamba, now we needed to find a way to trigger that sense of that character, that that self going out onto that court. And, you know, part of the process for me is building that mental movie theater for people. And for him,

his words, I wanted to commune with the Black Mamba. So in many other people's worlds, maybe they would build a cage. This is very much for athletes. We'd build a cage and that thing lives inside the cage. And then they would open the cage and then the thing gets unleashed. Kobe was different in that he wanted to commune with it. So he got into the cage with it.

And that's all the mental thing that's happening in the locker room before going out onto the court. And there's that there's that trigger that's happening. And the great thing about triggers, in the book I talk about enclosed cognition. And what enclosed cognition is, is because I have a story about what it means to have a white doctor's coat on, you're detailed, you're methodical, you're careful, you're smart. If I actually put on a doctor's coat, I will enclose my cognitive traits in the abilities of smart, detailed, methodical, and careful. Now, if I'm about to go do something that demands being careful and methodical and detailed,

I've just elevated my performance, my ability to go and execute that because of wearing the thing. So for me, it was wearing a pair of non-prescription glasses when I was 22 years old because I felt like I had a baby face. I looked like I was 12. It was getting in the way of me, even believing that I was credible. And so I went and bought a pair of non-prescription glasses for my alter ego, Super Richard, so I could step into a new identity that wasn't so worried about rejection. and Super Richard was specifically hired to do sales calls because I wasn't doing them. I was good at coaching, but I just wasn't good at promoting myself. So those rituals are rituals is when routine or habit meets storytelling because that's meaning.

It's not Kobe that's getting trash talk. It's the Mamba that's getting trash talk now when he goes into the arenas and everyone's got the slurred chance because he's someone who's just an abuser or whatever the case was. We had to create that for his own mental well-being. I love the idea of having that. Do most people tell other people about it? Kobe has sort of made this famous, but I would imagine that most people just sort of like keep it to themselves.

They do. Even Kobe. We created it in 2004. He didn't tell the world about it until 2009 when he won the World Championship, or when the NBA championship. Even Beyonce was Sasha Fierce. Sasha Fierce wasn't revealed to the world really until 2008 when she was retiring her. No one is going to go to the press conference after the game and say, oh, my alter ego,

so-and-so crushed it today. These are all creative mechanisms that we do to help us pursue the things that are difficult or challenging. It's not just one concept and one idea of we're only doing it to help us get past some sort of traumas or it's also an extremely playful thing. There's many different reasons why someone might be employing the alter ego. But at the end of the day, it comes back to the quote that I share all the time from Carrie Grant, the Hollywood Golden Era actor who was, grew up in Bristol, England, was challenged throughout his life with, say, some mental health and some depression and stuff. But he wanted to make it to Hollywood and he had this vision in his mind of being debonair and charismatic. And so he built Carrie Grant.

that's not his original name and at the end of his career he was getting interviewed and he said I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I finally became that person or he became me but at some point we met and that's when you feel very very fulfilled because you realize all of a sudden one day the actions that are now habitual to you you become unconsciously competent at them, you've become unconsciously competent at the identity that you actually want it to have. And the way that you know that is because your performance is living up to your capabilities. And you do the things that that person would do. And then you've become the person or the persona you've adopted. I think that's beautiful. My kids used to joke with me all the time.

They're like, oh, you're in dad mode. And it actually made me like a better parent, right? I was like, oh, yeah, I kind of am, right? And then I thought, what does it mean to be in dad mode? What techniques do you use to help people visualize? the name itself is misleading, visualization. Reality is there's about 20% of society that can't form visual pictures in their mind. But they're very auditory so they can hear things. Everyone, there isn't many people I've ever found that can't hear things. So the first thing is, technique-wise, is you want to engage all of your senses.

What are you going to hear? What are you going to taste or touch or feel like on your skin or make it real? Yeah. Make it holographic. Bring yourself into it. I call it scripting. It's one of the things I became known for very early in the early 2000s is writing is the doing part of thinking. So I found that when I get people to write out their visualization in the process, not the outcome, in the process. So when I walk towards the gate and my glove and hand grabs onto the boards and I, And my skate blade feels the ice beneath me. I can feel myself gaining more confidence. And now the sound of my blades as they cut through the ice as we do our warm up, with every single stride, I feel more and more of the power of the rink sort of soak up inside of me. So that's what I'm talking about.

So write it out. So people who struggle with visualization just know that A, It is a skill like anything else. People make it sound like, oh, everyone can visualize. Well, yeah, we all use forethought every single day. When we think about, oh, you know what, I need to get eggs and milk. And so, yes, we do it. But most people do not use visualization or imagery skills in a dynamic way for what you want to achieve and feel in life.

Yes. The final thing is I would highly encourage people to do what I. call fly on the wall visualization. And that is imagine yourself as a fly on the wall with the people that you might respect or would love to hear talking about you in the context of whatever your role is. And what are you hearing them say? What's the conversation? That seems to anchor inside of people's hearts even more is the words of other people. And what I found, after sharing this concept for two decades, when saying like, what, why do, what does that one feel different for you as a strategy for your visualization? And I said, because my imagination for what I see other

people or thinking about what other people are saying about me doesn't sound like that. I think people are talking about how terrible I am or how I'm not good enough or I don't know how that person thinks. So inviting in a very different conversation into my mind, that's been the most meaningful thing for me. So two questions left. One, how do we fend off complacency? It seems like a lot of times we achieve success, all the things we thought of for success. I'm using that word begin broadly and very loosely. Everybody can interpret that however they want to. We achieve the things we want to achieve. We reached sort of like where we had dreamed to go. We're like 30 and not 60. And then what? How do we fend that? Or you make the NBA. You make the NHL. And then,

oh, I've made it. I've accomplished this dream. I've had for 10, you know, 10 years. And I've worked really hard to get here. And now I want to enjoy it. I want to go. I want to. I want to part. I want to take care of my family. I want to increase the surface area. I want all these. Those are the people who don't make it, though. Because when I say to people in the context of there's goal setting two and goal setting through.

Oh, tell me about this. Well, do we want to simply land the people on the moon? I would like to return them safely to Earth. Like, you know, when JFK said, you know, by the end of this decade, we will have landed a man on the moon and returned to him safely to Earth. that's my best it's going to be the most important part of that mission was the returning the person safely to earth right that's to and through to the moon through the moon was was bringing the person back so your goal wasn't to make it to the NBA okay so you got drafted made it there on day

one and they cut you on day one is that what you actually wanted no what you wanted was to make it to the NBA and have a 10 12 15 year long career where you were a leader on the team and you were a top producer as well. And then some people might go, and I want to be the legend. I want to be the greatest of all time, right? Maybe that's it. So the complacency thing, I would say, doesn't typically set in when people reach that kind of experience. But if you are noticing or feeling like you're being complacent, put yourself into the identity

of an amateur somewhere. Start something new. And it could be in your personal life. Start building a new skill. Start a new hobby where it's challenging you in some new way. The other thing, too, is I highly encourage people to schedule average. What does that mean? What I mean is there are times when you might be pushing in one area of your life and it's like, you know what, in these other areas, the amount of energy, effort, emotion it would take for me to be world class in like four different domains of my life. You'll burn yourself out. NBA, Major League Baseball, and NHL players will play multiple times in a week. NHL, NBA, typically the most would be three games. Major League Baseball could be upwards of six. For the NBA guy who has three games this week, when I'm first working with him, I'd say, Hey, Shane, can you pick which one of these games you're going to be average at? And they're like, wait, what?

I'm like, no, I need you to pick a game this week that you're not going to push yourself as hard as you would in the other games. Just be average, like just you're kind of trying to index towards what your normal kind of average, median score would be, okay? 77% of the time, that was their best performance of the week. Why? Because they relaxed into it. They weren't forcing anything. There was more of an allowing mindset that was there.

Is it really you being complacent right now? Or maybe is it a reflex of your human system to just want to like go into a state of like maintenance or optimization or readiness mode where the, next big thing will show up for you. I'm conscious of the time here. I want to end with the same question we ask everybody, which is, what is success for you? So, again, in the debate, I'm not going to accept the frame of success, unfortunately. No, I'll tell you what it is.

My mission in life is to create as many smiling pillows as I possibly can. The reason I say that is the most honest place in your home is your pillow. because it's where you take stock of your day, it's where you take stock of like how you dealt with your kids or you beat yourself up because you snapped on them when they didn't really need to snap on them. And so I'll have led a successful life if I can leave as many smiling pillows behind as I possibly can.

And that's through sharing good ideas with people, encouraging people, maybe holding people to a higher standard for themselves so that when they lay their head on their pillow at night, They feel really good about the way that they showed up, maybe what they accomplished in that day, how they might have stood up for others or whatever their values are. That's what success is to me is now personally, if I can end my day feeling good and smiling on my pillow at night and I have my own little metrics that I would concern myself with regarding wife and kids and, you know, business and self, then that's success to me. that's beautiful thank you very much todd for taking the time today absolutely thanks for happening i just want to add a few reflections on this episode i've started to do this recently and got a lot

of emails saying people liked it i've been assuming different identities for a long time i just never really had a name around them i think todd helped me with the alter ego effect and being able to assume a different personality and i do this in moments where i need courage and I do it in moments where I have to do something that maybe I don't want to do or I have to appear more confident than I otherwise am. And I assume this mask. And the mask, it protects me from criticism and gives me a nudge, almost like a tailwind, a false confidence, if you will, in a way,

to go out there and just perform at my best. And it's incredible how powerful the way that you think about that is. Todd has opened my eyes to some more possibility around this. I really appreciated the conversation with him. I hope you check out his book, The Alter Ego Effect. It might just change your life. Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more,

go to fs.comf s.blog slash podcast, or just Google, the knowledge project. The Farnham 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.blog slash clear.

Until next time. Thank you.