The One You Feed - Why Your Default Behaviors Are Sabotaging You (And How to Outsmart Them) | Shane Parrish

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

In this episode, Shane Parrish, author of Clear Thinking explains why your default behaviors are sabotaging you, and how to outsmart them. He explores how small, everyday decisions shape our lives more than major choices. Key insights include positioning yourself for success through preparation, creating personal rules to build positive habits, and using role models as a “personal board of directors.” Shane emphasizes that clear, conscious thinking in ordinary moments accumulates into extraordinary results, helping listeners make better decisions and live more intentionally. Feeling overwhelmed in your life?Check out ⁠Overwhelm is Optional ⁠— a 4-week email course that helps you feel calmer and more grounded without needing to do less. In under 10 minutes a day, you’ll learn simple mindset shifts (called “Still Points”) you can use right inside the life you already have. ⁠Sign up here for only $29!⁠ Exciting News!!! ⁠⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is out NOW! Order today!⁠⁠⁠ Key Takeaways: The impact of storytelling on behavior and outcomes. The importance of pausing before reacting to situations. Managing emotions and ego in decision-making. The significance of small, everyday choices in shaping life outcomes. The concept of positioning oneself for better decision-making. The role of rituals and rules in creating positive habits. The influence of role models and exemplars on personal behavior. The necessity of emotional regulation and awareness. The dangers of impatience and the pursuit of quick fixes. The value of vulnerability and reflection in strengthening relationships. For full show notes:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoyed this conversation with Shane Parrish, check out these other episodes: How to Integrate Behavior Change with Your Values with Spencer Greenberg How to Get Unstuck with Adam Alter By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Aura Frames⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: Named #1 by Wirecutter, you can save on the gifts moms love by visiting AuraFrames.com. For a limited time, listeners can get 25 dollars off their best-selling Carver Mat frame with code FEED. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Rocket Money⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠rocketmoney.com/feed⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taskrabbit:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ When life happens, your to-do list grows. Get ahead of it now and get fifteen dollars off your first task at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taskrabbit.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or on the Taskrabbit app using promo code FEED. Taskers book up fast, especially for same-day tasks, so book trusted home help today. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Hello Fresh⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ – Get 10 free meals + a FREE Zwilling Knife (a $144.99 value) on your third box. Offer valid while supplies last. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Alma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ has a directory of 20,000 therapists with different specialities, life experiences, and identities, and 99% of them take insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠helloalma.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

your territory is sort of mental. It's your perception of yourself. And then your ego kicks in and your emotion kicks in. And then you respond. And when you respond in that moment, you're responding without reasoning. And the minute you respond without reasoning, you're no better than an animal. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. Welcome to the one you feed.

Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. and yet for many of us our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.

It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Shane Parrish says he asks his kids a simple question when they start fighting. Are you pouring gasoline on the situation or water? I love that question because it's a version of my idea of not making things worse. And when we do make things worse, they can escalate really fast. In this conversation, Shane and I talk about clear thinking, emotional reactions,

and the ordinary moments that shape the direction of our lives. We talk about how ego gets involved, why we double down when we know we shouldn't, and how a small pause can sometimes keep a tiny moment from turning into a very big problem. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Shane. Welcome to the show. Hey, Eric. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you on. I've been following your blog Farnham Street for a long time, and I was really excited when I heard you had a new book coming out,

and I wanted to talk with you about it. It's called Clear Thinking, Turning Ordinary Moments, into extraordinary results. But before we go into that, let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us

that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops,

and they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent, and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I love that parable. I'd never actually heard it before until I'd listened to a couple episodes of this. I think there's a tension between these two competing factors in us and we choose which one we feed. But really what we're doing is we're telling

ourselves the story. That story, I believe that the most powerful story in the world is the one that we tell ourselves. And that story is also a choice. If we tell ourselves that we are a good person and we do good things and we're open to love and we're vulnerable and we have very little fear about, I think that we're choosing to live a very different life than if we give up and we get up and we tell ourselves another story. And those stories just have the power to come true, right? Not the positive ones, but definitely the negative ones. Like telling yourself a good story doesn't mean you're going to get a good result or good outcome, but telling yourself a negative story almost virtually ensures that you're going to get a bad outcome.

Yeah. And so often when I meet people, I find that they're just stuck in the story. It's like you've got this song on loop in your head. And that story is powerful in terms of determining your behavior. So one of the things that you are really good at is taking a rational position on things and really working with the best knowledge, having the most clear picture frame of reference. And I'm curious how that works for you with telling yourself a positive story when you feel like perhaps your fears are drawing on a lot of data that seems to make sense. Well, like we have a book launch coming out, right? October 3rd.

And as we were talking about it, to me, this is fear. This is, you know, there's a part of me that is, I feel like I'm getting naked in front of a million people and I'm taking off all my clothes. and I'm exposed to the judgments and the criticisms and that tomatoes and all of these negative things. And then there's another story I can tell myself, which is, you know, I've done research for 15 to 20 years on decision making. And I think I come at it in a unique perspective. And if I can come at it in a unique perspective in a way that I haven't seen other people come at it, maybe that's helpful for somebody else like me. and maybe the act of writing that book, which for me was an act of reflection and amalgamation

of all of these thoughts over years, can I share that with other people? Am I willing to let the work be enough? Am I willing to just put the work out there? I know I've done the work. I know I've worked hard on this. I know all of the things that I control I've done. And am I willing to be vulnerable and put it out in the world? And I think that that's the life that I want my kids to live. In a way, they give me strength to do that, right? Because I know they're watching. And that gives me a little bit more strength to tell myself a better story. And that story can become empowering.

And I think in this case, it sort of allows me the courage to put that out in the world. Yeah, you know, the thing I often tell myself when it's getting into these stories is that we don't know the future, right? And since we don't know the future, why not use an empowering story? which is easier to say than do some of the time when when emotion runs really strong but it certainly you know makes more sense if i'm making it up anyway right now because i don't know make it up in a way that is supportive of things turning out okay yeah i agree with that you mentioned your kids a second ago and one of the things that you wrote in the book it was later in the book but i loved it and you said there's two effective questions i ask my kids to slow down and have them think

one, do you want to put water or gasoline on this situation? And two, is this behavior going to get you what you want? And I mean, those are great questions for us, not just for children, but in general. And they seem to sum up a lot of what your book is about in a way. Yeah, I try to get them to just pause and think. I mean, we're all animals. So biologically, you know, we share these tendencies with other animals. We're a higher arctic. We're territorial. We're self-preserving. You know, we're ritualistic. And, So often what happens is we have these ordinary moments that lead to disastrous sort of outcomes. And I see it with my kids, right? They start bickering. And then it becomes this slow escalation. They're about 14 months apart. And one person will slight the other. And then before you know it, they're nearly wrestling on the floor.

And I was like so frustrated with this. And I was like, they don't know that they're escalating. If they knew they were escalating, my theory was they would choose not to. and all the energy that they're spending escalating with each other comes at the expense of things they want to do, whether it's video games or homework or play with their friends or anything else. So all this energy is just being wasted. It's this wasted energy and it's kind of unproductive. And so I learned to start asking them, like, is this behavior going to get you closer or

further away from what you want? And that was a really effective question. And then we sort of shortened it to like gas or water. Are you putting gasoline on that? the situation, which means I'm escalating it. And I'm not judging what they're doing. I'm just making them pause and reflect. Right. So it's not about me interjecting and saying, don't do that because I find, you know, as they get older, that method of parenting, you switch to coaching. Yes. So my kids are now 13 and 14. So if I start with that telling them what to do, that's not very effective. But if I pause and say,

hey, gas or water, then they can think for themselves and they can choose whether to move forward with what they're doing, but now they're more aware of the consequences. It's like somebody, I tap them on the shoulder and be like, you're making a decision right now. Is this what you want to be doing? Yeah. And then they're like, no, this isn't what I want to be doing. And they come to that in conclusion on their own, which I think is very powerful for them. You mentioned earlier that you believe you bring something interesting and new to decision making. And it's one of the things I've always thought that there was a lot of content in your world about was decision making. But you make a really important point in this book, which is we're taught to focus on the big decisions rather than the

moments where we don't even realize we're making a choice. Say more about that. Yeah. So if you know you're making a decision, we generally get it correct. So most books on decision making, most classes on decision making are all about being more rational, you know, and they're not very practical. There's spreadsheets. There's sort of like decision tree. I've never really witnessed anybody fill all this out or do that. But what they're really doing is they're taking you out of the moment and they're getting you to pause and think. But if you know you should be pausing and thinking, we're generally pretty good. We're directionally correct. But a lot of the time, the things that get us into trouble, we don't know that we're making a decision. We don't know the future of that decision.

There are these small tidbits, whether it's celebrities going to court battle with each other over statues in their yard. You can imagine being at home with your partner or your spouse and, you know, what starts as emptying the dishwasher ends up into not speaking with each other. And that's that slow escalation again in these ordinary moments. And what happens in these ordinary moments is we don't know we're making a decision. If somebody taps us on the shoulder and says, hey, gas or water, you're going to pause and be like, no, I don't want this to happen. I don't want to derail my weekend because of a dishwasher incident. And all the energy that you're spending on those moments comes at the expense of enjoying

your weekend with your partner or being on vacation or all of these things. And so my belief is that these ordinary moments actually accumulate into these advantages or disadvantages. And the advantages are, do people want to work with me? And I hard to get along with. Do I do the little things right? And if I can do those little things right and I get these little moments right, I can put more of my energy into what matters. And I can spend less time sort of fixing these mistakes.

Because if you think about why we're so busy these days, we're stressed, full of anxiety, and often what we're doing is we're fixing these little ordinary moments, these little lapses that we have in these moments, right? If you're out at work, and a colleague slights you and says something, you know, slightly derogatory. Well, you're biological. You're instinctively become territorial. Your territory is not physical, like maybe it is, the wolf, but your territory is sort of mental. It's your perception of yourself and then your ego kicks in and your emotion kicks in. And then you respond. And when you respond in that moment, you're responding without reasoning. And the minute you respond without reasoning, you're no better than an

animal. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. But after that meeting, now you got to go make amends. You got to work with this person. But not only do I have to spend time repairing that relationship, I have to repair the relationship with everybody else in the room because I just demonstrated that I might be difficult to work with, that people have to be careful what they say to me. They're not going to tell me the truth. And all of these byproducts and those tend to consume so much of our time. It's interesting, this idea of these little moments. I've shared this on the show before. Part of my backstory is I was a homeless heroin addict at 24.

And there's a moment where I made a decision to go into long-term treatment. I was presented with the option to go. I originally said no. I had a moment of clarity and I said yes and my life changed, right? And I'm always like, if you made the Hollywood version of my life, that would be the key scene, right? But that scene is only relevant because of the thousands and thousands of other decisions I've made since then to continue moving in that direction. And so it's nice to look at these big moments and there are moments where something significant happens. But as you point out, so much of our life is this slow accumulation of positive or negative.

Can we talk about that for a second? Sure. If you're open to it, because I bet you the first time you did heroin, you didn't wake up in the morning and go, I'm going to do heroin. You were in an ordinary moment and you made a choice and that choice had a huge ramification on you later in life. Yeah. I mean, addiction was an accumulation for sure, you know, like anybody else starts out.

Like, I want to hang out with my friends and get high and increment upon increment upon increment that built until it was, you know, quite an edifice. Once those moments accumulate, they're really hard to undo, right, as you went through. Really hard to undo. And there's the other thing that speaks to addiction. And also what you were talking about is that these things amplify each other. So the downward addiction spiral is at a certain juncture, you start to feel bad about yourself for what you're doing. So you feel bad about yourself for what you're doing. So you feel terrible. And the only way you know how to deal both feeling terrible, is to get high, which then makes you feel worse about yourself for doing it,

and it's a downward spiral. And I think that in the decisions that you're talking about, too, I do believe that you're right that if people can pause and think, they've got a better chance, but how often do we see people double down and double down? You know, they get out of that work meeting and instead of being like, oh, I made the mistake here. It's like, Bob was out of line, right? And they double down on Bob being out of line. And the more they do that, the more they have to do it, right? amplifies it. And I think that's often, you know, the dishwasher thing is when a dishwasher leaves to fighting all night is often because there is an amplification of things that have been building. Yeah, we'd rather feel right than be right. I use these little catchphrases with myself,

just as a reminder to encapsulate these ideas, it's almost the compression of a big idea. And in this case, one of the things that I use with myself is outcome over ego. That's a great one. Am I working towards the best outcome? or am I working towards proving myself being right? And when I think about proving myself being right, I'm on the wrong side of right. And I used to do this all the time. I started at an intelligence agency and I was a programmer. And if I was, I was a knowledge worker. And if I wasn't right, then what was, I was worthless. Right? Because I'm hired to be right. I'm hired to do this job. I'm hired to know the answer. I'm hired to do all of these things. And I have all this self-worth and all this

ego built up in that. And if I'm not right, what am I? And then I noticed, you know, when I started working for myself, I was spending so much time trying to prove myself right. I'm looking for esoteric facts that back up my ideas. I'm trying to prove other people wrong. And all of a sudden, when I'm working for myself, I'm like, I just really want the best outcome. I don't care whose idea it is. Yeah. Because all of a sudden, I'm invested and my investment is in the outcome. And it's not in me as a person. It's not in my ego. And I think that that little phrase, that little compression of an idea is very powerful to remind ourselves with. Yeah, I love that phrase in your book, the wrong side of right. That is a great phrase. And I heard it. I was like, that is exactly it.

Like in recovery, we used a phrase all the time. It's a corollary. It's not quite the same thing. But it was, would you rather be right? Would you rather be happy? Yes. You know, you had to look a lot of the time and be like, well, okay, which is it I want to be? Do I want to be right? Or do I want to be happy? And oftentimes, the desire to insist that I'm right is going to make me unhappy. Because it's going to make someone else be wrong in my life. And who wants that? And that's where egos dig in and the battle deepens. When we have these moments, when we dig in, when we entrench, we're not thinking, right?

We're just responding. And our emotions are in charge. Our ego is in charge. Our biology is in charge. And I think that's normal and natural, right? We are animals at the end of the day. We have these animal tendencies, these animal instincts. What separates humans is our ability to push the clutch to interrupt stimulus and response

for just a second. And in that moment, reason instead of react. How do you think about emotion and reasoning? And this question is going to take a little bit longer to ask than I might like, but I'll get there. Because one of the things that we know from looking at various studies of different people is if you take somebody and you more or less they lose the emotion in their brain, they become incapable of making decisions, right? So emotion is playing a role in decision making, right? And it does tell us something to do about what's important to us, what matters to us.

So how do you avoid getting into sort of a binary where it's like, it can't be emotional, I have to be rational, right? How do you think about that? Because I agree with you that the ability to pause and look at the emotions and see what they are and then choose a response is incredibly important. Some people do that at the expense of having any emotion, right? They try and squelch their emotion, which has all sorts of other challenges. So how do you think about that? I think it goes back to almost the opening of this episode, right, where are your emotions in charge or are you in charge of your emotions? I'm not advocating an approach where you're not emotional and you're robotic. You know, I'm just advocating an approach where am I making decisions, are my emotions making my decisions,

or am I making my decisions? Yeah. And if the answer is my emotions, then that's fine, but that's probably not going to get me the outcome that I want. And if I'm making decisions fully aware of those emotions, I can feel those emotions. I can have those emotions. But often, if you feel emotional and you can opt out for a second, in opting out of that second, you can make that decision later. You don't have to make it when you're emotional. You can

walk away. If you look at athletes, athletes have to perform. They have a time frame involved in their performance and they get emotional just like the rest of us. So what do they do? They have rituals built into their game. If you watch any NBA player, they bounce the ball the same number of times before they shoot a free throw. If you watch a tennis player, they bounce the ball the same number of times before they serve. And what they're doing in that moment, and I've talked to a lot of head coaches about this. What's happening is whether the last play was the best play of their life, the worst play, whether the ref was totally unfair to them or fair to them doesn't matter. What matters is this, I'm going to center myself and I'm going to focus. And that's what we need

to do. If we're forced to make decisions when we're emotional, we need to take a breath, we need to pause. We need to center ourselves. We need to use a powerful method of doing that, which is ritual. So give me some examples of. of other types of rituals that might help us manage emotion. I mean, the term that I like is emotional regulation, right? It's the ability to regulate my emotions. And to your point, not let them be in charge. Let them do what they need to do and learn what I can learn from them and feel what I feel.

But there is a time and a place and a degree to all of this. So what are some things for you when you're feeling really emotional that ritual-wise It allow you to take the temperature down a little bit. Well, so one thing I do is like after meetings, I have a ritual where I just sort of compress the meeting into what's happened, how am I feeling? And it's that compression that dampens that emotion because it allows me to feel that emotion. And I usually do that when I'm walking to my next meeting or when I'm logging on to the next meeting. So it doesn't have to be this big 10 minute thing.

It just can be this, okay, I'm feeling this. I should have said this. I should have done that. And I can just sort of compress that meeting into these sort of ideas. Another one that I use that is really effective for me personally is just in the mornings taking five, ten minutes, whether I'm sitting in a hot tub or whether I'm going for a walk or whatever I'm doing and I'm just breathing and I'm focusing on my breath and I'm centering myself on the day. I'm trying to forget about everything from yesterday. I'm trying to just put myself

in the here and now. But I think rituals are very individualistic and I think it's important that we come up with our own rituals. I've seen powerful rituals around people taking a breath before speaking. And in that pause, that moment, they just sort of ask themselves, how am I feeling? You need a lot of discipline to start the rituals. But once the rituals sort of take hold, rituals become this powerful force where you turn your desired behavior into your default behavior. And I've used this with kids and homework, my kids, right? So every day after school, starting in grade seven, they would come home, they would shower, they would sit down and they would do their homework and every day it was a fight for about two months and then all of a sudden,

I didn't have to say anything and they still do it now. Two years later, they come home, they shower, they sit down, they do their homework and they start working on the stuff they need to do because that becomes their ritual around getting home. But it's also very grounding for them because I've noticed on days where we don't do that where we have an errand to run or an appointment, they're sort of like out of sorts, right? It's like my ritual has been interrupted and they become a little bit more emotional, which is really interesting because that's their method of decompressing the school day now. I've often said that depression hates a moving target, but there's a cruel irony in there

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within a week. If you've been thinking about starting therapy or getting back to it, I'd recommend checking out Alma. Get started at Hello, Alma. dot com slash feed that's h e l-l-o-a-l-a-l-a-com slash feed recently i had a sudden and unexpected need to move studios it was really stressful because it landed in the middle of a family health issue and book events and i just didn't have much time to do it so having task rabbit available really reduced my stress level i can book a tasker through the app and just get help ASAP tasker connects you with skilled taskers in your area for moving, furniture assembly, home repairs, yard work, mounting, and more. You can search based on costs, skill set, availability, and reviews so you know who's showing up,

and because taskers have assembled over 3.4 million pieces of furniture, completed 700,000 home repairs, and handled 1.5 million moves, you know you can count on them. I use TaskRabbit and you should too. When life happens, your to-do list grows. ahead of it now and get $15 off your first task at taskrabbit.com or on the task rabbit app using promo code feed. Taskers book up fast especially for same-day tasks. So book trusted home help today. That's $15 off your first task using promo code feed with the task rabbit app or at taskrabbit.com. You say each moment puts you in a better or worse position to handle the future. It's that position that eventually makes life easier or harder.

Talk to me about what you mean by positioning. Yeah, putting yourself in the right position is so important. And it's a key element to sort of clear thinking, right? So one of the most beneficial skills in life is learning to put yourself in a good position. And think about it this way. When you're in a good position, all of your options available are great. And when you're in a bad position, you need like a Hail Mary. Right?

you're like praying for something to work out. You have no good options. And if you put Warren Buffett in a consistently bad position, he's going to look very average. But what he does, and this is sort of where this idea came from, is he's constantly in a good position. And so a good position means you're never forced by circumstances to do something you don't want to do. So if we take this and we apply it to decision making, well, how does that impact you?

Well, all the stuff that we learn about decision making is how to be rational, how to make the best choice in the moment. But if your choices are all bad, it doesn't matter that you pick the best of the bad choices, right? You don't want to be in a situation. How do I avoid this situation? I don't put myself in a position where I'm consistently making good decisions. And often, the people who are right a lot are just people that they're not predicting what the future is. They're positioning themselves for multiple possible futures. And it's such a powerful sort of concept, right? So we talked about Buffett. We talked about a more practical example, maybe with my kids, is what it means to do your best, right? Parents are listening. You have kids. Your kids come home.

They have a bad score on their test and they said, I did my best. And what they mean in that moment was I did my best in the hour that I sat down for my test. What they don't mean is that they put themselves in a position to be successful. And so I've defined this with my kids as you know you are in a position for success before you even take the test. It's the moment when you sit down, have I done all the things I control? You think about Tom Brady or another athlete. You know, they put themselves in a position all week. They do the work. They eat healthy. They sleep. They practice. Well, for my kids, it's the same thing, right? Did I study? Did I work hard? Am I in an argument with my brother, am I eating healthy, am I sleeping well? And we do this in life, right? I might not

know what my next job is. I might not know what the next sort of level in my career path is. But I know, hey, there's probably some skills that I can go out today and get in advance. I can put myself in a position. So if the opportunity ever comes, I can take advantage of it. Or think about it this way. If you like investing and the Acme Brickco is the number one, brick company in your community. And you're really interested in this. And, you know, it's always just been too expensive. And then one day, the owner knocks on your door and he's like, I'll sell it to you for two times earnings. And you're like, this is the bargain of a lifetime, but you go to your bank account and you have no money. So you might make the right decision, but you're not in a position

to take advantage of it. So you're going to get the same outcome as if you made a bad decision almost. You want to put yourself in a position where you're not predicting what's going to happen in the future, but no matter what happens in the future, you're always going to look right because you just pivot and change with the environment and you're never forced by circumstances into doing something that you don't want to do. And I think if you look at all the sort of like grates or titans of decision making, if you want to call them that, the people who just generally consistently make good decisions, they're never forced by circumstances. is to do something they don't want to do.

Yeah, and I think, you know, for a lot of people hearing that, I think the response might be, well, I've already sort of got myself into a less than optimal position here, right? Right. And so what do I do with that? Because I'm not in a good position. Where do we start working from there? You have to start where you're at, right?

You have to start in the position that you're currently in. But if you think about every moment as strengthening or weakening your position, Yep. Your rate of improvement matters more than where you are in the current moment. How do I accelerate my rate of improvement? Stop the decline. How do I improve? And for everybody that's going to be different, you might be paying off your credit card bills. It might be, you know, downsizing your house and it might be saving more money. All of these different things add to your position. And you know which areas of your position you probably feel weakest because they're the ones you want to avoid talking about, they're the ones you probably feel a little bit of shame around.

If you're having a hard time visualizing where you might be ill positioned, imagine like a camera crew following you around all day documenting your success. Well, what would you not want them to see? And that might be a good angle for, oh, how can I improve my position? Right. It might be you're lazy getting out of bed in the morning. And a way to improve your position is start to learn something new in that one hour. Instead of that film crew watching you lay and roll around in bed on your phone for an hour and a half before you get out of bed. It's all of a sudden you're getting up, you're learning something new, you're challenging yourself, or maybe you're just going for a walk. I think that there's always something we can do to better our position. There's never a moment

where I don't think can do that. And that's not to say it should dictate your entire life either, but yes. Yeah. Yeah. That tends to be a pretty foundational belief of mine, which is that there's always a move towards the better. It may not be as big a move as you would want. The distance to travel may seem insurmountable, but there's always a move that is towards the better position. And back to that question, you ask your kids, right? Is this going to get you what you want? Am I doing something today that's improving? You know, there's always something, some small step, whether you're in the deep depths of depression or addiction or you're at the very top of your industry, right? I mean, I think that's true for all of us. When you were saying that, the thing that came to mind for me was

one of the reasons we have trouble improving our position is because we want it improved now. Yes. And it's the same element of human nature that exists everywhere. I have another one of those little catchphrases I use in these moments, which is a lack of patience changes the outcome. A lack of patience changes the outcome. By wanting something faster than naturally, like we often know how to accomplish the things we want to accomplish, but they take longer than we would like.

Or we're starting later in life than we would like. And so what we seek in these moments is like, I'm behind, we feel behind. It's an unconscious feeling and we want to catch up. So if you're out of position, you want to catch up, what are you going to do? You're going to chase secrets. You're going to chase hacks. You're going to chase quick fixes because you want to get there rapidly. You want the real estate course that's going to make you success.

You buy all these products and you never seem to go anywhere because you're avoiding the work of doing what you need to do to improve your position, which is going to take time. It's going to take energy and you're going to get your knees scraped. And that's just part of the process. And you have to learn to invest in that process and know that it's going to take time and take pleasure in the fact that every day you're improving your position. Yep. You say the space between stimulus and response, one of two things can happen. You can consciously pause and apply reason, or you can cede control and execute a default behavior. The problem is,

our default behavior often makes things worse. Let's talk about what is a default behavior, and then we can explore the four default behaviors that you lay out in the book. I mean, there's certainly more of them, but I think you've done a nice job of sort of capturing the big hitters. So examples of default behaviors are emotion is in charge. and we've talked about this. It could be fear. It could be something else. Another example is ego, right?

We're often making decisions. We're on the wrong side of right. We just want to be right. It's not anything that we're doing. It's just sort of who we are as a person. They're social, right? There's a social default, which is when we blindly sort of conform to the group norms or the expectations.

And inertia is such a powerful one. We're habit forming. seeking. The habits that served us years ago may no longer serve us. And we want to resist those changes. And these defaults are really powerful. And they cause us to sort of stay in place if they're making the decisions for us instead of us making the decisions. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about each of those because there's a lot to unpack there. I'm going to jump to the ego default for a second and see if you could tell us a story about Mr. Rolex. I think that's where it came in the book under Ego. go default. If I remember correctly, because I wrote the book a couple years ago, that was

the, that when I was a cashier. And this guy would come in and he would just be rate everybody. He would just be like better than everybody else, right? He'd illegally park. He'd come in. He was very flashy. He's like that stereotypical person that irritates us all. And one day, he said to me, this Rolex doesn't pay for itself. Hurry the fuck up. I don't know if I can swear on here. Hurry up. It's done now. I'm just kidding. go right in. And I responded, right? Because I'm like, who is this guy to tell me to do this and said something, you know, in the moment that I wasn't thinking at all. I was just responding. I'm like, you're not better than me. This isn't right. And on the way home that night, you know, he's got his ego.

I've got my ego. If we're talking on the level of ego, I mean, we're just not going to go anywhere. I'm not going to get what I want. I'm not getting closer to what I want, which was a paycheck at the time to pay for university, he's not getting what he wants, which is faster service and, you know, to be treated like the way that he wanted to be treated, nobody wins. Like, there's no outcome here that's positive, right? Walking home that night, I sort of rationalize this because we are hierarchical and I reorganized the world in a way where I came out on top of him. I may not have a job anymore, but at least I'm not an asshole. And so I felt better about myself. And we often do this, right? We do this in everyday moments where we, we tell ourselves these stories. And we tell ourselves,

these stories and these stories are sort of like, at least I'm not, I'm better than, at least I didn't do this, I really didn't want that. And these stories aren't true. They're just us protecting that very vulnerable part of us that is sort of, yeah, maybe it is. There's an element of truth to all of this, which is why we can believe the stories we tell ourselves. But at the end of the day, again, are we moving towards or farther away from the outcome that we want to get? Can we wrap our ego, instead of wrapping our ego into our self-identity and our territory about ourselves, can we wrap our ego into an outcome? And if we can wrap that ego into an outcome, I think we're going to get a lot farther in life. I love that story because, as you said, I'm walking home and I think

at least I'm not like him. I'm better than him. Yeah. You know, and you say in that moment I rearranged the world in such a way that I, the newly unemployed high school student without a car or a lavish wristwatch came out on top. Yeah. And what I just love about that is that's, that's the way that. I'm That's what we all do. Yeah. Right. We all, if we're not careful, we rearrange the world in such a way that we are right. And you may do deep search on your values and be like, that's not the kind of person I want

to be. And, you know, like that's different. Totally. Than the ego response of this doesn't feel good. So I'm going to make myself better than you, you know. And boy, do we do that a lot. All the time. It's so crazy.

It happens with promotions. It happens with dating. It happens in every element of our life. We tell ourselves the story that we're right, that we're a good person, that we did the right thing, that we thought about it right, that it just worked out that way by chance, or they didn't deserve it because they're not a nice person, but we're a nice person. And we just unconsciously do this all the time. And I think it's sort of like, it's self-defeating because it takes us away from, again, are we getting closer or further away from what we want to achieve? Yeah, you sort of talk about how complaining just is us arguing with the way the world is, which is usually a losing strategy.

Yeah, I remember, I think maybe the story you're referring to is I went to my mentor, I didn't get a promotion. And I said, well, you know, I justified it in a very similar way to what we're talking about right now. And he's like, you're just arguing with reality. Like, this has happened, right? This isn't a strategy. This isn't effective. It's not moving you closer to what you want to get.

You just have to deal with it. And the longer you're arguing with it, the more you're putting off dealing with it. And, you know, often we just don't deal with it at all because by the time we've maybe, like, toned down our emotions a little bit, we've come to realize that we might have had a contribution to this whole thing playing out the way that it did, including me. I mean, my contribution was escalating at the grocery store, right? Like, I totally, I had a contribution there, but I couldn't see my contribution because my ego and my emotions are in charge.

And by the time that those sort of like dissipate, and I felt, them and I can see the situation more clearly for what it was. Well, now I've moved on to the next story I'm telling myself. So I never really go back and sort of address to reality. At Desjardin Insurance, we know that when you own a nail salon, everything needs to be perfect from tip to toe. That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected. insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Dejardin.com slash business coverage.

Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of I can't keep doing this. But I valued everything I was doing and I wasn't willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That's when I stumbled into something I now call this still point method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I'd had eight years ago, so you don't have to stumble towards an answer. That something is now here and it's called overwhelm is optional, tools for when you can't do less. It's an email,

course that fits into moments you already have, taking less than 10 minutes total a day. It isn't about doing less. It's about relating differently to what you do. I think it's the most useful tool we've ever built. The launch price is $29. If life is too full, but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out, overwhelm is optional. Go to one you feed.net slash overwhelm. That's one you feed.net slash overwhelm. As we're talking, I'm thinking often about in my own life where my emotions do overwhelm me and I don't act the way that I want to act, you know. And I'm thinking about how even after the fact we can still pause, we can still reflect,

and we can go try and fix, you know, like I'll sometimes just say to my partner, Virginia like, uh, that was not the me I want to be to you. Like I was upset and so the me that came out is not the me that I want to be. Here's who I want to be. Here's my intention. I fell short this time. I'm going to keep trying to do better, you know. And that ability, even after we've become overwhelmed, right? Because we're describing here a high level of emotional maturity and regulation where you always pause. You're always able to stop doing the difficult thing. And for many, many people, that's not the case. But just even if that happens, there's still room for repair. There's still room for reflection. And there's still room to change our position, to use your

terminology. That is a very interesting angle to positioning, right? Because it makes your relationship better, makes it stronger. And it means that you're open to sort of being right in a different way. Right. It means you're open to getting a better outcome. You're open to, it doesn't have to be me that's right all the time. And not only does that make you more vulnerable, it makes her more vulnerable, and it makes your relationship more vulnerable and more powerful, and it makes it stronger.

So we talk about unexpected events. You can't predict the future, but if your relationship is stronger, you can withstand a lot more possible futures. And I think that's a brilliant sort of example. I do this with my kids too, right? Like it takes a lot of courage to go in and apologize to your kids, or at least it does for me.

Yeah. You know, but I'm like, I'm trying to model. this behavior. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, and there's no task that I have found in my life that more frequently pushed me up against my limits of what I was able to handle than being a parent, right? I was like, this task just seems like it was designed to make me fail. You know, I think good parents are able to go in and say, I made a mistake. I didn't handle that right. Because A, it repairs the relationship,

but to your point, even more importantly, it models. Like, okay, I'm not always right. I make mistakes. And when I do, here's how I handle because you're going to make a ton of them too. Yeah. And back to your earlier point, right? It's not about being perfect in every moment. It's really just about getting better and learning to recognize what you're doing to your position, learning to recognize if you're moving in the right direction, learning to recognize if circumstances are deciding for you or you're in charge.

And the recognition of those things, I don't have to tell you what to do in those moments. Once you start to recognize them, you know what you want to do. You just can't see it because your perspective is like blinders, right? In this moment, you can't see the broad perspective. Just like if I look back on my 16-year-old self, I did things that were pretty stupid. But my 70-year-old self is going to look back on my 40-year-old self now and be like, you did things that were pretty stupid too. And what that is is it's just a different perspective.

I don't have the perspective of a 70-year-old. And in those moments, what's happening is we're just that horse, right? We get the blinders on. And our perspective in that moment, it's just not what it needs to be. We need to widen it a little bit. And by widening it, we can actually see what to do, right? We're just blind to what we need to do. Yep.

What are some ways of working with the inertia default? Because that is a really big one. Like you said, we are wired to seek comfort. We are wired to be like, well, this is doing all right. I mean, you talk about the zone of average being a dangerous place. You know, it's the point where things are working well enough that we don't feel the need to make any changes. And I have found myself there many times where I'm like, well, this is pretty good. It's not great. It could be better. But I'm just getting through the day. I don't

have I got a lot left to continue to break this inertia. Well, one of the ways that I like to think about this is to take a step back. And instead of framing this as inertia, let's frame it as like pre-deciding and automatic roles. Let's create our own inertia where our, desired behavior becomes our default behavior. And so we're taught to follow rules from a very early age. We don't question that. We just follow them. However, we've never thought about how we can turn them around and use rules to our

advantage, use rules on ourselves, right? We can create our own rules and our own rules become this sort of inertia that counterbalances group thing. Maybe it counterbalances sort of like the social angle of this too. And so like let's say, for example, you want to lose weight. And most people sort of tackle this with willpower. However, eventually, we all lose the battle with willpower. If you're out with friends and they're drinking and they're having, you know, an unhealthy

meal and ordering dessert and you tell them in that moment, I'm watching what I eat, well, they're going to nudge you, oh, you know what? Just have a drink tonight. Just have some dessert tonight. You can go do that tomorrow. But tonight, you deserve a break. And that's often how they phrase it. You deserve a break.

And you'll believe them and you'll do it. And that takes you farther away from the place that you've identified you wanted to go. But if you have a rule, and I got this from Daniel Conman when I was talking to him in New York, in his house, if you have a rule, you don't argue with it. But not only do you not argue with it, other people don't argue with it. So our tendency to follow rules can work for us and create this positive inertia where we just create a rule. We pre-decide before we're in the moment. my rule is, I don't eat dessert.

You don't argue with yourself. You're not negotiating with yourself. You pre-decided before you're in the situation, what's going to happen? And that negotiation with yourself is super important because that negotiation is where you start telling yourself stories. I'll just opt out this one time. The contract is done, man. Your friends won't argue with it either.

If your rule is you don't eat dessert, you're not going to eat dessert. And so another one of like my positive inertia where automatic rules that I have is that I work out every day. I don't have any days off. I don't take any days off. And why? Because I find it easier to work out seven days a week, 365 days a year,

than two days a week or three days a week. Because when I work out two or three days a week, I don't get the consistency. I don't get the inertia going for me. And now I start negotiating with myself. I'm not going to work. I don't feel like working out today. I can do it tomorrow and still get my three times in this week.

Yes. And that's what I used to tell myself. These stories were crazy because it's like, I'll do extra tomorrow. I don't feel like it today. Well, if you don't feel like it today, you're not going to feel like it tomorrow. The contract is done. You don't negotiate. You create positive inertia around the desired behaviors that you want, and then you just

stick to the plan. One of the things we know about habit creation, right, is that habits tend to need a stable context in which to really form. Meaning if your context is always shifting, it's much harder to create an automatic behavior. So, you know, I've done a lot of coaching work with people over the years on positive habit formation. And what I found is those hard and fast rules work in situations where life is kind of predictable. But when life is really unpredictable, there's a degree of flexibility that is needed in order to not fall into all or nothing thinking, make a mistake, and give a mistake. up. You travel, I imagine, a fair amount for work. You know, how do you handle traveling or if a kid is

sick or I work out every day, but there are going to be times where something perhaps overtakes that, gets in the way. A lot of people I know tend to be like, well, if I do it perfect, I'll keep doing it, but if I don't do it perfect, I'm done. And so I'm kind of curious how you think about that in your own life. So to borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, James Clear, never missed twice. Yep. And so I think, you know, the second time you miss is the start of a pattern. The first time, I mean, life happens, right? Again, it's not about being perfect.

If you hold yourself to this perfect standard, you're always going to be perpetually dissatisfied with yourself. You're never going to be happy. It's not about that at all. I mean, Rules is a catchy phrase, and Rules is the great way to think about, but they're more like principles. And there's a saying that a friend of mine has,

which is the young man knows the rules, the old man knows the exceptions. And I think that that is, is never more resonant than it is in these moments, right? Like, it's not about holding yourself to this impossible standard. It's about adjusting to life and positioning yourself where you can adjust to life. Yeah, you've got a line that I really like that I highlighted, which you said, as simple as they seem automatic rules for common situations get results.

And I think that word right there, the common situation is the thing, right? Like, we can make rules that apply the vast majority of the time to situations that we encounter again and again and again. When we're in uncommon situations is when we need to have the cognitive flexibility to really say, all right, what's the right? What do I do here? There's an element of common sense here, right? If your rules, I don't need dessert, but you're at your wedding and your partner or spouse is like feeding you cake and you say, hey, I don't eat dessert. Well, you know, I don't think that's the situation where you want to apply that. You've got to be smarter than that. Yep. Well, it is true, though, like being a recovering alcoholic and addict, I often say there's a beautiful clarity to zero.

Yes. You know, like, I'm not having to debate. Is it okay? What's a special occasion? What's not a special occasion? Like for me, it's really simple. Now, most of life is hard to get to be that crystal clear, simple. But the more often the principle holds, again, the vast majority of the time, the far easier life is. It doesn't also have to work forever. Right? It can work to change your inertia to change your behavior and then you can go to more flexibility. If you work out every day for a year, it doesn't mean you have to work out every day for 10 years. But if you work out every day for a year, I guarantee you it's going to change your trajectory. Yeah, that's a great way

to think about it and say it, because I don't really set exactly how much I'm going to work out each week, but I have been pretty consistent for about a decade now where I am close to every day. And so I don't have to sweat it if I miss a day or two because it's an inbuilt pattern. I try and move my body in a way every day. Same thing with meditation for a long time. It's like once I got very consistent, I didn't have to worry about it being exactly every day because, again, the momentum was moving in the right direction. But again, that can change, whereas all of a sudden it's like, well, the momentum was moving

in the right direction. Now the momentum is petered off. Now I need to go back to being a little bit more firm and clear and drive the ambiguity out of this. And then as the momentum picks back up, I can sort of take my hands off the reins a little bit more. I think one of the most powerful ways to talk to yourself in those moments is I chose not to because. Yes, yes. And circumstances did not force me to. Yes.

I chose not to because I was at my son or daughter's x-ray. I was incapable of getting out of bed. I was whatever. I would not take that power away from you because that power is what enables you to do the things that you want to do. And that power is what enables you to not be a victim. And that power gives you control over your position, over your actions, over your choices, of your words.

Yeah, absolutely. I often would say to clients, like, you can choose not to exercise next week while you're on vacation. That is a perfectly fine choice to say, I just want to be with my family, I don't want to mess with it. Like, you can make that choice, but choose it.

Yeah, don't tell yourself you couldn't do it because you're on vacation. No, you chose not to do it because you're on vacation. Be conscious about what you're going to do when, and when you're not doing something, think about why you're making that choice. I'm choosing to do something else because it's more important to me right now

versus letting the default be, I just slid back into an old pattern. Totally. So you have a line in the book that says, show me your role models and I'll show you your future. And you talk a lot about having exemplars in life. And I thought we could talk a little bit about that, why that's important,

how you go about choosing people, what sort of person you do and don't choose, you know, how you filter your decisions through those lens. Talk to me a little bit about that idea. We're all born with exemplars, right? But we don't control them. Our parents, our environment, our teachers.

We're surrounded by these people who create rules around society for us that demonstrate effective or ineffective behaviors that model how to talk to each other. We learn unconsciously all of these things. And there comes a point where you become an adult. And, you know, it could be 14 for some people. It could be 25 for some people. But when you take control of your destiny, and the best thing you can do when you take control of your destiny, if you were unlucky and you didn't have exceptional exemplars in your life, which most people don't, is work for somebody exceptional. And if you can't work for somebody exceptional, we live in this era, this great internet era where you can go online and you can learn directly from exceptional people.

in whatever your domain, whatever your field, whatever your interest is. And those people can model how to behave. And they can model how to behave in different situations. And when you're reading books, you can create this repository in your head. How did this person handle this situation? I don't have to figure everything out the first time I've done it. I can, oh, well, this person did this in this situation. And it's not exactly the same, but now I have a starting point.

So exemplars can give you a starting point. And also, going back to what we talked about having blinders on, if you think, like I do, that the source of all bad decisions is basically blind spots. We're blind to our emotion, our ego, and how that's affecting us. We're blind to the outcomes. If we can change our perspective, we're going to remove some of our blind spots. One really effective way to change your perspective is to adapt the persona of somebody you admire. If you admire Warren Buffett, what would Warren Buffett do in a situation like this?

and you consciously try to think like that person. You want to see the world the way that they see it. You want to smell it, the way that they smell it, and you want to tell yourself what they would do in the way that they would do it. Now, that is not a judgment that you are going to do that or you agree with what they're saying, but it gets you out of the blinders that you have on and it gets you to see something else.

And your exemplars, if you think about it the way that I think about it, they're always sort of watching you. They're like on your shoulder. They're these little invisible figures and they follow you around all day. And they can hold you to this higher standard of behavior, but you're really holding yourself to it. And they can make you be a better person. They can nudge you to be a better person than you otherwise would be. It's funny, as you were saying that, I was thinking about what a spiritual teacher told me once. I've done a lot of training in Zen Buddhism.

And Zen Buddhism is somewhat arcane, right? It's strange, right? You read it, and you're like, that does not make the slightest bit of sense. And I did a lot of co-on work, and they said, what you want to try to do is imagine what state of consciousness, someone would have to have in order to say what they just said or believe what they believe. Like, what would your brain have to be like to do that? And it was a useful reference point to be like, okay, that seems like nonsense. But what would my view of the world be like if that was actually true?

So this is incredibly powerful, right? Because when you see somebody doing something that doesn't make sense to you, it doesn't make them crazy or wrong. It means that they see the world in a completely. different way than you do. Because if you saw the world, the way that they see the world, you would do the exact same thing. And I think that that's a really powerful way to look at a situation. We can all probably in our given fields of career, think of some exemplars, right? Where do you turn to for exemplars in other aspects of your life, about being a good person, about, you know,

And how many of your exemplars are people you know versus people you've read about versus alive versus dead? I'm just kind of curious like your makeup of your, you call them your own board of directors. Yeah. You know, the makeup of your board of directors, how many of them are career people versus moral people, living dead, etc. So I got this idea from Jim Collins, who wrote Good to Create. And Jim's become, you know, very impactful in my life in some ways. and this concept he has of a personal board of directors where you can have these people that you report to in your head.

It's like an imaginary conversation. I feel crazy even talking about it, but it's super effective for changing behavior. So you pick a board of directors and you sort of like, you can get advice from all of these people. You don't have to know them. They don't even have to be alive. Some of them you can talk to.

Some of them you can. And those people help you with various aspects of your life. And some can be parenting role models. We all have a friend. group and there's probably one parent that you sort of like think, oh man, I wish I was that good of a parent. Maybe that person could be on your board of directors. And they don't have to be there permanently. There's no like voting. There's no like year long requirement. They can come and go. You can try them out and be like, eh, that's not really a fit for me. But what you're really doing

is you're giving yourself a check and balance. You're trying to live up to the expectations of these people who are going to hold you to a higher standard. And if you look through history, where do we tend to learn the most, right? All of our history, whether it's us going through life, whether it's an athlete being challenged, it's all challenge. It's that teacher in school who held you to a higher standard, who came up to you and said, Eric, this is not good enough. You can do better. Yeah. And that standard, right, because you can't get away with being half ass. You can't get away with being lazy. Well, now all of a sudden you start doing the work. Yeah. And by raising the bar, you do a lot better work. But we can raise a bar for ourselves. We don't need anybody to tell us we

can do better. We can hold ourselves to a higher standard. I find the personal board of directors really helpful for holding me to a higher standard. Doesn't mean I'm always perfect. Doesn't mean I don't make mistakes just like everybody else. But it does give me this element of accountability to it where I have these conversations in my head sometimes about like, you know, I'm in a store, somebody, you know, does something that I don't like or I'm on an airplane and, you know, that person beside you just irritates you and I'm like, what would this person do right now? And I have a good friend and I just picture him. What would, I'm not going to say his name, but what would he do right now? And I'm like, he'd just let it go. And then all of a sudden it's, it's really empowering because

it's not me letting it go. Like I'm actually the one letting it go. But the story I'm telling myself is that he would let it go. And therefore, I want to be like him. So therefore, I'm going to let it go. Yeah. But I'm not consciously sort of like, oh, I'm just going to let this go because that would be really hard decision to come to. But if you do it through this other person, I find it's actually easier to do these little moments in life where I'm like, oh, he would just let it go. You know, same thing you would tell somebody else if they told you that story.

But when you're in the story, you're like, oh, that's really hard to do. Totally. Yep. Yep. Well, Shane, thank you so much. It's an excellent book. I've really, really enjoyed this conversation. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can find you.

your website where they can get your book and all things related to you. So thank you so much. Awesome. Thanks, Eric. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you feed community.