Kind: captions Language: en as you get older you are less plastic so it actually does become harder to learn new things you begin to find the things that work for you and so you think oh well I know how to do this and then you encounter that moment where it stops working and so now it's like oh wait a second so Tom we're gonna bring it to the light later but I'll start at the deep dark ends what are the top five behaviors and mental traps people do to live a really miserable life what do people do so ego is going to be number one so the whole idea if you want to live the good life is to recognize that you are a deeply flawed individual that is holding yourself back that your life is a reflection entirely of your choices and not your circumstances and if you're not happy with that that means that you're doing something wrong so I'll Define right and wrong as it's right when it moves you towards your goal and it's wrong when it moves you away so if you're not where you want to be You Are by definition doing something wrong but most people can't work through the loop that I call the physics of progress because their ego stops them in a critical part so the physics of progress go like this you have a guess as to how you're going to get to your goal so first of all it assumes you know what your goal is but for now let's assume that you do know your goal so you've got to guess this is what I would need to do in order to get to my goal you're going to do that thing and it's going to fail now we all have to struggle with uh oh I tried the thing and it failed the problem is most people put up their ego defenses find a way to believe that it was somebody else's fault it was the economy it was where I was born it was that my parents didn't have money it's that the system is rigged whatever because those are probably valid reasons why it's going to be harder for that person than the next person they stop but let's go back to my definition of right and wrong right is that which moves you towards your goals wrong is that which moves you away so people then are blind to the fact that they're saying that their real goal is to get where they're going make a million dollars have a successful business be a teacher whatever but the reality is their real goal is to feel good about themselves most people never have the self-awareness to avoid that conflict and then even if they have the self-awareness that they're in a conflict they don't realize that they could shift their self-esteem around instead of being right so um what I tried was right and the only reason it didn't work is because the world is stacked against me might actually be true but how are you going to move forward because there is some better thing that's going to move you forward most people are never going to see that because they stop at making it somebody else's fault the next thing you have to do is you have to be optimistic you have to believe what I call the only belief that matters that if I failed at something it's because I'm not good enough yet but I can get good and so many people believe because it really feels this way you believe that your talent and intelligence are fixed traits and the reason you believe that is it gets harder as you get older to get those huge gains that you get like when you're a little kid and you can't walk it's like this whole binary zero to one moment of like whoa I couldn't and now I can this is incredible and then you get to first grade and it's like can't do math now I can't do math while it's pretty cool can't do multiplication tables now I can you start to get to algebra and it's like oh God I don't know this is not as easy as I hoped it would be you start having failures you get rejected by girls like you start getting all these things to stack up where the path to stand up practice walking it doesn't work as well you're also as you get older you are less plastic so it actually does become harder to learn new things also you begin to find the things that work for you and so you think oh well I know how to do this I've done it really well and then you encounter that moment where it stops working and so now it's like oh wait a second I it was working so I had my big zero to one moment then it stopped working and people confuse that with hitting the edge of their abilities not realizing you've only hit the edge of your current skill set so I remind myself in business all the time my current skill set has already taken me as far as it's going to take me and so if I want to go farther I have to get better but if you don't believe that you can get better then you won't put the energy and effort into getting better but because it becomes incrementally more difficult to get better you begin to confuse it with I've reached the edge of my capabilities then if your ego is built around I'm right not that I can identify the right answer I am right so I've done all the things I hit the edge of my current abilities and I have a belief that I don't know that I can get any better and I have the ego defenses coming saying it was somebody else's fault anyway ah cool then I'm off the hook I don't have to be confrontational of this reality that I've reached the edge of what I'm capable of which sucks that feeling of like I'll never be as good as somebody else that feeling eats at us in a really gnarly way so that's where you get clobbered to death with oh I no longer am optimistic that I can get better because all my big gains my early gains those went away and my subconscious hands me a ready-made excuse for why this isn't my fault and I take it and I exit and that brings us to the third thing repetition you become what you repeat so people that don't repeat things they don't try over and over they just give up really easily they are destined for failure if you don't have a massive amount of resilience you are really in trouble and most people don't have resilience and so if I'm talking about the five things that you do that really like take you down a dark path don't be resilient give up easily because if it's true that you can get better but the sort of early big wins begin to diminish and you're gonna have to work harder and push harder and be more consistent then it's like by giving up you never get better and so now you're reinforcing hey Not only was it somebody else's fault you couldn't get better anyway so why would it matter don't even try and so everything that reinforces that don't even try is how people get themselves into a super dark place another thing that's really going to hold people back is if you are comparing yourself to somebody else and you're letting that diminish your sense of self so I would constantly if I wanted to fail I would constantly compare myself to other people and be like I'm a total loser and I have the proof because look at all these other people and they're doing way better than I am they're ahead of me I remember oh God every filmmaker of my generation had a moment when they turned 24 when they realized that what at least for my generation was considered arguably the greatest film of all time was Citizen Kane really is Awesome by the way even though it's black and white and it's all the [ __ ] for The Tick Tock generation they're never going to go for it but it it's a really fantastic film and Orson Welles made it when he was 24. and he made it when arguably the most powerful man in the world so imagine somebody like Bill Gates coming after you and oh God even better uh one of the guys that owns like a media conglomer Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post so the guy Rudolph Hearst owned what at the time was the media publication Citizen Kane is about that guy so it would be like somebody making a movie about Jeff Bezos and that he's corrupt and lonely and Jeff Bezos was like oh you think you're gonna actually tell that story nah I'm clamping down I'm gonna get your funding revoked I'm going to make sure that nobody screens the film all that so this guy at 24 gets this movie made when everybody thinks oh this guy's literally gonna kill him have him killed or he's gonna stop his movie from being funded then not only does he get it made but it becomes arguably the greatest film of all time and so you hit this moment where you're like Orson Welles are just better than I'll ever be why am I even trying then back into not being resilient then back into all the things you're trying just aren't working on and on and on and then the last thing is if I really wanted to mess somebody up I mean I really want to break their ability to go anywhere in life I'm going to make sure that I mess up their body I'm going to make sure that they aren't getting the sleep they need I'm going to make sure that they eat a ton of sugar I'm going to make sure that they're overweight I'm going to make sure that they don't exercise and that is going to destroy their cognition in a thousand ways they're going to be in a level of pain they don't even realize they're in because they've never not had a stomach ache when they eat they've never not eaten right before they go to bed and have their sleep disrupted because they've got food just sitting in their digestive tract they don't even know brain fog all that stuff and so those are the five things I would do if I really the funny thing even as I'm saying I can't make it about me I've gotta like if I were gonna mess up somebody else uh those are the things that I would do wow but gotta avoid like the plague like the plague but so the the fourth one like it just feels so like instrumental this guy 24 like he did it and I'm not 24 but I'm 24 but let's say I'm like 26 and and I'm still not I'm not there yet so yeah like let's say you're 40. say you're 46. so you're 50. so this is the Trap Is by comparing yourself to other people it's going to diminish your sense of self it pulls you out of that optimistic mode and the reality is I may never make a film as good as Citizen Kane I may never be as good as Walt Disney that's my the real person I'm chasing I may never accomplish what Elon Musk has accomplished and so I do the thought exercise and the words I want to introduce to people are and now what so you're never going to be whoever it is that you look up to and you admire you're never going to be as good as them and now what do you give up do you cry all day do you uh accept a lesser life or do you go ham and so the thing that I want people to understand you can get a hundred times better at whatever now most people spend so much time lamenting that they'll never be as good as whatever person it is that they look up to and fantasize about and want to be that they never 100 x their own abilities and so their life is far less than it could have been so what I have found through experience even though I still feel the sting of not being as good as the people that I admire or having to face that Disney Walt Disney had done way more than I've done by this point in his life even if he didn't have as much money as I have he certainly had built something far more um that represented what he wanted to do far more than what I've done right my whole life has been about finally getting to that moment and I haven't and maybe it forever recedes into the distance but what I've learned through experience is the act of going ham is so intoxicating is so fun that it is the juice but most people are broken emotionally by the comparison and so to some extent you just can't allow yourself to do it how do you unlearn the beliefs that got you here uh that are now holding you back so you have to let them atrophy so if you want your negative beliefs to atrophy then you have to really stop using them so number one read the book feeling great by David D Burns it's all about cognitive behavioral therapy but one of the core tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy is pattern interrupting so you have cognitive distortions you're repeating things to yourself that aren't true I'll never be able to I'm not as good as I could never right those are all cognitive distortions you don't know that that's true you won't know that that's true until you spend a lifetime trying and you're on your deathbed you're like well I'm out of time now I really know I really won't be able to do it or by then you will have accomplished so much if you really are that diligent persistent so you have to pattern interrupt you have to break out of that thing that you repeat now what I find fascinating is the reason that pattern interrupting is so important the reason that the only way to begin to let those negative beliefs dissipate is by not using them is because neurons that fire together wire together it's an evolutionary Advan Advantage it's actually a really good thing this is why you can pick something and get good at it because your brain is an energy hog from an evolutionary perspective we have this weird dueling competing desires that are baked into our brain one go hard go out there chase after it get it right Grand ambition but then you also have the desire to sit on the couch and eat potato chips because your brain is so hungry for calories it eats up 25 of the calories that you intake into your body now when you can just go to the grocery store and get a bag of potato chips it's not a problem but when you have to go out and face death every day to hunt to gather all of that you have to have evolutionary pressure to chill right so you go out you get what you need don't keep going so you've got it now you need to calm down because your brain just to keep everything going is going to gobble through those calories so I can't also have the body going ham all the time what the brain does is go all right from a biological standpoint I've got to make these thoughts as efficient as humanly possible so that we're not 50 or 75 percent of the caloric energy so it does things to make them more efficient and one of the things that it does is it myelinates the connection points so when you do things and I think people underestimate the complexity of a habit so a habit isn't just seeing something doing something hearing something feeling something smelly it's all of those things put together right so you've got the Habit Loop trigger you've got then the desire to pursue the drip of dopamine that you know that you're going to get you've got the sights and sounds that might be all a part of that all that stuff is wired together so it's this huge cluster of neuronal firing and it all gets this fatty tissue wrapped around it so it's like this ball of activity and so you get into these patterns of activity that are the easiest thing for you to think and feel so if the easiest thing for you to think and feel is a negative thought that you repeat to yourself over and over and over and that your brain goes oh we do this a lot we feel this way a lot we think this thing a lot rad let me make it super easy so now when you get back into I'm a loser I'm not going to do that I'll never accomplish that or just like a negative Doom scroll on Tick Tock or whatever that becomes the most efficient thing for your body to do and you crave that feeling you are pushed into the efficiency from an evolutionary standpoint so you have to interrupt it you have to stop the thought stop the activity whatever and then begin to build something new so you stop using the old one and then you force a demand on the brain so that it's unwiring these things and making these new wiring connections and connecting that and because tissues in the body you never keep if they're not needed so if you think about muscle right if you work out like a demon you get a yoked physique and then you stop working out six months later you're going to be way closer to where you started before you started lifting than the left and I would say probably a year 18 months out no one would ever know even if you had a massive amount of muscle because your body's just like muscles expensive calorically if I don't need it I'm going to get rid of it and so when you stop using a pattern in your brain then the connections are going to dissipate it's not going to be the first thing that occurs to you anymore you're going to be out of that habit Loop in fact to push us to the extreme during the Vietnam war there was massive amounts of drug use and people get addicted to opioids heroin all that stuff most of them just stopped when they came back and the reason that they stopped when they came back was they just didn't have access to it they didn't know who to talk to like I'll tell you right now I would have done um psilocybin or whatever by now if I could reliably get it but I don't have anybody that I know how to get it from so I've tried like a tiny bit here and there but that's it so it's when you don't have it in your environment you don't think about it you don't reach for it you don't crave it so you've got to do that break apart but then to make it easier make sure that you're leaning into something new that's powerful that you can repeat I want to go back to capabilities and skill set and ask you how you would advise a person who has ventured off in different career paths they've tried so many things in their lifetime they've excelled in all of them but at the end of the day they're the Jack of all trades and the master of nothing so I want to hear your advice on that and a follow-up question is do you think that that's the way to go or do you think they should stop and just reassess and focus on one thing what outcome do you want um like let's also say because another question I had was how does somebody go about finding their passion who's completely lost okay so those are two wildly different questions yeah so how you find your passion will set aside now we'll just say you don't find it it is an architectural build not an archaeological dig but going back to the first part so you have to know what you want to accomplish so for most people when they fantasize about their life they fantasize about becoming the goat of something like I'm going to be the greatest singer of all time if you want that just think about LeBron James if LeBron James were simultaneously trying to be the greatest basketball player of all time the best singer of all time the best accountant of all time you'd be like hey LeBron I've got money on you this weekend you better get your ass on the basketball court stop [ __ ] around with accounting right so we know when it's somebody else exactly what they should be doing if they want to be the greatest of all time you need a maniacal Focus you need to be lasered in on one thing and you do it to the abstraction of everything else and you do it obsessively to the point where everything else in your life ideally is falling apart right it's just and I say ideally as a person with money on you know LeBron James it's like ah I don't want you to think about it I want you to be like Tom Brady like from what I hear and I don't know that this is true but given that he get just got divorced I'm going to guess that it is that he would make his family sleep somewhere else when he had like a big game coming up he did not want distractions he wanted to be totally laser focused literally to the point where everything else in his life is falling apart but you want to talk goats that guy is going to go down in history now having said all of that I find it very hard in my own life to just say oh I'm gonna do this one thing this channel would be way bigger if I just interviewed one kind of guest over and over and over and everybody knew exactly what they were going to get and I didn't try to Branch out and cover more things that I find fascinating this channel will be a lot bigger if we didn't have the entertainment side where we're trying to do comics and video games and all that stuff right if I would just maniacally focused on having the best interview series YouTube channel ever I know that but that's not the life that I want to live that's why the first question is what do you want because ultimately my advice to people is to chase fulfillment and fulfillment has to do with what do you love right so you're gonna have to discover that you're going to find that initial bump of like oh this thing gives me more energy than it takes but it's not like when I was a kid I was like oh yo I want to have a YouTube channel I didn't even think I want to build the next Disney I created that over time when I was a quest I was actually perfectly happy to do storytelling inside of a protein bar company right because I just needed meaning and purpose now I knew I wanted to storytell I've known that since I was 12. but it wasn't like the central passion of my life to build the next Disney until I decided to make it that and so when I was Jesus I probably would have been 37 38 the first time I said I'm going to build the next Disney so it's you know that's a lot of my life where I had another mission that I would have stated another passion that I would have said now storytelling was always one of my passions but I actually would have told you that it was filmmaking so I would have said oh I want to be a I want to be a director that was my earliest thing and I invested a lot into that which is how it went from being an interest to being a passion so I want people to understand you don't look in words and find a passion you look inwards and find something that gives you more energy than it takes then you invest in that to see if it's really going to be a Fascination if the more you do it the more you push yourself into learning about it if the more you're like whoa this is really cool I love this that's a Fascination now if you want to turn it into a passion you're going to go through the process of gaining Mastery for something to be a passion I think you have to get feedback from the world okay I happen to know that you're a singer and an amazing one at that and I know human psychology enough to know when you played me your song for the first time and I freaked out that that feeds into your sense of like wow I worked really hard to get good at something and this person's having a really big emotional reaction and that's part of how I want to contribute to the world I want to sing in a way that moves people you saw that it moved me now you you're in that Loop that I called the passion Loop so for it to be passion you need to work really hard to get good at something that matters to other people and you need both the shout meaning when you sing it makes you feel some kind of way and the echo where I hear what you've worked so hard at and I'm like oh my God and now you're in this Loop where you're like I want to get even better because I want more people to react like that now you're in a passion Loop now where people get into trouble it's going back to the first question so now you're in this passion Loop you should be fine with hey I sing it makes people feel awesome we're good right no because you're comparing yourself to other people you have this huge goal that you want to attain and so now you've got something outside you try to achieve it you get knocked back it didn't work the way that you thought it was going to work what does that say about me possibly you make it other people's fault or you just give up and go wow I'm really not capable which then makes you feel terrible about yourself which that makes you not love the singing as much as you did before and you get into this super self-destructive Loop so let me tell you what monks have figured out that other people don't get that that desire to want more is a double-edged sword a monk is somebody who realizes oh this thing that makes me feel alive and pushes me to be better also Cuts me down and makes me dislike myself and makes me lose passion for the thing that I loved right before I started comparing myself and so the choice that they choose is to opt out of the Rat Race and so they're like I'm just gonna go over here and I'm gonna let go of Desire because I realize that desire is the root of all suffering now I take a totally different approach and I go well I know I'm going to suffer I know the world's gonna kick me in the face I know that I'm not going to be I want to be the greatest at everything I ever think of I know that just isn't going to be true so I had to come to peace with okay you're never going to be as good at all the things that you want to be good at and so now how do you play the game and so for me I like to be broad ER maybe than somebody who's gonna like really be the goat at something but I just want to enjoy my life I want to enjoy the shout and the Echo and so for me to to if I just wanted to enjoy the echo I would go in the YouTube comments I would figure out what they want me to do and I would just do that if I want to enjoy both the shout and the echo I find this balance of here's a range of things that I like because trust me here's how many things I want to spend my life on here's how many things I do spend my life on here's what I would have to do if I wanted to be the goat and I just realized that for me being that myopically focused on something doesn't make me feel the way that I want to feel and so I understand that that means that I probably won't achieve I know I won't achieve as much if I were to broaden it but I only want to broaden it so much so that I can still achieve quite frankly on a massive global scale that will echo through human history the truth is hitting your career goals is not easy you have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else but there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100x your efficiency so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day you'll not only get control of your time you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal to help you do this I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any High achiever needs to dominate and you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description alright my friend back to today's episode don't you think you will actually be the goat of your Niche by focusing on multiple skills that synergize rather than just focusing on the one thing to be the best at it all right so you have to hold two competing ideas in your head so here's the truth about what it's like to be inside my own mind I imagine myself in a Dragon Ball Z Super Saiyan moment with flames all around me screaming like morphing into something huge and Unstoppable but at the same time I understand that the reality is that this is probably going to be a struggle and I may never become the goat but I don't accept that internally internally I'm like okay maybe it doesn't happen but what if you play all out like it is going to happen what if you act like it is an inevitability that if you keep pushing as hard as you can moving forward that you will eventually get there but I know so well that if I judge if I only reward myself for becoming the goat then my life hinges on one final moment and I know two things one it's prop it is wiser not as probably it is wiser to enjoy the climb than to reach the summit and then two because I know that I may never get there I don't want to constantly have my thing in the future because the future will always let you down now the question is why this goes back to Evolution the reason the future always lets you down is because we have hunger this is why we equate the desire for food the desire for sex the desire for Success we say hungry I'm hungry for whatever because that's what it feels like and hunger can only be momentarily satiated it can't be permanently because you would die right so if all you had was the motivation to go get one meal and eat the biggest meal the biggest Feast that you possibly can if that's all Evolution got you to do and then you ate it you were full and like I'm full forever you would die so once you understand it's an evolutionary context of there is a sub-program running in your brain to make sure that you're just going to keep going and going and going so I'm very careful about how I approach my life to make sure that I acknowledge the truth of The Human Condition which is that I'm having a biological experience which is that I will always have hunger no matter how much I eat I mean I'll momentarily be sated but it won't last and so I'm super careful to enjoy the climb because I know the struggle is guaranteed but the success is not and I know better than to make my whole life hinge on the future because even when I get to the Future even if I was the goat and I stand towering above all the accomplishments of Walt Disney I'll still be like yo what's next it's an inevitability do you think everybody's like that like or do you think there's ever going to be a time when you see like what you said you're like hovering over all of your accomplishments like every somebody would be capable of being I'm I'm good like that's it do you think that's a youth thing or like do you think everybody always wants more it is a hundred percent that every single person has Drive hunger it is also true that that's a spectrum it's just a personality trait so we all have it to some degree but the question is how much now I'm probably pretty close to pegged out where I'm willing to suffer to the point where other people worry about me because I'm I just push myself and push myself and push myself so not everybody's going to be like that also I think there are people that have a different value system than I have so take a monk they like the idea of I want to disengage from the world I realize the toxic toxic nature of never-ending Pursuit that there will never be a meal so satisfying that I don't want to eat again so why do I allow myself let me transcend that so for them they would train themselves to let go of that to not give into it I feed into it I have looked at both options before me and one resonates with me at a conceptual level because it's not like oh I wouldn't became a monk for 30 years and I'm like oh rad now let me go like really like pour myself into building something and see which I prefer but I flirted with them both enough to know at least at the early stage which one I find constantly energizing and the one I find constantly energizing is building and even when I fail I'm still energized by it and I'm very careful with my ego not to let it get tied up in that but everybody's going to make a different choice but I think that people that don't face the reality of what they want their life is going to be very sad and so what I'm always trying to do when I'm trying to get people to understand go after it want like want to be the best and really go after it like I mean give it your everything but don't value yourself on whether you achieve it or not so the thing that I value myself for the thing that I reward and punish myself for is did I show up and play to win not did I win did I show up and play to win and since I show up and play to win almost every day not every day every now and then I'm off my game but I I played a win man and I'm tracking myself from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed and if I'm like yo you played to win today and by the way I had a good time doing it like I love that [ __ ] then I'm good but as somebody who has succeeded and failed many times I learned very early to reward myself for the pursuit and not for the accomplishment so you're extremely self-aware and I feel like that's something really hard to teach but how would you go about helping someone become more self-aware of what's right for them dude I love this question so the way to get more self-aware has become an obsession for me because I'm trying to become more self-aware in myself so those moments where you break through and you're like oh wow I didn't even realize that that was a part of my personality that was you know this is water right it's so ubiquitous in my life I don't even realize it as a a choice or a way that I view the world it was completely invisible to me and then someone will say something and you finally go whoa I Can See Me Now from your perspective and I realize that is what self-awareness is you can finally see yourself the way other people see you there is no more water there is only the awareness that oh I'm constantly wet so I've started thinking okay how is it that I do that how do I and look I am blind still and it horrifies me every time I have an awareness I'm like oh my God I got to this age and I never realized that about myself a little unnerving but I've become aware of so many different things that it it comes back to tying uh Revelation to a bodily sensation so what I try to do is realize what I am feeling at any one time and then be honest about why I am feeling it and being able to track that down and so figuring out there's this idea that Jordan Peterson has of micro personalities and he says that's the best way to understand yourself so an alcoholic when they're jonesing for a fix just in the in the grips of um the alcoholism they become a different person so they have a whole subset of their personality that's now in control that might lie cheat lack Integrity um push other people down whatever to get that alcohol like one thing you learn if you're a lifeguard is they say if you go to rescue a drowning person odds are they're going to try to drown you as well just because they're just trying to get air man they stopped being like the loving caring person because when you want that like breath of air that badly like you're just gonna do whatever it takes to make it happen you have to be aware that these micro personalities take over and so when you have a feeling odds are that represents a micro personality that you've slipped into and if you can recognize oh and I feel this I bet I am a certain way now to other people that that almost doesn't feel like a spectrum of you it's like oh here we go they're in their annoyed phase they're uh pissed off and I know how they are when they're like that they're scared and they act this way they're depressed and they act that way right so for them it's like these discreet versions of you these micro personalities so what I began to realize is oh when I feel this way I man it Manifest this way I have a microcosm of personality traits that cluster together that are hyper predictable to people outside of me but because the emotion feels so Justified to me it's water I don't even see it it seems like this is the only way to react to this moment there is no other way everybody in my position would react exactly like this so it isn't a micro personality it's just how one should act and so it's not like you're even thinking about that you're just like stimulus response now what I've trained myself to do is go I feel something what do I feel whoa I I'm agitated why am I agitated well they obviously did something wrong no no what do I know right because I have these rules and so I walk down rule number one if somebody's angry I guarantee an insecurity has been triggered now there's actually things that the edges I'll leave that aside for now so I recognize oh I'm agitated I know that that means an insecurity's been triggered what insecurity has been triggered but it was training myself through having these realizations of like oh I get this flustered feeling and now I want to argue for an idea that's mine oh I'm feeling stupid okay so that's what I do whenever I feel stupid but it really was tracking back as I would like replay the day like I don't like the way that feels and in fact that's where it started I don't want to feel that way again how do I avoid it to avoid it you have to figure out what caused it as far as I can tell that's other than getting feedback from other people so empowering people to tell you like hey why are you acting like that it's not pleasant I don't like the way you're talking to me whatever or after the fact hey you came across really harsh um I I didn't respect the way you handled that it's like oh whoa like it was invisible to me I had no idea like there was one uh time during a company team meeting where I was like hey everybody's got to step up now because I love that kind of language I like yo we got this we can do it but everybody's got to rise up I was completely taken aback that somebody gave me a DOT which is feedback for people watching this uh and they were like yo that was really hard to hear and I was like huh and so because for me I love that [ __ ] War language like we got to do this we gotta get better I'm not saying oh you're a loser and you need to get better I'm just like this is a human condition our current skill set's already taken us as far as it's going to go if we want to go somewhere in the future that's farther we have to get better but that gave me the like oh wow I see how that part of my personality comes across to other people now I may still use that tool but at least I won't be blind to it now I have self-awareness literally aware of self from another person's perception and I can act accordingly and then a last question on this is uh being able to see yourself from a different perspective are the things that either trigger you or whatever caused by some sort of like some experience in your childhood that par like is a pattern that you exhibit which causes these emotions in other people I think it's inevitable that you are shaped by everything that happens to you in your life and you formulate responses and you repeat those responses they get hardwired in your brain and so you act a very predictable way in a given set of circumstances but I personally can't track back oh this is because of that thing that happened for me there's precious few things like that so it's more about the personality and how your personality is just you but then if you see it from a different personality type it'll seem uh that's how you'll understand what caused that or how I end up taking in the information about what I'm like to other people a little bit of both so the way that we become who we are you're 50 hardwired your personality and you're 50 malleable your response to all the different things that happen to you and your ability to unwind some of that so there are things about ourselves that we can unwind and we can be different and people like whoa like I will tell you in my marriage Lisa and I are dramatically different people than we were at the beginning and we will point out to each other hey that barb in your personality I actually don't like that some have been easier to change than others and so it's like wow like there are some things even though I'm aware of them I can articulate it I can even say I've slipped into that thing you hate I can't stop myself from doing it yet so some of those things prove very difficult to unwind so for instance I constantly slide back into optimism like no matter where things are going like I'm just I find myself like but we could ultimately and then it's like this is like hey we have to re-ground we've got to really think about how this is going to happen and so we'll butt heads over that we're all slip back into the dream the big vision and she just she can't be there it's stressing her out she's like I need to know how we're going to pull this off and so not doing that is very hard now you can get better you can train yourself okay so that's part one nature and nurture they Collide I think it was Lisa Feldman Barrett that said we have a nature that requires nurture so they are so intertwined it's almost pointless to try to tease out like what half is what just there's a process to run for change that is outside the scope of this answer every time that you get to something you want to change run the process if you do that diligently for three years and you're still having a hard time making a change odds are you've hit close to bedrock of the 50 that's unchangeable okay so the other part how do I Peg my sense of self-awareness this really comes down to there's only so many personality types right so let's ballpark it let's say there's 50-ish types of people that you're gonna meet of course you can boil it down to like the five types whatever but it feels more nuanced in reality it's not like everybody meet you like oh you're this you're that you're that there's only five like people definitely feel like Shades and blends of those big five traits so let's just call it five sort of big 50 big buckets that you're gonna encounter different people it's like okay I'm beginning to understand how when I act that way how that kind of person sees me that's really useful now as you begin to collect that data you're going to drive yourself crazy constantly trying to be the way that that person is going to be able to respond to you so there are things that I will take in and go okay that's really useful you can never know too much about how you come across but there's also I need to live my life on how I feel as well so if I'm gonna go into battle even though my battles are always business if I'm gonna go into battle I'm going to call it battle because that resonates with me now if that doesn't resonate with other people in some circumstances I'm going to make sure that I speak in a way that is understood by more people and other times I'm going to be like I need to feel a certain way to perform the way that I want to perform and I'm going to go in with all of my language and all of that the key is to just be aware of it so that you grab a tool when it's useful so for instance I try never to be out of control of my anger I won't say that it doesn't happen but damn is it rare So I was recently on a call with lawyers and I realized anger is the only thing that's going to move this forward and so I had to display very controlled trust me I wasn't a raging lunatic but I had to display a very controlled anger to let them know hey this is what we're doing was bringing more the the opposing sides together and so I had to make sure that the intensity of a given point was communicated through emotion so I need to know ah cool this feeling that I'm getting of being really annoyed really frustrated and wanting to punch through my computer it's like okay some insecurity's been triggered one is what insecurity that I'm not going to be able to achieve what do I want what I want to achieve in the business that's going to stop me from achieving my goals if I don't achieve my goals as much as I know better than to build my self-esteem around the accomplishment I'm still highly invested in the accomplishment so cool I know why I'm feeling it am I going to display it that becomes the question is it useful in this moment so for instance I was in a near rage that entire call lasted two and a half hours but how many minutes of that call would anybody on the call know that I was that annoyed seven so it's like you have to have the awareness to turn it into a tool and then you have to have the control of your emotions to wield the tool appropriately so in my life I think one of the biggest thing that's stopping me um is the this distraction and I know you talked about distraction how like doing the easy things first or doing the thing that side just more comfortable first so it feels like you don't have don't get distracted you're like a level 100 at like squashing distraction what would your recommendation be for someone maybe level one where it's like I have this big goal and then there's but then there's like scrolling on social or doing the easy task first like what is that like that's huge Chasm there so how do you walk people through um that Chasm or to get to that level 100 uh of your life so I'm I'm unfortunately I'm only a level 80 Mage when it comes to distraction so I do still suffer uh from some of that just like anybody else but I have so I think rules values and desire are wildly underutilized so I have rules in my life at certain times I'm doing certain things and since I block my time so religiously I have very bright lines when you have bright lines you know whether you're doing the thing you're supposed to or not right so if I pick up my phone and I start scrolling and the funny thing is I have there's a certain um set of circumstances that when they're met I will blindly reach for my phone pull it out and start scrolling and I'll catch myself like reaching for my phone I'm like what are you doing but it's this certain kind of anxiety where I've encountered a tough problem I need to think through it I don't have the answer that I can move on but I'm not quite sure what hook to latch into to begin thinking through the thing and so there's some release that I get from the distraction of soothing my mind and so when I realize that I do that and that there's a predictable set of triggers I was like whoa distraction is actually really powerful so as teaching in Impact Theory University and I forget the question that was asked but I was like sometimes you just need to Doom scroll cats and because you you will reach a point where your brain is like really tied up in a knot about something and you have to let it go you have to release and sometimes you just need the input of something this is why Tick Tock is so powerful it's like all about retention that retention is really distraction and so it's probably worth I've never done this before but it's probably worth defining what distraction really is from an evolutionary standpoint it is total acquisition of your attention because you want your attention to be on something else you don't realize that the distraction is hey something just moved in the bushes and so your brain needs a mechanism by which it goes you should be paying attention to that thing now your brain is very good at utilizing mechanisms for multiple things and so like testosterone can actually make you hyper violent or hyper uh loving it's super weird it all depends on the context they've done crazy studies on this where I was like there's no way that's going to be correlated to testosterone and it is so it's literally one way and then the exact opposite super bizarre so the same thing I'm guessing I've not looked at any studies on this but I'm guessing the same mechanism is happening with distraction so it is both the yo you need to pay entire attention to this and you're so gripped on one thing you need to use that ability of the brain to yank your focus over to something else to shift gears because imagine from an evolutionary perspective if you got stuck on one thought like think about in your relationships do they love me do they not love me imagine you could never shift out of that thought you get eaten right so there's a part of your brain called the basal ganglia it's known as the gearbox of the brain so when people get obsessive like obsessive-compulsive disorder they can't shift out they've got this thought it's intrusive and it just won't go away so my guess is that distraction is actually the brain's way of Shifting your gears so when you are distracted it's actually your brain grabbing your entire attention and saying look at this and that's what Tick Tock has mastered and that's why it's so short because it's going to give you these quick things that say pay attention to this all of the evolutionary cues make you want to look at that thing and then to the next look at that thing then to the next look at that thing and so because a I know that that's happening I'm able to deal with it with the rules the values right so I know the rules I've got bright lines I know the values so I want to be the kind of person that's staying on on task that's bringing myself back to it and then I'm going to practice so that I'm getting better and better and better all the time which would be my advice for somebody who's level one that's trying to get to level two three four I meditate every day and so every day I'm I do this thing called Just Breathe meditation or that I call just breathe I don't know if everybody calls it that or not but I call Just Breathe meditation I'm just trying to come back to the breath and it's my way of elongating the period of time where I'm actually focused on the breath now it's actually not very long I would guess 15 maybe 20 seconds on a good time and then my mind starts to wander and then I just remind oh yeah back to the breath back to the breath and so you get very good at oh I'm reaching my from my phone back to the task back to the task and because I'm practicing it every day and then I have the rules to know if I've gotten off task I have the value system that makes me want to stay on task and then I'm practicing it to make sure that I'm actually getting better at being on task all of those things become very useful in terms of like getting me back and then I'm time blocking so I know exactly what I should be doing at what point what is up my friend Tom bilyu here and I have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a 10. I've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach a potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact I will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline right I've just released a class from Impact Theory university called how to build Ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work I will see see you inside this Workshop from Impact Theory University and tell them my friends be legendary peace out I think you said don't confuse your your feeling with truth though just because I'm feeling distracted like doesn't mean that it has to be true or like I need to like follow that impulse right that's really true so if I'm right and a lot of distraction is I'm feeling a level of anxiety and my brain goes don't worry bro I got you cats bro cats like hit that Tick Tock if that is my brain technically trying to look out for me when I have that level for me it's a type of anxiety it's a little flutter of anxiety that will make me crave a distraction so that I don't feel that anxiety so I move on to the thing that's going to capture my attention so completely that I forget that I was anxious I realize oh wait I can just face that anxiety I don't have to run from it and that's where it gets the value system oh I need to be able to sit in the anxiety and this is something this is something I find fascinating about the difference between men and women when I heard this I was like yo anything that you're judging whether it's true or not ask yourself does it give you does it improve your ability to predict the outcome of your actions and behaviors and other people's actions and behaviors if it does odds are that it's true so when I heard that uh estrogen makes it possible to sit in negative emotion doesn't mean that the emotions aren't more distressing it just means you're not distressed about how distressing the emotions are I was like oh my God I can finally understand why women are like I just want you to listen and I'm like I don't want to just sit here and listen I want to solve this problem I do not like the way this makes me feel and so I was like oh my God because honestly when my wife is really upset about something she seems crazy to me I'm like what do you you just want me to listen this is so uncomfortable how are you not crawling I'm crawling out of my skin for you so how are you not crawling out of your skin so it was so unnerving my whole life I was like okay I don't have to run from this I can just sit in it but I'm like what is happening why does she want to sit in this so anyway fascinating insight about men and women but you really do once I realized that like oh I could just get better at sitting in this emotion I don't have to run from this emotion then you begin to get stronger you become more capable of facing things than if you have a value system that says hey Tom don't be weak you're that feeling of like you want to run and hide stop man up face it sit in it do not allow yourself and then when I do it I'm like bro this is why you are you this is why you've accomplished what you've accomplished because in this moment everybody else runs in this moment everybody else breaks in this moment everybody else becomes so insecure that they go chase distraction but you don't you sit here like even when I go to the dentist and it hurts I open my mouth why lighter and I'm like get in there I don't Flinch I don't try to pull back I'm like yeah baby like get that drill in there like go on scrape it get down to the bone even though it hurts and my every impulse is to pull away if I'm dealing with something and it makes me anxious I won't blade blading is where you turn sideways or something when somebody does that to you they're either intimidated by you they're stressed whatever I will face that thing head on literally and figuratively if something is terrifying me I'm like I'm in this I'm not running from this I'm dealing with this when I've got a hard thing that I don't want to do which is almost always contracts I'm like here we go we're going to do these contracts I'm going to do this contract at three in the morning when everybody else they wake up and actually they're sleeping who are we kidding they're still asleep I'm up I'm looking at a contract and I am emotionally rewarding myself to the ends of the Earth for doing that that's so cool like so fascinating because like I said the ironic thing is I'm only distracted when I'm trying to accomplish something meaningful and hard hard but it's like challenging I'm never distracted when I'm doing something easy and and fun that's why I think I'm right about the what distraction really is it's your brain trying to soothe you it's grabbing a hold of all your attention and saying ah don't worry about that put all your attention on this thing here and now you can feel better and I'll be honest there are times where I have been so stressed that the only thing that's going to allow me to decompress is Doom scrolling and it's awesome like I am grateful that Doom scrolling exists because I don't do things that aren't on my agenda but sometimes my agenda is I need to allow myself to relax because there are times where even meditation is like bro I I will get more out of this 20 minutes of meditation if I take five minutes to Doom scroll to like forget what to shift gears right so I'm obsessively thinking about this thing Doom Scrolls some cats for five minutes ooh cool now I've been distracted acted away from that thought now I can sink into a meditation now that level of stress doesn't happen often but when it does I know what tool to reach for but this goes back to self-awareness you have to distrust yourself constantly be asking I should not have this reaction right I shouldn't allow myself to be overwhelmed you know me I don't do overwhelm but I don't do overwhelm because I have pattern interrupts Doom scrolling cats I limit it to a small amount of time I follow it with meditation and then I've got the value system of being hardcore facing my challenges so on and so forth but it really takes that Gestalt and this is the part about helping people that I find really frustrating it's all of those things it is this incredibly complicated nest of rules time blocking value system rewarding yourself punishing yourself on and on and on is there a way to make those distractions like knowing like I'm aware of them I'm aware that I'm easily distracted is there a way to make it a healthy distraction to make it use for your benefit and time block it so if you want to take something light distraction and make it healthy you need to have parameters so you're going to time block you're going to have it be a known tool so you're not going to like I catch myself doing sometimes blindly reach for your phone if you find yourself picking up your phone you've got to be like why am I doing this does this fit into my rules did I say hey I'm now going to look at cats for 5 minutes 10 minutes an hour whatever but like that is the amount of time that I'm going to do that I'm going to confine it to that and then it's like hey if you want to spend 10 hours a day looking at cats I'm not judging like if if your life is rad and you're stoked spending 10 hours a day looking at Cash just don't trick yourself into thinking oh I want to go you know build a huge charity and help millions of people and doom scroll cats for 10 hours like those two things are mutually incompatible so it's only the unintentional use of that the unrestrained use of that so once it becomes intentional you're using it as a tool for a specific reason that you can articulate to yourself and it's time blocked you're good so for those people who do maybe they aren't aware or they understand but have so much dopamine and just like habitual of just going to tick tock Instagram Twitter just scrolling for days uh to pass the time to do whatever how do you go about how like changing that behavior if you're already so entrenched in it I come down to one thing George like you're young so I really want you to hear me your life is a confusing mess right now and that will manifest as negative emotion it's all going to pass I've glimpsed your future it all works out it's amazing your life becomes wonderful because as you get older you're going to gain control of your emotions as you gain control of your emotions you're going to gain control of your time as you gain control of your time you're going to acquire skills as you acquire skills you're going to be able to do things that other people can't do like that really is the loop and so as people get older the reason that they tend to be happier and more self-assured is they realize the rules of the game that you can just really get better at this stuff and you can get good and so I want people to hear that but my thing is like dude you've really got to be obsessed with what you want to accomplish and so if I could get you to understand bro all your dreams that maybe the scale will be off maybe you want to be the greatest and you become you know 1142 but out of 7.4 billion that's really pretty cool and so that's going to be the ride of your life but you have to get obsessed and the only reason that obsession is fun is because you actually know you're going to make progress It's when you're obsessed and things aren't going well and you don't realize it's just a matter of time and so like right now dude I I am really emotionally worried for people that don't understand the economy is going to turn back around Wars end like they're devastating I don't wished on anybody but this too shall pass it's like the great Buddhist phrase of all time this too shall pass if you knew that yeah the next three years are going to suck but after that it's going to be dope man and there's going to be a stretch of seven years that are nothing but awesomeness but then you're going to go through an 18-month period you're you know one of your loved ones is going to pass away and that's going to be brutal but then you're going to have a stretch of six years it's gonna be awesome then you're going to have four years of just total suck but through it all you're going to be getting better and better at managing your emotions so through it all you know all is going to be well that's the joy man and so the thing I'm always trying to get people to understand you'll never get what you want out of life you're never going to accomplish the things that you want unless you are obsessed obsession will hurt and it will be unhealthy unless you realize that you can get better and if you value yourself for already being good right better faster stronger life will be a misery no matter what and so far better to focus on did I leave it all out on the field today right so value yourself for how hard you went after something not for what you accomplished and then let yourself get obsessed with something because you'll get better over time and then with that Obsession what if it's an obsession with something that's not productive or unhealthy like video games for example who said that's not productive and who said it's unhealthy so there's only that which moves me towards my goals and that which moves me away from my goals now I'll make one caveat your goals should be honorable I'll Define honorable an honorable goal is something that uplifts you and other people that's about as simple as I can make it so if you have a goal that uplifts you and other people then why not go just absolutely Bonkers to make it come true if you want to be a professional gamer then that's going to be playing a lot of video games and I actually I never would believe this is true but I enjoy watching other people play video games it's fun and so if that's the way that you want to contribute that for people that want to watch you play they can amazing so now it's uplifting you and other people you'll be able to get into the passion Loop so that you're both the shout and the echo the shout being you playing the echo being people enjoying watching you play or maybe you're like playing video games so you can help build video games right so there's many ways that you can do something like that so I just want people to have an honorable goal and then ask themselves of everything you do did this movie towards your goal yes or no if yes keep doing it if no stop doing it and that's it and that literally is the easiest way to steer but people let things complicate that because their parents tell them that they should be doing something that maybe they do or don't want to do they think that they should be making a ton of money and the thing that they love doesn't make them a lot of money they want to be the best and they trick themselves into thinking this is only fun if I'm the greatest of all time I will tell you right now I play the video game Destiny too and I would laugh I'm sure if I saw the people that are spanking me I mean just embarrassing me but I still love it and so I try to remind myself that it's about getting better when I play because I love to improve and it's just video games are designed to squeeze the brain centers that Evolution has given you for progression and goal acquisition and all that stuff so it is a very fun microcosm so finding people to be very careful casting aspersions moral judgments on any goal that is uplifting you and other people do you think that there is a way to incorporate your passion which could be video games into purpose and also providing service and have that work for you or do you think you have to sacrifice one or like you know focus on on a certain thing first like does is there a perfect world where all three can exist I think all three can exist but greatness makes demands so hiding in that meaning and purpose will all but break you because the world is constantly moving towards entropy so from the moment of the Big Bang everything is moving towards chaos now when you introduce humans Jesus you magnify the amount of chaos uh ten thousand fold I mean it's just absolutely insane we ourselves are complicated bumping into all people that are complicated as well and so to achieve something great you are really going to fail a lot you are going to run into more obstacles than you can count but the problem is that fulfillment requires that you work hard partly because that for humans to become the most dominant predator of the world has ever seen we'd be very good at ordering the world to order the world you have to pour a tremendous amount of energy to stop the chaos and move it towards order because that's the other part of that equation to bring order to a system you must pour energy into it literal energy and so that's the battle that all of us are are fighting against and so if we know that meaning and purpose is the only thing that will ever serve you long term that is how you get to fulfillment and to do meaning and purpose we know it's going to be brutally difficult then the very thing that makes life worth living is going to be very hard it will bring you to your knees I I have literally been brought to my knees but as you get back up which I encourage everyone to do because we're all going to get brought to our knees but not everybody's going to get back up so if you get brought to your knees don't worry about that doesn't make you a loser but it does mean that you're on your knees and it does mean you owe yourself getting back up now when you get back up that's going to make you feel some kind of way about yourself you'd be like yo that didn't break me that's incredible so having meaning and purpose means by definition you are going to be brought to your knees at some point you are going to fail to have the impact you want to have in the world and if you're ever going to have that and feel the way you want to feel you have to get back up and keep going we've been talking a lot about like ambition and driving getting your goals I know another big part of your life is your relationship so how does your relationship fit into your good life with your ambition and um yeah how does that all cocktail work in your life the good life how to live it step one you're having a biological experience what does that mean you are an animal that's been shaped by Evolution the more you understand the organ of the brain really the whole body the microbes in it all of it the more you understand that biological system the more you're going to be able to predict the outcome of your thoughts and actions and so if you're trying to have a good life one you're going to want to Define it which I will say the good life is fulfillment it's the only emotional state that is resilient to everything from anger loss and grief through all of that you can be fulfilled you may be devastated and when you love a lose a loved one it's devastating it sucks there's nothing fun about it that doesn't mean that I'm not fulfilled as a human it just means that I'm a fulfilled human going through something brutal conversely if I'm momentarily happy but nothing is going right in my life I'm not contributing in any meaningful way I can laugh for five minutes and still be depressed so fulfillment I would say is the only thing that's resilient you're not going to be depressed and fulfilled at the same time like it's just not now that we have a definition for what the good life is now we can actually begin moving towards it now the reason I say that step one is recognizing that you're having a biological experience is I understand the things that are going to lead to fulfillment one of them is working really hard another one is following or developing a passion that lets you contribute that's number three to the group and to yourself so if those are the rough ingredients that make up this cocktail of fulfillment we have to figure out this idea of contributing to the group what's that all about that's about being a social animal now what's the ultimate iteration of being a social animal it is love now why is love so potent because Nature has one aim and one aim only the reason you are a social animal is because of this one reason the reason that you have drive and ambition is because of this one reason Nature's only goal this is it this is the punchline of everything every your motivation for sitting here right now my motivation for answering these questions the reason that we put these cameras together built this Channel all of it is for one thing because nature wants to make sure that you have kids that have kids that's it and now everything in your brain is nature pulling levers to make sure that you live long enough to have kids to have kids and that you actually have kids so love which I will say is a neurochemical state is Nature's Way of going yo I want to make sure you do this thing so it's this incredible cocktail of I mean obviously the there's different kinds of love I will assume you mean romantic love since you reference my relationship so romantic love is like the thing it is the thing that when you think about how people want to feel in fact when they have people describe how they want to feel and they look at that neurochemistry you know what it most closely matches even though this isn't the word that people put to it do you have a guess like it looks like you're on drugs or something it's an orgasm and so it makes sense that if Nature's jobs make sure that you stay alive long enough to have kids that have kids that the neurochemical cocktail of an orgasm be pretty high on people's list so as people are describing it they're like oh yeah that's the neurochemicals you state you feel right after an orgasm so technically it isn't the orgasm itself but it's that cocktail afterwards all the bonding hormones are secreted after that you can actually predict I don't know with what degree of accuracy but I'm going to guess it is extraordinarily high that you can predict who will stay married by the number of receptors that they have for I think it's vasopressin which is one of the bonding hormones so there's oxytocin and vasopressin are the two biggest the ones where you're it's like the cuddle hormones so that's the kind of feeling over time that you want to have for somebody why because then you're more likely to have kids and then you're likely to raise them long enough that they have kids because it's not just having kids it's having kids that have kids so you have to keep them alive and all of the crazy things that nature does to do that are incredible but nature only has two levers Pleasure and Pain and one of those tremendous Pleasures that nature will give you that is extraordinarily resilient to suffering and loss and sadness and all that is that really deep love not the early Lusty stuff that's super fun but like that really deep I have shared a life I don't know who I am without this person love that you can have with another person if you're leveraging all of that neurochemical cocktail of soaking in the bonding so that over time that sense of love is like nothing can touch it nothing can give me that right I've made a lot of money in a single day right nine figures in a single day I'll let people go put in a calculator nine figures to see just how much that is in a single day okay it's a dope feeling but it's not love love trumps everything I've ever been through in my life when it's sustained and so I put a lot of energy into it a lot of energy because it gives me back more than anything else in my life so you mentioned how nature is programmed you to have kids who have kids and you made a personal decision not to do that uh why did you opt out of what nature wants why I opted out of it we'll get to in a second but the fact that we can all opt out is fun because I'm like huh I got you [ __ ] it's like nature thought she had me but I'm you know I'm not I'm not playing that game uh so here's the thing I really want kids to this day I really want kids there are Still Moments where I'll see that thing that's like whoo man it triggers all of my desire to have kids and I'm like man I am very sad that I can't both have the life that I'm living and have the life where I have kids but I looked at my life from several different Vantage points what my wife calls the average Wednesday so what would an average Wednesday look like if I had kids and I Know Myself and I feel a tremendous amount of obligation in fact part of the reason that I work as hard as I do at impact Theory is I feel an obligation to you guys I feel an obligation to the team and I really I take that seriously in ways that I think most people would be distressed by and so for me it's like okay I really need to think about that if I had kids I would feel a huge obligation to them to come home and so one thing that I like about work is that I don't feel conflicted Lisa and I are building it together so as I put energy into this I'm putting energy into something that I'm doing with my wife so that doesn't feel like it's fragmented energy it feels like it's coming together that was obviously on purpose I'm building a company that brings many of my passions not all of them but many of my passions together so even as I pursue things that I would do no matter what I'm also building the business and I do that because I know I'm gonna feel that sense of obligation so let me make sure that I'm doing things that I love to satisfy the obligation if I had kids now when I'm at work I would feel like I should be with my kids when I'm in with my kids I should feel like I I would feel like I should be at work I just know that about myself so I want to be really honest and then you don't miss what you don't have so it's not like I had a seven-year-old and they died just never had kids right so kids are a thought so I can think and I'll have those moments sometimes really intense like oh dude like you see that moment like have you guys seen that Tick Tock Trend where it's like they record they do like the little there's a song and they like propose to their daughter and they have the daughter recording she doesn't realize she's recording herself and she's like looking at them with like oh enjoy I'm like oh God like that hits me right in the fields and I'm like oh man I want to have a daughter or like that Jordan Peterson wanted to know that one where they have like kids will not always be kids they'll grow up and they haven't seen it and it's just like people videoing their kids going up from like a kid to like five years old even hearing about that kicks me in the fields yeah yeah like Lisa says yes oh yeah yeah my suddenly I have a uterus as well yeah exactly yeah it that kind of thing like they really really hit me so but anyway I can set that aside because I'm like my marriage is amazing I fully understand Nature's trick which is when you have a kid the child will be your number one priority and right now Lisa is my number one priority I don't know that this is a stat but I'd be willing to bet that relationships are more likely to break up or be dysfunctional that's a better way to say it relationships are more likely to be dysfunctional if you have kids so even people that stay together I think it's a higher likelihood that that stop being a very um thriving emotional and sexual relationship if you have kids so I'm super thoughtful about that and then again average Wednesday don't really like I hate like doing things that kids want to do and stuff like that I have so little time it's like I want to do the things I want to do uh and then when I look back on my life and walk through all the different moments because all of our lives are broken into phases I look look at the different phases it's not until I'm in my 60s that I start to go oh I think that having kids will like be pretty important to me and by the time I'm 80 I will regret it there's no doubt about that but because I've thought through it I'll know how to deal with that frame of reference when I get there so that I don't get destroyed by it because it's when people are caught off guard by a frame of reference and for explaining a frame of reference is beyond the scope of this conversation but when you get to that frame of reference you see life through that and when you get caught off guard like by having a kid and you didn't think through that well or not having kids and you didn't think through that well uh at last check the most unhappy people in America are mid 30s female lawyers because they've chosen career over children and they are now at that moment where it's like whoa is this really what I want for my life now maybe other occupations they love it and it's not a problem but for whatever reason 35 year old women uh attorneys it's emotional implosion time so that's somebody who did not think through what are the different phases of my life like it's dope in my early 20s where I'm like yo I'm proving I could do anything I set my mind to I'm grinding I'm making a ton of money this is rad and then you realize oh wait a second maybe there are other things that I didn't think through but if you think through that and you're like oh in my mid-30s I may want kids but you know what I'd actually rather play my career out now at least you're not taken by surprise so you can plan around okay I better have a career that gives me those things thinking through that I think is very important I know when I get to 80 that I will be very grateful that I thought through how my frame of reference will change and so I will make plans to be able to Mentor people to have in fact I'm starting to do that now even just in the way that I shift my own thinking thinking about myself more is like a father trying to like hey I've suffered in my life I want other people to learn easily what I have learned through great suffering which is of course what one of the things that makes being a parent cool it's like hey I can help you hopefully make your life a little bit better and so that part of being a parent I can express in a lesser way I'm very well aware of that through the people in the company through the people that watch the content so being aware of the how the frames of reference shift is important but anyway that's how I have the way I've thought about pulling a fast one on mother nature to the extent that you can but it's a trade-off and then the last question I had was what are like three behaviors that you do to reinforce your love for Lisa that other people can put into their relationships okay so this is huge one don't criticize compliment so when I was young and you get together and you're in that relationship and everything is great but then you start living together and like that super drug like early day starts to wear off and all of a sudden it's all the things that they do that drive you crazy and you're like hey could you not do that you know when you do that it really bugs me hey oh God stop why are you doing it like that and I was like wow when she does it to me that drives me crazy so I was like you know what every time I have an Impulse to criticize her instead I'm gonna reach for a real compliment I'm never gonna lie I'm not gonna be us but I'm going to reach for a real compliment what that does is it pattern interrupts in my own brain so I'm not reinforcing the negative thing because it really is negative like the person really is doing something that drives you crazy and it probably really is a dumb thing that if you could wave a wand to make go away you would and so it's not even like I'm saying that annoying thing isn't actually annoying it is but if I obsess over it all I'm gonna see is the Annoying Thing whereas that positive thing is also real so I want to make sure I'm spending my time thinking about the positive thing so don't criticize compliment always make it real but spend your time in the compliment have a lot of sex just real like even now in my 40s it is so funny in my late 40s I can think back to what I was like in my early 20s my poor wife and like going through that and thinking oh it's going to be like this forever it's not like as your hormones change and I know that I'm only one testosterone injection from being right back there but it feels more manageable whereas before I felt like a drug addict who couldn't focus it's like now I feel like hey I have a healthy relationship with this drug uh if I'm a recreational user now instead of an addict which is way better and so being in that space though I've realized it's still critically important it is a thing that is unlike anything else in your life it's the only person that you have that relationship with if you're monogamous and that's not an over vote for monogamy but monogamy has a really potent upside and so being in a monogamous relationship and knowing that that's my one outlet for that it you realize that sex is this fascinating thing that is a mode that we all go into and Going Back To Nature wants to make sure that you have kids that have kids it's like nature made sure that that was an awesome thing that is unlike anything else and so I'm legitimately freaked out by how much less sex young people are having now because they're missing out on something incredibly potent now I'm only vouching for sex with connection I won't say that it has to be uh a marriage because I've had my share of non-marital sex and it was awesome and I'm not denigrating that at all but I've always found that it's way more enjoyable if it's somebody that you have a real connection with so but thinking about it like that it is this mode that you don't get anywhere else if you have a spouse and you have what they call Bed Death that relationship is going to become dry and brittle that's metaphoric obviously but that you'll get you'll get the right idea in your head whereas if you maintain a sexual relationship you're constantly Crossing this weird boundary into like this this completely unique space that you only have with that person and nature is squeezing this neurochemistry that constantly bonds you brings you back together so that's hugely important I cannot stress that enough and then number three you have to be a high level Communicator you've got to invest in saying things that you don't want to say and I think one of the biggest breakthroughs in my marriage was when I finally realized that I had to say out loud anytime insecurity was driving me because then my wife could help me and as long as she never weaponized the insecurity against me now it's not my wife's problem to solve now hopefully she can help me overcome that that would be amazing but it's not she doesn't need to solve that problem it's my problem to solve but she can't weaponize my insecurities against me and by me articulating them now we know what's actually going on so we're not arguing about a surface level thing we get to the real issue that's driving it we can both process through that together and so now you have stupid fights that last forever you're getting to the root cause of the issue I mean this is exactly like in medicine don't treat the symptom find the underlying cause but when you are arguing you have friction in your marriage you have to figure out the underlying cause and I promise you it's either a collision of values so you just you both understand each other you just disagree that that's how the world should be it's misaligned base assumptions so you are viewing the world in a way that you don't even realize you're doing it so people don't realize what their base assumption is it's just it's what they call an axiom you just live by it like oh I assume that that emotion is very distressful for you so why wouldn't you want to solve the problem you assume that I know that it's not uncomfortable to sit in a negative emotion those are base assumptions but in reality my base assumption is you're in so much pain right now from this emotion the only thing that makes sense is for us solve that problem and your base assumption is dude how can I solve a problem if I haven't had a chance to sit in it yet but if we don't say that I'm trying to solve the problem you're like [ __ ] just listen right and so when two smart people are colliding they need to check their base assumptions first like what's your base assumption that I need to sit with this emotion before I can problem solve I need to problem solve to to even think straight cool now we can begin to understand each other so it's either values it's misaligned base assumptions or you've got an insecurity that's driving you and you either aren't aware of it or you're not being honest about it and so if you get that stack right then all of a sudden communication becomes very easy but man you've got to be emotionally naked and that is very very difficult but it is hyper rewarding if you have a partner that doesn't use it against you so everybody sees how strong you know your relationship is with Lisa how amazing it is how deep but then also people see how amazing your the career side of it is like your business impact theory is growing it's thriving and I just want to know how you balance that to keep both of them leveled up so evenly to keep them both growing and what your advice would be to people who don't know how to balance their relationship and their business or their work so if you want to balance things you have to know thyself so just a few days ago I sent Lisa a text that hurt her feelings and I didn't mean it to I said hey would you mind if we did this business thing on a day that was special for her and I and I even said you're probably gonna hate this idea but because remember I feel a tremendous obligation to to work for you guys and to make sure that the company thrives and all that so I'm always thinking like hey this would be really good for the team now Lisa's role stay dated role it's not like she would be confused if she heard me say that she'd be like yeah it's my role her stated role is to be the early warning system because I don't see the problem coming in the relationship as quickly as she does so we refer to it as being disconnected where I work so much that we start to feel disconnected so thank you for saying that people see my relationship as thriving and I would say that it is but it's because we have these bumpers and I'll bump up against it as I did just a few days ago and I sent that thing and said hey let's do this business I know this is that really special day for us but let's do this because I think it'd be good for the team and she said hey that hurts my feelings that you would even ask because it makes me feel not heard and not understood because 2022 was the hardest year of my business life and for eight months she let me work 120 hours a week that's not even getting a full night's sleep that's working around the clock seven days a week I mean it's it's pandemonium and I do not recommend it I'm not proud of myself for doing it was actually a result of mistakes do I think I'm a badass for doing it yes but do I think it was a problem of my own making very much so so my wife was very understanding through that now I promised her that I would find my way back to her which I did and so but now she's very gun shy of like hey I gave you Grace and latitude for eight months and now you want to do a work thing on our special day that makes me feel very unheard now if either thing happens poorly in that moment we have a problem but Lisa and I do that movement well she speaks up and says hey it bothered me that you even asked and I'm like oh damn like I don't like that it bothers you that I ask because your role is to play that person where I can say hey let's do this and you say early warning don't do that so she had to be graceful in that moment and say cool I'm not going to double down I'm not going to be angry let's not do that as the early warning system I'm telling you we can't do it and then if in that moment I'm like yo what the [ __ ] like come on this will be better for the business I thought we were in this together then she's going to feel abandoned in the marriage so I'm like hey your stated role is to be the one to say nope that will lead to us feeling disconnected and so when you say it even though I have an Impulse to go in the opposite direction and I'm not feeling disconnected and that feels like a really small thing to me that's your role word so I'm going to immediately back off totally I'm actually sorry that I asked because I didn't mean to upset you and I totally get where you're coming from I hear you like we're on it and so now we just we move on I'm more thoughtful about okay fair like the eight months is pretty intense I totally get where she's saying that next time I'm gonna try to catch myself before I ask but if I do she's not gonna be upset but she is going to check it and say you can't do that so it's one understanding it takes constant maintenance there is no such thing as oh my marriage is great and it will remain great forever my marriage is great because we work on it every single day now balancing the business in that it doesn't mean that I give more more time to my marriage because I don't I give more time to the business but it does mean that I prioritize my marriage so if my wife says hey we can't do that thing then we're not going to do it like I will just tell you the CFO pulled Lisa and I I was like yo two weeks of Christmas Crazy Town can't do it and I was like I'm just telling you right now two weeks of Christmas every year from now until the end of time because like the rest of my life I make it about my business for two weeks I'm not a businessman I'm a family man it is what it is and he was like okay cool like totally on board I get it but that's one of those you you have to know like I need to do this set of 32 things to make sure that my marriage is always thriving and they don't always mean the most time now it's not an accident that Lisa and I build the company together I would never be able to work as much as I do if we didn't and I know this because the first company that when I got into entrepreneurship for eight years she wasn't and it was a nightmare and even though I worked less it was harder on the marriage than when I'm working more now because we're in it together and we share you know the same stories and the same people and wants and all that good stuff I read feeling great you mentioned it earlier um and I might inflame the comment section by saying this but I feel like if that book exists then like why do people who read it like don't suddenly like oh now I'm no longer depressed or no longer feeling like anxious in that sense because he lays out all the steps very clearly so what do you think is the thing that causes people to just not be like transformed from reading a book is it the number three thing that you said early in the beginning like just not enough repetition it just hurts the first time that they do it so they don't follow through like what is the thing that yeah it doesn't work big reason that people struggle to get out of depression even if they've read a book like feeling great is that one they aren't they don't believe the following very inflammatory statement that you can get control of your neurochemistry and they think that it's all in the mind and they don't realize that it's a far more complicated Beast than that but because they don't believe that they can completely get control of it they will try a few things early on and stop now if you have depression and you are not dealing with the body your microbiome very specifically then the odds of you getting out of that depression are virtually zero and so even a book is extraordinary is feeling great is only dealing with the psychological component of depression and it is far deeper than that so your gut controls many of your neurotransmitters and serotonin so ssris are selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors meaning they keep more serotonin floating in your body now seventy percent of the serotonin in your body is produced and stored in the gut so if the very chemical that they use to combat depression is in your gut and you're not dealing with your gut now you have a problem but it goes back to what I call the only belief that matters if people don't think oh I can control this then they won't keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going until they find that root cause so they think that this is oh this is that thing that happened to me a tragedy befell me and therefore I'm never going to be able to get out of this this is because of the trauma that I went through in childhood yes partly but you can get out of that you can unwind that stuff and I am not in any way shape or form saying this to be flippant I am not trying to diminish the terrifying grip that is depression I'm just saying you have to believe that you can get your way out of it and yes it is hyper complicated and having watched Lisa go through an extraordinary battle with her microbiome and seeing how complicated it is to undo all that the psychological side's already bad enough especially if it's a result of trauma abuse where that gets hardwired in I mean that's in your nervous system in a deep way that is going to be very complex to unwind but it starts with believing that you can unwind it and then doing something like cognitive behavioral therapy where you go through I forget how many like it's like 13 steps and one of the steps is like the 15 cognitive distortions I mean it's crazy so it is already a very complex book just cognitively psychologically that takes a lot of repetition which requires you to believe that it's going to work but then it's also the very difficult part of getting your body right sleep exercise diet you want to talk about hey let's really like the comment fire on the comment section on fire remind people that what they eat is going to influence their microbiome is going to influence their production of Serotonin is going to influence their sleep is going to influence depression anxiety all of it it just is and if you're eating junk food you are making everything worse not a moral judgment it's just a biological reality now if you can strip away the moral judgment and realize you're not a bad person if you eat junk food but you are a person that's creating obstacles for feeling good so all I'm saying is remove the obstacles now there are people in my life that I love that put every food obstacle in their way humanly possible they are actively in pain and they actively tell me how much they're suffering and they actively ask me what they should do to stop suffering and they keep doing it does that mean that I think they are a worse person not in the slightest I love them just as much I think they're just as valuable as a human being and I really wish that they would remove the moral judgment from themselves because it is not a moral question it is 100 entirely a question of this path leads to one outcome this path leads to a different outcome pick the path worthy you like the outcome and then walk that path and so people have to recognize I can do that that there are it is cause and effect there's nothing uh mythological about this it's cause and effect but it is hyper complicated it is both Psychology and Physiology unwinding that will almost certainly require that you get help from professionals and other people and so the shortest answer in the world to your question is it's complicated should we watch this episode but even that like now how do you go in and do like Lisa had me by her side and it still took five years to get back to Baseline with her microbiome and man when you're in the thick of it the whole time you're asking is this actually going to work because some days it doesn't feel like it some days it feels like this is going to be forever and it's not until you look back a year and go yeah wow that's right I actually have 17 more foods that I can eat now that I couldn't eat before but I still three days a week have just absolute agony in my gut and so it's still this still sucks then two years you look back and you're like oh wow I'm only having that two days a week four years in you're like oh that's right I only have it occasionally and then five years in you're like God this took a very long time there's a lot of dark days for somebody struggling with depression but if you don't believe that you can unwind it if you don't believe that you're in control even though it's very complicated then you'll never do it and having been a victim of something would be horrible but you now have to take control and say okay this sucks I can't undo the past but I always can control how I react to that thing don't take my word for it read man search for meaning that is the ultimate form of abuse he was in a concentration camp so like nobody's got a trump card to play on him right and his punch line is it's all about how you process it emotionally so if if you can share with her in that five years where the days that Lisa just did not believe oh yeah well they were the darkest days of my marriage they were depression they were me being afraid she was going to die because she was so sick there was her being so fed up I don't even want to try anymore why Try why bother there's no point I was like wow that's hard there were times where she would respond to love with just rejection and anger I was like what is happening and so it was brutal and we didn't know I mean you had to have Blind Faith that it was going to work but did I know it was going to work no and there were times where even I was like I have to act as if this is going to work but I've never been through this before and this is early man we we as like uh uh mainstream Society have only known about the microbiome for like 10 years like a year before Lisa got sick I'd never even heard of the microbiome so it's like dude this stuff is so complex that it it does feel like a big question mark but I will just say there is a solution to every problem those that judge that do you guys just sleep fit often tomorrow you'll feel better again or like what is like that thing to get back to to to base Baseline and not that um um what do you call it like uh not exaggeration but like um magnification of the problem catastrophic thinking yeah surviving it so the only way to stop catastrophizing is to pattern interrupt that not allow yourself to wallow in that cognitive distortion to say I'm going to base things on fact and then have a growth mindset when you have a growth mindset you have the only belief that matters which is that if I put time and energy into getting better at this thing I will actually get better at this thing so if I put time and energy into learning about the microbiome I will learn about the microbiome so when I went into it I said to Lisa look I'm gonna go learn about the microbiome and I would wake up every morning and the first thing I would do is I would spend a couple of hours researching the microbiome and I just thought cool I let's say that there's no doctor in the world that can solve her problem I'm Gonna Learn enough about it to do it myself and so when you go into it with the arrogance of belief and it's like cool I don't need somebody else to know this I will put all the pieces together now thankfully it didn't end up needing to be that but because I approached it like that that I'll read the studies I will learn all of these things I'll do research if I have to I will buy a microscope and start doing laboratory tests but when you approach something like that which is how I approach all of life you realize oh I get it other people don't succeed at whatever because they're not willing to be absurd they they're not willing to say I'll I'll become a Nobel prize-winning scientist to solve my wife's problem if you're willing to say that and actually act in accordance it's unreal what you can accomplish now obviously we solved the problem long before I had to become a Nobel prize winning scientist but the fact that I was willing to move like one the fact that I was willing to go yeah I can do this I can become that I'm not yet I'm I'm gonna have to learn a lot I'm gonna have to figure out how to read abstracts and do research and ah fine I'm not going to let my wife die my number one priority is making sure that we get her back on track and then you go at it like a freak of nature but most people cannot do the first part which is to believe that it's [ __ ] possible and this is what I want to scream to people is like hey [ __ ] you are average yes stop being afraid of that you're average but you can get better go [ __ ] learn but you have to be a demon you have to give your brain and body the impulse adapt or die [ __ ] I will break you in half before I give up when I put on the muscle mass because boy did I used to be a lot smaller when I would show up to the gym every day I had to say adapt or die and I'm just telling myself adapt or die [ __ ] I will meaning my body I'm gonna keep pushing you scream and cry all you want we're doing this and I would lift to the point I remember one time this is when I was broke I couldn't even unlock my car from the door I'd uh lean across so open the passenger side the lean across to the driver's side and I had worked out so hard that I couldn't hold up my own weight and I put my arm in the seat to reach across and my arm gave out and I literally just face planted into the sea but you you have to attack everything you do like that and when you go that hard you will be shocked everything will relent to your Superior will everything will relent to your Superior will never forget that there it is everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you want to achieve even your wildest dreams be sure to watch this next episode about staying motivated the first thing to know about me is I am not a born entrepreneur now there are many people that consider themselves a born entrepreneur I am not one of them